Russell Smith “hipster” citations

Document 1 of 42

It’s hip to hate a hipster – and that’s not cool

Author: Smith, Russell

Abstract:

[Daniel Riley]’s GQ hipster renunciation comes from the opposite direction, and it is a child-like explaining of the obvious. The author admits that he has "bought into a system in which part of my value ... can be measured by the restaurants where I’ve stuffed my face." This cultural knowledge, in his social circles, was as valuable as the novelists or directors you knew.

Full text:

rsmith@globeandmail.com

Hipster hatred is reaching a new boiling point. Everyone who has ever dined in a restaurant in which $13 drinks were served in mason jars has by now savoured Will Self’s funny screed in the New Statesman ("The awful cult of the talentless hipster has taken over") in which every stereotype of bearded urban life is nastily and hysterically insulted.

You may have also read a widely circulated piece in GQ last April by Daniel Riley ("I’m Only into Jean-Georges’s Early Stuff"), which described a young person’s competitive addiction to eating in cool new restaurants, as if this activity formed a kind of cultural study or research, and this naive author’s stunning realization that obsessing about food is kind of shallow.

In Self’s piece, the British author blames his generation ("he is 53) for what he calls "the miserable gallimaufry of web-headed, tiny-bike-riding, moronic poseurs" who run the supposedly most fashionable districts of the world’s greatest cities. It is our fault, he posits, that restaurants have become places crammed with farm machinery in which one must listen to the loudest trip-hop, because we, the aging Xers, are the ones who claimed "that there was no distinction between high and popular culture, and that adverts should be considered as an art form," and we were the ones who sprayed out the "slurry" that was cultural theory. Worse, we did all that from an absurdly privileged position, at a time when there were jobs in universities for jerks like us.

Riley’s GQ hipster renunciation comes from the opposite direction, and it is a child-like explaining of the obvious. The author admits that he has "bought into a system in which part of my value ... can be measured by the restaurants where I’ve stuffed my face." This cultural knowledge, in his social circles, was as valuable as the novelists or directors you knew. He claims to be not rich and to have only visited restaurants that appealed to the "cashstrapped," whatever that means in New York. "And these restaurants – with their tatted-up chefs barking orders over a Zeppelin Pandora station – acted as proxies for the culturally cool things we couldn’t afford."

This is exactly the kind of superficiality that people suspect they are going to find in young men with giant beards. It bears out the standard media-borne hipster-hating insult: shallow, fake, posing, lightweight.

Everyone who is flamboyant has always attracted this exact list of insults, from Oscar Wilde on. These are the same insults that used to be levelled against me and my pals when we dressed up as punk rockers, with our spiky hair and our straight-leg jeans.

Of course it was a pose; all fashion is a pose. I enjoy poses and I admire sartorial flamboyance. I really can’t imagine myself as someone who wants to sneer at a person who likes a different style of dress; I am not a redneck. And yet my inner eye roll when I see the 1860s miner’s beard and the rolled-up jeans and the hornrimmed glasses and the plaid shirt ... That eye roll is so convulsive it’s well on the way to being vocal. I am disgusted with myself for feeling this. People can wear whatever they want.

And why is it that so many criticisms of so-called hipster culture centre on restaurants? A stereotype has arisen: the place where each dish requires 200 words to describe, where the lamb was raised in a Montessori school, the tables are laminate or concrete ("the expensive place around the corner from me called Barnyard or Manure has a patio filled with old tractors and concrete-topped tables), the glasses are old jars, and the smallest thing costs $30. What is so annoying about these places is the contrast between their culinary aspirations, which are high indeed, and their comfort level, which is laughably low.

Young people are more than their restaurants, of course. Yes, they are their weedy folk music, and their video games, and their half-assed Buddhism, and their degrees in gender and privilege studies, and their deadly serious knowledge of celebrities. Yes, they are all that: there’s plenty to make fun of. It’s just that the only point of contact between old curmudgeons and the stylish youth happens in the restaurants where the latter work, so the restaurant concretizes, for the outsider, current aesthetic values.

But even the sneering mainstream media ("what a young person would call the MSM), are confused about what they think of hipster neighbourhoods. After all, spending a lot of money in restaurants is something that older and clean-shaven people do.

They like lots of new restaurants with locally sourced organic produce. And they sure do like to talk about real estate values, which unquestionably rise when the beards and the mandolins move in.

We were all very proud, weren’t we, when Vogue named a Canadian neighbourhood as one of the hippest in the world? ("Toronto’s Queen Street West came in at No. 2, beating counterpart neighbourhoods in Paris, New York and Berlin.) It was all over the Canadian news. It means we are sensitive and cultivated.

So what do we hate, exactly? Do we hate fine food made with local ingredients? Why can sophistication and sensitivity, generally desirable values, be so annoying?

Perhaps because we are still not so sure we want those things?

Or rather because we suspect that the purported values of the bearded waiter – especially classlessness and inclusion – are not actually in any way represented by pan-seared Northern Ontario pickerel with beet wasabi mousse at $27? Is it the strange sense that everything around us, even our sophistication, is somehow false, meaningless, a painted cardboard bulwark keeping out the real world of Putin and Ebola and the Islamic State?

Pages: R.14

Publication year: 2014

Publication date: Sep 20, 2014

Year: 2014

Section: The Globe Review

ProQuest document ID: 1563617721

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1563617721?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2014-09-20

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 3 of 42

The fault in our aesthetic pigeonholing

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

Just today, I read a blog post that’s going around by a humorist named John DeVore. It’s going around because it’s mildly funny. It’s about how much he loves Broadway musicals and how the people who disdain them are "dead inside." It says musicals are deserving of the snobs’ respect because they are honestly and unironically emotional. "Musicals don’t get respect from most people, and that’s fine. I don’t watch hockey, and that’s okay.

Full text:

Who cares if grown-ups are escaping through young-adult fiction? And who cares if someone questions the propriety of that?

rsmith@globeandmail.com

This week’s literary controversy is about an inflammatory article that appeared in Slate, dissing "YA" (young adult) fiction, in the wake of the release of the summer blockbuster movie The Fault in Our Stars , which is based on a massively successful novel of the same name.

The essay, by Ruth Graham, was titled "Against YA." It revealed that large numbers of novels marketed at teenagers are actually being consumed by adults, and criticized those adults for indulging in childlike pleasures. "The enjoyment of reading this stuff has to do with escapism, instant gratification and nostalgia," she wrote.

The response was quick, indignant, derisive and almost universal. Everybody who has ever enjoyed a science-fiction or detective novel read the piece as an attack on genre fiction generally and voiced rage at the elitism of the "literary" writers who want to take all the fun out of the world and who are trying to tell people what they should and shouldn’t enjoy. In this newspaper, Erin Anderssen penned a defence of the pleasures of teen fiction, especially when one is around teenagers, and of reading widely in general.

It’s a tough argument to address because no one, so far, has attempted a plausible definition of what YA is. It is not merely sci-fi or fantasy or romance; all those genres exist within it. If anything, Graham’s jeremiad was against a particular narrative tone rather than a genre in the conventional sense.

What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style. The only thing that unites books in this category is a certain straightforward diction. The narratives, on the whole, are chatty and explanatory. The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.

At least that’s the only consistent criterion I can make out. There are many canonical adult stories about teenagers – Romeo and Juliet being the most famous; The Catcher in the Rye a close second – that were never sold as being for teenagers. The novel Maidenhead , by Tamara Faith Berger, is about a teenage girl discovering her sexuality, and it could never be called YA, not just because it is sexually explicit, but because its language is impressionistic and unusual. It’s an artistic experiment. The artistic experiment is the opposite of YA.

The YA category is an entirely new one, and seems to have more to do with readability than with age group or theme. The adult YA readers I know do actually consistently say that they are looking for an easy read, a fun read, an unchallenging read. And they are unashamed of seeking the light and the fun, even defiant about it – populism seems to many like a non-conformist position.

This is one argument that recurs, and I think it is indicative of a larger movement among young intellectuals that privileges the demotic over the obscure. Repeatedly, the outraged fans of YA are saying: It is wrong to tell me what I should and shouldn’t enjoy. There is nothing wrong with enjoyment.

Increasingly, to dismiss any popular artistic style is seen as the worst kind of snobbery. And snobbery, it goes without saying, is unacceptable in a diverse and democratic world.

This stance was best articulated in Carl Wilson’s brilliant examination of the nature of aesthetic snobbery, Let’s Talk About Love , a book about trying to like the music of Celine Dion. Wilson begins by confirming that a complete openness to every genre is seen, among pop-music culturati, as a necessary condition for any criticism; that a highly eclectic taste is seen as the mark of the sophisticated and fashionable person.

This is part of the tenor of the times, and it is not without its unease. It makes some critics distinctly nervous. The determined appreciation for the commercial and formulaic is one step away from insisting that every cultural product has equal value.

I see this insistence on kindness and openness as part of broader ideological positions: It is a part of the same youth culture that demands highly sensitive language to describe gender choices and wants trigger warnings on upsetting poems and reacts indignantly when told that teenage girls might ever be wrong about anything. It’s a culture of inclusion.

I mention this piece of ephemera because it’s so typical, such a perfect encapsulation of a philosophy of aesthetic judgment that is so current it can only be called hipster. "Love what you love," he writes. "This is a truth you can only read on a non-ad-supported Internet digital web blog platform. I’m not selling anything."

Here you have all the vectors of hipster judgment converging: the proud embrace of kitsch; the plea for universal acceptance of every emotional expression; the vow of non-capitalist authenticity; and a vague sense of non-conformism or rebelliousness. (It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, pervasive ironic self-deprecation being another part of the ethos.)

Sure, love what you love, of course. But please don’t try to argue that criticism of what you love can only be motivated by some sort of classist snobbery, or that any criticism that relies on aesthetic judgment is in some way elitist.

The defenders of YA are willfully, I think, ignoring some important points. It is not ridiculous to point out that the primary appeal of this literature lies in its artistic conservatism. That seems like a legitimate troubling point to me. Nor is it mean or small-minded to criticize art, for as long as there has been art, there has been criticism.

Credit: SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Pages: L.2

Publication year: 2014

Publication date: Jun 13, 2014

Year: 2014

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 1535198558

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1535198558?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2014-06-13

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 4 of 42

THE ARTIST IS CONFUSED

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

LaBeouf was a teenage star like Justin Bieber. The recent aggressions and erratic behaviour of both men have been called "meltdowns"; only LaBeouf has had the shrewdness to call his art. LaBeouf did, it must be said, look a little rough – underslept, maybe – at that press conference.

Full text:

Shia LaBeouf says his recent bizarre behaviour is performance art. Russell Smith thinks it’s more complicated than that

A sketch in the TV comedy series Portlandia shows a nightmarish hipster city in which every single action is called an "art project" by its participants – even the traffic cop waving his arms says he is "showing the juxtaposition of motion and stillness in a shared public space." The purse snatcher asks earnestly, "How do we see personal property?"

That such simple-minded artists’ concepts have become so common and so predictable has made them a subject of parody for television. The dreary language of the second-rate art students who come up with these things, their deadly serious determination to say the obvious again and again, is especially familiar.

This makes it difficult, one would think, to seriously come up with new public performance-art projects and not feel as if one was participating in some kind of giant parody.

Self-consciousness is the way around it, of course: to claim an ironic distance, to acknowledge the parodic aspect of all that is derivative, to claim that one is satirizing art itself. If one has no original idea, one can always make an art piece positing the impossibility of originality in a cut-and-paste world.

Indeed, the ubiquity of influence is a serious inspiration for a lot of experimental art practices. Vast teams of avant-gardist poets are all about found or copied words; novelists write coherent essays made up entirely of other people’s sentences. Music is made entirely from samples. The thing is, those artists are trying to make something powerful and serious out of our surrounding flotsam. An artist who sets out to make a parody of really stupid art by just copying really stupid art, well ... that artist might succeed in making some seriously stupid art.

As the New York poet Kenneth Goldsmith wrote in an essay last year, the pursuit of dumb – the purely dumb, the purely meaningless – has driven some of the world’s most intellectual artists for a century. In the incisive words of David St. Hubbins, front man of Spinal Tap, "It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever."

On what side of the line is Shia LaBeouf?

The actor has been doing a lot of strange things lately and claiming, à la Portlandia , that it is all an "art project." The themes of this project are numbingly familiar: originality, reference, celebrity. First he got into trouble for plagiarizing a short story for a film he made. He apologized abjectly for that. Then he went a bit overboard on the apologies and it turned out all his apologies were plagiarized.

This is when people first started thinking he might be attempting some kind of intellectual performance. He confirmed that with a series of inarticulate tweets about performance art and celebrity that used such grand phrases as "meta-modernity." Then The Hollywood Reporter reported that they had heard from four Los Angeles art galleries who had received a proposal from LaBeouf for an art installation.

The show would be titled #IAMSORRY and would involve a performer – possibly the actor himself – sitting in a gallery with a paper bag on his head, emblazoned with the phrase "I am not famous any more." (LaBeouf did appear at the Berlin Film Festival on Sunday wearing this bag.) Visitors would have a choice of implements, including a whip, a pair of pliers, a bottle of whisky, some chocolates and pieces of paper with nasty Twitter comments on them. Each visitor may take one object, then use it in any way he or she chooses on the artist. The piece has so far not been performed.

This idea is of course itself a copy of a very famous performance done by Marina Abramovic in 1974. (And Yoko Ono had done something similar, in her Cut Piece of 1964.) So is it designed to be another comment on originality? What if it isn’t – what if LaBeouf doesn’t even know about the Abramovic piece? Does that make it a clever plagiarism or just ... stupid?

LaBeouf’s next piece of reappropriation happened just last week, at a press conference for the screening of Nymphomaniac .

In answer to the first question of him, he quoted a famous line from another celebrity press conference. He said, "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea." Then he left dramatically, like a teenager deciding to ruin the prom.

When the impetuous French footballer éric Cantona said the same thing to the press in 1995, he was thought to be referring to his fame and the press’s appetite for gossip. So it fits LaBeouf’s current disgust with his own fame.

There are other parallels between Cantona and LaBeouf: Both are brawlers. Cantona was notorious for losing his temper and punching people out (in fact it was after an assault conviction that he made his famous statement).

LaBeouf has been accused of fighting twice at the same London pub. Cantona also went on to become an actor.

I think he is going through a lot more than an art project. But even unhealthy and excessive living has been an art project for some: British dandy Sebastian Horsley convincingly made his own fatal self-destruction a work of art, for example.

Is there anything interesting about any of this? Yes: It’s an indictment not of contemporary celebrities but of contemporary art itself. It’s the fault of all the bad MFAs that we have to live through all this pretense right now. It’s their cliches – and their nihilism – that are being shown to be deeply entrenched, familiar and ripe for mindless imitation.

If there’s anything artists can learn from Shia LaBeouf, it’s to stop giving him such terrible role models.

Credit: SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Pages: L.1

Publication year: 2014

Publication date: Feb 13, 2014

Year: 2014

Section: The Globe Review

ProQuest document ID: 1497358998

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1497358998?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2014-02-13

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 5 of 42

The rise of the big night out, the fall of indie-rock and the pervasiveness of EDM

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

The underground has gone mainstream" – that’s how you’ll hear this shift described in a lot of magazines. But that’s not exactly what has happened. It is true that some of the jangling elements of techno and electro – buzzsaw sounds, harsh percussion, wailing – have made it into the slick and booming pop music that makes up most of the big clubs’ playlists. Massively successful DJs such as Deadmau5 do throw techno tracks into the mix.

Full text:

rsmith@globeandmail.com

One of the most dramatic cultural developments of the past year has been the explosion, among young people, in the popularity of clubbing; that is, dancing in fancy places with an overwhelming sound and light show, to prerecorded music mixed by DJs, and in the pervasive presence of illegal stimulants. It surprised everybody, as the days of rave had long been known to be over. This has been replacing, across North America in particular, the live indie-rock shows and heartfelt folkie crooning that so dominated youth culture and the media imagination in the first decade of the century. People with beards and banjos, as you can imagine, hate it.

The trend is usually called "the rise of EDM" (electronic dance music) in newspapers, but the epithet is vague and inaccurate: The trend is about a certain kind of night out rather than a strict style of music, and the EDM tag has already started to connote a conventionally luxurious and expensive kind of space (what we tech-heads call "big-room" culture) rather than the matte-black, DIY spaces formerly associated with house and techno music. (In very large dance clubs, there are often several stages; the smallest is the one devoted to the underground music; the big room is where the spotlit go-go dancers and frat boys are.)

This sudden ascendancy has been both a cultural and economic event, generating massive new companies and income streams. Back in February the giant – and growing – entertainment company SFX bought the online DJ music emporium Beatport for $50-million. SFX already owns a number of dance event promoters and music festivals, and has been accused of making the clubbing experience generally more homogeneous and mainstream. Just before that, the music-identification software Shazam partnered with Beatport to have access to its entire catalogue, meaning that if you hold up your phone in a nightclub you have a good chance of discovering the name of the track and composer of every sound you hear. (This in itself destroys the mystique of the DJ as studio/club insider with his milk-crate full of rare white-label records, and opens a much more educated conversation about what exactly those knob-twiddling wizards are doing up there.)

A fascinating article in The New Yorker in September, by Josh Eells, described the life of top club DJs in Las Vegas, where stars can be paid millions a year to play exclusively in one club and more than $300,000 for a single night’s spinning. The article claimed, astoundingly, that the giant hotel complexes of Vegas are now able to earn more money by selling overpriced drinks in these dance complexes than they can from conventional shows and even, in some cases, from their casinos.

"The underground has gone mainstream" – that’s how you’ll hear this shift described in a lot of magazines. But that’s not exactly what has happened. It is true that some of the jangling elements of techno and electro – buzzsaw sounds, harsh percussion, wailing – have made it into the slick and booming pop music that makes up most of the big clubs’ playlists. Massively successful DJs such as Deadmau5 do throw techno tracks into the mix. But big-room EDM still has a lot of vocals in it. It has almost, but not quite, abandoned the worn paradigm of the song.

The rising success of bottle-service clubs, and their old-fashioned gender roles (girls in tight, strappy dresses, muscular boys with hair gel) has outraged clubbers who were around in the nineties, who remember the fierce androgyny of rave outfits (everybody in baggy pants) and the peaceful, non-predatory vibe that came from a room in which ecstasy was widely distributed. Or they remember rooms that were entirely gay, as early house clubs were.

There have been points of fiery friction between the two aesthetics. There have been a number of widely-reported incidents in the expensive clubs of Miami and Las Vegas, where very highly respected – and highly paid – DJs have been booted off the stage because of complaints by high-rolling patrons. What happens is this: The guys entertaining ladies with $650 bottles of Grey Goose, thinking it’s just another club employee up there, get bored with the hypnotizing rhythms and demand their favourite hip-hop or pop songs, as they are used to doing. DJ refuses, high rollers complain to management, manager bows to power of cash and switches famous DJ off. It has happened a half-dozen times this year, usually documented in camera video instantly posted to YouTube, and often entails intemperate attacks on the crowd by the DJ over the PA system. A day or two of traded Twitter insults follow.

Indeed, there have been plenty of flame wars in the wake of EDM’s wide popularity: It is common now for DJs of the various schools to take to Twitter to condemn each other for being sellouts or fakes – "not a real DJ" is the slur that follows the big-room stars because they just play a lot of hit songs and don’t improvise with their knobs and faders much.

The days of peace and love are over. One may wonder why such an abrasive sound – and an abrasive culture – are so popular. My theory is that hipster music – the gentle sound of a young white man singing about love and alienation with a band dressed like farm workers – was just too wimpy to excite hormone-fuelled teenagers for too long. People are finally getting tired of songs; songs are a fixed form in music, and fixed forms are limiting. The industrial pounding of a big drum and a lot of scratchy, wailing synths does for young people what heavy metal used to. It’s big and mean and dark and that’s sexy. When you’re 22, sensitivity is just not what you want from a big night out.

Pages: L.5

Publication year: 2013

Publication date: Dec 27, 2013

Year: 2013

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 1470886038

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1470886038?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2013-12-27

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Document 6 of 42

The hip turn on the proto-hipster

Author: Smith, Russell

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Eggers’s premodern potboiler has been bombarded with criticism on all sides, but the real letdown is that it tries too hard to please

rsmith@globeandmail.com

In the first New York Times review of Dave Eggers’s first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , in February, 2000, the word hip was used. Also slacker, self-conscious, post-modern and David Foster Wallace. This was long before hip became such a puzzlingly ambivalent word, before the word hipster came into common parlance as such a fraught dividing line, a tension-sparking insult that invariably leads to the people being so described denouncing the very existence of such a type. It was before hipster meant a certain sartorial style and a kind of bicycle.

