Santino DallaVecchia

Poetry. Criticism. Vampires. Coming of Age Stories. Mysticism. Metamodernism. Postmodern Existential Angst & Such.

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A Mini-Dialectic of“I” and Character

How much are we the products of characters? How much are they representations of us?

I.e., do I like Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader because I recognize myself in him, or do I recognize myself in him and subsequently define myself in relation to him because my sense of self has been interpolated somewhere between my initial “I” and the apparent influence of the Dark Side? Do I recognize significant aspects of my personality in theirs’, or do I conceptualize the world and behave as I do because I’ve engaged with so many of these figures?

Obviously, it’s not as simple a binary as I’m making it. Observe below. If it were, I’d be a Sith, which would offer some fairly damning circumstantial evidence that I totally am just a construct of having watched a shit-ton of Star Wars.

(Also, I love Episode III. A lot Favorite prequel by far, tied for favorite Episode overall. But as much as I love it, having Obi-Wan say this is either crazy sloppy or a metacommentary about good and evil that’s just a lil bit ironic for a blatantly archetypal narrative like Star Wars.)

The easy argument here is that it’s all pretty subjective, it depends on the person, who knows, but this ignores the fact that a significant amount of our time is dedicated to the consumption of various media that use the construct of character to hold our attention, and certain types of characters appeal to us. In that sense, are they us, or are we them? Probably both, but it’s a question of extent and maybe indoctrination (in a neutral sense) depending on the nature of the media consumed, the way in which its consumed, and the pre-existing self awareness of the consumer. No firm position being argued here, just a consideration.

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How to Dance like You’re 22: A (Brief) Satirical/Late-Night Critique by Lisa Folkmire

[My boo (http://abeginnersbaking.tumblr.com) may have provided a Neo-marxist critique of Taylor Swift’s 22 for my twenty-second birthday. There are a lot of reasons why she’s my favorite. You may take this choice of gift as a prime example. Personal highlight: once Prince enters the rhetorical discussion. 10/10, yo.]

Dedicated to Santino DallaVecchia and Karl Marx: Thanks for reading this like a real pro. And to Karl, thanks for being Karl.

(Copyright 2016.)

Taylor Swift’s hit song, 22, has raised quite a stench about turning the age-after-21. Was it just a ploy to give one more wonder year to young adults? Does it really matter that she’s 22? How much does Taylor Swift really care about your birthday today? This essay (I believe) answers none of these, but it does offer a completely satirical view point of her song. So, without further ado:

It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters And make fun of our exes, uh uh, uh uh. It feels like a perfect night for breakfast at midnight To fall in love with strangers, uh uh, uh uh.

Taylor has given up on making it to a higher class status. She is going to spend her night making fun of a subculture that is comprised mostly of upper-middle class young adults, ages 16-24, highly popular from the years 2011-2015. At the same time, she hopes to have the cheapest meal of the day as her fourth meal, an idea brought to popularity by fast food restaurants, an enterprise running largely on lower-middle class America. She ends the stanza with hopes to fall in love with those she doesn’t know, a love that has little to no chance of working out for the long haul.

Yeah, We're happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time It's miserable and magical. Oh, yeah Tonight's the night when we forget about the deadlines It's time

It would appear that Taylor sort of hates being a young adult because she has surpassed most “coming of age” benchmarks and now must deal with understanding the exact responsibilities of being a tax ridden, job searching, life treading human. She ends the stanza with an oxymoron, “Tonight’s the night when we forget about the deadlines/It’s time.” While dismissing all outside responsibilities, Taylor adds in a new responsibility, once again claiming control of a life and age that she feels she is quickly losing hold over.

Uh oh! I don't know about you But I'm feeling 22 Everything will be alright If you keep me next to you You don't know about me But I'll bet you want to Everything will be alright If we just keep dancing like we're 22, ooh-ooh 22, ooh-ooh

22 becomes an other-dependent age for young Taylor. While she claimed that she did not enjoy the age of 22 in the second stanza, she adds a sign of dependency in the chorus line, stating, “Everything will be alright/If you keep me next to you.” But what would happen if Taylor did not keep that human next to her? Would she be able to face young adulthood on her own? Who is this ambiguous “you”? She gives us a small hint to this as she claims, “You don’t know me/But I’ll be you want to.” The “you” appears to be the stranger she was hoping to meet in the first chorus. She’s placing her dependency on the unknown, symbolic of the life of a 22 year old, already holding the capabilities of drinking, driving (not at the same time), and owning firearms, now facing the unknown next big steps in life. She ends with a self-reassurance once again dependent on acting like a restless youth, “If we just keep dancing like we’re 22.” This last line could relate to The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Prince’s claim, “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999.” These claims leave the listener questioning, “How does one dance like she’s 22?” “Am I actually partying like it’s 1999?” and the likes. Without any direct attempt, Taylor adds to the confusion of entering the age of 22. The placement of this statement within the chorus appears to be her own way of “rubbing it in,” as the kids say.

