Good signs

I was in the Interior last weekend, where there are always great home-made road signs. Two of my favorites:

NO SHOOTING CHILDREN ON ROAD

and

SLOW CHILDREN ON ROAD

Hipsters

Adbusters makes a great article about hipsters in this months issue
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

Hipster is one of those words which describes people who live in my neighbourhood. They share most of the following characteristics--

-- white, University/college educated or students
-- into cheap clothes, or expensive clothes that look cheap
-- irony matters lots, esp. ironic t-shirts
-- musical preferences all over map, though they like thrashy punk and it's weirdly cool to like bluegrass
-- facial hair, tight-ankled pants with room for turds in ass on men
-- fixie bikes, ridden without helmet, light, reflector etc
-- girls like tight trashy jeans/cords
-- it's cool to be bisexual and polygamous

No hipster will admit to being a hipster.

Anyway, Adbusters makes a great point-- the whole hipster thing is the dead end of Western civ in the sense that what we have here is a cultural movement with no point, only fashion. Hip-hop, punk, hippie stuff, the Beats etc all had political agendas as well as the music, clothes etc to go with them. Obviously most were co-opted yadda yadda but they did have points to make, many of them sensible, and many had strong political effects. Hipsterism does not; it's fashion only.

Adbusters doesn't take it ay further, so I will. My qyestion...WHY has hipsterism emerged? Why an aesthetic movement with no politics?

Answer...starts with race. Hipsters are white, educated and generally privileged. Now, follow me through this seeming detour, please. Generally speaking, in Europe, Australia, and North America, rich white people run the show. At the same time, white culture has a tradition of "rebellion" as part of the process of individuation. Most white people, unlike, say, Indians or Chinese or black folks (allow me to generalise, please), feel the need to separate themselves from their parents either in real terms or symbolically as part of the process of becoming an adult. Of course, most of us white people eventually become versions of our parents, but still we go through the motions. This is something that started with the Romantic poets and writers in Europe around the end of the 18th century. Difference was, the Romantics (most of them) actually lived their ideals. Shelley and Byron died doing political stuff, Keats got tuberculosis, and even Wordsworth spent time in revolutionary France before ebcoming old and imbecilic.

So, you have a paradox: white folks need to rebel to become themselves (at least symbolically); white culture at the same time owns and runs the show, and nobody in their right mind is ever going to give uptheir social privileges, money, connections, knowledge etc. So...what to do? How do you stay part of the dominant system AND rebel at the same time?

White culture in North America and Europe since WW2 has managed to link this process of symbolic individuation with the counterculture (in mass-marketed echoes of what rich white male Romantic poets did in the late 1700s, and what the Lost Generation did in Paris in the 1920s). You have to rebel, so might as well add some politics to the mix, add some fashion, take some drugs, yadda yadda, and presto! you have a countercultural movement.

So now, back to my answer...hipsterism is basically the realisation of young white people that the order of things is not going to change because of anything they do, or want to do, so, fuck it, let's just do our own thing.

The overwhelming fact of white culture-- that rich, white people run the world for (largely) their benefit, with a few bones tossed to the dogs circling the table-- has not changed, ever. What, after all, do white people really have to rebel against? They own and control most of the world. True, they have shared the basics with others-- you can't really be openly anti-gay, sexist or racist anymore in most of the white world. The injustice that remains is economic. 40% of the world's wealth is controlled by 1% of its population (most of these white). In the U.S., 80% of the wealth is controlled by 5% of the population, a statistic that once applied to Guatemala. So, if you want to rebel, you have to rebel economically...and that means biting the hand that feeds you.

Dear reader-- would you give up one-half of your income to make the world a fairer place? I thought not.

Anyway, if you have to rebel, but don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, it seems logical to leave your rebellion on a purely aesthetic level. So have at, hipsters-- Drink. Fuck. Look cool. Live on Facebook. Wallow in irony-- it allows you to stay disengaged. Wear those gross clothes-- you can pretend for awhile that you won't be a part of The Machine. Pretend, with your fixie bikes that thumb their noses at the fat yuppies on their carbon-fiber road bikes, that you're simplifying your life, or, like, whatever.

