Explosions in one's pants.

Really, we are going to start forcing people of certain nationalities into mandatory pat-downs and searches? Why don't we just make them wear a patch on their jackets so we can identify the jihadists from the rest of civilized society? Then we could just farm them into camps where we can educate them on all the best ways to be westernized and believe in Jesus and teach them our more enlightened ways! It is our burden after all. Because anyone with a burka, a Qur'an and a passport from Pakistan must be a terrorist. Just like anyone from the US or EU must be an imperialistic, racist capitalist.

Not to mention the fact that we are really worried about people blowing up our planes with underwear bombs? Really? I mean, I've heard about explosions in one's pants before, especially ones that most conservatives get all up in arms about, but this is ridiculous. If the highest terrorist threat I have to worry about on a plane is someone trying to light a bomb in their underwear, while people are looking on, I think I'll take my chances without having to indict 14 other nations on assumed terrorism. It's amazing to me that we always want such understanding from those nations on why we are such decent peoples, and yet we do nothing but invade their countries and treat them like heathens.

Above all of this, the fact remains that when we all need to stop living in fear. Do threats exist?, of course. But our constant privileged paranoia is not making us any safer, it's only making us bigger targets due to our ignorance.

Bolded emphasis below is mine.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=F5BC265E-18FE-70B2-A86A363EFDB4A591 U.S. tightens international air security By: Mike Allen January 3, 2010 02:50 PM EST

All travelers flying into the U.S. from foreign countries will receive tightened random screening, and 100 percent of passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries will be patted down and have their carry-ons searched, the Obama administration was notifying airlines on Sunday. The more stringent Transportation Security Administration rules, to take effect at midnight, follow the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner headed into Detroit from Amsterdam. “These are changes that weren’t widely in place for all carriers or countries on 12/24,” a senior administration official told POLITICO. “These are sustainable measures that are a significant enhancement of our security posture. TSA will continuously review these measures with our global aviation partners to ensure the highest levels of security." All passengers from countries on the State Department’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list – plus all passengers from other "countries of interest" such as Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen — will receive “full body pat-down and physical inspection of property,” the official said. The countries on the State Department list are Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria. Other countries covered by the TSA directive include Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia. A complete list was not released. A much higher percentage of all travelers from all foreign countries will receive such screening than is currently the case, the official said. "The screening “could also include explosive detection technology or advanced imaging technology where it’s available,” the official said. Kristin Lee of the TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, announced: "Today the Transportation Security Administration issued new security directives to all United States and international air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010. The new directive includes long-term, sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners.” In other words, there will be a new normal for international travel into the U.S. The “enhanced security measures” apply to “all international flights to U.S. locations, including both U.S. and international carriers,” the official said. “All international passengers will be screened and the majority of passengers will be screened using threat-based or random measures, the official said. “ These are designed to be sustainable measures that are a significant increase in our security posture. The measures apply to all “passengers with passports from or itineraries through State Sponsors of Terrorism and ‘countries of interest.’” “This goes beyond simply looking at passports and now looks at itineraries from and through countries of interest,” the official said. “This is a significant step forward.” Lee said in her statement: “Because effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders, and as a result of extraordinary cooperation from our global aviation partners, TSA is mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are State sponsors of terrorism or countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights."

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

Death to Hipsters: a)! or b)?

OK. I'll give you that this article is a bit cynical - which I think is a hypocrisy within itself when compared to the huge cynicism that hipsters carry around with them. However. Though I can't determine if the use of hypocrisy is a style used to unite two ideologies or if the author just doens't recognize their own cynicism, the piont about the use of counter-culture to then further divide people is so true and so damaging. True revolutionary ideas do not involve bitching about corporate music while sipping lattes, it involves true acceptance and understanding of why the things that we are against exist while having compassion for those who follow them - while we try to make a change. The bolding below is my added emphasis.

Why the hipster must die

http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/features/4840/why-the-hipster-must-die

A modest proposal to save New York cool

By Christian Lorentzen

Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it die the day Wes Anderson proved too precious for his own good, or was it when Chloë Sevigny fellated Vincent Gallo onscreen? Did it vanish along with Kokie’s, International Bar and Tonic? Or when McSweeney’s moved shop to San Francisco and Bright Eyes signed a lease on the Lower East Side? Was it possible to be a hipster once a band that played Northsix one night was heard the next day on NPR’s Weekend Edition? Did it hurt to have American Apparel marketing soft-porn style to young bankers? Was something lost the day Ecstasy made the cover of the Times Magazine? Or was it the day Bloomberg banned smoking in bars? And how many times an hour could one check e-mail and still have an honest, or even ironic, claim on being cool?

Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.

It was in the real-estate section of one of the city’s lesser dailies, under the headline luxury seems to be set for the lower east side, that I found an astonishing remark attributed to Michael Desjadon, the director of sales at Massey Knakal: “The profile of the typical renter in the area is changing from the ‘counterculture hipster’ to the ‘more mainstream’ hipster and young professional.”

“I wish I’d thought of this phrase, but we call the Lower East Side ‘the last real neighborhood in New York,’” Desjadon, an amiable fellow and a patron of LES bars, told me when I called him up. “The mainstream hipster,” he explained, “is not an artist or a musician. He has an office job, and wears one hat to work and another at night.” Presumably, the latter is a trucker—or a porkpie—hat.

The mouth of a real-estate agent is rarely the source of truth, but Mr. Desjadon knows his territory (and is no doubt cashing in on this knowledge). He has unwittingly explicated the transformation of the hipster into the “indie yuppie,” an avatar we might imagine as the fusion of Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik. The indie yuppie is (literally) the child of the bobo, and just as his father the baby boomer did, he has learned to simulate rebellion while procuring and furnishing a comfortable two-bedroom. His haircut may be asymmetrical, but his dog never misses a walk. And around the corner, sleeping on couches, neophyte slackers dream until they wake up late for their temp jobs. The savvy among them soon grasp that they’ve arrived at the party too late.

Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.

Of course, hipsterism being originally, and still mostly, the province of whites (the pastiest of whites), its acolytes raid the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity in the pot. Similarly, they devour gay style: Witness the cultural burp known as metrosexuality. As the hipster ambles from the thrift store to a $100 haircut at Freemans Sporting Club, these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod.

All isms seek dominance of human affairs, and in this, hipsterism in New York City has proved more virulent than any of its forebears. (Punk, after all, never really broke—except in the form of hipsterism.) At last there was nothing left for hipsters to do but to convert the squares, take them to the bar and let them pick up the tab. Secrets were shared. The hipster hooked up with the common consumer; he woke up a zombie.

How can this be undone? I propose that the only hope for a reanimated bohemia, if not a dezombified hipsterdom, is civil war.

Hipsters in their present undead incarnation are essentially people who think of themselves as being cooler than America. But they are afflicted by that other ism sociologists made an industry of decrying in the 20th century: narcissism. The late prophet of our current moment, George W. S. Trow, posited that television had obliterated the context of American life. The only refuges remaining were TV, God and the self. Young people who live in cities notoriously shun God and television to cultivate themselves. Now, as the age of MySpace comes due for a backlash and the former teen idols of our crypto-ironic fascination start to show their age, the time has come for the hipsters in the garden of Union Pool to open their eyes, realize that they are surrounded by jackasses and milquetoasts, and stage their own dive-bar putsch.

The fault lines are clear enough already. We know that there are Sweet hipsters, who practice the sort of irony you can take home to meet the parents, and there are those Vicious hipsters, who practice the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark.

On the Sweet end of the spectrum, The Believer lavishes its literary and pop-culture idols with a uniform layer of affection that renders it near impossible to distinguish the great from the mediocre. This aesthetic of relativism grants everybody an A for effort and allows anyone projecting the image of an artist to conceive of himself as such. It proliferates as a social plague among hipsters who invite their entire address book to readings, shows and art openings. The e-mails arrive, and though it is known in advance that the art will be nothing much,the trek is made. The avant-garde illusion ultimately sustains itself on free beer.

As the war claims its casualties, the Sweet may discover that behind their aesthetic relativism is an impulse more political than cultural: They are rightfully activists. Their cause has emerged in the form of global warming, and I would not be surprised if the color of cool in their future is green. Along the way they might rediscover a concept hipsters have lately had little use for: love.

Meanwhile, among those who adopt the Vicious pose, a lighthearted scorn perfected by Gawkeris roundly applied to the objects of pop celebrity, both talented and (mostly) otherwise. The effect is akin to dipping sushi in wasabi sauce: The flavor is a little less bland, but it’s still mostly rice. The hipster who keeps up with the antics of Hilton, Lohan and Spears does so sneeringly, and her knowingness introduces one degree of difference between herself and the Midwestern housewife who buysUs Weekly at the Wal-Mart checkout line.