It seems like one of those nights, This place is too crowded. Too many cool kids, uh uh, uh uh (who's Taylor Swift anyway, ew?) It seems like one of those nights, We ditch the whole scene and end up dreaming Instead of sleeping.

Once again, Taylor finds herself relating to the young adult’s party scene. She brings back a reference to the hipsters, “Too many cool kids” and “who’s Taylor Swift anyway, ew,” both self-deprecating and sending shade (again, the language of the youths) to the hipster crowd. She appears to disdain the scene she originally finds hope in, changing the last portion of the chorus to choosing fantasy over reality, ending up “dreaming/Instead of sleeping.” Like many young adults hope to do but cannot because of their socioeconomic status, Taylor decides that it would be best to settle for a romantic daydream rather than facing the life 22 has brought her.

While the rest of the song mostly repeats itself, Taylor adds in one more line, “You look like bad news./I gotta have you,/I gotta have you.” She once again surpasses her new adult responsibilities to revert back to what could be perceived as a teenage like way, going against her initial instinct, “you look like bad news” and deciding that she can “have” the other person. This both shows her intention to give into her desire (which, to be clear, she has total right to do and does not show any lack of responsibility toward herself, she is 22, after all…it’s a confusing age), and her insinuation that she can “have” another person. Ownership or simple sexual desire, the ending is open to interpretation to the reader. 

In short, Taylor Swift finds 22 to be an age of making fun of others, dancing, and generally avoiding reality. I would have to agree. However it turns out, I hope your twenty-second year is just as song-worthy as Taylor Swift’s. You are my top favorite of humans! Sending you all my love today! Thank you for all that you are! <3 <3 <3

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Rhetorical Analysis of Kim Kierkegaardashian

I drew a lucky card in a digital rhetoric course I’m taking– we’ve been discussing the process of applying rhetorical analysis to digital productions and one of the options was one of my favorite Twitter producers wooooooo.

Categories– Aim, Audience, Affect.

AIM

So, Kim Kierkegaardashian’s bio is apparently transparent– “The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian”– but this belies the fact that this is a complicated amalgam of

a) a philosopher existentially positioning and defining how the self works RE to all that alienation in bewildering universe stuff (fun!)

with

b) a pop-culture-socialite-reality star–existence whose public presentation pretty much dismisses existential positioning in favor of embracing a constant shifting of roles to maintain fame and pop-culture relevance (not as fun!)

Søren Kierkegaard is a philosopher trying to discover how we exist as individuals; Kim Kardashian is an aggregate of factors, shaping and shaped by cultural fixations. Kim Kierkegaardashian, then, is a consummately metamodern project– equal parts sincere analysis of our condition via juxtaposition and ironic postmodern disinterest.

If that sounds overtly complicated, keep in mind that Søren was a Christian who didn’t go to church and that Kim is married to a guy with an album called Yeezus.

Prime example– a little inditement against capitalism, generated via an exhortation to figure out where your identity’s at alongside an invitation to be a consumer. Aim? A little bit to make us think, a little bit to make fun, and a lot to entertain. Which brings us to Audience.

AUDIENCE

In the least callous way, this content isn’t designed for the general consumer demographic of the Kim Kardashian brand. Besides cultural theory people, her popularity is predicated largely on passive consumption of her brand. On the flip side Kim Kierkegaardashian isn’t really designed for serious devotees of Kierkegaard, as those are generally a little too busy delving into the process of loving, fearing and trembling, or being snarky towards institutionalized religion to live that Twitter life. It’s uniquely catering to audiences familiar enough with existentialism to get the critique, but pop-culture aware enough to find it funny. 

As evidenced in the below tweet, it’s generally fairly ironically judgmental of consumer materialism. In that respect, it again isn’t really designed for the Kierkegaard people– the whole thing is fairly Neomarxist. You can totally integrate some of Kierkegaard into Marxist thought, but he’s not on that spectrum. So, people with an equal investment in being entrained as voting for Bernie, your average seventeen to thirty-seven year old humanities bent person who may be the beneficiary of a lot of education and a lot of Netflix, for fans of Slavok Zizek, Derrida excerpts, Calvin & Hobbes, and (if you saw the video), Fall Out Boy, that crowd is going to be all about that Kim Kierkegaardashian life.

