No. 355 - It's Square to be Hip

Are you drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon with your ill-earned trust fund money, a flannel shirt tied around your waist, blabbing about your latest philanthropic cause and your vegan lifestyle astride a fixed-gear bicycle, or perhaps a scooter? Are you wearing an ironic trucker hat and an American Apparel long sleeved shirt? Do you look down your nose at anything anyone else likes, but secretly covet it?

Does your second-hand-esque wardrobe clash with your $100 haircut that gives you a permanent disheveled bedhead? In your strenuous attemps to look "thrown together" and act like you don't give a damn, do you actually take heavy stock in what people think about you?

Yes to all the above, you say? Well then, you, friend, are a hipster douchebag. That's correct: it's a scientific fact and a well researched topic, from the mouths of culture's greatest thinkers; they say hipsters, who don't really have an identity, are destroying our very idea of a counter culture. It's a manufactured, prefabricated personality, as insincere as it is strangely appealing.

Hipsters have strangled some of the finer things in our society and mashed them into a two-dimensional self-caricature, cannibalizing bits and pieces from longstanding counter cultures into one disingenuous identity that makes hipsters more like uniformed drones than intellectual outsiders who have the "in" on every cool style, movie or band.

In fact, if you happen to be a hipster, you are most definitely too cool to be reading this. Your coolness meter is so in the red that even if you do think something is cool, you'll go to your grave never admitting it.

One exception we'll make in our skewering of hipsters is Wes Anderson, whom, we feel is more pre-hipster. In fact, hipsters likely attached themselves to this master of cinema regardless of how he felt about the assimilation. Wes Anderson is genuine, swept up in the hipster movement in the same manner that Kurt Cobain shunned the grunge moniker. Same goes for indy rock. And PETA. And Greenpeace. And scarves.

We must be rid of hipsters at once; inaction is tantamount to guilt for being a part of hipsterism's growing influence. Hipsters are infesting our best restaurants and nightclubs, even overruning Salvation Armys across this great land. They're ruining literature and art, blurring the lines between brilliance and crap, kitschy and just plain dumb. They're yuppies in vintage clothing.

We shall not be overcome by this societal scourge. We are burning our horn-rimmed glasses in effigy. And then we'll burn all of our Decemberists albums and cook a big steak over the fire.

No. 65 - Advertising Rage

Ads Hole

There's a giant eye in the sky, sinister and all-knowing, watching every one of us -- kind of like Sauron's eye in "Lord of the Rings," but not nearly as kick-ass (and a lot less friendly). This omniscient being sees what you do in your most private of moments, and yes, even watches you when you do that...thing that you do with the shampoo bottle and the cocoa butter. You know.

This eye is searching for something intangible, something no one can pinpoint. It's looking for coolness, and how to sell this coolness to you with lots of plastic and twistie ties and limited warranties.

There may not be a literal eye watching you at all times (notwithstanding those PCP users reading this right now), but we are being watched and communicated with via the thousands of messages that lurk everywhere we look. Execs in starched shirts and khakis are plotting our psychological futures, what we will think we need tomorrow, or in ten years.

What we see in ads are beautiful people having fun, more bliss than we'll ever imagine, the equivalent to approximately two million drunk circus clowns. Wow, does holding a candy bar really make someone that happy? We want in on that action. Is it possible that buying anything will make me this cool?

And then you think, if I open this bottle of beer, will a party spontaneously erupt in my tiny hole of an apartment with strobe lights and hundreds of people? If I buy this car, will hot models throw their panties at me while I'm driving by?

Messages are at every turn, swatches of rural highways lit up and animated like Times Square. We have enough personal distractions to begin with, yet we're bombarded with these messages every single day.

Even a trip to the most rural areas of this expansive nation are not exempt from advertising's evil grip. Just the other day, we were in the deep woods of Minnesota and witnessed a deer carrying a giant sign for Crazy Fanny's Furniture Factory, and nearby, a raccoon ran by with a Nike symbol shaved into its side. Shame.

Let's digress and be realistic: we would not turn down advertising of any sort, because we could abandon our desk jobs if advertising were generous enough. The point is, those creating advertising are not bad. It's the repercussions, the smiley mascots that take on lives of their own -- the babies who recognize McDonald's and Walt Disney characters before they even utter a word.

Bless the advertising gurus, some of whom are brilliant and funny, but damn them on the other hand for studying us and waging war on our psyches. But like Patton, we fight back. We record our television, only to skip the commericals, and what do they do? Infiltrate the shows themselves. Case in point: "The Office," a brilliant program, but also a blatant shill for HP and Cisco, among other products. But we tolerate this because the show is that good.

We would let advertisers tattoo messages inside of our eyelids if that's what it took to watch our favorite television shows or movies. Yes, this particular entry is inspired by Adbusters (http://www.adbusters.org/) for whom we thank graciously for opening our eyes to many new ideas and for introducing us to Culture Jamming.