But looking back one has to admit, Eggers was a kind of proto-hipster – the ur-hipster, even. I remember that time, when the book came out, and the kind of person who grew instantly enthusiastic about it: They were the clever kids who were also unafraid of popular culture; they had an unabashed fascination with the United States; they used the Internet with ease and they were concerned about the environment. They went on to run magazines. In subsequent years, Eggers became a hero to them – and to the rest of the literary world as well – for his many creative projects that included art, idealistic philanthropy, activism and a literary publishing house and magazine that were both intellectual and quirky. These things made him enviable to the kind of educated person who was on the cutting edge of social trends and technology.

Exactly the same kind of people, in other words, who are lining up to pillory him now.

Eggers has just released a novel, a big blockbuster potboiler of a novel, a dystopian science-fiction story about an evil Internet empire that controls all social media and is going to control all of its users by extinguishing every last remnant of privacy. The book is called The Circle . Even before it appeared in physical form on shelves it was provoking caustic response from people who are presumably feeling themselves targeted by its satire: tech experts and people who spend their lives on the Internet. An opinion writer for Reuters castigated him for "getting Silicon Valley wrong," others who have worked for tech giants have made ploddingly literal-minded catalogues of Eggers’s fictional inventions that couldn’t be real.

Gawker, spurred into ecstatic disdain by the praise of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, then let him have it with both barrels, calling the book "pulpy" and "naive" and repeating claims that Eggers just doesn’t "get" Silicon Valley, and also – most damning of all – doesn’t even regularly use Twitter himself. Then suddenly the fact that Eggers doesn’t use Twitter and admitted in an e-mail that he had done no research on any actual technology companies – the arrogance, for a novelist, to make things up! – became the big story and the Internet attacks became all about him rather than about his novel.

And then the inevitable comparison to Jonathan Franzen occurs. Franzen, another middle-aged male American novelist – he is 54, Eggers 43 – also incurred the wrath of the tweeting classes just a few weeks ago with a book excerpt he published in The Guardian that denounced a lot of the contemporary world, including its penchant for brief and instant communication.

Franzen is no stranger to this kind of loathing, having attacked mass culture and Twitter long before; he is easily assigned the role of aging conservative, defender of some kind of ancien regime , white privilege, maleness, whatever. But it comes as some surprise, to me at least, that Eggers suddenly finds himself in this category as well. Where are all the fair-trade, gluten-free San Francisco Eggerites, fans of McSweeney’s and The Believer, going to fall on this?

One by one, the kind of writer one might have expected to revere Eggers is appearing before the people’s tribunals to denounce him. A brazen essay appeared this week in the Canadian online magazine Hazlitt, written by a technology writer, formerly of Wired, named Tim Carmody. Titled, simply enough, "This Isn’t Franzen’s World Anymore," it makes the stark and startling argument that fiction itself is simply inadequate these days in any effort to describe the world, and that (I guess) it is only non-fiction, written by technical experts, that can have any moral authority.

His examples of the failings of the novel are Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers – who are presented as being basically the same man, and representatives of all fiction, for having both written criticism of new means of communication (in which of course Tim Carmody is a specialist).

Neither Franzen nor Eggers, he argues, have any authority to write about technologies that they themselves are not fully immersed in, and this failing is not just theirs, but one of the novel itself. That’s right, the novel; the art form. "The real issue, it seems, is the declining moral and critical standing of the novelist," writes Carmody. "... The gap today is really between people who still want to assign literary novelists that role [of being central to cultural discourse] and people for whom only nonfiction will do the job." It’s pretty clear which kind of writing Carmody himself would choose. Enough with the fanciful tales, back to facts and figures!

In all of this lining up on predictable sides, the novel itself is being lost. And honestly, it is not worth all this debate. The Circle is a very conventional sci-fi novel about an apparently benign corporation that promises social reform and equality and secretly wants to take your freedom away. The book warns that a lack of privacy can lead to political control, a fact that has already occurred to even the most devoted Facebook user. It is pulp fiction. Its protagonist is ludicrously gullible, as are most of the inhabitants of the planet. Its antecedents are the most famous of dystopian fictions, from 1984 to Logan’s Run . Its biggest plot secret – the identity of a mysterious stranger, revealed toward the end – is obvious.

What surprises me most about it is the conventionality of its style. It contains no postmodern self-referential cleverness, not even any of the compression and elision that marks so much contemporary fiction. It’s past-tense, third person, with a garrulous narrator who doesn’t mind stepping in for a little exposition now and then.

Why is it that futuristic fiction, informed by the most contemporary of discussions about the most recent of social trends, is usually so formally old-fashioned? These novels – from Ray Bradbury to William Gibson – are in structure and delivery not postmodern or even modern; they are premodern. This is generally, in fact, how we distinguish between genre and literary fiction: genre is wild in its imaginings, stodgy in its style; literary is stodgy in its imaginings, wild in its style. It is rare to see a collision of innovative social thinking and innovative technique. All this should, I think, be more worthy of discussion than what Eggers said to a reporter in an e-mail or how old he is.

It undermines comparisons with Franzen as well. Franzen is a more adventurous stylist – a prettier sentence-maker, frankly – and a more subtle and nuanced storyteller. And his novels are not apocalyptic. Believe it or not, these are two different guys, not representatives of some kind of aging and tyrannical dictatorship, like the generals of the First World War. I wonder if Eggers was just trying too hard to be relevant, cutting edge, too. To please, perhaps, the tech writers at Wired. I wonder if he might not have come up with something more powerful had he stuck to smaller and more personal stories. If he had tried not to have had any consciousness at all of the terribly fickle and vindictively shifting tides of fashion.

***********

Revision date: Tuesday, October 15, 2013

CORRECTION: Tim Carmody is a literary critic, not a technology writer as stated in a column in Life & Arts on Monday.

Pages: L.5

Publication year: 2013

Publication date: Oct 14, 2013

Year: 2013

Section: The Globe Review

ProQuest document ID: 1441643007

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1441643007?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2013-10-15

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Document 7 of 42

Poet works to ‘dumb’ down conceptual writing

Author: Smith, Russell

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There’s nothing like conceptual art to make you feel "dumb." That’s the art that takes longer to read about than to witness; the art that takes up less emotional and sometimes physical space than its explanation does; the art whose primary power comes from its conception rather than from its existence. It often exists merely as a set of instructions, or as a one-off performance or a temporary installation. It’s not meant to be something you can buy, although collectors do their best to undermine this precept.

In visual art, it began with the exhibiting of found objects – usually mass-produced objects – at the beginning of the 20th century. It has always been associated with text, as the writing about it could be said to constitute the art itself. In literature, it often takes the form of experiments with found text from old newspapers or recordings. A movement in poetry, called flarf, uses search engines to put together amusing collages of phrases found on the Internet.

The guru of English-language conceptual poetry right now is a New Yorker named Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and theorist who has edited a couple of major anthologies of what he likes to call "uncreative" work. The title of one of the anthologies he co-edited – Against Expression – pithily summarizes his radical approach. He frequently links his practices with those of the great conceptual artists from the world of gallery art who preceded him in the sixties and seventies. He is currently the poet laureate of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and just recently arranged performances there – sealing the affinity between this kind of thinking and art gallery spaces.

He entertained the non-academic masses recently with an essay, published on the website The Awl, on the connection between conceptual writing and – his words – "deliberate dumbness." His idea of what is dumb will make your head swirl with its clever paradoxes and inversions. It’s a Mobius strip of thinking. Anyone who writes a manifesto in favour of stupidity – especially someone who usually writes with ease about art history and detournement and Bourdieu – is obviously very carefully clever, and this disingenuousness may make you lose heart in all further investigation of this matter.

In his "dumb" essay, Goldsmith’s argues that conceptual practices such as his use of found texts (banal newspaper articles, phone books, daily conversations) as the material of literature – practices usually thought of as erudite and recherché, the products of elite university education – are actually just "dumb." He lists his "smart dumb" heroes: "Smart dumb is The Fugs, punk rock, art schools, Gertrude Stein, Vito Acconci, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, Seth Price, Tao Lin, Martin Margiela, Mike Kelley, and Sofia Coppola. Smart dumb plays at being dumb dumb, but knows better."

I get the connections between artists he’s making here – they all have a certain detachment from the obviously esthetic – but still am not sure what he means by dumb.

He opposes purely conceptual gestures to clever ironic practices (the hipster variant of smart dumb – "McSweeney’s, Miranda July, Ira Glass, David Byrne" – which he doesn’t like), and to "smart smart," the complex, overtly intellectual practices of people such as Christian Bok (which he does like). But he is dissatisfied with the merely smart: "Smart is always looking over its shoulder. Success or failure, win or lose, smart trades in binaries. Smart is exhausting – and exhausted." This is why dumb (purely conceptual) art is the best reflection of contemporary society. "I want to live in a world where the smartest thing you can do is the dumbest," he writes. "I want to live in a world where a fluorescent tube leaned up against a wall is worth a million dollars."

Well, he should be happy then, as that’s already the world.

Some of Goldsmith’s work is on display at the large show of conceptual "writing art" on display at The Power Plant gallery in Toronto until Sept. 2. The show is mostly work from the visual realm – artists who happen to work with printed letters – with only a couple of poets. On the whole, it’s an art show, not a poetry show, a collection of large-scale graphics meant for wall display. The works are mostly cryptic, so of course visitors turn to the tiny squares of explanatory text next to each piece, reading them closely to see the idea behind the piece. Then, once the viewers "get" it, they give a second quick glance at the large piece of mostly blank paper on display, and move on the the next small square of text.

Goldsmith has covered two vast walls with the written transcript of every word he uttered over one week; it is visually striking, a cathedral of text, but impossible to actually read in this disposition. Here is his argument about the dumb – the unaltered, unedited, unfiltered streams of words that we are daily exposed to, but reframed, seen in a new and strange light – perfectly represented.

Some of the other artists’ work is visually arresting, too, such as Derek Beaulieu’s representation of the Calgary Herald as blocks of colour instead of text. A lot of the rest of the work reaches such stupefying depths of boredom and aridity that I really don’t know if Goldsmith would call it overly smart (not a good thing), hipster smart dumb (a bad thing) or genuinely smart dumb (the apex of the progressive and liberating). An example: The artist Jen Bervin has reproduced, as embroidered textile, some of Emily Dickinson’s handwritten manuscript pages, except she has eliminated all the words, leaving only punctuation and editing marks such as dashes. The result is so deeply uninteresting it might just qualify as perfectly dumb dumb.

See? It is extremely difficult to argue convincingly that conceptual art – even that which is, in Goldsmith’s words, uncreative or against expression, art that reappropriates, recycles and bores – is a deliberate dumbness when it is presented in white-walled galleries with pages of dense text to explain it. It comes across as the smartest of the smart smart, the product not of popular culture and the Internet but of universities, and as a result is not as much revolutionary, popular, subversive or futurist as good for you. Like any lecture.

Pages: L.5

Publication year: 2013

Publication date: Aug 8, 2013

Year: 2013

Section: Globe Life Column

ProQuest document ID: 1418360067

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1418360067?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2013-08-08

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 8 of 42

The case against chequebook journalism

Author: Smith, Russell

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In a downtown Toronto park last weekend, a couple of young entrepreneurs were selling T-shirts saying, "Rob Ford Smokes Crack," for $15 a pop. They claimed all proceeds would go to Gawker’s Indiegogo crowd-sourcing campaign to buy the infamous video. I am suspicious of their altruism – how does one actually follow the money, after they pack up their blanket? – but still fascinated to see a whole new cottage industry piggybacking on another entirely new kind of industry, all sprouting from one drug dealer’s own entrepreneurial endeavour.

Crowd-sourcing to buy a news story is new; buying news stories isn’t. We’ve known about – and condemned – chequebook journalism since the American yellow presses of the 1890s. Its apotheosis has been the recent crisis in Britain over tabloid presses and their practice of paying all possible sources, including police ones, for salacious or sensational information, no matter how it was obtained. That led to a national expression of revulsion against the press, and several criminal charges.

The Toronto Star has been denying that it would ever pay for such a document, in old-fashioned journalistic reasoning, whereas the gossip-oriented Gawker has gleefully rejected all such qualms. So does every hipster I know. It seems like a totally obsolete debate now. The tape will get out somehow; someone will make money on it (at least for a few hours, before it is copied and everywhere); even the pious Toronto Star will end up linking to it. If the technology is there to raise the money, it will be used. What can one do? Lamenting that people will do whatever they can to obtain shocking information is like lamenting progress itself.

But what makes a crowd-sourced blackmail tape different from a corporate-paid one? Does the existence of the technology eliminate ethical questions? Here is another example of the strange contemporary belief that because technology enables us to do something, we must do it – indeed, that we are utterly powerless against doing it. Anyone in literate circles these days who raises skepticism of any technology-driven cultural tendency is branded a Luddite and a reactionary.

This is particularly true when the cause is embraced by those who see themselves as ideologically progressive. In my left-wing Toronto park, where Mayor Ford is widely despised, supporting an ethically dubious journalistic practice is seen as simple community activism, a form of political action.

Indeed, on Tuesday even a Toronto Star columnist issued a public plea to her editors to get over their prudish scruples and just buy the thing. "There are times, rare instances, where the end justifies the means," Rosie diManno wrote. "... Ethics shmethics, boss."

So anyone against paying sources for information now sounds like a hopeless fuddy-duddy. But just for the record, here are the conventional arguments against paying tipsters: It taints the credibility of the information provided, because it calls into question the motivation of the seller; and it taints the credibility of the news organization that pays, because its relationship with the source is no longer objective and critical. A good summary of the argument is provided by the U.S.-based Society For Professional Journalists, whose position on buying stories remains unchanged. The SPJ says, "[Readers] can’t be blamed for wondering whether the source is telling the outlet the truth, telling the outlet what it wants to hear or embellishing the truth to increase the value of the information." It adds, "Once a media outlet has paid for information, it is less likely to continue to search for the details of the story for fear it might uncover conflicting information."

This may not be true in the specific instance of the Ford video. But what will be the long-term effect of abandoning these principles – not just for this case but for news-gathering in general? Well, we’ve seen exactly where widespread source-buying leads: It leads to ruthless competition among privacy-invading freelance paparazzi; it leads to even more unscrupulous competition among private investigators to acquire personal information from the phones and computers of public figures; it leads, in short, directly to the Leveson Inquiry, the judicial inquiry into British media ethics and practices after the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

What it encourages is a culture of bounty hunters. And in the new world of stealable digital information and easy broadcasting, it may well reveal, to the next generation, the possible commercial value of cyberbullying.

We need to remove our emotional distaste for an incompetent mayor from this larger ethical decision.

Pages: L.5

Publication year: 2013

Publication date: May 23, 2013

Year: 2013

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 1353975603

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1353975603?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2013-05-23

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 9 of 42

Once a cliché of blandness, now a cliché of weirdness

Author: Smith, Russell

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Here’s a trivia question every nerd will be able to answer: What song won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1959? If you answered Sing Little Birdie in a bad Chinese accent, you are officially a social embarrassment, since you must be a Monty Python fan. You only know the answer to the question because you know the skit in which four famous Communists (Marx, Che, Lenin and Mao) are forced to appear on a British quiz show, competing for a lounge suite. (Marx is baffled by a football question; Mao gets the Eurovision one.)

Even at the time of that skit, the early seventies, the Eurovision contest was a cultural joke: It symbolized the blandest of pop, the lightest of entertainments, the worst insult to the seriousness of the great revolutionaries. Created in 1956 as a unity-building diversion for Western Europe at the height of the Cold War, it was easy to laugh at in the age of rock ’n’ roll and counterculture. And if you listen to Sing Little Birdie , a children’s song by Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson, you will feel how desperately the world must have craved rock ’n’ roll in 1959. (By the way, pace Python, the song actually came second, not first.)

The contest has been culturally irrelevant ever since, seen by music critics as a showcase for bubblegum and tourism commercials. Its most famous success story is ABBA (the 1974 winners).Why, then, is it still going, a massive annual televised event (airing this year from Malmo, Sweden, starting on May 14)?

See, if it wasn’t for Eurovision, you wouldn’t have seen, this week, in your social media feed, the strangest rock video of the year – possibly of your life. It’s a performance by an Estonian punk band called Winny Puhh, broadcast on Estonian television as part of their national contest to select their representative at Eurovision. Winny Puhh’s performance reminds one, finally, of how much fun pop music can be if it doesn’t cling slavishly to the soul-singing diva style that is worshipped by American televised talent competitions.

Winny Puhh is very silly. It’s a bunch of muscular guys wearing spandex wrestling shorts and hairy monster masks. The lead screamer has what appears to be a dead fox hanging from his microphone stand. There are two drummers suspended from the ceiling on a spinning, upside-down platform. The instruments strummed include a banjo and some sort of gourd-shaped double-bass. The Wookiee-headed front man has a favourite sound to emit: It’s a kind of yappy dog bark. The video is edited so as to provoke seizures, like a strobe light. At the end of their performance, three of the musicians are yanked upside-down by ropes attached to one foot, and dangle there like writhing sides of beef. You may not like this work of art, as music, but you have to admit its aesthetic is invigorating.

Okay, so Winny Puhh is just a novelty act, and there have been funny guys doing novelty songs on mainstream pop-music TV shows since an arm-flapping Steve Wahrer sang Surfin’ Bird on American Bandstand in 1963. Winny Puhh had little chance of winning Eurovision. (In fact, it did not even qualify to represent Estonia: The official entrant is Birgit Oigemeel, a pretty girl singing a soulful ballad with orchestral accompaniment, American Idol style. She has no chance of winning either, as she is stone boring.) But novelty acts have been getting further and further up the Eurovision finalists’ ladder in recent years. Last year a group of folk-singing grannies in traditional Russian costume made it to the final without any conventional pop sound. In 2006, the contest was won by a Finnish metal band in elaborate monster costumes. Generally acts have been growing more theatrical, with futuristic costumes and dance troupes. It’s actually becoming hard to predict what will impress the increasingly diverse European population.

So now the contest is a joke for different reasons – not as a cliché of blandness but as a cliché of weirdness. And it’s one of the few remaining bastions of earnest weirdness untinged by irony. The finalists are never hipsters making fun of the whole pop-music thing. Now that it is broadcast over the Internet as well, its audience only grows. And how else would you know about the newest Estonian punk?

Pages: L.5

Publication year: 2013

Publication date: Apr 4, 2013

Year: 2013

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 1323204133

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1323204133?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2013-04-04

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 10 of 42

A perfect app for the time-pressed narcissist

Author: Smith, Russell

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It is probably just a coincidence that the title of [Cesar Kuriyama]’s app includes a grammatical error – it should read "every day" (daily), not "everyday" (ordinary). Or maybe that’s deliberate and clever. "For two years now," says Kuriyama, in his promotional video for the app," I’ve been recording one second every day, so I’ll never forget a day ever again." Why would one want to not forget a day?

Full text:

rsmith@globeandmail.com

A new iPhone app helps you make the most modern form of public diary: It’s called One Second Everyday and it prompts you to shoot one second of video, of whatever you are doing, once a day. The program then strings the days – the seconds – together into a movie. The results are hyper-jumpy, cryptic life stories, with no more than one or two words of dialogue possible in any given scene.

It was the idea of a young American called Cesar Kuriyama, a former advertising guy who now gives TED talks and other clever Internetty things. Kuriyama made a similar film from one year in his own life: It’s an extremely watchable six-minute sequence (it’s up on Youtube, called One Second Everyday – Age 30 ). The film garnered him a lot of media attention – CNN and the BBC both picked it up – only partly because of the unusual one-second-per-edit device. It has fascinated us also because Kuriyama’s life, as presented in these flickering snippets, is so very attractive: He wasn’t working when he made the film, so his existence is, from the look of things, everyone’s fantasy of travel and socializing. He goes to a lot of restaurants and public events, and also has a lot of time to spend reading in parks. He appears to have no daily drudgery. It’s an ideal hipster life.

Actually the story, such as it is, does takes one dark turn with about 60 seconds (that is to say, 60 days) mostly spent in a hospital beside the bed of someone in intensive care (it turns out it’s his sister-in-law). She is clearly extremely ill, but by the end of the montage, she appears to be getting better.

Kuriyama has said in interviews the process helps to analyze what is good about his life, and how to live the best life possible. This semi-therapeutic, semi-conceptual approach actually comes from an earlier, 20th century tradition of artmaking. Documenting one’s daily existence, no matter how banal the results, was a staple of conceptual art from the 1960s on. Its practitioners include the great On Kawara, who has been painting a picture of each day’s date, in white letters on a black background, since 1966. When the Internet and webcams came along, these self-immortalizing records became easy to create, and the practice of ritual daily documenting moved from the domain of the intellectual to that of the banal and the prurient.

