March 19, 2010
or, What Hipster Means to Me
Hipster. Reject the label or embrace it, Sisyphus does not envy you though your path is clear: you like art (check), music (check), design (√), fashion (√), film (√), food (√) and biking around Brooklyn to jam with hipster friends or go to (i.e. be seen at) art happenings and step out for smokes (√√√√√). And you blog about it (√). There is no possibility that you have freely chosen to do these things: the hipster is a sheep, a cartoon, a robot, a target market—anything but a living, breathing human being. The hipster is Sartre’s waiter.*
[It would be too easy to populate this post with photos from LATFH, Vice, Cobrasnake, Last Night's Party, Lookbook.nu, etc. etc., so we're going with photos from Beijing's Ren Hang, via Neocha Edge. Are Chinese hipsters more or less authentic than their Western idols? Is Chinese anything more or less authentic than Western versions of the same? Meta-migraine...]
The New York Times recently ran a blurb on the (decline of the) hipster with a handful of decent and not-too-hateful comments. The piece cites Salon’s recent article on Hipsters+Food Stamps—which itself has elicited the usual anti-Trustafarian screeds and counterarguments in defense of food(ies), etc.—as the latest development in the ongoing culture war between “Young, Creative Urbanites” and regular people. Meanwhile, Adbusters is over it, which is probably for the best.
In any case, it’s worthy enough of an occasion to reflect on What Hipster Means to Me. (Ok so that’s probably an inappropriate, if pithy, exordium for what is intended to be a thoughtful, unironic and somewhat ambitious essay, but it was just too good to pass up.)
In other words, I’m not in denial about my hipster proclivities, so long as I might be granted the possibility of unironically self-identifying as a hipster. Similarly, Idolize Your Killers is (to borrow WordPress’s felicitous phrasing) “Just another hipster blog”—lest we forget that meta-commentary is the trademark of postmodernity and, by extension, hipsterdom and digital culture alike.
Yet “hipster” has been a pejorative term for nearly a decade now—a pigeonhole, a pariah, or worse: a Platonic “idea of Hipster.” This archetype finds infinite variations of empirical manifestations, though it is never fully realized; instead, an individual is reduced to his urban outfit, fixed-gear bike or love of Animal Collective, etc.
A brief overview on the case against hipsters: as the indie nation evolved alongside American Apparel*, so too did pent-up indignation at their smug, unleashed most memorably in Adbusters’ seminal July 2008 cover story “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.” Time Out is known to dabble in hipster-bashing; Paste did its part last year; Gawker and Gothamist hit the hipster hot button when they want to pander for pageviews. (I’m sure I’ve omitted many a rant; those are just the media that come to mind.) Conversely, the proto-hip tastemakers at Vice have somewhat validated the hipster with VBS’s ongoing alt-journalism efforts, which are now featured on the likes of CNN and Huffington Post.
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March 16, 2010
» Aesop Rock – Daylight (4:25) – 4.1MB m4a @ 128kbps
The Persistence of Trite Imagery
Since this Sunday marked Daylight Saving Time, I decided to put my philosophy degree to good use by pondering the psychology and metaphysics of this semi-annual ritual.
First of all, there is technically only one daylight to be saved: contrary to folk wisdom that might suggest otherwise, daylight is an indivisible entity. In a sense, daylight is like money—which is also grammatically singular but conceptually plural (insofar as one would hope to have more than one money)—such that daylight is quantifiable, at least in terms of daylight hours. In other words, official terminology denotes that summer is ‘Time to Save Daylight’—i.e., Time for Daylight-Saving—while the colloquial (if not altogether prevalent) shorthand “Daylight Savings” is a gerund, as per the nominal usage of “Savings” for that type of bank account. (Even the Wikipedia URL for the Daylight Saving Time entry is Daylight_savings.)
The monetary metaphor is useful in illustrating how DST’s pithy essence “spring forward, fall back” belies the curious phenomenon that either occasion—the turning of the clocks in spring or in fall—can be described as gaining or losing an hour. Common parlance suggests that we have indeed acquired a full 60 minutes, yet this increment simultaneously seems to have slipped through a mysterious temporal rift in the wee hours of Sunday morning. It appears that we have both gained and lost an hour on Sunday, a discrepancy that reveals two divergent systems of belief concerning time and how it is measured: absolute vs. relative. The two views correspond to a scientific picture of an independent physical world and a pragmatic ‘lived’ experience of time, respectively.
The former system holds that time marches forward of its own accord and that to push a clock forward—from 2AM to 3AM, say—disturbs the clockwork of the universe to the effect that humans have erased an hour from their day. Here the bank analogy must be modified: on Sunday, we withdrew an hour on credit, which we will pay back in October; for the next six months, we owe one hour to the universe, or nature, or whatever. We have lost it in the interest of practicality—we need to borrow the hour for the better half of the year—though we plan on restoring balance in six months or so. For the absolutist, the hour is deferred.
