A nod to the nineties cult film: stylised violence set in bland suburban landscape – the short film promo for the new album by The Dead Weather.

BLAME IT ON THE ANTI-BOOGIE Dust off your docs, ditch the shampoo and wipe that smile from your face – the 90s are back.

Out dancing with friends a week-end ago, we were served a selection of alternative 90s chart toppers to groove to. The dance floor erupted in spontaneous ensemble-karaoke at the chorus of every “invigorating power ballad”. But something was missing: beats – about 55 of them, every minute. Half way into every song, the predictable, mid-paced tempo became boring. All you could do was to pull harder at your beer and wait for the next track.

A few die-hards always head-bang, but head-banging – that extreme form of nodding in agreement – does not by itself qualify as dancing, at least not in my deeply un-cool opinion. While you might well be able to come as you are, you can’t dance to the 90′s.

THE STAGE PROPS The nineties started in a financial recession and counted down to the end of the century, a period historically characterized by world-weariness, cynicism and feelings of uncertainty.

Big historical moments followed in quick succession. The end of the Cold War was followed directly by the Gulf war. Germany re-united over the Berlin wall, Mandela was released. AIDS became a big issue.

Cell phones and the internet became available to the average Joe. Over-excitement surrounding new technologies lead to the dot.com boom and subsequent bust, and everyone was freaked out by the cloning of Dolly the Sheep.

Amid shifts and changes however, pop culture was on a jaded and disinterested “been there done that” track, and embodied a morbidly cool decadence in its very own, sullen way.

FIRE THE HAIR-AND-MAKE-UP DEPARTMENT The 80s steadily digressed from gilt to guilt, and the after party in the 90s was nursing the hang-over. Queue grunge, and it’s translucent, waif-like sister, heroine chic. Everybody looked like they hadn’t slept or showered in months. Wasted silhouettes, knotted hair, clammy skin and black circled eyes constituted the “used-up, worn-out look”, or  “junkie sweats”, as dubbed by William Mullen, creative director of Details magazine at the time.

According to Tom Ford, the creative director for Gucci around 1996,

“Fashion has always perceived boredom as cool. The goal is to look like you’ve seen everything, done everything, been everywhere. It’s an intimidating look, and the drug thing is a continuation of all that. If you look like you’ve been out all night, it conjures up all these images in your head.”

Mullen had a similar fashion-conscious, fence-riding view on the the drug issue:

“It’s wrong to say drugs are good. What … these images [refer to] is all the other stuff: the glamour, the free sexuality, that whole nocturnal thing that only drugs can truly give you. Only people on drugs stay up all night, but that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the look of someone who stays up all night.”

Jack White from The White Stripes, and Alison Mosshart from The Kills pelting each other with bullets in "Treat me like your mother" by The Dead Weather.

THE BEAT The 90s saw the rise of alternative rock. Grunge culture established itself in the coffee shops in Seattle and turned its flannel-clad back on the high-gloss excesses of the 80′s. It was angst-ridden, cynical, self-deprecating and, well, generally stoned. Grunge, in short, hated itself and wanted to die, as was so eloquently expressed by Nirvana in “I hate myself and I want to Die”.

Despite this wish, Grunge, and post-grunge (’94 onwards) kept on growing to become the defining genre of the decade. Lyrics echoed the sentiments of GenX: bottled frustration, a loss of purpose and meaning, social alienation, apathy, confinement.

Unless you were a very early adopter already swinging glow sticks at illegal raves in 1990 (the so-called “Summer of Love”), you were most likely still about to be weighed down by your first pair of Doc Martins, a shoulder length mop of hair (for guys), and the revival of oh-so-hard-done-by third wave of feminism (for girls – think Tori/Sheryl/Sinead/Alanis).

Grunge reached commercial success in the early 90s after Nirvana released Nevermind and Pearl Jam released Ten. Many grunge bands were uncomfortable with this popularity.

