I'd argue that, regardless of your intent, that mullet was ironic.
Speaking of this, I notice on the cover of Kerrang! magazine that 80s L.A. style glam-rock styling is back [in a minor way]. I'm assuming there's been some sort of revival via all the emo/metal-but-in-denial bands that have been around for a while.
http://www.kerrang.com/blog/newissue/
This post about the category "hipster" as a boogeyman is good.
Sometimes I wish Unfogged were on FB so I could just write on its wall. But that would be bad.
It was interesting that for all its in-depth consideration, Mark Greif's hipsterstravaganza reprinted in New York Magazine from the n+1 pamphlet skipped right over that aspect.
Cat and Girl had it right even earlier.
I had to look twice to make sure this picture wasn't of my parents.
Speaking of this, I notice on the cover of Kerrang! magazine that 80s L.A. style glam-rock styling is back [in a minor way].
Has it ever gone away as far as Kerrang! is concerned? Also, that cover doesn't look very glam to me. Certainly not compared to, say, The Darkness.
Wow -- thanks, Apo. I've had a laughing fit going for the last little while, and I'm only on page 1.
re: 7
It's classic mid-80s Motley Crue, even down to the haircuts. Oh, shit, they've changed the cover that was up just an hour ago.
I meant this lot:
http://th02.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/f/2010/299/d/3/d318e5af59348dfeb42621ff4f40021c-d31k2cb.jpg
Although the cover in question was even more mid-80s than that. Zoolander meets Motley Crue.
Your dad a birther before you were born. He convinced half of the town that Jimmy Carter was born in Kenya and that LBJ was a Muslim.
3: Yes very nice. Makes explicit some things I struggle to put into words. My favorite quote (although the second sentence is a bit over the top):
Yet it's a hysteria to focus that anxiety on these kids personally rather than on, say, the system of cool and cultural capital, and what's more the genuine lack of control you have over hypercapitalism, of which their look uncomfortably reminds you. The hipster-monster is the face of a cultural death wish, along the vector of a snarling circle jerk hurtling towards social atomization and collapse.
re: 7
Also, I think 80s style glam-rock was deeply unfashionable even for people who were basically fans of 80s rock music. The Darkness revived it a bit, but with so many layers of irony that I don't think it counts. Recently, there's more of a taking-themselves-seriously revival of that look.
More About Kids Today vs My Much Superior Generation ...from the Paper of Record's Science section
A couple of years ago, as his fellow psychologists debated whether narcissism was increasing, Nathan DeWall heard Rivers Cuomo singing to a familiar 19th-century melody. Mr. Cuomo, the lead singer and guitarist for the rock band Weezer, billed the song as "Variations on a Shaker Hymn."Where 19th-century Shakers had sung " 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free," Mr. Cuomo offered his own lyrics: "I'm the meanest in the place, step up, I'll mess with your face." Instead of the Shaker message of love and humility, Mr. Cuomo sang over and over, "I'm the greatest man that ever lived."
Judy Collins didn't sing it that way.
There wasn't any irony to the Darkness. Knowingness, yes. Irony no.
re: 14
I don't know. I think they had a real love for that music, but they definitely did [or the singer did] layer on the silliness which they clearly didn't take seriously in the way that the pouting emo/goth types do.
I get really puzzled by the discussions of hipsters and why they're bad, mostly because I can't quite figure out the position from which 'hipsters' are being criticized. In 1970, someone bitching about hippies was probably implicitly contrasting them with young people who had short hair, nine-to-five jobs, and had registered for the draft: hippies were bad because they weren't well-behaved good citizens.
But people bitching about hipsters seem to largely be indistinguishable from hipsters, at least from the perspective of my advanced years. I can't see what the objection to them is.
I think this celebration of one's parents is kind of endearing.
Also, the reminders that the present generation did not invent sexual intercoursethe current mark of the youth whatever it may be have my approval.
The Flynn Effect in narcissism (and anxiety, apparently) is understudied, both as a phenomenon in itself and in its relation to the better known one about IQ. After all, why shouldn't the kids be pleased with themselves? Their IQs are something like 20% higher than ours!
I think they had a real love for that music, but they definitely did [or the singer did] layer on the silliness which they clearly didn't take seriously in the way that the pouting emo/goth types do.