When I asked Gawker managing editor Choire Sicha whether it was possible to ignore talentless celebrities, he responded with the remorse of a custodian of cultural decline: “Everyone can, and should, be ignored. We were warned about this situation we find ourselves in by philosophers, and well before it happened. It’s just too bad we weren’t warned by celebrities, or we would have listened to them.”

So the Sweet will turn on the Vicious, and the Vicious will shun the Sweet. The sniping in the blogosphere will escalate, and turf wars will ensue. Power will be consolidated in the frontiers of the outer boroughs as the Vicious tighten their grip on Bushwick and the Sweet flee south to Kensington and Windsor Terrace, or give up and move to Queens (better yet, to their rightful home: the West Coast).

If they can vanquish the Sweet, the path for the Vicious is less obvious. A good first step might entail purging the lawyers and bankers lurking in their company. But on the other hand, those guys are good at footing the bill. Another tactic would require the conversion of snark to self-criticism, and that would necessarily involve ignoring no-talent celebrities, and mean an end to playing it safe. The safest game in town—in fashion and music especially—is retro, and if there is no Ezra Pound in corduroys out there to say, “Make it new,” let me be the one to say, “Stop making it old.”

What distinguishes the zombie hipsters at large today from the “white Negroes” Norman Mailer described in the 1950s is a lack of menace. The original hipster—Mailer had in mind James Dean and the Neal Cassady who inspired On the Road—was a “philosophical psychopath” who might steal your car and drive it to Mexico. The myth of menace survives in the pages of Vice,but the magazine’s signature feature—the “Do’s and Don’t’s”—suggests a safe path to transgression, a notion as oxymoronic as the “mainstream hipster.” Mailer, who traced hipster psychosis to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, would likely point to September 11 as the event that left hordes of twentysomethings whispering, “We would be safe,” to quote the Sweet hipster novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. Menace is now lost on anyone older than 20. It is left to those born after 1990 to move to town, frighten the zombies away, destabilize the real-estate market and restore something unsavory to what used to be called hip.

***Be Sure to check out the link to the actual article for some more interesting discussion and other links to rebuttals. Also, check out Ad Busters recent essay on the same topic, "Hipster: The Dead End of Western CIvilization." -JRR

Details Magazine: "douchefag"?

Yo Details-

Next time you want to hit the gays over the head with all they do wrong (i.e. "Rise of the Douchefag", Dec. 2009, pgs. 78-80), you may want to make sure that in the previous month's issue, you didn't have a gay dude make out with a straight girl. You know, kinda revokes your credibility a bit. (See Adam Lambert).

Despite the fact that what you were getting at was kinda true, unless you're gonna have the balls to call out every other minority on all their shit, I would appreciate it if you left the judgement of all us "fags" to other publications that wholly identify with us rather than just display fashion and then ridicule it's readers. I mean really, how many straight men do you honestly think read Details?

Last I checked, you "straight" guys had plenty of your own issues to wrestle with, why don't you concentrate on those for a bit longer.

Thanks in advance,

J

Out Magazine strikes again . . .

Dear Out,

Can you please stop copying my ideas? (Or at least pay me oodles of money to use them?) K, thanx!

J

Note to self: Apparently I need to be more specific when asking the universe to broadcast my ideas . . . to, you know, at least make sure that I'm the one doing the broadcasting. Damn you common consciousness!

Click here (or scroll down) for MY letter to Mr. Lambert, written Oct. 22, 2009.

A Letter to Adam Lambert

Dear Adam,

Hi! How are you? I hope you've been well. I know that things must be crazy for you now, you know, after the whole American Idol insanity. Honestly, though I think that your voice is an acquired taste to a certain extent, I was very happy to see someone make it so far in Idol who was so obviously a homosexual. I mean, sure, we've had our suspicions about a few in the past (hello Mr. Aiken - need you really take, like, 5 years to come out?), but once the gay rumors started, you didn't deny them. Sure, you also didn't kick down your closet door, strap on some rollar blades and ass-less chaps and start cruising South Beach, but still. All in time, my good man.

Actually, it is because of your semi-recent acceptance of your sexuality in the public light that I am writing to you. As I briefly stated before, I think it is a great thing you are doing, by just saying you are gay. (although I did hear at one point you were "bi"? Bi now gay later? Oh you crazy kids and your denial . . .) I think that in this celebrity obsessed culture of ours, when those of us who are out can use our gay powers and hunt down others like us (mostly we just follow the smell of poppers), and we can look at movies, television and rap music and pick out those of us whom feel up women's asses in public but we just know that when they go home at night they are on Manhunt more than they are on top of said ladies (in much contradiction to what they would have us believe), this obviously leaves a huge gap for finding identity and familiarity within today's gay youth. Granted, the fact that we find our identity through celebrity culture is a problem within itself. However, we as a community strive to find role models, whether they want to be labeled as so or not. Because we have had to deal with such erasure from within our own community, it makes those who are determined to be themselves even more admirable.

