Hip To Be Overthinking

Jun. 15th, 2024 12:49 pm
fengi: (Mr. Bateman)

It's a worn phrase, but there's a lot going on here.

A cosplay / makeup / fashion vlogger has dressed up as a sexy version of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, the 2000 film about white male anxiety, misogyny violence and capitalism. This film likely came out around when they were born or before.

They're lip-synching lyrics from The Real Slim Shady by Eminem, also released in 2000. His persona fluctuated between parody and genuine expressions of male anxiety and violence.

His vocal track has been remixed with Lone Digger by Caravan Palace, from 2015. They're a French electro swing band with a female lead. It's a simple tune about dancing though "Leave that old record spinning" is a nod to the band's retro style.

Lone Digger samples a 1947 field recording by Alan Lomax of “Rosie” a prison work song by inmates of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Sampling of black music by white artists, particularly Lomax's recordings, is controversial as not only is the work of the oppressed profiting artists in the oppressor group, but sampling obscures the history.

Which is interesting given the Eminem lyric in the clip is about the white rapper killing his black mentor, who was key to his being accepted by other rappers at all.

Then there's how lip-syncing connects to queer / drag culture, especially given the gender swapped character. [As the performer's sexual identity is unknown, this may not be appropriation. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.]

Plus there's the layers of the "You Like Huey Lewis And The News?" scene being referenced.

When Bateman says "It's Hip To Be Square" reflects "a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor" than Elvis Costello, that seems like Mary Harron making a direct argument.

"Square" is satire: it recognizes his race, class, age, gender, sexual orientation, habits, etc. is the dominant culture that takes hipness from the marginalized and ruins it. "It don't look like a lot of fun / But don't you try to fight it / An idea whose time has come" implies square becomes hip due to oppression. Six years into Reagan, "It's Hip To Be Square" is as ironic as Devo's 1981 "Beautiful World" (which has video that relies on ironic juxtaposition of archival footage).

But Harron then has Patrick Bateman miss the point, saying it's "about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends". This fits how Bateman shifts between awareness and denial. It's also how satire is received: even if people get the intended meaning they may unironically engage the surface. Consider the Reagan campaign's misuse of Born in the USA or the initial censorious reaction to the 1991 American Psycho novel or the issue of sincere misogyny is in Eminem's work.

Getting back to the video - how much intent informs this 14 second clip? The maker has watched the scene, but have they thought about every source used? Do they think about how a satire written by a gay man 33 years ago then adapted by a lesbian 24 years ago might be obscured by the sexy halloween costume trope? Do they know the 14 seconds of music has links going back 77 years?

This of the moment clip seethes with nostalgia. Is the feeling of time compression a symptom of the possible end of civilization or the age and sense of mortality of the person writing this post?

At this point you may look down at the floor and see it's covered by printouts of Notes On Camp. You barely have time to wonder why before I bring the ax down.  

  • Current Mood: contemplative
  • Current Music: Think Too Much by Paul Simon

Children of Child-Men

Mar. 15th, 2023 03:04 pm
fengi: (Mr. Mellie)

I’m annoyed by the essay “Everyone Needs to Grow Up” by James Greig, though it's clearly written in haste for content mill wages and low expectations. But it reflects a certain half assed analysis that gets under my skin.

“Everyone” opens with “We are a generation of adult babies.” A quip a world weary college freshman might find wise. It’s been a hit of generational self loathing since at least Noah Baumbach’s first movie. From there offer series of complaints that reads like Andy Rooney doing a cover of Flagpole Sitta - two references that pre-date the author’s birth.

It’s part of youth to feel certain trends are unique to one’s peer group. To Greig’s credit, he eventually references distinct pressures that set his group apart: worse than ever economic and ecological conditions.

Yet these are also part of a longer trend - to the 80s when Reagan and Thatcher gave class inequality a turbo boost. And since then a favored bullshit tactic has been to pretend systemic issues that impact younger adults are just a generation's inherent weakness. By 1990, young people living at home after 18 were deemed immature rather than coping wiht the impact of the S&L collapse. A 1990 article offers a definitive yet absurdly broad description of Gen-X immaturity: “They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder...They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial." A handy rationalization for treating adults like children in terms of pay, status and job security.

