The Truth About Cool Guys
If you haven’t already had three half-hour long conversations about Rob Walker’s Sunday Magazine piece on hipsters trying to turn a fast buck on their own retarded lifestyles, we advise that you get your cultural radar checked.
Using such up-to-the-minute examples as A-Ron the Don and the Hundreds, Walker explains how the latest generation of downtowners rebel through logos. Rather than going to work for a big corporate brand, they slap their own logo on parties, flyers and t-shirts, only collaborating with the big boys when the project is right, the money dear, and the liquor free. (Hmmm … sounds like the m.o. of basically everyone we know in this town, who have had varying degrees of success at at it: Diplo, Oxy, Amanda Blank, Philebrity, Paperstreet etc.)
Check out this graf…
Refusing to be the fodder for someone else’s lifestyle-making machine because you are building your own still strikes me as a hollow victory. But maybe I’m just too old to get it. And I have to admit, the more time I spent with the minibrand entrepreneurs, the more I had to concede that what they have been up to is more complicated than simply imitating the culture they claim to be rebelling against. They believe what they are doing has meaning beyond simple commercial success. For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them.
MAYBE I’M JUST TOO OLD TO GET IT. Has a man who gets paid to observe cultural trends ever uttered such courageous words?
The Times is usually at its worst when talking about trends–slow, sloppy, frequently snide, and always hopelessly out of touch. Walker, on the other hand, drops all the right names, arranges them around some fairly brilliant and well-stated ideas, and frames the whole task with a perfectly neutral combination of sympathy and skepticism. Mr. Walker, we tip our beak.
Play Gets Serious
The share of the population that considers video games to be as adult and legit as playing golf or SCUBA diving has been growing for the last ten years. They’ve been getting smarter, older, and accumulating larger and larger portions of disposable income that do not depend on a weekly allowance. More recently, the most skilled gamers have formed their own professional league to compete for cash prizes–the MLG or Major League Gaming.
And now, just yesterday, pro games got the ultimate stamp of legitimacy–a front page story in the Wall Street Journal where we learn that NBA pros and busy stockbrokers are paying $20, $40, even $60 an hour to see the intricacies of Halo 2 through the bloodshot eyes of pasty-faced shut-ins. How do they justify the expense?
“I think my time is valuable enough that paying Tom for lessons is worth it if it saves me however many hours it would have taken to figure it out on my own,” he said.
Hmmm … can anything be a waste of time if there’s a market of people paying by the hour to get better at it? We think not.
Guns Are the New Sneakers
Back in the 60s, the First Amendment was all the rage. Every Tom, Dick and Harry was massing in the streets with flowers in his hair, waving angry signs and lighting draft cards on fire. It was like the director’s cut of the Forrest Gump DVD, set to a neverending “Freebird” jam.
Nowadays, it’s the Second Amendment–the right to bear arms–that’s all the rage. Advanced hipster elites are buying up weapons, gathering at gun clubs, and blasting away at empty beer bottles out on lonely country lanes.
Why are guns so cool? A few reasons.
First, they have the power to kill. Everyone likes to pretend to be bad, like their power to retaliate surpasses all everyone else’s. Without a gun, this pose is a total bluff.
Second, they’re beautiful. Killing machines always get the hottest new technologies and the biggest R&D budgets, which is why guns have sexier design values than the slickest sports car you can imagine.
Last, they obliterate the whole red state / blue state dichotomy in a wisp of smoke. Owning a gun is a political statement that is as radical is it is hard to interpret. Are you a traditional Republican from the plains who grew up hunting with your father? An espresso-drinking, Nigo-wearing, New Republic-reading Brooklyn nihilist who’s so annoyed by Downtown for Democracy that you swung the other way? An insane lefty blogger who thinks the Department of Homeland Security is going to show up, smash your laptop, and ship you off to Guantanamo? A white hip-hop fan trying to feel Biggie Smalls and Grand Theft Auto on a slightly less ironic level?
Nobody knows. All they know is that you’re hardcore.
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Squirting in the City
London must get pretty boring in the summertime, judging by some of the pastimes–some immature, some downright sick–that Londoners are engaging in.
A year after the phenomenon hit U.S. cities, the Brits are finally catching up with Streetwars, a citywide water fight wherein “assassins” are assigned “targets” to stalk and soak. We suppose activities like this are supposed to take the place of skateboarding in the lives of uncoordinated 20somethings who need a break from the hard and fast rules of adulthood and sometimes fantasize about being terrorists. On the more disturbing side of public squirting is London’s public “Masturbate-a-thon,” which involves spanking it in public, for hours, for charity. If we weren’t awash in waves of nausea right now, we’d try to explain what trend this event represents.
The Red Cross needs to drop some playing cards, jumping ropes and chessboards on this city ASAP.
What Tycoons Do For Kicks
We share your hatred of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and most every other luxury glossy magazine that’s filled with images of skeletal women in $1,000 outifts. Such consumer pornography is designed to pierce us with envy, then send us to the mall to bandage our wounded egos with clothes we don’t need, such that we might imagine ourselves to be beautiful as well. Until the next issue comes, that is.
