Category Archives: Visual

Amis Live

Posted on by under Authors, Visual

Over the past couple years I’ve had the Martin Amis fever real bad.  I started out liking his pop, Kingsley, whose Lucky Jim (1954) is required reading for anyone born after World War II who likes really funny novels, then got into Martin via his psychotically hilarious Money (1984), the best novel of the Eighties. It’s been heating up from there. There are many novelists I love on my shelves, but right now if I had to take one person’s books to prison, they would be his: there is nobody smarter or funnier or sadder or meaner or cooler writing fiction in English, not since Bellow (or maybe Twain) died.  David Foster Wallace is the nearest American equivalent, and he only got close.

Amis got his start at 24, because people wanted to see how bad the novel of famous Kingsley’s son would be. Turned out he was good.

His prose has always sounded “young,” because he’s a funny prick with a poet’s relish for the language, but Amis is getting older. He just turned 60; his best friend of forty years, Christopher Hitchens, is dying of cancer; and he’s now written twelve novels. A reliably engaging guest on Charlie Rose, during the latest interview (from August) he’s able to dodge Charlie’s inane, overabundant questions, and get to improvising brilliant things about terrible things like death and wonderful things like writing. He probably practices in the mirror, but still. Enjoy the video here.

-TGR

Addendum

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis, Visual

In the previous post, I might have made it sound like few professors are openly confronting the problems facing universities.  This isn’t the case: not only have the best books on university decay been written by academics (Chris Newfield, Frank Donoghue, Mark Bousquet, and Louis Menand, among others), but plenty of progressive younger professors–including ones with tenure–are speaking up eloquently.  Trouble is, nobody in a position to change things listens.

-TGR

Breaking News: Lame Magazine has Lame Cover

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Visual

Please, please tell me this is a parody.  I’m all for humor, but I can’t take this.  Not just the tatted bro with his fixie, but the stuff about how agents are actually nice/necessary and the bromide about how small presses are the best ever, too.  Please tell me there aren’t earnest editors behind this.

Now, I can’t speak to this guy’s literary chops, because I haven’t read him; for all I know he’s the next Hazlitt.  But he let someone take that photograph and then put it on the cover of a national magazine.  Even though P&W is pretty useless (writers don’t need trade rags), this is embarrassing.  Here’s hoping Mr. Kaelan keeps his shirt on next time and lets his writing do the talking.

-TGR

Free Market Friday

Posted on by under American Masculinity, in the news, Visual

During the past few weeks there’s been a minor Internet kerfuffle over the reputed hiring practices of the hipster clothing label American Apparel.  According to documents obtained and published by Jezebel, the women’s site of the Gawker Media network, the company has spent years intentionally hiring only hipster-hot employees (male and female) to work in its stores, which sell clothes that only fit skinny people.  If you’re chubby or wear New Balances or wire-frame glasses, sorry, but AA doesn’t want you.

Personally, while the aesthete in me appreciates the label’s preference for solid colors and fairly simple items of clothing, I’m too big and preppy to adopt AA’s orthodox look, nor do I want to.  And despite being a twenty-eight-year-old heterosexual male who hopes always to see as much of as many pretty girls as possible, I find their raunchy ad campaigns kind of gross.   By all appearances the company’s founder, Dov Charney, is greedy, pompous, and more than a bit lecherous.  American Apparel’s whole media campaign has always been brazenly, unapologetically about using the exposed skin of slender young people with interesting hair to sell slim-fit clothing.

Which is to say, the company operates like pretty much every other clothing line on earth, from Old Navy to whatever gets strutted around on runways in Milan.  Models are always physically attractive humans; even outlier types of models–e.g. “plus-size” women–have better faces and skin tones and hair than most people.  99% of us couldn’t make it as professional clothes-wearers.  We don’t look right for the part.  The young people who work retail in any chic clothing store are the “in-house” models–whatever else they do while on the clock is secondary to their main purpose, which is to visually contribute to the general aura of coolness/hipness/whatever the label is trying to gin up.