But please, under no circumstances, should you engage in political work, vote for a candidate who wants to tax you and your trust fund and your parents more, ride a bicycle with gears (cos that's what yuppie cunts like me do) or believe in anything. Cos, like, whatever.

The Environment Sucks

I hate the environment.

Sure, I like gardens, and hiking in mountains whose trails aren't full of garbage, and I like drinking water which doesn't have benzene in it. But really, these are just personal things. More fundamentally, I hate the environment, and I hate it as much as I LOVE my standard of living.

I like my car, my new clothes, my vacations to South America, my endlessly-replaceable climbing gear, and my expensive instruments. For me to buy these things, I need money. Money gets things done. It's basically energy, if you think about it for a minute. If money is going to work, it has to be tradeable for something real, be that an octave mandolin or a nice suburban house, since both of these things need materials, knowledge and energy, focussed by craftsmen, in order to be built. So to make money worth anything, it has to ultimately reflect the capacity of human beings to transform things into other things (oil into flights, trees into instruments).

Oil, coal and natural gas provide 85% of the energy in the world on average, and so basically my lifestyle demands heavy use of these fossil fuels. I would HATE to have fewer things (or mental things, like the ability to play music, or talk in complex ways about, say, cinema), cos that would lower my social status relative to others. I COULD be nicer to the environment by being poorer (earning less money). But then I would have lower social status and we can't have that.

So what I do is this. I PRETEND publicly to like the environment. (I recycle. I drive a cheap-on-gas car. I cut down on my meat eating. I don't litter in parks. I buy organic free-range lesbian Tibetan shade-grown gay-positive inclusive coffee. Etc). This is good because it helps me feel good about myself and it gets me friends. Mostly though I am pretty psyched that resource extraction and processing happens in shithole Third-World countries, cos that way THEY can have polluted areas and children with three arms, while Vancouver remains pleasant and eco-conscious!

A very good deal. Fuck the environment.

Lost: the Lost Children of Empire

If you havn't seen to the end of Lost Season 4 stop reading now-- SPOILERS.

Lost will enter its 5th season this year and probably end in 2009. For those who havn't watched, it is a stupidly entertaining story of the survivors of an airline crash, who end up on a South Pacific island which appears to come equipped with polar bears, spirits and other weirdnesses, as well as with a Surivor-style rival tribe. Weirder even than the island are the off-island narratives that the multiple-plot-line series shows us: basically all of the characters on the island know or have met each other indirectly through a vast web of coincidences, etc, before they end up on the island.

Anyway, the thread running through both the island plots and the off-island plots is that of authority and the absent father. Every character is missing a Dad. Jack's is drunk and then dead, Sawyer's was killed when he was young, and Kate has never had a father (and has alienated her mother by killing her father-in-law). Locke-- the island's father figure whose name hints at the role he should be playing-- was abandoned young and one of the sub-plots involves a con man who preys on his adult insecurities about his lost father. Walt literally loses his father, and Benjamin (of the Others) is brought by his Dad to the Island and then abandoned.

Missing from the Island are not only Dads, but political authority in general. Within the first two episodes of Season One, the newly stranded are torturing each other. At the end of Season Three, the survivors have split into two groups. Authority seems to fall to Jack, but he makes enough mistakes and foolish self-indulgences that the tribe remains divided. Even the Others were (and remain) divided under the enigmatic Benjamin's leadership.

And, crucially, there are numerous references to Star Wars in the story (e.g. the Korean and the Black characters communicate, as do Han Solo and Chewbacca, despite not knowing each others' language...look online for many exhaustive catalogues of these connections). The show's creators have also admitted lifelong passion for Star Wars and have pointed out a # of the show's references. So...absent Dads, absent political authority, Star Wars references...how does this all tie together?

Well, first of all, Star Wars, whose first three episodes came out 1977-1983, was the second of the mega-blockbusters that Hollywood produced (the first were the Godfather series). Both take on the theme of the son's return, post-adolescence, to the adult world, and both examine the compromises that youth make as it enters the world of responsibilities, sin and decision-making. In the Godfather films, Pacino's Michael Corleone character is of course corrupted by the Old World's tentacles, his own greed and fallibility, and of course by his devotion to "family," which by the Godfather 2's end takes on what Paul Coates calls a nearly Shakespearian resonance. In Star Wars, Luke has to grow up (and find out all about Dad, while being guided by the Jedi substitute-Dads), while Han Solo has to face up to his financial, emotional and ethical responsiblities to Jabba the Hut, Leia and the Rebel cause.

