Hipsters in Adbusters

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

This is well written, yes, and some of it is apt, but generally I disagree. I think the first commenter has some good points – be sure to read that. Who says apathy and hedonism can’t be a form of cultural revolution? In a way it’s the ultimate rejection culture: “I’ll do whatever I want to do, because I could care less.”

Better ways to spend 175 million dollars

So good ol’ Georgey Lucas gave my film school 175 million dollars, and they built a new building with it. I’ve been taking classes in there for the past semester, and I have to say it’s not bad. It looks like a cross between a Vegas hotel and a Cheesecake Factory, but since I like both of those things I can’t complain.

However, I can’t help but think that there are better ways this money could have been spent. It’s the same logic that crops up during rush meetings. 1 pledge = $1400 = a small car off craigslist = 280 double jack-n-cokes = 25 good lapdances = 70 thirty-racks… etc. It makes me think, okay, if I can stand having that guy chill with me and call me an acquaintance for a semester, it’s like he’s buying us all _________.

Well, needless to say, 175 million dollars would buy more than 25 good lapdances. (Side note, I heard each palm tree out front cost 1 million dollars). 175 mil = one Lucas Building = 500 Lamborghinis = 15 impressively large yachts = the cost of making Rush Hour 3, etc.

They could have bought RED cameras for every kid in film school with enough money left over to buy all the teachers sports cars. I think they should have financed 175 million-dollar-budget films. It would be like an investment, USC as the studio owning the rights to the films. Chances are at least a handful of talented kids would be able to scrape something worthwhile together (not everyone here is talentless), take it to Sundance or Cannes or something and sell it. USC would probably make it’s money back and then do it next year.

Anyway, food for thought.

I’m running out of reasons to nuance my communication

Communication is the spreading of ideas. You have an idea, you communicate it to me, I have that idea, or some version thereof. The first and last step have been the same since monkeys first shuffled out of the sea-foam, tore off their webbed fins and invented agriculture. But the middle part, the actual communication – now that’s getting pretty confusing.

In the olden days it was limited to the following: To share an idea, you spoke it to someone, or many people, either in public or in private, in either a normal speaking voice, a whisper, or a yell. That’s two binaries and a trinary, which means twelve possible ways of communicating an idea, which would seem like enough, right? How much nuance could I possibly need? If I was planning to overthrow the chief of my tribe with a few of my fellow cavemen-and-women, I would be communicating my plan to multiple people, in private, in a whisper. If I wanted to accuse my neighbor of stealing my lucky sabretooth tiger paw, I would communicate it just to him, in public, in a yell. Plenty of options.

But then writing came and screwed it all up. Something intended for one person (like a love poem) might end up being read by a whole bunch of people (embarrassing!). Something intended as a soft whisper could be interpreted as a derisive yell. And so, partially to get around this whole writing-being-interpreted-the-same-way-as-speech thing, a whole new breed of communication was developed, so that what was expressed in writing couldn’t be expressed with speech; writing was for the future, for the unknown audience, for the far away friend, for the history books.

And so it goes: every time a new communication medium is developed, a new communication nuance must also be created to avoid confusion.

But now! with this proliferation of commu-nuances, I am wholeheartedly confused. There’s still speech, then physical writing (in various forms, each with their own nuanced meanings: postcard, letter [S.W.A.K. or N.S.W.A.K.?], graffiti, post-it note, greeting card), email (To:, CC:, BCC:), fax, phone calls (to cell phone or home line, leave a message or not, or hang up after one ring just so they see the missed call, or call directly to their voicemail to avoid actually talking to them), blogging (and comments on the blogs, wordpress or blogspot), text messaging, BBMing, IMing, MySpacing and Facebooking (friending, defriending, wall post, private message, status update, photo comment, status update comment, note, poke), and Twitter, which, I’ll admit, I can’t figure out the nuance for. Meta-communication, people: the method of delivery actually changes the message being sent.

Someone just wrote on my Facebook wall, and I couldn’t figure out what was more appropriate, to comment on their wall post, or to write on their wall? Writing on their wall is the more direct response, yes, but the playful nature of the comment made me feel that perhaps the subject should be open for public debate, and so a comment thread would be more appropriate.

In any given string of communication these days (i.e. I tell you something, and you respond back to me), I have about 45 different delivery options at my disposal, just off the top of my head, and I’m not even counting anything absurd like carrier pigeon. And so to respond to me, you have an equal number of options. Which means that in one simple back-and-forth, two messages communicated, there are a total of 2,025 different nuanced meanings. For example, if I write on your wall, “Hey, let’s hang out,” and you say back “Sure! Let’s meet up later,” then the form the response comes back to me in means a great deal. If you call my cell phone and say that, I know that you probably actually want to hang out. If you text me that, then you might want to hang out. If you write that on my wall, it’s pretty non-committal, and probably a no. If you send me a private Facebook message (word to the wise, girl: very sexy), then, well, not to brag, but I’m set.