But that's kind of inherent to the genres, isn't it? Emo and goth is, generally speaking, extremely earnest. Glam rock is pretty much the opposite. The Darkness weren't any more ironic, or silly, than, say, T-Rex. But what there is is an acknowledgement and an embrace of the silliness. When, say, Hawkins rides over the crowd on a plastic tiger, he's not doing it to be ironic, but because it's fun. And awesome.
18: I think I'd be more pleased with myself if my IQ was 20% lower.
re: 19
I suppose, yeah. I did used to see a lot of 80s glam-rock bands at the time [fuck it, I _played_ in a shit 80s glam-rock band in pubs around Falkirk] and they were a lot of fun.
But people bitching about hipsters seem to largely be indistinguishable from hipsters
The joke about the hipster who says "I won't go to that bar, it's full of hipsters!" has been around since at least the mid 90's.
13: Comedy gold from the bobster's link:
"In the early '80s lyrics, love was easy and positive, and about two people," says Dr. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University. "The recent songs are about what the individual wants, and how she or he has been disappointed or wronged."
LB: For "hipsters" read "poseurs." All will become clear.
24: I have that sense that wanting to call people poseurs is sort of it, but it's still weird -- who are the people who are entitled to act in the way that exposes 'hipsters' as being phonies, and what do you call them? If you see what I mean.
"The recent songs are about what the individual wants, and how she or he has been disappointed or wronged."
Heh. So, Bob Dylan's entire oeuvre then.
The critique of hipsters isn't that they're phony, surely. It's that they're try-hards.
I think the Wilson article gets across problems with "hipster" as used by complete outsiders - culture warriors, total squares, prior generations, etc. But there's something different about the term when used by at least slightly trendy younger people. In particular, I think it connotes the idea that the associated dress, manner, and activities are a form of status-seeking conformism that masks itself as non-conformism - think about how many of the stereotypical hipster utterances are cliquish putdowns of venues, bands, etc. But the trouble is that for quite some time now, individualism / non-conformity has itself been an enduring primary criterion on which people are judged; variation in styles, tastes, and hobbies is taken for granted, and so the person who has a full complement of the "correct" things to wear, do, and listen to, and looks down at everyone who doesn't, is going to be fairly rare. To a large extent when my circle of friends say "hipster," I believe it reflects internal anxiety that their characteristics are not completely individual and idiosyncratic in origin (which is the ideal) and are in fact a tool of social grouping and excluding (which they are - at least partially); a bogeyman of what they fear they might become.
32: If I understood that, the hipster ideology is that each person is a radically individual special snowflake, each of whose esthetic decisions has been arrived at with absolute independence. And so if you find a person with those values, and he resembles anyone else in his attire/hobbies/whatever, he's a hypocritical jerk because he thinks he should be absolutely unique but he isn't?
And so someone who's dressed precisely the same, but isn't a jerk about being a special snowflake, isn't a hipster and is fine and not mockworthy at all.
Well, it's never about characteristics needing to be absolutely internally-derived - there will always be fashions, and it doesn't make you a poser to follow them to some extent. But yes, I think what makes the concept of "hipster" as I know it is being a dogmatic jerk about all the vagaries of self-expression.
25: Right, that's the weird thing about hipster: it's not a self-identified subculture, in the way that punk or hippie were/are, it's a diagnosis within a subcultural sensibility.
To GY, yes it's try to hard, but I think that's pretty fluid with inauthentic. There's a difference because in contemporary youth culture there isn't a sense of subcultural movement for hipsters to be an inauthentic expression of, but I think that putative hipsters aren't just expressing a sensibility but putting on a pose. In either case, it's someone whose actions expose the artifice in what's already an artificial activity. Poseurs aren't just fake punks, they remind you that punk is something you chose to put on/become rather than what you just are.
32: Wilson's early stuff was better.
But seriously, when he asks critics to "provide some minimal grounding of generalizations in fact", I think he's making an unwarranted assumption that this is impossible.
Hipsters, as they exist today, an as distinct from fashion-following youth of the past, have some very distinct characteristics.
First, their clothing and accessories are chosen deliberately to maximize the irony-value of each article. In contrast to early punk fashions which deployed signifiers such as swastikas or fetish gear in a way that intentional diluted and contested their power to shock, current hipster fashion tends to repurpose the most banal artifacts as a means of (ostensibly) casting doubt upon the entire exercise of fashion.
