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In Praise of… “Functional” Technology

December 3, 2011
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In Praise of… “Functional” Technology

Writer Thomas Hayden has made quite a stir in the blogosphere recently with his provocatively titled post “In Praise of Crap Technology” on the site The Last Word On Nothing. Acting as a sort of modern day Martin Luther going up against the seemingly unassailable papal fortress of the Steve Jobs legacy, Hayden eschews high-end toys like the iPhone in favor of cheap, sturdy stuff that actually works. He cites his $20 Coby MP3 player, his Roadace 404 bike, his durable-but-unlovely pair of eyeglasses, and his son’s hand-assembled wooden garbage truck as examples of the “crap” technology he so loves. “I’ve stepped off the escalators of feature creep and planned obsolescence, and all the expense and toxic e-waste that come with them,” he says. “Crap technology, it turns out, is green technology.” Hear-hear, I say. I too am interested in a phone that functions primarily as a device for making and receiving calls. I refuse to buy a Kindle because I think the centuries-old invention of the book works just fine.  My go-to guitar is a $100 ($75 on sale) Rogue acoustic that may have been thrown together in China but plays really damn well. Additionally, I have to confess

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‘The Death of the Hat’

September 26, 2010
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‘The Death of the Hat’

I was struck by the men in the photo above, gazing upon Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in a scene from 1937′s “Topper.” The head of every single man is covered. Even the women are sporting chapeaus. For these folks, the hat strikes me as a mark of adulthood and maturity. If a man wears a hat today, it’s of the ball cap variety, and can hardly be described as a garment representing adulthood. The one-time Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote a fascinating poem about the death of this staple in men’s fashion, which is also an elegy on his father’s passing. The Death of the Hat by Billy Collins Once every man wore a hat. In the ashen newsreels, the avenues of cities are broad rivers flowing with hats. The ballparks swelled with thousands of straw hats, brims and bands, rows of men smoking and cheering in shirtsleeves. Hats were the law. They went without saying. You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd. You bought them from Adams or Dobbs who branded your initials in gold on the inside band. Trolleys crisscrossed the city. Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor. Men with hats gathered

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The A-Team: It Crawled from the ’80s

June 13, 2010
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The A-Team: It Crawled from the ’80s

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading/hearing all of these so-called cultural critics going on and on about how dreary and materialistic the 1980s were. I grew up in the ’80s. I effing loved the ’80s–and still do, without disclaimer or apology. I got to see Empire Strikes Back on opening night and had my interest in history jump-started by Raiders of the Lost Ark. The small screen boasted Magnum P.I., Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, The Winds of War, The Cosby Show, and, on PBS, Doctor Who was winding its way through the Peter Davison years. Which brings us to The A-Team. Could there have been a more perfect encapsulation of the 1980s in all its innocence and swagger? I’m not suggesting for a moment that it was a great TV show. It was not a Magnum P.I. or even an Airwolf. However, the concept was great. It was all there in the intro, and if you’re in your thirties, you know it by heart: Ten years ago, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the

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Rise of ‘Good Girl’ Culture Shows Value of Liberty, Ideals

September 17, 2009
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Rise of ‘Good Girl’ Culture Shows Value of Liberty, Ideals

          The rise of "good girls" in the culture is a natural outcome of the freedom that makes the Omniculture possible. We should make sure to preserve that freedom, and a respect for the value of ideals, if we want more of those good outcomes, S. T. Karnick writes.

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Flabby Action Hero Wins Big at Weekend Box Office

June 9, 2008
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Flabby Action Hero Wins Big at Weekend Box Office

Kung Fu Panda won the box-office race in its opening weekend. Here’s a clue why.  

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Attacks on Mexican Emos Reflect Nation’s Fundamental Social Problems—and Political Causes Behind Them

April 1, 2008
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Roving gangs of young men in Mexico are beating and terrorizing teenage boys who like "emo" music. The situation shows the value of respect for rule of law and the pressing need for a culture of liberty.

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“Hot Ghetto Mess” TV Program Under Fire

July 11, 2007
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“Hot Ghetto Mess” TV Program Under Fire

At least two companies have pulled their ads from the upcoming July 25 premiere of the Black Entertainment Television (BET) program Hot Ghetto Mess which is based on the popular website of the same name. Expressing the same attitude as the website, the program will show viewer-submitted videos of stupid things people do, with an emphasis on the black community. It will also feature comedy, pictures, music, and man-on-the-street interviews to "shine a spotlight on prevalent images in pop culture and examine what role they play in American lifestyle," as the BET web page for the program puts it. It will feature, according to the BET site, "shaking booties, thug life, baby-mama drama and pimped-out high schoolers." In short, in showing the stupidity and ignorance of many Americans, Hot Ghetto Mess will do precisely what a good many shows directed at a broad audience do, but will be directed toward black Americans.

