X all the Y!

Dorian Lynskey is a very good culture writer, partly because, although left-leaning he’s scrupulously fair in a world full of NME-style, Hunter S Thompson impersonators. Careful liberal doubt works much better in culture than it does in politics. He’s also very good because he gets it about right when it comes to how important culture is.

Culture is an essential frippery. No one lives or dies on its progress and yet it informs everything we do, especially when you regard culture in its broadest forms, language, manners etc.

Lack of access to culture is a good indicator of poverty. The link here is an illustration (a small illustration) of the frustrating paradox of our society. We live in a world of such plenty, yet so often so many people are not able to access it. In the case of the author, who is firmly middle-class, it is poverty of time, so many books to read but little opportunity read them.

No one wants to end up fretting over first-world problems (like becoming a parent who has mistaken themselves for a film studies undergraduate) but it's worth asking, who are these cultural riches for?

The X number of things to Y before you die phenomenon is a class assertion, people with the time and the money (33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynskey, recommended retail price £17.99 - cheap for some, I guess) to enjoy the legacy of 6,000 years of human endeavour. The end extreme is How to Spend It- the Financial Times “website of worldly pleasures”, for people presumably who people who’re so rich who’ve been through consumerism and come out the other side… How to spend it, indeed!

All this is without even getting to the question of whether a society that defines itself by the consumption of artifacts is a healthy society. Modern day hipsters are not creative by and large but 'creative' consumers.

Who are you to criticise? I don't see you with a Fungineering Degree...

Does this sound interesting to you?

While Copenhagen has its Harbour Baths, Paris has its Plages on the Seine, and Basel hosts the annual Rhine Swim, the thought of wild swimming along London's waterways might be somewhat less appealing.

Not to Alex Smith and David Lomax of young design practice Y/N Studio, who have conceived a project to transform a stretch of the Regent's Canal into a swimmable commuting route.

I'm actually in favour of this cockamamie blatant waste of money, so long as when the LidoLine opens we get to chuck Boris Johnson in first. There you go, Boris, get in there! Get in there with the zinger burgers! Get in there with the needles and the jonnies! Get in there with the dog turds and rotten wood...! From now on you're swimming to work!

Thoughts for the brain - recycled thoughts

I was bumped into Dorian Lynskey's blog 33 Revolutions Per Minute yesterday. I've pretty much always liked the things he's written (though not bought his book - I'm not made of money!), and was pleased to find his website.

Amongst other things it has a version of his article from earlier this year, yet another attempt to nail down the protean problem of the hipster.

"Hipster-hating is seemingly a victimless crime because nobody will admit to actually being one, although if you’re at all bothered by them then you’re probably somewhere on the spectrum".

Indeed. One of the aspects of modern culture people are most concerned with is esoteric knowledge:

"Norman Cook recently said on 6Music that when he started DJing he could unearth a floorfilling obscurity and it would take months for a rival DJ to identify it and track down a copy".

This quality of The Scene is destroyed by pseudo-democratic forms of technology:

"If today’s cratedigging DJ plays a new discovery it’s on a thousand hard drives on the other side of the world by the next morning".

I say pseudo democratic, the audience, the mass have a much bigger role now in shaping culture than ever before. This is why, amongst other things, hipsters are fucking everywhere. They are the recycling agents of late capitalism, exposing and promoting cultural artifacts at a faster and faster rate. The greater the turnover of cultural capital the faster new forms of capital have to be appropriated and turned out. But this is not agency, let alone emancipation. There is still a sharp division, class-based, between those who can and can't participate. In the example given, you need access to a computer (and computer literacy). Not everyone has this.

Esotericism stems from the Middle Ages. It was a solution to passing on knowledge before mass education and mass media. Craft guilts were built on this kind of knowledge and ritual. It was also a response, in religion, to the counter-reformation. These days it is an anti-capitalist urge, to resist commodification and conformity. It fails (though it can produce great art) because it is an elitist outlook.

Comfortably the best thing to happen in 2012

now all we need is george osborne to make like stephen milligan, and i'll really believe things are turning.