i don’t watch as much TV as i used to, and what TV i do watch is largely restricted to televised sports. i have adblock on my firefox, so i have to rely on my friends to share the bounty of weird/inexplicable/potentially evil paid web advertisements with me. rest assured that i am not on some Adbusters shit. if someone pays money to get up in the places where people’s eyes and attention fall, well, that’s their prerogative. all i can do in response is to expend my own money/time on being careful about where my eyes and attention ego-trip. this is less out of a desire to smash capital than it is to not experience undue stress. it’s not really any different than my decision to not watch DVRed episodes of E’erbody Loves Raymond.
the one kind of advertising i consistently pay a lot of attention to is MTA subway display ads.
pretty bland self-empowerment ad about the transcendence of both NYC as place and running a marathon as upmarket-sexy-asceticism. they had these ads last year for the marathon and they had the same formula — aping a propaganda poster in style and containing messages about how clean-cut people should occasionally, in a managed environment, sweat on themselves above and beyond their established norms (getting ripped for business-casual hugging at Equinox while multitasking, identifying potential hugmates snagging an oatmeal and latte).
but this is a new wrinkle: you might notice the marathon takes you through the bronx. i realize they mean “say goodbye to your ego in re your jogging prowess or something” but it’s funny that the death of ego is associated with the economically mangled, mostly non-white borough. welcome to the bronx: where crackheads and zombies live. it’s like heart of darkness but with a cardio workout built in. also please note that white man is looking over his shoulder in terror and appears to be running *away* from the bronx. also the dude behind him in the ‘marathon’ is non-white.
i’m just saying.
so i had two ideas in the shower, both for irritatingly niche-stupid works of personal expression:
1) this is more of a recurring theme. 21st century americanization of dead souls. still can’t decide what chichikov’s scam would be, and i don’t want it to have anything to do with ARMs …
wait, never mind i figured it out. SECRETS. now to tinker with this thing so that it’s not irritatingly obama-voting. ƒ BLACK REAGAN NUHZZ
2) re-writing the new testament, retaining the King James diction/translation except for the red letter words of JC, specifically the parables, which would be updated into like, David Simon-brand slightly befogged systems parables about a boys home/crumbling urbanity/failed civil bureaucracies. Also there would be dick jokes. or i would write the parables in Peyton Manning’s voice a la those DirecTV ads. Cuht that meat
COME NOW
trying to wring spiritual value out of hipsterdom is like trying to eat rocks: you might wind up learning something from the process that makes you a better person, but the price is too high. first, it hurts to eat rocks, second, your teeth would break and people would know you’d done something wrong when you smiled or talked. anyway, my point is, i’ve learned a few things from working in an affluent playground of the deracinated urban elite, and also (until recently) living in one of their subaltern super-secret ice-cream play zones. the main thing that i learned is that, i hate most people who are near me in terms of socioeconomics/class demography GPS. i hate them a lot. for a variety of blubbery, small-minded reasons, and a smaller sampling of really good reasons. this blog is a collection of notes about *the other* things that i’ve learned, a knot of things that’s sealed the tomb of my desire to differentiate myself from my fellow travelers by way of what i consume.
i wonder at the end whether my decision to not participate is just another tiny upmarket culture war, that by choosing to not pay attention to the cultural terrain as i pass through it i am in effect making the same choice i made when i reverse-reverse told people that Stone Temple Pilots have always been good, making that same kind of choice, just with different production values.
fashion is transient fuckery of the worst kind. vanitas and shit. ego et arcadia blarrgg.
i have to go. more later.