The reluctant messiah’s of the movement lived the grunge brand, and many passed away before the age of 30. Kurt Cobain, Nirvana (suicide); Layne Staley, Alice In Chains (OD); Shannon Hoon, Blind Melon (OD); Doug Hopkins, Gin Blossoms (suicide); Michael Hutchence, INXS (accidental death, drug related).

BORED BUT NOT BITTER The Brits were slightly less intense, and Britpop gave us gems like “I was looking for excitement, but all I found was cigarettes and alcohol” by Oasis, and Pulp famously crooned “[we] dance, and drink, and screw. Because there’s nothing else to do …“

In a sense Britpop was an answer to the US dominated grunge scene, and reactionary to the self-loathing, self-annihilating aspects of the trend. In a 1993 interview with NME, Damon Albarn of Blur called them an “anti-grunge band” while Noel Gallagher of Oasis, was slightly more outspoken on the matter when referring to their 1994 single “Live Forever”:

” [Live Forever] was written in the middle of grunge and all that, and I remember Nirvana had a tune called ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,’ and I was like . . . ‘Well, I’m not f*cking having that.’ As much as I f*cking like him [Cobain] and all that sh*t, I’m not having that. I can’t have people like that coming over here, on smack, f*cking saying that they hate themselves and they wanna die. That’s f*cking rubbish.”

Um, you tell ‘em, Noel.

THE NEXT TRACK Film as a genre captured the spirit of the era and voiced a measure of latent frustration. A certain set of 90s films that can be summed thus: disenchanted youth in transit through some dour landscape end up in a shower of bullets, followed by scenes of explicit and sometimes gratuitous violence and/or sex.

Natural Born Killers, Love and A45, The Professional (or Leon), Thelma and Louise, Fargo, Pulp fiction, The Big Lebowski, even Kids and Fight Club, all adhere to some of the distinctly 90s preoccupations with angst, frustration, sex, drugs and rock & roll.

An now the retro 90s are upon us, one check shirt and deep rock anthem at a time. We are yet again at the end of a decade, and from an economic and environmental perspective, the future is unclear. Record levels of graduates are struggling to find jobs, and we have lost faith in some of our main governing systems and financial institutions. We are on uncertain footing, the angst is there – it sure smells like the 90s.

Recently, The Dead Weather staged a Mickey and Malorie-esque shoot-out in suburbia as a “short film” for the release of their first album. A collaborative project between Jack White (The White Stripes), and Alison Mosshart (The Kills), The Dead Weather released Horehound in July to a fair amount of hype. It was directed by Jonathan Glazer, award-winning music video director for Radiohead.

The Creative Review write-up was cautious:

“The film shows White sizing up to The Kills’ Alison Mosshart in a duel, with both protagonists touting machine guns. Both White and Mosshart show that they can wear a leather jacket very well indeed, but is that enough to justify all the fuss?”

In the name of that distanced, retro 90s cool, wearing your leather jacket very well is probably the entire point. It doesn’t just smell funny, grunge is dead. Long live grunge.

]]> http://hannekedutoit.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/check-leathers-gun-toting-and-roses-the-revenge-of-the-90s/feed/ 1 hanneke du toit Love You Always - The Dead Weather Poster And they say romance is dead - The Dead Weather Poster http://hannekedutoit.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/enough-about-me-what-do-you-think-about-me/ http://hannekedutoit.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/enough-about-me-what-do-you-think-about-me/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:21:32 +0000 hanneke du toit http://hannekedutoit.wordpress.com/?p=189 ]]>

Second shadow: your personal information on display wherever you go. (Image from a survey conducted by Matthias Böhmer.)

People say we are self-involved (and who are we to disagree?)

Critics of social media have been lamenting about its narcissistic and self-referential nature. Blogging and micro-blogging is considered to be nothing more than a time consuming, data intensive exercise in self-broadcasting. The medium can be employed for a variety of different purposes (in the way Twitter was recently used by protesters in the Iranian elections), but for the majority of users it is still a channel to tell the world that you are stuck in traffic / watching re-runs of Prison Break / at some franchised coffee bar having the most fabulous latte known to man. Stephen Fry tweeted tonight:

“I have been most remiss, tweetwise. Apologies. Thissing and thatting, whiching and whatting – a walk here, a lunch there and now a dinner.”

