Read this:
http://www.tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/08/the-percentages-a-biography-of-class
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My theory is that Xeni trolled / clickbaited the boingboing readership with what she described as a âwonderfulâ image and waited for the fur to start flying. It is arguably the most objectionable and âoffensive to someâ of all of the J.Peg photographs: itâs interesting that she picked this one for the lead. There are a couple that come close, but none that hit the whole gamut of âfat, drunk, stupid rednecksâ quite so well. That having been said, this photo in question, and the handful of similar others of âMerle and Matildaâ, donât bother me much at all. For the very reason that theyâre so heavyhanded and (honestly) not very interesting or âwonderfulâ or even original.
Another point: someone above said âItâs people making fun of their own stereotype.â I kind of doubt it. Fat, drunk, stupid rednecks donât generally take so many photographs, with costumes, decent cameras, actual lighting, etc. In most of the photos, the participants seem to be, well, hipsters in their real life maybe? With a fondness for the vastly overdone âironic decadent American Gothic shabby chicâ school. Where most of the rednecks look a bit like Jason and the Nashville Scorchers. Or Buckaroo Banzai. Victorian Hipster Rednecks. Itâs a thing.
Just a thought. What do I know? Iâm just the guy who gets his posts removed at the drop of a hat.
(hatdrop)
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Well, if you look him up, heâs a photographer in Monroe, LA.
And I mean, the vibe I get is that itâs a guy whoâs alienated about being stuck in the south and has decided to poke fun at rednecks. And I mean, I guess I can understand it; I used to make fun of rednecks, too. Then I turned 15.
Iâm assuming that Xeni picked it because the comp work and body sculpting isâŚerm. Check out the rest of the photostream; outside of the redneck series, there was some stuff in there.
Iâm sorry, when did it stop being cool to make fun of rednecks? And yes, even rednecks make fun of rednecks, Iâm pretty sure thereâs some big comedian who kind of made it into a thing. Oh, and I love how someone above says he canât possibly be a redneck because the photos are quasi-professional with real camera gear and lighting so they must be hipsters, and this is why they are not kosher. JeanBaptiste, you, Sir, WIN the meta-trolling competition!
Wow. Didnât mean to offendâŚ
Let me guess: youâre wearing a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots (and a mechanicâs shirt with a name patch on it) at this very moment, arenât you?
The PBR in a can is the obvious clue we are dealing with hipsters.
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｡ďžâââ(ďžâďž)âââ!!
itâs computerz not photos. but the chick is 'nuff hot.
Dixie Hipsters, a.k.a. âDixters.â
There was no context given. None. That link that you claim provides the necessary context shows the dominant thumbnails in âXavier J Pegâsâ photostream to be more cheesecake and some guy playing electric guitar.
How does that help a naive viewer infer that the original image is self-satire?
Since you have the context for Mr Peg that I lack, please help me out. I assume a fellow Southerner [*] named Xavier Peg is an African American with Louisiana roots. Did I get the context right this time, Mr Krause?
[*] In my home town, The Confederate Soldiers of America Memorial Arch sits proudly on the South Lawn of the Courthouse and features two water fountains. I am all-to-familiar with your rhetorical stance, Mr Krause.
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It does seem to me that the feller on the right is dressed an awful lot like some guy who got famous saying things like, âI donât care who you are, thatâs funny.â
But my own seven-years-in-a-doublewide upbringing has to wonder whatâs up with the PBR, the Miller High Life hat, and the corncob pipe. In my neighborhood those would have been Budweiser, a CAT hat, and a pack of Marlboro Reds (if you were in high school) or Camels (if you were out of high school) or Benson & Hedges (if you were my dad).
And yeah, that Airstream classes things up waaaay too much. We had us one of these:
Shit, Iâve wintered under canvas, and that thing looks grim.
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To this day, I love the smell of off-gassing fiberglass in the morning.
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Iâm amazed that you mention googling something as if it were effortful, or remarkable, or worthy of reward or, indeed, of notice at all. Can I get a gold star for breathing too?
Questions about context, content, intent are basic and very important in Introduction to Art and/or Sociology 101 theory. Who is this picture for ? Who is in the photograph ? Who made this picture ? Do you feel these questions are unreasonable ? Does that make this photograph art ? Is it satire ?
Theyâre eminently reasonable and quite common questions to ask, duh. Theyâre also way better than the trollishy, hand-wavy, âI have concernsâ thing that you were doing earlier.
The point is that itâs a blog post, not a monograph or an exhibition, click the link, look at the pictures, read the words: donât rant on about not having the context for an image when itâs been provided for you and while refusing or failing to further contextualize it yourself.
And full disclosure: Iâm not at all really concerned about the subtext(s) of the image, or who the artist is, and I havenât even materially contextualized them. I donât feel the need to do this or feel that theyâre vital issues for my consumption of the work because I looked at the work and enjoyed it and that was enough for me.
That link that you claim provides the necessary context shows the dominant thumbnails
There are 5,795 photographs in that photostream. Even if that were all one had to go on, the claim that thereâs no context to the image is stunning, ludicrous, false. Look for even a brief second at the early pages and at the current ones and youâll easily see a switch from documentary to posed-staged portraits, humorous stuff, photoshop, cosplay, etc. Satire or self-satire, dunno, maybe google it? As I said above, theyâre not burning questions for me, but if youâre tortured by the thought of people being unfairly lampooned then I donât see how driving trollies about it here is a better strategy than using your Internet 101 skills.
