that thing white ppl do when they disparage 'white ppl'

so carles is like a millennial andy rooney right

I have to say, I recognize myself and my "lifestyle" in a lot of what Carles describes as "contemporary conformity." For that reason, it makes me cringe a little to read his posts, but it also seems sharply observed and well-considered and driven by curiosity, so I don't take it as an indictment of my tastes/values as much as an attempt to expose the social/cultural mechanisms behind them.

I didn't make it to the end of that. Writer can't do better than "Contemporary Conformist"? Pretty dopey name, highly questionable assumptions, like if you walk into a certain kind of store you have "conformed" to it and said YES to all of it, just as when I go buy my cheap functional cargo shorts at Wal-Mart I have obviously signed on to their whole life package.

CC's are causing brunch wait times to skyrocket.

some conformity is necessary in any society or social group, else it would fly apart from overwhelming mutual repellancy

I forgot to say, somebody who thinks croissants are exotic and some kind of rejection of American pastries....croissants peaked in America like a quarter century ago right? At this point do they have any resemblance to anything European, any more than pizza does?

can't believe a person thought some things omg so crucial

Idk if it's really an INDICTMENT of every single characteristic listed, I mean it's impossible not to have some of those unless you're a totally different age or group identification than you are, and/or truly live in the country or some other cultural enclave and never leave it. Or live off the grid or something. Who doesn't like pastry?? Or wooden furniture or whatever?! I guess it's an indictment of ppl for whom that whole article is a checklist or something. If they exist.

it's observational humor

Mmm, you put a title like "contemporary conformity" on it, suddenly whole levels of pretension added to what could just be a stylistic walk through Hipster Rogers Neighborhood.

you put a title like "contemporary conformity" on it, people are more likely to pass it around

Yeah, I don't think it is intended wholly as an indictment, but I think some people have interpreted it as such.

i'm actually impressed he avoided the pitfall of assigning it to a generation

THE MASON JAR GENERATION, coming in June, warm up yer kindle

it's sparking a contemporary conformist riot. the retweets and likes are off the charts

tbf this restaurant aesthetic has been around a while, prob needed calling out sooner rather than later

carles is critiquing how the logic of marketing has inflected the way people come to understand themselves and others. this is always what it's been about: with hipster runoff, his target wasn't hipsters as in "hipsters are shallow people." he was more interested in exploring the hipster as a cultural form, while writing like a child

i just wish he'd been around to call out bellbottoms, or that it was easy to look for whether rooney ever did

almond croissants are (usually) delicious

i still can't stand to wear shirts with buttons though

Great post by CRLS but portraying the adoption of a certain look and conforming via lifestyle posturing is something practiced not just by whatever narrowly defined micro-trendsetters but pretty much any and all consumers. Authenticity is Consumerist Canon, a sort of invisible AAA-rating system for goods and services, the invisible hand of the market revealing the most desired and valued products.

"Sometimes an almond croissant is just an almond croissant."

--- Bob Marley ---

almond croissants are babylon

CC's are just foodies and the other things they do.

you can dislike one particular column and still be CC, which is basically "white" afaic, like as a cultural form / idea.

i think he is unconvincing / less strong when he is trying to point out what 'auth' looks like because i think by definition it doesn't really have a look.

It seems to me like Carlos' critique is that they don't really like X they are just expressing their brand etc but I don't know what it means to like something authentically (he suggests that the real natural position is purchase dependent solely on affordability). On some level this seems like a rehash of the critique that the poor use gaudy possessions to signal wealth while the truly wealthy can afford to signal it through more minimalism.

I don't really think it is white actually.

I also don't think this is a stand up comedy thing, more seems like he's going for a millennial john Berger vibe

I mean u can say CC is based in or references whiteness but as a cultural idea it certainly appeals more to a sense of bourgeoise-ness

It seems to me like Carlos' critique is that they don't really like X they are just expressing their brand etc but I don't know what it means to like something authentically (he suggests that the real natural position is purchase dependent solely on affordability). On some level this seems like a rehash of the critique that the poor use gaudy possessions to signal wealth while the truly wealthy can afford to signal it through more minimalism.

― Mordy, Thursday, April 23, 2015 12:28 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think he's saying they don't really like it ... More that it's as constructed as anything else

This is far more making fun of class distinctions than anything here.

Race is tied up in class distinctions of course. But I don't think you can do a 1:1 with "whiteness"

i don't think carles knows what he actually thinks about these things. his main purpose, imo, has always been to create this literary effect he is really good at, where the comfortable surfaces of everyday life are torn apart, revealing a level of banality that from a certain light seems funny, but from another angle is super depressing, like an abyss is opening inside you. sorting people into marketing niches the way he does is obviously dehumanizing, and it's especially weird because there is clearly no way -- from his standpoint -- to step outside and be more "authentic." for carles everything becomes class signaling, or else pathetic vying for acceptance bb. hipster runoff got too dark for me to read once he introduced "the mainstreamer," a character whose engagement with pop culture was fully an expression of her own self loathing

though to jeff's comment re foodies this phenomenon is pretty heavily about 'going out' as something inherently desireable / meaningful. xps

But seriously, folks...