Everyone’s at it.

He started it.

None of us can claim to have invented self-absorption, but then there’s never accounting for the French. The first open advocate for all things self-focussed was Michel de Montaigne, born in 1533. He is the father of the essay (producing the first volume of Essais meaning “Attempts”) and thus also of the modern blog.

In FT on the week end, Harry Eyres notes that de Montaigne was

‘… the begetter of the contemporary curse of self-absorption … [he] reversed the whole direction of study, research, investigation; he turned the lens from the observed to the observer. “For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me…” You could blame Montaigne for the culture of narcissism… the patron saint of self-help books: “You should not blame me for publishing; what helps me can perhaps help someone else.”’

Sounds like a blog to me.

Just look at it grow!

So we like broadcasting ourselves. On the one hand we feel uneasy about disclosing personal information, but at the same time we really want to be in touch, we really want to share. There has been exponential growth in social media in the past year. South Africa ranks number 10 in the world for new users on Twitter. Newcomers to Facebook in the past few months are 55 years old on average, indicating that older generations are joining the conversation.

Social media offers more than just a digital soap box. It has become a form of self-expression and crafting of identity. We become what we associate with. What we follow or join, and who we befriend all says something about us. Social media increasingly connects our online persona’s better, faster and more appropriately with things we relate to – from people and news to products and brands. An interesting look at the users of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn can be found here and here.

And OH! the marketers just love it.

The very fact that we tend to be so narcissistic in our travels across the net is heaven for marketers. The information we so meticulously upload is more or less freely available (you consent with one quick click), direct and profiles mostly real (as opposed to pseudo, or anonymous). Tom Anderson from Anderson Analytics is excited about what he calls 3-D market reasearch. He does this with information he gleans from Facebook, through a basic application called Compared to Me. The game walks you through 15 steps of comparing yourself to a randomly chosen person from your group of friends (Who is probably stronger? Who is probably more likely to own an SUV?). The game assigns a personality profile to you based on this (ranging from Rock Star to Couch Potato), although the individual comparisons are not revealed. Should your friends play the game, their subjective comparisons will also be available to the researcher. Compared to Me provides data on how you see yourself and how you are viewed by your peers, creating a context for the information –  a”cubed” or “3-D” sampling plan as Anderson calls it. Check out the Facebook application here.

Another Facebook application that will yield interesting data in terms of consumer behaviour, is Super Fan – the “super charged” alternative to current fan pages. The basic concept:

“… a platform for fans to express all levels of fan status — from avid to anti — on music, celebrities, television shows, sports, brands, places. It combines the community elements of social networks and adds a layer of gaming and competitive play to keep members engaged with their onsite faves.”

Thought I recognised you from somewhere. (From the survey by Matthias Böhmer)

One step beyond: ubiquitous social media.

Now consider this: Imagine your social media persona appearing around you, courtesy of few advances in display technology. Think of it as a digital aura that carries your, name, education, interests, affiliations and connections. It is visible to everybody wherever you go, and alerts you when passing people carrying compatible and relevant information. This comes from a study being done by Matthias Böhmer, and considers what social networks might look like in the future. You can find Bömer’s interesting, and rather disturbing questionnaire here, and pitch in your own thoughts. This hypothetical (but not terribly far-fetched) scenario will have an immense effect on the way we connect with each other on a face-to-face basis.