Though Gen X recognized this as bullshit, it was pervasive enough to inform their culture. Thus pop songs about failure, movies about being adult but not grown up and stuff like the savagely self mocking comics of Peter Bagge and Evan Dorkin, etc.

There was some truth in the self-deprecation as there did seem to be a certain lack of class consciousness and solidarity. But part of it was just how those on the bad end of things can be hardest on themselves and the bosses are more than willing to cultivate that.

The problem is Greig's thesis treats the BS narrative as substantial, despite being old enough to notice the Peter Pan bs that has dogged millennials into their 40s. Overall the essay is light on context. The opening includes links that are ostensibly citations but not really: a glib article from the same platform, a single tweet and a single Instagram post. To me an insipid tweet about ADHD isn't quite a qualified source for a broad generalization about peers being babies.

Greig also doesn't note how the 20th century was defined by increasingly creepy fetishization of youth as commodity by an upper class obsessed with exploiting it while resenting its loss.

I'd argue the alleged infantilization Greig laments arises not from the young, but their struggle to navigate over half a century of accrued immaturity by capitalists. It's not 20 somethings who had the power to trap large parts of culture into IP franchises that began 30 to 80 years ago. The original man hating reactionary comic book guys and video gamers are now grandfathers. Harry Potter became a kids book read by adults a quarter of a century ago. And the internet was founded by guys who needed to read another book besides Tolkien or Heinlein and so on.

Then there's how public performances of certain immature qualities can be a career. The parasocial industrial complex (not just the sex work bits) rewards certain kiddish qualities and occasionally punishes adult language or behavior. This is related to how the rich and powerful will chase youth in various ways for as long as they can get away with it.

Which connects to part of the essay that really bugged me. In the middle Greig his editor embeds a tiktok clip of a woman miming to a little girl talking about putting on lipstick. It's a creepy but popular meme. There's no caption nor reference to it in the text, but it's placed after this quote: "I think self-infantilisation is a belated version of this. If as an adult I play at innocence, cuteness and delicacy, then I choose and assume some command over my feeling of helplessness." It's implied the woman is an illustration of this.

If one clicks, through, however, one sees that Hybr!d is an aspiring model/musician from Sweden who presents as her age in most videos. The one vid was part of the self-marketing grind maybe seeking a lipstick sponsorship. Creepy, but a different context than the essay's self-infantilisation. But it's used as a sensational sample of the adult baby generation for the reader to disdain, all the better for being an attractive woman.

To me, a good example of self-infantilization would be Justin Roiland, whose career imploded at age 43 when it came out how success allowed him to regress to a tween's idea of power, boundaries and work ethic. It wasn't just that he creeped on and bullied women younger than him, it's his childish response to his workers unionizing and apparently defined success as doing as little work as possible. It was Dan Harmon and a everyone else on staff acting like fucking adults that allowed him to be a baby, actively enabled by other members of the managerial class, who only stopped when it all came out.

To be fair, I do wish many of my fellow adults would grow the fuck up and read another book, watch another movie and just think or do something else. I think much (not all) of fandom is consumer dysfunction. But it doesn't seem confined to a single generation.

So while I appreciate "grow up" in this context, I also think of how the ruling classes equate commoners with children to elevate themselves. I think of their mixture of resentment and desire as wealth may allow them to fuck and fuck with youth but not stay young (not yet). And rage over getting older without having fucked as many young as they felt entitled to consume seems to be a key driver in their fascism.

In this way the lower classes need not so much to grow up as grow in solidarity so we can rid ourselves of these man babies and enjoy our adult lives regardless of what cutesy or grumpy persona we prefer.

Oh, Hello

Nov. 17th, 2022 06:11 pm
fengi: (Agent !)


Note: Comments are open, it's just anon will be screened before posting.

As of 20 or so minutes ago, the big rumor on twitter is this:


Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why. We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they're still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for. Offices will reopen on November 21st. In the meantime: "Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere."

So this does not seem good. It is at the very least a spectacular example of how the executive class is just another version of merit free aristocracy. Upper class twits with an entirely unearned pretense that they deserve that wealth and power due to competence or skill rather than winning a series of rigged lotteries.

Meanwhile I've read various assertions that I can sum up as follows:

This is the 2nd biggest act of hubris in 2022 next to the Truss mini-budget
or some elaborate investment scam that I cannot parse
or a deliberate attempt to sabotage a platform that (despite everything) gave the lumpen a bit of a voice and power
or the upper class losing all pretense of coherency while they run out the clock on humanity
or something else.

