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It Was the Best of Teens, It Was the Worst of Teens

It was 4:20 and the teens felt great, man, but they also had impaired cognitive abilities. It was the post-9/11 era, the effects of which were being felt in increasingly tragic and bizarre ways. It was the season of light beer, the season of darkness, the season of hope. Teens were on Cloud 9, teens were going to Heaven, and the two things may have been related becauseCloud 9 was a synthetic drug sending Michigan’s youth to the hospital. History was changing, literally. In Colorado, AP US history students protested a conservative school board’s plan to emphasize “topics that promote citizenship, patriotism, and respect for authority.” It was a time a lot like the past; there was a new Bill & Ted’s movie planned and another sequel to Dumb and Dumber, featuring original stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.

Does technology shape the culture, or does the culture shape technology? The answer to most questions is, “It’s complicated.” Yik Yak didn’t help us write this column and it was unclear if teenagers, “less concerned about privacy and data security than others,” would take tonewly-launched anti-Facebook social network Ello. Internet consumption was still high, though, as was consumption of the “rave drug Molly.” That’s why a father shared a photo of his daughter on life support, following her attendance at a Denver rave. “This could be your child. Mine was responsible and did well in school. These raves are death peddlers.” Snapchat remained a popular way for teenagers to run afoul of the law. A Wyoming high school student took a selfie whilst giving a boy oral sex and now persons who shared the image could be charged for having child pornography. Two girls were kidnapped at knifepoint after sneaking out of a slumber party. Depending on how you look at things, cell phones either helped them to safety or allowed thousands of people to listen to their harrowing post-escape 911 call.

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I'm really proud of this weeks #Teens

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Florida Teenagers Got Caught in a Snapchat-Fueled Robbery – This Week in Teens

Summer break sounds amazing in June, but by August the teens have grown restless. They’re broke, they’ve got all these hormones that they can’t properly act on, and Mom’s at work. Today’s teens are left at home with little more than technology and other teens to keep them company. It’s with this sense of boredom and the possibility of danger in mind that we turn to our top story This Week in Teens.

A 15-year-old boy in Florida got a Snapchat of his cousin holding a stack of cash, so he and four of his friends decided to rob his cousin’s house. They would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for his cousin’s pesky dogs, and the fact that the rest of his family was home. The teens ran from the house, taking a laptop with them, but were caught by police—because that’s what happens when your aunt sees you robbing her house. This story is truly a perfect encapsulation of the way teens live now. The traditional teen traits of confusion-fueled idiocy and responding to the pressures of capitalism with petty crime are compounded by technology. Snapchat, an app that’s wildly popular among young people, is being valued at around $10 billion. Teens are an instrumental part of the app’s success, so there’s a certain poetry in the idea that the app is inspiring them to commit crimes for cash. 

Check out the rest of This Week in Teens

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Also in this week's This Week in Teens, I adultsplain why teens shouldn't use cocaine and why selfies aren't cool. Plus these two sentences that I'm really proud of: "A lack of sleep is just another factor that contributes to teens’ high-risk behavior,” is something that a pessimist might say. My glass is half full of Monster, and I choose to see high-risk behavior as high-reward behavior.

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This Week in Teens: Are America’s Teenagers Setting Themselves on Fire? 

Teens are America’s greatest natural resource. They’re full of new ideas, smarter than ever, and not yet racked with cynicism and guilt. Some of the best things we’ve got—rock ‘n’ roll, energy drinks, hickeys—wouldn’t exist today were it not for teen demand. Not to mention that teens are sustainable; left unchecked, they’ll create more teens just over a dozen years. And yet, to reference a perennial college freshman favorite, the teens they are a-changin’.

The global recession hit those on the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum the hardest. Part time employment and summer jobs are now harder to come by. Consequently, teen purchasing power is on the decline. Plus, teens are good at streaming things for free, and Macklemore made them think used clothes are funny, so they have less incentive to buy new things. At this point, it’s baby boomers who have the real discretionary income. As marketers catch up to this shift, the prized demographic will become those over 55. Our nation’s youth will be forced to adapt to their ever-evolving circumstances. Will teenage ingenuity emphasize their continued relevance? Or will our younger siblings collapse into a messy room of hormones, broken curfews, and not-yet-illegal drugs? It is with this background in mind that we launch a new column: This Week in Teens.

Talking heads are going nuts over the Fire Challenge. Photo via YouTube

-If there’s one thing teens love, it’s trends. And if there’s one thing local news stations love, it’s scaring people who think they might come into contact with teenagers (this is easy to do as teens are inherently terrifying). Combining these two passions is this week’s top news story: Teens are taking off their shirts, standing in the shower, pouring flammable liquids on their chests, and lighting themselves on fire. Sometimes the teens start flapping around—because of the fire, remember—before they can turn on the shower, and then the flames spread to their shorts or the shower curtain and they end up in the hospital with severe burns. It’s called the Fire Challenge mom, and it’s all done in the name of internet fame.