Iâm not sure about the rest of your bit. Iâm not sure who Xavier J. Peg or Xavier Peg is. Iâm a northerner who knows little about the south save what Iâve read in books and brief visits. I have no idea what youâre talking about when youâre bringing in the CSA, but Iâm not a states-rights, fly-the-rebel-flag kind of guy, if thatâs what youâre implying (which would be odious, btw). My ârhetorical stance,â such as it is, is simple: click the damn link, read, then cavil away. Cavil first, and badly, lulz ensue.
Or maybe try to be appreciative of art and images and try to understand them first before taking a big fat crap all over a really fun place on the Internet.
âXavierâ is the guy whose photostream youâve been defending â the persona whose missing âcontextâ supposedly makes the orignal image non-insensitive. Given your vigorous defense, I was hoping you could enlighten me. Alas, you are as ignorant as I.
The context simply isnât there without substantial extra work. 5,795 additional photographs, by your count.
I had clicked on the links, and I simply donât agree with your analysis of the âcontext.â Given how poorly you inferred my own context, I am not willing to put much value in your analysis of Mr Pegâs, either.
About that âCrapâ you think I took on BOingBOing. BoingBoing takes insensitivity seriously. Xeni leads the way â see her posts on Guatemala or the founder of American Apparel, for example. That thoughtfulness is a big part of what makes BoingBoing wonderful. Any seemingly insensitive remark on BoingBoing gets jumped on hard by the commentariat, whether a newbie poster or a BoingBoing Founder. BOing BOing is better for this. I seriously doubt Xeni is feeling âcrapped on.â I presume she is at most amused by this minor kerfuffle.
You have your opinion of this art, which you have presented thoughtfully. I have an opinion, too. As someone sadly too-familiar with the expression âSome of my best friends are black people,â I call out this art for what I think it is:
A demeaning of an âother.â
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Could very well be. Iâm not gonna bother, myself, to investigate whether the artist is mocking his own kind or not (though that is probably the crux of the argument). As I mentioned earlier, the Pabst and the High Life hat and the corncob pipe seem to me to be giveaways that maybe someone doesnât know their target as well as they maybe think they do. Or I could be totally wrong. Where I come from, Pabst was virtually unknown, Miller High Life was marketed more toward an African-American market (Miller Genuine Draft would have appealed more to the rednecks in my trailer park, who wouldnât have a can of High Life poured on them if they were on fire), and the corncob pipe fell out of fashion when General MacArthur died. But my trailer park ainât everybodyâs trailer park, plus I moved out of it in 1979, so times they have a-changed.
But on a more casual, theoretical level, I wonder to what degree white privilege insulates âredneck humorâ from being too terribly awful. My family was lucky in that we were able to âmove on upâ out of the trailer park and into the kind of suburbia where your house didnât have wheels under it. But still there can be abject poverty and misery in such places, and thatâs nobodyâs idea of funny.
And yet. My familyâs whiteness, I have no doubt, helped grease our skids, if you will, on our way up and out of the trailer park. We didnât have much money and our collars were completely blue (my dad was a machinist and my mother what was still called a housewife, raising three kids at home with four more already moved out), but still we eventually saved up and bought a modest house with a foundation and everything, and we kids had the opportunity to go to college (though we had to pay for it ourselves), and we were always encouraged, by our family and society at large, to believe that we could be or do whatever we wanted when we grew up.
I was a big fan of Greg Garciaâs sitcom My Name is Earl, and Iâve also enjoyed his more recent show Raising Hope. Both shows poke some gentle fun at the very sorts of people I lived alongside⌠the sort of person my family members and I were, to an extent⌠in our trailer-park days. Now, as far as I can tell, Greg Garcia grew up in regular olâ suburbia; his childhood home is this attractive three-bedroom home in North Arlington, Virginia:
He attended a state university (Frostburg State in Maryland) and got an âinâ through the Warner Bros Writing for Television course, so itâs not like he came from a particularly elite background, but still, I imagine he always did okay for himself, even if he did work as a cashier at the Burbank Burger King during the last WGA strike (that was done partially as research for a book).
Blue collar family or not, can Garciaâs work lampooning some of the trailer-park denizens on My Name is Earl be self-mockery, as opposed to âdemeaning an otherâ? Garcia has said that he prefers to write about working-class characters because he finds them more real, as well as more fun to write. I know that I recognized a hell of a lot of familiar attitudes and situations on that show, and yeah, they were funny as hell, especially when I saw myself or my family and friends reflected in that showâs characters. I honestly thought Garcia had to be trailer-park-bred himself in order to so accurately (and yet lovingly) skewer the mindsets of the colorful, undereducated, and cash-strapped weirdos populating both my childhood and his TV shows.
So I donât know. Maybe Garcia isnât poor or uneducated enough to be given a free pass to write this stuff. I guess maybe thereâs a spectrum of identity along which we possess varying degrees of ownership of our own images and their mockability. Subjective as it is, it must be nigh impossible to avoid offending someone.
But I donât think the sorts of people lampooned in the OPâs picture are necessarily quite so downtrodden and underprivileged that having a laugh at their expense should be automatically verboten, if for no other reason than that their social mobility is probably not so fixed in stone as it would be for, say, non-white people. I suppose itâs not nice to laugh at the weirdnesses and excesses of the overprivileged since that, too, would be demeaning an âother.â But the consensus among most people seems to be that they can take it (though a few of those 0.01%ers can be known to whine about it).
In any case, it strikes me as rather weird that it might be perfectly okay for me to laugh my ass off at My Name is Earl (or the Merle picture) simply because I, myself, inhabited that world⌠or, more to the point, that I could legitimately write such a show, and someone from a significantly different background (who might even be a keener social critic, funnier writer, and all-around nicer person than I am) should not.
Authenticity aside (like whether or not the Pabst belongs there), how is the audience to know?
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