Thursday, May 2, 2013
All Our Little Lives
Besides the comments on proms and crushes and parents and school and #yolo, the most common theme on #followateen is people pointing out that #followateen is creepy. It’s a good point. Of course it’s creepy. It’s really creepy. If you haven’t yet noticed, Twitter is, itself, creepy. The language is creepy and the concept is creepy. The form is creepy and the content is creepy and the fact of all our relative habituation to it is very, very creepy. The word follow is creepy, evoking heavy-breathing stalkers. Cult leaders have followers, and hapless victims get followed down dark alleyways. Follow implies obsession, lack of autonomy, predators, and silent threats. (...)
Twitter is a self-curated world of choose-your-own-adventure voyeurism. It becomes interesting when you realize that you can just sit behind the scenes of someone’s life and listen to them talk to themselves, when you realize how many inner monologues — those of friends, celebrities, strangers — are waiting there naked-faced in a neat backward scroll. Voyeurism is not widely acknowledged as useful, and social media are constantly being asked to justify their efficacy. Although Twitter succeeds as a mechanism for self-promotion and offers a way to connect with strangers or friends of friends, its main utility is as entertainment. We have all wished at times that we could be there for someone else’s argument, gossip session, or first date: Twitter gets us pretty close. Twitter is where we go to be creepy, and #followateen demonstrates this: It is precisely what has made Twitter so popular, so successful, and so addictive.
Teens are always interesting. In a teen’s life, something is always going wrong. Very little actually happens, but all of it is of enormous consequence. Or at least that’s how we assume it feels, from our definitively creepy position of adult voyeur. Many tweets in the #followateen feed are extremely condescending, as is Thorpe’s original tweet. The description of a “little teen life” minimizes the teen. The appeal of #followateen as characterized is intrinsically connected to the smallness and inconsequence of the teen’s life. After all, we’re all sick of being grownups, sick of caring about large things like jobs and bills and marriage and aging. It’s probably no coincidence that #followateen caught on like wildfire right as all taxes were due in the U.S. If only our lives were smaller, and if only we still had so few big things to care about that the small things could feel big. In a teen’s experience, everything is a crisis — school, clothes, parents, cars, prom, shoes, backpacks, homework. Every tiny thing is crucial and worth crying about — or, in this case, worth tweeting about. Teens are the ideal tweeters because they are never happy and always interesting.
But none of this actually distinguishes the teens from their creepy audience, as much as those of us watching might like to believe it does. Teens don’t have “little” lives because they’re teens but because all our lives are small. We stumble though the pointless minutiae of the day to day. Tiny events that seem like crises are made large only in the telling. What #followateen admits is not that teenagers’ lives are smaller than our own, but that teenagers are the only ones who are doing the internet right.The social internet is determined by teenagers. Our use of the medium and all its memes and codes and approved and appropriated and habituated constructions and formal devices are all adapted from the language of teenagers using the internet. The Twitter account of a 16-year-old complaining about homework and boys can be seen simply as the true and correct use of Twitter.
Twitter is a self-curated world of choose-your-own-adventure voyeurism. It becomes interesting when you realize that you can just sit behind the scenes of someone’s life and listen to them talk to themselves, when you realize how many inner monologues — those of friends, celebrities, strangers — are waiting there naked-faced in a neat backward scroll. Voyeurism is not widely acknowledged as useful, and social media are constantly being asked to justify their efficacy. Although Twitter succeeds as a mechanism for self-promotion and offers a way to connect with strangers or friends of friends, its main utility is as entertainment. We have all wished at times that we could be there for someone else’s argument, gossip session, or first date: Twitter gets us pretty close. Twitter is where we go to be creepy, and #followateen demonstrates this: It is precisely what has made Twitter so popular, so successful, and so addictive.
Teens are always interesting. In a teen’s life, something is always going wrong. Very little actually happens, but all of it is of enormous consequence. Or at least that’s how we assume it feels, from our definitively creepy position of adult voyeur. Many tweets in the #followateen feed are extremely condescending, as is Thorpe’s original tweet. The description of a “little teen life” minimizes the teen. The appeal of #followateen as characterized is intrinsically connected to the smallness and inconsequence of the teen’s life. After all, we’re all sick of being grownups, sick of caring about large things like jobs and bills and marriage and aging. It’s probably no coincidence that #followateen caught on like wildfire right as all taxes were due in the U.S. If only our lives were smaller, and if only we still had so few big things to care about that the small things could feel big. In a teen’s experience, everything is a crisis — school, clothes, parents, cars, prom, shoes, backpacks, homework. Every tiny thing is crucial and worth crying about — or, in this case, worth tweeting about. Teens are the ideal tweeters because they are never happy and always interesting.