The principal problem is that we often portray slightly idealised versions of self in social media. “You Looked Better on MySpace”: Deception and authenticity on Web 2.0 explains the phenomenon well (link via LB, thanks). How would you feel walking around with your status update flashing above your head? Or with your profile picture in tandem with your real face, with your interests, connections and education boldly on display?  The thought is rather intimidating. Exactly how confidently narcissistic are we, and soap boxes aside, how visible can we bear to be? Might people become more private, in social media terms, as a result? We are demanding transparency from our governments, our banks, colleagues, friends and lovers. Is it fair to be hesitant about being reciprocally transparent? Author and developer Kathy Sierra Twittered last night:

“Most humans love mystery. Seduction is often fueled by what we do NOT know/see (but want to). Some forms of opacity should NOT be lost.”

Then again, perhaps it is simply getting used to a whole new level of connectedness. People were still suspicious of mobile phones as recently as 12 years ago. As for personal information on public display?  I might be more inclined to consider the benefits the next time a stranger starts chatting to me in a bar.

Comic Sans font, definitely inappropriate on a prostitute's call card.

There is nothing funny about the recession, everyone is struggling. Print media, hard hit by a steep decline in advertising revenue and desperately involved in doing its own extinction management, is trying to get by in any way possible – short of prostituting itself. Which is just as well since not even sex is selling anymore. Walpaper magazine decided to embrace the state of affairs and commissioned designers to make typographic call-cards (like those pasted inside telephone booths) for their current issue.

The cards are typographer’s in-jokes, using font names and stylistic attributes to lewd effect. The use of goofy, innocent-looking Comic sans font in the context of a prostitute’s business card is most definitely appropriately, inappropriate.

Comic sans has developed something of a, shall we say, cult-following, but in the form of an angry mob bearing pitch forks and torches. Designers despise it. The font face has an annoying and inelegant wannabe fun feel to it, an uncomfortable air of bonhomie, a superficial, grown-up kind of childishness in the meticulously mis-formed strokes. The problem with Comic sans is that it always seems to crop up where it doesn’t belong, and it does so very, very often.

Most recently it had the curators at Christies look on their noses. They put a flyer to a Sex Pistols concert up for auction, allegedly dating from 1978. A designer noticed Comic Sans in the artwork which identified it as a fake, since Comic sans was only designed in 1994. Christies has since taken it off the auction.

Fake Sex Pistols Flyer put on auction by Christies

The much maligned type face, described as groovy [sic] on its own home page, was designed by Vincent Connare as a standard font for Microsoft 95. Describing it as FUN (all-caps are Connares) when launched, it has since become his own Frankenstein. He is as annoyed with its over-use and improper application as other designers, and sympathises with a world-wide movement to ban it. He chat with the Wall Street Journal in April amid growing irritation with the font cropping up everywhere including online, being one of a few basic web-safe fonts.

Perhaps the most inappropriate application of this font I have had the misfortune to encounter, was at my local police station. After an exasperating brush with the criminal elements barnacled to the underbelly of any big city, I had to open a case at the station to get a case number for insurance purposes.

The SAP provides case numbers in Comic Sans. Are we having fun yet?

If you are looking for somewhere to vent some frustration (misdirected or otherwise), you can join the Ban Comic Sans movement here, and even download your own Propaganda Kit, which includes nifty stickers like these.

There are some new kids on the block. A new wave of techno-savants are growing up and entering the workforce, interacting with technology as fluidly as with another human being. They lack the innate distrust of technology harboured by older generations, mainly due to growing up with computers. They multitask, attention spread across a variety of media streaming at the same time. Everything is instant, almost everything accessible. Traditional ideas on focus and attention span have all gone out the window. Interacting with technology on a continuous basis did not turn these kids into socially defunct, square-eyed blobs like our parents feared, but instead into highly efficient, inventive and communicative masters of media in the broadest sense.

So I was surprised at the buzz created around an article in the New Yorker on the Stanford Marshmallow Expriment.

In the late 60′s, psychologist Walter Mischel did a study on four year-old children, testing their ability to delay gratification. The premise was simple. Put one four year-old and one marshmallow in a room. Tell the child that he will be left alone for a while. He can eat the marshmallow, but if he waits, he will get two when the therapist returns. The individual children were observed through a one-way mirror, grappling with temptation for about 20 minutes. All of them struggled and about 30% managed to wait. Good on them.