Godfather 1 and 2 are ultimately about the failure of America to break free of its European historical baggage, and about the Baby Boomer generation's failure to develop meaningful autonomy from their parents. Mafia, sin and corruption are as New World (Eden) as they are Sicilian. Michael Corleone, the idealistic and decorated WWII vet tells fiance Kate that "that's my family, not me" when she brings up the delicate topic of his father's reputation for violence; Michael will of course become his father, and worse, and so the symbol of idealism and wholesomeness fails to break free of either father, Old World or the capitlaism-gone-amok that the Mfia "family" represents. Dad is absent-- the Godfather famously begins its complex story with the Don's assassination, and on his death, he lives on through his famous advice to Michael ("keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"). Who will Michael obey-- hsi conscience, his family loyalties, his duties to his father, or his greed?

Star Wars was offered as a palliative for the painful and ugly messages sent in the first two Godfathers. In Star Wars, the Rebels-- operating on a 1977 Apple-sized shoestring budget out of a garage on a tropical moon-- are 1960s American baby boomers, and they confront in the Empire and its Darth Vader (dark father)-led Death Star the corporate world they symbolically rejected in the '60s. But while the Godfather was ultimately hopelessly pessimistic about the possibility of you escaping from the power of capital, Father and corporate/Old World power, Star Wars made its money by being optimistic. In Star Wars, the Mad Dad is humanised, the outrageous evil lunatic fringe is controlled (Death Star blown up), the kids make peace with the parents, the Empire becomes responsible, the Ewoks and their eco-baggage are integrated into the scheme of things...you get it.

Star Wars' job was ultimately to tell the baby boomers-- who were by its 1977 release date having kids, getting real jobs, putting away the flower power signs and doing more coke than weed-- that yes, you can go and work for The Man, who will listen to you, and the world will be a better place. And, yes, Dad can be made to pay attention to you.

But back to LOST. Lost's absent Dads and Star Wars references re-frame it as way more than just endless narrative candy. The show is basically about the death of 1960s idealism and the ongoing political crisis in the United States. Since 2000, the U.S. has had two fraudulent elections. The president's approval ratings are so low that he cannot even campaign for his successor. The U.S. itself has now the largest debt it has ever had in history (by any definition), a total lack of respect on the world stage, it is devoid of resources, and it is even more profoundly morally bankrupt than it was in the 1980s. Perhaps the most representative comment came from Bush II, who after 9/11 told Americans to go patriotically shopping, as that would boost the economy. The larger American question now surfacing is, "what is the point of our existence and our leadership?" If Bush's suggestion that it be merely to consume, and to lead consumers, is it...Houston, we have a problem.

In LOST, we see the Others, gradually revealed to be the survivors of an idealistic early '70s project (Dharma Initiative) that was working on rebalancing cosmic energies (the work ont he equation), as having had their work hijacked by the evil corporate world. Meanwhile, the crash survivors-- a kind of mini-USA or mini U.N.-- cannot organise themselves, remain divided, and suffer from the losses of both real and symbolic (political) fathers. The plot revolves around control of the island's unusual natural wealth, and the Surivivors' job is clearly to form alliances with the Others and take a principled and organised stand against the depredations of their corporate "rescuers," just as it is increasingly clear that Americans need to...

-- get rid of ALL Bush II bills (Patriot I & II, the Military Tribunals Act, etc)
-- call an investigation into 2004 vote rigging in Ohio
-- call to task the various multinationals and banking cartels who by now control the majority of U.S. wealth
-- impeach Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Gates and above all Rumsefeld and charge them with treason, war crimes, etc
-- sign on to various international agreements (e.g. ICC) and play U.N. ball

Film Review: American Gangster

Parties should be gotten-to late; film genres you want to be among the first. It gets harder every time to do something we havn't seen, especially when the film is in genre mode. Genre contractually giveth and genre contractually taketh away: the filmmaker agrees to give us certain things and in return we promise to sit up and pay attention.