But none of this actually distinguishes the teens from their creepy audience, as much as those of us watching might like to believe it does. Teens don’t have “little” lives because they’re teens but because all our lives are small. We stumble though the pointless minutiae of the day to day. Tiny events that seem like crises are made large only in the telling. What #followateen admits is not that teenagers’ lives are smaller than our own, but that teenagers are the only ones who are doing the internet right.The social internet is determined by teenagers. Our use of the medium and all its memes and codes and approved and appropriated and habituated constructions and formal devices are all adapted from the language of teenagers using the internet. The Twitter account of a 16-year-old complaining about homework and boys can be seen simply as the true and correct use of Twitter.
by Helena Fitzgerald, TNI | Read more:
Image via
Bob Brozman (March, 1954 - April, 2013)
Bob Brozman, a guitarist and self-described “roving guitar anthropologist” who collaborated with musicians from Northern Ireland to Guinea to India to Papua New Guinea, died on April 23 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 59.
The cause was suicide, said Mike Pruger, the coroner’s deputy in Santa Cruz County.
Mr. Brozman’s music was rooted in the blues, but the open tunings, syncopations and microtonal inflections of the blues inspired him to soak up styles worldwide.
He was a traveler and collector who learned to play many other stringed instruments, from the Andean charango to the Greek baglama. He visited musicians around the world at their homes, studying with them and collaborating with them on recordings that brought new twists to traditional styles. He was especially fond of island cultures where, he told Songlines magazine, “musical instruments and ideas are left behind without much instruction and then left to percolate in isolation.”
His main instrument was the National steel guitar: a gleaming Art Deco-style instrument with a broad dynamic range, often played with a slide and associated with deep blues. He wrote a book, “The History and Artistry of National Resonator Instruments,” and designed a lower-pitched guitar, the Baritone Tricone (with three cone-shaped resonators), for the company, which is now called National Reso-Phonic Guitars.
He recorded dozens of albums, including solo projects and collaborations with musicians like the Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Ledward Kaapana, the Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya, the Guinean kora player Djeli Moussa Diawara, the Okinawan sanshin player and singer Takashi Hirayasu and the accordionist René Lacaille from the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. He also made instructional videos about ukulele, bottleneck blues, Caribbean rhythms and Hawaiian guitar.
Mr. Brozman approached traditional styles with curiosity, respect and energy. “I don’t expect them to meet me halfway musically,” he said of his collaborators in an interview with the British magazine Guitar. “I try to meet up about three-quarters of the way towards them.”
by Jon Pareles, NY Times | Read more:
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Cultural Revolution
The best general formulation of the problem may still be Herbert Marcuse’s essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937). For Marcuse, even when art or entertainment didn’t flatter power outright, culture as such tended to affirm, rather than negate, the existing social order: the very foretaste of a happier life offered by one kind of art, or the commiseration over present-day reality offered by another kind, helped people to endure the way things were. A dialectician, Marcuse did allow that culture could also, sometimes, negate, and seduce or incite you toward revolution — but his emphasis fell on culture as accommodation to the status quo. And this dominant pessimism about the capacity of culture to do the work of politics, occasionally relieved by a hesitant optimism, could be said to characterize the whole tradition of so-called Western Marxism to which Marcuse and the rest of the Frankfurt School belonged, many of whose unfinished projects and unresolved questions came to be inherited, knowingly or not, by French critical sociology and American cultural studies. Western Marxism (not just Marcuse, Adorno, and Benjamin but Lukács, Sartre, Althusser, et cetera) paid special attention to culture and ideology and correspondingly neglected the issues of political strategy and economic analysis that so preoccupied earlier generations of Marxist thinkers. As Perry Anderson pointed out in Considerations on Western Marxism, this cultural turn, beginning in the ’20s and in full swing by the ’30s, took place amid political disappointment: the defeat of working-class revolt in Germany, the hardening of the Soviet Union into Stalinist deformity, fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War, and so on. (...)
