I found a page of G.K. Chesterton quotations on the internet while looking for a George Bernard Shaw quotation, and they all seemed quite pithy, but I was struck by one because it seems to describe one way in which I differ from most people in my life.
"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
Sometimes I feel like I'd have a lot more adventures if the people around me didn't insist on considering them inconveniences.
Mittwoch, 17. November 2010
Dienstag, 2. November 2010
Vintage overload
I have decided that the vintage fad has to stop. That may sound odd coming from one who routinely wears clothing hundreds of years out of style, but I stand by my declaration.
Blogs like Permanent Style and A Suitable Wardrobe often post fashion plates from the 30s, 40s and 50s as inspiration for correct modern business dress. This, to me, is ridiculous. In 1910, any man caught wearing even twenty-year-old fashions would have been laughed at, and yet now it is the height of cool to wear a suit that looks like it could have been made half a century ago. The kicker for me is that the 1960s was itself a retro-styled decade. They called it Neo-Edwardian, because the fashionable silhouettes were borrowed from the Edwardian era fifty years or so before. Which means that when I make and wear a jacket based on late Victorian/early Edwardian (i.e. hundred-year-old) style, nobody really gives it a second glance. Fashion in the fourteenth century had more innovation.
Now, I like old stuff. I make some of my own clothes, and I draw inspiration almost exclusively from the distant past or from fantasy films (which are also inspired by the past, but in a way that's different from retro fashion). I like learning about old languages that nobody speaks anymore. I like having the kind of facial hair not seen in public office or the financial sector for over a century. I have been told that I was born anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries too late. BUT. I like these things for their novelty. My homemade clothing is based on costume. I don't really want those times to come back; I just like the look of parts of them. And I certainly never wanted all the cool people to be wearing what I want to wear.
I sound even to myself like a whiny hipster complaining about mainstream society ruining what was once cool (see my previous post for my views on hipsterdom), but the real root of my problem with this whole thing occurred to me on Halloween: if all I wear is costume-type stuff, then whenever I want to wear a costume, it feels no different from wearing my normal clothes. I have always loved Halloween because it allowed me to dress up like and pretend to be someone I'm not. I've always been slightly uncomfortable in my own skin, and so being someone else for a day was incredibly exciting. Now, though, despite having all this crazy stuff to wear, it's not exciting because I wear it all the time. So it turns out that I have ruined Halloween for myself.
When I started sewing, I never intended to wear what I made day-to-day; I intended it to be costume. I'm not saying I won't keep dressing oddly; I'm a hipster and a nerd and that works for me. I just don't believe the cool people should like the same strange and esoteric things I do. Fifty years of retrospective fashion is long enough. It's time for a change.
Blogs like Permanent Style and A Suitable Wardrobe often post fashion plates from the 30s, 40s and 50s as inspiration for correct modern business dress. This, to me, is ridiculous. In 1910, any man caught wearing even twenty-year-old fashions would have been laughed at, and yet now it is the height of cool to wear a suit that looks like it could have been made half a century ago. The kicker for me is that the 1960s was itself a retro-styled decade. They called it Neo-Edwardian, because the fashionable silhouettes were borrowed from the Edwardian era fifty years or so before. Which means that when I make and wear a jacket based on late Victorian/early Edwardian (i.e. hundred-year-old) style, nobody really gives it a second glance. Fashion in the fourteenth century had more innovation.
Now, I like old stuff. I make some of my own clothes, and I draw inspiration almost exclusively from the distant past or from fantasy films (which are also inspired by the past, but in a way that's different from retro fashion). I like learning about old languages that nobody speaks anymore. I like having the kind of facial hair not seen in public office or the financial sector for over a century. I have been told that I was born anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries too late. BUT. I like these things for their novelty. My homemade clothing is based on costume. I don't really want those times to come back; I just like the look of parts of them. And I certainly never wanted all the cool people to be wearing what I want to wear.
I sound even to myself like a whiny hipster complaining about mainstream society ruining what was once cool (see my previous post for my views on hipsterdom), but the real root of my problem with this whole thing occurred to me on Halloween: if all I wear is costume-type stuff, then whenever I want to wear a costume, it feels no different from wearing my normal clothes. I have always loved Halloween because it allowed me to dress up like and pretend to be someone I'm not. I've always been slightly uncomfortable in my own skin, and so being someone else for a day was incredibly exciting. Now, though, despite having all this crazy stuff to wear, it's not exciting because I wear it all the time. So it turns out that I have ruined Halloween for myself.
When I started sewing, I never intended to wear what I made day-to-day; I intended it to be costume. I'm not saying I won't keep dressing oddly; I'm a hipster and a nerd and that works for me. I just don't believe the cool people should like the same strange and esoteric things I do. Fifty years of retrospective fashion is long enough. It's time for a change.
Dienstag, 5. Oktober 2010
I think I may be a hipster
This is a response of sorts to this blog post by a friend of mine.
I was talking to a guy from California about Portland before I came here (well, before living here; I had visited before), and he described Portland as pretty hip, but too aware of its own hipness ("Keep Portland Weird" bumper stickers, for example) to be as hip as somewhere more unassuming, like Minneapolis (which is, incidentally, where the conversation took place). Now that I'm here, I agree, to a certain extent. The same is true of hipsters in general, I find. They are too aware of how unusual or ironic or meta they are, and don't realize that in order to be taken seriously, they have to find something, anything, to take seriously themselves.
If being cool is about not caring, then the stereotypical hipsters rule. But if it's about not sweating the small stuff, they are inexpressibly lame, because small stuff is all they ever seem to talk about.