American gangster is the more-or-less true story of the rise and fall of Frank Lucas, a black heroin dealer who at one point was the biggest single supplier in the U.S. and who had most of the New York D.E.A. in his pocket. Figuring out who he is, and then chasing him, is detective Richie Roberts who also happens to be a law student. This is interesting material but director Ridley Scott manages to ruin it. How?

Well, expository dialogue, for one thing. You have character explaining EVERYTHING. Makes me feel like an idiot watching it. After the Sopranos and GoodFellas, the dialogue sounds hokey and scripted. The pretend-complex morality business is laid on thick: philandering Roberts lacks personal virtue but engages in public service; Lucas is a pragmatist and family man who murders and mutilates when necessary. The film takes a boring look at women: they are whiners (Roberts' estranged wife), social climbers and causers of downfall (Lucas' wife), or hookers, dope-baggers or mistresses. On one hand, the film tries to show us something of the characters' interior lives, but leaves the job oddly incomplete. GoodFellas avoided this altogether; the Sporanos (and the Godfathers) have the time to do this; A.G. does a half-assed job. The gangster film tropes-- casual violence, (seemingly) trivial arguments about fashion, whining women, hilarious period clothing, corrupt cops-- seem re-hashed.

Most interesting, and therefore least looked-at, is the question of C.I.A. and government complicity in drug running. Lucas was paing $100,000 per shipment to Air Force and Army guys to transport his heroin on military planes (and then in body bags) from Asia to the U.S. How did this happen for six years with nobody finding out? How did Lucas make hundreds of millions for years with no scrutiny? What about the echoes of this practice-- in '84, Ollie North was busted for basically sing the CIA to sell cocaine to buy guns from Iranians to sell to the Contras. Gary Webb wrote in detail about the CIA's role in protecting and helping businesses launder money. There are interesting suggestions-- one character speculates that the CIA and the DEA want Lucas to stay in business, because there are 100,000 jobs in the U.S. which depend on busting drug dealers-- which the film doesn't pursue.

The film raises many questions and then fails to answer them. The American experience with Prohibition (which created the modern Mafia, as well as the Kennedy dynasty) was an object lesson in how black markets make crime. Loads of modern studies have suggested that the way to deal with drugs is to legalise the "soft" ones (weed, psychedelics) and control them like alcohol or tobacco, and to provide support for addicts of "hard" drugs (coke, heroin). Yet drugs remain illegal and meaningful discussion remains off the table for all political parties, except for a few fringe candidates who argue for weed's legalisation. This begs the question of why?

The only answer I can think of is that the drug business is Big Business and that there is loads of money laundering going on which benefits big business and government. Drug money needs to be laundered; "legit" businesses can make big $$ by helping with laundering. Government employment remains high (all of those cops and jailers), and lawyers make big $$ defending people on drug charges. GOvernment looks "tough on crime" for voters. Addicts don't matter; let them die; they have "made poor choices." And above all, drugs-- used by loads of people, esp. weed-- become a tool for the government to push people around. There is loads of evidence that government and big business is deeply complicit in drug money laundering: see the work of Catherine Austin Fitts or Gary Webb. SO where is the film's look at these questions?

Why are Vancouver girls so hot?

(a) they only appear that way cos I'm not getting any right now

(b) another theory (warning, this is offensive)

oh and btw we will define "hot" as a mix of well-dressed, physically fit and of course the usual, high cheekbones, wide eyes, hip-to-waist ratio, etc, tho these are less important, as fitness and decent clothing choices can make up for not being a Norse or whatever goddess.

-- First up is girl competition. Women dress to compete with other women. Most of us guys could give a shit about how new your jeans are or how much your lipstick cost; indeed, most of us can't even tell when you did something to your hair or that you gained/lost ten pounds. So in Vancouver you have three big groups: whites, Indo-Canadians, and a mix of east Asians. Indo girls dress well, despite the Surrey stereotypes; Indo girls in University are a marvel. East Asian women dress well and-- crucially-- are slim. This means that white girls have to compete with the Asians on the slimness front, and with the Indians on the dress front. The Indians, at least until they are safely locked up in marriage (and because more and more of them are not having arranged marriages but are choosing (and being chosen by) their partners, and are no longer in a culural matrix that values fatness as a status sign in a hungry world), also compete with the Asian girls on the slimness front. So you end up with women who compete
with each other for body shape and dress.

