Lifestyle & Culture
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk Part I
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on August 21, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, August 21st, 2010How Gutter Punks, Crusties, and Travelers represent a conformist and freedom-motivated lifestyle “brand” that isn’t Punk at all.
 Has Anarchy Become A Brand? |
That’s not only a song by The Tubes that I really don’t care for, it’s also a simple truth. It was all kind of an accident really. In 1977 I didn’t mean to be a teenage punk. I just had the misfortune of having a British hairdresser and a predilection for buying my clothes at resale shops at the same time that bands like the Sex Pistols were first making a splash. Suddenly, and for almost a decade, I was “punk”. Which was annoying, because the fact was that in spite of my appearances in the early eighties, I HATED most punk bands, and just about everything else that was officially punk. My friends and I were just arty types who liked drugs, had weird haircuts, wore a lot of black clothes and makeup, and didn’t want to be Ronald Reagan’s suggested version of a young adult, i.e.: a YUPPY. All of which is why I have a sort of anthropological fascination with contrived American urban tribes and subcultures like Gore Lolitas and Juggalo Furries, body modders, self-cutting emos, and most recently “Gutter Punks”. You may have noticed more of these kids lately; while they’ve been annoying people in hipster havens like Williamsburg or the Haight in San Francisco for quite a while, they’ve more recently been invading more middle American towns as well. I was actually spending time with a few of them recently to write an in-depth piece, but got tired of being stood up by them over and over, so have shelved the idea for a while. Which was kind of a relief in a way. Because although some of the kids I talked to were witty, reasonably intelligent, and had some interesting things to say, they really, REALLY smelled awful. And I’m not the kind of person that needs everybody to smell “Zestfully Clean” or anything; I’ve been around all kinds of people who don’t have the same hygiene standards as an urban American. The natural smell of a healthy human really isn’t unpleasant. But almost every crowd of these kids I’ve spent time with smells like some horrible collision of urban grime, petrol, beer, patchouli, urine, feta cheese, and Cool Ranch Doritos™. Not necessarily in that order. That may sound superficial, but try spending an hour with it. In any case, what I really find intriguing about this kind of “tribe” is that these kids have made a serious lifestyle choice, and usually possess refined hoboing, trainhopping, and grifting skills that are all wrapped up in a hybridized cookie-cutter countercultural brand that borrows from beats, hippies, punks, and rastas to create a new lifestyle that is “off the grid” and seems rebellious, but is ultimately based on conformity. It’s like “anarchy as a brand”. Which is why I cracked up when I learned that there was a The Decline Of Western Civilization: Part III for sale on Amazon for 200 bucks
Scientist #1: Blah, Blah, Blah. Scientist #2: Nuh-uh!
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 18, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010It’s interesting how two scientists with the same information available can arrive at diametrically opposed positions. Is science just another religion? Ray Kurzweil says we’ll reverse engineer the brain in 20 years. PZ Myers says “nuh-unh”. Oh yeah, and the web is dead. Or it isn’t. Or it is.
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| No it isn’t. |
I would like to clarify that I am not an expert in any of the areas I’m about to discuss. This is obvious to most intelligent people whenever I start to speak, but I just want to make sure that you know that I know. In spite of my lack of expertise (some may call it actual ignorance) in the fields of science, technology, religion, and philosophy, I have a great deal of enthusiasm for learning about and discussing them, which is why I love it when a real scientist or expert makes a broad, bold assertion, and another immediately refutes it. This happened twice today in the tech press, and in one instance, the contested “science” veered dangerously close to the metaphysical. The more mundane example was when Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson (who most recently got a lot of attention for his book Free
Why You Need To Stop Uploading Photos From Your iPhone To Facebook. Now.
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010With over 2 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE, when will we have time to enjoy it all? And where will we keep it until then?
