Portland, Oregon: White People Gone Wild
This is where every homeless man has a Walkman, every spoiled terrier boasts two pair of Nikes, and even the mayor is known to join in a drum circle now and again. This is like the white Jamaica, where a racially purebred monoculture commits shocking fashion atrocities in the name of being “chill.” And my goodness gracious, are Portlanders ever polite! Only yesterday I was gorging myself on this fellow’s lower intestine and he kindly offered the use of his shirt as a napkin. This is as different as can be from the hard-scrapple streets of my native Philadelphia, which seems like a burnt-out Soviet factory town beside this Scandinavian city-state, with its clean streets and inoffensively lame knowledge workers, swaddled in North Face fleeces and Space-age fabrics the color of highlighters. Those of a more shamanistic persuasion wander the up-and-coming Pearl District with sandals, wooden staffs, and long hemp robes.Phil Knight
Burning Man
Spring to Summer is the Season of Ripeness
As for the young women, we’re seeing a palette of colors that evoke highlighters, Lisa Frank stickers, Toucan Sam, and Stephanie on Full House: apricot, bright turquoise, bright lime, bright lemon, bright strawberry fuchsias, often swirled together like sickening stripes of sherbet. There is also the hideous and glassy-eyed wildlife, lacquered, stitched, and appliqued onto their hides – the brightly colored birds and fruits themselves, the plastic flora and fauna baubles dangling from the neck and the ears. The Vulture interprets all this to be a display of fertility, a tawdry proclamation that this is the season of heat, a neon sign screaming “I am produce!”
Lisa Frank
Dumb is the New Smart
Now that the high and low have collapsed into no-brow, many writers attempt to prance across the whole spectrum by talking about subjects like particle physics and literary theory in the language of meatheads. Here are two of the finest specimens for your inspiration. Protozoic is the shared blog of two brothers, one a physicist, the other a budding English prof, writing doggerel poems and taking pictures of dead animals found on laboratory floors. Joe Thielen is a genius computer programmer who writes in the pitch-perfect meathead style of Vice’s ace porn reviewer Chris Nieratko. Check out this incredible post on space travel:
Now, at this point, I’m just talking smack. I have no space background other than science fiction. But I do have my own personal experience to bank from. I know that 10 years ago I couldn’t do what I do now. But I also know that if I haven’t been TRYING IN THE FIELD for the last 10 years, if I had just sat there for 10 years and waited for things to progress and then tried to jump in, it would take even more time to adjust. Today I can adapt to new technologies because I have the background and experience to take the new stuff and figure out what it is.
Look at what is happening here. PRIVATE commercial entities are building space ships. Are there going to be setbacks? You betcha. Are people going to die? You betcha ass. Are more people going to die in 5-10 years in private commercial entities than in the entire history of NASA? I think so.
These people are putting their money where their mouth is. They have a vision, and are willing to die for it. Do I want to die? No. Would I jump on board a space ship given the chance knowing I could die, but given the chance that I could be in space, or even better, on another planet for just a brief period of time? YES. Human beings are explorers. We’ve explored this planet to death. Now we’re bored. And when humans get bored we turn on ourselves. We do stupid things like fight each other over personal beliefs and create reality TV.
You want to unite the human race? Give us something to shoot for. Give us a challenge, 21st century style. Give us space. Give us our god damned dream back.
The New Idea Machine
Half thesaurus, half free association machine, Lexical Freenet is the site that will yank that half-formed idea off the tip of your tongue onto the blank page. You can enter any two words and pull up a series of “intersection” terms that connect them, or simply enter a word like “blue” and watch as this engine assembles everything from Robert Johnson to American Express in one simple list.