It is probably just a coincidence that the title of Kuriyama’s app includes a grammatical error – it should read "every day" (daily), not "everyday" (ordinary). Or maybe that’s deliberate and clever. "For two years now," says Kuriyama, in his promotional video for the app," I’ve been recording one second every day, so I’ll never forget a day ever again." Why would one want to not forget a day? Perhaps one might want to forget the day waiting in a doctor’s office, or at the Cleveland airport.

That was the thing about the previous tradition of self-documenting, particularly in video: the sheer length of the artifacts. Static shots, emptiness, repetition were key. It was very much about all the drudgery that’s missing from Kuriyama’s privileged life. Watching them was an exercise in endurance and introspection.

Now we’re seeing the video equivalent of the tweet. One second of film, it turns out, is all it takes to convey a mood; 15 seconds all it takes to document the anxiety, suffering, sleeplessness and relief of seeing a family member through a life-threatening illness.

The constraint of the one-second shot is one that has been used in film art before. In the documentary film The Five Obstructions (2003), Lars von Trier presents another filmmaker – von Trier’s mentor, the senior Danish art filmmaker Jorgen Leth – with a set of obstacles to making a good film. Leth must make the same film – a version of his 1967 experimental classic, The Perfect Human – five times, each with a different set of formal rules. The first "obstruction" is that a cut must be made after each half-second (that is, that no shot be longer than 12 frames). The result is a kaleidoscopic dance and music piece – like all the obstructions, it only makes the obstructed film more lively.

That’s why I think this app could make all of our lives look more exciting than they are – it’s the perfect vehicle for public narcissism in the age of brevity.

Pages: L.4

Publication year: 2013

Publication date: Jan 17, 2013

Year: 2013

Section: Globe Life Column

ProQuest document ID: 1270029467

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1270029467?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2013-01-17

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 11 of 42

The enduring appeal of the cruel review

Author: Smith, Russell

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Agastropub in San Diego – with the impeccable hipster name of Craft and Commerce – has taken to broadcasting bad reviews of its food in its washrooms. According to Restaurant Hospitality magazine, the place was so taken by the tone of some of the critiques posted on Yelp, it turned them into pseudo-earnest audio recordings and uses them as a soundtrack in the toilets. This is a copy, of course, of the popular Internet series "Real Actors Read Yelp," a meme that shows how much fun can be had from disappointment and hostility.

Why are mean reviews so much more fun to read? Why do we settle in, smirking, to devour a review excoriating a movie we never had any intention of seeing, a restaurant in a city a thousand miles away? What is it about the wit that arises from scorn, or from condescension or from sheer rage, that makes it so much more enjoyable than even the most eloquent of praise? Clever vitriol is entertainment in itself, whereas a high-spirited recommendation is just information. It’s useful to find that a restaurant is comfortable and that the food is delicious. But how do you make that funny? Read, instead, A.A. Gill in Vanity Fair, about a restaurant you will never set foot in: "It’s a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository."

Obviously, the point of writing like this is not to draw attention to the restaurant, but to the writing, to the essay as entertainment. The restaurant is long forgotten.

That’s precisely what displeases the reviewers of reviews, the critics of critics, who argue that a gleefully bad review is just a writer showing off. To draw attention away from the cultural product under discussion, and from analysis of what it’s trying to do and its function in society and larger questions like that, is bad form.

This discussion is front and centre in the culture pages these days, again, largely because of The New York Times and a couple of recent flamethrower wails from angry critics. The biggest kerfuffle has been about a funny, trashing restaurant review of a tourist-trap restaurant in Times Square. (TV host Guy Fieri’s Guy’s American Kitchen).

Just before that was a small literary scandal in the same paper: a caustic savaging of a youngish, mid-listed (i.e. not famous) writer named Alix Ohlin. The review, by William Giraldi (himself a not-famous novelist) was about not one but two recent books by Ohlin. Her characters, Giraldi writes, are "cliché-strangled Canadians whom Ohlin flies around like kites in a waning zephyr." It gets worse from there. The stories are "insufferable schmaltz," the language betrays "an appalling lack of register." It is being called one of the worst reviews ever published in the paper. One of the two books discussed ( Inside ) went on to be shortlisted for the two biggest Canadian fiction awards, which made the review even more curious.

The review is chilling to read. But of course I am eager to read it. Wouldn’t you rather read that than another review praising contemplative sensitivity? The question that leapt out of Giraldi’s Ohlin review, though, was again, why? Who the hell is Alix Ohlin? The reviewer didn’t bother to situate the writer or her works, to tell us why we needed to pay attention to her at all – was she a bestseller, or in the running for a major award? Was she representative of some kind of school or -ism, something telling of the zeitgeist? What were we learning from the review about current literature as a whole, other than the sophisticated aesthetics of one William Giraldi? (By contrast, the review of the terrible Parisian restaurant began by explaining how popular and praised the place was among expats.)

The question has been around for as long as reviewing has: What exactly are newspaper judgments meant to do? Are they entertainment or analysis? Or useful recommendations? And in an age of democratic mass reviewing on the Internet, does the role of the educated critic need to change? It is now time to answer these questions, but they are closing the lid on my box. I will pop out again next week.

Pages: L.7

Publication year: 2012

Publication date: Dec 6, 2012

Year: 2012

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 1222222911

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/1222222911?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2012-12-06

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 12 of 42

Beards. Plaid shirts. But don’t call them hipsters any more

Author: Smith, Russell

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My somewhat gritty Toronto neighbourhood, a place of many dollar stores and two strip clubs, has seen a recent influx of young men with beards and plaid shirts. They carry guitars on very austere racing bikes. They have taken to opening art galleries in storefronts and leaving the faded name of the original business instead of a sign. There are many new bars, which is great, but conversation in them sometimes feels as if they have all been watching Portlandia – the TV comedy about sensitive downtowners in Oregon – very, very intently. I wanted to buy some coffee in a new organic food shop and I heard quite a serious pitch for a fair-trade bean that was delivered to retailers by bicycle only .

I was describing this population to a friend who said, "Have you noticed that no one uses the word "hipster" any more? It sounds so 2010."

Yes, I had noticed, and that’s why I am careful now in describing these people without resorting to any dismissive shorthand – for one thing, they themselves get so upset. You’d think very fashionable people would want to hear themselves described as fashionable, but the idea of fashionability is highly suspect among the fashionable themselves. That is to say, no respectable hipster would admit to being a hipster, even though he may adhere to an extremely strict and recognizable dress code. So walking my streets is like being at a convention of Salafist Muslims who are forbidden to use the word Islam. (I mean, it’s what I imagine that would be like.) All right then: mum’s the word!

But I understand too that the word "hipster" is no longer valid because it has become marketers’ and media code for a certain set of brand names rather than for an artistic subculture. The vegan, bearded indie-rock guy with the perpetual hat, and the word hipster, became a cliché of comedy a couple of years ago: first on the Internet, with short funny videos such as the Hipster Olympics and How To Be A Dickhead . Those satires, like Portlandia , were at least about cultural values rather than about expensive purchases.

Compare a more recent parody: the "hipster lorem ipsum" text that has circulated among designers. (Lorem ipsum is the Latin placeholder text used in graphic-design mockups.) A guy called Jason Cosper created a popular online generator of "artisanal" lorem ipsum – that is, it spews words like "chambray butcher biodiesel sustainable Tumblr" for you to use as nonsense text, in your presumably hipster-targeted website. Most of the words he has chosen as truly "hipster" are actually objects and brand names, which shows that the idea is now fully diluted. Say what you will about the artistic culture of the plaid-shirted from 2000 to 2010 (and I said lots, none of it nice), at least it was a genuinely odd aesthetic, a genuine subculture, with an unselfconscious love of childish pop culture and a curious mixing of the emotional and the archly ironic. It was new. It was not simply a certain buying pattern.

Recall the wisdom of Danny, the drug dealer in Withnail And I , set in 1969: "They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s, man." His point was: It’s over.

I remember when "hippie" was a powerful term, referring to a scary person, or at least the kind of person my dad actually felt threatened by. I, like many other children, was quite afraid of the hippies camping in the park; they were dirty and very strange. It wasn’t till around 1980 that the word became a lazy descriptor of anything vaguely soft.

The same thing happened with "yuppie" around 1990. Yuppie lifestyle magazines banned the word from their pages. No one was a yuppie any more because everybody was. And to use it was to show how out-of-date and old-fashioned you were – it was like saying pinko for left-wing or women’s lib for feminism.

The most recent one of these is "metrosexual" – remember that? When was the last time you read it in a magazine? And wasn’t it in every single article just five years ago? Suddenly there are no more metrosexuals, as there are no more hipsters, just as the sidewalks are finally full of them.

Pages: R.4

Publication year: 2012

Publication date: Mar 15, 2012

Year: 2012

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 927984707

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/927984707?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2012-03-15

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 13 of 42

Uh-oh, it’s Spaghetti-Ho: a viral perfect storm

Author: Smith, Russell

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It is difficult to talk about the latest Internet meme, or much-pastiched video, without describing it in detail or showing it, but this one has generated dozens of pages of learned discussion about the value of performance art and the new audiences it might encounter online, so I’m going to try. The film in question is an amateurish video of a student art piece that happened last spring in a small gallery in Chicago. It shows an audience of extremely young people – they look to be mostly students – crammed into a space, most of them sitting on the floor, to see a young woman (her name, it turns out, is Natacha Stolz) doing a performance that involves reciting a couple of nihilistic lines and then doing strange things with a can of SpaghettiOs. Some of the things that the woman does are deliberately shocking, and there is brief nudity, so you won’t want to watch it at work.

The piece is an homage to an artist called Carolee Schneemann, who did similar performances years ago, and even the title, Interior Semiotics, is a reference to a notorious 1975 Schneemann performance called Interior Scroll . It all seems quite familiar if you have spent time among art students. But whoever was filming it decided to focus not so much on the performance as on the audience: The camera just scans their faces as they sit there in deep and respectful focus. The piece ends with applause. The important thing about this audience is that they can be only classified as hipsters, as they seem to have all been reading the manual on this highly codified style of dress and are wearing wool tuques and heavy 1980s glasses and mustaches and odd dresses. And they are almost all white. This ends up being important to the reaction to the piece.

The story of the video is this: The artist posts the video on YouTube and it goes unnoticed there for several months, as so much underground art does. Then someone posts it to the Internet forum called 4chan, a famous repository of the nasty and mean, the video starts getting mocked and passed around, and the comments start getting hysterical and out of control.

People hate this video; they hate it passionately and viscerally. The comments around the world grow into the thousands and they include threats of rape and murder against the artist. People start posting reaction videos on YouTube, in which they sit in their bedrooms and rant about the state of modern art. This one video seems to symbolize everything that’s wrong with the kind of privileged white kid who doesn’t have to do anything in the world but go to art school. It’s not clear what people hate more – the art, or the pretentious audience looking so damn serious. People start making mashup videos of the original, editing the performance and setting it to music.

This is what qualifies it for discussion on the surprisingly intelligent website Know Your Meme, which tracks the progress of viral reiterations like these; it even has graphs showing when the spikes in views peaked, and some speculation on the reasons for the hysteria of the reactions, and a few examples of the most amusing Lolcat-style images referring to the now famous Spaghetti-Ho. An interview with the artist and another account of the debate can be found at Rhizome.org.

So now the bulk of the online discussion is about the fallout rather than the original video; it is an analysis of what kind of person would become obsessed with it and why. Many commentators agree that the outrage must have some class resentment in it, since so much of it focuses on art schools and hipsters and their clothes and poses.

The tempest also shows us something new: Performance art no longer happens in private, in those white-walled downtown loft spaces. One person has a camera, and the performance is instantly internationally accessible.

This hipster party was crashed by almost a million outsiders. It will be interesting to see if or how the conventions of this art form will change to adapt to this massive and impatient new public.

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2010

Publication date: Dec 2, 2010

Year: 2010

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 815273962

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/815273962?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-12-02

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 14 of 42

So quirky, so clever and so irritating

Author: Smith, Russell

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rsmith@globeandmail.com

My unease with hipster culture grows with every new manifestation.

I am currently twitchy about a clever and extremely popular band that only sells and performs their work – O perfect hipster conceit! – online. The band is called Pomplamoose and of course I don’t have to watch their quirky, clever, cute, pretty, twee videos if I don’t want to. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels visceral dissatisfaction and itching annoyance at hipster artistic values; let me be the spokesman for the grumpy here. And also they are perfectly representative of a perfectly contemporary aesthetic, so they must take the fall for hipsters everywhere.

Pomplamoose consists of two very talented musicians, a boy and a girl, who record music in what looks like their own apartment or house, and they do it dressed in the fanatically comfortable clothes of the hipster – the clothes that must all look like pyjamas – and they post videos of the performances on YouTube and then sell their songs from MySpace as MP3s. They are from California. Most of their songs are not theirs, however: They specialize in covers of pop songs, particularly by big stadium mainstream performers. What they do is take a massive dance tune – something by Lady Gaga or Beyoncé or Michael Jackson – and they wimpify it; they bring it down in scale till it’s a plaintive, wispy little sing-along. There is pervasive irony here: They are taking the most mainstream (that is to say, uncool) of music and translating it into another aesthetic, one that privileges the small over the big, the homey over the polished, the gentle over the aggressive.

To do this they use quaint, old-fashioned instruments such as electric organs, and children’s toy xylophones, and it’s all cute and sweet. The two of them – a couple, Jack and Nataly – are unbearably cute as well.

Often at the end of their videos there are outtakes that show the two of them joking together, or (in one particularly nauseating one) eating student food cross-legged among their instruments. "Nataly made macaroni and cheese, with onions and tomatoes" says Jack, like a clever nine-year old who knows his parents are beaming, and she replies, with her mouth full, "Now all we have left is beans." So unaffected! So down to earth! So adorable!

Of course, I’m the kind of guy who, immersed in such studied unaffectedness, only sees affectation. The pose of naturalness requires a studious adherence to a particular fashion, and a certain amount of mugging for the camera – the singer, Nataly Dawn, has perfected a wide-eyed, surprised-naïf look that she puts on every two seconds that’s about as natural as Lady Gaga herself. And there’s something about this careful hipster anti-fashion – the careful sexlessness of the girls’ short hair, the carefully cultivated beards of the boys, the jammie-wear of both – that seems like a rebuke to the elaborate staging of Gaga or Aerosmith. It’s as if they are teaching a lesson to these glammed-up stars about how much sweeter they could be, how much more sensitive, how unaffected. How much cooler. Indeed, Jack Conte has made superior statements to the press about countering "fake" music culture.

But a folk-jazz treatment of high-energy pop will always strip out that which makes the pop so much fun: Take off the brassy, buzzy, abrasive edge and you’re left with banality – in this case, a pretentious banality.

It is cruel of me to criticize this pair, because they are not trying to appeal to me – she does have a sweet voice and they make music that many people like – and I know what it is like to have somebody you have never met mock you out of the blue in print (baffling and upsetting), but the point is not really how I personally dislike their music. It’s their fixation with other people’s music – with the idea of a cover, a remix – that’s significant. This is what is so contemporary. It’s pretty much the definition of a certain kind of postmodernism: the idea that there is nothing original in art, that everything is a reference. And that every perception is filtered through a haze of mass culture, the omnipresent noise, so all art might as well be about, in some way, Beyoncé and McDonald’s. And that there is no difference between a parody and an homage, that one laughs at everything one admires anyway, that irony is so unavoidable that it is impossible to differentiate from seriousness.

There is something defeatist and basically not brave about hipster postmodernism – and this goes for the domains of visual art and literature too. If you claim to believe that there is no possibility of original art in an age of reference, you are cleverly avoiding the nauseating stress of being original. It’s too easy. And you shouldn’t believe it, either, because it’s not true. Artists in every era have faced the terrifying pressure of what has already been done, and every age has had its revolutionaries. An artistic culture so focused on pastiche as our own can start to look nihilistic.

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2010

Publication date: May 13, 2010

Year: 2010

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 276148536

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/276148536?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2011-10-27

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 15 of 42

Men and the art of motorcycle jackets

Author: Smith, Russell

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(Yes, I’ve got this one right: My apologies to movie fans for saying in a previous column that [Marlon Brando] wore a striped T-shirt in the film. It was of course his adversary, played by Lee Marvin, who wore the shirt. Silly of me – I’ve seen the film and all.)

Full text:

style@globeandmail.com

Dear Mr. Smith: What do you think of hipsters in leather biker jackets with lots of zips? Retro cool cats or fashion victims? Yes, the waist-length black motorcycle jacket with diagonal zips is back, part of a 1950s nostalgia, current among a certain kind of downtown dweller, that includes flat-top rocker haircuts, sideburns, Buddy Holly glasses and stovepipe jeans. It is also apposite to the "workwear" trend in contemporary men’s fashion. The classic design is best represented by a U.S. company called Schott, which has manufactured, from the 1940s on, a style called the Perfecto. This is the one the Ramones wore, and the one Marlon Brando is wearing in The Wild One . (Yes, I’ve got this one right: My apologies to movie fans for saying in a previous column that Brando wore a striped T-shirt in the film. It was of course his adversary, played by Lee Marvin, who wore the shirt. Silly of me – I’ve seen the film and all.) The Perfecto style – much copied by other companies – has a self-belt with a chrome buckle, cuff zippers, epaulettes (useful for attaching chrome stars or studs), a small buttoned pocket in front, two diagonal zippered pockets and a main zip that covers a doubled front closure (to stop the wind). These jackets were actually designed for motorcycle riding. Real motorcycle jackets of this kind – not just Perfectos but any other brand in this style – have reinforced elbow patches and heavy-duty zippers; ones made just for fashion will be lighter and have small-gauge zippers. These are supremely practical jackets: The leather is heavy enough to stop rain yet they are flexible enough to enable vigorous activity. And the four pockets provide lots of secure storage.

You will want to be careful with them as fashion statements, though. They look best on the young. The middle-aged guy – particularly the guy with the ponytail or the fedora – is just signalling his allegiance to jazz or antique Coke machines or some other embarrassing boomer thing. If you’re going to do it, you have to keep the look lean and punky. That means heavy boots rather than those comfy suede hiking shoes that seem to come with the purchase of jazz CDs.

But I will admit it: I have had one – a real, heavy, classic one – since 1989. I am now middle-aged and I still wear it. It is almost completely disintegrated, but then so am I. I probably look silly in it, but I’m in the advanced class, right?

Also, don’t wear them with a skinny tie. You’ll look like a hipster, which I am now using as synonymous with goofball. And one more thing: There is a trend toward brand names and other meaningless lettering on fashion items. Indian Motorcycle jackets, for example, are all about branding, and we wise grown-ups resist branding unless we are paid. You’ll also see faux-rockers with stupefyingly expensive biker jackets with words like "Alpha Cafe Atomic Rockers" or other Engrish nonsense in retro white fonts on the back. Wear this and you might as well wear a sign saying "Fashion Victim."

Ask Mr. Smith a question,

or view the complete archive,

at Russell Smith’s online advisory service, DailyXY.com.

Pages: L.7

Publication year: 2010

Publication date: Mar 27, 2010

Year: 2010

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 382577842

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382577842?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2011-10-26

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 16 of 42

Click! We’ve gone Gaga over the new nostalgia

Author: Smith, Russell

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Yet, according to the newly revived Polaroid corporation, the 23-year-old Gaga will be the "creative director" (a word companies use to mean celebrity endorser or public face) of a new line of Polaroid products. And, to the surprise of business analysts, the new company has also announced it will relaunch some kind of instant film camera – the very thing that led to their downfall in an age of instant digital pictures.

Full text:

Why would Polaroid, a company that went bankrupt in 2001 because their product was so old-fashioned, try to relaunch its instant film cameras in 2010? And why would they hire someone so non-nostalgic as Lady Gaga to be their celebrity representative?

It’s an odd marriage at first glance. A camera that produces a small sheet of paper, with its echoes of seventies family albums (all faded brown now): It seems quaint and friendly and soft compared to the shrieking serpent of sex, the personification of the unattainable and the inhumanly fashionable. Where Polaroids were soft, in every sense, Lady Gaga is the hardest of the hard.

Everyone my age remembers with, I would guess, a certain fondness, that schnieck sound that an instant camera made as it produced its magical sheet; it’s the sound of a naive excitement about the wonder of technology. But Lady Gaga offends old people. The U.S. novelist Mary Gaitskill recently posted an unabashedly cranky essay about a Lady Gaga video and kids these days (on the Canadian site Ryeberg.com), saying that the pop star’s hard body, model-posey, poolside world is "a picture of hell."