Which gets me (again) to why I am writing you. And let me say right off the bat that I am down for all sorts of sexual exploration. We should be living in a time (despite the past 8 years) where we should be allowed to explore who we are without being told that certain things or certain acts demonize us, when for the most part, they are simple explorations that humans (and most higher intelligence organisms) do on their way to maturity. If we want to be poly-sexual, then have at it. Forget the puritans, forget the conservatives- go do what makes you happy.

However.

There is a big difference between going out and doing what makes you happy and then putting that in a magazine, and THEN going even further to having a photo shoot in which a certain slightly gender-ambiguous pop star is photographed having his way with a naked woman in a "straight" men's magazine. Yes, I realize that the jury is still out on how many straight men actually read Details, but the magazine is still regarded as such. I say this mostly because they have articles about how to bed women and they then talk about homosexuals like we should be those distant friends with whom you associate with out of obligation to the advancement of society rather than because one really wants to. You know, the whole masculinity issue and all. And that isn't a rant on straight guys. I know plenty of straight guys who have very dear gay friends. And while I won't make the same stereotype that persists among gay men who are very close, I will say that stereotypes exist for a reason.

However, I digress. So- finally, the LGBT community has an icon that we can look up to- who isn't a singing-straight-female, who isn't an ally, but who is young and hip, and frankly, quite beautiful, handsome and sexy. Then we have him make out with a chick in a men's fashion magazine. I mean, and it would be totally (well maybe not TOTALLY) different, if it was in, say, Out or The Advocate or some gritty porn magazine or whatever. Because then, it would be more of a comment on sexuality as a whole then it would be a comment on the fact that it looks like your publicist told you not to act too gay anymore.

And Adam, I must say, this is slightly disappointing. I give you much kudos for being yourself and trying not to hide who you are. But whether you like it or not, since you are in the spotlight, you owe us as a community. I mean please, how many horny 14 year old boys called up Idol while wearing their mother's eyeliner to vote for the boy who looked and talked like them? How many goth kids did the same? We voted you into Details. At the very least, you could give us some more eye candy and get it on with a naked dude instead of some model. I mean, how revolutionary would that be?! The most you could do? Be true to yourself and to your community, and continue to leave a legacy in which you will be remembered for not allowing your image to be manipulated by the same media that has tried to sweep our image under the rug for so long.

I expect good things from you Mr. Lambert. Please, no more disappointments.

Much love and respect,

Justin

Click here for the rest of the pictures from the Details photo shoot.

"The Newest New Media"

As I have been going through old(er) issues of art magazines that I seem to hoard like a hamster with too many grapes in its' cheeks, it is interesting to view articles, even from only the past couple years, and see how perspectives have changed. Change, of course, is inevitable. The factors of everyday life weigh down upon the "Art World" whether they like it or not, and the greatest factor in recent days has been the recession. As per one of my classes this semester, I went through some old issues and found an issue of Art News from February 2008, the title piece shouting "The Newest New Media" over an avatar from artists Eva and Franco Mattes. Being a new media artist myself, I am often in an awkward position with the medium. On one hand I find it to be incredibly freeing - there are possibilities with New Media that older artists simply couldn't fathom. However, I also often feel like some New Media artists are sometimes quick to disregard Art History - there is somewhat of a disconnect I see between a "canonical" view of art making versus a "low art" view - that somehow because artists are free from the constraints of the physicality of traditional art-making, that this then allows them to be free from the Art World in general. In my view, this does not always make for good art, regardless of a high or low view upon it.

For example, the Art News article starts with Eva and Franco Mattes's pieces entitled Synthetic Performances, in which the duo create avatars of themselves and re-perform (in)famous art performances from throughout the past few decades, in the online world of Second Life. The main question I have with this is why? It's all been done before? Granted, yes, performing the pieces within this "synthetic" environment is new, but I am very hesitant to give an environment like Second Life any validity. It is also unclear as to whether or not the artists want to do the same.