This is exactly how it should be.  American Apparel’s policy truly would be scandalous if it were based on the sort of essentialist discrimination that has long been established as culturally poisonous and destructive (misogyny, homophobia, racism, things like that).  If they sold exploding oil rigs (for example), they would also deserve legal scrutiny.  And if AA were a public institution, hiring people based on looks and sartorial taste would be not be OK: you can’t defensibly argue that Elena Kagan isn’t hot enough for the Supreme Court.  But American Apparel is a private, for-profit company.  They sell a particular brand of style–a “look”–which is clearly organized around a particular type of bodily appearance.  That is what clothing retailers do.  It’s what one must do in order to have a shot at becoming a profitable, taste-making designer.  This has always been the case.  If you don’t like how American Apparel does what it does, then don’t buy anything there.  You can even tell everyone you know how lame they are (and their policy is pretty sad, albeit realistic).  But don’t pretend that they are  accountable to some nebulous cultural standard or that how a private T-shirt company structures its business model is a huge public matter which threatens to undo the achievements of feminism.  They aren’t and it’s not.

It is also hypocritical of Jezebel to push this critique.  Their website’s tagline is “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women” (which would be annoying even if it were grammatical).  Each day they post dozens of high-res pictures of and stories about movie stars, famous designers, models, and crap like that.  Hey, guys: HOLLYWOOD AND NYC FASHION WEEK RUN ON THE SAME PRINCIPLES AS AMERICAN APPAREL.  If you don’t complain when Brad Pitt gets cast ahead of Paul Giamatti, then you have to leave Dov Charney’s creepy brand alone, too.

-TGR

Hat Rules

Posted on by under American Masculinity, sports, The Moronic Inferno, Visual

The golden age of the fashionable American male hat has been over for a long time.  Sorry, nostalgists.  By “fashionable,” I mean hats that are plumage, and which aren’t worn as a necessary part of one’s work (e.g. farmers still wear hats, so do construction workers, as do baseball/softball players).  For a while there, every prole got to have something that used to be the prerogative of aristocrats and royals: articles of headwear whose functional assets are secondary to their aesthetic effect.  But by the late 1960s, in the developed West, few young or middle-age dudes from the white-collar and educated classes donned hats when going to work or a party.

As things stand today, if you are under 70 and wear any sort of retro hat—a bowler, a fedora, one of those “newsy” tongue-like woolly things—you look like a dick.  Trust me, you do.  Even hipsters quickly relinquished their fascination with undersized fedoras (R.I.P, 2006-2008), although these do remain popular with entry-level alts.

However, one type of hat has been tenacious.  This is the baseball cap (which needn’t actually bear a sports logo).  Dudes still try to rock it during sit-down dinners.  At the bar.  In class.  Seriously, the other night I walked by Opal (an expensive restaurant in Santa Barbara) and saw a 30s-ish guy wearing a Yankee fitted on a fucking date.  Even a Red Sox cap would not have been OK at all.  This indecorous dorm-life shit has got to stop.  I love baseball caps in moderation.  But there need to be some contemporary guidelines.  Think I’ll volunteer to write some.  And since I don’t feel capable of theorizing female hat rules, I will restrict my comments to my gender.  Here are 12 tenets worth considering:

1.) If you are under 23 years of age and/or an undergraduate in college and/or terminally ill, congratulations.  Wear one all you want.  Otherwise the following rules apply.

2.) No caps at work, unless you have a job where a cap is immediately useful (i.e. construction or professional baseball).

3.) If you are sitting down and eating at the same time, you may not have a cap on.  A female family member should have told you this anyway.

4.) You really shouldn’t wear a cap to a party, unless said party is outside on a sunny day or taking place during a rainstorm.  Otherwise, Spaceship You emits a spectrum of bro-vibe which doesn’t entice most women, not even young ones from California.

5.) Even if you are under 23 and in college, you can’t wear any cap to my classes.  Not even a Sox cap.  Sorry, bro, but I already let the sweatpants & surfboard pass.

6.) Caps may be worn to sporting events whether you are a participant or an observer.  Same goes for outdoor concerts, but be aware that caps still aren’t considered very hip, so if you’re wearing one in Prospect Park or wherever don’t expect the girl with the Lisa Simpson tattoo to come strike up a conversation.

