Mansplaining Reactions To The News That Ryan Adams Was An Asshole

The New York Times continued to out public personalities as assholes/abusers today with a researched piece that has seven women (among them his ex-wife Mandy Moore) accuse indie darling Ryan Adams of being a manipulative creep.

It's a tad short (the article, not the women's suffering), but to the point.

I believe the women's suffering, and I believe there being (at least) seven makes for a pattern. Those are statements that are most likely facts, in a legal manner of speaking.

What I have a problem with is the public lynching in lieu of due process and the lumping apples and oranges to create a bigger story than it is.

Case in point, one at a time:

From this post

"95% of the music industry, from the independents to the huge stars, are mediocre pervert dudes." Notwithstanding the fact that almost all pop stars are female, that most of the music paid for in the past five years has been made by or with women, that the most influencial acts of the 1990s that weren't part of the "Seattle grunge quadrinity" (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, maybe Mudhoney and Chicagoans Smashing Pumpkins thrown in for good measure) or Nine Inch Nails were women, including a lot of other Seattle acts (Hole, Babes In Toyland, Bikini Kill, L7, Sleater-Kinney, The Fastbacks, The Gits, Heart/The Lovemongers, Sonic Youth, Unwound, Bratmobile, 7 Year Bitch, The Breeders, Veruca Salt, The Pixies, Suture). I'm sure I'm forgetting obvious ones.

The Beastie Boys - not quite my cup of tea -  helped Luscious Jackson and Cibo Matto have success, because friends help friends, and gender doesn't have to be an issue.

One of the best songwriters of all time came from the 1990s, PJ Harvey, in England, but my limited knowledge of British music from my adulthood has me thinking ladies may have been rarefied there indeed. On the American side of the pond, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair made a huge dent. In Canada, a jazz singer and pianist, Diana Krall, became a world-renowned jazz legend - the only jazz legend borne out of the 1990s of any gender. I doubt their critically-acclaimed work came only from their looks or men wanting to sleep with them.

I was not a fan of Garbage, Fiona Apple, Björk or Alanis Morrissette, but they had clout.

In the 2000s, the only decent new male rock acts were The Strokes, The Raconteurs and The White Stripes (female drummer). The rest of the fun and quality came from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Kills, Sahara Hotnights, Arcade Fire, The Donnas, First Aid Kit, The Pack A.D., The Dead Weather and so many others acts that proven women have a lot more balls and talent than their tired and lame male counterparts. Did all of those acts have to sell their bodies to make it?

And about the men...

Artists: Eddie Vedder, Trent Reznor, Beck, Andre 3000, Ben Gibbard, Marilyn Manson, Jack White, Robert Plant...

Executives: David Geffen, Russell Simmons, Bruce Pavitt, Jimmy Iovine, Berry Gordy... all pervert dudes? Each of their public personae go against all of that.

That's a serious fucking accusation, a high fucking number - and completely made up.

I ran a music festival for over a decade and every night, we had at least one woman on stage - usually one in at least two-thirds of the acts, never with a quota in mind - it just happened that way because that's what was good and worth sharing to concert-goers; the only style of music that didn't fit that statistic was noize - which is basically a bunch of solo sound nerds doodling and tweedling on knobs.

Here's another extremely harsh accusation:

From this post

I get the sarcasm, I get the exaggeration for effect, but while we're conducting public lynchings instead of going through the (failed, uneven, biased) Justice System, we are all responsible of our words, for the scope and impact of our comments. Hyperbole is dangerous. It isn't you with your friends in someone's living room; it's public, to the world. It's your public reflection of you.

If a threatening tweet can result in probably cause condemnations, so should false accusations.

Fuck, (wo)man, how many rapists do you think are around?

And all of that is saying nothing about the fact that if any one of the people overreacting to this story in particular played devil's advocate for just a few minutes, they could see that he actually has a half-credible defense if he can get expert testimony from a qualified shrink.

That probably wouldn't be enough to prove he wasn't responsible for the way his victims felt (civil case), but there may be enough evidence that someone who was already recognized as having had bouts of mental illness was just responding the way his brain was letting him, with threats of suicide and bipolarity (not guilty in a criminal case).

We're not there yet, but it helps to once in a while put yourself in the other side's shoes with a clean slate instead of a bias to understand the pattern of behaviour.

Again, I'm not defending his actions. But when he says he can sue over this, he might have a case.

What works for the NYT is having his ex-wife and ex-fiancée on record corroborating his actions in terms of behavioral change, tonal change, and so forth. They likely won't get him on impeding careers (not of all seven anyway, but maybe Moore), and he definitely inquired about the young one's age (she refused to provide ID and they never met in person) enough to get away with what would possibly have been the worst charge of all.

As a "fan" of legalese, this is far from the Bill Cosby case, but it's also far from the Chris Hardwick case.

Bread Face

Via The New York Times (via BuzzFeed, Vice and Instagram...) comes Bread Face, a woman who, well, uh, likes to smash her face into bread.

Is it art? Is it comedy? Is it just a weird fucking fetish? Is it just that it feels good?

If you can, look up the one where she does it over a super-salty pretzel from Brookly hipster spot Black Forest, over Jennifer Paige's 1998 pop hit Crush... as much as I love pretzels, I'm just worried she'll get salt in her eye(s).