And yet, according to the newly revived Polaroid corporation, the 23-year-old Gaga will be the "creative director" (a word companies use to mean celebrity endorser or public face) of a new line of Polaroid products. And, to the surprise of business analysts, the new company has also announced it will relaunch some kind of instant film camera – the very thing that led to their downfall in an age of instant digital pictures. In an interview with CNNMoney.com, the CEO of Polaroid said, "We know instant film won’t be the saviour for the company, but it’s important to bring back the old classic. ... Our customers unequivocally want this experience back, especially the art and fashion communities."

And there you have the explanation. For years – especially since the ascendancy of digital cameras – an old Polaroid camera, and the ability to find film for it, have been mandatory accessories for downtown hipsters. Art students love them. There is a vast, international gallery of instant pictures online at Polanoid.net (note the spelling), run by an Austrian enthusiast who has collected as much of the remaining SX-70 film in the world as he possibly can.

Why is this? What’s so cool about a tiny and unalterable picture? The hipsters themselves claim that there is something unique about the colours and textures of a true instant (they will wax geeky about the difference between Polaroid and Kodak), and it is true that the old photos have a certain kind of rich saturation that takes at least a few minutes of Photoshopping to imitate these days. Their fixed, uncroppable frame also provides a formal restraint that artists like to have imposed on them, as they do any formal restraint (the fixed form of a sonnet, for example). Artists and grad students like to talk too about the philosophical significance of a chemical change on paper as opposed to an electronic signal; the chemical change could be said to be less mediated. And you can create weird effects by scratching or wetting the film as it develops.

All this is interesting, but there is another element in the cool factor that often goes unsaid: Instant film cameras are associated with the fashion industry. Stylists used to bring them along on shopping trips to snap clothes they could quickly show to editors and art directors; photographers used to take Polaroids while setting up a shot with a larger camera, as a kind of preview to show to the team arranging the models and dresses. Downtown people with instant film cameras were, for a couple of decades at least, visibly connected to glamour (and models).

And here’s where Lady Gaga comes in: She is beloved by followers of clothing because she is such an ardent supporter of daring costume. Her videos are theatrical runway shows, and she is not afraid of the outré and avant-garde in the sartorial domain (as opposed to in her music, where she is a populist). She has been chosen as a representative of the sexually permissive, multigendered, downtown yet epically rich world of high fashion. So she’s palatable to hipsters and suburban teenagers alike. And there’s nothing nostalgic about her.

If I were a Polaroid marketing exec, I would make a big deal too about the role of instant film cameras in the sexual revolution. Everyone knows that people took their naughty pics with instants in the years when you had to take your camera film to a photo shop and have it scrutinized by the developer. Polaroids mean sex: There’s something faintly pornographic about them, as there is with Lady Gaga. The commercial combination of high fashion, pop, art and porn reflects a liberalization of attitudes that is very modern, and not even hip, really: Amazingly, it’s mainstream.

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2010

Publication date: Feb 4, 2010

Year: 2010

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382585022

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382585022?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2011-10-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 17 of 42

Hats off (literally) to a hipster hallmark

Author: Smith, Russell

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style@globeandmail.com

Dear Mr. Smith: Why do hipsters always wear hats?

Funny story: My mother, who was visiting the big city for the first time in a while a few weeks ago, had lunch in a restaurant on a street of fashion boutiques. "There was the oddest group of men beside me," she said. "They were dressed like nerds, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses and plaid shirts. One had a little mustache. And they were all wearing some kind of hat. But they were talking about making films. They were actually quite intelligent."

Those, Mom, weren’t nerds: Those were hipsters, devotees of fashion who want to proclaim participation in an artistic pursuit. But I can see how you would be confused.

The hats, of course, were keys to this code: A hat is as important to hipster identification as the beard or mustache. It is the most uncomfortable part of the outfit, as it must be worn indoors and out, and even in great heat, so it is the part that demonstrates the greatest commitment to pure aesthetics. It has no function whatsoever except as an indicator of political affiliation with certain neighbourhoods.

The most ridiculously impractical hat is therefore the hippest. And that would be the hipster look par excellence – the wool tuque worn at the height of summer. I saw three of these yesterday: big, bushy, knit wool tuques, usually in black or grey, with a thick mop of hair under them, all on bearded young guys riding old bicycles, in a temperature of 28 degrees. It made me itchy just to look at them. What commitment! The wool tuque might be seen as an homage to early-nineties Seattle-based grunge rock, a movement that spawned a great deal of lumberjack wear among the university students of America. It was originally a signifier of working-class affinities, and now is evidence of enrolment in an art college (almost the opposite).

One might argue that, in choosing to look uncomfortable, the hipsters are showing the ultimate disdain for discussions of fashion. And that this paradoxical combination of nonchalance and great affectation – the willingness to look ridiculous as part of a pose of indifference – has been a hallmark of some of the most influential fashion trends, starting with Beau Brummell’s fanatically austere dandyism.

Or you might just not worry about it, take off your tuque, cool off and enjoy the summer.Ask Mr. Smith a question, or view the complete archive, at Russell Smith’s online advisory service, DailyXY.com.

Pages: L.4

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Aug 15, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 382620297

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382620297?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 18 of 42

A plain, lightweight coat is right as rain

Author: Smith, Russell

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Plain means single-breasted and relatively unornamented. Basically it means not a trench coat; anything double-breasted, covered with buckles and straps and epaulettes, looks like a castoff from a seventies movie about inner-city crime. I know the fashion magazines are pushing a trench coat revival. That’s because of the irony thing that makes so many hipsters look like bags. Please avoid ironic dressing; it’s like ironic lovemaking.

Full text:

style@globeandmail.com

Dear Mr. Smith: What’s a good formal coat to wear in the rain? Am I stuck with a trench? Can a hood ever be worn with a suit?

No stylish raincoat is waterproof. Raincoats are for warmth; they are not sealants. To stay dry, carry an umbrella (which is also a stylish accoutrement – just make sure your umbrella is full-length, not collapsible, as those look cheap).

If you are riding a bicycle or camping, by all means wear a yellow slicker or a cheerful blue Gore-Tex thing (and night-vision goggles and a parachute and whatever else these activities require). But if you are meeting me in a hotel bar to discuss the nature of democracy or the purchase of some armoured cars, all you need at this time of year is a plain lightweight coat of medium length.

Medium length means that it must be quite a bit longer than your suit jacket – about to the knee. The colour is usually dark – grey, navy, black – but pale raincoats are a sign of sensuality; try dove grey or even white.

And plain means single-breasted and relatively unornamented. Basically it means not a trench coat; anything double-breasted, covered with buckles and straps and epaulettes, looks like a castoff from a seventies movie about inner-city crime. I know the fashion magazines are pushing a trench coat revival. That’s because of the irony thing that makes so many hipsters look like bags. Please avoid ironic dressing; it’s like ironic lovemaking.

The coat will be cotton or wool or a blend thereof. Lots of raincoats are part synthetic, which is fine. It will not be a leather car coat. If you want to know why it will not be leather, look for photographs of the Toronto drug-squad cops who were charged with corruption a couple of years ago. A local magazine ran a picture of them in their best court suits, and several of them were wearing identical short leather coats. The coats matched the various goatees and bad suits so perfectly as to make them all look exactly like gangsters (or undercover cops).

As for hoods and suits, it depends on your business and what kind of thing you are discussing in the hotel bar. Most occupations that require a suit are conservative, and so destroying the classic uniform with something trendy like a hood would be frowned on. You don’t meet with other lawyers and bankers looking hip unless you are their interior decorator or graphic designer or house poet.

In artistic circles, of course, you may wear anything you want. So when we meet to discuss Rousseau and/or the LAV, I would love to see the bizarre outfit you have come up with. I’ll have a manhattan, thanks.

Ask Mr. Smith a question,

or view the complete archive,

at Russell Smith’s online advisory service, XYCanada.com.

Pages: L.8

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: May 30, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 382632666

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382632666?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 19 of 42

The hip game of mocking the hipsters

Author: Smith, Russell

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Full text:

rsmith@globeandmail.com

Hipsters are taking a great bashing on the Internet these days, and it’s hard not to join in the uncharitable fun – contemporary urban fashion is at its most ridiculous point since at least the late 1960s, and there is something so cleverly smug about the skinny-jeans artist brigade that they cannot help but annoy. You have probably seen the "Hipster Olympics" video on YouTube, a fake contest in the spirit of Monty Python’s "Upper Class Twit of the Year," in which young New Yorkers compete in choosing ironic T-shirts, photographing themselves for MySpace and criticizing a jock. So now I encourage you to check out my current favourite hipster-mocking site, the rudely named "Look at This [Expletive] Hipster," which is a collection of candid photos of real people on the blog site Tumblr.

LATFH, as we will call it, is modelled on the famously cruel Vice magazine "Dos and Don’ts" photos, in which an anonymous, violently misogynist and racist, and very funny voice made comments about unfortunate people photographed in the street. There is the same tone here.

But where Vice magazine praises, with masturbatory enthusiasm, some of its subjects (the Dos), LATFH is purely negative. It’s all Don’ts. Which were always the funniest anyway.

Here are three textbook hipsters, for example, standing on the lawn of some college campus, all stick men with mandatory hipster slumped shoulders and mops of unwashed hair, in their super-narrow jeans and their striped T-shirts and their oversized glasses, and they are looking with some boredom at a girl sitting on the lawn in front of them, and she has a blanket over her legs. The caption reads, "There better be some torn leggings, bruised thighs and tattered cowboy boots under that blanket, or we are out of here." Which actually made me laugh out loud. Or here is an extremely skinny, pale, androgynous boy in dark glasses, sitting next to his identical-looking girlfriend on the subway, and the caption reads, "I’m sorry. This is the last time I’ll ask, but are we a lesbian couple?" And here is a guy with the most unbelievably hideous, greasy mullet, big 1970s spectacles, an ugly mustache and a nasty acrylic sweater. He is saying, "Why yes, I do have ironic pubic hair."

Now yes, of course, this is a juvenile and conservative humour, and it is not cool to find sexual androgyny ridiculous; it usually indicates some kind of insecurity. I have been on the receiving end of it so much in my life I am surprised by my own hostility here. Why is it that the hipsters irritate me so? I try, I try hard, to see something subversive or rebellious or aesthetically interesting in their determinedly ugly clothes and their determinedly unimpressed stance and I just can’t.

I see a certain hypocrisy: The hipster pose is of someone who rejects fashion, who is wearing second-hand clothes because she is poor and refusing to buy into consumer culture, who makes fun of sensual subcultures such as Goths and dandies, and yet the outfits she invariably concocts are so odd they cross the line into flamboyance. If you combine your second-hand 1970s dress with huge plastic sunglasses and canvas running shoes, you can’t deny you want to be looked at. And then of course there’s the weedy, whiny music, and the lack of interest in any cause or intellectual issue, other than possibly environmentalism (the default cause of the sensitive dropout).

The twist on hipster mockery, of course, is that (like all vicious satire), it comes from inside. That is, you have to recognize the subtle hipster tropes, which means that you are probably pretty much a hipster already. I myself wouldn’t be so irritated if I didn’t live in the thick of them. Vice magazine is the prime example of this self-deprecation, and LATFH itself is deeply in-the-know. One picture, of a guy in a plaid jacket listening to headphones, is captioned, "If I didn’t already know I was listening to Animal Collective on these headphones, I would bet myself $100 that I was listening to Animal Collective on these headphones." Which is, of course, only funny to a hipster.

Indeed, this kind of photo blog, and Tumblr itself, are madly hip. This is exactly how hipsters communicate. Tumblr is a site where, for free, you can create your own "tumblelog," a blog that is usually a collection of photos, links and oddities rather than of written entries. Like Twitter, it represents microblogging, a trend away from the page-long texts and arguments of blogs and toward brief flashes. You could call it post-literate.

And like any good Internet meme, LATFH has spawned iterations with similar names. "Look At This Lovely Hamster," for example, is exactly the same, except it’s pictures of hamsters. Is it a parody, is it ironic, or is it completely serious? What’s the difference? I can’t tell. That’s how hip it is

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Apr 30, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382650198

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382650198?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 20 of 42

I dress better than my boss. Is that OK?

Author: Smith, Russell

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Dear Mr. Smith: I recently started a new job and the dress code is casual. My boss dresses very casually and I sometimes look a lot better, either because I have dress shirts/pants on or wear a tie once in a while. Should I stop wearing ties to work? I bought a few new ones just before I started and I want to look good.

Will you be dressed down for dressing up? This will depend on two factors: 1) the office culture of your industry and 2) the temperament of your boss. But, really, it is highly unlikely that you will annoy your co-workers or any clients or customers you may interact with just for looking snappy. You might, however, be teased for it. Anyone who has gone to a resolutely T-shirty workplace wearing a tie or even a jacket has experienced the instant questioning: What’s up? Job interview? Date tonight? The badgering may get aggressive, and that’s because your colleagues are feeling threatened and insecure. But they will respect you for it, too. And watch, over the next few weeks, their dress will start to change as well.

Even in the most creative industries, where guys come to work on skateboards in camo shorts, quirkiness is generally tolerated and even encouraged, right? So your tweed sports jacket and silk pocket square should be accepted as just another individual eccentricity, like the hipster’s ironic mustache.

It’s only the possible-job-interview part of it that may make your boss nervous. But so what? That plays in your favour.

If your boss is really so insecure as to feel that you are challenging him in some way by dressing ambitiously – and only you will be able to feel if he’s getting nasty about it – then cool it. But anyone who has reached a position of authority should really be more confident than that.

Ask Mr. Smith a question, or view the complete archive, at Russell Smith’s online advisory service,

XYCanada.com.

style@globeandmail.com

Pages: L.2

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Apr 11, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 382651468

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382651468?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 21 of 42

Computer messages are giving me a sad Mac

Author: Smith, Russell

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‘The connection to the server has failed," says my computer when it doesn’t like an e-mail I am trying to send. Then it adds some useful specifics: "Socket Error: 10060, Error Number: 0x800CCC0E." Well, that’s good, now I know the error number. And it is helpful to know that it is a socket error, and not any other kind of error, say a matjack or a wiblet or a flimbop error. One assumes that these things are comprehended by computer engineers, and that these numbers will be useful when you call technical support – because that’s all they mean to us, really, is "Call technical support" – but actually no one at technical support knows what these numbers mean either; they don’t really need the actual numbers. They are just going to tell you to move the bookcase and check the phone cable.

Are there still living programmers who know these archaic codes? The messages were mostly written in another era, in the age of DOS, when you had to have long lists of commands and abbreviations at your side, or memorized, to make computers work. The most frustrating error messages that still show up on printer and computer screens ("abort, retry, fail?") were originally written in such cryptic language in order to save memory space. They were not, obviously, meant for the average user, but for someone who knew the difference between abort and fail. There is no longer a need for error messages written in code, and yet they still infest every system. Some are still quite fantastic, such as the warning found periodically in the Windows Vista operating system, "Error: the operation completed successfully."

Similarly, my computer frequently tells me, when I am shutting it down, that it cannot close a program because it is shutting down.

The most famously enraging computer messages of all time have mostly been corrected by now. The now legendary message on Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers, "PC LOAD LETTER", became a standard example of confusing nonsense. (The "PC" does not refer, as you might guess, to personal computer, but to paper cassette, and "load letter" means you are out of letter-sized paper.) The phrase is now so famous it has become code for something else – for bad programming.

One of the anxiety-causing elements of so many error messages is that they seem angry or panicked. "Bad command or file name" seems like a snarl at the user, and thus commits the insidious crime of personification: It perpetuates one’s unconscious fear that one is dealing not with a machine at all but with an obdurate child that could be helpful if it chose to. Ditto for "The program performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" – it creates the image of the computer as supercilious nanny. Early Macintosh users will remember the crash messages that seemed designed deliberately to terrify: the little bomb icon with its burning fuse, as if the whole thing was about to explode, the "sad Mac" icon with its x-ed out eyes, again a personification, and again overly dramatic.

And then of course there is the most alarmist error message of all time: the Unix warning about your line printer, "lp0 on fire." It originated in the 1970s, when large computers were attached to enormous high-speed printers. If the printer was suffering from some kind of error and was still running, it meant that parts could be grinding together and it could be getting dangerously hot. The fire warning would come up to frighten operators into switching it off immediately. No actual printer fires were ever reported. But apparently the message is still buried in some Unix systems.

Horrible error messages have become memes: They have become catch-phrases that are then altered and improved on. The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), for example, that Windows message that says something terrible has happened to your computer ("A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down") and usually necessitates a trip to a repair shop or a landfill, now pops up in hipster dialogue to refer to any catastrophic failure. Similarly, the word "fail," the useless option on the "abort, retry, fail" screen, is now used as an expression of disapproval, as in: "I went to that Interpol concert and they were already out of tickets, it was like, fail." Apparently in London, young people use the number 404 to refer to someone who seems a bit out of it – a reference to the Internet message "404 – page not found." I have heard people saying, in actual speech, "Four-oh-four" when they can’t find something on their desk or under the sink.

Thus the very worst attempts at communication become common language. It is ironic that computer programmers, obviously the most inarticulate educated people on the planet, have managed to change everyday speech, and even make it more colourful.

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Apr 2, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382648555

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382648555?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 22 of 42

Take that tuque off, mister

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

So let’s think about it calmly for a minute. Yes, of course a guy looks like a major dork if he sits and orders the seared tuna with mango-wasabi froth while wearing a hat that advertises some DJ product or skateboard oil. He will mortify his date, for one thing. But is he being offensive to the others in the restaurant, to the guys like me staring slack-jawed, wondering what the world is coming to? Not really.

Full text:

Dear Mr. Smith: If a guy sits down in a nice restaurant and eats without taking off his ball cap or his hipster tuque, does he just look like a jerk or is he actually being rude to the people around him?

The flouting of this kind of convention gets emotions strangely high. And perhaps that’s why guys do it. They want to get us middle-class types to hyperventilate.

I have heard confident and quite beefy men talk about how they feel threatened in the street by guys who dress like the stars of gangsta rap (with the low jeans and the hoodies). They claim that such dressing is a deliberate reminder of prison and therefore of violence, and it is a silent challenge to all those around them. If you really feel that certain kinds of dress constitute a challenge to a fight, then you are going to either get into a fight yourself or you are going to start talking crazy talk about banning certain kinds of "anti-social" dress (as certain U.S. towns have actually done). And once you’re on to banning clothing, it’ll be books next.

Yes, maybe the guy is trying to sneer at the whole place, to show he’s above these bourgeois fancies of respectability. So what? Let him. He’s going to have a much harder time in life that way. Good luck to him.

Ask Mr. Smith a question, or view the complete archive, at Russell Smith’s online advisory service, XYCanada.com.

style@globeandmail.com

Pages: L.2

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Mar 14, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 387380143

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/387380143?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 23 of 42

Mean epithets are the new catchphrases

Author: Smith, Russell

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A peaknik, according to our inventive media, is a person who believes the "peak oil" theory (that supplies of oil are running out and prices will grow prohibitively high and civilization will change dramatically). The word is an example of how ironic and derogatory terms become so widespread that they lose their ironic connotations.

Peaknik is a play on peacenik, a derogatory term for an anti-war protester in the sixties, which was itself a play on beatnik, which was a play on Sputnik. The -nik ending in Russian corresponds to the -er ending in English, meaning someone who does something (buyer, watcher, traveller). The word beatnik was coined by Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, in 1958, to refer humorously to the pretensions of the bohemians who called themselves "beat," from beaten down, fatigued or downtrodden. (Contrary to popular belief, "beat" didn’t refer to music.)

Sputnik I, the Soviet satellite, had been launched the year before, and it had caused great agitation in the United States, as it signalled the first Soviet victory in the space race at the height of the Cold War. Sputnik means, literally, co-traveller.

It will be pointed out that the -nik suffix had already entered American English in previous years from Yiddish – in such words as nudnik – but there can be no question that it was the Russian that inspired Caen’s brilliantly condescending epithet. He meant to make the hipsters sound naively communistic.

The beat poets themselves loved to play on their chosen word: Jack Kerouac famously started associating it with the religious-sounding beatific, and spoke of the essence of their quasi-spiritual movement as beatitude, clever fellow.

But beatnik rapidly lost its negative connotation, and became another fashion to be marketed. Hollywood made a bunch of silly films with the word beatnik in the title, with busty women on the posters, selling the titillation of a promiscuous and fashionable world rather than any ideas about poetry or Buddhism. It became almost desirable to be a beatnik: There were beatnik beauty contests and fashion tips in magazines.

The term punk rock had a similarly derogatory origin: It was an American journalist’s way of dismissing angry, bare-bones rock groups in the seventies. The phrase was originally homophobic: Punks were the weakest part of a prison population, the young men who were sexually abused. And yet the phrase was proudly embraced by the fashion and music movement later in the seventies.

"Impressionist," the adjective thrown at the painters who exhibited with Monet in 1874 (after his title, Impression, Sunrise ), was also disparaging in its intent, and now we revere all that is associated with the word. Other labels that were introduced as insults include Quaker, Yankee, Tory, Methodist and Shaker, not to mention geek.

Linguists have a word for this shift from negative to neutral: melioration. (It’s the opposite of pejoration, whereby a euphemism like "concentration camp" takes on dark connotations.)

The iterative evolution of peaknik – a play on a joke on an insult on a multilingual pun – is reminiscent of the drift in meaning of popular buzzwords such as recessionista. Recessionista is an iteration of fashionista, and fashionista also originated as an unflattering descriptor. The Italian suffix suggests fascista , or, if in Spanish, Sandinista – both evoke political extremism. The idea was that people obsessed with fashion took it as seriously as some might take politics, and the connection was clearly ironic. Now, fashionista is a term eagerly added to resumes by youngsters who want employment in the media.

Interestingly, the peakniks are sometimes also referred to as doomers, because they believe the sky is falling and tend to build macaroni-stocked reinforced basements like the survivalists of the Cold War. Doomer is an iteration of boomer, as in baby boomer – and that’s not a coincidence, because it was the boomer generation that grew up with the fear of nuclear annihilation and a similar preoccupation with bomb shelters.

These media coinages can be irritating, particularly when they reproduce and mutate in this way (when Gen X spawns Gen Y and then Gen Why, for example); they can just seem insufferably cute. It can be argued that they don’t represent new concepts at all, either, that they are simply trendy new words for old phenomena. (A lot of generations have been called lost or aimless, for example.)

But funny neologisms don’t last long, especially if they gain widespread currency, because their repeated use will inevitably rob them of their humour and their satiric edge. We don’t hear yuppie much any more, just as we don’t hear hippie, but it doesn’t mean the phenomena have disappeared, it just means we got tired of the words. That’s why we keep needing new ones.

rsmith@globeandmail.com

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Feb 19, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382641701

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382641701?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 24 of 42

Personal pics are fine at work, but minimize cubicle kitsch

Author: Smith, Russell

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Unless you are working with your finger on the nuclear button, however, an image of one’s mother is hardly offensive or even noticeable in even the soberest of environments. I have been in government offices arguing about international tax law and hardly noticed the cute kids’ drawings on the partition and the holiday snapshot on the computer screen. (I’m sure they were bumping up against regulation there, but who cares?)

Full text:

Dear Mr. Smith: I have been working in an open-concept office for the past three years. Appearance is important here and I don’t have much space on my desk or cubicle walls for personal items. Five months ago, I lost my beloved mother to cancer. How appropriate would it be to put a small framed photograph of her in my space? Would this be sweet and acceptable or awkward/creepy for my co-workers and clients?

The only office I have ever known to ban all personal items from cubicles was a fictitious one: It was the White House on The West Wing , where a senior staffer sternly warns a newcomer that the place is too serious for domesticity.

It’s true that cubicle decoration can get out of hand, especially in those creative industries (advertising, video production) where an exaggerated love of kitsch seems to proclaim a greater hipster status.

Too many plastic water guns and animé toys make me feel as if I’m walking through a daycare. And obviously you have to be careful with artistic images that are risqué – cool it, for instance, with the Egon Schiele reproductions – or jokes that are controversial. (I recently worked with a radio producer who had a portrait of Slobodan Milosevic tacked to her wall; at first I was scared to ask if it was ironic or not.)

But who could object to one small pic of a mom in your own space? And why would it be creepy just because she has passed away? For one thing, visiting clients don’t have to know that and, second, it is perfectly traditional to display photos of the past – including ancestors and other departed relatives – in one’s home. No one need feel awkward about death and remembrance.

Ask Mr. Smith a question, or view the complete archive, at Russell Smith’s online advisory service, XYCanada.com.

style@globeandmail.com

Pages: L.2

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Jan 31, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 382660664

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382660664?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 25 of 42

Against all odds, reading is alive and well

Author: Smith, Russell

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If you show subjects pictures of objects of a similar category – say an orange, a banana and a cherry – they will name the category, fruit, more quickly than if you show them flash cards with the words orange, banana and cherry on them. They will also display a different pattern of brain activity. So the brain seems to process images quicker than it does words. Which seems rather obvious: Words are not representational icons. The word banana does not in any way look like a banana.

This biological fact is the obstacle writers must tackle every day, and when they are in competition with the creators of images, it gives them a distinct disadvantage. If you choose to create entertainment that demands reading, you are deliberately choosing the most inaccessible of art forms from which to make your living.

Think about all the disadvantages of reading: First, it is not a social activity, like movies or concerts. It is totally private and isolating – isolating because you actually need isolation to do it. (This is why even trying to read the newspaper in the presence of a chatty breakfast-mate can be so agitating.) That’s the second major disadvantage: Reading requires intense active concentration. Many people find this concentration so elusive that they even need actual silence in order to attain it. And silence is an extremely rare and valuable ambience these days. Only the very rich can afford it.

Any public space is likely to be inhospitable to reading. Even the most determined and experienced reader has had the experience of settling into a possible reading zone, a long train trip or a flight, with great expectations and finding the most minor of irritations – a proximal conversation, repeated public announcements – become impenetrable barriers to concentration. It’s hard even for the devoted reader.

Portable music, portable movies and portable conversations are much easier to get into in such situations.And so it makes sense that the numbers of books sold would go down every year, and bookstores become department stores selling china and wrapping paper (with books on the fourth floor), and writers find it harder to find publishers, and publishers go out of business.

At least, that’s what you’d think. Astoundingly, however, books continue to be a lucrative business. It doesn’t make any sense. Popular books are selling in the millions. One of the biggest cultural stories of the past 10 years is the astounding international success of the Harry Potter books, which are almost the best-selling books of all time. An entire generation is being raised with knowledge of these books. The shared set of values, not to mention the shared set of references, that this will spread around the globe is a cultural seismic shift.

Similarly, the hysteria for Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire books has made her a multimillionaire and led to widespread questioning about the significance of vampire myths in the media and the academy throughout the Western world. And an entire non-literary ancillary industry has risen out of The Da Vinci Code .

As a result, publishers are not, in fact, going out of business but excitedly chasing down (or inventing) and promoting the next blockbuster. Literary prize money goes up and up and the hoopla about the winners continues to intoxicate the media. Books continue to turn up on front pages. The latest false Holocaust memoir scandal turns out to be a major news story – and it’s about a book.

I cannot explain this bonanza – unless it’s because other people had the same experience I had when I tried to watch the last Batman movie, the one with the guy who died. (I know, I know, why would I see that? I am an adult, and have no 12-year-old kids to entertain. But so many other adults – intelligent ones, usually the kind of hipster critic who is funny and clever about pop culture and makes you feel as if you’re missing something – said it was an actual movie for grownups that I mistrusted my instincts and gave in and rented it.)

Halfway through such an experience one sort of comes awake with irritation – it’s like waking from dreams about surgery and realizing you have a stomach ache. The plot is incomprehensible and interrupted every five minutes by a series of stylized explosions. These glittering sequences, like the repeated meaningless gestures in art videos in downtown galleries, become dreary. I fast-forwarded through the last third without any sense of loss. And this, according to quite a few of our enthralled film critics, is the very best that cinema can do.

With such weak competition, literature, even with such severe biological and social handicaps, and with a much smaller budget – with both its hands tied behind its back, as it were – still seems pretty interesting.

In an upcoming column, I will give even further reasons to read: my favourite reads of the year. But first – a week today – we must get back to the question of why there are no words for smells, as the results of last week’s inquiry are piling in.

Credit: rsmith@globeandmail.com

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Jan 8, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382663690

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382663690?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 26 of 42

A field guide to the Smas, Ghetto Fabs, Gabberbitches, Reli-Rockers and more

Author: Smith, Russell

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For the past 14 years, a pair of Dutch artists, Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, have been documenting styles of appearance in series of photographs. They go to a city, notice a particular look that seems to recur, find a dozen or so people who look like this and invite them into a studio to pose. The people tend to look a certain way because they belong to a recognizable social group, defined by region or class or style of music. Versluis and Uyttenbroek put their subjects against a white backdrop and pose them in exactly the same way. Then they create a grid of images and label it "Skins – Rotterdam, 2007" or "Sapeurs – Paris, 2008." The results are stunning: The people in each group look identical.

The "Reli-Rockers" from Rotterdam are all wearing heavy-metal T-shirts; the "Bouncers" all have black leather coats; the "Gabberbitches" (followers of hard-core techno music) tend to have crop tops and shaved heads with top ponytails. There are "Ghetto Fabs" from Paris, Beach Boys from Rio, "City Girls" from London in business suits, "Fly Girls" (hip-hop listeners) from Rotterdam, schoolchildren (all in bright tracksuits and knapsacks) from Beijing, widows in black from Cape Verde, "Tektoniks" from Paris – there are hundreds of images you can browse (and I promise you will spend a quarter of an hour on this) at the website Exactitudes.com.

The artists chose the name Exactitudes for the series, a contraction of attitude and exact, to show the correlation between extreme conformity and individuality: Each group represents a subculture, and each adherent follows a strict set of sartorial rules. Many are amusing: The white preppy guys with longish hair each have a pale blue Oxford shirt with the right side tucked in and the left untucked. Surely this was imposed by the photographer, or is this asymmetrical tucking in fact some kind of gay code?

The Rotterdam group called simply "Hipsters" is perhaps the most ridiculous, and will make any downtowner laugh with recognition: Each guy and girl is wearing a baseball cap on sideways, low-slung jeans, and mismatched jacket and colourful T-shirt. When you see them all together, you realize that the outfit is actually ridiculous, such a determined attempt at looking unconcerned that it becomes campy. They look as if they are wearing children’s clothes that are too small. The concentration of hipsters on one grid reminds one instantly of the old adage that the line between hipster and jackass is fine indeed.

There are subcultures here I had never heard of. There is a group of robust black women in black clothing called "Smas"; a bunch of young London guys in black peacoats called "Donkerboys." I am guessing the artists simply invented names for these groups. At any rate, it makes one fascinated about street life in cities other than one’s own.

There are artistic antecedents of this style of documentary photography. The most similar, and also profoundly different, is the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German duo who meticulously recorded the most banal of industrial buildings in precise black-and-white photography. They found apparently dull buildings – warehouses, water towers, barns – mostly in Europe, and shot each one from the same angle, then displayed the photos side by side in grids. The result shows up the surprising similarities among buildings with a certain function – the uniformity of our landscape – as well as their strange elegance, the cleverness of their functional architectural choices.

But the Bechers’ work also had a significant historical element: It was the document of a landscape that was changing. Many of the types of buildings they photographed are no longer built. So, too, will Versluis and Uyttenbroek’s work be dramatically passé in just a couple of years; it will be a useful record of past fads.

It’s interesting how similar this project is to the work of cool hunters, who try to document and label current vogues and then sell the ideas of the subgroups they invent to corporations on the lookout for marketing trends. The most desirable skill in a cool hunter is, I think, the poetic ability to name the groups in evocative ways: It is the labels themselves they are selling. This year’s group of toughs in black-leather biker jackets can’t simply be called "James Dean" or "Rockabilly"; they have to have a contemporary name to make them the height of fashion – so you call them Faux Angels or Neo-Punk or something cleverer than that (this is why I don’t get paid for it). The labels are similarly important in the Exactitudes series. As is the co-existence of so many radically different sartorial modes at one time and in the same city. It shows that there is no dominant fashion or culture of the era.

Credit: rsmith@globeandmail.com

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2008

Publication date: Nov 20, 2008

Year: 2008

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382683550

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382683550?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 27 of 42

Bruni and Banksy are victims of bias, plain and simple

Author: Smith, Russell

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(Here’s a bonus one-degree-of-separation fact: [Bernard-Henri Levy] has a beautiful novelist daughter called Justine, who was married to a philosophy professor called Raphaël Enthoven, who had an affair with [Carla Bruni]. This is not of musical interest, but shows that the lives of French philosophy profs are different from those of Canadian philosophy profs.) Dombasle’s music is so treacly romantic, it’s unlistenable to a non-French person.

Full text:

You can hear excerpts from Carla Bruni’s new album of pop songs on her MySpace page. You will recognize the musical paradigm as quintessentially French: It’s the breathy, high-pitched funny-girl voice with acoustic guitar and sweeping orchestral background that made Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg so popular in the sixties. It’s the soft, cute and quirky sound parodied by the New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords in their Foux Da Fa Fa video. It makes you want to be in a black-and-white movie and ride a bicycle along the Seine.

The French don’t really get pop music, at least not its hard edge, but they do specialize in this particular genre: the voice almost a whisper, the words clever, usually rhyming, and all amour amour amour . It’s very filmic. We tend not to listen to it much, but it does inform the music of more interesting musicians: Jay-Jay Johanson, for example, the androgynous Swedish androgyne trip-hopper, parodies the French movie sound in his early work and the result is haunting.

Beautiful actresses specialize in this genre. Compare the career of Arielle Dombasle, the gorgeous blonde (star of my favourite Eric Rohmer movie, Pauline at the Beach ). Like Bruni, Dombasle comes from high privilege (her real name is Arielle Laure Maxime Sonnery de Fromental). She is the daughter of a silk manufacturer; Bruni’s family of industrialists made tires. Both started as models. Both married powerful and famous men: Dombasle is partly famous for being the wife of popular philosopher – such things exist in France – Bernard-Henri Levy. Bruni, of course, married the President of France.

(Here’s a bonus one-degree-of-separation fact: Levy has a beautiful novelist daughter called Justine, who was married to a philosophy professor called Raphaël Enthoven, who had an affair with Carla Bruni. This is not of musical interest, but shows that the lives of French philosophy profs are different from those of Canadian philosophy profs.) Dombasle’s music is so treacly romantic, it’s unlistenable to a non-French person. Bruni’s music at least has some texture. You’d think the French would love it. And, indeed, I’m sure they would have loved it, if the singer weren’t the wife of the most hated man in the world of French arts and letters. Nicolas Sarkozy is so despised by the left-leaning world of culture that once he was elected it became popular for Parisian intellectuals to announce to friends overseas that they were considering emigrating. (They never did, but still, the thought of leaving Paris is like that of suicide.) And so the European hipster’s reaction to Bruni’s new album has been mercilessly negative.

Internet forums have been awash in scorn, with many participants proudly saying they won’t even listen to it. They’re not even pretending it’s for artistic reasons. Having married the evil man, she is now a failed artist. The British music critics, also unlikely to be fans of centre-right pro-business politicians, have trashed it. "First lady ... of schmaltz," sniffed The Independent. (This newspaper gave an admirably unbiased review: Robert Everett-Green pointed out that Bruni was a pop star long before she was a first lady, and praised her "husky purr" and her "sly amalgam of French chanson , guitar-based folk, Latin dance, rock and blues.")

Coincidentally, there has been a similar wave of vitriol toward the formerly popular bad boy of British art, the mysterious Banksy, since a newspaper reported that his real name is Robin Gunningham, that he comes from a middle-class suburban family and that he may have attended a private school. The famously anti-establishment guerrilla artist mocks the police and the art world alike, and now he has suddenly, according to the writhing tangle of idiocy that is Internet chatter, lost his credibility.

Why someone who went to a private school is not allowed to hold left-wing views is not something Banksy’s detractors want to argue about; there is no argument here, just seething class hatred. In Britain, having gone to a private school is an embarrassing skeleton; it must be carefully hidden if one wants to become an artist. None of Banksy’s new critics seem to find it embarrassing that they previously judged his art to be brilliant. Their about-face is perfectly reasonable to them: To discover his class impurity is to discover a lack of talent.

We are not immune to this kind of cretinous bias in this country. Writers, for example, can guess which newspapers are going to disdain their novels well before they come out. (In my case, they are the ones that mention in the lead that I also write about fashion.) I’m so sick of trying to read the ideologies behind the bizarre aesthetic judgments that I have to avoid the free weekly city magazines altogether. Complete objectivity is impossible in artistic response, but there are still degrees of objectivity, and one would like to think that we all agree that it’s something to strive for.

Credit: rsmith@globeandmail.com

Pages: R.3

Publication year: 2008

Publication date: Jul 17, 2008

Year: 2008

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382710093

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382710093?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 28 of 42

It’s cool to be a blockhead

Author: Smith, Russell

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There is a debate going on in Birmingham, England, about the fate of its famously ugly central library. The English Heritage organization is recommending that the concrete mass be "listed," or designated as a building of historic significance. The Twentieth Century Society, a British group devoted to preserving the architecture that best characterizes the past century, whether beautiful or commonplace, is also campaigning for its preservation. The city council has been planning for some time to have it demolished and replaced. This conundrum – the choice between glorification and total destruction – is typical of discussions going on around the world about the value of brutalism, that utopian postwar architecture that it was so chic to disdain about 20 years ago. Brutalism is back.

The Birmingham Central Library was built in 1974, designed by John Madin, toward the end of the vogue for hulking utilitarian concrete design in Britain. (Madin’s other famous bunkers were built in the 1950s and 1960s; many of them have been demolished.) The library is an inverted ziggurat: That is, its upper floors project outward and loom over the street below. Prince Charles, one of many to voice rebellious thoughts against late modernist architecture in the 1980s, said the Birmingham library looked "more like a place for burning books than keeping them."

Interestingly, its design was inspired by that of Boston City Hall, another famously hideous building, built 10 years earlier. And the same debate is happening over that one, with newspaper columnists demanding it be torn down and preservation societies springing to its defence.

Originally, the term brutalism was humorously pejorative: It was coined by architecture critic Reyner Banham in punning reference to the French beton brut (raw concrete), the material Le Corbusier said he liked best.

Banham was primarily attacking the work of the British husband-and-wife team Peter and Alison Smithson, who were responsible, in the fifties and sixties, for many failed housing projects and authoritarian public buildings. The funny thing was that all these disciples of Le Corbusier were socialist idealists; they believed that social progress would come from experiments in communal, vertical living. There was something puritanical about this ideology too, as if comfort and beauty were bourgeois.

Why brutalism became the style of choice for North American university campuses isn’t so clear, but it’s in university buildings – libraries, in particular, for some reason – that one finds the most amazingly awful examples of the genre. For example, the library of Ryerson University, in downtown Toronto, is a square block so featureless it appears from the outside to be solid concrete all the way through. And it still doesn’t rival the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library for gaudy inhuman unpleasantness.

But I am sounding very uncool by saying this now, as hipsters all over the educated world are singing the praises of concrete. Books and articles are coming out monthly on the most influential concrete structures of the fifties through the seventies, and societies are developing to fight for their preservation.

In Berlin a few years ago, I saw a number of books and games on sale in intellectual bookstores devoted to pictures of plattenbauten , the dreary apartment blocks of the former East Germany. Those buildings were made with precast concrete plates and often ended up with strange geometric patterns covering their façades. Close-ups of the patterns look pretty cool in photographs, like the op art of the period (although I still wouldn’t want to live in one of these buildings). A lot of them are being torn down, which is indeed reckless. Victorian architecture was also once considered ugly and silly, and many interesting examples were torn down in the 20th century. Now, we miss them.

But it’s hard to tell if the fashionable affection for communist housing is slightly ironic, or if it’s simply another form of ostalgie , the yearning for East German kitsch. Interestingly, a lot of the people singing the praises of brutalist university libraries are baby boomers who spent their undergraduate years on these campuses. I suspect there is some nostalgia at work there too.

Trellick Tower, a high-rise apartment building in London, built in 1972 as public housing, was notoriously crime-ridden. But now that real estate is worth as much as diamonds in London, a one-bedroom apartment in it sells for $500,000. The concrete boxes of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, also conceived as affordable housing, are now similarly sought after. And it has always been chic to live in a Le Corbusier building, cramped and slab-like as they may be. This is understandable: His designs are still startling, and there is a majesty to such bold ugliness on such a scale. There is a thrill to be had from the huge and menacing; if there weren’t, we wouldn’t listen to amplified electric guitars and drums.

More importantly, it’s probably the optimism of the era, the belief that the future would all be geometric, that is worth preserving. The gaudiest and strangest of brutalist designs are therefore probably the ones that are most historically significant.

Credit: rsmith@globeandmail.com

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2008

Publication date: Jul 10, 2008

Year: 2008

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 382720837

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382720837?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 29 of 42

Like a rhinestone club guy

Author: Smith, Russell

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Full text:

Dear Mr. Smith,

Aren’t you getting tired of the standard slick, young, downtown guy-at-a-bar look that you yourself have done so much to promote? You know what I mean: narrow jeans, expensive blazer, white dress shirt, pocket square, fancy shoes? Don’t you find it tends to go hand in hand with large plastic-framed Chanel sunglasses and too much hair gel? Do you feel at all guilty about this?