This according to a friend's girlfriend stresses the ladies out, cos young women-- unlike in small towns, where the men outnumber them and so they can let themselves go-- are under pressure
to look good.

-- the beach and outside factor. Since there's a beach scene here in summer, and since you can easily exercise year round even in the rain-- running, hiking, skiing, climbing, all kinds of cycling, etc-- women are often in revealing sports clothes, and so they feel they have to look good. Yoga also plays a part here-- the hippie thing (and the fact that it's not really very difficult, and that it relieves stress, and it is (err I mean was, ill they started offering it in Surrey) "alternatve" and "holistic" and "non-Western," and it "gets you in touch with your body") means that women are really into yoga, and oh my God, anybody who has ever been to a yoga class knows that the only thing that demands more mental focus than the yoga itself is putting the yoga outfit together. BTW smart Vancouver men go to yoga classes. I mean, where else do you get to see hot women in tight clothes bent over mere inches from your face?

-- the Hollywood North factor. Loads of film work means hot people (you can't be in movies unless you are hot) so more eye candy for women to obsess about and compete with.

-- the dumping ground factor. Women are smarter than us men, do better in school, etc. so if you are a small-town chick, you are going to come down here for your education and a job that's not in resource industries or service.

-- the money factor. Money-- some of it corporate, some of it Asian, much of it illicit from weed, and there's lots of money here in Van.-- is generally controlled by men, and men buy, err I mean, have relationships with women whom many end up supporting in one way or another. (Ceteris paribus, women prefer men with money; among the upper-middle classes, it is a full-on status symbol for women NOT to work, and to have snagged a guy with enough $$ to support them as Lunch Mommies)). So women who don't work have lots of time for fashion, gym, whatnot; also, they have to stay in shape, cos their husbands/boyfriends have enough $$ to get other women and they need to keep hubby's eyes on them. Go to Kits and check out the yummy rich mommies one weekday morning as they buzz around a nice steaming pile of Starbucks.

Cold Vancouver

Vancouver is beautiful, clean, safe (unless you are poor, take drugs, and live in the downtown East Side)..and unfriendly. And Vancouverites are polite and decent folk, but not friendly. Your typical Vancouver guy is nebbish, cool and inwardly focussed, and we all know the Kits Girl stereotypes. "Why," ask Albertan, Newfie or Quebecois(e) transplants, "are poeple here so unfriendly?"

Well...list of theories.

a) The culture mix. Asians (the newcomers) and English (founders) are notoriously publicly cold.

b) The "bling" race. Because of the massive (south and east) Asian big-money safe-investment-haven status of Vancouver, the enormous drug economy, and immigrant cultures' custom of displaying wealth ostentatiously, the wealth signs are everywhere and in your face. If you don't have money (or real estate), for whatever reason, you feel lower on the totem pole. This is one of the reasons why clerks and servers in Vancouver coffee shops and stores are often such assholes-- status resentment. It also means that there is an endless itemising and comparing going on.

c) Big city and loads of newcomers, plus suburban sprawl, plus culture mix, means that you don't really have communities of people who live close to one another who actually interact with one another. So everybody is a stranger.

d) The history of resource economics. In BC, the big jobs have generally involved resources: mining, forestry, lumber, industry. In these industries, you don't need to be friends with you co-workers to survive. You need to form a union to extract decent wages etc from management.