7.) NO NEW-ERA FITTED CAPS FOR ANYONE OVER 30.  Not even if you aren’t white.  Grown men should confine themselves to unstructured fitted caps like this one:

8.  If you wear glasses you look better in a cap than a guy who doesn’t (at least according to a girl I once dated).  Get some fake lenses if you want to tart up your style.  I also suggest a blazer.  Counterintuitive, I know.

9.  If you are venturing outside within an hour of waking up, you may wear a cap.

10.  Caps are (sort of) OK while running errands.

11.  You are not allowed to own more than 5 caps.

12.  Baseball caps are cooler than basketball caps, which are cooler than football caps.  This rule applies only to the aestheto-cultural appeal of the cap, not to the sport itself.

13. Don’t make rules about stuff like caps.  What are you, illiterate?

-TGR breaks these rules all the time

Go West, Young Man

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Book Recommendations, the polis, Visual

From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, the Western was the most popular form of mass entertainment in the United States.  The genre is vast, comprising Buffalo Bill’s turn-of-the-century roadshow, cowboy poetry, good and terrible fiction for both boys and adults, widely reproduced photos & paintings & woodcuts, advertisements (especially ones for cars), political campaigning (Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan both loved bullshit about the glorious frontier), TV shows, and films.  Lots of academic studies have been written about the various cultural functions of the Western–i.e. what it tells us about how different kinds of Americans conceptualize American identity—but by far the best and most accessible is Jane Tompkins’ West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford UP, 1992).  Tompkins is that excellent kind of professor: she combines a historian’s erudition with a literary essayist’s verve.  In other words, Tompkins will entertain the hell out of you while also teaching you a whole lot.

Tompkins organizes the book by dividing the first half into chapters that each focus on a key Western theme or icon (Cattle, Indians, Horses, etc.) and then devoting the latter to chapter-length discussions of major Western texts (e.g. Louis L’Amour’s famous–and quite good–novels).  You can probably stick to the first part of the book without missing much.

While she spends a good deal of time demonstrating how popular conceptions of the West, most of them produced and consumed by white people, tend to minimize or erase altogether the incredible complexity of American history, largely by ignoring the perspectives of Native Americans, Spanish/Mexican colonists, black settlers, and Chinese immigrants, her main argument is that the Western is all about policing gender roles.  Westerns became popular at exactly the same time that the U.S. was becoming an industrialized capitalist empire, which made it difficult to maintain the longstanding image of Americans as courageous settlers who battled the wilderness and converted it to a rural, farm-based, Christian pastoral.  In particular, it was especially hard for American men who now tended to work in factories or white-collar office jobs to think of themselves as powerful, tough-talkin’, pragmatic individualists.  The Western responds to this panic about gender by offering a simplistic, consoling story in which men are quiet heroes and women are nurturing companions in need of male protection.  Her implicit point is that many of our nation’s cultural formations are about exactly the same thing.

So if you like history or are at all interested in the byzantine origins of “American” identity, check this out.

-TGR

219-212. Finally. My condolences to the stupid and/or reactionary.

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, Visual

Woooh, SPRING BREAK.  I have spent 3 hours today watching live coverage of & commentary on the House health-care vote, and my brain is greasy at this point.  Basic cable in Santa Barbara doesn’t give you Fox News, and I’m genuinely sad about that, because it remains as interesting as ever to compare it to CNN’s and MSNBC’s respective coverage.  Still, this gave me time to begin noticing (again) how much more humane and less cheesy MSNBC seems.  Sure, they have in-house reactionary perverts / commentators like Pat Buchanan and that cross-eyed guy who used to work for Cheney, but they also utilize Rachel Maddow and Ezra Klein, and shrill as Keith Olbermann can be, he’s still not the blue-state Geraldo.  Even their graphic design is somehow cooler looking, in both senses of the word: it looks hip compared to CNN’s hyperactive visuals and is more elementally soothing.

Why is this?  Isn’t NBC owned by an evil conglomerate, too?  Why hasn’t all mass visual media turned into Fox?  Presumably the corporate overlords wouldn’t want Maddow doing stories about Blackwater murdering people in Iraq, yet in reality that’s what happens.  Is it just because media corporations can make more money appealing to niche political markets (e.g. how MSNBC is generally left-of-center) instead of trying to grab a vanilla plurality?  IS THIS COMMODIFIED DISSENT?  I need to stop watching the TV now.

-TGR