Years later a small portion of the test group was traced down. It was concluded that the kids who resisted, performed better at school than their marshmallow munching counterparts, were happier and better socially adapted.

Another article highlighted that:

… At four years of age gobbling a marshmallow now v. waiting for two later is twice as good a predictor of later SAT [academic] scores than is IQ.

… The quoted source sees the Marshmallow experiment as showing the importance of emotional intelligence. The economists at the Clark seminar just thought of it as a remarkably reliable indicator of general intelligence–apparently even better than IQ.

As parents and educators globally gasped in a synchronised “a-ha” moment, something about it irked me intensely on a level I could not quite explain. I get uneasy when studies use warm fluffy pop-psych terms like EQ. I get suspicious when a basic test is done and the follow-up is not conducted with the entire focus group (they could not in later years track down a large portion of the kids that were originally tested). I dislike that the study essentially implies a big, unhappy, socially-malajusted “fail” for 70% of those kids, and hypothetically so for any other poor kid who happens to be subjected to a similar test. Is it safe to take this kind of blanket approach, applying it to individuals, and then predict their future as bad apples? When they tested the children, did they control for, um, hunger?

I am not a parent or a teacher, but I was also a kid, and I think I probably would have eaten that damn marshmallow. And if I didn’t, it would have had more to do with my genetically ingrained, Calvinistic predisposition for disproportionate, unquestioning respect (read fear) of authority – not because of some admirable, innate sense of self-discipline.

On the rare few occasions my brother and I were allowed candy as kids, I had mine on the spot while he saved his for days, rubbing it under my nose to my great annoyance. He once taunted me with a toffee apple for days, only to bite into a really ghastly rotten fruit when he finally decided to eat it. And in that primal way that only rivaling siblings can rejoice in each others misfortune, I was utterly delighted. So I could not keep my candy but I did well at school, and my over-committed work and social schedule at least suggests that I’m not a raging sociopath. I fail to see what made the entire exercise so revolutionary in the first place. We were all raised on the old “Eat your veg or you won’t get dessert” premise. In fact, I will confidently posit that most people working for a salary find themselves in a continual state of delayed gratification, with the odd exemption of playing the lottery.

Delayed gratification in its extreme is the the “One Day” syndrome: after deadline / next December / when I retire. People live and die that way. There are cubic kilometers of  office space filled with people practicing warm-chair attrition (n. The loss of workplace productivity due to employees who dislike their jobs and are just waiting for the right time to quit and move on to something better/retirement) and layoff lust (n. The strong desire to be laid off from one’s job for a severance package). All of life’s not carpe candy, but there has to be some balance.

The people in the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment are all now in their mid-forties. There are new kids coming in who function differently, and are doing brilliantly.

Perhaps what someone lacks in delayed gratification is made up for in proactiveness, a lack of focus might be the ability to multitask. An inability to conform might be the sharply attuned ability to observe, trouble-shoot, solve. A sense of curiosity trumps having all the right answers, enthusiasm and spontaneity goes much further than a dogged dedication to totalitarian discipline.

The art of succumbing to temptation holds many mighty challenges. (Wilde)

The Sinclair ZX81 – with all of 1K of RAM.

What a wonderful 80′s headline. Power. Apparently that’s what everyone was into in the 80′s: power dressing, bouffant power coiffes kept in check by nuclear powered hairspray leaving a sticky film on power padded shoulders. Whether you were an American Psycho-esque inner city slicker with a corner office, or the teenage geek next door screwing around with bits of computer, the cats on Madison avenue figured that power was what you were after. And they were going to offer you that, whether it was actually present in the advertised product, or not. Because the funny thing about the ZX 81 is that it had 1K of RAM – remarkably underpowered even for its time. I’d imagine the guitarist of Kiss could negotiate more functionality out of his instrument (if you count trashing hotel rooms) than a prospective computer geek could extract from this basic little PC with 1 K of RAM. But as it turns out it was not power, but something closer to – dare I say it – love that afforded the ZX 81 its cult following.