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I'm VICE's new Teen Editor

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Social Media and Obfuscation

Two things came up today that made me think about the way in which social media—and Twitter, especially—rewards obfuscation. More precisely, it frequently punishes people who say things a little too clearly. A lot of this has to do with technical aspects; character limits, for example, mean that a meandering, vague statement lacks the easily-spread punch of "We tortured some folks." The constant stream means that, generally, only the most notable words get noticed. (I mean this in a literal sense: your eyes gloss over, so that if a few words don't jump out, you literally don't see it. Think about how you do this subconsciously all the time when you scroll through your Twitter feed, in the same way that your eyes never go to the parts of pages where banner ads live.) We're now in an environment where when the president, while defending the CIA, admits that America tortured people, everyone focuses on his word for people instead the part where America, our country, tortured a non-singular number of people, and now the president admits it, and sure it was bad, but he still stands behind the people who did it. Yes, "folks" probably wasn't the best option here, but like, how is that the thing you focus on! We! Tortured! Some! Folks. There are three more important words in that sentence. Imagine: "Honey, I need to confess something. Last weekend, after Shakespeare in the Park, I fingerblasted the babysitter." "You did what?!? I haven't heard that term since 9th grade lol."

Similarly, everyone was up in arms over a now-removed op-ed called "When Genocide Is Permissible." Obviously the follow-up to that weirdly phrased almost-question should be "Never," but: A) It's been reported that as much as 95% of Israelis approve of their country's actions in Gaza (I'm not sure it's actually that high, but it's clearly something with wide approval). B) The situation in Gaza already is, or is rapidly approaching, the standard definition of genocide (the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation). Which means that, in the minds of many of the people in Israel (and their supporters elsewhere), this genocide is permissible. One guy had the lack of PR sense to say what millions believe, and now, instead of being something we can point as evidence of the abject inhumanity of the situation, the post has been deleted. I'm not arguing people shouldn't have been up upset about the article, but it's so unfortunate that we're coming to a world where you can do almost anything, so long as you make sure the verbs will be spread out over many long, boring sentences.

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Untitled (Landscape), 2014

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The Problem of the Community Board; or, How Activists Are Both Correct and Ruining My Twitter Time

Let's say you've opened up a store that you think is really cool. It's your dream and you've personally customized every detail to your liking. From the name to the products to the layout and even down to the wallpaper, it's all you. (For some reason your store mostly sells indie rock jokes, mid-level references to the literary canon, and celebrity puns, but that's not really what matters here. It's your store, traditional business models can't stop it.)

Everything's going great, until one day someone comes in and says, "Excuse me, but my dog's missing. Would it be a problem if I left a flyer here, just taped to the corner by the door, so that people see it when they leave? You've gotta understand, Higgins means the world to be." You'd have to be heartless to say no. 

The next day someone else comes in, and their son is dying of cancer, but it could be treatable—only they need to raise money for an experimental operation. Now you've already put up a flyer about a dog, so you really have no choice but to also put up the photo placard about their human son. 

Because this is hypothetical, the world in which your store exists has an almost infinite number of other causes too, and they're all deserving of a spot on your wall. Even though you try to only give space to the worthiest of issues, it isn't long before you end up with a whole corner of your store covered in flyers. Every time you look over there you end up feeling depressed, reminded of how terrible the world can be.

But you're also just bummed, because this isn't how you wanted your store to be, and you can't really do anything about it. After all, it wouldn't help if you told people that, "I support your cause—I really do. I just don't want to display the poster." That'd be inaction, and you know that inaction isn't good enough. 

It starts to feel like your whole store is dominated by these flyers. When customers come in to the store, they don't want to talk about your jokes, or even their own lesser jokes. They want to talk about how terrible that news on the wall is. No one even notices the rest of the place; nothing you can do competes with the urgency of these flyers. You realize that discussing the issues at hand is way more important than whatever you wanted to go on about, but that doesn't make you feel better. For you, it simply isn't very fun to go to the store anymore. And whenever you're tempted to complain about how little you enjoy working there, you rightly feel like a dick. 

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Sometimes I will have an opinion about an issue that—despite making sense to me in a measured, evidence-based way—seems like an opinion that only other white guys hold. When this happens, I try see where other people are coming from, and usually I can, but often it still doesn't change my thoughts. So here's what I do: I just don't tell anyone about my white guy opinion. I don't pretend to hold a different view; I don't say anything at all about the thing. And no one ever asks! Then, after a few hours or a few days, I start to believe what I've always known: What I think doesn't matter anyway and I didn't care very much to begin with. You don't have to write about everything! You don't have to write about anything at all!

