Archive for May, 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »The Death Of Meta-Ironic Hipsterism. No Really, I Mean It.
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on May 11, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010Do hipsters really even exist? If so, share your definition. We’re drowning in the recursive irony.
 This rather pervasive and uncredited graphic sums up my image of a hipster pretty well. |
Today I ran across one of my favorite pop culture phenomena, the “meta-hipster reference”. It all started with a Village Voice blog post called The Most Epic Hipster Break-Up Text Message, Ever: The Interview!, which, since I don’t live in Williamsburg or Portland or wherever hipsters live these days, I might have found incomprehensible, but instead just found kind of yawn-worthy. But then a friend asked what a hipster was, and I realized that although I had some media-driven sense of what I thought a hipster was, that in fact perhaps no such thing exists, except when some hipster blog entry denies it’s existence, thereby confirming it. So I of course turned to the most trusted source on the internet for this sort of information. No, not Wikipedia – although the entry there amusingly paraphrases this 2007 Time Out New York piece thusly: “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic elements of all of the fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge, and draws on the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity and gay style, regurgitating it with a winking inauthenticity and a sense of irony“. Which – while a mildly amusing take on hipsters, hardly captures the spirit. I mean, it misses the whole “death of irony thing” caused by the recursive meta-irony of being intentionally ironic while actually just being an educated but utterly unoriginal millennial. No, for a more insightful look into what hipster really means, I turned to Urban Dictionary, which has over 170 entries, featuring such gems as “twenty-something stroketard whose style of clothing conflicts with their demeanor, thus resulting in a spicy pseudo-intellectual with more flavor-of-the-month conversations than a long island prostitute“. Many of the definitions could have only been written by a hipster. I mean, who else would know what a conversation with a Long Island prostitute is like? If you’re not sure if you’re a hipster or not, there is of course a quiz. And to skip the whole hipster phase and become a meta-hipster straight away, familiarize yourself with Look at this Fucking Hipster (often NSFW). And please, for the love of God, if you know what the hell a hipster really is, enlighten us with a comment.
Film Industry Is Only FCCing Itself With New Regulations
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 10, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Monday, May 10th, 2010How the film industry’s latest victory in its battle to control how you watch your movies may actually contribute to its demise.
It is with mixed feelings that I bid adieu to the MPAA and the major motion picture companies of America, because although some of the epic films that came out of….oh hell. Who am I kidding. I’m already planning a party. The desperate land grab for your hard-earned CD’s and song files that the RIAA and the established music industry attempted with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and DRM has spawned one of the most creative decades in pop music, and put more money in more artists’ pockets than ever before. Although smart pop media influencers like Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing are in a tizzy about the admittedly insane new “Selectable Output Control” power that the FCC is handing the film industry, the development should come as no surprise; I can only guess that the reason Cory is so upset is that he must be a cable subscriber. As an avid film lover, this will have little impact for me personally. As just one of the more glaring examples of why this should come as no surprise, one of the people who more recently spun through DC’s revolving doors was Catherine Bohigian, chief of the office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis at the FCC, who left in 2008 to take a job with the cable giant Cablevision. To me the most shocking thing about this recent round of nuttiness being promulgated by the in-some-ways shadowy MPAA is that it’s taking so darn long for the movie industry to undermine itself the way the music industry did. It shouldn’t take too long though; although the studios haven’t been aggressively suing their customers on a regular basis like the record companies, they do have a pretty batshit-insane shopping list for how to protect their market. And after witnessing the indy music industry explosion of the last decade, I personally don’t see any reason why this couldn’t happen with film. The film industry is doing exactly the same thing the record companies did; they’re routinely annoying their best customers, and sticking it to a key distribution channel in their maniacal grab for control of intellectual property. The RIAA did it with radio, the MPAA is doing it to theaters. And they’re doing this at a time when professional-quality production and distibution tools are within the reach of just about anyone. In my opinion there would be nothing cooler than a massive movement comprised of small-house indy film venues showing nothing but indy film in intimate settings using HD technology. I say go ahead and FCC yourself, MPAA.
Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 9, 2010 by admin in Music
Sunday, May 9th, 2010Id’ like to teach the world to sing, but it sounds like they already know how.