Tenth Time's The Charm

A woman from the Bronx seems to have an unusual addiction: marriages. The problem isn't that the 38-year-old has married 10 times, it's that she hadn't divorced them all before getting hitched again. Husbands 1, 2, 5 and 7, for example, were only let go after her marriage to 9.

Furthermore, according to NBC News, ''Liana Barrientos, 38, is charged with offering a false instrument after allegedly obtaining marriage certificates with 10 men between 1999 and 2010.''

Wait, a false instrument? If all marriages were consummated, I'd say the instrument might have been the only truth that was out there (you see what I did there?), but this will be a fascinating case to watch unfold.

There is some speculation that these marriages are for immigration purposes, so, legally, many departments and charges could each have their own say in how the case is handled.

The New York Times had an interesting and sarcastic take on it:

The year 2002 was very busy for a young woman named Liana Kristina Barrientos.

For one thing, she got married - on Long Island, on Valentine’s Day.

For another, she married again, 15 days later, in Rockland County, to a different man.

Thirteen days after that, while still married to at least two men, she wed yet another, back on Long Island.

And then a few weeks later, when the average bride might still be recovering from her honeymoon, Ms. Barrientos was named in a divorce proceeding initiated by a man she married three years before.

By the time 2002 was done, she would marry three more men, each in a different town in New York State. (...)

Friday is also going to be busy for Ms. Barrientos, who is now 39. She will be arraigned on felony fraud charges in State Supreme Court in the Bronx.

 I'm just astounded that this didn't happen in Florida.

In Russia, Words Kill You

In a recent interview, Russian opposition leader (and former deputy Prime Minister) Boris Nemtsov said:

(My mother) is truly scared that (Vladimir Putin) could kill me soon for all of my statements, both in real life and on social networks. This is not a joke; she is a smart person.

Yes she is, and so was he.

He was murdered on the street, coming out of a radio station in which he asked people to come out to a protest march this weekend. 1990s style, with the Kremlin as the background of a gruesome, mafia movie-like scene.

Scarier still? Putin said he would personally overlook and lead the investigation. It's a plot twist you wouldn't have believed if it happened on House Of Cards...

The (Cute) Face Of Terror

Big uproar in the social media (and media in general) regarding Rolling Stone's front page, showing Boston bombings suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev...

Critics are saying they make him look glamourous, like a ''rock star'', comparing it to their covers featuring The Doors' Jim Morrison:

Sure, if dying in your bath is what passes for glamour.

Funny how no one batted an eye when the New York Times featured the exact same fucking picture on their front page:

I know the concept of ''innocent until proven guilty'' has taken a beating of late, and how there are innocents on death row and George Zimmerman walks free...

But to call for a boycott of one of the most important publications of the 20th Century because they dared show that appearances can be deceiving, that a popular kid who is a good student can veer from the straight path, that not all terrorists are disgruntled old men with long beards - is completely missing the point.

Shit can happen, and can spiral out of anyone's control. Not all troubled teens turn downright ''evil'', not every honor student becomes a killer, but the ''perfect storm'' of circumstances can bring a home-grown threat to life just as much as blindly waging useless wars abroad, or blindly supporting countries that get on other countries' nerves on purpose.

I say ''kudos, Rolling Stone''. Instead of putting Maroon 5 or Bruno Mars on your cover for a vapid, 3-page piece on how hard it is to do your own shopping when you're a superstar, you strapped your balls on and went ahead with the main article of the summer.

Then again, you also put Charles Manson on your cover once...

How Lobbies Are Killing Society

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin useless killing, our eyes once again turn to Florida (this time, Tampa), where the Republicans will hold their presidential convention in August.

It will be forbidden to bring water pistols on  the premises; same goes for air and paint guns. But fully-loaded, concealed, actual fucking weapons will be ok, because it is illegal for the city to supersede state laws about the right to bear arms, even for a single day.

So instead they ban all sorts of other things: ladders, clubs, hatchets, switchblades, pepper spray, slingshots, chains, shovels...

Only in America!

When Republicans Choose Obama

First it was Colin Powell, decorated former General, Bush's first Secretary Of State, whom the White House humiliated by sending him in front of the whole world to support the WMD theories. That wasn't all that much of a shock.

Then came Bush's former official mouthpiece, Scott McClennan and Arne Carlson, former Governor of Minnesota. Considering McClellan had also publicly said he had been manipulated when came time to defend the Iraq war, that wasn't a huge surprise either. Loyalty only goes one way so far before enough's enough.

Today, it's William Weld, former Governor of Massachussets, and Charles Fried, a McCain advisor who used to work for Ronald Reagan.

Just when I was thinking that McCain's new strategy of abandoning certain states and having advisors publicly backstabbing each other in newspapers might be Karl Rove's new strategy to keep Democrats at home thinking a landslide was coming and getting the Republican vote to come out and mean something might be genius...

It doesn't really look like a strategy anymore.

Have we all overestimated America's racism? Could they really go back to being the force of Progress and Reason on this big blue globe? Could it be (gasp)... HOPE?

I'm still doubting. Hopeful, but doubting.

And the New York Times endorsed Obama today. Considering their recent track record, that may not be the best idea.