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

Edison light bulbs make me IA, though.

yah they are bad

Jars are cool, glass is good, we know how plastic containers leak cancer, so that's just good sense.

shakey mo what are things that you think are important/interesting to talk about?

based on recent posting habits: national energy policy, obscure Bee Gees solo albums, racist policing practices, the amusing idiocy of David Brooks

but seriously yeah I am just not engaged by lifestyle porn critiques/analysis, it's all just window-dressing for our deeply fucked capitalist consumer culture. And when it comes to capitalist consumer culture I'm more interested in hoos-style "how do we get out of this mess" sorta approaches than the "lookit these assholes" approach.

xp

Being poor is actually kinda good in a lot of ways, in light of this sort of thing

My hot take is, being poor is actually bad

Overall, yeah. But it frees you from this kinda useless wasted thinking

when i was in college i drank out of jars all the time (it was just what we used) but now i am older and i guess my mouth doesn't work as good? i try to drink from a jar and the brim is too wide and stuff just sort of sloshes out around the edges onto my face like a toddler.

a way of filtering out people with kids I guess

― Is It Any Wonder I'm Not the (President Keyes), Friday, 24 April 2015 20:49 (Yesterday) Permalink

legitimately curious what made you post this link. not that you shouldn't have & I thank you for it, hadn't seen before
(btw I was a fool to read the comments)

Just thank god they got rid of coffee shops that served hot coffee in pint glasses. So you had to, like, hold it with a napkin if you didn't want to burn your hand. WHITE PEOPLE AMIRITE?

sounds almost as undignified asI am trying to block out the fact I had a cocktail the other night that may have been served in a tiny canning jar

it also had a beet peppercorn shrub instead of sweet vermouth but I'll overlook that for now

― ultimate american sock (mh), Friday, April 24, 2015 8:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh wait I didn't realize that 'shrub' was a mixologism
& here I was picturing an entire small plant in yr drink. tiki-bar-for-millennials on some nightmare artisanal kitsch.

oh I just posted the W. Kamau Bell link because it related to hip brunch places, and I don't remember seeing anyone on ilx mentioning it.

But it does highlight some of the self-policing these hipster establishments do in order to maintain a sense of "safety" for their customers

Classism essentially right? -- the issue in the linked article appears to be that the server 'got classism wrong' (via not recognizing a person's clothing/bearing/other signs all point to them 'belonging at the table', like any other brunchbro, because skin color = jump-to-conclusions mat)

((& also, secondarily, that a white guy got away with panhandling b4 that))

there is a pretty good moment from Eastbound & Down S3E2
*when Kenny's looking for April & he goes to speak with her boss, a black man named Jamie

during the conversation with Jamie, Kenny uses a lot more African-American vernacular than usual, in ways that are weird & presume familiarity
& the conversation ends with him saying [more or less verbatim]
"I'm putting you on blast, dawg: you're moving from NEUTRAL ALLY, back to HOSTILE THREAT"
"Kenny, wa--" "HOSTILE. THREAT!!"

... & then he zips his baby into his backpack & storms away, it's really beautiful, y'all who've not seen the show, should do so

One interesting about CC, I think, is that it is a very scattershot aesthetic -- lots of things that don't belong together. marble tables with wood tables. edison bulbs and also wood antler art. elements of the arts and crafts mvt along with rococo mirrors. it isn't a unified vision, but an assemblage of things that say "design!". almost like they're not intended to be viewed in concert, but each appreciated individually. this is one of the ways it is jarring -- along with the evident "just so" care put into things that are supposed to evoke comfort and familiarity. CC is very heartland, very kitsch. CC is bohemian cracker barrel.

perhaps it reflects the deporsenalization of our identities & their dissolution into ~the cloud~

that's a lovely accent you have

baby, I'm just full of lovely accents

(winks)

it's pronounced wins but I love the way you say it

it isn't a unified vision, but an assemblage of things that say "design!". almost like they're not intended to be viewed in concert, but each appreciated individually

instagram is key to this, where someone's life can fit this aesthetic if they crop enough out. All these little pieces end up as trends and obsessions with very little focus on how they come together as a whole, and I've been to plenty of spaces that I've seen beautiful photos of on instagram or pinterest that aren't nearly as impressive in person. It's hard to convey context in a photo on a phone screen, but easy to highlight details.

it isn't a unified vision, but an assemblage of things that say "design!". almost like they're not intended to be viewed in concert, but each appreciated individually.