The Britlin Losee clip that started it all |
If you saw the video at left on its own, you might just think “Aw, what a silly sappy little fangirl with a sweet voice”, or, if you’re a weepy little crybaby like me, you might actually tear up a bit. She does have a lovely little voice, and she seems like she’s on the verge of crying as she does her introduction and then sings an a capella piece. But what makes the whole thing more touching is that her simple, unsolicited video clip inspired American choral composer Eric Whitacre to assemble his Virtual Choir (clips below), which is a project that uses 285 singers from 12 countries to perform his work. So what’s so inspiring about that? Well, it’s all done through YouTube! On his how we did it page, he describes how a friend sent him the Britlin Losee clip, which inspired the rest. Although the inclusion of Whitacre “virtually conducting” a couple hundred YouTube clips floating in darkness detracts a bit from the video production (it lends a slightly “John Tesch” vibe), the resulting music is gorgeous, and embodies the sort of thing that’s rarely achieved but always hoped for via the web: international sharing of creativity, passion, harmony, and beauty. It also proves something that I’ve always believed but am willing to ascribe to my perceptual disorders, which is that everyone has a song in them. I am almost always hearing a choir in my head, and this music sounds like part of it. Now I know what some of the people look like! More clips below. Read the rest of this entry »
You Will Soon Be Dead To Me, Facebook
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 8, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, May 8th, 2010I’m in a relationship with Facebook, and it’s complicated.
 Rest In Peace, My Love |
We asked recently if Facebook was “over”. Well, the results are in. And the answer is no. I think “dead” would be more accurate. Sure, hundreds of millions of people will continue to use it, but hundreds of millions of people still use Hotmail. And toilet paper. And other things that they don’t necessarily enjoy using, but kind of have to. So why am I suddenly going so harsh on Facebook? Well, partly it’s my own whiny techno-ennui. It just became boring to me some time last year, after doing the one thing I valued it for, which was reconnecting with some valued old friends, and meeting a few new ones. But mainly because of two other things. First of all, the fact that the people behind Facebook have no interest in the user other than as a data mining resource, as evident in their constantly eroding privacy policies and repeated interface changes that do nothing but bury content and confound users about what their privacy settings are doing. Bet you didn’t know Facebook even censors your Inbox messages, did you. The other main reason is that while they do all of these things that are geared toward user data collection to increase their market value, they’ve managed to position themselves as a “utility”, but one that falls short in dozens of ways while distracting many people from more flexible and purposeful forms of communication. Although different users experience the phenomena in different ways, the illusion of being “in touch” with people on Facebook is a compelling one, but in my and many of my friends experience, an illusion that profoundly detracts from real communication, and occasionally actually impedes work when someone is dumb enough to use it as a primary communication channel. But what finally got me in terms of all these interface and privacy changes was the recent rollout of Community Pages. Try some of the paranoia-inducing things listed on this page, and you’ll see what I mean. I’m gearing up to archive my content and contacts, and delete my posts (which FB makes rather difficult), and completely backburner my account as a real tool. How about you? Are you over it? I’m not being melodramatic, by way, just check out Gizmodo’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Obama’s Record On Transparency Worse Than Bush’s?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on May 7, 2010 by admin in Politics
Friday, May 7th, 2010The Obama administration has been a little more like “translucent” so far.
Don’t you hate it when you meet someone, and they say all sorts of hopeful things with a genuineness that makes you kind of like them, things about changing the world and making it better, and then over time you get to know them, and you find out they really were just “saying hopeful things with a genuineness”? Well, that’s how I feel about Barack Obama right now. Before all you Obamaphiles and Obama-defilers start in, let me say that the fact that I voted for the guy doesn’t tell you much about me. I’m a little bit republican, in the old-school sense. I believe that when reasonable people do business in a socially conscious manner, the government doesn’t need to get very involved. I’m also a little bit democrat, in the sense that I know that reasonable people don’t go into business, so social programs, regulation, and taxation are a must. I’m almost libertarian, except I don’t think the world has ever really benefited much from a bunch of Americans owning a gun. But I DID vote for the guy, because I believed him a little bit when he said things. I’m continuing to wonder if I should have. He let me down in a big way before I even voted for him, with the FISA bill. His staff is way more Clintonian than I would have liked to see, and although he’s doing fairly well over on the Obamameter, he has repeatedly supported Bush era policy , he was far less transparent than promised on the health bill process, and his track record on transparency in general has been even worse than the Bush administration. Even HE thinks it could be better. My last hope for the guy at this point will almost certainly be dashed; I’d love to see him continue to go after the banking industry with gusto, but I don’t think he wants to go down in history as the guy that collapsed the global economy, even if it would be the right thing to do. I fear he has little hope of bringing real change, given the insurmountable mess he inherited and the depth of the festering rot that is Washington in 2010, but I would admire him for the rest of my life if he went down swinging with his intelligence and oratory genius intact. Read the rest of this entry »