Forty-Eight: Reading Books (06-12-2023)
By now it's fairly obvious that the cultural hegemony of the 2010s was the rise and reign of "tech", meaning the industry of venture capital, internet product, and associated simple, fast-pace lifestyles. This tide brought with it now commonplace, though much maligned, extraneous cultural changes. Altheisure- sweat pants and workout clothes as dailywear- is the uniform of American shoppers, third world workers, and Ukrainian warhawks. It's a look derived from the ever-pleasure of fingertip access to knowledge and resources by means of uncertainly funded business endeavors. The reactionary gut response to return to more formal or vernacular modes of dress is unfortunately moot, the dial progress only moves in one direction.
To refer back to a figure whose influence outlives them and outsizes their own worldview, it's fascinating to watch Anthony Bourdain's retrospectively narrow portfolio of content (a term that seems anachronistic in describing his work, not unlike calling radioplay a 'live podcast'). Bourdain adorns flimsy button downs, often partially unbuttoned, in humid and dry, hot and cold. His producers are similarly fitted- often accesorized with small wire-framed glasses and disturbingly tight hairstyling. The fashion attitude of these people- whose professional travel would necessitate highly versatile clothing- seems odd when viewed decades later. Even with the burgeoning internet available to them, which no doubt accelerated their ability to connect and explore at a global scale, although no doubt at a pace unlike today's possibilities, they seem under-informed, an almost hyperbolic expression of mid-aughts optimism and the last moments of Post-Modernism.
It's a fortunate place to have come-of-age around the beginning of the Obama presidency, and to have lived out adolescence and young adulthood as millennials exchange cultural power for political power, realizing the futility of age and social movement. These were the "cool adults" that generated much of the art and information that was consumed by the youth of the two thousand(ten)s. Vice Media is no more, Gawker is a faded memory, print died and blogs did too. People who read heaps of Foster-Wallace and listened to hours of totally entuned NPR failed to achieve the culture-defining legitimacy that their parents, the demonized boomers, did in the nineteen sixties. The cycle of rebellion was broken by the fruits of their bullied, uncool, overinvested techy peers' angsty neo-arpanet gluttony.
Millennials are old now, shooing kids off their lawns (if they even have neighbors, and further if those neighbors even have kids), and do not seem to have realize that the tabloid "Millennials are killing X" headlines were right- they were moody neoteny-afflicted consumerites, who may have lacked the bank account, but floated in an economic pool that they refused to be thankful for. No one gets to "be" a writer or creative anymore, they are a content creator. Videos of Lady Gaga performing now multi-platinum hits in a musty club to a crowd of hardly a couple dozen go viral now for their absurdity. How could a pop star become famous without a tik tok sound to spread their name around? How did anyone make plans when they had to text by numpad? How did anyone shop without consulting multiple reviews? How could someone unclog a sink without consulting Reddit?
So when there's a zoomer waiting for the train, in a hoodie and 5-inch inseam instagram ad shorts, with a typically uncool, widely popular hairstyle, glued to their phone, the dissonance is unavoidable. Members of an unreachable peer group, who grew up in the grasp of a disaffected autistic elite, will, in the next half decade, assume roles of power in business, politic, and industry. Trying to critique the culture of now seems silly, there's just so much of it to be found, and it's all so connected and muddied and categorized and uncategorizable. At a yard sale yesterday, ran by a clear hippy out of a very tobacco yoga studio on a very how-do-they-afford-this block, there was a book by an i-swear-its-ironic baggy jeaned cultural critic published two thousand and five and dripped on the front and back with the sort of New York is the center of the world imagery and textuality that dates it so clearly to a not two thousand and fiver. The author's munchkin mug is plastered front and back, crowded and not, for some reason.
The book is cultural writing, the guy puts a weird veneration to ancestry by including his IV suffix, and makes no mistake of the book's meandering low-effort organization (real). It won't be read anytime soon. Now, sitting behind a desk with a web-based word processer and a gleamed understanding of the tapestry of human experience that doesn't even exist five minutes later, it's pretty easy to feel superior to the twenty-five-year-olds of yore, who certainly felt a lot more twenty-five.