Ambivalent: The Iron Sheik’s Twitter feed

By Dan Brooks in Ambivalents 5 Comments

The Iron Sheik, forced to live in the real world with Beyoncé for some reason

I assume that you are already following The Iron Sheik on Twitter, for the simple reason that I assume you are not Tito Santana. As a quick glance at Sheikie’s recent activity suggests, he and Santana are not friends. Then again, the Sheik’s claim that Santana has “the taco ass” may be kind of ironic. It’s hard to tell. The former Olympic wrestler, WWF heel and bodyguard for the Shah of Iran has presumably always separated his interior and public personae, since his public persona is completely absurd. When you think about The Iron Sheik, you have to do a lot of surmising and presuming. How else to explain six borderline-racist tweets in an hour attacking Santana for no discernible reason? And what beside pure, life-consuming dedication to art could explain tweets like this?

You would have to be dead inside not to appreciate that, and you would have to be an idiot to completely endorse it.

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Wall Street still occupied

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 10 Comments

If the gap between rich and poor seemed like it was widening a bit more slowly this morning, it was probably because Occupy Wall Street is still going on. Exactly how it goes on remains a matter of conjecture, although certain non-televised journalists are beginning to pierce the veil. Michael Greenberg’s longish tour of Zuccotti Park in the New York Review of Books provides us with a slightly less vague picture of the movement than what we’ve gotten so far, including their use of “the people’s microphone.” Because city ordinances prohibit the use of amplification devices, public speakers at the OWS demonstration have their words repeated by the crowd. It’s a big ol’ objective correlative for a protest that has coalesced out of Twitter, Anonymous and maybe a few emails from the insufferable Adbusters, and now has to grapple with the problem of propagating a message when no one has been designated to speak first.

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Friday links: Boom! It Sucks edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

Thanks, Failblog!

It’s a disorientingly beautiful day in Missoula, where the sun and light breeze and 71-degree forecast almost distract me from the roaring of the creek, which has gone from eight inches deep to about eight feet. In this way it resembles the Clark Fork river, another usually placid body of water that has decided to erupt in rage and have its way with everybody’s basement. It’s like my father used to say: this whole thing could fall apart at any time. It’s summer now, everything is awesome, but all it takes is one driving mistake or subprime lending crisis or month of heavy rainfall and boom—everything sucks. This week’s link roundup is all about stuff going catastrophically wrong very quickly. You’d think that’d be depressing, but don’t worry: it’s stuff going wrong for other people. Fun, right? I’m sure we personally will be fine.

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Internet has its way with Jon Kyl

By Dan Brooks in lying 6 Comments

Arizona Senator Jon Kyl on the set of his extremely unpopular children's show

If you are a regular viewer of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, which at this stage of American discourse are types of news, you probably already heard about Jon Kyl’s claims regarding Planned Parenthood. During debate on the Senate floor, Kyl said that abortion is “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.” That number turns out to be off by a mere 2900%; abortion is actually about 3% of what Planned Parenthood does, which puts them well below such organizations as Courtney Love.* Shortly afterward, a spokesman from Kyl’s office told CNN that the Senator’s remark was “not intended to be a factual statement.” See, Jon Kyl wasn’t lying: he was merely making a statement that he did not consider accurate but his listeners did, as part of a persuasive argument he conducted in his capacity as a United States legislator. The absurdity of this defense has not escaped the internet, and Senator Kyl has consequently achieved the highest grade of infamy possible in contemporary western culture. He has become a meme.

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Matthew Creamer on the year’s best digital writing

By Dan Brooks in advertising 0 Comment

Now that all forms of human endeavor are over for the year, it’s time to look back on the 2010 that was. Okay, it’s time for other people do that, since my disconnection from popular culture makes more less of a broad-survey kind of guy and more of a fleeting-obsession-that-I-try-to-talk-to-the-cashier-at-Taco-Bell-about fellow.* On a break from compiling my list of Best Innocent Remarks Made By Strangers That I Thought About Until I Convinced Myself They Were Veiled Threats of 2010 (Part I), I ran across this article in AdAge, in which Matthew “Nondairy” Creamer submits three works for the Best Media Writing of 2010: The Social Network, Kanye West’s Twitter feed, and an Xtra Normal video made by Mat Bisher and Jason Schmall. Seriously, do all ad executives have hilarious names? Even more seriously, the confluence of these items might just sum up the entirety of our culture’s relation to digital media in three neat pieces.

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