it does seem scattershot, but those motifs (cliches) have clustered together into distinct contemporary design aesthetic, signifiers of haute bourgeois "taste." for what cc is "imitating" (always already a set of cliches before reaching mass market*) see for example

http://www.remodelista.com/

http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com/

*btw one thing that irked & needs unpacking are paragraphs like

New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco are places with economies/legit culture & ‘real rich ppl’ that naturally segment ppl out. There is no artificial drive for culture / no ‘demand’ for ‘places that look a certain way’ because a natural economy dictates supply/demand. There are enough ‘real poor ppl’ that can’t be hidden, so development can’t really ‘hide’ or ‘highlight’ undesirable cultural groups.

which i will assume are folds in the ironic fictional persona here (as treeship argues), because not sure exactly what work "artificial" and "natural" are doing here

THE KINSPIRACY is my favorite contempcomformie hivemind project http://thekinspiracy.tumblr.com/

http://cityhomecollective.com

oh look their favicon is a deer. assholes

holyshit at that kinspiracy link. that's amazing curatorial work. the continued appearance of the american flags is significant i think -- the "new americana" element is important here.

the one thing about fuckyrnoguchicoffeetable is that the things highlighted there are more single obnoxious "accent" pieces for the most part. its sort of the accumulation of bric-a-brac that defines CC, and also the degree to which certain "design" elements highlighted on that tumblr clearly don't match the CC aesthetic -- there's nothing minimal about it.

is "kinfolk" actually popular? i hadn't heard about it until earlier this year

the name makes it seem kind of fascist

i thought that thing on the major coastal cities was onto something, even if in a sort of weird troublesome way -- there's a secondhandness to CC, a try-hardness. this is also what i was thinking about in terms of the jumble of signifiers. like we need to distinguish CC from "brooklyn artisinal" etc.

There is a hipster taco place in Chicago that looks like this:
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x880fd2c58cff46e7:0x15b00c6df5d3f62!2m5!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i100!3m1!7e1!4s

I've seen Kinfolk for sale at Whole Foods and Crate & Barrel but I'm not sure that means it's popular or that anyone actually buys it.

Kinfolk doesn't even need to be that popular to be the keystone of CC

I kinda want to put together a magazine that has Kinfolk's design aesthetic, but is all about death metal and porn.

i thought that thing on the major coastal cities was onto something, even if in a sort of weird troublesome way -- there's a secondhandness to CC, a try-hardness. this is also what i was thinking about in terms of the jumble of signifiers. like we need to distinguish CC from "brooklyn artisinal" etc.

― entry-level umami (mild bleu cheese vibes) (s.clover), Sunday, April 26, 2015 1:51 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah i thought that was way off, the bullshit about "enough real poor people that can't be hidden" in NY, LA, SF, as opposed to Cleveland where "CC is running wild"??? fuck that noise, have you been to Cleveland??? compare manhattan or SF to cleveland and tell me which city is hiding poor people.

brooklyn artisanal is the fucking wellspring for this entire aesthetic.

anyways i'm pretty ambivalent about carles in general and i dont think he is hugely profound, he is fun to read though and there are kernels of interesting stuff in there. outic kind of otm though about lifestyle porn bullshit

i mean there is a lot of buzz about a city like cleveland being "an urban renaissance with craft breweries and farmers markets and cafes" but if you go there you will find a working class and poor people's city where people are still trying to find factory jobs and there are tons of check cashing places and and empty lots and dreary polish neighborhoods with used car dealerships and the browns and the bbq fest are on everyone's mind way more than the local craft brewery or 'foodie' eatery. the city's most vibrant market has always been an old world place with beefhearts and kielbasa and is not some newfangled yuppie CC place for coldbrew coffee.

It's the Trader Joes lifestyle.

Local is the new global.

It seems perfectly natural for all of this fetishization of rural America as a reaction to the Dot Com boom and subsequent omnipresent monolithic iPhone/internet culture. Retail stores are being dissolved in digital era so more care needs to be taken in packaging consumer goods and services. The authenticity of the genuine experience, invoking artifacts relics methods and clothing of a sort of mirror/bizarro America Past to the one the right is always on about taking us back to.

Maybe the US Left disengaged (voluntarily or not) from the public discussion during the Bush years and focused on learning farming/sustainability/public planning/industrial design/steampunk/homebrewing/etc. and through those trades shifting their attention from the national to the local level. Now those people have graduated from art school and gotten jobs marketing stuff.

marcos otm i didnt get that part of carles' post at all

i am still lolling at "entry-level umami (mild bleu cheese vibes)"

also surprised carles hasn't mentioned kinfolk

kinfolk is super fucked up btw

also i lolled at "permanent instragram filter"

it helps to imagine Kinfolk subscribers as 8-year-olds wearing turquoise and purple windbreakers in 1993

lol i had one of those when i was a kid

Don't hate

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0234/5963/products/IMG_7926_large.jpg?v=1428940244

http://i.imgur.com/gLvSPvr.png

whiteamericanfolks.jpg

indie guy tryna change partners