Monday, November 28, 2005
Friday, November 25, 2005
Gigantopithicine as Bionic Proxy
Totem of an anachronistic future...
...in the hands of our progeny
The schema of the brute anthro-folkloric Other, melded with a forward-looking, retro-biostatic ‘what-if’ pipe dream...
An absurd notion indeed, from an adult perspective, but in the hands of youth, an idealistic, yet metaphysically realistic tool to help reconcile id/superego conflicts within pre-teenoid contingencies.
Meet the "Model Student"
He's an engaging character whom the reader may see appear on occasion as an innocent bystander, fount of wisdom, convenient punching bag, or whatever role the Powers That Be see fit to assign him.
Please give him a warm welcome.
Die Verwirklichung der Nutzlosigkeit
That cruel mirror, verity, eventually compels every man to confront and grill the everyday façade with which he wears with contrived nonchalance.
The forced self-questioning may not dawn until years later — perhaps in the throes of a mid-life existential exigency, perhaps not — but just the same, the inevitable query to account for one’s conscious pretenses awaits.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
What to do about The Scene?
It takes a dying scene incrementally separated from its creative underpinnings, seeing itself neither obligated to seek attention as it is commonly understood, nor to shield the clueless from the strong and individualistic, to make the aim of moral relativism as clear as it is today.The actions of the sane would appear to be in conflict with The Condescending Cool, but that is merely circumstantial evidence. One cannot simply be prosecuted for speculative malevolence towards the ailing fashion sense of others.
As Heretic Friends have so well argued many a time now for over a year, there appear to be convergences of Fashionable Nihilism. Hipsters are using our dying scene to protect agents of Emo-Apparents; why haven't more pundits pointed out that these same fashionistas enjoy their displays of insecurity... as seeing people cowering under a black cloud is the height of style [read: Shy is the new Black]. Their purposes would be clearly suspect if the protection of innocents were still the apex of Western thought.
One of the sources of ‘strength’ of The Hip is their refusal to acknowledge the existence of anything smaller than a Mass Meme. Rhetorical lip service to the people, masses, food service workers, the poor and downtrodden are objects worthy of emotive adulation; but love, pity and sorrow for individuals is sentiment beneath contempt.
What do Hipsters want?
Locally, the Hipsters’ thrust is to facilitate Self-Centered Public Gushing and Cred-Building. But down the clothesline, few get specific. The ambiguity is a dense pall of Parliament®, wafting in no particular direction.
We could spend all of today and half of tomorrow on the explication of the above brief passage. It rings with significance — not unlike some Phish bootlegs — though let it be said at once, the central thrust is quite different from what Hipsters would like us to believe they want.
The entire reason for the creation and perpetuation of their Subjective Whim Flossing is to win attention points — to give fellow travelers the superficial application of deck style. There could be no clearer illustration of this than the tendency for Hipsters to make slavish devotion to Obscure Niche Artistes a fetish upon the sleeve. Surveys taken indicate that the overwhelming majority of self-described Hipsters had that as their main reason for being snooty.
In any consideration of the decision-making towards cultivating public personæ, it's vital that this motivation be kept front and center. Only a comfy coterie that weren't Ego Activists would steer their course away from cozy connections with the Entertainment-Industrial Complex; their relevance to the scene's subjective dynamic would be barely noticeable.
Free-Thinkers have resisted Hipsters' offers of guidance of late. The sole identifiable taste in American life is the subjective taste, a Hipster-dominated realm which bitterly resents intrusions on its privileges from outside its domain. Denial simply crosscuts the grain of history as heretics are crossed off the proverbial Guest List.
Hipster strategists know all of that, which suggests that they're having real trouble finding a new groove for their gang. This is understandable. A subjective posse must establish a new identity, regardless of how derivative it may be. “Me-too-ism” only fleetingly wins fashion points — then too few and too early in the game. To co-opt Free-Thinkers would reduce the Hipsters to insignificance even faster than their recent concentration on blackening the names of those outside their Sphere of Annoyance.
Emo-Affiliates have de-emphasized traditional attention-mongering in Hipster Outreach; they're solely concerned with assembling a winning coalition of ‘The Globally Concerned.’ Sadly, they will find that attitude very hard to shift, in witness whereof we can see how the top figures in the scene have cold-shouldered any questioning of motives. Is this shot in the foot merely a case of the ‘Dummies’ or are these unwitting self-parodies designed from the start to fail?
It may be that this is a necessary stage in the lifecycle of a played-out meme. Whether or not its content changes, it might have to die and be reborn as something a good distance from its origins every decade or so, in order to bolster their Indie Flo-Master Exhaust. It's already happened once: in 1996, people conducting themselves like pathetic losers captured the attention of the clueless Media Tastemakers who then marveled in print at how Cutting Edge they were.
Style in America has some of the traits of an ecology. When an organism stumbles or dies, effects spread out in ways difficult to predict. With the Hipsters tottering, what will the Free-Thinkers' reaction be? Will they clarify and solidify their Distaste for Fronting and become explicitly dedicated towards individualist principles? Or will they slide downward while nursing some pathetically unrealistic pipe dream of standing in front of fans and getting paid million$ for looking vacant, while guaranteeing their dominance for years to come?
Stay tuned.
Starz at 33
Happy 33rd birthday. By the way, you won't be a star.You're not the center of attention — even your Mom doesn't care anymore.
Hear that sound? That's the sound of people your age rolling their eyes at you.
The battery in your Social GPS died in 1996, leaving you in the temporal desert with other aging scenesters, striving to make some sort of social claim to stake...
…As if ‘being there at the time’ was simply enough to merit you the status of ‘elder hipster,’ even though you were a mere bystander with nothing to contribute.
It's sad when magenta hides the gray, and de rigueur black masks the dishwater ambivalence of pedestrian opinions you randomly pick up, knowing all-too-well the social risk of positing something lacking in superfluous profundity.
The tortured artist as social façade (Yes, it's A Given)
Well, it’s an allegory really, probably, and it’s all about nice young individuals who wander in to college towns. It’s ‘self-discovery’ in their eyes, you see. And, these nice young folk show up, and he’s bored with himself and simultaneously inept socially, and his mousy little ‘new best friend’ is more of the same, who is so hollow that her default-mode name-dropping sounds like someone gargling a phone book. Anyway, Mopey Boy and Sad Girl show up here in Classic Town, looking for ‘individuality.’ But Our Man is all in disguise really, all got up as artiste, because his baggage ticket has bigger things writ on it. Historical Inevitability... And he has this baggage, and his baggage is in the form of his Pose and his Need. But what nobody can figure out about Mopey Boy is not the Pose, but the Need. I mean, here he is, a bohemian brooder on the outside, or something, and he has his company, who are as solicitous as he, to a point that faileth human understanding given that they are following a banal life script in the long run... His forays into ‘ironic t-shirts’ and ‘minimal rock’ notwithstanding; and she, touting bad poetry immodestly with art school seriousness... But their true collective baggage is vapidity itself, pursuing individuality by adopting already-stale clichés, unbeknownst to them. Ironies ripped from the golden teeth of ironies... None can argue that their projected, desperate need to be unique, as stated, can be any more accurately interpreted as an equally desperate need to join and be accepted.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Monday, November 21, 2005
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)