As I understand it, the ideal for a hipster is to listen to certain music and wear certain fashions and do certain things not because commercial television and other media say they're popular, but because of the appeal of the music or clothing or activities in themselves. This is laudable. But so many more people are impressed by this idea than can actually fully understand it or put it into real practice that this ideal concept is tainted by the many people who are clearly only putting up a flimsy façade of counter-cultural quirkiness without any real sincerity or conviction. That, in fact, is the central irony of hipsterdom: the people who profess to dislike anything that has been discovered and thus ruined by mainstream society have themselves distorted their own hyper-individualist philosophy almost beyond recognition. They forget, or never bothered to learn, that unique things are still unique whether the rest of the world knows about them or not.
Whether they know it or not, I think this is why everybody loves poking fun at a hipster, even another hipster (who would of course never admit to being one). But I actually identify with the philosophy underneath all the cultural (or do I mean subcultural?) distortions, and I do have a fairly unusual set of interests and abilities, as well as a unique personal style, and am proud of this uniqueness, so even if a person might not peg me as one just to look at or talk to me (though for all I know they might do just that), I am about as hipster as I can be.
By the way, I have heard that one defining characteristic of a hipster is a refusal to admit to being one. What does it mean, then, that I claim the title as my own?
I was talking to a guy from California about Portland before I came here (well, before living here; I had visited before), and he described Portland as pretty hip, but too aware of its own hipness ("Keep Portland Weird" bumper stickers, for example) to be as hip as somewhere more unassuming, like Minneapolis (which is, incidentally, where the conversation took place). Now that I'm here, I agree, to a certain extent. The same is true of hipsters in general, I find. They are too aware of how unusual or ironic or meta they are, and don't realize that in order to be taken seriously, they have to find something, anything, to take seriously themselves.
If being cool is about not caring, then the stereotypical hipsters rule. But if it's about not sweating the small stuff, they are inexpressibly lame, because small stuff is all they ever seem to talk about.
As I understand it, the ideal for a hipster is to listen to certain music and wear certain fashions and do certain things not because commercial television and other media say they're popular, but because of the appeal of the music or clothing or activities in themselves. This is laudable. But so many more people are impressed by this idea than can actually fully understand it or put it into real practice that this ideal concept is tainted by the many people who are clearly only putting up a flimsy façade of counter-cultural quirkiness without any real sincerity or conviction. That, in fact, is the central irony of hipsterdom: the people who profess to dislike anything that has been discovered and thus ruined by mainstream society have themselves distorted their own hyper-individualist philosophy almost beyond recognition. They forget, or never bothered to learn, that unique things are still unique whether the rest of the world knows about them or not.
Whether they know it or not, I think this is why everybody loves poking fun at a hipster, even another hipster (who would of course never admit to being one). But I actually identify with the philosophy underneath all the cultural (or do I mean subcultural?) distortions, and I do have a fairly unusual set of interests and abilities, as well as a unique personal style, and am proud of this uniqueness, so even if a person might not peg me as one just to look at or talk to me (though for all I know they might do just that), I am about as hipster as I can be.
By the way, I have heard that one defining characteristic of a hipster is a refusal to admit to being one. What does it mean, then, that I claim the title as my own?
Freitag, 24. September 2010
Hitler's handedness
I found this site making fun of Tea Party activists, and posted about it on the facebook. I picked the "Obama is right-handed just like Hitler; that's why I'm voting Tea Party" one as a thumbnail. People seemed not to quite get the joke, so I said something like "it's funny because Obama's a lefty", and somebody else said they thought Hitler was too, so I had to go looking. That's when I found this. It's an insightful analysis of the current political climate that uses a non-issue like handedness to illustrate the craziness of the most vocal far right. It is the same idea, but more detailed and with the other hand. But the fact remains that Obama doesn't write with the same hand Hitler did.
By the way, this post is not in the typeface I want it in, but the controls seems to have stopped working entirely. There goes my consistency.
Montag, 13. September 2010
Sonntag, 5. September 2010
The New York Times on language
When I was reading the article I mentioned in my last post, I found a link in the sidebar of the New York Times website to a discussion of the way a person's language affects their world view. I forgot about it in my zeal to spread the "emerging adulthood" idea to my loyal readership (hi, you two!). It would have stayed forgotten, too, if my father hadn't reminded me of it by telling me about a radio program that dealt with the very same ideas. So you may thank my dad for your current ability to click on this link.
Also, while I was looking for that article (it wasn't as easy to find as the first time), I found a goodly number of other articles about language, mostly elucidating a gripe about modern trendy or erroneous terms or usage. On occasion, however, there is a book review that is really interesting beyond a superficial delight in pointing out the linguistic foibles of others. For example: this review of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue makes it look like exactly the kind of book I've been yearning for. My interest in language was first sparked by an article about the history of the English language, and I've been wanting to learn more about the subject ever since. This book appears to offer "the untold history of English", which I hope means that it will tell me (when I inevitably obtain it) about those strange quirky corners of the language that have undeservedly gone unnoticed in the general excitement over Latin and Greek and Norman French. I'm pretty excited about it.
Montag, 30. August 2010
Twenty-somethings
As a person in my mid-twenties, I identify strongly with the group described in this New York Times article. I feel like I'm not a child anymore, nor even an adolescent, but I'm a long way from feeling like an adult. I'm in between. And I feel tremendous pressure to stop equivocating and grow up already, though nobody seems to want to tell me what that entails or how to do it.
I am reminded of Hobbits, who come of age at 33, and consider the decade or so before rather an awkward time. It seems we're all more hobbity than we knew.
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