Postmodern Conservative.

Voodoo Home Economics

McMegan brings the horror. Keeping up a churning carnival of worthless delights apparently has the indirect effect of "actually mak[ing] everyone better off." That sub-zero fridge that's too big for your last-season kitchen remodel? It's consumption as moral patriotism, peeps:

The positional competition may not be doing you any good directly, but if it raises national GDP, it will indirectly help you, and everyone else in the country. If you don't want to conspicuously consume just to aggrandize yourself, you should carefully consider whether you don't owe at least it to your neighbors to install the new granite countertops.

Paradox: if falling guilt and justified bourgeois wankery drive our need for psychoanalgesic pills down, does the collapse of the pharma-market suck the wind from the sails of the Good Ship Lollipop?

Bottom line: dumb trinkets are still dumb trinkets, and I'm not sure in the end this vindicates anyone but Aristotle.

If You Hate Cavities You Must Celebrate Sex

And other words of wisdom from Britt Peterson at the Plank, howitzer trained on easy target David Gelernter:

The tactics were just as transparent and occasionally nasty as they are now, if not more so – sleep with me and I’ll write you a poem, sleep with me or you’ll get old before your time, etc. And the sex was just as premarital -- that was the whole point of it; married sex was slightly less fun when the idea of choosing your spouse was a fantasy played out on the stage, but rarely in real life.

To recap: the old days were simply worse than the new ones (and if Gelernter disagrees with that, I’ve got a 16th-century dentist I’d like to introduce him to). And literature makes a very poor expert witness, especially when you're twisting it to shore up already absurd arguments.

The main problem with the way sex is had nowadays has much less to do with volume and frequency than the psychological reasons that account for them. When it comes to an active life of getting it on, it's not always necessary to feel like you're throwing yourself away sexually to compensate for feeling thrown away in other respects. But that attitude helps things along. Our sexual patterns, especially among the young, are very ignoble -- not because kids shouldn't mess around, but because the psychocultural premises are debased and perverted. Yet nobody seems to want to have that conversation. One side says loosely regulated sex is unhealthy. The other says it's the picture of health. This is a false dichotomy. Please someone help me destroy it.

Russia: the Cutting Edge of Hip

What's kitscher than kitsch? Move over, childhood nostalgia of the emotionally stunted American hipster. If 1UP mushrooms and Clash T-shirts, why not this?

young and trendy Muscovites are in the throes of nostalgia for the staples of Soviet childhoods, relics of a time when the U.S.S.R. was at the height of superpower status. That may explain why one of the most popular fashion designers this fall is Denis Simachev, who is selling overcoats fastened with hammer-and-sickle buttons, gold jewelry minted to look like Soviet kopecks and shirts festooned with the Soviet coat of arms, complete with embroidered ears of wheat. “People in their 30s see these kinds of symbols as reminders of happy memories, like going to pioneer camp where they lived together, ate breakfast together and played sports,” said Mr. Simachev, 33, who wears his hair in a Samurai-style ponytail. He insists he is no Communist — for one thing, his overcoats sell for about $2,100 and his T-shirts for about $600. His boutique is sandwiched between Hermès and Burberry stores on a pedestrian lane, Stoleshnikov, that is one of the capital’s most expensive shopping streets.

Ah the irony, when history repeats itself as farce and capitalism's to blame.

UPDATE: Julian about nails it with the Hang the Capitalists Playset analogy: a fake gulag, though tacky, is always to be preferred to the real thing.

Problem is of course that in Russia's case today the gilded hammer and sickle is merely one shiny facet of the Putinocratic diadem. Kind of takes the shine off freedom of contract when it applies only to the entertainment sector. But that's what I keep nattering on about with this 'pink police state' stuff.

Ties, Yes, But Spare Me the Wes Andersonishness

This makes me ill:

Slightly offbeat in a laid-back way — the Wes Anderson of the accessory world — the youthful tie is giving the old dress code a much-needed shot in the neck.

“It’s a uniform that doesn’t look like a uniform,” said Daniel Pipski, 31, a senior vice president at LivePlanet, the Los Angeles production company whose founders include Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. In Hollywood, where the open-collar dress shirt is king, the necktie is largely held to be a benighted relic of East Coast business style. But that has not deterred Mr. Pipski, who sees the tie as a kind of style passkey, especially the slender wool 1950s-style ties created by the Los Angeles label Band of Outsiders. (He owns about 60 of them.) To him, ties manage to be both a bit of self-expression and a concession to business dress.

“Wearing a tie is a kind of style,” he said. “It’s a thing you’re doing. It’s seen as ‘creative.’ So you can go from meetings with the creative side and then go meet the head of a studio.” -- The New York Times

The tie is a fashion accessory for men that requires skill, patience, taste, judgment, and inherited wisdom to wear properly. When worn properly -- and there are many ways to do this, including ones that flagrantly violate every standard of tie-wearing known to regular man -- the tie vastly improves and often completes a man's dress, whether casual, formal, or something in between. This is why a tie is good. A tie is not good because it is 'a kind of style passkey.' Wearing a tie is not good because 'it's a thing you're doing.' Being creative has no inherent worth, and being seen as creative -- the poor man's actually being creative -- should have even less.

