Audioccult Vol. 90: Once You Read This, You’ll Never Look At Deadlines The Same Way Again
Light a candle. Draw the required sigils. Now, raise your arms above your head and slowly, gently, exhale your soul. You won’t need it here. This is Audioccult, and it’s time to get low. Illustration: SHALTMIRA
Being a writer isn’t all fun and games. Oh, I realize that people think all we do is recline in our luxury offices, shakin’ and slappin’ our big bellies rudely and making them sing along to records nobody else will hear for two or three months. And yeah, that’s definitely a big part of it, but it’s not everything. Aside from the physical and mental annoyances that accompany such a job description— the strain to the wrists and eyes, the occasionally laughable paychecks, the fear that the security footage of our stomach sing-alongs will be leaked—there’s also the constant threat of that most hated enemy of all writers: editors deadlines. Most of my own best writing actually comes from frantically racing against one of these bastards; it’s something akin to the bizarre strength people sometimes get when they’re trapped under a burning car, only the car represents procrastination.
If you ever find yourself backed into a corner, there’s one thing you can always rely on: the list. Editors love the list, because it tends to require very little editing. In terms of social media, it also tends to garner quite a few clicks and shares. The list is occasionally accompanied by the Upworthy-style headline; if you can throw down something like “Once You Read This, You’ll Never Look At Deadlines The Same Way Again”, you’re more or less in the clear… Say… I think I just found my column title.
This is the part of the column which is the middle part. Here you might expect me to discuss, oh yes, the
FIVE LICENSE PLATES I TOLD NET ARTIST STERLING CRISPIN TO GET
1. CIS COP
2. FREE CAR
3. 5318008 (requires the owner to frequently roll their vehicle)
4. IGOTGAS
5. REGRETS
See? Fast and easy. I didn’t even have to write those, I had them saved in my thingsisay.txt file. It doesn’t even matter, because I’m pretty sure he decided to go with SELFIE, and anyway I was e-beaten when someone else suggested this:
Consider as well how many completely erroneous things get shared online as factual information; the Fukushima meltdown, for example, the reporting of which has been plagued with so many odd and conflicting bits of information and graphics that the average person isn’t going to understand anything about it until the mutants begin their takeover… and by then it will be far too late. Guess what, FACT: a study conducted by scientists somewhere proves that all future battles will be fought on next-gen Call of Duty expansion packs, and because of this the Purple Heart medal will also be retired. No dignity in death when your ass gets AWP’d by War_Boner_420. FACT: Foetus’ 1985 album Throne of Agony was written about the Iron Throne from the TV show Game of Thrones, because why not. FACT: You know those rules people have about smoking in their house? I have that, but for cum. Never cum in my house. I have a patio; you can cum there. We’re building a world of Narcissi thanks to the sexual applications of Google Glass, Kiev is tearing itself apart while we style ourselves after androgynous nineties Leonardo Di Caprio, and here’s a bombastic and non-referential guide to Music Journalist Slang (Flabbergasting 2Chainz: to make an intelligent hip-hop album) that mentions pizza. Ding-ding: mmmmoney.
This is the concluding section of the article. By now you’ve seen the graphics and embeds, and you want something more visual to rest your eyes after having to read text. The worst thing a modern writer can do at this point is to drop a heavy load of information all at once—by now, the reader has likely done as much thinking as they care to and the hand is ready to click elsewhere, so you need a pithy closing paragraph. No need to mention that New Narratives Through Transformations of Structure, a conceptual album by Providence composer Emlyn Ellis Addison, is a fascinating work that explores the concept of music as a meme—i.e. spread en masse through repetition—and alters the meaning of these original compositions by reworking them significantly; “Compound C21H23No5” (the name of an active ingredient in heroin) for example is an ecstatically beautiful variation on Bent’s “Swollen” which uses specific words and reversed choral harmonics to evoke an entirely different vibe and subtext from the original work. But who cares! All you need to know is this:
On 8MM film, actually. ⁓
For more editions of Audioccult, click here.
Published January 24, 2014. Words by Daniel Jones.