Chris Navin

Racked via Virginia Postrel: ‘The Fall of the Hipster Brand: Inside the Decline of American Apparel and Urban Outfitters:”

A lull…a true decline?

‘By 2006, American Apparel’s hipster-centric aesthetic became so popular that the company was snapped up for $382.5 million by an investment firm, who promptly took it public. That year Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, once described as the “nectar of the hipster gods,” overtook Coors in volume sales. Meanwhile, Urban Outfitters saw a 44% increase in profits every year between 2003 and 2006.’

So long to seedy chic?

Hipster Real Estate At The New York Times:

‘By many measures, Jeff Huston and his wife, Lisa Medvedik-Huston, arrived late to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They weren’t among the first waves of artists and hipsters in the early-to-mid ’90s to cross the East River in search of cheaper, grittier confines.’

Stay ahead of that gentrification you’re inevitably helping to bring about…

Yes, it’s mostly been done before. Your time will come and go. Truth will out and you’ll decide to get off your carousels in due time. Some really daring folks just read the classics.

This blog has some sympathy for those trying to find meaning by picking and choosing from styles, ideas, and fashions as though at a rummage sale; striking a pose so ironic and vaguely anarchic and artistic as not to appear to care about anything, or to care about the right things in the right measure. Who we choose to be at any one time isn’t all that we are.

Yet, the basics don’t appear to change much: Life ain’t fair, it can and will be a struggle for survival at times, some people are decent, some are assholes, some are dangerous etc. On that note, James Bowman at Arma Virumque.

The theater is dead. Long live the theater?

Is it just me or has the theatrical culture of the English-speaking world gone into a terminal decline? I would think that perception a sign of my advancing age but for the occasional straws in the wind to suggest that I am not entirely alone. Janice Turner in The Times of London, for example, writes that she recently walked out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie Inherent Vice.

‘After 30 minutes of letting bonged-out hippy ramblings “wash over” me, I was imploring my husband to leave. We lasted an hour. And as we burst into the foyer, enjoying that same exquisite pleasure as when escaping a boring dinner or almost any play, two others followed us. “What the hell was that about?” we all cried.’

It can’t be that bad, right? Maybe he is just getting old.

Though, I do remember the following lines by Gore Vidal, which I can’t help but think apply to some plays these days, especially the preachy, didactic, ’emotive’ navel-gazing types wandering in a hall of modern mirrors: