In my infirmity...

I've been watching a lot of West Wing. The cool fall weather and and the annual, cruddy fall cold means that I've been watching my favorite political drama. And recently, I saw the episode on PBS.

It is, and I say this with no exaggeration, a crime how little we fund and promote our public broadcasting.

I grew up on PBS and NPR. I have bright and clear memories of watching the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour with my dad everyday when he came home from work. I learned my letters and numbers from Sesame Street and my geography from the campy, live-action Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. My parents once, from somewhere, scraped up 100$ to sponsor an hour of the boring but classic Prairie Home Companion. I am conversant in classical music and was on the classic blues trip long before my friends, entirely due to public radio. Both my parents still send me clips and stories from NPR. Public Broadcasting is a good thing.

We don't value public broadcasting because we are, rightly, suspicious of government, and because we are, wrongly, suspicious of learning. If I were a genius, I'd invent a way to reconcile those. I always liked the NEA's slogan "A Great Nation Deserves Great Art," because I think it's true. Our greatness isn't international heft or economic clout, it's our spirit. I think, then, that a great nation deserves great public broadcasting.

Something Different.

My friend Becky and I will sometimes bemoan the current state of western intellectual life, and it's things like this that cause it. I get in this elitist snit because, fuck, 2 million copies of an airport novel about the Freemasons and I can't get a motherfucker to read some Orwell to save his life, but then I think, 2 million people putting words in their heads via their eyes. That's pretty massive. I mean, just on a sort of "fuck yeah, humanity!" level. We not only invented a way of taking thoughts out of our brains and sharing them with other people, we let enough people in on that magic that some jackass with a talent for exciting plots and minor puzzles can make a damn good living at it.

That's pretty cool.

Reminiscing.

Just a random thought, but on election night, my buddy Marcus and I wrote "Yes we did!" on our white tshirts in sharpie when we went to the rally/party at the Alma Mater.

Just popped into my head for some reason. That was a good night.

Hipsters

This article and another in Adbusters got me thinking about hipsters.

First, every other youth counterculture movement has had to defend its existence. There are books and scholarly articles and what not defining what it means/meant to he a beatnik, a hippie, a punk - what have you. Hipsters have 1.) never embraced the term or acknowledged it as legitimate or 2.) tried to defend it. While the constant argument about "what is punk" has had bad outcomes, it at least shows some awareness that there is something called punk and that it's a meaningful category. Hipsters never had to do that. There are such things as beatnik literature (Kerouac, Ginsburg, Ferlighetti [who probably embraced the idea of the beatnik more than anyone else associated with the movement]) Punk literature (see: the zine movement, Less than Zero, Yes We Have No, and attempts to explain punk like Please Kill Me and Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense), Hippie lit (Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson [although he doesn't fit as well as some think]), even Jazz Age/Lost Generation lit. It might be a function of time (hipsters have only been around for a few years, at least in their present incarnation), but there's a certain lack of self-awareness among the hipsters.

The second problem is the homogenous nature of the hipster subculture. Among my Rockforder friends, the word subbie* is often used as a compound adjective with hipster - that is, describing a person as a subbie-hipster bitch or subbie-hipster douchebag indicates a somone with a toxic combination of self-importance and self-involvment. Beatniks included both William S. Burroughs (the scion of a good industrial family) and Jack Kerouac (the son of French-Canadian millworkers). Punks included the diplomat's son Joe Strummer, the promoter and impresario Malcolm MacLaren and the thousands of gobbing, safety-pinned youth who made the public's image of the movment. Hipsters though, tend to be undeniably subbie. They are the leading cause of gentrification, bullshittery and tweeness in the country.

Finally, hipsters' love of cynicism (in some cases a welcome tonic) and irony (again, at times a worthy response to the fuckuppedness of the world) has become toxic. Their's have lead to hedonism. There's no bottom there. Hipsters may have gotten behind Obama, and may have been anti-Bush, but hipsterism wasn't a response to the lock-step mindset of the Bush administration (as the Now Toronto article claims), but the product of the 80's "me generation" and the fracturing and re-homogenizing of the scene in the 90's. It wasn't that hipsters retreated to irony and hedonism in the Aughts because that was the only response to the post 9/11 mindset, that was the only toolset they had. Hipsters don't do satire. Satire requires awareness and a certain level of care. The greatest Roman satirist, Juvenal (here I reveal that I'm a dead-language-speaking jackass) began his satires with the line "Rome, such a corrupt and wonderful city - it would be unholy not to write!" Hipsters wouldn't recognize corrupt or unholy if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. Their lack of context makes it impossible to take a stand. Hipsters wear the keffiyeh, and may have a sort of reflexive anti-colonialism, but at the end of the day, they're rich white kids, playing at bohemianism. They're blinkered and self-absorbed, and I wonder what it says about our generation that this is the dominant subcultre we've produced.

*Subbie is a classist slur used against rich, white suburbanites, indicating a certain amount of money, entitlement and disconnection from the real world. "Daddy's money" - both as an attitude and actual financial resource - is the operative term here.

Liveblogging MTV at night.

So, I'm on hour 600 of Next, and this time, it's gay next. They've got a burly, ex-navy Filipino on, and his second date was a mildly gender-queer dater, dressed up as a sailor, with an origami belt, long hair, and an obsession with Paris Hilton. He walks out, and the sailor just goes, "Why the hell not?"