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One of the better internet things I did this year was 'Like' this Eminem fan group on Facebook. I'm not sure where or how I found it, but it's been a consistent highlight of my online experience. It's filled with memes that don't quite get what the meme is, screenshots of people with Eminem shirts and posters, and constant requests that you 'Like' pictures in order to show that you like Eminem more than Justin Bieber or One Direction. The closest thing I can compare it to is a genuine version of @seinfeld2000, but with less emphasis on the spelling and grammar errors. I just noticed that the page says it's based in Pakistan, but it could just as easily be from Peoria or Peru or a place that doesn't start with P. The punctum is there for me, but I'm not posting this to suggest that you 'Like' the page yourself, as almost 3600 others have done; it's not actually that interesting and it's barely funny. Rather, I just want to reiterate something that I think we often forget in the era of Reddit and Twitter and websites that exist to post shareable things from Reddit and Twitter: the internet is still weird if you want it to be. It might not be as obvious as it once was—you might have to join a bodybuilding forum or dig around on Facebook or search for energy drink reviews on YouTube—but it's there, just waiting for you to find it. And if you do find something that's particularly good, maybe do yourself a favor: don't tell us. 

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All the Books I Read in 2013

The Woman in the Dunes – Kobo Abe

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

We Think the World of You - JR Ackerley 

Speedboat - Renata Adler 

Pitch Dark - Renata Adler 

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Camera Lucida - Roland Barthes

Wittgenstein's Nephew – Thomas Bernhard 

Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

Between Parantheses - Roberto Bolaño

Distant Star – Roberto Bolaño

I Remember – Joe Brainard

Watermark – Joseph Brodsky 

Urn Burial - Thomas Browne

Letters to Emma Bowlcut - Bill Callahan

The Fall – Albert Camus

Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

Red Doc> – Anne Carson

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

All of Us: The Collected Poems – Raymond Carver

Where There's Love There's Hate – Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

Falconer – John Cheever

Jean Genet in Tangier – Mohamed Choukri

Diary of a Bad Year - JM Coetzee 

Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

The Sportswriter – Richard Ford

Independence Day – Richard Ford

Paris Stories – Mavis Gallant

Ferdydurke – Witold Gombrowicz

The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

Slow Homecoming - Peter Handke

Short Letter, Long Farewell – Peter Handke 

Don Juan – Peter Handke

Repetition – Peter Handke

In Love – Alfred Hayes 

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 

The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson

Train Dreams – Dennis Johnson

My Struggle, Book 1: A Death in the Family – Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle, Book 2: A Man in Love - Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Incredible Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Death and the Penguin – Andrew Kurkov

My Tender Matador - Pedro Lemebel

Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner

Taipei – Tao Lin

Soul of Wood - Jakov Lind

Tough Guys Don't Dance – Norman Mailer

The Skin – Curzio Malaparte 

So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell

Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

The Beggar Maid – Alice Munro

The Museum of Innocence – Orhan Pamuk

The White House - Orhan Pamuk

Istanbul - Orhan Pamuk

Kiss of the Spider Woman - Manuel Puig

The Bleeding Edge – Thomas Pynchon

The African Shore – Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Tenth of December - George Saunders 

The Rings of Saturn - WG Sebald

Unrecounted – WG Sebald

Vertigo – WG Sebald

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – Elizabeth Smart

A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams

To the Finland Station – Edmund Wilson

The Waves  - Virginia Woolf

Bonsai – Alejandro Zambra 

Ways of Going Home - Alejandro Zambra

If you want to talk about any of these that'd be cool.

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All the Movies I Remember Watching in 2013

I don't really ever go to the movies (partly because I'm cheap but mostly because I don't think it's an enjoyable experience) and I'm rarely in the mood to watch one at home. Even still I managed to watch at least 17 this year. Next year I'm aiming to get it down to ten. Movies are too easy, you know? Books can be boring and difficult whereas even the most 'challenging' film on this list was not at all hard to finish. You know when people talk shit on people who say things like "I don't own a television"? I'm trying to become that straw man. Fuck with me. Anyway, the list:

Metropolitan*

Upstream Color**

Scrooged***

The Act of Killing****

Terminator 2

American Hustle*****

Mud******

Magic Mike******

Sneakers 

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga*******

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Alps********

Frances Ha

Patience (After Sebald)*********

Scoop

Bad Boys

Total Recall

Notes after the break.

*The part where the guy is talking trash on Jane Austen and the girl asks him which of her books he's read and he's like, "oh I haven't read any, you don't need to read something to have an opinion on it" is pretty 'droll.'