The New Idea Machine
Steven Johnson Should Go Back to Blogging
Every so often, some guy writes a book that’s so incredibly stupid that we have to blurb it here, then quickly rip it to shreds. Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad is Good For You” is just such a book. Johnson says that things like prime time television and video games are not bad for you. He says they are good for you. This is infuriating, because the Vulture would not enjoy gorging on brain candy if it were not bad for us. We love things that are bad for usÑthere is no pleasure for the Vulture without guilt, no succor without tummyache, no lollipop without cavity. But worse, Johnson is completely wrong. He says that if video games were old and books were new, people would criticize books for contributing to isolation and passive, linear thinking. This is as ludicrous as saying that if boats came before oceans, people would think the boats were unnecessary, because without books there would be no literacy, without literacy there would be no Industrial Revolution, and with no Industrial Revolution there would be no cheap, mass-produced shoes, ketchup and automobiles, let alone video game systems and semiconductors and other gizmos floating about their innards. The moment Johnson started talking about a world with video games but no books, his agent should have slapped him and spared us this McLuhan-esque wanking. Or if he thinks video games are so healthy and worthwhile and instructive, he should have written one instead of a book
Steven Johnson
Why Email is Trash
Technology turns ornate expression into plain code. Consider the email, once the proper paper letter’s younger electronic brother. Long ago, email began with the word “dear.” Then it was Hi, then Hey, and then no salutation at all, just a name and a comma and away we go, mash a few of the old formulas together, like “checking in,” “let me know,” “by the way,” “see you soon,” “thanks for the heads up,” “thanks much,” “hope all’s well,” “regards,” and worst of all, “best.” These syntactic units are as boring as road signs, all meaning and no voice, which would be fine, were it not so exhausting to pound out a continuous stream of this pabulum for nine hours a day. Deep inside each of our hearts lives a sad dolphin, a dolphin who desperately wants the world to hear his unique squeaks and chirps but can’t, because he has too many emails to write and not enough time in which to write them, so his little squeaker gets all worn out. To make peace with your inner dolphin, the Vulture recommends Basecamp, which is a project-wide, password-protected blog where you can post deadlines, to-dos, and individual task lists along with the usual message board chatter. Best of all, it’s free! Also of note is MIT’s RadioActive project, which is an experimental system for mapping live person-to-person conversations in virtual space.
The Staple-less Stapler
How do you make your proposals stand out when everybody’s got more cotton and holograms in their stationery then a twenty-dollar bill? Answer: take out the staples. Instead of metal, this bad boy weaves a slender strip of paper through your loose leaves, for under $40. Heck, with the staples we use around here, this handy little doodad will pay for itself in a week!
Garrett Wade Look under “Home and Living”
What Makes Hollertronix so Diplolicious?
Three years ago, two skinny white boys from Philly started throwing parties in a dingy basement where, for ostensibly indie crowds, they played the sort of rump-shaking Z100 Bar Mitzvah tunes of yesteryear, mixed in with the occasional Dirty South obscurity. Today, DJs Low Budget and Diplo enjoy the regular pleasure of glossy spread-and-suck sessions by such authorities as the Fader and New York Times. What gives? One lesson we can glean from the rise of Hollertronix is the importance of good collateral – websites, flyers and the like, with crude and repetitive motifs of junk food, soft porn, early Nintendo, and, that timeless classic, clownish black men bearing guns, bare asses and bling. Be consistent, be thorough, but most importantly be obvious. Easy sells, cheesy sells, sex sells. The second lesson has been true since the time of Elvis: find a white boy with the balls to play black music and not blush, and you’ve got yourself a hit. Credit is also due to the promotion efforts of Ms. Oxy Cottontail, which would put Colonel Parker himself to shame.
Hollertronix
Revenge of the Cassette
What’s that hissing we hear? Why, it’s none other than the return of the cassette! The hardcore Wrangler Brutes issued their latest Kill Rock Stars release on cassette, and cassette only. Wolf Eyes started their own label, Hanson Records, for the sole purpose of releasing music on cassette. Compared to CDs and mp3s, cassettes are relatively inconvenient, expensive and difficult to store, so releasing music on cassette pretty much guarantees that your music will reach only those ears which actually care enough to listen. In the age of convenience, willingness to go through some hassle is what separates the true fans from the blasŽ consumers. The cassette confounds the collector by decaying. It is especially popular with lo-fi and noise groups, for which the hiss fits in well with the live ensemble. You may use the cassette or keep it pristine, but not both. Like life, it erases itself in the unspooling. It disappears into the magnetic fog of white whispers. It is indeed ephemeral, but unlike the iPod, which conceals its extreme fragility in a false cloak of deathless preservation, it’s not pretending to be something it’s not. After the cassette, you ask, what else is in line to be the next retro-techno fetish? Pagers, of course, and the sound of a skipping CD.
Wolf Eyes
But Fall & Winter Will Look Like a Roulette Wheel
By which we mean reds, blacks, reds, blacks and more blacks. These are angry colors, the colors of siege and simmer, that tend to emerge whenever the urban intelligentsia set itself against the capital – look at Moscow in 1905, Paris 1789, Shanghai 1925, New York under Reagan, London under Thatcher. At long last, the outcast Goth kids will have their season in the sun as their look goes straight from Magic the Gathering tourneys to the runway via the aisles of Hot Topic.
Goth Kids’ Favorite
This Woman Snores Like A Duck
Cleveland: The Land Where Bears Are Made Of Cardboard
Louisiana Government Loves Themselves Some Halle Berry
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