Second, in terms of consumption of other cultural commodities, there's also a strong sense in which they are only valuable so long as they are dross. Thus music and art and film are not things that are appreciated for their own sake, or because of their political context, or even because they are fashionable with like-minded people, but more because they are calculated to be precisely unlikeable, so that the hipster can always approach them at one remove, never having to make a commitment to a particular genre, never mind an artist.
Third, the current hipster tends to engage politically only in terms of asserting their imperative to be post-political. While previous style tribes might have found politics boring or insipid, or held themselves aloof from what they saw as political excess, today's hipster simultaneously acknowledges the importance of the political while refusing to draw any conclusions about their own position from the politics they espouse. I think this is where the specific critique of contemporary hipster trustafarians gains much of its currency -- they have had every opportunity to interface with political movements and activities, and they will happily acknowledge the significance of those things, but they'll continue to use "gay" and "retard" pejoratively, refuse to engage with any positive practices, and generally act as though any criticism of their duplicity is beneath their contempt.
See also Palmer, Amanda
11, 32: I haven't read the entirely of the Wilson, but I'm reminded of DFW's "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction", with its discussion of irony.
I haven't looked for a link, but here's the passage I had marked in the paper book:
"So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It is critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites."
DFW is talking about writing and media in general (e.g. television), but I think the observations hold with respect to the ironic stance in general.
32: a form of status-seeking conformism that masks itself as non-conformism
I'm still not really buying this argument as applied to any subculture, ever, though. The people who really want to resist conformity don't generally join subcultures. Look at Alfred Jarry for instance -- total wanker in many ways, his friends could hardly stand him, he didn't really do anything like anyone else, and he wound up being pretty successful at not conforming and also at destroying himself, not surprisingly.
Contrast that to your average punk or skinhead or even hipster. The idea of belonging to their specific subculture is very central. Rejecting mainstream/adult/bourgeois culture, yes, but failing to conform to the prejudices and fashions of your friends? Hardly. What would be the point? There are, in my experience, very very few youth who do not have a fairly strong urge to belong to something. Whether that's an Xtian chastity crusade or a local underground hip-hop scene is rather insignificant. In fact, the only people you really see criticizing youth for "all trying not to conform in exactly the same way" are older people who are desperate to both assert their connection to youth and its desires and establish their place in the adult world.
See also Rye, Catcher in the
I'm still not really buying this argument as applied to any subculture, ever, though.
It's able to mask itself as non-conformism because "non-conformism" is interpreted as not conforming to mainstream culture specifically. The fact that in not so conforming they're also conforming to something else is elided.
In fact, the only people you really see criticizing youth for "all trying not to conform in exactly the same way" are older people who are desperate to both assert their connection to youth and its desires and establish their place in the adult world.
I dunno, it was also me when I was 13.
41: I'm guessing you were precociously trying to fit in as an adult.
Long before looking like you just rolled out of bed became a fashion and back in a time where you were never too drunk to drive, your dad had a man mane.
For restricted values of "your dad", obvs.
I am objectively pro-hipster. It is a bad idea to get worked up about the way people dress or the music they like. Less reputably, I am objectively pro-douchebag.
"Thus music and art and film are not things that are appreciated for their own sake, or because of their political context, or even because they are fashionable with like-minded people, but more because they are calculated to be precisely unlikeable, so that the hipster can always approach them at one remove, never having to make a commitment to a particular genre, never mind an artist. "
This isn't true. Hipsters who listen to whatever music actually like that kind of music. Music is good. Why wouldn't they like it?
"Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage."
This is overrating the value of irony. The emergency use of irony has never done anything for anybody. If you replace the concept "irony" with the concept "joking around", things become clearer.
43: It would appear he has beef with those people.
Dropping in because I actually wanted to complain about that anti-anti-hipster article when it was making the FB rounds the other day. To wit:
There are no hipsters, only anti-hipsters - or at least the ratio is approximately the same as that of actually existing Satanists to anti-Satanists during the heavy-metal and Goth panics of the 1980s and 1990s.is not even approximately true. There were no Satanists. There have never been any Satanists. There are as many Satanists in the world as there have been Elders of Zion*. I don't think that the claim that hipsters are, literally, nonexistent is a plausible one.