It was pretty fun. Kinda sad he got nexted.

I wish they did more interesting Next. This is the first time I've seen anyone but fey, kinny boys on gay Next. On straight next, all the girls look like Realdolls - vacant and overly plastic - and the guys look like all the douchebags you hope get arrested for DUI. I'd like them to mix it up. Match up "hobbies." A foot fetishist and a bus full of girls with pretty feet, a chubby chaser and a bus full of bears, some furries, I don't know - but something more interesting than a bus full of subbie assholes.

And now, random liveblog thoughts.

• There is no need for student living with a 32 seat movie theater.
• LL Cool J is accepting of the fact that he's growing old.
• Someone smarter than me needs to do some cultural analysis on Next and gender roles.
• Next writers are being punished for sins to terrible to contemplAmate. I'm guessing something from the 7th or 8th Circle.
  
• Fuckers just made a frat joke.
• A distressing number of peoples' facts on the show are about poop.
  
• It's impossible to look like a real grown-up when eating a cupcake, which is why the proliferation of cupcake bakeries make me sad.
• "What are you gonna do if you get instantly nexted?" "Probably go get a boob job."
• To whom is MTV advertising?
• I wish I could make noises like Charlie Brooker.
• I wish I was Charlie Brooker.
• America Ferrera is really pretty.
• "For never seeing another ringtone commercial, text OH GOD OH GOD MAKE IT STOP to 22879"
• The basic concept of Next is "Do what I want, bend to my will, be perfect." Probably not healthy.
• I think it was Bill Clinton who said "there is nothing wrong in America that can't be fixed by what's right in America." While the Big Dog was a bit centrist for me, and both he and the country would have been well served if he'd soldered his zipper shut (or showed an ounce of self-control), I appreciate the sentiment. Watching MTV, I'm not sure he's right.
• I want to be on Next - Boring people edition. I will accomplish this by being on "Made: I want to be on Next." I will make MTV my plaything!
  

You asked me why historians look down on cultural studies folk

Here's why. I cannot think of enough bad things to say about this motherfucker. He's got that brilliant self-righteousness only found among dedicated potheads - the kind who are truly, blazingly (hah, sorry) committed to the belief that marijuana is a gift from some god - and those in poorly-defined, utterly amorphous areas of study with no real methodology. He's also got that goddamn cultural studies mindset where everything they do is plated with the finest gold, and real world concerns and pursuits are beneath them. Vide:

A lot has been written over the past decade about the corporatization of the university and the subordination of a liberal education to business efficiency. The drug usage of scholars in the humanities may be an indication of that shift. I fear that we'll have finally, irrevocably, lost the culture wars when the humanists are doing the same drugs as the M.B.A. students.

Oh, gods above forbid that humanities people do the same drugs as the M.B.A. students! Oh, man, we have to keep our culture pure, and not party or enjoy ourselves in the same way, for verily, that leads to soulless corporatization! The personal is political, man. That's why my drug use is ok, because I support NORML.

What a fucking shower, to use a fun little anglicism. This concludes my substantive remarks on his article.

I'd like to take a second here to point out that this douchebag's pseudonym is "Thomas Quincey." Thomas de Quincey was, of course, the author of that great 19th century version of Go Ask Alice - Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The pseudonym seems a bit hard to take; after all, Mr. Quincey (the pseudonymous, 21ist-century version) seems aghast at the use of hard drugs in academia, and not at all struggling with his own favored chemical. Perhaps something more appropriate would have been a pseudonym that spelled out "THC," rather than trying to cloak himself in history.

This all just confirms my prejudices about cultural studies people. They're faintly silly. They're like Burrough's description of "tea-heads"- "naturally silly."

• The tl:dr from all of this - smoke all the damn pot you want - please, feel free - but for the love of god, don't become a cultural studies person.

(Via New Kid on the Hallway, which came to me via Notorious PhD)

A question for all the cultural studies people.

So, as I've spent more time on Youtube in the past 3 days than I have in the past 3 years, I'm going to illustrate a question with a pair of videos.

the Weakerthans - the Reasons


Postal Service - We Will Become Silhouettes


So, it seems (not just from these two videos, but also from things like the design of the iPod) that we're cannibalizing the past enthusiastically in these last days, viz, the fake 50's Weakerthans video, with it's choreography and costuming and the 70's Postal Service video. See also fashion - the 80's revivalist trend (tights, jewelry, Christ-awful haircuts) and the continued existence of hippies. In music, even, Belle & Sebastian basically picked up where the 60's left off in pop music, and made the words weirder, and the Killers basically tried becoming an 80's rock band on their last album.

Even when we're not stripping it for parts, it seems like we're living up to the past's expectations. If you read comics from the 80's, dystopian ones*, the youth of the future are depicted wearing tights and mohawks. Well, we covered tights when we talked about 80's revivalists, and I work with grade-schoolers with mohawks. Beyond personal fashion, look at our appliances - the iPod is a space age dream, all white and smooth and plastic. It looks like a TV remote from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even beyond all the iPod related space-agery, appliances are being made out of brushed metal - another space age shibboleth.

So, basically, does this mean anything? Have we run out of original ideas? Were our forward looking grandfathers right about the future? If we are living in the future, can I have a personal robot?


*The one coming to mind here is Dark Knight Returns, but there are others that escape me at this hour.