Indeed, I was struck by this uniformity at a recent patio party on a Toronto rooftop. Although this fashionable casual ensemble is far preferable to the bad old days of khaki trousers and golf shirts, it is no longer a reliable indicator of sensual or artistic interests. Instead, it seems to proclaim a loud knowledge of real-estate trends and electronic gadgets (many of which are seen attached to ears and belts). And yes, the big plastic shades with the big logos on them, sometimes even traced out in rhinestones, for some reason seem have been adopted – in defiance of my tastes, I stress – by this fashionable crowd. In fact, there are all kinds of unapproved variations on the costume, particularly in shoes: I have often railed against the too narrow, too decorated, and the white or beige, and yet these attributes seem to be precisely what attracts the pocket-square-wearing, hip-hop-quoting, high-fiving club guy.

A word has developed for this slick type: Politely abbreviated, it is bag. Bag fashion is particular and recognizable; it is expensive and flashy and strangely flamboyant for such macho adherents. (Am I not the only one who finds it strange that such aggressive heterosexualists are drawn to ladies’ sunglasses with rhinestone designer logos on them?) And of course there is a very fine line between bag and hipster, such that these advanced-class guys might properly be classified as bagsters.

Am I responsible for it? I can hardly claim such influence. And even if I were to blame, it would be unkind to suddenly declare my tastes passé and laugh at those who still follow them. I still prefer the fine jacket to the previous options (remember when guys went to casual events in acrylic sweaters?). Just avoid the massive sunglasses and the white shoes and you will sidestep baggery.

And be honest: Aren’t you equally bored with the artistic hipster uniform of superskinny jeans, canvas Converse high-tops and beard?

You can view the complete

archive of Ask Mr. Smith questions, or ask a question of your own,

by going to Russell Smith’s online advisory service, XYCanada.com, and selecting your city site.

Credit: style@globeandmail.com

Pages: L.1

Publication year: 2008

Publication date: May 24, 2008

Year: 2008

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 382739864

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382739864?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 30 of 42

Tweed: It’s not just for Sherlock Holmes any more

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

I would wear it to weekends at country houses, if I knew anyone who had the kind of country house at which suits were worn on weekends, or indeed any sort of country house.

Full text:

Dear Mr. Smith,

Is it my imagination, or am I seeing a lot of tweed jackets around? Is tweed coming back? Will it ever be hip again?

Coming back? It never went away. Tweed has always been a staple of the male wardrobe, and I recommend its frequent wearing by young and old.

Why has it been around so long? Primarily because the substance itself is so physically tough it can be worn for years.

I myself wear a brown-green jacket my father purchased in London in 1965, and all it needs is a new lining.

Recently tweed was given another injection of fashionability by the glamorous Italian house Etro. Its designers are in love with wool and have experimented a great deal with plaids and nubby textures. Their jackets look anything but professorial.

Etro aside, tweed will always connote Britishness, of course, because it is from there: The word itself comes from the Scots term for "twill," a kind of weave (and it had nothing to do with the River Tweed).

The most traditional tweeds come from Ireland (Donegal) and Scotland. The most famous brand name, Harris Tweed, is a quite rough fabric hand-woven on four wind-blasted islands in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The best tweed of this sort is made from wool dyed with natural vegetable dyes from the region: In both Ireland and Scotland, plants, moss, berries and lichen are all used to make dyes. The result is comforting earthy colour that’s instantly recognizable as genuine.

Whether this makes it actually hip is another question.

I am tempted to say that the attraction of tweed is precisely its unhipness: It is inherently conservative, and it cannot help but evoke a certain gentle sensitivity. But that makes a man stand out, and any attempt at avoiding fashion for the sake of fashion inevitably makes one hip again ... so this is one of those Mobius-strip conundrums that I’ll leave to the sociologists.

I tend to wear tweed with jeans and a T-shirt more than with wool dress trousers and a tie; the latter combination does make me feel nerdy. What I would really like is a full tweed suit, perhaps with a waistcoat (green, I think, or light brown).

I would wear it to weekends at country houses, if I knew anyone who had the kind of country house at which suits were worn on weekends, or indeed any sort of country house. Until I move into those circles, it isn’t worth the investment to me, but if you’re the kind of guy who already has five or 10 business suits, you don’t need to justify such luxury: Get a tweed suit and wear it to dark nightclubs in big cities and I guarantee you’ll be a beacon to all the jealous hipsters – they won’t know what hit them.

You can view the complete archive of Ask Mr. Smith questions, or ask a question of your own, by going to Russell Smith’s online advisory service, XYCanada.com, and selecting your city site.

Credit: style@globeandmail.com

Pages: L.4

Publication year: 2008

Publication date: Mar 22, 2008

Year: 2008

Section: Globe Style

ProQuest document ID: 382749635

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/382749635?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-24

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 31 of 42

Unlocking the secrets of the hipster world

Author: Smith, Russell

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Even the hipster male must be skinny. Very skinny, in fact: spindly. The hipster male (and I admit I am more interested in male costume for professional reasons) then chooses clothes that accentuate this slenderness: extremely narrow yet loose jeans, a T-shirt that is slightly too small, a tight cardigan or V-neck sweater. In other words, the hipster male must look not at all like the steroided ideal of male desirability as portrayed in hip-hop videos.

Full text:

Hipster is one of those things that is impossible to define and yet instantly recognizable when you see it. A hipster bar is never described as such by its patrons, of course: The very word is unhip.

I was in one of these bars last weekend, in a downtown neighbourhood that is the perfect incubator for such fleetingly perfectly cool people, ground zero for the kind of anti-fashion and non-committal art that influences the pages of magazines around the world and will surface in Super Bowl ads a year from now, and I was struck by several things about hipster culture and aesthetics.

Hipster culture has been much described in the United States (particularly in a 2003 book called The Hipster Handbook ). Its Canadian equivalent is almost identical, but perhaps a couple of years behind and with different slang and different centres. Its incubator is the same: Hipster bars develop in urban neighbourhoods in transition from impoverished to desirable. The locale must be far from any entertainment strip known to large numbers of suburbanites or grownups. A hipster bar must be founded by a well-known hipster: well-known bartenders, DJs or vintage-clothing-store owners, for example. This way, they don’t have to rely on any expensive publicity, the way, say, a multilevel new dance club in the entertainment district does.

The promoters carry their clientele from place to place through word of mouth alone. (A massively funded corporation can hire all the cool hunters and focus groups it wants and it will still never be able to reproduce the desired crowd.) Ideally, a hipster bar has no identifying sign outside and minimal decor inside.

In this nurturing space, hipsters learn to dress. The current hipster uniform is designed to pass under the radar of the unobservant. Dressing in a consciously outrageous fashion – as was accepted in the days of punk rock, for example – is no longer acceptable.

The key to being among the most fashionable is to claim a total disdain of fashion. But there are certain rules, foremost among them extreme slenderness.

This look has been echoed by recent high-end runway fashion, in which most male models are waif-like. Right now, the aesthetic is the opposite of masculine ideals as seen in big popular dance clubs in the commercial districts, where it still helps to be robust and ripped. But look out, muscle boys of Richmond Street and Argyle Street and the Red Mile: The stick men are the vanguard of things to come for all of us.

The little sweaters – often in argyle – continue the theme of boyishness or asexuality: The guy with the sweep of hair hanging in his eyes with a schoolboy sweater looks above all sensitive. He also looks overheated, particularly in a dance club. The only flamboyance that the male hipster can show, besides his tousled haircut, is his knotted wool scarf and tuque, which may not be removed . It is astounding to see these guys dancing energetically in a sweaty crowd and steadfastly refusing to remove their scarves and hats; it must be hellish. Here is where the pretense of nonchalance disappears, for one must admit that such strictures – like Beau Brummell’s injunctions to keep a perfectly stiff stock and elaborately knotted cravat in place at all times – are quite outlandish.

This brings up the question of irony, so long a central part of hipster culture. This particular group in the bar on the weekend was enjoying a mix of music that was contemporary and nostalgic: It combined recent electronic dance music with 1970s disco and soul. The DJ was from Brooklyn (far cooler of course than "New York City," an origin that DJs might have boasted of a few years ago; hipster culture is mad for all things Brooklyn, including art and literature).

I recognized to my amazement an easy-listening soul song that had been popular when I was trying to make out with Theresa in Cynthia’s rec room in Grade 9. (It was Boz Scaggs’s Lowdown , from 1976, and to hear it again now in that churning youthful environment was a Proustian shock, a curiously unpleasant mix of yearning and embarrassment.) This kind of music was violently disdained during my own hipster years; it was exactly what punk rock was reacting against. But the happy dancers here displayed no trace of ironic appreciation: They just loved it.

The word hipster itself was a few years ago ironic. It was funny because dated; it comes from the 1940s, from jazz. I’m not using it ironically myself, nor are the hipsters irony-obsessed any more. Irony has been so pervasive for so long that it has simply disappeared: We have come full circle into endearing sincerity.

Credit: rsmith@globeandmail.com

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2008

Publication date: Feb 28, 2008

Year: 2008

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 383361746

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/383361746?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 32 of 42

A bit of quirkiness is better than ‘serious’ schmaltz any day

Author: Smith, Russell

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This is why [Michael Hirschorn] disapproves of quirk. Quirkiness, he says, is too easy to achieve, it’s "a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. ... It’s harder to construct a coherent universe that has something to say about contemporary life."

Full text:

“We’re drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn wrote in the September issue of the Atlantic. Hirschorn, who is an intellectual who also happens to be a U.S. TV executive, defines quirk as that motif in American stories that makes stories of small obsessions, heroes of oddballs.

His prime examples are the films of Miranda July (the young writer/actor/director who weaves sort-of stories out of the daily lives of misfits), the films of Wes Anderson, the "strenuously odd" TV comedy Arrested Development and the long-running radio, then TV, show This American Life . That show’s host and creator, Ira Glass, is an intellectual hero in the United States, and Hirschorn spends half of his article defining Glass’s style and values.

The stories in This American Life are gently comic, its heroes idiosyncratic and generally cute, and its message ... well, that’s the thing about quirk, Hirschorn says. We’re wary of messages these days, wary of grand themes. Hirschorn argues that This American Life is a sort of youthful antidote to the conventional public-radio documentary about Guatemalan basket weavers. In other words, he seems to be saying, it’s superficial.

He sees the trend in American literature as well: Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem, with their unusual characters and their fear of sentiment, are its representatives. Hirschorn traces the evolution of quirk way back to the pop group Talking Heads, who portrayed themselves as nerds rather than as rock gods or hipsters, and whose lyrics often tended toward the childish or nonsensical. This makes quirk the fault, quite clearly, of the now-vanished Generation X, and so must be associated with that demographic’s famed skepticism and cynicism.

And this is why Hirschorn disapproves of quirk. Quirkiness, he says, is too easy to achieve, it’s "a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. ... It’s harder to construct a coherent universe that has something to say about contemporary life."

What substantial art could or should replace this wave of pleasant stuff? Well, anticlimactically, Hirschorn’s exemplar of really meaningful art is Judd Apatow’s comic film Knocked Up , a film, he says, whose characters "face real peril, show real anguish." This is a film, he says, that "dares to matter."

The article has provoked condescending reaction, predictably, among the kind of person who spends a great deal of time arguing on Internet forums – that is, exactly the kind of contemporary hipster to whom quirk is most likely to appeal. Their objections focus mostly on Hirschorn’s bathetic conclusion – that another American comic movie about urban life is the serious art to which we should aspire.

But they have also been railing against Hirschorn’s job: He is a vice-president for programming of the television network VH1. That means he has overseen such reality television as Flavor of Love and The Surreal Life . He has apparently been a driving force behind a series called So NoTORIous , starring Tori Spelling. In indie culture, a guy producing Tori Spelling vehicles just has no credibility, no right to make any pronouncement on culture at all.

Interestingly, of all the movies and books Hirschorn names as examples of this trend, only one is not American (it’s Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time ). Clearly, this quirk thing is a trend in American art, but it’s never named as such, even by Hirschorn’s detractors. It’s just called art.

This relentlessly narrow vision is familiar to any observer of culture: Those inside the United States tend to see its culture as culture, period. It’s frustrating, but it’s the way it is. (And frequently Canadian observers see the world this way too, which I find sad. Surely one of the great advantages of being Canadian is to be conscious of the rest of the world?)

However, anyone looking to see examples of quirk outside the United States doesn’t have to look very far, either. The goofy YouTube video craze – party tricks, bedroom monologues, lip-synching teens – is a great example of the power of quirk, and it is international. Indeed, a great deal of trendy performance art looks a lot like those videos: Young artists all over the world are revelling in little games, in sitting in confessional boxes or organizing processions of clowns ... quirk is serious business in art.

Does it mean that the intellectuals who produce art are just becoming callow and cowardly? This is certainly frequently argued. But it is dangerous, I think, to condemn as trivial that which deliberately avoids grand themes such as war or politics. The lightest of entertainments can be profoundly influential – which is why The Importance of Being Earnest is regularly performed 100 years later.

Hirschorn’s thoughtful piece certainly identifies a trope that has become a signature of the age, but his reasons for dismissing it are too simple. Quirk, one might argue, exists as a reaction against the kind of schmaltzy dramas that people such as Michael Hirschorn develop for television. In his plea for more serious art, he is likely to appear merely as a champion of the earnest. He is suspicious of archness, and in its place he proposes what? Old-fashioned sentimentality?

rsmith@globeandmail.com

Pages: R.3

Publication year: 2007

Publication date: Sep 20, 2007

Year: 2007

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 383406863

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/383406863?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 33 of 42

If this music is hip, then I’m no hipster

Author: Smith, Russell

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There’s a band called I’m From Barcelona. They have a video that gained popularity on YouTube: It’s of their song We’re From Barcelona . It shows a lot of young people swaying and singing along to its sweet and catchy melody. The words are nonsensical. The style of music is nostalgic: It sounds like mid-seventies easy-listening pop, with a brass band accompaniment. It reminds me a bit of the famous I’d like To Teach The World To Sing Coca-Cola advertisement; it has that same mix of vague pacifism and corporate blandness.

The weirdness of contemporary culture cannot be more accurately represented than by this band, and by its non-ironic popularity. Actually, I have no idea if its popularity is ironic or not. It’s not clear if the song is a joke or not. Well, parts of it clearly are: First of all they’re not from Barcelona, they’re from Sweden. And they’re clearly being silly at least part of the time.

But the group’s creator, one Emmanuel Lundgren, writes in all earnestness on his website (www.imfrombarcelona.com) that his music is "explosive happy pop songs" and that they are "fuelled by love and vacation." The backdrop imagery on that website, though, is an illustration that would not be out of place on a dentist’s wall. . . . Is that a joke or not?

Well, one thing that indicates that hipsters are behind this is that the band stems from a clique: Lundgren explains that there are 29 people singing on the record because when he came up with his songs, he had all his friends to his apartment, with all their instruments, to help record it. So the record is as much a celebration of belonging to this cool set. And the element that finally proves their cool beyond all questioning is, as usual, their appearance: These are young Swedes in the international hipster uniforms of second-hand clothes – lots of wool cardigans and pyjamas – and piles and mounds and whacks of facial hair. Facial hair, in case you haven’t been following, is mandatory for young musicians these days, and it must be as outrageously nostalgic as possible: greasy little mustaches, mutton-chop sideburns – these are the markers of the contemporary arts graduate with his own whimsical blog.

In fact, this group is part of a musical school with impeccable hipster credentials. The tendency is called "twee" or "twee pop," and it has been around since the 1980s; it is only recently that Sweden has become a global production centre for this genre. The word means exactly what it always has: overly cute, affectedly quaint. It probably derives from a child’s pronunciation of "sweet." It’s the word that comes to mind in describing a tea shop with too much floral wallpaper.

There are hundreds of bands all over the world that delight in this appellation: They make soft songs with acoustic guitars, on the whole, and they sing about summer girls and sunshine or about their cats. They make a cult of gentleness.

The Ur-twee band, in my opinion, was the eighties group the Smiths, with their whiny songs about urban neurosis. A nineties girl band called the Sundays also went a long way to defining the aesthetic. A contemporary group you may have heard of, called Belle and Sebastian, is perhaps the most famous one to fit the moniker. Other twee bands include the Lucksmiths, Cat’s Miaow, the Field Mice and a variety of others with sun or sunshine in their names. (The funniest belongs to the Swedish outfit Suburban Kids With Biblical Names.) You can often hear the Canadian forms of the genre on CBC Radio 3 on Saturday evenings.

The record labels who put this stuff out are proudly small and not based in huge urban centres. They put pictures of their kitty cats on their websites, along with defiant manifestos.

It’s interesting that such calculated wimpiness is vaunted as being somehow anti-establishment. The manifestos and blog entries claim that twee pop is a reaction against the chest-thumping machismo of punk rock and other loud forms of indie rock. It calls angst-ridden rock "pretentious."

This I find amusing, as I can’t think of anything more pretentious than the affectations of these fashion-obsessed students. Like all movements that begin in anti-cool, this one has inevitably become itself cool. Sorry kids; you can’t get away from it.

Is it ironic? I think, on the whole, it is not. The people I know who listen to this music (who are uniformly female) just really like the soft sweet songs. And the shaggy-haired soulful boys in sweaters who stare out from the album covers are of course the very embodiment of sensitivity.

I’m From Barcelona is a slightly more complicated case: This is the serious product of a group that can’t, for reasons of pride, appear to take anything seriously, so they make a joke of it.

I find such pervasive irony rather cowardly; at its worst, it is nihilistic. But then I can’t listen to five minutes of any of this stuff without wanting to break something. This is a clear indication of my non-hip status, which is a corollary of age.

Pages: R.1

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 2006

Publication date: Nov 30, 2006

Year: 2006

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 387220665

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/387220665?accountid=14369

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Document 35 of 42

1970s New York: When boys & girls really went wild

Author: Smith, Russell

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A fascinating collection of photographs by Allan Tannenbaum can be seen on a SoHo weekly website. He was a part of the famed party scene of New York of the 1970s, and documented the excesses at Studio 54, Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club and at various underground swingers’ clubs and pornographic magazine launches. The photos are on display at the Tribute art space in New York until July 5 (and there is also a book of Tannenbaum’s photos from the era, called New York in the 70s ). Boy, did he get around.

There are photos of quite hysterical excess here: There is nudity on the dance floor, nudity on the sofas, nudity in the washrooms. Everybody looks giddy and exuberant. Here is the wired and flamboyant disco era; here are huge afros and fright wigs; here are feather boas and elegant suits and leather jackets, all on the same dance floor; here are proto-punks in ripped jeans, proto-club-kids in spacesuits; here are maniacal and wasted hipsters, drag queens, porn stars, doms, hustlers who all look as if they were members of the Village People (and some of them were).

There is a real sense, in these pictures, of a place that was undergoing a deep and transforming social revolution, a place in which social and sexual selves were being discarded and reinvented. It makes New York look like one gigantic orgy. It really makes you feel square.

Seriously, it does make you aware of the conservatism of our own era. It really makes you aware of the current resurrection of religion – in particular of stern and ascetic religions, such as Protestant Christian evangelism and Islamic fundamentalism. You can’t look at these pictures without thinking, immediately, of the subsequent crackdown in the United States – of Ronald Reagan and the Meese Commission on pornography and the Moral Majority and family values. You can’t help thinking that none of this risky behaviour would be allowed now, that the cops would raid these parties.

We don’t even allow smoking in bars now, let alone open fellatio and amyl nitrate. Now we are arguing about gay marriage. Back then, it appears, nobody wanted to get married. They wanted to have sex with everybody and everything.

It makes you wonder what happened to us. I have been to a lot of underground parties – including to swingers’ clubs and fetish clubs and body-mod rituals – and I know that the first thing you learn at these things is a list of rules. No this, no that, absolutely no excess. At regular parties, in clubs and at concerts, among young people there is the occasional exuberance but it follows very strict social conventions: Girls can whoop and lift their tops up and show their breasts and guys cheer. It doesn’t seem in any way like the natural, experimental nudity of Tannenbaum’s photographs. Today’s big-drunk-frat-boy, girls-gone-wild top-lifting seems juvenile and snickering in comparison; it seems basically, strangely, conservative. It seems to come from a hard and mean world of commodification and tough guys, not from a truly Dionysian mentality.

Now it is legal for women, at least here, to walk around topless, but no one has the slightest interest in actually doing it. Whereas in New York in the seventies it was technically illegal but it seemed to be a common practice (at least in Allan Tannenbaum’s world). Pornography wasn’t the powerful, ubiquitous and conservative industry that it is now; it still had some hippie elements. Sex wasn’t quite as commercialized.