So what are we left with? The claim that people denigrating members of another group/subculture are engaged in dishonest othering and strawmannery. Is there a less controversial claim possible?
I suppose that, if I were surrounded by people who spend their time bitching about hipsters, I'd find a screed against anti-hipsters edifying. But this screed, at least, adds very little to the larger discourse.
* Obviously there have been adolescent types who use Satanic imagery for the shock value; that doesn't make them Satanists any more than wearing a statuette of Winged Victory makes you a priestess of Nike
I think the distinction meant (and I'm not sure that this is true, but I've seen people claim it) is that there's pretty much no one who'd self-identify as a hipster; the people who would be non-controversially identified by others as hipsters would take the identification as an insult.
So it's not metalheads bitching about punks and vice-versa, it's guys in skinny jeans with trendy facial hair and fixed-gear bikes bitching about hipsters, despite the fact that no one's sure what to call the people bitching other than hipsters themselves.
WHAT AM I, CHOPPED LIVER?
The term hipster is (a) a descriptive term, used by non-hipsters, to describe trendy folks who are into indie rock and started wearing trucker hats in roughly 1999 and skinny jeans in roughly 2004 and who knows what they wear now and (b) a derogatory term used by people who are plausibly "descriptive" hipsters themselves to denigrate the over-trendy, passe, or annoying subsets of their tribe.
Also, both the term and this controversy are about six months away from the dustbin of history.
That's my attempt at a resolution, anyway.
who knows what they wear now
Beards.
But I think it's false to think that subcultures only ever get to name themselves. It has a whiff of, "I'm not a Trekkie. I'm a Trekker."
It may be that the (vast) majority of hipsters would deny the term, but that doesn't make the term devoid of content. I get that the content may be less fraught than some commentators want to make it but, again, that applies to every subculture that anyone notices. Sometimes a fixie is just a fixie.
Is there any lesson in the linked piece that couldn't be applied to the term "fratboy"? Does that mean that fratboys don't exist?
I guess fratboys don't denigrate each other as "fratboys," but they certainly do judge each other according to whatever sliding scale will put their own particular flavor of fratboyism on top, and they certainly deny being fratboys, and generalizations made about fratboys by outsiders are almost certainly not completely accurate descriptions of every boy who joins a frat. Ergo, there are no more fratboys than there are Satanists! Right?
I do have a neighbor who's a hipster. Not sure if she'd cop to it or not.
Your dad swore fealty to the Dark Lord before you did and he has the toddler skulls in his fraternity's crawlspace to prove it.
I have a neighbor who has one of those little "Welcome" flags and a snarling shit of a dog.
I like the term "bros" as a replacement "fratboys". It's more inclusive (not actually in a frat? you might still qualify!), and it's actually deployed by the members of the group to describe themselves (cf. "bros, icing thereof").
replacement for "fratboys", that is.
I guess fratboys don't denigrate each other as "fratboys," but they certainly do judge each other according to whatever sliding scale will put their own particular flavor of fratboyism on top, and they certainly deny being fratboys, and generalizations made about fratboys by outsiders are almost certainly not completely accurate descriptions of every boy who joins a frat.
During my brief time as a fratboy (TOS: It's true!), the more egregiously unsbubtle and therefore less cool frat types were the "meatheads."
56 I took Natilo's 38 to be describing what might be called a "broster" (and in fact that term already exists in ye olde urban dictionary which itself tends towards the brosterific).
During my brief time as a fratboy (TOS: It's true!)
You're not alone, bro!
I was thinking "dudebro," but I think Twisty invented that.
There is a form of music called "brostep" that I have been unable to find out what sounds like. It is apparently the same as "medium crank".
I'm more of a brohemian, to be honest.
60 -- weren't you in the awesome frat with McManly Pants, though? I was briefly in a much more bro-ish frat, before abandoning getting blackout drunk all the time in the fraternity manner for getting blackout drunk all the time in a nonaffiliated way.
Hipsterism is a spectrum disorder, and at least several people here are on the spectrum (though generally at the mildly hipsterish end). I include myself, and the rest of you know who you are.
Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, so don't kid yourselves.
65.--Hey now. No need to get personal.
|| Big news brings with it decisions. |>
71: In hindsight, the Bay of Pigs will look like a mistake. Don't do it.