AFFECT

Mostly entertainment, if we’re being real with ourselves. But this isn’t to draw the Art vs Entertainment, DFW-style spectrum analysis: while Kim Kierkegaardashian isn’t art, it is an implicit societal critique couched in a comedic dialectic set up between existentialism’s granddad and consumer based pop-culture’s embodiment. The affect is that we, the audience, are entertained, but that we are likewise reminded of the positions that we probably basically already say we hold– that is, the anti-consumer message of Kim Kierkegaardashian. 

And this tweet is basically In Persona Christi of the irony present in a anti-consumer message framed in the Kim Kardashian context. The critique is there, but it’s the swing back into postmodernism, where we’re pretty endlessly trapped in being able to reference to Kim Kardashian. We know who she is and we’re pretty clearly interpolated into a cultural state where a comedy account criticizing said culture makes recourse to the thing it critiques in order to enact its critique. The affect doesn’t exist outside the irony– and, ultimately, this realization is the most integral affect of Kim Kierkegaardashian.

[abeginnersbaking]

A 23 Year Old Groundhog Rises Again

I would like to say that I don’t relate to a small mammal that determines our outerwear for the next few weeks, but I’d be lying. Hear me out on this one, please.

Keep reading

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Critique of American Mythology I

Preamble:

1. America is Myth.

2. America’s Myth is a grandiose, beautiful, violent, troubled falsehood.

Specifics:

1. One of America’s greatest stories about itself is Freedom.

2. “Capitalism is Freedom.” This could be posited as one of the most endemic iterations of this narrative.

3. Marxism, in challenging the narrative of capitalism, is bad.

4. Futhermore, Marxism is Stalinism.

5. These are lies.

5. Capitalism is not freedom.

Elaboration:

The false identification of Marxism with Stalinism– the latter meant generally to include all faux-communist governments established in the wake of 20th century socio-political revolutions– in the American consciousness is a potent example of corporate capitalist totalitarianism. We are not free. Our justice is a facade. This is inarguably imbalanced, and many identities among us are disproportionately the victims of this system, but nonetheless, we’re all basically stripped of our essential subjectivity in the corporate-capitalist superstructure. So– the visceral recognition of ourselves as existing in a commodified, objectified, and as such dehumanized state is inadmissible to the cycle of profit and to the government curated to enable it. But Marxism, in the broad sense– maybe gravitate more here towards like “neomarxism” or whatever iteration of that sounds best to you– is still a dirty concept, outside academia. Why? Marx himself had a luxurious beard and I can imagine that it was dirty, you know? So why is rejecting a system of controls in which we, subjective, embodied, transcendental existences, are relegated to commodified consumer objects, regarded as in some way an inditement against our vaunted freedom?

The misapprehension rests with our association of freedom with the ability to buy and sell according to one’s means. This is a sign of agency and liberty. Practically speaking– agency, liberty, with those you’re capable without significant impediment to perform an action. But freedom– the state in which an individual may exist as an individual, baptized with subjectivity, anointed in their right to exist in the state in which they’ve always existed, to be their own ur-text– is not equitable to agency and liberty, though these are important corroborating factors. With the market, then, the ability to amass and trade capital, all the ingenious features of capitalism, if restricted, does can facilitate these constituent factors for freedom. I’ve bought conservatively gallons of expresso on these principles. Seriously. Paychecks to cute little indie cafés. (This isn’t responsible spending in any system, so like watch your sitting-around-reading-and-drinking-coffee addictions, friends.) But this isn’t a bad system of itself and, while it isn’t equitable to freedom as a state of existence, it does seem to be a nice accessory for agency and liberty.

It’s when capitalism morphs into something else that still wears its name that we go from trading for apples with gnomes to giving our first-borns to Rumpelstiltskin. But the misidentification in the first place is a huge component in how complicit we’ve been, culturally, about the rise of the corporate-capitalist superstructure. We’ve already erroneously identified capitalism in its benign form as freedom, or, rather, as a major component of freedom in the conceptual sphere. In assuming the name of capitalism, corporate powers, existing overridingly for the enrichment of the few who stand to materially gain from the profit generated by these massive agencies, create a scenario in which they are instinctively identified with freedom. Which, as we all know, is capitalism.