Logically, there seem to be three possible results of the mounting economic insecurity of intellectuals and “culture producers” amid a general population scoured by the same blast. The possibilities are hardly exclusive; all three are to some extent inevitable, and already taking place. It’s the proportions in which they’re realized that will answer for our own time a question about the relationship between intellectuals and the general populace classically formulated by Marxism in terms of “hegemony” and “cultural revolution.”
One possibility, and the worst, would be to see the next decades exacerbate the class character of culture. In this scenario, since very few people not already wealthy would risk careers as writers or artists, certain vital strains of culture would become, more exclusively than today, the expression of an upper-class stratum. A basic relegation of literature, art, and philosophy to pastimes of the idly rich (as, say, in prerevolutionary France) doesn’t seem impossible.
A second possibility, closer to realization today, would be the confinement of important varieties of culture not to a single socioeconomic stratum but to demographic archipelagos amid rising seas of mass corporate product. Young people might give up hopes of gainful employment through art or serious writing — without giving up the production or consumption of those things. Holding down uninspiring and ill-paid day-jobs, they would huddle together in select neighborhoods of big cities and devote their evenings and weekends to culture (and laundry, shopping, and cleaning). This doesn’t sound so bad; it sounds in fact like the cozily disappointed existence, streaked with fear of unemployment, of half the people we know.
But the confinement of much cultural production to the leisure hours of a few bohemian enclaves entails real costs for the resulting culture. Challenging art and radical thought, with no hope of a large audience truly susceptible to being challenged, slip easily into administering “provocativeness” to the jadedly unprovokable. The idea of an avant-garde leading a general charge becomes, as it has, impossible; the infantry of a would-be popular audience has deserted, and an officer corps with no troops merely redesigns its uniforms according to cycles of fashion. Squabbles over medals and rank take the place of what Gramsci called the war of position; cultural hegemony — a prevailing climate of opinion — is left, uncontested, to capitalism. (...)
We are witnessing and sometimes personally experiencing a sharp de-classing of intellectuals. Our precious credentials are increasingly useless for generating income and — let us hope — social prestige, too. This should mean that most intellectuals view ourselves as sinking, economically, into the lower-middle or working class, and that “meritocratic” markers — the contents of our bookshelves and iPods; our degrees — accord us less and less social status in our own and others’ eyes. Not to say there won’t remain a self-protective cultural elite hoarding its prestige: the hostility to criticism among mutually appreciative writers, artists, and academics — an aversion to meaningful disputes — is contemporary evidence of such a siege mentality. But we can also hope for something else: perhaps intellectuals’ increasing exposure to socioeconomic danger will give a new political dangerousness and reality to what some of us produce. Might the continuing commitment of de-classed left intellectuals and radical artists to their vocations, in spite of withered prospects and eroding prestige, give our work an antisystemic force, and credibility, it has lacked?
In recent decades, varieties of politics among intellectuals, hipsters, artists, and academics have seemed to outsiders, and increasingly to ourselves, like just so many types of functionally affirmative, system-stabilizing, content-neutral cultural capital. In the years ahead it may become easier, while much else becomes harder, for both left intellectuals and our intended audience to believe that we do what we do and say what we say for the sake of conviction, not capital. Artists and intellectuals, to go on existing in serious numbers without much help from universities, corporate publishers, wealthy families, and rich patrons, will be groups marked by some sacrifice. And if we want to work hard—“Il faut travailler, rien que travailler,” Cézanne wrote to Rilke: probably the one common motto of artists and thinkers — many of us may quit the demographic islands where our very concentration drives up the rent. Released, unprotected, into the dark fields of the republic, we would find new things to say and, with luck, new people to say them to.
by The Editors, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Maya Lin, "Storm King Wavefield."
The Death Of Blogs? Or Of Magazines?
[T]oday, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn’t need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn’t going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog.