What I do know is I'm probably going to be posting here periodically now.

It's also where I'll post info about where else I can be found.

Anyway.

 

  • Current Location: Back here, weird.

I'm Sure There's a Woodcut List of Bad Pickup Lines Out There

Sep. 20th, 2010 04:55 pm
fengi: (Default)
What I find most intriguing about the Carl Paladino case: not only are his politics retrograde, but some of the shit he circulated represent a culture of those still faxing the Bart Simpson Crack Kills images to each other. I remember that image from a dry cleaner I used in the mid-90s; they had a wall covered with crudely drawn memes on crumbling thermal paper. It's hard to believe such xerox- and fax-lore existed outside academic journals now. I mean, Paladino might as well have sabotaged himself with a bawdy sea shanty.

A good thing about social networks is they have nearly eliminated the Annoying Email Forward. I am not nostalgic for this crap at all, but I shall reminisce about the three types of unwelcome guests which visited my inbox.

Forwarded Jokes and Articles: for me these actually died out first, perhaps because nearly everyone I know continued to evolve socially after 1998 and found posting or sending links to actual web pages more interesting. I'll admit I have a soft spot for essays circulated by email because it happened to something I wrote back in the day, though under a fake girl's name because it mentioned a fundraiser for feminist causes. This identity confusion is nowhere as cool as Mary Schmich being mistaken for Kurt Vonnegut and ending up as a techno hit, but I'll take what I can get.

Chain letters: At first the online versions indicated one was not only superstitious and inconsiderate, but remarkably lazy as they still contained the instructions for dead tree circulation. Then they evolved, adding lists of vapid aphorisms as if this mitigated the parasitic and selfish magical thinking at their core. I'm sorry but a friendly reminder to always eat brown rice does not excuse the raw self interest in circulating a cursed text. These infuriated me, but not as much as the next group.

The Zombie Activist Email Blast: For me the worst is the PBS/NEA/NPR funding alert. It tested my patience every few months until about two years ago. It may be unfair, but I felt any real supporter such groups should be smart enough to recognize the bullshit.

What bugs me about that one is it was an urban legend from the start. Maybe it's too hard to verify a claim before hitting send (though they should), but one can easily notice the barely coherent text and inconsistent dates. Since then there have been real funding issues, but it doesn't make this stupid email which will not die true.

Here is where Facebook is handy. If someone stumbles across something like this, they'll post it to their walls instead of contacting everyone, and where someone quickly comments HA HA SNOPES.

That Obscure Object of Organized Desire

May. 19th, 2008 11:41 am
fengi: (Default)

While researching what might be the most amusing or utterly lame short story I've written in a while, I made a sad discovery: Chandler's has completely gone out of business.

It's somewhat amazing they were still in business. Chandler's Office Supplies and Bookstore was an Evanston institution for over half a century until the early 1990's.

Even in the 80s, it was an anachronism - 4 to 5 floors of goods, services and storage connected by a stair case which went from elegant to tiny as it ascended, plus an elevator with an operator. There was a large workshop of old guys and machines cutting paper, cardboard and frames with a craftsman precision several generations away from a cutting board at Kinkos.

Chandler's was best known (if at all), for the Assignment Notebook. For me it was part of the annual Northwestern ritual of being sincerely determined to be on time and honor deadlines this year. The plastic faux engraved leather cover exuded the potential of old fashioned scheduled integrity.

Years after graduation I bought at a Chandler's Datebook out of nostalgia for an idea of time given significance by the academic schedule. I used about 10 pages at most.

The Chandler's store was dwindling when I graduated and it closed in 1994 and a branch store shut down sometime later. The notebooks kept appearing on Chicago area shelves into the 21 century in defiance of major chain products and technology.

I think it survived on the momentum of tradition - maybe some canny Chandler salesman secured some multi-decade purchase orders in the pre-computer age. I suspect Chandler's might have survived if it had achieved cutural cache like Moleskine, but it's only claim to fame is as an obscure prop for John Cusak's character in High Fidelity.

I just called Beck's Bookstore and they still have Chandler's Assignment Books listed as on order, but they won't know if the final run will be delivered until later this spring. The person I spoke to was going to ask their buyer. So maybe I'll have one more mundane yet sublime object to tote around come next fall.