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Academy Award Nominations Reflect Cultural Shibboleths

January 23, 2007
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Academy Award Nominations Reflect Cultural Shibboleths

The nominations for this year’s Motion Picture Academy Awards were announced today, and they basically repeated those made earlier this year by the Golden Globes. Dreamgirls was left out of the Best Picture nominations, rather surprisingly according to Hollywood insiders, and Sacha Baron Cohen was not nominated for his performance in Borat, which was not a surprise. (The Academy seldom honors broad comic performances, except those that are intended as serious. . . .) The AP story noted that ethnicity appeared to be a plus this year: With five blacks, two Hispanics and an Asian, it was the most ethnically diverse lineup ever among the 20 acting nominees. After decades in which the Oscars were a virtual whites-only club, with minority actors only occasionally breaking into the field, the awards have featured a much broader mix of nominees in the last few years. The nominations are indeed much more "diverse" ethnically than in prior years, and in fact much more so than the population of the country. A non-caucasian is now decidedly more likely to receive an Academy Award nomination than a caucasian is. Can affirmative action for caucasian actors be on the way?  Peter O’Toole was nominated for Best

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Fattening Up Fashion Models

December 20, 2006
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Fattening Up Fashion Models

Here’s an interesting item in our ongoing series of observations that everything happens in the Omniculture. Women’s Wear Daily reports that photo editors are beginning to retouch photos of seriously underweight fashion models in order to make them appear . . . healthier: PUTTING ON THE POUNDS: As the body mass index of runway walkers continues to make headlines, skinny models just might present a whole new problem for editors. Everyone has a story of a celebrity cover slimmed by Photoshop, but several editors have been quietly ordering the retouching of gaunt model shots to make them look, well, a little fatter. "A model shows up and you realize she’s too thin and has lost weight since the booking, but the show must go on," said Allure editor in chief Linda Wells. "When the film comes to me, I realize I don’t want to see hip bones and ribs in the magazine." Enter the retouching process, which helps make the haggard look healthier. "If a girl shows up at a shoot and she’s too skinny, a good stylist can pose her so that the reader doesn’t have as much of a sense of it," said Lucky editor in chief Kim

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A Good Quote on Masculinity

December 18, 2006
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A Good Quote on Masculinity

The estimable Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune quotes former NBA Utah Jazz coach Frank Layden on current Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who just achieved his 1,000th victory as a coach in the NBA, regarding Sloan’s legendary toughness: Sloan replaced Frank Layden in 1988, and this was Layden on Sloan: "Nobody fights with Jerry because you know the price would be too high. You might come out the winner, at his age, you might even lick him, but you’d lose an eye, an arm … everything would be gone. "I know you’re going to think I’m kidding when I say this, but I saw Jerry Sloan fight at the Alamo, I saw him at Harpers Ferry, I saw him at Pearl Harbor. He’s loyal. He’s a hard worker. He’s a man. There aren’t many men you can say that about these days. And that is not a good thing. 

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Guest Article: The New Avant-garde: Clean Comedy

December 4, 2006
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Our friend Mike D’Virgilio has posted an interesting article on a cultural trend toward "cleaner" products and has kindly granted us permission to present it to you here. Mike’s article notes something important about the Omniculture: everything happens, and while there is much on what traditionalists would call the extremely bad end of the spectrum, there is also much more than in recent decades on the more wholesome end of things as well. Here’s Mike’s article: I guess if you live long enough you pretty much see everything, but I never thought I’d see an article I read on the front page of Friday’s Weekend Journal. (I can’t link to it, because it requires a subscription–I get the dead tree version–but I can steal a few quotes.) The article’s title drew me in: “Comedy Comes Clean: In a backlash against racy and gross-out material, some comics are turning to still-biting but less salacious jokes.” Who would have ever imagined that post-Lenny Bruce, the cutting edge of comedy would be comics who refuse to utter vulgarities or refer to bodily functions? Since I’m not a connoisseur of comedy I had no idea such a thing even existed. Sure I’ve heard about

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Jerry Garcia on the Omniculture

December 1, 2006
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Our Reform Club colleague Tom Van Dyke sent us this nifty quote from the late Jerry Garcia, of the rock band The Grateful Dead, in which Garcia observes that the real action in changing American society actually happened before the hippie revolution of the mid- to late 1960s, as I argued in my two-part article on the Omniculture a few years ago: "It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness." — Jerry Garcia That’s as good a description of the Omniculture as I’ve seen.

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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