We will still have blogs, of course, if only because the word is flexible enough to encompass a very wide range of publishing platforms: Basically, anything that contains a scrollable stream of posts is a “blog.” What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter.I wish he had some solid data to back that point up. Of course, blogs have evolved – and this one clearly has from its early days. What began as one person being mean to Maureen Dowd around 12.30 am every night is now an organism in which my colleagues and I try to construct both a personal and yet also diverse conversation in real time. But that doesn’t mean the individual blogger – small or large – is disappearing. Our entire model requires, as it did from the get-go, links to other sites and blogs – and we have not detected a shortage.
One reason we have had to grow and evolve – and this started as far back as 2003 – is that the web conversation has grown exponentially since this blog started (when Bill Clinton was president). Yes, many bloggers now get employed by more general sites, or move on to more complex forms (think of Nate Silver, a lone blogger when the Dish first championed his work and now part of an informational eco-system). But every page on the web is equally accessible as every other page. Blogs will never die – but they might form a smaller part of a much larger online eco-system of discourse.
My own view is that one particular form of journalism is actually dying because of this technological shift – and it’s magazines, not blogs. When every page in a magazine can be detached from the others, when readers rarely absorb a coherent assemblage of writers in a bound paper publication, but pick and choose whom to read online where individual stories and posts overwhelm any single collective form of content, the magazine as we have long known it is effectively over.
Without paper and staples, it doesn’t fall apart so much as explodes into many pieces hurtling into the broader web. Where these pieces come from doesn’t matter much to the reader. So what’s taking the place of magazines are blog-hubs or group-blogs with more links, bigger and bigger ambitions and lower costs. Or aggregated bloggers/writers/galley slave curators designed by “magazines” to be sold in themed chunks. That’s why the Atlantic.com began as a collection of bloggers and swiftly turned them all into chopped up advertizing-geared “channels.” That form of online magazine has nothing to do with its writing as such or its writers; it’s a way to use writers to procure money from corporations. And those channels now include direct corporate-written ad copy, designed to look as much like the actual “magazine” as modesty allows.
by Andrew Sullivan, The Dish | Read more:
Photo: uncredited
How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank
Indeed, some 3,000 lobbyists had swarmed the Capitol in hopes of killing off pieces of the proposed bill—nearly six lobbyists for every member of Congress. For Michael Barr, then an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, the trench warfare spurred by Dodd-Frank left him shellshocked. “You pick a page at random,” says Barr, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, “and I’ll tell you about all the issues on that page where the fighting was intense.” Remarkably, despite the onslaught, Dodd-Frank “got stronger rather than weaker the closer we got to passage, which is incredibly unusual,” says Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, one of a handful of advocacy groups that fought tenaciously for the bill.
That sense of victory barely lasted barely the morning. The same financial behemoths that had fought so ferociously to block Dodd-Frank were not going to let the mere fact of the bill’s passage ruin their plans. “Halftime,” shrugged Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group representing 100 of the country’s largest financial institutions. It was 5:30 am on a Friday when a joint House-Senate conference committee approved the bill’s final language. By Sunday, an industry lawyer named Annette Nazareth—a former top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission whose firm counts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs among its clients—had already sent off a heavily annotated copy of the 848-page bill to colleagues at her old agency. According to a congressional staffer whose boss was a key architect of Dodd-Frank, Nazareth is one of two “generals” running the campaign to undo the bill. The other is Eugene Scalia, a fearsome litigator and son of the Supreme Court justice.
After Dodd-Frank’s passage, lobbyists for the big banks and industry trade groups divided themselves into eighteen working groups, each organized around a different element of the new law. “That’s when the real work began,” Talbott tells me. One working group focused on derivatives reform, including the requirement that these complex financial instruments now be sold on open exchanges in the fashion of stocks and bonds. Another focused on efforts to hammer out the so-called Volcker Rule, which would limit the ability of federally insured banks to wager on risky ventures. A third tackled the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created to protect ordinary consumers from Wall Street deceptions involving mortgages, credit cards and other major profit centers for the banks.
In the months leading up to Dodd-Frank’s passage, the big story was the staggering sums of money being spent by the industry to defeat the bill—more than $1 billion on lobbying alone, according to one estimate. Yet, incredibly, the financial sector dramatically increased its spending after Dodd-Frank was signed. Whereas commercial banks such as Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, along with their trade groups, spent $55 million lobbying in 2010 (the year Dodd-Frank became law), they would collectively spend $61 million in 2011 and again in 2012, according to OpenSecrets.org. The twenty-eight lobbyists Talbott has on the payroll at the Financial Services Roundtable makes it relative small fry. The American Bankers Association has ninety-one lobbyists representing its interests, while the US Chamber of Commerce has 183. Goldman Sachs has fifty-one lobbyists, JPMorgan Chase sixty, and even the obscure-sounding Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is armed to the teeth, hiring the services of forty-nine lobbyists.