**This made me not want to eat pigs for a few weeks because they're so cute, but then I started eating them again after a few weeks. As a cultural Catholic I think there's something healthy about having small, manageable things to feel guilty about.

***I watched this in like July or August for some reason.

****When I was typing this I accidentally wrote a 3 at the end of the title,  turning a documentary about the very nature of killing into The Act of Killing 3, which sounds like a straight-to-video Stallone picture. Again, I laughed. 

*****This was okay I thought.

******I felt like this needed more Matthew Mcconaughey.

*******This was probably my favorite thing I watched all year. It's narrated by Herzog and available on Instant Watch.

********This was made by the Greek same people who made Attenberg and Dogtooth, the latter of which I cannot endorse enough.

*********This is a really boring documentary about W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. But the soundtrack was done by this guy called The Caretaker, and it's totally Sebaldian. Listen to it instead of watching this. Is W.G. Sebald everyone's favorite author yet? Oh also in 2013 I read a Teju Cole interview where he said he was more influenced by Coetzee than Sebald and it's like, "Suuuuuuuuuuuuuure, bro."

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The first time I heard this song I thought Mark Kozelek was singing "Tim Moon, he died at fifty-three." I didn't know who Tim Moon was so I googled it and I found an unfamous man who died last year at fifty-three. He wasn't a musician so I couldn't figure out how Kozelek knew him (my best guess was that they grew up together), but seeing that this Tim Moon, like the guy in the song, was survived behind a wife and kids seemed to confirm that it was the right guy. 

A few months later someone put the actual lyrics online (who are these people transcribing song lyrics? somehow the words to songs that could have been heard by a few thousand people at most are easily available online) and I found out that actually, "Tim Mooney died at fifty-three." Tim Mooney, I learned, was a drummer in American Music Club and a longtime friend. So now I feel sorry about an extra dead guy.

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Quartersnacks just posted numbers 20–16 in their annual 25-point New York Skateboarding Year in Review, which is consistently the most important year-end review around. If you like New York or skateboarding or skateboarders or round-ups you should definitely check it out.

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Mark Kozelek’s songs sometimes feel like poems, but he lets you know this one’s a short story right away: “Gustavo was an illegal immigrant.” Mark hires him to work on his house and they become friends, or friendly. Eventually Gustavo runs into a “redneck Sunnyside highway cop.” He gets deported, then calls Mark from a Tijuana payphone, asking him for money to hire a border coyote. Mark hangs up and says “I’m sorry.” His “heart is heavy.” He “feels uneasy.” There’s an interlude—Mark mentions hiring a licensed contractor who “quit ‘cause his wife was dying of cancer”—then his girlfriend asks what happened to that guy from Mexico. “I don't give much thought to Gustavo,” Mark says, but I don’t think I believe him. Me, I think about “Gustavo” all the time.

— Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon frontman Mark Kozelek had a low-key amazing year, spreading out two and a half albums worth of great material over four releases. I wrote about "Gustavo," my favorite song from his album with the Album Leaf's Jimmy LaValle, for Myspace's 100 Best Deep Cuts of 2013 list. Make sure you read the whole list; pretty much everyone I've ever met from music internet contributed.

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There are no words in Dirty Beaches’ “Alone At The Danube River” because there’s no one to talk to when you’re all alone. This is the sound of walking alone through a foreign city (probably at night): haunting, hypnotic and spectacularly lonely. It’s seven minutes of the most wistful guitar I’ve ever heard. A synthesizer comes in at the 4:30 mark, but it just holds one note. The song doesn’t build to anything—there’s nowhere it needs to go. In a climate of hyperbole and superlative, the sublime sometimes goes unremarked upon. Which would be a shame: This Is The Subtlest Song You’ll Hear All Year. 

—I wrote about Dirty Beaches' "Alone At The Danube River" for Myspace's 100 Best Deep Cuts Of 2013 list

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Dupeworthy

So I have been thinking about how the new guard of media sites seem to be having a lot of trouble with posting things that aren't true. I feel like part of the issue is that writers for the new guard don't realize that to many normal (i.e. non-media) people there is no distinction between old and new media, or between given news sources. These writers don't feel like they need to fact check because they don't think of their sites as being as serious as the Times or Reuters, and they probably don't even think of themselves as reporters. There's an us vs. them/underdog mentality. The Times is a corporation; a website is a few dozen people in an office with the boss in the next room. "I'm just a struggling 20-something posting something that I wrote in 15 minutes, and once I've posted that I've got to post another thing." This feeling persists (and they're not necessarily wrong), despite evidence that these sites have sometimes surpassed their fact-checking forebearers in readership.