Grief criticizes hipster as a consumption avant garde, in which the heroic production is not art but taste. I think it works better as a tendency (or perhaps a spectrum disorder a la 65) than as a label for any individual person.
Someday someone will say something smart about Shepard Fairey and we'll get it all worked out.
I apparently (according to my dining companion, I didn't recognize him at all and have no independent idea what he looks like) sat across from Shepard Fairey at a breakfast spot last week. He looked like a regular guy in his 30s with kids. Maybe I am a hipster!
64: A few years before McManlyPants, but the same august institution, yes. OTOH, I don't really consider hipster to be a derogatory term*, so perhaps that reveals exactly which douche accessory I most closely resemble.
*That's right, I'm broclaiming the word from the haters.
75 is smart enough. Case closed! Now what's Kennedy on about?
77: She's still pissed the demand for VJs fizzled at MTV?
71: I'm sure he'll be a better husband than his father. And if he isn't, you're still rich. Plus, not everybody can find a tea towel with their own picture so easily.
I didn't post 71, but I might well have.
Well damn. I wish I had some big news.*
*NO JOKES ABOUT HAVING A BABY, OKAY? The mothers have already started speaking in chorus.
And I already went and blabbed about my big news months ago. So. Jealous.
83: Sweet-voiced daughter of Zeus from thy gold-paved Pythian shrine
Wafted to Thebes divine,
What dost thou bring me?
83: Just tell them, "Oh, we're making plenty of practice runs, I assure you." That'll shut 'em up.
Have I missed something that would make it clear what JFK and neB are talking about, or is everyone equally mystified?
83: You could talk about your plans to keep venomous snakes as pets, which will only be practical because you don't have kids. Or birds of prey, whichever. That might calm, or at least distract, the mothers.
Maybe if you followed it with "And your sofa looks just like where my psychic said it would work best."
I also didn't post 71, but I could have posted the first half. There is big news, but because my life is otherwise a huge piece of shit, there's no decision to make. I'm just taking the job and moving.
NO ONE'S STEPPING INTO ME TWICE, LET ME TELL YOU.
Have I missed something that would make it clear what JFK and neB are talking about, or is everyone equally mystified?
Well, Moby is convinced that JFK is actually Kate Middleton. I'm not sure.
NO. YOU CAN'T COMMENT ON THE SAME BLOG TWICE
I'm just taking the job and moving
Living wage? If so, given that I'm probably unemployed after next month, I'd say do it.
Like the sands of time through the hour glass...
I don't mean to sound ungrateful; it's an amazing opportunity, and I'm thrilled. But it's difficult to go from taking for granted that everything will always suck forever and ever and then one really great thing happens. It doesn't feel real.
Sorry, I'll be less mysterious soon. I just had to vent some OMG.
AWB yours is old news, though. Everything's been swell for ages. Like me, I could go on about my coming 40% pay cut and how excited I am, but people's be like "pssh, shark jumper". JFK and neb have everybody entranced with the novelty of it all.
98:
I sympathize. I'll find myself thinking, "Man, I should look and see if any more jobs have been posted, but I'm so sick of applying for jobs." And then, dawningly, "Wait a minute, I have a job!"
shark jumper
Fascinatingly, in the UK this refers to a knitted garment with a dorsal fin.
Wait, that wasn't fascinating. Never mind.
I blame my iDevice for "people's be like"
WHO WILL RID ME OF THIS MEDDLESOME RIVER?
104: Ha! I got sad this weekend when I got a series of rejections before I was all, oh right, fuck them!
103: Eek, sorry to hear that.
103: Eek, sorry to hear that.
No, the pay cut is a good thing. In the grand scheme of things.
We keep repeating to ourselves.
109.2: that's what happens when you go from "salary" to "stipend". I'm not (shortly to be) in grad school for the money, luckily.
108. So are we allowed to know who has finally appreciated your worth? And where do we point the goons on behalf of Sifu?
113: But you can sell meth producing robots on the side to make up the difference, right?
Here's hoping the market for them stays strong.
114: Not on the blog I won't! But I'll respond to my email (linked) if you ask.
So, which is it, neB: tea and cake, or death?
You know what's hip? Encino Man! Yours from Amazon for only $8.49!
Tom Selleck, the original hipster.
124: complain all you what, but they were a deeply influential band for the west coast punk scene.
124: When it's done in a snotty way, sure. Perspective, however, is a great tonic to "kids these days"ism.