Those who abide by the second perspective, on the other hand, see time as more malleable, where chronology is purely pragmatic: we gained an hour on Sunday because we now have an extra hour of sunlight—and, ostensibly, productivity—to the effect that the days themselves grow longer. By springing forward, we stake a claim to the greater daylight afforded by the rotation of the Earth, silently folding one hour into the shroud of slumber in order to extend each and every day in those six months. For the relativist, it’s possible to save daylight like money albeit not in the interest of yielding a long-term dividend: everyone cashes out the same predetermined amount at the end of each day.
Of course, both schools of thought understand that the actual demarcation of time to be incidental (i.e. pragmatic in a broad sense)—otherwise we wouldn’t have license to give and take (or take and give) hours as we please. Nevertheless, I wonder if there is any correlation between the saving(s) locution and the gain/loss dichotomy: are relativists more predisposed to regarding DST as a savings account, as opposed to absolutists who treat the extra time as a line of credit?
Does that even make sense? Rather, does it even matter?
Now for the real news:
- Advertising 2.0: This Time, It’s Personal. FaceBook is now crowdsourcing targeted advertising like social AdSense (=AdBook?). (NYT, Future Perfect) Also, Product Placement: Geolocation is so hot right now (NYT)
- Mattel Mentality x Mad Men = Barbie. WTF. (NYT)
- Google Maps now has (spotty) bike directions: Gothamist blurbs, Streetsblog mentions, Wired crowdsources; Bike Snob NYC is more thorough, with an incisive riposte to the Post
- Big ups to the Alma Mater in the Times. But seriously, the prospect of digitally tracking writers’ inspiration and composition process is quite fascinating.
- Stanley Fish on Pragmatism’s Gift.
- I’ve always been a stickler for free throws (i.e. I don’t understand why every player isn’t shooting 90+% from the line), so I was pleased to see that Wired has posted a guide on How to Nail a Free Throw.
- Old news, but here’s a couple of interesting articles on sports video games and their source material; specifically, how video games are have become increasingly true to life for athletes: League of Gamers (ESPN); Gamechangers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes (Wired)
- Speaking of video games, Virtusphere. Just watch the damn video.
- G4 (correctly, I think) identifies Chatroulette’s ‘Merton.’ NYMag’s Vulture (correctly, I think) identifies Ben Folds as a “Fin de siècle singer-songwriter.” Just watch the damn video.
- (Over)analysis of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” music video. (Vigilant Citizen)
Music news:
- What Would They Know: Matthew Perpetua interviews Liars for Pitchfork.
- Time to Get Away: LCD Soundsystem finishing up their last record. (Daily Swarm)
- Wanna Be Startin’ Something: MJ posthumously lands a massive record deal. (WSJ, NYT)
Art news:
Bonus Trailer:
March 11, 2010
Ashley Gilbertson for the New York Times
Today is the first day in about two weeks that I haven’t had a cup of coffee. I go through coffee phases, though I’ve been hitting the French press harder and harder, in a manner of speaking, lately. I also drank a fair amount of coffee in Beijing (related excerpt below) and I think I’ve been on the upswing since the beginning of the year…
Meanwhile, the New York Times has an excellent feature on the city’s best coffee, plus an interactive map of coffee hotspots. I’m tempted to try and get a cup of joe at each and every one, moving outward daily in concentric circles from Fort Greene starting with Ortine. NYT also says coffee is good for you and Christoph Niemann’s thoughts on coffee. (Unrelated, but he has cleverly appropriated the iconic visual language of Google maps [which now features bike directions] for the latest installment of Abstract City, which was posted yesterday. Much better than the last two, in my opinion.)
Free associating a bit, City of Sound has an excellent (if rather lengthy) essay on the iPad as a device for the third place (i.e. the coffeeshop).
Here is my analysis of the Wudaokou coffee scene, from a long-lost China post that I drafted on the food & drink situation:
Nevertheless, much of the money I’ve been saving on food, alcohol and cigarettes ends up going towards coffee, a necessary luxury which happens to go for American rates or more—$1.50 for shitty drip, $3 for anything decent—the same price as A.) lunch and an afternoon snack, B.) anywhere between one and five beers depending on the point of sale, and C.) two to four packs of cigarettes. I usually stick with the Americano, which is roughly the same price as the daily brew at 18RMB [$2.66] including one free refill; fancier drinks have fancier prices.
A staple for the wealthy elite, coffee is rarely ordered to go, as per the American on-the-go lifestyle; instead, it is usually consumed in a coffeeshop with a Continental deference (and cigarettes, of course).
Indeed, cafes are typically rather upscale affairs, a fabled “third place” that Westerners might call their own, since the Chinese seem largely unaware that there might be more than two places. Free wi-fi, long (often endless) business hours, decent service and full menus (invariably in English and Chinese) reinforce the classy atmosphere.
Still, I have come to discern clear discrepancies between the clientele of the three coffeeshops that I frequent: The Bridge, Cava Coffee and Beantree (all located conveniently on my block). The Bridge is the largest and busiest, with room for about a hundred patrons on each of two floors, catering to a majority of foreigners representing North America, most of the EU and Australia, not to mention Chinese-American students and a few native Chinese. Cava attracts more native Chinese and other assorted Asians, as well as the occasional 老外, while Beantree’s clientele consists mostly of Korean and Japanese students.