But we know, of course, why the rules had to come in, why excess is dangerous, why the backlash happened. There is one particularly glamorous shot of the party kings of Studio 54 – Halston, Roy Cohn and Steve Rubell – looking suave and stylish together on a night-club banquette. All three were to die of AIDS. The gay underworld that was driving the party scene of New York with its inventiveness and imagination and iconoclasm and defiance and style was decimated in the 1980s. It subsided into a state of perpetual grieving, punctuated by bouts of political anger and protest. I remember a gay friend telling me in the 1980s that in his circle, the phrase "I’m going to New York" had become synonymous with "I’m going to a funeral." Drugs turned out to be not so much fun, either – bottomless supplies of cocaine and poppers and heroin took nearly as great a toll. People died.

A clever contributor to Metafilter posted, next to a link to Tannenbaum’s 1970s work, a similar set of photos of America in the 1980s. They are by Stephen R. Mingle (galleryofamericadocumentia.blogspot.com), and they mix up the party and concert shots with more conventional photojournalism about politicians and sports. Granted, it’s a different photographer at work, but one can’t help draw conclusions from the fact that the whole mood is different; this is a darker vision. The heavy-metal and punk concert images seem suffused with anger and sarcasm.

And check out the photo galleries of contemporary American hipster youth at parties at thecobrasnake.com. What a slick, frosty bunch! The fun, when there is fun, seems to be ironic.

I am no nostalgic: I don’t want to romanticize a golden age of hedonism and freedom. And I’m sure there are people in New York today who are having some pretty wild parties that I’m not invited to. But they never became part of mainstream culture. It is sobering to see these old pictures and realize that the sexual revolution overdosed and died before it matured.

Pages: R.1

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 2005

Publication date: Jun 23, 2005

Year: 2005

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 383670237

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/383670237?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

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Document 36 of 42

Spare me from the dreary world of sneakers and T-shirts

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

The aesthetic subculture which came out of postpunk musical splintering of the 1970s, then, was called Gothic in reference to 19th-century fiction, not to medieval architecture or to barbarian Scandinavian tribes. What’s amusing is that their fashion – a mixture of Victorian, sexual-fetishistic and futuristic, organic velvet on toxic plastic – is now described by a word referring to a genre which was an imitation of a fantasy period which didn’t really exist.

Full text:

I know I will never be a true hipster, because I so love Goths. True hipsters – and in fact most normal people – sneer at the beautifully dressed; they sneer at anyone who takes his appearance too seriously, at anyone who tries too hard. The vanguard of hip at the moment reads Vice magazine, which is largely about vomit and excrement, filled out with a hysterical mockery of everyone and everything. The vanguard of hip is sneaker-and-T-shirt clad and refuses to betray any feeling for anything at all, including politics or war, let alone an interest in non-ironic aesthetics.

I like Vice magazine myself, precisely for these reasons, and so felt faintly guilty, on the Victoria Day weekend, about my deep enjoyment of the costumes and theatricality of the Fetish Masquerade, a dress-up party in a dance club. Here is what more socially adjusted people would call the deep end of pretension: it is where the world of poetry-writing, vampire-novel-reading teenagers and the more adult world of sadomasochism overlap. Those milieus have always had one thing in common, which is a love of theatrical clothing. They also both have a refreshing disrespect for traditional gender roles. Although there is, at this party, the mandatory dungeon room with its benches and ropes, its primary function is not hard-core sexual fetishism, but simply as a stage for costume.

And what costume: This is a parade of shiny black corsets, of stiletto heels and fishnet stockings, of garter belts and lace. There is so much pillowy cleavage it makes you just want to rest your head in random strangers’ bosoms. There are spidery tattoos on every square inch of exposed skin. The first thing one thinks is that one has entered the set of a science-fiction film. This is a fantasy of what the future should look like: a future in which sexual mores have progressed and repression and inhibition have been eliminated, so the drab, practical work wear of the present has been replaced by a universal flowering of sexual expression through slick, hard-edged façades. (And it’s a fantasy that dozens of Hollywood movies have used for precisely that effect: Compare the black-leather fetish wear of the good guys in the Matrix movies, as opposed to the business suits of their enemies.)

Hundreds of dollars have been poured into these costumes, Each one the result of months of collecting individual pieces, and hours of careful strapping and cinching and painting and dyeing. This is where every woman is a glittering sexual icon, and every man is a Byronic loner, a tortured, skinny poet. This is the most glamorous, the most fearlessly sexualized of all underground aesthetics. So why is it so embarrassing?

Perhaps because the history of the word is a history of pastiche. The original Goths were a Germanic tribe who invaded the Roman empire from the third to the fifth century AD. They were considered barbaric; well into the last century the word Goth was often used to denote an uncouth person. And this is why the term was used, pejoratively, to describe a kind of architecture: the late medieval and early Renaissance architecture of northern Europe, with its ornate, pointed perpendicularity, had nothing whatever to do with the Goths, but it displeased later critics, such as Christopher Wren, who promoted neo-classical styles. These critics called it Gothic to suggest its lack of sophistication – and to stress its Germanic, as opposed to Latin, roots.

Three hundred years later, a completely unrelated genre of fiction gained popularity in Britain.

Vampires, monsters, ghosts, chill visitations began to titillate the European public, and the perfect backdrop for these tales was the late medieval period, with its gloomy abbeys and leering gargoyles. Once again, neither the setting nor the literature had anything to do with Goths of any kind, but the name of the medieval architectural style somehow became transferred to the fiction, and came to mean, by one of these irrational, lateral, associative, linguistic slides, anything dark and menacing.

And so hard, actually, to pigeonhole into one cliché or another. Here is a room full of dazzling people in beautiful and erotic clothing, all displaying intense sexual confidence, and yet one feels, so close to this shiny surface, the angst of the unpopular – one can hear the catcalls of the skinny girls in tight jeans who go to hip-hop parties. (For it’s true, on the whole, with some notable exceptions, that the skinny or athletic girls tend not to end up as Goths.) This fantastic façade, this sheen of sexual poise, has been largely created to make up for inadequacies in the brutal Darwinian arena of teenage attractiveness.

This dialectic of the overtly sexual and the clearly repressed, the violent and the diffident, the beautiful and the shunned, is what gives this particular theatre its intrigue. After all, here is a movement named for a word that once meant barbaric and uncouth, and now means extremely rarefied and sensitive. That combination is precisely what thrills, on a dance floor on a Saturday night.

Pages: R.1

Publication year: 2005

Publication date: May 26, 2005

Year: 2005

Section: The Globe Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 383700219

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/383700219?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 37 of 42

Berlin’s bohemian paradise

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

So the pursuit of cheaper spaces and more dilapidated buildings in which to perpetuate this mythical bohemian culture has a serious political pedigree here. Now the real hipsters are leaving Prenzlauer Berg and going even further east, to the completely undeveloped Friedrichshain. "It’s hard to find even a grocery store there," said one Canadian grad student living in [Prenzlauer Berg]. "It’s in a nascent stage of capitalism. There are only anarchists there."

Full text:

It’s not communism or capitalism the artists are afraid of. It’s gentrification. And, as RUSSELL SMITH finds, it’s spreading like wild fire, pushing the city’s cultural centre – with its galleries, art cinemas and dilapidated buildings – deeper into the east

Berliners – young Berliners, anyway, which means most Berliners – like to say that things are all over now. You should have been here in the eighties, when the punks’ squats of Kreuzberg were really subcultural; you should have been here in the nineties, when the east was just opening up and there were no shops and no signs anywhere and entire apartment blocks were being given away free to artists’ collectives. You missed it. They try to outdo each other with reminiscences of how underground everything was: There was that one guy in Prenzlauer Berg who put a dance floor in his bedroom and paid $56 a month in rent; or the jazz musician whose rent was $14.

The greatest terror of the artists and club kids of Berlin is gentrification, which is spreading with the speed of a forest fire; they wake up in the morning and two new cafés and a wine shop have opened up in their previously crumbling neighbourhood, and they think paradise is being bulldozed.

But Berlin is still a city of great empty spaces, of blanks on the map, a city in outline. There is so much construction going on that you cough from the dust. A surreal scaffolding of blue pipes snakes through the streets, draining the groundwater that seeps into the building sites. Parts of the subway are regularly shut down as new lines and massive stations are dug.

The centre of the city was taken up, from 1961 to 1990, with the no-man’s land that the wall created – the wall was actually several barriers of wire and concrete with space between them – and this space is now being filled with glass office towers and commercial boxes, but not, apparently, with people.

The massive, squat concrete Chancellery and the gorgeous Parliament building, the Reichstag, with its sparkling glass dome, are now complete; you can visit them if you feel like walking through the few hundred metres of yet-to-be-developed concrete that surround them.

In the middle of the former East Berlin, clustered around the brooding, bulbous, science-fiction-style television tower, called the Fernsehturm, are the concrete blocks and windswept plazas of Alexanderplatz, a futurist expression of a socialist utopia, built on the cheap in 1970, now being demolished, renovated or simply abandoned. The Potsdamer Platz development, a knot of post-modern buildings in the middle of a vast construction-site wasteland is centred on a mirrored public square called the Sony Centre, with chain restaurants and a TV screen showing advertising. There are no people here, aside from tour-busloads, because it is not close to anything, and there is no reason to go there.

But just three subway stops from this capitalist Brasilia is the new cultural centre of the city, the cluttered, low-rise area around the Hackescher Markt. This part of the former East Berlin suddenly found itself in the middle of the city when the wall came down and is now a jam of cafés and clothing stores. It’s the ideal Berlin mix of bohemian and chic: There are still shrapnel wounds in some of the buildings, whose peeling facades and courtyards shelter craft guilds, sculpture studios, art cinemas and galleries.

One gallery, at the end of a crumbling alley, houses a bookstore specializing in Japanese cartoons and obscure techno records. Nobody in the building seems older than 25. These places, however, are being pushed out by developments such as the Hacke-scher Hofe, a set of six linked courtyards in perfect Jugendstil (Viennese art nouveau) buildings.

Berlin was once made up of courtyards such as these; they were destroyed in the war and are now being meticulously reconstructed, exactly as they were, from photographs and plans. The shops in the courtyards sell wedding dresses, silk wall coverings, and $25 brunches. Just up Neue Schoenhauser Strasse is some of the hippest shopping in Europe.

Shops such as Apartment sell delicate gauzy dresses by lines such as Theory and Laundry, old-school sneakers and rock-slogan T-shirts. On Alte Schonhauser Strasse, the uber-weird T-shirt store Elternhaus perpetuates the subversive traditions of hip Berlin by printing vintage dresses with puns on other people’s brand names.

Even though this area will soon be the equivalent of New York’s West Village, a place where lawyers will buy condos, there are still actual artists working just around the corner. On Oranienburger Strasse, a famous artists’ squat called Tacheles is in a bombed-out, graffiti-covered hulk of a building, with a beer garden and some rubble in the courtyard, a maze of studios and barely-legal bars inside. It’s no longer glamorously communal: The government insisted on its ownership, and after a court battle the artists now pay a symbolic rent of one dollar a year.

This central area is now, of course, being denounced by Berliners as too touristy and too expensive. The real action, they say, is even deeper into the east, in a residential district called Prenzlauer Berg. This is where buildings are being renovated at a rate of 10 or 20 a week, and new cafés sprout up overnight, but you can still rent an apartment with iffy heating for $500 a month (which would be impossible in an equivalent district in London or even Toronto). Not being at the exact centre of Berlin, this leafy quarter suffered less bomb damage than most during the war, and there are still a few magnificent 19th-century buildings, their stone ornaments pocked and crumbling.

Sandwiched between them are the apartment blocks the Communists built: square and mean. But even these have a sudden historical significance, now that the communist German Democratic Republic is gone: some intellectual bookstores (such as Pro Qm) are selling collector cards with pictures of the ugliest of the "Plattenbauten" (concrete-plate buildings), which have a certain futurist-utopian romance.

There are store-front not-for-profit galleries with conceptual installations in them (such as a machine that eats paper all day). There is a former brewery, the Kulturbrauerei, that has been turned into a complex of cinemas, galleries and throbbing bars. There are abandoned spaces that are used for art shows or raves, such as the gorgeously dilapidated turn-of-the-century swimming pool on Oderberger Strasse.

The Montreal-born composer Robin Minard used this pool in an art exhibit earlier this summer, gluing a thousand tiny loudspeakers on the ceramic tiles of the empty pool; a computer sent noises swishing through them to create a three-dimensional soundscape – which seemed like a perfectly Berlin thing to do.

After Mr. Minard’s show, I asked a Prenzlauer Berg resident called Silvia where to go out at night. A student of English and American literature, Silvia is, like all Berliners, exactly 25, and she lives, like all Berliners, in an "art collective." I had read about a nightclub called Tresor where I thought I might hear some techno; I asked her if it was still cool. "Sure," she replied icily, "about eight years ago."

She took me first to the oldest beer garden in Berlin, the Prater, a half-acre of trestle tables and benches in the open air, for some cheap pints. Her friends were meeting at a bar on Kastanienallee called the 103, a frosty white Clockwork Orange model with a bustling terrace and a lot of extreme lounging going on inside. (In the bars of Prenzlauer Berg, when T-shirted video-makers sit back, they recline so deeply they are almost horizontal; it’s an opium-den kind of pose connoting serious nonchalance.)

On another night I visited an irony-soaked "football club" called Magnet Mitte, really a bar full of beautiful slackers in low-rise jeans and vintage T-shirts. Behind the bar, a board gives the recent soccer league results; on the walls huge slides show the shaggy heads of 1970s players. It really is a football club, but the dudes in tinted glasses and afros lounging on plastic airport chairs didn’t seem like sporty types to me.

Hip Berliners’ fear of the mainstream is understandable, but it has its snobby side. Even the fabled Love Parade, the annual celebration of dancing and ecstasy that has long been the envy of repressed Canadian clubbers, is now seen as commercial by German techno fans – a sellout. Instead, they’re interested in the smaller, alternative love parade that happens in another part of the city. That’s where the really cool DJs are. It’s called the Fuck Parade.

It’s at this point that I start to think, whatever, I would still like to go to the Love Parade. The fixation with what’s underground seems obsessive, perhaps even a little juvenile.

In fact, the Germans have an interesting historical basis for this neurosis. In the post-war years, economic success was promoted as the panacea for Germany’s wounds, its guilt and its horror. Blandness – the identical housing blocks, the conformist social life – was a relief after the flamboyance of the Nazi years. Clean new washing machines and televisions were going to wash away the past. But German intellectuals of the fifties and sixties were skeptical of this new religion and anticommercialism became a form of deliberate mortification. Washing machines were not going to erase the past.

So the pursuit of cheaper spaces and more dilapidated buildings in which to perpetuate this mythical bohemian culture has a serious political pedigree here. Now the real hipsters are leaving Prenzlauer Berg and going even further east, to the completely undeveloped Friedrichshain. "It’s hard to find even a grocery store there," said one Canadian grad student living in Prenzlauer Berg. "It’s in a nascent stage of capitalism. There are only anarchists there."

This is the difference between Germans and Canadians. I have no problem with expensive fashion shops moving in among the artist’s squats. A big city’s mixture of ramshackle and chic strikes me as a happy mix of esthetic pleasures. Art and esthetic indulgence are partners, not rivals. And if the current disdain for clean and luxurious spaces is no longer about economic ideologies, it might easily turn into playground hipper-than-thou-ism, serving mostly to exclude outsiders.

At the moment, Berlin is all potential. The dusty spaces on the map are being filled with buildings that are either stunning or massively banal. It’s a whole new city, and it’s becoming prosperous, liberal and educated. There is a sense of promise and anxiety here, a knowledge that this, if it doesn’t become an enormous Sony Centre, could become the coolest place on earth. Russell Smith writes the Globe’s Weekend Review column, Virtual Culture If you go WHERE TO EAT German food is still, alas, more quaint than elegant. But the Asian-fusion trend that enveloped North America years ago has now hit Berlin like a massive U.S. airlift. Monsieur Vuong : 46 Alte Schoenhauser Str.; phone: 49 (30) 3087 2643; Web: www.monsieurvuong.de. Lively, fresh Vietnamese, for cheap, with a street-side terrace full of stylish Berliners, and an elderly owner greeting you with a handshake. Pan Asia : 38 Rosenthaler Str.; phone: 49 (30) 2790 8811; Web: www.panasia.de. Chic modernism with communal eating at long tables. Sexy waitstaff have a reputation for being a little scattered, but you’re there for the scenery. Mao Thai : 30 Woerther Str.; phone: 49 (30) 441 9261; Web: www.thaipage.com. One of the few authentic Thai restaurants in all of Germany, here in student-filled Prenzlauer Berg. White decor, killer satay. Obst + Gemuse : 48 Oranienburger Str.; phone: 49 (30) 282 9647. Healthy takeout counter in a former fruit and vegetable store, with a couple of tables outside for a coffee and people-watching. Barcelona : 2 Hannoversche Str.; phone: 49 (30) 282 9153. More lawyers than artists, but still crowded, boisterous and genuinely Spanish: huge, steaming plates of paella ,lots of black olives. Barist : 13-14 Am Zwirngraben; phone: 49 (30) 2472 2613; Web: www.barist.de. One of the new restaurants under the viaduct that supports the S-Bahn, in the newly populated square in front of the Hackescher Markt station. Classic Italian style sporting a cool, sprawling interior with high ceilings. WHERE TO DRINK Prater Garten : 7-9 Kastanienallee; phone: 49 (30) 448 5688; Web: www.pratergarten.de. The oldest beer garden in Berlin. FC Magnet Mitte : 26 Veteranen Str.; phone: 49 (30) 4849 5049; Web: www.fcmagnetmitte.de. A real "football club," with slides of ex-players in constant flux on the wall and a crowd of uberhipsters that spills onto the sidewalk at night. Kulturbrauerei : 95 Knaackstrasse; phone: 49 (30) 4431 5100. A former brewery that has been turned into a complex of cinemas, galleries and throbbing bars. WHERE TO SHOP Fishbelly : 7A Sophien Str.; phone: 49 (30) 2804 5180; Web: www.fishbelly.de. Lingerie. Jane Garber (Kostuemhaus) : 40-41 Rosenthaler Str.; phone: (30) 282 7018; Web: www.kostuemhaus.de. Futuristic women’s wear. Lisa D : 40-41 Rosenthaler Str.; phone: 49 (30) 282 9061. Hippy-style women’s wear. Apartment : 3-5 Neue Schoenhauser Str.; phone: 49 (30) 2838 6666. Clothing and accessories. Respectless : 19 Neue Schoenhauser Str.; phone: 49 (30) 2809 9999. Cool, affordable fashion. Blush : 25 Alte Schonhauser Str.; phone: 49 (30) 4202 2701. The most beautiful and interesting lingerie in the city. Pro Qm : 48 Alte Schoenhauser Str.; phone: 49 (30) 2472 8520; Web: www.pro-qm.de. Intellectual bookstore selling collector cards with pictures of Berlin’s ugliest communist-era concrete-plate buildings.

Pages: T.1

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 2002

Publication date: Aug 17, 2002

Year: 2002

Section: Travel

ProQuest document ID: 384160300

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/384160300?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 38 of 42

Will Frank change? Frankly, my dear ...

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

The bidder for [Frank], a 28-year-old called Theo Caldwell, said in The Globe and Mail, somewhat confusingly, that he’s going to keep "some of Frank’s dark side," yet generally the tone will be that of a "Friar’s Club roast" – i.e. good-natured. But that tweedy former editor will still be writing the Remedial Media section, so don’t expect much kindness there. I don’t think Frank will change much. And I don’t think it matters.

Full text:

Word has come that the unpopular Frank magazine is up for sale. It looks as if it’s the end of the road for the nasty and inaccurate rumour sheet that’s printed on newsprint: A prospective buyer is boasting that he will make it kinder and gentler, thus possibly removing its thrilling sting and its appeal to the mingy, career-defeated losers of the world. Which will be the end of Frank as scourge of the Toronto media.

If this happens, it will greatly relieve its targets, who range from important politicians to minor local-TV hosts to minor newspaper columnists. But most people won’t notice any difference, because most people didn’t read Frank magazine. It has a circulation of 13,000. That’s across the whole country. The whole enterprise is being offered for $150,000.

The only people who read Frank are the people it attacks. Ottawa socialites, Queen’s Park politicians, Toronto media and publishing employees. (This is the only reason a story about it would pop up on the front page of the Globe.) A few writers and artists who know media people. That’s it. Doctors and garbage collectors don’t read it: They wouldn’t know any of the names being tarred, or care about what they read.