What's up about the haircuts, Flip? I don't get it.
OT: Whoa. Is it wrong that I'm developing kind of a huge crush on Aisha Qaddafi? Insanely hot.
What's up about the haircuts, Flip? I don't get it.
You have to listen to their first couple of albums on vinyl to really appreciate the production. Did you know they toured with the girl from Gertrude Stein's Pencil Moustache on drums in '92 when Murgatroyd Murdock got hepatitis from that photo shoot in the hospital? You probably didn't hear about it.
Also, "Get a haircut, hippie," is Butt-Head's sole response upon learning that Beavis has been arrested on suspicion of being the "Hippie Killer."* I remember it when the conversation turns to Famous Hair I Have Known/Worn, he typed, brushing aside his Justin Bieber-esque bangs thank you very much humidity thick, gleaming chestnut locks.
* "When asked how a fifteen-year-old boy could have committed crimes that took place more than thirty years ago, a police spokesman responded, 'He's very clever.' "
130: Really? Google image search hasn't convinced me at all, but at least that means you won't have to fight me for first dibs.
OT: We're trying to sell our house and buy a bigger one but not for much money. An amazingly cheap and seemingly quite decent six-bedroom came on the market today in our favorite neighborhood. How many rooms would I have to fill with books to keep me from being tempted to find more kids to fill the space?
(Realistically, we want to be an available placement if Mara's mother has another child taken into care, plus think the odds are good that sixteen-year-old Rowan will want to move back at some point in the near future, so something like a four-bedroom doesn't seem outrageous.)
OT: Whoa. Is it wrong that I'm developing kind of a huge crush on Aisha Qaddafi? Insanely hot.
When I read this I had a weird thought that this is completely consistent with your idiosyncratic views about what kind of food to eat, and then when I thought about it, I realized that didn't make any sense at all and I can't figure out what made me think it did.
I'm operating on, like, two hours of sleep, though.
We're trying to sell our house and buy a bigger one but not for much money.
That's the real trick, isn't it? I think that if you have kids (or one really pushy one) you need an "adult" extra room so you have somewhere without toys to keep nice stuff and for the kids to learn how to disobey commands like "Don't go in that room." As long as you can heat it, go for it.
Ooh, the Bluebeard factor! I hadn't factored that in, but it's a good idea. And I think my preference is still for the bungalow with solar panels right by the playground, but apparently Lee prefers a house that's more than 100 years old. (That's also probably how she'd prefer her women, but obviously she's been willing to settle. Just throwing that out there before anyone decides to test what dreams are prompted by a midnight snack of lowish-hanging fruit.)
I think you mean "blue hair" unless you mean to keep the kids from pirate treasure.
Bluebeard, Moby. Not to be confused with Blackbeard.
130: She's no Queen Rania of Jordan.
In reference to the original post, I humbly submit my dad and his Buddy Holly glasses.
Jackmormon, your dad was a hipster hottie.
Cool technology your dad used to use.
The link in 143 is really adorable:
"But Mum," Mulan asked with tractor-beam focus, "how can this ever happen? I mean, men and women, they can never be naked together."
"Well," I explained, "when people are older - much, much older than a kid - when they are older and they both decide they want to, in very certain circumstances, like if they're in love with each other, well, then, they can be naked together."
"But how do they know when?" Mulan asked. "Does the man say, 'Is now the time to take off my pants?'"
We held each other's gaze for a moment.
"Yes," I said. "That's exactly what they say."
143 is great, except for the sheer overwhelming Guardianness of calling your daughter Mulan.
145. I sort of assumed that 'Mulan' was a half baked attempt to preserve the child's privacy by using a pseud, but according to the pedia thing, no. She is called Mulan. And if this thing isn't consumed by link rot, she will murder her mother in about 2016.
What's the Chicago social equivalent of the Guardian?
The absolute acme of the hipster/anti-hipster thing is that there is a blog (hosted on Tumblr!) based in east London called "Hackney Hipster Hate", written by someone who spends their Saturday mornings wandering around Hoxton with a huge Nikon taking photos of people whose dress sense interests them so they can post them on the internets. At this point, they could realistically replace the whole project with self portraits. The joke in J.G. Ballard's The Kindness of Women about the psychology experiment where a panel of subjects have to pick the war criminal out of a group photograph, which is actually a photo of the last group of subjects, comes to mind.