Skinny ties are always a mistake unless tucked behind a shirt or vest or accompanied with a tie bar. This is the original sin of 'the hipster set,' which understood that skinniness is pleasing both in body type and in the cut of a man's trousers (no pleats, please) and his jacket. But unless you are so skinny that a regular-width tie makes you look like an eight-year-old, please refrain from your otherwise misguided and chintzy attempt to muster up a nexus of ironic-nostalgic reference points designed to prop up the weak and rootless fashion of contemporary times with the gravitas of the Rat Pack and Brit Punk.

Get ties, anchor the aesthetic sites of your own style in something slightly more timeless, master several knots, stay away from leather, and wear them. Often. Class dismissed.

Pop Culture + Philosophy = Pop Culture?

The track record for this sort of edutainment is dodgy and its future unclear. I remember, for example, curators at the Field Museum, in Chicago, once telling me that they had brought recent traveling exhibits about Harley-Davidson motorcycles and chocolate and couture jewelry and Jacqueline Kennedy's dresses in hopes that visitors would come to see the flashy stuff but then wander over to the more substantive permanent exhibits, too. The curators also spoke of sugar and medicine. Careful analysis of the foot traffic, however, revealed that visitors came for the candy and exited the museum straightway — no additional nutrition was ingested. -- Stephen Asma, CHE

Read the whole dodgy business. There's nothing wrong with using some pop culture as an explanatory level for philosophy, international relations, or any other brainy discipline. Necessarily. One problem arises at once, however: the same intellectual snobbery wherein philosophers think of themselves as on a higher plane than the peons in the cave applies to things of the cave, too; so I think The Simpsons is really quite genius while Seinfeld is horrible, dull, and pedestrian in every way. (Those early-90s clothes! That plonking, white-man-jazzy bass! Gahhhh!) What happens when philosophy degenerates into particularly erudite camps of pop culture partisans?

This seems the inevitable result of an attempt by officers of high culture -- or as Arendt would call it, culture -- to use low culture as a hook, Polonius style, to catch a carp of popular enthusiasm for works that transcend popularity with the bait of schlock and dross. I like me a Harley, don't get me wrong, but the Bodyworlds exhibit suggests just how coyly overt the technique can be: who wants to see the amazing scientific nature of life-sized dissected bodies preserved in plastic -- the ostensibly edifying point of the exhibit? People want to see skinless dead dudes with their heads exposed three layers deep playing football. People want a quick gawk, no deep contemplation, save that for our memorial ponds, thanks.

Pop culture is sugar -- fast tasty blasts -- but philosophy ain't no medicine, something you can gulp down like a shot of NyQuil and be done with. It must be savored, rolled around in the mouth, swished, spit out, tested against other sippings, and so on. When you get down to it, the use of pop culture as a heuristic by philosophy isn't a question of substance, but of format. Whatever's inside, the average person -- i.e. the person who isn't a philosopher -- seems more and more likely these days to exit the museum straightaway.

That's Identertainment II

For the sake of dispelling the notion that I was just slinging jargon yesterday on the topic of 'identertainment' and the niche, kitch globalization of self-branding, may I present hundreds of prisoners in the Philippines reenacting Michael Jackson's Thriller video.

That's Identertainment

Not long ago the only place you could read about Nerdcore, if you weren't already down, was Wikipedia. Then the NYT got hold of it. The result is a little sno-globe version of three of the biggest social forces driving people coming of age today: self-branding, niche globalization, and lifestyle kitch. Pull quotes, in corresponding order:

Mr. Ward said his rap career is just a step in personal brand-building. Ultimately, he plans to incorporate his music into an anime-style cartoon feature, which he will ideally sell to cable television, and spin off into video games, toys and T-shirts.

“By definition, nerdcore has to be marginal,” said Mr. Hess, who now lives in Brooklyn. But the margins these days can be wider than ever. “Because of the Internet,” he said, “any cultural niche can find all 2 million people who are fascinated by it.”

“I don’t think it’s about nerds,” he said, after reflection. “It’s about grown men who are in this new phase of their life, their mid-20s or late 20s, postcollege. They just want to think about the kid stuff. Because it’s easier. It’s a simpler time.”

It all pretty much speaks for itself, and would be easy to criticize were the fundamental bargains of capitalism not being shifted on such a profound level that 'rational choice' as we have known it no longer functions as we would expect. What's rational has changed. The identities and emotions market is where it's at. Despite the considered defiance the indie set aims at cashing in and going mainstream, the terms of moneymaking and mainstreaming have been renegotiated such that the line between goods and services and the line between style and substance blur away. The result is an increasing market openness to making a brief but significant score by selling an attitude, a memory, a pose, a slice of sincere irony or ironic seriousness.

Because it's easier than selling something both tangible and un-self-referential? This puts pressure on goods markets and art markets alike, pushing each to become less like themselves, more like one another, and both like 'identertainment.'

Capital itself was diagnosed as phantom value, so it should be no surprise that the incorporeal 'world' of attitudes, emotions, psychologies, and identities makes such a match in virtual heaven.

Cry Me A River

Ah, national news, in the Times' "AGE OF RICHES" section. The headline: "In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich." The real-genius lede:

Many members of the digital elite do not see themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because others have more.

Another Reason Self Parking Won't Do

Vegas, baby.

Cosmopolis

I would argue that whether you are a housewife from Orange County or a person of Mexican heritage living in Los Angeles, you know who David Beckham is. -- Alexi Lalas

I'm at once reminded of another British import capable of causing Anaheim chicks who were teens in the '80s and East L.A.'s most machismo to get all hot and bothered: Steven Patrick Morrissey.

UPDATE: Moz's still got Becks beat in this dept., I think.