However, today marked the first time I’ve enjoyed Kombucha in about five months. Maybe that’s what got me all wired this afternoon… though I will most certainly be back on the bean tomorrow.
March 9, 2010
1.
March 7, 2010
Or, a New Direction in China’s Digital Communications
Back in January, Nowness posted a handful of production stills to mark the premiere of Yang Fudong’s “First Spring.” Well I’ve decided that they’re interesting enough to reblog here, a month and half a late to spite the title of their original source.
Meanwhile, the New York Times recently ran an interesting article on bloggers in Shanghai. The article suggests, in so many words, that Chinese blogs are regarded as documents of unique cultural significance, and that their archives should be dog-eared, in a manner of speaking, for their future historical value as chronicles of first- and secondhand accounts of life in the Web 2.0 era, not to mention a massive body of meta-level commentary.
“The Chinese migrant experience to Shanghai is going to be as important to the future Chinese self-image as the New York immigrant experience was to the American self-image,” he said.
But whatever its gaps and the limits, Mr. Wang said, the broad rise of blogging has meant a welcome increase in available information; and more information means a better idea of what is really happening in the city.
–Maile Cannon & Jingying Yang, “Bloggers Open an Internet Window on Shanghai,”
The New York Times, February 24, 2010
So it’s probably safe to assume that blogging in Shanghai (or Beijing, perhaps) is at once quite similar and quite different to blogging in, say, New York: I find that Chinese blogs are somehow both more and less authentic than their Western counterparts. It probably has something to do with the Western / American dogma of freedom of speech, but I’m not quite sure how or why.
February 28, 2010
January 24, 2010
–Pingdom has some web usage stats for 2009, such as:
- 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
- 47 million – Added websites in 2009.
Nice to know that IYK is among 47 million new websites. There’s also numbers for e-mail and social networks. Definitely worth checking out: Internet 2009 in Numbers.
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.
Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.
Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.
–The New York Times recently announced that it is going to start charging online readers (in 2011) with a ‘paywall’ system. Or, as Gothamist bluntly puts it: “the Gray Lady’s going to start making bitches pay.”
–Apple has announced that it will unveil its “latest creation”—the digital world is certain that it will be an Apple tablet—at an event next Wednesday, January 27th. (Engadget; also on NYT, the Guardian, etc.; rumormongering has also caused a backlash in the world of tech journalism)
–P.S.1 just announced that Brooklyn’s SO-IL (Solid Object Idenburg Liu) is the winner of this year’s Young Architects Program design competition. Arch Daily has more pics and info.
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January 17, 2010
» Autechre – Bike (7:58) – 9.2MB mp3 @ 160kbps
Mark Jenkins via Arrested Motion
The mild weather in New York this weekend has been highly conducive to activities known as “getting out of the house,” especially with regard to my favored mode of transportation, biking. Since I returned to the NYC three weeks ago, I’ve taken to doing laps around Prospect Park for brief cardiovascular excursions, while my single-speed has taken me to various destinations around the boroughs—most recently to dim sum in Bay Ridge.
In retrospect, I regret not biking at all when I was in China. While the feasibility, practicality and efficiency of biking in Beijing were debatable—rentals were clunkers and I didn’t want to buy a bike for a two month stay—I grossly underestimated the ecstasy of cycling. At the most visceral level, I find it liberating: not only from the limits of bipedal locomotion, but also from traffic laws, which also become very fast and loose—to spite every other form of transportation—at cyclists’ own risk.
Apparently, free association also becomes very fast and loose at bloggers’ own risk:
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January 12, 2010
798 Dashanzi Arts District – Pace Beijing
I had intended on writing a longer-form essay on the Beijing art scene—among other stillborn topics such as food, drink, work and leisure—but I settled on a few profiles and discursive remarks regarding specific artists. Just as there are emerging artists, I would say that there is an inchoate art world that is still redefining itself.
However, I have decided to refrain from writing an inane opinion piece or a tedious art-historical treatment of Chinese contemporary art.
Instead, I will resort to a simple device: interpolating quotes (which invariably resonate with my experience in Beijing) from a highly relevant news article (which was conspicuously absent from my previous NYT-heavy aggregation of interesting news items) into a series of photos from the 30 Degrees opening at Red Gate Gallery last fall.
This juxtaposition may or may not reveal profound connections between words (taken out of context) and images (of images) within a thematic framework of contemporary art production and exhibition in China.
In other words, here are some pictures that I didn’t get around to posting and some quotes from a recent New York Times article.
Zhang Jie – Pigs Might Fly / Mao Yu – Tree of Man
Being Chinese-American makes it easier to be an observer of what’s really happening because I’m camouflaged,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean I understand any more what people are thinking.” Still, Ms. Ho, 40, revels in her role as outsider in a society that she says is blindly enthusiastic about remaking itself.
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