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

"I dont know about whiteness but Carles doesn't use the word 'white' at all in that piece so I don't know why we are even talking about that."

Nobody said HE did; thread topic is about white stuff; at least two diff discussions going on here.

so is the social capital something you get from reading carles? is he not just transmitting his audience's anxieties about whether their choices are real choices back to them

idk, i mean its not adorno, but it's also accessible

http://www.troll.me/images/ancient-aliens-guy/white-people.jpg

http://www.troll.me/images/ancient-aliens-guy/white-people.jpg

i love and admire affluent white ppl

didnt read that carles thing but feel like 'contempo conformo' could be called something better... or just call these ppl yuppies like everyone else already does who h8s these ppl (i.e. me and my friends)

yuppies are diff tho

u don't have to be a yuppie to live a CC lifestyle

sounds more like young bobos so I guess carles is young david brooks

I just went out and tried to describe how people are living, using a method that might best be described as comic sociology. The idea is to get at the essence of cultural patterns, getting the flavor of the times without trying to pin it down with meticulous exactitude. Often I make fun of the social manners of my class (I sometimes think I've made a whole career out of self-loathing)

carles is like tao lin for me- I find his appeal incomprehensible and it makes me feel like I belong in a different generation

maybe a different message board idk

Tao Lin the abusive creep? You shouldn't feel too bad, tbh

lol young david brooks. even though i like carles, i could see there being a weary paternalism behind the facade

seems like he's getting at some of the stuff Thomas Frank wrote about in the 90s with The Conquest of Cool except instead of critiquing marketing carles comes at it from the angle of "Look at these lames."

never thought id see the day

ilx turned on carles

sounds like carles is having an existential crisis. getting older happens to all of us, good buddy. we'll always have the justice jackets.

carles is like tao lin for me- I find his appeal incomprehensible and it makes me feel like I belong in a different generation

i dunno, I'm totes old and really like Tao Lin but Carles leaves me cold. I think young David Brooks is actually a good comp; you admire the craft but there's something kind of emptily self-regarding about the whole project.

Tao Lin and Carles are just two sides of the same despair. The former retreats into mysticism and the latter launches a guerilla attack on a culture that seems to repulse him (i say seems to bc carles is a persona.) Finding life meaningless is pretty old -- so not generational -- but the information overload element is new kinda. familiar exhaustion with bourgeois affectations/falsity but sped up

I think they're both remarkably anti-social and anti-political. All choices are false choices/life is vanity are major themes for the two of them

instead of critiquing marketing carles comes at it from the angle of "Look at these lames."

imo anthropology on homo marketus (which is always gonna be in danger of looking at these lames + which will require true humility & perspective) is gonna be a lot more useful going forward than fuck-the-corporations (though obv fuck the corporations). nb i thought this partic post was pretty boilerplate and the bit goole excerpted raised an eyebrow when i read it too. in general i have always thought carles is not as good as the thing he is trying to be has to be, but god bless.

but

he certainly has a knack for completely obliterating any sense of authorial point of view thru unhinged use of scare quoting

this a guilty pleasure for me; it is the very definition of a gimmick but sometimes i think just signposting cliches--acknowledging that this concept came from outside you and that you're not entirely sure you believe it but that it is now as inside you as any of your own feelings, that your authorial pov is not fully your own and you don't confidently understand the ways in which it's not--dissolves or unravels them faster than trying to purge them from your prose (which is what i do) as if they aren't squatting on your mind at all, as if you're brilliant and free. and since marketing works, mamabirdlike, by regurgitating cliches into you, experimental ways of dealing with them are presently v worthwhile artistic r&d. not that scare quotes are all that experimental in 2015 i guess.

(and not that writers haven't been Dealing With Marketing since the 1960s at the very least.)

where's our flaubert

anxiety of influence: a theory of gimmicky scare quoting

dlh otm

treeship otm

'anxiety' of influence: a theory of gimmicky scare quoting
anxiety of influence: a 'theory' of gimmicky scare quoting
anxiety of influence: a theory of 'gimmicky' scare quoting
anxiety of 'influence': a theory of gimmicky scare quoting
'anxiety' of 'influence': a 'theory' of 'gimmicky' 'scare' quoting

what a shit revive, consider yourselves disparaged

Yep, mordy otm what a clinically insane amount of attention to give to this concept, person and writing

I did appreciate the hasty circumvention of the fact that dude isn't a white ppl nor is he talking about whiteness, that was good

CRLS 4EVA bb

2k9 for all time

CC's are causing brunch wait times to skyrocket.

― Jeff, Thursday, April 23, 2015 11:43 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gets it

Yep, mordy otm what a clinically insane amount of attention to give to this concept, person and writining

― neetsooh ebebay (wins), Friday, April 24, 2015 7:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He said on a board with an entire thread devoted to the subject

carles could be dressed like an urban lumberjack like all these other contemporary conformists for all we know, it's just the way things are

Deej I did not say "writining" wtf

lol

innovative use of invented typos as gaslighting technique

lol

did that c n p on a cell phone my bad

Literally twisting my words smh

never thought id see the day

ilx turned on carles

― deej loaf (D-40), Thursday, April 23, 2015 8:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't think he had serious fans here!

omg are you guys still talking about this

xp i mean, i know there was thread...

(which is always gonna be in danger of looking at these lames + which will require true humility & perspective)

it's p easy to find images of the "CC" lyfe if you're digging around on the internet; it has its fullest state in a photoshoot, so there's a wealth of evidence for something that has a paper-thin existence. really surprised the perceptive, incisive carles ref'd "normcore" which is one of the great phoney-baloney made-up things that nobody ever did really.

what i'm trying to say is that nobody really lives this way. a style is always aspirational; not just in the nakedly classist sense that but, like, "i aspire to have this look and vibe at all times, but, like, i'm at the end of my laundry cycle right now."

all those women you hate at the brunch spot, what do they do when they go home?

ftr it appears i posted on the hipster runoff thread 5 times in '09 and 1ce in '11

fullest embodiment is this place imo http://www.sohohousechicago.com

i didn't think he had serious fans here!

― goole, Friday, April 24, 2015 10:44 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really? when i logged onto Facebook this piece was already shared by like 3 ilxors. i guess big hoos & jho & whoever the 3rd person was...crut? haven't realized this discussion is happening here, but

idk maybe its bc i didn't feel like i was being targeted but i always found him pretty pointedly funny when turning the cameras on his audience.

i was never a regular reader & no it's not an in depth commentary on How We Live but some of his pieces are just good imo, accessible, and more self-aware than they're given credit for as is evidenced by the first couple of jabs at him on this thread

i mean it's done thru the window dressing of caring about 'indie rock on the internet' but this kind of anticipates what most ppl in media have spent the last 2 years arguing about: http://hipsterrunoff.com/2012/10/how-indie-finally-officially-died-broken-indie-machine.html

it all just reads like "growing up is so CONFUSING" whininess to me

if you guys think this lifestyle isn't real I have some photos and profiles to share

it's totally real I just don't care about how "authentic" it is relative to other lifestyles

not to minimize that wince-worthy passage about 'Contempoconformist women'—like one could argue he's trying to embody from a distance the dude who thinks like this but he doesn't really pull it off—& likewise he's made similarly eyebrow-raising statements related to race where u don't get the impression he's interrogating assumptions so much as reaffirming them

all lifestyles are authentic! not all make strides toward ""authenticity""