As I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had nothing I wanted to listen to in my music collection, I had to pause and laugh. I have what some of my friends consider to be a rather puny collection at about 14,000 song files. Really? Nothing to listen to? If I DID choose to listen to it all, I just did the math, and it would play non-stop for just over 48 days! And my collection is only about 0.001% of the 13,000,000 songs on iTunes. This reminded me of a discussion I had years ago when I worked in a bookstore and I asked one of the more seasoned bibliophiles on staff when he thought was the last time a person might have read all the books in print, and without hesitating he replied “around the time of Voltaire”. I guess book store employees have time to ponder these things. Today, if you were to read a book a day, it would take you 355,794 years to accomplish the same feat, at least based on Google Books’ count, which is 129,864,880 books. Things get worse when it comes to user-generated content. If you wanted to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube from JUST TODAY, it would take you about 94 years. Of course, somewhere in there you’d be watching a few thousand versions of Keyboard Cat, but that’s how much video was uploaded today; 24 hours’ worth every minute. And things are for all practical purposes just as hopeless if you have any intention of trying to keep up with feature films; this source says that globally, there were 6,324 made by major studios in 2009, and if you include indy films submitted to major festivals, the number jumps to 50,000 each year. Even if you stuck to only watching the major releases, that’s still 17 movies a day. So where do we store all this media? And when will we have time to consume it? Well, the answer to the first question may soon become a problem; 2008 was the first year in which the data we generated exceeded our available storage space. Thank God we delete old e-mails, right? And the answer to the second is up to you. Personally, this all made me realize that with an estimated 37 years to live (according to this MSN calculator, who knows how much storage space it uses) I probably need to select my media more carefully, and maybe read a book before years’ end. That hour on YouTube, 3 hours on Wikipedia, and 2 hours sharing it all on Facebook last night was probably time better spent. Read the rest of this entry »
No Tax Cuts For The Rich Until They Buy More Stuff
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 8, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, August 8th, 2010In fact, if more of them don’t get on board with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates’ GivingPledge.org idea, maybe we should just eat them.
 When you look at the numbers it’s a no-brainer. |
I find it a little difficult to stomach that there’s any kind of debate about extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. With a stalled economy, 2.5 trillion in debt still laying around from when we “fixed” it, a 16.5% unemployment rate, and 1 in 8 Americans actually struggling to eat, what kind of psychology makes it possible for someone who already has hundreds of times more than they need to sit by the pool fretting about whether or not they’re losing the tax breaks they probably didn’t deserve in the first place? Even Timothy Geithner thinks that we should let them expire. And while the wealthiest are figuring out how to adjust their budget, they better figure out how to spend some money, because their tightwad behavior is wrecking any hope for a recovery that we have. In fact, I’ve got a better idea. Well, it’s actually Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffet’s idea too, but like you probably did, I thought of this a long time ago. How about they just GIVE ALL THAT EXTRA MONEY AWAY? That GivingPledge.org site is even inspiring Dicks named Larry to get off his yacht long enough to get on board. It’s a great idea, because the money pledged doesn’t go to a specific cause or charity, and the person pledging doesn’t really have to do anything, they just have to say they will, which inspires a lot of dialogue, and therefore, inevitably, guilt. Which eventually is bound to result in some actual philanthropy. If more wealthy people can’t get the hang of this, I say we eat them. How about you?
You Biatch! You Stoleded My Link!*
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 3, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010Ever get a weird possessive feeling about the links you share? Me too. That’s because they’re ALL MINE. I just haven’t been sharing them. Help me name our new weekly “link dump” column.
I get depressed sometimes when I realize that my life is just a bunch of web links strung together with occasional real-life discussion, but mostly just connected by written commentary and link sharing on Facebook. It gets REALLY depressing when I find myself having an emotional response to someone sharing a link on their Facebook “wall” without crediting me, as if somehow it was MY link. Or if they get more comments in spite of posting it when it’s already a week old. “Stupid link sharing friend! I shared that link LAST WEEK!” This is one of the unfortunate side effects of maintaining a site like Dissociated Press. As I said to a friend once: “The Internet. I have seen it“. Out of the literally dozens of sources I comb regularly to bring you interesting stuff, I OMIT infinitely more than I share, because, well, they’re JUST LINKS. So I’ve finally decided to put this wasted pile of weekly links to use, with a regular “link dump” section. I just need a name for this new section on the site. “Linkdump” somehow doesn’t sound like something that would generate enthusiastic user engagement. So if you have an idea for a name, feel free to share. But enough delaying. On with delinking! Read the rest of this entry »