Tag: contemporary culture

Why Are There Hipsters? — Part 1

hipsterI’m fascinated by Hipsters.  Like Flappers, Beatniks and the more recent BoBos, these folks are the cultural definition of our age.  If that brings a tear to your eye, you’re not alone.  However, the fact remains: ever since Sean Combs (Diddy Whoever?) and Kanye Kardashian turned “Straight Outta Compton” into “Sub-Urban Acceptable,” no other contemporary group packs the kind of street cred that Hipsters do.  They are the biggest sidewalk society we’ve seen since the Hippies stormed out of Haight-Ashbury to conquer the 60s.  So, when history judges us (and it will) Hipsters are going to be front and centre.  Not bad for a cultural subset that spends its days denies its own existence!

So what makes Hipsters more than just a bunch of pompous asses in plaid shirts?

I’ve done some massive research.  Last weekend, I laid in a load of Doritos™ and Pepsi™, smoothed my ass groove out of the sofa, and settled in to watch every Hipster movie I could get my mitts on.  (Serious social commentators have to take these kinds of risks.)  I watched everything from Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and High Fidelity to Frank, Her and Inside Llewyn Davis.  By the time I was done, I had a junk-food food baby and was speaking in tongues.  However, after 48 eye-bleeding hours of intensive study, I did discover the roots of Hipsterism in these movies, the visual literature of their culture.

I was, like Custer meeting the Sioux, shocked and amazed.

First of all, despite the mythology, Hipster culture is not actually centred on incomprehensible Film Festival movies and Indie music.  These are just the vehicles that give Hipsters their style, and like every other social phenomenon in history, it’s the Hipster style that defines it.  Secondly — and this is where the bike helmet hits the pavement — unlike every other measurable trend in social history, the Hipster phenom is the first one driven by women.

And on Friday,  I’ll prove it.

50 Shades of Mom Porn — Revisited

grey1Okay, so I was wrong — big deal!  Fifty Shades of Grey (the movie) sucked.  Who knew?  My thought was when you start out with crap lines like “inner goddess” and “puckered love cave,” the only direction you have to go is up.  It never occurred to me that the movie producers, directors etc. would find rock bottom and start to dig.  My mistake.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been wr-wr-wr — not right, although I do stand by my definition of Mom Porn.  (You can read about it here.)  Actually, I’m relieved.  Now that Mom Porn isn’t sweeping through suburbia like some pandemic itch, people can see the 50 Shades phenom for what it is: Twilight meets The Story of O — at WalMart.

Here are a couple of other thoughts.

You can fool all of the people some of the time.  For nearly a year before the movie was released, 50 Shades was being touted as the ultimate erotic Valentine.  Herded to the box office by the hype, an unsuspecting public was initially scammed out of 500 million dollars.  However, within a week, attendance had crashed and the choruses of WTF were reaching a crescendo.  Still, there is no limit to the cojones of contemporary Mad Men (and women.)  In a blatant lunge for just a few dollars more, they released the DVD and Blu-Ray versions of the movie on May 8th — just in time for Mother’s Day!  Their assumption was dad would add it to the flowers in the hope that mom would get a little frisky on her special day and that mom was dumb enough to fall for the old “deleted scenes” con.  Cynicism, thy name is marketing!

Ironically, Universal actually sued Smash Pictures when the boys down at Smash announced they were going to produce a porno version of 50 Shades.  Just take a moment and let that one sink in!

Ultimately, it comes down to this.  Take Christian Grey out of his penthouse and three piece suit, put him in a trailer park in a t-shirt and jeans; then, turn Ana into a waitress at Denny’s and voila! Suddenly, you’ve got a book/movie franchise that’s actively promoting sexual abuse and violence against women.  It’s amazing how perversion becomes erotic when you dress it up in Armani.

And finally, the best test of a good movie: is anybody talking about the sequel?

Why Do They Hate Us?

Our western world is the most carefree, benevolent society in history.  So why does half the rest of the world hate us while the other half is actively trying to kill us?  It’s a conundrum, and a lot of learned minds have written volumes hoping to figure it out.  Forget all that crap!  It boils down to the 3Gs: Grocery stores, Game shows and Golf.

groceryGrocery Stores – In North America, there’s enough food in the average grocery store to feed a 3rd World village for the better part of a decade.  There’s fresh food, frozen food, canned food, processed food and food that isn’t even food anymore.  (BTW, what does “meal replacement” actually mean?)  We’ve got so much food there’s an entire aisle devoted to food whose only purpose is to go on top of other food.  There’s another aisle for the food we eat between the times we’re eating food.  We can buy food and use it to decorate other food — and then just throw it away.  Incredible as it sounds, grocery stores even have a whole bunch of food that’s actually bad for us — not to mention the 600 different kinds of sugar water we can buy to wash it all down with.  And that’s just one grocery store: there are thousands and thousands of them.  The industrialized West has more food than it could ever possibly eat.

Game Shows – Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and The Price is Right are absolute WTF moments in modern living.gameshow  Contestants can walk away from these programs with more money than billions of people on this planet can earn in a lifetime — and they do it in 30 minutes or less.  And what do they have to do to collect all this coin?  Not much beyond spinning the big game wheel or making it “a true daily double, Alex.”  However, for insult to injury TV, nothing beats Survivor.  The premise of this game is that, for a month and a half, a  group of Americans have to live the way the rest of the world lives all the time.  After six weeks, the person who is sneaky, cunning and manipulative enough to outlast everybody else, wins a million dollars.  (A million dollars!)  That’s folding money in any country’s currency.

golfGolf – Nobody actually knows how much money is spent in the Western world on golf.  Even a conservative guess would put it somewhere around the accumulated GNPs of 50 of the world’s poorest nations.  A quick inventory of balls, clubs, tees, gloves, a bag, shoes, a collared shirt, and the dicky little hat and you’re into the game for a couple of thousand.  Add green fees, cart rentals and all the other etceteras and you’re looking at five figures to bang your balls around a pasture every week.  And that’s what it is — a Members Only pasture — and we have thousands of them.  Plus, we soak these pastures with billions of litres of drinkable water, thousands of metric tonnes of fertilizer and millions of working hours in maintenance.  (Some places cut their putting greens with lasers!)  To produce?  Nothing — beyond huge tracts of immaculately manicured, inedible grass.  All for the sole purpose of getting a little white ball into a tiny round hole, hundreds of yards away from where we’re originally standing.

These are the 3Gs, and it’s this kind of in-your-face affluence that pisses people off.