All I saw there were a bunch of advertising and marketing images used to represent real people who supposedly had internalized those images to the point where they slavishly reproduced them in their real lives. Except all the images were of the painstakingly composed artifice that we all know exists briefly in front of cameras, but which swiftly decomposes itself into normality once the camera is finished, and not photos of anyone slavishly composing their lives in homage to those contrived images, which supposed people the author was disparaging. Those real life people we had to imagine for ourselves, based on the stock photos. Which seems suspiciously circular.

they don't really like X they are just expressing their brand etc

This is perhaps an expression of the self-destructive tendencies inherit in capitalism. Which is one of the big markets serving (self-serving) consumerism by perpetuating more consumption. There is some self-hatred in relying on an endless cycle of consuming products in order live in society, and those of us on the fringes may direct that angers towards others. What is of most value in a consumer society is Consuming. "I am a better consumer than you" is the preferred point of dissent. This stuff isn't new and it isn't even criticism. I still enjoy it tho, cos he's a funny writer, and he's great at what he does imo. I enjoy the style of it.

i guess i should be saying the value of carles is observational humor of the rooney style ("what's up with all the metal and wood in restaurants? does it feel more authentic? why?") - his intent doesn't really matter

except there are many, many people who live in front of that camera in different ways. it's the concept of the spectacle in action and i think it's disingenuous to deny its effects. xp

i agree carles is at his best when just purely observational, not trying to force a good/bad binary.

i mean you can tell he wants to do something else, it's right there in his new blog title "In search of a meaningful/authentic human/internet experience", but i think his current format / project would have to change / expand a lot more in order to get there.

I guess I wonder what makes his observation so valuable. The note that ppl of a given time tend to reproduce a particular aesthetic seems banal. Would Carlos of the 17th c be writing about baroque bros?

So - not talking about this article here, talking about the thread subject now:

When people say such and such place/practice/style is "white," does that imply that if somebody is not white and goes there/does that/acts like that regularly, does that mean they are "acting white"?

Logical conclusion right? But I bet that part of the equation isn't going to go down real well - and it shouldn't, either. Might be a problem with this whole line of talk.

Removed from the oh-so-sincere context of working for justice etc, defining certain things as "white" is something that racists have always been happy to do. The difference, that you might think means something, and that I sincerely doubt means enough to justify it, is that now these things are expressed in the context of a critique. Again, what do you say to non-whites who wish to partake of them?

This is not a made-up problem. It's like the shit Jimi Hendrix endured for not wanting to play properly "black" music - shit he endured from blacks and whites, who of course thought of themselves as working for progress. I doubt anybody here is going to defend what happened to Hendrix, getting called "an electric Uncle Tom" by you know who. But if you go around defining things as white, you might want to think about what kind of messages you are sending to everybody. You are not automatically immune from this possibility just because you can see where liberals of the 60s and 70s didn't quite have it down.

I don't expect anybody on this thread to just surrender and give up on the possibly positive value of this whole 'defining whiteness' thing - so how to do this right without just perpetuating exclusion?

i'm leaning in that direction. i still get some enjoyment from his shtick because i have a chip on my shoulder re consumer culture. and so i think you're right that it's not really valuable. xp to mordy

feel like 'whiteness' as a concept is a tricky deal and treated very well in books i haven't read.

Hear hear, I think it has been especially well dealt with in books I haven't read too.

my pov is that while i'm not in a position to tell someone who isn't white how to use the word "white," i think it'd be shitty, excluding and racist for ME to use the word "white" to describe things i thought were lame, conformist, etc. it'd be a weird, self-aggrandizing, racially essentialist action.

xxxp I'm reading Nat Hentoff's 'Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee' (btw super fantastic + i highly recommend if for nothing else than the vertigo of reading a book from 92 that perfectly describes 2015) + he writes about a time he met Mingus and someone came up to Mingus and accused him of not really being black enough to play the blues and then Mingus started playing and blew the room away (iirc i read this section late last night on the plane and may not be remembering correctly). anyway, Hentoff's point was that there will always be ppl saying other ppl aren't X enough, pure enough, etc enough & that those ppl pretty much suck.

With you on your adjectives, da croupier. Okay, Mordy, there will always be those sucky people, but do only sucky people create these distinctions? Because I think maybe otherwise well-meaning people do too.

sometimes well-meaning ppl accidentally become sucky ppl bc humans are flawed creatures

i do think there's a tier where liberally-minded white people want you to know they're aware of the failings of "white" people but then vanily extrapolate that only white people watch dr quinn reruns etc, assumming only white dr quinn watchers who can't handle the truth would be offended, and don't realize they're also telling an asian dr quinn fan that they're white

and i should note that not every asian dr quinn fan necessarily has to be offended, and could well say "oh yeah it's so white" - the point is that it's shitty to be a white person making that leap imo

Dr Quinn was hilarious