I was once so traumatized by my appearance on its cover – and by the article within, which contained an entire private e-mail correspondence I had had with someone – that I became depressed and unable to go outside. I imagined mockery everywhere. I saw my shrink and told him I had been hurt by this, thinking that he would be sympathetic, and he said, "Um, I’m sorry, but who is Frank?" – thereby putting my petri-dish problems into perspective.

Its editors have claimed that it was their role to bring down "the powerful" in society, for some vaguely democratic reasons, but most of the targets – particularly in the media sections – are not important people. They are just people, any people, whom their writers found ridiculous, either because of their appearance or their name or for something they did while drunk at a party. Anyone who lives in Toronto is a target for vicious mockery because, I suppose, just living in Toronto makes one powerful.

What function did it have? It repeated rumours, most often about people’s sex lives, which were true about half the time. It repeated rumours about tensions in workplaces, which were true maybe slightly more of the time. But most of all, it just insulted people. Its amusement factor came from the nasty epithets it would attach to anyone in government, corporate life or, especially, to people from Toronto. "Wheezing prof . . . flatulent bore . . . tedious hipster . . . "

These were often so vague as to connote no actual crime or failing. For example, when I made one year’s list of Top 100 Wankers (which was mostly Toronto media people), I was described as "egregious, twat-like", which is wholly negative but also utterly vague. It’s as clever as sticking your tongue out. It was hard to tell why they hated whom they hated. (Several people phoned me to boast that they were also on that list, and compare rankings, and one friend, who hosts a lot of parties, was honestly disappointed that he was not included.)

Who wrote for Frank? I met its editor once, a middle-aged tweedy guy who smelled of divorce. He gives off bitterness like a scent. Who would aspire to be a staff writer at Frank? Can you imagine a student in journalism school dreaming of a position at a tabloid that steals people’s private correspondence about their sex lives and prints it? No: Frank is the end of the line; it’s where you end up when you can’t work anywhere else.

The people phoning in the rumours were hacks who had seen someone else get a plum job. They were junior copy editors, publicists, junior photo-desk assistants, book reviewers who hadn’t written a book of their own. The people whose names you forget at office parties (God help you if you do that, you snob – you think you’re better than the rest of us? . . . Hello, Frank?)

So what was Frank’s value? When it first started up, sophisticates in my city often said that it was necessary: an antidote to Canadian niceness and clannishness. I myself have often said that we need a humorous edge in our fiction (but I was talking about fiction, not real people). Do we need gossip? Well, what is news if not a lot of gossip? And we read novels to learn the intimate relations between characters; is that not indulging in the same pleasure? Why relegate gossip to a lower moral status than other writing?

This was certainly the view that all the Toronto media embraced after Frank first started being noticed here in the early 1990s. I think that Frank’s popularity was directly responsible, for example, for Toronto Life’s launching a nasty gossip column of its own (which it still has, and which is idiotically trivial). The Globe and the Post have both experimented with anonymous rumour columns in a clearly Frank-like style. So it has had its influence. I don’t think any of these copies have improved the level of behaviour or even of discourse in the country. They’ve just made people a lot more nervous about inviting strangers to their parties.

People are now lamenting the "kinder, gentler" Frank (even though it doesn’t exist yet) because, "Canada needs biting satire." I agree with this: Canada does need satire. But Frank isn’t satire. Satire is a cleverly exaggerated imitation. Frank is a list of insults.

The bidder for Frank, a 28-year-old called Theo Caldwell, said in The Globe and Mail, somewhat confusingly, that he’s going to keep "some of Frank’s dark side," yet generally the tone will be that of a "Friar’s Club roast" – i.e. good-natured. But that tweedy former editor will still be writing the Remedial Media section, so don’t expect much kindness there. I don’t think Frank will change much. And I don’t think it matters.

Pages: R.7

Publication year: 2002

Publication date: Aug 10, 2002

Year: 2002

Section: Weekend Review Column

ProQuest document ID: 384131835

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/384131835?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 39 of 42

The parental press has just discovered rave. Maybe: no one told them this important cultural movement is over.

Author: Smith, Russell

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Abstract:

Full text:

The Canadian media are all abuzz about raves. This is odd, considering that the idea of a rave as an underground and interesting cultural phenomenon peaked and faded a good five years ago. (In Britain, where the phenomenon originated, it was more like the late 1980s.) But in the past few weeks there has been a crackdown by the Toronto police on dealing in the stimulants ecstasy and crystal meth, leading to mass arrests at two recent Toronto raves. At a March 25 party at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, police hauled in 19 people; just last weekend, 24 more were arrested in the same place.

This in turn has led to angry editorials in the alternative weeklies and by younger journalists, denouncing the targeting of such innocent drugs and such violence-free locales as raves. It seems strange, many people are saying, that the police are cracking down on raves now that raves are large corporate enterprises, fully legal and sometimes even occurring on city property. It seems the parties attracted much less attention when they were illegal.

Now that the scene is no longer as interesting, the ever-trendy Macleans has charged bravely into the 20th century with a cover story (in their April 24 issue) on the frightening rave phenomenon – written explicitly for Boomer parents, not for people who might be going to raves. A headline on the cover reads: What Parents Need to Know. What an amazing antimarketing ploy: a warning on the cover that this magazine is not of interest to the tens of thousands of educated and literate high-school and university-age students in the country, and even a few thousand in their 30s, who have gone to raves and done these relatively mild drugs. No, we don’t want a young readership here, trumpets Macleans, we are speaking only to parents here. This at a time when every other print journal is eager, indeed some might say desperate, for younger readers, as their core readership dies off and is not replaced by a new one. Why do they think this is happening?

The Maclean’s article itself is well-researched, well-written and balanced – in large part because it’s by a young person who has been to many raves herself. Associate editor Susan Oh is, in point of fact, a genuine hipster, whom I see at many an underground poetry reading or art show. In her piece, ravers are well enough represented; it’s just the parental focus of the cover copy that dismays me. Does it not occur to headline writers at Maclean’s that if one of their own editors is a rave goer, then maybe some of their readers are too? I wonder if the Maclean’s of the 1950s would have seen its readership as excluding people in their 20s?

But then pointing out that the media are dominated by a Family Values crowd with their heads buried in Harrowsmith magazine is about as new as reporting on drugs at raves, so I will move on.

While the mainstream media are discovering raves, they have been steadfastly ignoring a new book that offers the first complete history of the scene, and the most comprehensive analysis of its elements – Rave America: New School Dancescapes by Mireille Silcott, published by Montreal’s ECW press. The phenomenon it describes is so widespread and important that it should be on the front tables of every bookstore and debated in every newspaper’s book section. (It is not.)

Its author, the former music editor of the Montreal Mirror, is an expert on electronic dance music and admits having sampled – in the name of research – most of the party drugs that fuelled rave. She spent years travelling throughout Britain and North America, interviewing ravers, DJs and promoters about the evolution of the underground scenes in various cities, and the picture that emerges is a fascinating model of how geography shapes taste. The really hardcore techno-and-ecstasy scene in North America, interestingly, did not develop in the major cities, but in suburban wastelands like Orlando and depressed Midwestern towns like Milwaukee, where teenagers were presumably more angry and alienated and more willing to plunge into aesthetic extremes. The San Francisco rave scene became hippie-like and nostalgic; the Orlando scene was the most multiethnic and hip-hop influenced; the Milwaukee scene became satanic and industrial; the Toronto scene became slavishly anglophilic. Silcott does not shrink from the bad drug stories that each milieu produced (little Disney-cute Orlando was particularly insane, with an estimated 60 drug-related deaths between 1991 and 1997), but also attempts to describe the strange new music that first excited the fans (which newspaper accounts of raves rarely consider important).

Admittedly, her book is written for insiders, for people who already have a sense of what the difference is between house and and hip-hop – i.e. people under 45, which is the opposite of Maclean’s readership. There is still no middle, general-interest ground between the arch music press and the baffled parental press. Furthermore, Rave America takes a tone of reminiscence, with its focus on the early underground days: It’s an epitaph, a memorial to a heyday of artistic creativity that is basically over. The big media were never very interested in artistic creativity. But now that it’s over, drugs and crime are something they can sink their teeth into.

Pages: R.5

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 2000

Publication date: Apr 29, 2000

Year: 2000

ProQuest document ID: 384429375

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/384429375?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 40 of 42

Author: Smith, Russell

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Full text:

Mining the underground: When the avant-garde goes mainstream, how are you supposed to stay hip?

It’s nobody’s business but my own, why I was watching the Speedvision network on a Sunday afternoon. I feel no need to justify my wandering so high on the dial (channel 48 where I am), shuffling like a dazed discount-outlet shopper among the all-birdwatching channels and the all-city-hall-meetings channels. I’m not going to explain why Speedvision, the all-machinery channel for the connoisseur of monster-truck racing and smash-em-up stock cars, consistently draws me to it.

And indeed I couldn’t tell you, at first, why I was transfixed by an all-kayaking montage on that Sunday afternoon, a fast edit of splashy spills by guys in crash helmets careering through white water. Kayaking is not usual Speedvision content; there’s not enough metal in it. And I personally have no interest at all in kayaking, or in any outdoor sports, or indeed in the outdoors. ("A man must be of a very quiet and happy nature, who can long endure the country" – Longfellow.) But I watched the kayaking highlight reel for a full 90 seconds before it dawned on me why it was so gripping. The soundtrack was hard techno, Rotterdam techno.

Now, for those who have spent so much time doing outdoor sports that they have neglected to follow the past 10 years of underground youth culture, hard techno is a particularly noisy and fast form of electronic dance music. Its heyday is now past. Rotterdam and its U.S. descendants date from the early 1990s, when techno was in its most experimental stage, and had no patience for the squeamish outsider, no interest in commercial success.

It was made up of hammering squeaky-bleep patterns, a beat too fast to dance to – often more than 200 beats-per-minute, or BPMs – a lot of buzzing or shrieking or roaring, a lot of repeated fragments of spoken words and a determined lack of any tune or remnant of song. Like any defiantly avant-gardist art, it offered no point of access to the outsider.

Like gallery installations of rows of blank canvases, like sculptures of steel cubes, like "Language Group" nonsense poetry, it was interesting only to those who have the key, who know what they are supposed to be looking or listening for. Anyone listening to hardcore minimalist techno for a hummable tune, a catchy chorus, is going to be frustrated. (Just as those who looked at Impressionist paintings for conventional representation were frustrated.) This repetitive and grating music is meant to be nasty, even painful. One might compare it to German Expressionist painting, or Futurist poetry, or early punk rock. One can certainly compare it to the musical experimentation of such U.S. minimalists as composer Steve Reich, who had a similar fixation with the monotonous and the grating, with minute variations on a simple pattern.

It was music, in my club-going apogee, for those iconoclastic few who rejected commercialism of any kind, the mushiness of pop songs – the language of malls and advertising – the khaki pants and minivans of rock-and-roll boomers. It was guaranteed to enrage people who lived in Peterborough or worked at the CBC. It was the opposite of television.

I have long argued that rock and pop music are the most conservative art form there is. Rock was long ago subsumed into a monolithic, banal, homogeneous corporate entertainment culture – the kind of music listened to by hockey fans in pickup trucks who are going to alight on my café terrace at any moment and beat the Schoenberg out of me. But techno, I always said, techno is too difficult, too painful for normal people; it separates the aesthetes from the nice people, the pantouflards.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before television picked up on the energy and the modernity of techno. Its thrusting aggression made it perfect for televised sports. The European TV networks were the first to use fast techno themes for World Cup soccer coverage; now even American football – surely the last bastion of the redneck, no? Surely the last place one would expect support for elitist experimentation with the industrial consciousness, no? – uses really quite hard techno themes in its coverage. Dark, bleepy techno has been used especially well in automobile ads, where its metallic edge is gripping. And when the U.S. electronic group the Crystal Method sold an edgy, sample-heavy breakbeat track to the Gap for a famous khakis-and-Rollerblades ad, the absorption into the mainstream was complete. Now Speedvision – of all channels, Speedvision! – doesn’t even flinch at using the baffling and impenetrable music to illustrate the danger of white-water kayaking – of all things!

This cycle of absorption, the passage of a trend from underground and menacing to sanitized and widespread, is accelerating. Corporations use professional coolhunters to speed a trend’s passage from the inner-city "early adopters" to the mallbound middle of commercial success. The cycle is so quick now that the distinctions themselves – between iconoclastic art and Hollywood cliché – are increasingly meaningless. Top is bottom and bottom is top. So what’s a hipster to do? Where does one look for truly non-commercial art, for art that will still shock the television executive?

There is one kind of new music that is newly rebellious, that will still remain too weird for anyone but inner-city hipsters: that of Dmitri Shostakovich. You will never hear that on television.

Pages: R.5

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 2000

Publication date: Jan 29, 2000

Year: 2000

ProQuest document ID: 384433391

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/384433391?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 41 of 42

Hipster toes

Author: Smith, Russell

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Hipster toes

Thursday, October 7, 1999

The wide, square-toed shoe, a year ago the mark of the seriously monied hipster, is starting to dominate the mainstream. And this is troubling to those of us who lived through the 1970s and don’t want to be reminded of it. For it was in vaguely ironic nostalgia that this trend began: a clown-like toe as made by Prada or Gucci in 1997 looked like something out of Shaft or the Mod Squad.

It no longer does: Now it just looks like money. Narrow, pointy shoes are suddenly looking drab and silly. The knock-offs surface in the lines of conservative shoemakers, with slight modifications: Zegna, for example, nods his head to the fashion without plunging wholeheartedly into the wide shoe, making narrow, delicate, Italianate things with suddenly squared-off ends. Trussardi, a rather glitzy Italian manufacturer whom no-one would accuse of being overly hip, has accepted wide, square slip-ons with a seam running around the upper. Boss and DKNY are making, predictably, the most overtly hip men’s dress shoes in the conservative stores, all with swollen, chunky round or square-front ends. Brown’s and, at the lower end, Pegabo, have both made almost their entire lines into an echo of this blunt-ended obsession.

The extremist, of course, who has pushed this trend into ever more platypus-like forms, is still Miuccia Prada. Her innovation of the oddly moulded rubber sole, the one that looks like a cross between a sneaker sole and a wetsuit sock, with a square toe and a square heel that are made from the rubber sole itself, curling up around the front of the shoe, has been perhaps the most strangely powerful fashion trend of the past two years, in both men’s and women’s shoes. It is now widely copied: Costume National makes boots and shoes with the square, upturned rubber bumper, as does Pegabo. It’s a vaguely sporty, vaguely Japanese-avant-garde look (and, if you want my opinion, the most hideous piece of clothing of the past twenty years, with the possible exception of the poncho).

This "organic" sole, with its high-tech biomorphism, has been linked by cultural analysts to a whole new trend of modernist design, which takes the smooth, futuristic surfaces of the twentieth century and moulds them into round, flowing, natural-looking shapes. The Promostyl coolhunters, for example, whose trend forecasts I discussed in an earlier column, link the Prada sole to Philippe Starck objects and to biological artworks by the artist Kiki Smith.

What these analysts, so eager for the new, never acknowledge is that this aesthetic is far from new: it is in fact a reference to a mid-sixties American and Italian modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright’s swirling Guggenheim and Charles Eames’s spare curved wood. Compare Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, or the famous round apartment towers in Chicago, called Marina City, built by Bertrand Goldberg in 1964, in which every apartment is shaped like a slice of pie. Compare the kidney-shaped coffee table of Isamu Noguchi, or the Space-Age televisions of Achille Castiglione. This trend, at its most debased, gave us the drawings in the Jetsons. It is the modernism of a time that was optimistic, not skeptical or ironic, about the future.

Clearly, the current vogue for this aesthetic is merely another post-modern reference, another revival – like James Cagney gangster fedoras in the eighties – of a vaguely kitschy style. It is this aesthetic that dominates Wallpaper magazine, for example, and what could be more archly self-conscious, more knowing, than that hipster’s ode to urban ennui?

At any rate, at its less extreme end, the square toe is here to stay for a few years at least. I admit I have a pair of cheap Pegabo slip-ons with a square toe and a chunky sole and a buckle on one side that I quite like. (I won’t spend $500 on a really good pair, because I’m not sure how long the trend will last.) Men who still find it startling, or who are loath to so slavishly follow the newest fashion, needn’t worry: you can still find solid-looking shoes with a conventional toe at such stalwarts as Dacks and Florsheim (or, if you want the top end, from Allen Edmonds or John Lobb), and they will be forever acceptable.

Pages: C.8

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 1999

Publication date: Oct 7, 1999

Year: 1999

Section: Focus Column

ProQuest document ID: 384476249

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.torontopubliclibrary.ca/docview/384476249?accountid=14369

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

Document 42 of 42

Men’s-wear goes English

Author: Smith, Russell

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Men’s-wear goes English

Thursday, September 10, 1998

Current Hollywood movies always reflect fashion obsessions, and serve to promote certain designers’ visions. Armani popularized a Prohibition gangster look by designing costumes for The Untouchables . The outrageous Jean Paul Gaultier space wear featured in The Fifth Element made that film almost worth watching. This fall’s Hollywood megafolly, The Avengers , is no exception: The pinstripe bankers’ suits and bowler hats that Ralph Fiennes will be wearing reflect the season’s obsession with the conservative, the British, and, strangely enough, the golden age of British TV, the sixties.

Simultaneously, department stores around the globe are showing sombre grey suits with double vents and slightly nipped waists, high button stances and details such as an extra, smaller "ticket" pocket just above the regular pocket on one side – exactly the kind of suits the phlegmatic Steed wears like a kind of armour. Shoulders are subdued. Pinstripes and chalkstripes (slightly farther apart than pinstripes) are everywhere. One result of the high button stance is that the chests are slightly tighter (which salesmen call "fitted"). All this goes with a lot of talk of "tailoring" – which is a nonsense word, really, if applied to a ready-made suit. But the word is meant to evoke an attitude: meticulousness and money. The extra pocket looks, to my eye, slightly fussy, which is indeed its goal.

For some reason, this fussiness is being called an English style, although the suits are being designed by Italians and New Yorkers. The staggeringly expensive Italian designer Gianluca Isaia has just been taken on by the very establishment Harry Rosen chain, and his stuff is rife with "English" details – vents and pockets. There is much talk of Prince Charles’s old-fashioned, highly buttoned double-breasteds and the Duke of Windsor’s tweeds. Salesmen have taken to calling an outer pocket imposed on a sharp angle a "hunting pocket."

It’s interesting that this apparent return to conservatism is in fact the flip side of the same hip nostalgia that the fashion-forward designers indulge in at the trendier boutiques. The narrow, tubular look promoted by Prada and Helmut Lang and DKNY is also a late-fifties/early-sixties-looking line. Picture another British action hero: Sean Connery as the early James Bond, in three-button fitted suits and narrow, flat-front trousers. That was a London look, too. The conservative end is aping the London of a few years later – which was not a conservative place at all. By the mid-sixties, that city had become Swinging, the fashion centre of the world, with colourful Carnaby Street at its hub, introducing nipped, flared jackets, bright colours and ascots – and it is this era that the fussy English business suit is making reference to. The double vents of the new jackets flare out over the hips, giving men a curvier line. It’s slightly different from the lean, sleek casual stuff, but reflecting exactly the same nostalgia for a stylish era.

Whether such nostalgia is archly modern or merely conservative is a difficult question. If you start showing mannequins in blue blazers with brass buttons and ascots at their necks – as Holt Renfrew has recently done – then you look so square you start crossing the line into camp, into a sort of Hugh-Hefnerian vision of English swank. And, what do you know, the campier hipsters have already taken this further: In gay clubs and in British style magazines, one is starting to see velvet smoking jackets with silk scarves held by a ring. (Again, the movies may be responsible for this one – Austin Powers in particular.)

Meanwhile, Giorgio Armani is expressing nostalgia for an even earlier era. As I mentioned last week, new suits in his Emporio line have a single button, a nipped waist, and quite wide, loose, flat-fronted trousers. The trousers are supposed to look soft: The crease down the front is not at all exaggerated, or is non-existent. (Round-fronted trousers have also surfaced in the suits of Canadian designer Philippe Dubuc.) To me, Armani’s wide pants look English as well; they remind me of stylish Oxford undergraduates of the 1920s. Photographs of the young T. S. Eliot or C. S. Lewis – now both images of establishment respectability – invariably show them in tight jackets over V-neck sweaters and ties and pants like flapping sails. Punch published a satirical cartoon in the mid-twenties showing elegant Oxford students at a dance, all tripping on each others’ vast trouser legs. A reminder that even what we consider extremely conservative today was once outrageously hip.

Last updated: 2010-06-25

Database: Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies

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