Except that this is a fabrication. Kierkegaard, discussing the fundamental duties of the individual to the individual, that is, the human to the human, writes, “The condition is that of finding a foothold in actuality. Delusion is always floating; for that reason it sometimes appears quite light and spiritual, because it is so airy. Truth takes a firm step, and for that reason sometimes a difficult one, too.” An enormous part of our mythology, the metanarrative we’ve been indoctrinated into as passive recipients and which we’ve helped maintain as active contributor-consumers, is this whole false identification of freedom with capitalism. The foothold in the real, in which we are subjects possessing inherent freedom, is an aspect of existence we have been partially shut out of by the constant birth and rebirth of the corporate-capitalist superstructure. In this system, we’re objectified, deprived of the opportunity for advancement, relegated in our passions and careers by demands of profit as dictated by the superstructure– all in the illusion that it is this very state that allows us the maximum potential for freedom.

This whole narrative is grounded in delusion: it becomes spiritual because we’ve internalized this whole ideology for so long, it becomes unquestionable, sacrosanct, mythical– part of the fabric of how we conceptualize ourselves. And how do we conceptualize ourselves? As free– or, at least, that this is our ideal state, that we should be free. But the story we’ve been told and have told ourselves associates a social order– blankly referred to as Marxism– with totalitarianism. A cursory glance over the actual goals of a socialized system should pretty serenely show that totalitarian regimes are not actually related to this philosophy. (Stalin, in what should be a major cue, had a mustache, not a beard. Unlike Marx. That man had a beard to remember.) In the same way that our corporate capitalist superstructure associates itself with freedom, Stalinist et al ideologies associated with Marxism.

Capitalism is not freedom. We have to disavow ourselves from this association and step out into reality. What does this reality look like? To be sure, it doesn’t resemble any classical Marxist fantasy of a lovely little egalitarian society. Obviously, I love small market capitalism. And the full dismantling of the corporate superstructure, that’s a long road. But here I’m getting at, and I think the goal of embracing a new Marxism, is to de-center these powers, to recognize that they are not edifices of freedom, but instead, massive instruments of control, objectification, and commodification. To cleanse “Marxism” of our cultural misrepresentation. I’m quoting Kierkegaard, I routinely link to poems– I’m a Bohemian Catholic transcendentalist type, not a radical materialist. But we are wonderfully, beautifully embodied, and we exist in such a state of material being that it’s incumbent on us by the nature of our existence to rise and become embrace our subjectivity by cleansing our false association of Marxism– in the broadest possible sense– with totalitarianism, and our identification of capitalism with freedom.

[abeginnersbaking]

I’m not supposed to be here.

I wasn’t supposed to do this again. Start a blog. Talk about my own boring experiences online for people to browse through at work or at home or in the car (hopefully not the car) or wherever. But about three hours ago I decided I had an hour to spare and that I might as well be constructive with it. My life has reverted back to the way it was when I was 18: Blogging on tumblr and listening to what could be Forever 21′s playlist.  

Keep reading

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The person writing this might be in some way tangentially connected to me a bit. <3

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By Santino DallaVecchia lstn listn listen. Before the nineteen seventeen small town taverns and their grimy liquor fronted mirrors, Shhhhh, through the big headed little fox’s impenetrable gaze bef...

One of my poems appeared in Sediments Literary-Arts Journal.

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In Which Peculiar Mormyrid Took Me To Tea

Two poems I published a few months ago in the inaugural issue of Peculiar Mormyrid. http://peculiarmormyrid.com/santino-dallavecchia/

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This Halloweentown apparition is probably one of the best things that's happened to Alma College in decades.

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Vampire Thesis Related Stuff

Cultural critic William Patrick Day writes, "the vampire has become an ambiguous figure in the story about the nature of humanity at a time when we are no longer sure we know what human nature is" (4).  Thus, lacking a compelling metanarrative about human nature, we use the vampire's dark fluidity & extensively varied representations of different points in conversation about our sense of being to explore what we think we are.

Just vague thoughts right now. Still taking in a lot of texts & exploring what my favorite monster means.

(Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture)

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Alma College, where I’m finishing my undergrad, publishes an anthology named after the river near our school every spring. My friend Jacob & I, along with a fair amount of other writers we've known, both appear in this one.

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Everything in Pennsylvania

Traveling is weird & one of my favorite things.

Being published is exciting, even if it's not your first time. Sort of like being kissed.

I wrote this last winter, on the threshold of spring.

Bob Dylan is cool, & I don't know what he'd think of this essay, but I hope (in a vague sort of way) that he'd like it.

(My piece starts on page 18.)