Contrast this with the Prairie provinces, where most folk (other than the Natives we killed and stole from) originally came from farming/ranching stock. Farmers and ranchers depend on each other for business, support, social life, friendships and often matters of life and death, and so have a massive incentive to be friendly.

e) The weather. The endless winter rains bum people out.

f) Liquor laws. Vancouver (and BC) had Prohibition longer than other provinces, and Vancouver had well into the '80s some of the most repressive liquor distribution and licensing laws in Canada. This meant that neighbourhood pubs-- which, given Vancouver's incredible density, should be plentiful-- didn't develop. The biggest immigrant groups-- south and east Asians-- generally don't drink, and they organise social life around family, so again you have less of an incentive to build informal community ties.

g) Weed. There is so much pot smoking here that lots of people are regularly in the spaced-out zone where social interactions are for them a hassle. The weed growing also means that people cannot talk about a big part of their lives, for fear of either the law or the gangs what prey on home growers. And when your income is illicit, you withdraw from normal social interaction to some extent, because you don't go to a job.

h) Extreme sports and the outdoors. A Maritime acquaintance pointed out to me that lots of young people don't build community around people who live or work near them, but rather around activities. This is great in one sense-- you hang out with your climbing buddies, or your mountainbiking or skiing partners-- but in another it takes you away from the city and from interactions with those who are different. She told me that she noticed a kind of "fuck this, I'm going ___________ing this weekend" attitude toward stress. She contrasted this with rural Nova Scotia (and even Halifax) where people's historical limited ability to move around (esp. in winter), poverty and local connections (through fishing and farming) meant that community was built around local people interacting.

i) The Hollywood factor. Because of the film industry, the physical activity and summer beach scene and the general trend among Asian immigrants to display social status with lots of shopping and self-adornment (plus the fact that East Asians tend to be slim), white women have to compete with east Asian girls (skinny, well dressed) and south Asians (well put together). This makes for stress for women. And also for guys: you get really aware in Vancouver how you look compared to the fashionistas who are everywhere. So there is this endless subtle game of self-evaluation and one-upmanship going on.

Ok, your ideas?

Star Wars

This is more or less from Derrick Jensen.

OK. So not many people know that Star Wars was originally written by a bunch of eco-freak hippies as an anti-corporate story: the brave Rebels in tune with the Force of the Universe take on the evil Empire whose powerful symbol is the Death Star, a kind of flying factory/army base. Hollywood of course got ahold of it and changed it. In the Hollywood ending, the Rebels battle the Empire and blow up the Death Star. Now, the readership gets to decide which is more realistic, the Star Wars we all know, or this one.

...a long time ago, in a film studio far, far away...in the ORIGINAL Star Wars...

-- the Rebels have a long debate about the use of violence. They eventually decide that "the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house," so they renounce the use of violence.

-- deciding that they must "be the change we want to see in others," the Rebels refuse to use petrochemical-based fighter fuel and switch to an organic ethanol blend. It is eventually pointed out to them that it actually takes more petrochemicals to make ethanol fuel than to make normal fuel, since the ethanol-producing crops require lots of fertiliser, and this fertiliser is made from...petrochemicals! The Empire is all too happy with this Rebel decision, since its corporations can now sell the Rebels even more petrochemicals.

-- facing the onslaught of the Death Star at the film's climax, the Rebels, rather than sending out fighters to destroy the Death Star, decide to beam loving kindness to it to make its occupants surrender their egos and transcend their material selves and merge into the universal Atman (oversoul).

-- When about to crossing the Death Star's ventialtion duct chasm on a wire device while being pursued by Stormtroopers, Princess Leia decides that, since kisses are an expression of the patriarchy's conditioning of women, she won't give Luke the inspirational kiss. She instead makes a Goddess offering and levitates across the chasm to show Luke the power of female intuition.

-- Han Solo is confronted over his excessive debts to Jabba the Hut. But instead of shooting the Hut's bag-man, Solo invites him to share a healthy vegetarian meal and discuss their differences.

-- the citizens of Alderaan, about to be annihilated by the Death Star, gather in public places on the panet's surface and sing "We Shall Overcome" together. This deflects the Death Ray and Alderaan survives.

-- the Empire's soldiers are named not Stormtroopers but Breezedrifters.

-- The Empire is not at war with the Rebels. Rather, it is "seeking dialogue about trade and tariff issues" and "promoting justice and freedom from terrorism."

-- Empire citizens and soldiers regularly go on ecotours of Rebel planets and buy organic Rebel coffee from Rebel co-operatives.


-- Darth Vader, needing information from Princess Leia asbout the missing 'droids, rejects torture, and instead goes through a Native peyote ceremony with her, during which they realise the underlying unity of cosmic reality.