Tag: contemporary culture

Selfies — Snapshots Of Who We Are

selfie
My Only Selfie

Although not all of us are addicted to taking endless self portraits, the Selfie is as common in our society as the codpiece once was in the Elizabethan world.  It’s our public face in Cyberspace.  It tells the world what we think of ourselves.  We do it to denote major events in our lives, trivial occurrences and pure boredom.  It’s the one thing we can say when we have nothing to say.  However, the selfie also offers some serious insights into our contemporary culture.

One — The selfie is documented proof that there’s a ton of people on this planet who actually believe they’re creative, imaginative and witty.  Unfortunately, the selfie is a doubled-edged sword — it also proves they’re not.  Perhaps the Duckface, the Rocker Devil Horns or the Gangsta Thug Crotch were brilliant and unique the first 50 million times they were done, but since then?  Not so much.  Likewise, nobody’s fooled by Photoshopped boobs anymore and half-naked photos in the toilet mirror aren’t actually sexy.  Think about it — it’s where you go to poop!  Oh, and BTW, holding up or kicking down the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been done to death.  For God’s sake!  Give it a rest!

Two — Like the Elizabethan codpiece, selfies are an In-Your-Face demonstration of just how bloated our egos have become.  Our Shakespearean ancestors thought strapping on an enormous strap-on was telling the world they were cool, trending,  popular and sexy.  The contemporary selfie works the same way.  Yes, it’s impossible to ignore, but there’s nothing particularly appealing about it, either.  There isn’t a whole lot of difference between a 16th century dandy striding around wearing the latest in See-My-Dick fashions and a 21st century millennial posting endless “See me, Seeee Meee, SEE ME!” photos of themselves at the bakery, waiting for a bus or eating a hot dog.  In fact, it takes exactly the same amount of over-inflated ego to think anybody even cares.  Look, there are seven billion people in this world, and the only reason the vast majority of them even look at selfies anymore is to find the hilarious ones.

And finally:

Three — The selfie, by its very name, indicates you have no friends — or at least no friends who like you enough to take your photograph.  How’s that for an ego killer?

Leisure — The First 40,000 Years

leisureForget the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, The Age of Enlightenment, The Space Age and even The Post-Industrial Age: all human history can be divided into two distinct periods — The Age of Work and the Age of Leisure.  Our great-great-great-grandparents lived in the Age of Work; we live in The Age of Leisure.  And that, in a nutshell, is why Western Society is speeding towards the Abyss of Hell like a runaway stagecoach full of passengers shouting “WTF happened?”

Let me explain.

Give or take a day or two, human history is really only about 40,000 years long.  (Before that, it’s kinda iffy — unless you’re specifically trained to spot the difference between a stone used as an axe and an axe made out of a stone.  Even mega-smart anthropologists argue about that one.)  Anyway, for the first 39,750 years of understandable history humans worked … dawn to dusk, every day … like … endlessly.  That’s what they did and they did it because there was only one alternative.  Oops, sorry: you’re dead.  They had a purpose — work your ass off and improve your lot in life, or face the alternative.  Things was simple in those days.

Then, about 250 years ago, a guy by the name of James Watt showed up.  History tells us that Watt invented the steam engine.  (He didn’t actually, but that’s a different tale.)  What history doesn’t tell us is that Watt, by setting off the Industrial Revolution, inadvertently created leisure.

There are all kinds of myths about the brutality of the Industrial Revolution, but the reality is machines started doing our work for us.  People, therefore, didn’t have to spend all their waking hours just trying to survive anymore.  They started doing other things — leisure activities.  (It’s no coincidence that book, magazine and newspaper sales went through the stratosphere in the 19th century.)  Slowly at first, but steadily, leisure (an unknown term before 1836) became an essential component of our modern world.  But now — in the 21st century — it has turned into a monster.

We spend millions on young people who kick, hit and throw a variety of balls around — and billions more to watch them do it.  We spend millions on people who sing to us, tells us stories or tell us what to wear.  We spend so much money on the film industry and spend so much time watching television that even Stephen Hawking can’t imagine the numbers.  We have created celebrities who literally have no redeeming qualities; they just exist, and we worship them.  We spend more time and energy playing video games than we do deciding who will govern us.  My God!  Has our world gone crazy?

For the vast majority of human history, leisure was an occasional activity that took us away from the soul-eating brutality of endless toil.  However, these days, leisure has become the reason we exist, and we’re so addicted to relentless entertainment we can’t see beyond binge-watching Full House reruns.

See you at the abyss!

WHY ARE THERE HIPSTERS — PART 2

hipster 1My fascination with Hipsters has resulted in a stunning tour de force of binge-watching Hipster movies (you can read about it here) and I ended up with a Pepsi hangover and an amazing conclusion.  Unlike every other social trend in human history, the Hipster phenom is driven, almost exclusively, by women.

First, some background.

Every era has had its own fiction.  Contemporary fiction (of whatever age) is always that exaggerated funhouse mirror the reflects the time in which it was written.  For example, Shakespeare can’t escape Elizabethan England, and it appears in every one of his plays.  F. Scott Fitzgerald showed us The Jazz Age; Ginsburg and Kerouac, The Beats; and Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson took so many liberties with nonfiction that people still don’t know where the truth of the 60s ends and the fiction begins.  Our contemporary society, however, is rapidly moving beyond the book and becoming Post Literate.  Therefore. to understand GenerationText, we must look at its visual literature — the movies.

Like any archetypical fiction, Hipster movies are basically all the same.  (Believe me, after 48 hours, I was accurately writing the dialogue for some scenes as they were happening.)

Anyway, all Hipster movies are based on The Useless Boob.  This boob is always male.  He’s always drowning in his own sensitivity.  He’s normally consumed by angst and he’s always awkward and ineffectual.  This is supposed to indicate there’s a deep ennui-ed soul down there somewhere.  Unfortunately, it just comes off as too many emotional steroids.  The unique thing about the useless boob, though, is that, unlike every other stereotype in literature (hero, lover, rebel, villain, etc.) the useless boob is actually useless.  His function is to provide an empty venue for the female to fill.  That’s it!  Harry the Penguin could do it if a director could teach him how to talk and look constipated.

The real story in any Hipster movie is always about The Quirky Female.

Juno – Juno (Ellen Page) is a quirky, intelligent, uncertain female, trying to find her adolescent place in an adult world.  Paulie (Michael Cera) is the sperm donor.

Garden State – Maybe it’s the meds, but Andrew (Zach Braff) spends 99% of the movie swimming in emotional treacle.  On the other hand, Sam (Natalie Portman) and her attempts to redefine herself are way more interesting.

Her – Does Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) do anything in this movie?  No.  The guy’s so emotionally stagnant even his computer leaves him.  It’s Sam (Scarlett Johansson) the quirkiest of all female Hipsters, who’s searching for emotional and intellectual growth.

Francis Ha – Some would say the quintessential Hipster movie and the main character Francis (Greta Gerwig) doesn’t even have a male counterpart — unless you count Benji (Michael Zegen) who’s inconsequential even at the very end.

500 Days of Summer – Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is depressed — big surprise.  He’s emotionally and physically stuck with a life he doesn’t like — another big surprise.  He decides that Summer (Zooey Deschanel) can fix it for him but doesn’t lift an emotional finger to help himself.  Summer leaves his sorry ass and gets on with her life.

And it goes on and on.
Inside Llewyn Davis
Frank
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Submarine

So, what have we learned — two things.  Even though a person can actually live on Doritos and Pepsi it’s not healthy to go nuts with Netflix.  And, hipsters are indeed just pompous asses in plaid shirts, but the girls are fascinating.