Meanwhile, I note that at least two vintage clothes shops have opened on the Holloway Road, previously held to be immune to gentrification, fashion, or pretty much anything short of nuclear war (the crime map is weirdly correlated with the map of Nazi ballistic missile strikes).
re: 147
Every day is a reminder that Nathan Barley was a dreadful prediction of the future, rather than satire.
the crime map is weirdly correlated with the map of Nazi ballistic missile strikes
Back to Gravity's Rainbow.
except for the sheer overwhelming Guardianness of calling your daughter Mulan
The author is, AFAICTfromwikipedia, an American with an adopted daughter, so I surmise that "Mulan" wasn't her idea and if it was it's not the Guardian's fault.
Actually you can see the same thing as a stand up comedy act, sthereygo.
148: Well, the explanation is that they built council estates on the V-2 and other bomb sites, and the poor ended up there and therefore, the crime. But then again, much of the bits of Holloway that weren't bombed were knocked down during slum clearance so you're left wondering why the Germans bombed the slums.
you're left wondering why the Germans bombed the slums
Because the closer the housing to working heavy industry, the less desirable, so it tended to decay first? The bombing targets would have been the factories.
re: 150
Yeah, there's a riff in Gravity's Rainbow on the occult patterns of V2 sites.
I imagine the bombing of the slums may be partly accidental? And the result of how London's air defense was structured? Speculating.
"Why did they bomb the slums" and "why did the V2s hit the slums" are two different questions.
They bombed the slums, as chris y correctly speculates, because they were aiming for industry, and in particular the docks, and slum areas tend to be near docks and heavy industry; also to some extent probably because they were approaching from the south-east and there's a phenomenon in area bombing called rollback, in which successive bombers tend to release their bombs as soon as they see the fires started by the first wave - so the bomb impacts gradually spread back in the direction of approach, from the docks themselves over the poorer areas of the southeast.
The V2s, on the other hand, hit the slums because they weren't very accurate and tended to fall short of their aimpoint, which was in the very centre of London, and the Twenty Committee was deliberately misreporting impact sites and times to stop the Germans realising this and correcting their aim.
Twenty Committee was deliberately misreporting impact sites and times to stop the Germans realising this and correcting their aim.
Yes, I think it's my half-remembered previous reading of this fact that I was alluding to with "the result of how London's air defense was structured."
Meanwhile, I note that at least two vintage clothes shops have opened on the Holloway Road, previously held to be immune to gentrification, fashion, or pretty much anything short of nuclear war (the crime map is weirdly correlated with the map of Nazi ballistic missile strikes).
Holloway Road's been gentrifying for a while. There's a massive Waitrose now for God's sake. I haven't lived this near a Waitrose since I lived with my parents in deepest, poshest Surrey.
What's the Chicago social equivalent of the Guardian?
Chicago Public Radio, presumably. Certainly their (self-deprecating) self-image is similar to that of the more self-aware Guardianistas.
...there's a Waitrose, but the Hesco barriers are a bit of a giveaway. (Actually, I know a branch of KwikSave in Bradford that did in fact have bollards strategically placed in the car park to stop the ram raiders, but that was the 1990s.)
FOB Waitrose, outpost in the Gentrification War. I like it.
Actually, I know a branch of KwikSave in Bradford that did in fact have bollards strategically placed in the car park to stop the ram raiders, but that was the 1990s
also true of Liverpool, as long as for "a branch of KwikSave" you substitute "nearly every shop".
Coming out for a pint, D^2? Queen of Hoxton roof terrace looks good if the weather stays like this.
Loads of places have those bollards. I'm not sure it's particularly indicative of an area's dodginess. Though plenty of other things on the Holloway Road are.
They put some up to protect the offices across the street from me because people drive like shit. Nobody is worried that Jude Law is going to drive into it intentionally.
So much new vocabulary this thread!
Large swathes* of Glasgow, the shops are barred like Fort Knox and the pubs are literal drinking bunkers. I remember walking past places , even in not particularly rough areas like Maryhill, that were comically fortified.** I presume because they were in easy slithering distance of Possil/Ruchill.
* not the leafy West End, mind.
** although looking on streetview, not quite as heavily as I remember.
I will have to ask the missus but in principle yes