The weird thing is that we totally love Trader Monthly, a magazine filled with fat, neckless stockbroker dudes tooling around their private islands on 2,000 horsepower gizmos that we could never, ever, afford. Trader Monthly makes being rich look like a drag, a perpetual string of Cessna flights and steak dinners eaten on private islands. To these guys, collecting watches and cigars counts as a hobby.
So thank you, Trader Monthly, for letting us peek into the luxury prison of the professional stockpicker’s life. It’s such a relief to know that we’re not missing anything.
Dept. of Fine Print: YouTube Now Owns You
Having just finished partying their asses off with the media elite in Sun Valley, those YouTube lads seem to be rapidly outgrowing their britches. As BoingBoing reported yesterday, the site’s new terms and conditions are more miserly than a Viacom work-for-hire contract.
By posting a video to YouTube, users grant the service “a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submission … in any media formats and through any media channels.”
Usually, when such rights are transferred, a little bit of money flows the other way as a kind of “thank you” to the creator. In this case, all YouTube is offering is fifteen second of fame and free space. In return, they’re taking permanent worldwide all-media rights in return. That’s a big gamble for a site that would be a blank white box if it weren’t for the trust and goodwill of its users.
Wal-Mart Tries to Rip MySpace
You know an idea is on its last legs when it finally reaches the boardroom of America’s largest retailer–Wal-Mart.
The idea in question is “social networking.” You know, those crazy newfangled World Wide Web thingies that let you converse with friends of friends, hence turning your private alone-time into a festive jamboree?
At their best, social networking sites save you the trouble of tracking down each one of your friends and acquaintances and personally handing them a flyer for your band’s show this weekend. At their best, they are like the worst cocktail party you could possibly imagine—fake plastic smiles, contrived personas, stilted pick up lines, and unwanted solicitations from friends and strangers to attend lame events that you could care less about.
Wal-Mart figures it can appeal to parents by cutting out MySpace’s much vaunted sleaze factor. At SchoolYourWay.Walmart.com, authority figures will constantly looking over the shoulder of the innocent “hubster,” or user. They will have the power to censor postings and messages. Everything will be squeaky clean.
MySpace without the sleaze. Sure. This’ll be the greatest thing since engineless cars and sugarless candy.
Screw the Story. We Want the Blood.
Should video games be like novels, with characters, settings, and linear action? Or should they be simple guilty pleasures, retarded bloodbaths where action appears everywhere and leads nowhere? Are video game experiences better when organized into stories, or raw and vertiginous joyrides?
Video game designer David Jaffe says he sometimes likes to play both, but that he only gets his kicks out of designing the latter, games where “Feelings of tension and release, feelings of fear and anxiety, feelings of triumph and defeat, feelings of confusion followed–sometimes–by joy at having overcome the challenge.” Well put.
He calls these games “pure” games, games that aren’t held down by the constraints of story. We’re not surprised that someone’s finally had the stones to suggest that the day of the story is over. After all, stories take a considerable investment of time and attention. Both of these are close to being completely tapped out by the demands of keeping up with our technologies. “Pure games,” on the other hand, are like putting on a CD or turning on a lamp. They occupy our minds but demand next to nothing from them.
TV and movie execs should take note—streaming on-demand media may make beginnings, middles, and ends obsolete. Instead, give us Headline News and Sin City, stuff we can drop in and drop out of at our leisure. Instead of bending over backwards to hold our attention, maybe it’s time to stop trying.
Blogging the History of the Button
The story of the button is the story of technology itself. From the presidential “biscuit” and “football” combo which controls America’s nuclear arsenal, to the humble plastic squares upon which we tap these dispatches, most every human transaction now moves through an electrical circuit, completed by the smallest possible gesture of human intent, the pressing of a button.
We have no idea why no one has ever thought to write a history of the button before, but we’re glad that Bill DeRouchey of Portland’s Ziba Design has taken up the task. DeRouchey’s tastes range all over the field of buttonry. He delights in tracing the portable button back to the world’s first flashlight, revisiting those old escalator buttons that used to tempt our fingers back in the early department stores and completely geeks when he visits a local retro arcade to photograph dozens and dozens of vintage console buttons. Fellow Bloggers, take note: This is what the electronic medium was made for. Not to give us the details of your last date or post some tribute to your favorite band but to explore some previously unknown niche of human knowledge and share your idiosyncratic findings with the world. Like a button, this is one link that simply begs you to click on it.
Warcraft: What a Great Time to Be a Nerd!
The crazy thing about nerds is that they live off in their own little world. Things have to get really crazy over in nerd world before anyone else takes notice. That being said, you have to be living under a rock not to have heard how insane Warcraft has gotten. In the event you are living under a rock, just go to eBay, and do a search for “Warcraft.” You’ll see an entire worldwide economy based off of an imaginary role-playing world, with completely imaginary swords, characters, and real estate exchanging hands for real money. This is what’s known as a MMORPG—a massive multi-player online role playing game.
No longer are the nerds relegated to the far side of the cafeteria with their Dungeon Master manuals and ten-side dice. Now they can gather into a giant nerd herd online, a place where obsessive imagining and fantasy are no longer seen as freakish, but normal.
But wait. It gets crazier. For more than a year, players have been aware of the existence of Warcraft “sweatshops” in third world countries, where rooms full of wageslaves grind away for less than a dollar an hour, building up characters to be auctioned by their masters on eBay.
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