I will also be the first to admit that my main problem with this piece stems from the fact that I do not view Second Life as any kind of life at all. There has to be lines drawn between what is real and what is not, regardless as to how much that aesthetic plays into how one wants their life to be. Going further, it is because of this disconnect that some have with actual reality that leads what is the "real world" into many of the problems we have today - it is because of the fact that people cannot relate to each other that we have conflict; it is because of the fact that people cannot, to put it bluntly and tritely, deal with the happenings of this real world that they then try to seek solace in one in which they create themselves. But my question is what makes this world immune from the same diseases that plague the one we are in? What happens then, we create Third Life? Where is the line drawn?

Besides the fact that creating other realms of reality is some serious psychological shit. If one did that in "real" life and chose to live in it, one would question one's mental health. Does that mean we need to redefine "reality" according to what one person thinks it should be? But I digress . . .

However, adding on to this illusion of what is real and what is not is the simple look of Eva and Frano's avatars. The artists themselves are quite normal looking, especially for artists. They are both somewhat skinny, no real big distinguishing characteristics.

Their avatars on the other hand are a different story. I encourage you to google their avatars. Eva is a fairly busty, tall woman with long blonde hair. Frano is a dark-haired muscle boy, complete with six-pack. This, I find, is the real reason why most people go online. It's not to really create a new circumstance, it's to escape from the one they are currently in. It is the same thing with online dating personals. The internet is the only place where one can exist as different personalities within the same body and not be labeled as schizophrenic.

My other main problem with this piece is that it is very hard to believe that Eva and Franco had to go through the same emotional or physical barriers that the previous artists had to go through for their pieces. Not to mention the fact that the Mattes's didn't have to conceptualize it either. Neither one of them had to stand naked in a door way like Marina Abramovic and Ulay. Neither one of them had to be shot like Chris Burden. Franco didn't actually have to masturbate under the floor of gallery goers like Vito Acconci. Because of the veil that separates the physical world from the cyber, the artists didn't have to endure the physicality that much of the original work was meant to portray. And being that I don't buy Second Life as a viable reality in which to exist, it totally undermines the purpose of the original pieces.

Now it could also be that the artists are doing these pieces to prove just that. However, that wasn't the gist that I was getting from the article. In fact Franco goes on to say that "The very act of calling it a virtual world is wrong. It's synthetic, but it's an actual world that is no less real than the phone conversation we're having right now." He goes on to say that he has known people who have married and divorced because of happenings in Second Life. Really? It would seem to me that if they worked on their marriage in First Life they might not have these problems in Second Life.

Besides the fact that I can't help but associate a religious undertone to all of it.

However, The Mattes's have gotten support from other artists, including Marina Abramovic herself. She says in the article, "It's very interesting, all this separation between our body and mind. It's another world, but sometimes it's more real than the real one." I wrote in the margins of the article "No! No! No!" Yes, the separation between our bodies and minds is highly interesting, but our mind does not exist on a server somewhere to solely engage in cyber-encounters. And at the risk of sounding like one of those people who wants to do away with anything technological and return to a state of feral play in the forests, there has to be some distinction between what is mechanical and what is mental. Yes, I realize that this now bridges over into a whole other realm within this debate. Yet I am very hesitant to allow any state of which makes us uniquely human to exist within a realm that does not require human initiative to operate it.

For the online version of this article: http://www.artnewsonline.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2443

Edmund White and Terrence Koh

I find it somewhat disparaging that in a recent issue of Out, they call contemporary artist Terrence Koh the "defining voice of the gay art world" and yet Koh had to Google Stonewall. Granted, the man is Chinese, yet he's been in the states since before 2003. Has the erasure of the origins of gay identity already reached those who are leading us into the future?

The article, which is a conversation between Koh and Edmund White, has many instances where I felt somewhat let down by the gay art world's poster boy and his glib remarks. The most interesting passage came from White, when speaking of the influence of Stonewall: (in reference to the AIDS movement) "So you get this thing where everybody now wants to get married and adopt children - it's sort of dreary. The early gay movement was all about the right to have sex, because it was very hard to find anyone to have sex with in the old days. Stonewall, in a way, was about saying, 'We have a right to have bars; we have a right to get together; we have a right to be visible.'"

Reading this, I can't help but think that 30+ years after Stonewall, yes things are better, at least for us in the US. Yet homosexuals are still being hung in Iran. I mean, the yes I believe everyone should have the right to get married if they wish. But as far as the gay movement goes, I can't help but think marriage is just a big band-aid for the fact that after all these years, we are still fighting for a right to be visible all around the world.

"Edmund White Vs. Terence Koh" in Out, June/July 2009, pages 117-120.

1/20/13 Update: Add to that last line - "and even visible amongst ourselves."