In a string of six messages, the number of nuance-chains jumps to about 184 million. Like, if I call you and don’t leave a message, so you text me, so I post a link on your wall and then you comment on my status, so I call you again and do leave a message, and then you say hi to me in the hall in a normal voice, in public… well what the hell does that mean?

Beats me. So to simplify things I will only be responding to communication in the form of good-ol face-to-face speech and Twitter @s, which are currently the most cutting-edge form of communication, and therefor the most nuance free. So holler @dennyroberts if you need me. I reserve the right to send you a postcard in return.

An island in between misery and ignorance

I was on my way home to northern California sometime last year, and it was winter. The usually six hour drive was taking considerably longer, due in part to traffic in L.A., but also due to our frequent stops, detours, and general “we’ll get there when we get there” attitude. I was driving, and I had just dropped off a friend at their house in the city. We were approaching hour ten, and it was three in the morning when we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County, where I live.

There were three of us left in the car, and just as we crested over the hill into Sausalito I noticed with some alarm that there were brake lights flashing ahead of me. I pulled the car to a quick and uneasy halt, becoming the last in a line of stopped traffic, flowing motionless down the hill into the hazy distance. I caught my breath, and turned around to make sure that the next cars to come over the hill didn’t plow into me, and that was when I realized that it was snowing.

It doesn’t snow often in San Francisco, certainly not in any places where people live. Sure, there’s a cap of white on top of Mt. Tam during certain months, but here I was in the middle lane of the freeway, in Sausalito, and it was three in the morning and it was snowing.

About three more layers of cars filed in behind us before a police car appeared at the of the crest and began signaling people still coming across from San Francisco to exit into town. If we’d have shown up six minutes later, we would have been one of those cars, and I probably never would have noticed that it was snowing, and I would have gone straight home and gone to bed and probably would have been told all this by my father when I woke up around noon the next day.

But I guess I didn’t linger in that rest stop, or I ate a little quickly at In-n-out, made up the extra six minutes somehow, and now I was stuck here, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the freeway, and it was snowing.

Out the window, we could see that people had started to get out of their cars, so like the confused kids we were we got out too. There were faint flashing lights in the distance. No one could see anything from their cars. We all figured it must have been a car crash or something. The snow. Everyone was amazed that it was snowing.

Let me tell you, it was like being in a dream. It was like standing on the exact other side of the world. Everyone else you know is warm and asleep and doing what they ought to be doing at three in the morning, and here you are, and the situation is beyond absurd. Here you are, standing on a freeway, with thirty or so people you don’t know, in the middle of the night, and it’s snowing.

I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I think it was the young people in the limo next to us. They got out of their limo, giggling like pixies, scooped some snow off their long roof, and threw it at each other. I think an errant ball flew onto my trunk. I carefully bent down and picked up a handful of my own, and just sort of tossed it back onto the road with disbelief. Snowballs, I thought. With a grin, I took a handful off my hood, opened my back door, and tossed it in the face of the sleeping passenger in my back seat. Watching him wake up and wrap his head around this new world one detain at a time was an event in itself.

Soon all the cars in our little parking lot neighborhood were in on the war. We made the mistake of challenging the limo, which not only had more people in it but also more surface area with which to let snow gather. A shaky truce was drawn due to our groups being close to each other in age, and we set about pegging other cars that we had the uphill advantage on. Our unlikely snow war raged for about half an hour, before an officer came and cleared our line of cars, directing us backwards on the freeway one car at a time, up to the exit at the top of the crest. The whole ordeal took maybe an hour and a half, and I drove home in disbelief.

When I woke up at noon the next day I learned that I had been stuck behind a 31 car pileup. It had been caused by a drunk driver, and two people had died, two young women. We were all playing and laughing while people bled out a hundred yards in front of us. Six minutes later and I would have been one of them, mangled metal and crimson droplets turning the once-in-a-lifetime snow a sickly shade of brown. But instead, this drunk driver had been six minutes ahead of me on the road, probably leaving the bridge just as I was getting on it, and he lost control because of the ice, and the two people he was driving home died when his car crashed into another car, and then another car crashed into them, and then 28 more cars all crashed into them and into each other, and then I had a snowball fight.

I had found myself perfectly perched in that little island of time, that eleven minute span that allowed me to experience that pileup from the perspective of a joyfully ignorant snowball fighter, knowing that there was a pileup ahead of me yet not caring, enjoying a surreal, serene moment of temporal isolation, while those ahead of me suffered and cried, and those behind simply drove on home.