Even so, those numbers don’t begin to capture the army of people being paid exorbitant sums to beat back reform. “The lobbyists are just the point of the spear,” said Ed Mierzwinski, director of consumer programs for the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). “There are also the regulatory lawyers, the research staffs, the PR people and all those loyal think tank supporters shilling for the banks.”
Dodd-Frank’s Achilles’ heel is that it leaves the tough work of writing the actual regulations to existing federal agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had failed so miserably at protecting the public interest in the run-up to the 2008 crash, as well as to backwater independent agencies like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which was tasked with regulating a derivatives market that played a central role in the collapse of the global economy.
The story of how Wall Street lobbyists worked the halls of Congress, blocking the appointment of Elizabeth Warren, Obama’s first choice to head the CFPB, or pushing bills aimed at defanging Dodd-Frank, is fairly well-known by now. But it was the stealthy work of battalions of regulatory lawyers, who descended on the private offices of regulators deep inside the bureaucracy, that has proven more crucial to the industry’s effort to pick off pieces of Dodd-Frank. There, a kind of ground war has been going on for almost three years, with the regulators waging hand-to-hand combat to defend every clause and comma in Dodd-Frank, and the lawyers fighting to insert any loophole they can to protect their clients’ extraordinary profits. This is how the miracle that was the making of Dodd-Frank—hailed as the most comprehensive financial reform since the 1930s—became a slow-moving horror movie called “The Unmaking of Dodd-Frank”: a perfect case study of the ways an industry with nearly unlimited resources can avoid a set of tough-minded reforms it doesn’t like.
by Gary Rivlin, The Nation | Read more:
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
It’s over 20 years ago now that Nirvana’s video for “Smells like Teen Spirit” debuted on MTV’s 120 Minutes and, for better or worse, inaugurated the grunge era. The video arrived as a shock and a thrill to a generation too young to remember punk and sick of the steady stream of cheesy corporate dance music and hair metal that characterized the late-80s. For everyone outside the small Seattle scene that nurtured them and the tape-trading kids in the know, the band seemed to arrive out of nowhere as a total angst-ridden package, and the MTV video, by first-time director Samuel Bayer, seemed bracingly anarchic and raw at the time.
But a look at the first live performance of “Teen Spirit” (above) makes it seem pretty tame by comparison. The video’s a little grainy and low-res, which suits the song just fine. Live, “Teen Spirit’s” disturbing undertones are more pronounced, its quiet-loud dynamics more forceful, and the energy of the crowd is real, not the thrashing around of a bunch of teenage extras. Not a cheerleader in sight, but I think this would have grabbed me more than the pep rally-riot-themed MTV video did when it debuted a few months later. Despite their anti-corporate stance, Nirvana was a casualty of their own success, eaten up by the machinery they despised (...)Also don’t miss Nirvana’s Home Videos: An Intimate Look at the Band’s Life Away From the Spotlight (1988).
via: Open Culture
The 'Public Safety Exception'
The initial debate over the treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focused on whether he should be advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. In the wake of news reports that he had been Mirandized and would be charged in a federal court, I credited the Obama DOJ for handling the case reasonably well thus far. As it turns out, though, Tsarnaev wasn't Mirandized because the DOJ decided he should be. Instead, that happened only because a federal magistrate, on her own, scheduled a hospital-room hearing, interrupted the FBI's interrogation which had been proceeding at that point for a full 16 hours, and advised him of his right to remain silent and appointed him a lawyer. Since then, Tsarnaev ceased answering the FBI's questions.
But that controversy was merely about whether he would be advised of his Miranda rights. Now, the Los Angeles Times, almost in passing, reports something which, if true, would be a much more serious violation of core rights than delaying Miranda warnings - namely, that prior to the magistrate's visit to his hospital room, Tsarnaev had repeatedly asked for a lawyer, but the FBI simply ignored those requests, instead allowing the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group to continue to interrogate him alone:
"Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said.
"Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said.A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule."Delaying Miranda warnings under the "public safety exception" - including under the Obama DOJ's radically expanded version of it - is one thing. But denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is another thing entirely: as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined. As the lawyer bmaz comprehensively details in this excellent post, it is virtually unheard of for the "public safety" exception to be used to deny someone their right to a lawyer as opposed to delaying a Miranda warning (the only cases where this has been accepted were when "the intrusion into the constitutional right to counsel ... was so fleeting – in both it was no more than a question or two about a weapon on the premises of a search while the search warrant was actively being executed"). To ignore the repeated requests of someone in police custody for a lawyer, for hours and hours, is just inexcusable and legally baseless.
As law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky explained in the Los Angeles Times last week, the Obama DOJ was already abusing the "public safety" exception by using it to delay Miranda warnings for hours, long after virtually every public official expressly said that there were no more threats to the public safety. As he put it: "this exception does not apply here because there was no emergency threat facing law enforcement." Indeed, as I documented when this issue first arose, the Obama DOJ already unilaterally expanded this exception far beyond what the Supreme Court previously recognized by simply decreeing (in secret) that terrorism cases justify much greater delays in Mirandizing a suspect for reasons well beyond asking about public safety.
But that debate was merely about whether Tsarnaev would be advised of his rights. This is much more serious: if the LA Times report is true, then it means that the DOJ did not merely fail to advise him of his right to a lawyer but actively blocked him from exercising that right. This is a US citizen arrested for an alleged crime on US soil: there is no justification whatsoever for denying him his repeatedly exercised right to counsel. And there are ample and obvious dangers in letting the government do this. That's why Marcy Wheeler was arguing from the start that whether Tsarnaev would be promptly presented to a federal court - as both the Constitution and federal law requires - is more important than whether he is quickly Mirandized. Even worse, if the LA Times report is accurate, it means that the Miranda delay as well as the denial of his right to a lawyer would have continued even longer had the federal magistrate not basically barged into the interrogation to advise him of his rights.
Advanced Style
Then there is old old, a realm often belonging to the parents of the baby boomers. This is nursing-home old. This is prunes-for-breakfast old. This is “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up” old.
Yet a few months ago, arriving on my desk like so many pounds of zeitgeist, an unlikely third way appeared in the form of a coffee-table book called “Advanced Style.” The book features old people, often very old people, mainly women, photographed on the street, dressed up lively for the winters of their lives. They are buttressed by pullquotes like: “When you are younger, you dress for other people. When you are older, you dress for yourself.” One photo is of a 100-year-old woman holding a seasoned ostrich purse in one hand and a walking stick in the other; her facial expression suggests a certain curiosity as to why in God’s name this boychik with a digital camera wants so much to take her picture.
“Advanced Style” was created by a 31-year-old street-style photographer from San Diego named Ari Seth Cohen. He started the project as a photo blog, and both the “Advanced Style” book and blog share the standout quality of being so of their time that they feel nearly peculiar — at once familiar and like nothing you’ve ever seen.
“Advanced Style” has sold out four printings since it was first published last spring. Its popularity has made Cohen — by all photographic evidence something of a nebbish, a guy who says that if he hadn’t made it in the style world, he would have gone to work at a nursing home — one of New York City’s more unlikely tastemakers. (...)
It would be easy to make the mistake of thinking new interest in the aged exists simply because the boomers, still the largest generation in the Western Hemisphere, are now careering into seniorhood. But it’s worth remembering that, notwithstanding their aging, the boomers are still the generation that gave us the famous boardroom credo “Nobody wants to see old people on TV/in the movies/in advertisements.” In the 1980s, the peak years of boomer creative influence, if you were on television with more than six decades to your name, you were most likely flying into a snowy moonscape pulled by reindeer. “The Golden Girls” was what it meant to be acceptably ancient on prime time. Rue McClanahan was a fit 51 when she took the role of Blanche Devereaux on that show.
So it’s not the new old who are driving this fascination. It’s the young. Scratch the surface of youth culture, and a kind of Eldertopia is revealed, a pro-aged paradise lovingly promoted by people who are themselves not even close to middle-aged.
by Mireille Silcoff, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Beatrix Ost via:
Monday, April 29, 2013
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