I’ve certainly had my fair share of machine cult worship. One of my more unpleasant memories of moving house involves leaning far over the edge of a dumpster, slowly releasing my grip on a deeply beloved but long deceased Blueberry iMac. I had come to love that machine despite the staring contests over stagnant progress bars, (it had 64 MB RAM) and compatibility issues with almost every peripheral I brought home. I might as well come out and admit that I named the thing. The first range of candy coloured iMacs was undoubtedly the most aesthetically exciting thing to have happened in hardware since VGA monitors displayed 256 colours. I had hung onto this ’98 model for years thinking it might acquire collectors value, being, as it were, the product that turned the entire ailing Macintosh empire around. My Mac guy told me not to hold my breath and sent me instructions for turning it into a fish tank. But I can say that I have first-hand experience of love for an inanimate object. It is easy loving pretty things.

Sinclair patent illustration

But the ZX 81 wasn’t even aesthetically appealing. Released in, um, ’81, its perfunctory design sported striking similarities to the veggie pricing scale down at your local Checkers (on which you can never find the button for lemons/onions/whatever you happen to be weighing). Its programming functionality was basic – all you got after boot up was a flashing cursor and a command line. It was a total hit in the UK and later in Eastern Europe, but less successful in the US where video gaming had just become very popular. Wherever it did take off, it sparked a love for programming.

In his novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson pays homage to the ZX 81 through Voytec, a caracter that collects and exhibits them.

… he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek’s opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them.

A first wave of computer programmers grew up on these, referring to themselves as the “Sinclair Generation”. The ZX was a spark, a contributing factor to much more powerful “real” programming some of those kids went on to do. But no, all of us don’t want to program and as end users we are ever further removed from the digital petticoat of 0′s and 1′s. Just because you don’t understand it though, doesn’t mean you can’t love the result.

You’ve come a long way, baby: Here are a few illustrations of early 80′s PCs, submitted to the US patent office.

Software: Programmes were loaded onto the Sinclair PCs using a tape deck. Tapes squeaked noises similar to a fax being sent.

In what was termed a landmark decision, the British high court decided not to protect the anonymity of Richard Horton, author of the blog Nightjack. Horton was recently  awarded the prestigious Orwell prize for his behind-the-scenes blogging on police investigations in  Lancashire. A 45 year old detective constable, Horton started Nightjack in February 2008, not knowing how much attention his writing would draw.

I stumbled across the blog in March when he was shortlisted for the prize, and had already stopped adding new posts. His nightly reports on investigations read like A Touch of Frost with a side serving of Irvine Welch:  edgy, eloquent, caustic, real. He unapologetically aired his strong views on social and political issues, but with surprising craft and sophitication. The blog has since been taken down and a only few snippits remain on the web. A typical post would describe a case of random street violence:

“Mike slurs ‘I’m not from here’ as his periphery starts closing in. He’s thinking that it must be mistaken identity. It is Lee’s second kick that sparks Mike out, face down.”

Advice on dealing with officers of the law?

“If the Police arrive to lock you up, say nothing. You are a decent person and you may think that reasoning with the Police will help. Wrong.” … “All you are doing by trying to explain is digging yourself further in. We call that stuff a significant statement and we love it.”

Soon after starting out, his readership hit 1500 visitors per day, reaching up to 60 000 a week at its most popular, his frank and uncompromising style clearly striking a chord. In February he was long-listed for the Orwell prize and when finally awarded it in April,  he did not attend to protect his anonymity, and his dayjob. His identity remained undisclosed in the media until The Times decided it was in the public interest to know the real Nightjack. It ended in court when Horton tried to prevent the Times from revealing his identity, but failed, and subsequently removed the blog from the web entirely.

And here’s the uncomfortable thing. The ruling stated that Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”. The Times stated their case here, and elicited in excess of 130 fuming responses, from bloggers and non-bloggers alike.

“I think there’s a misunderstanding by people who use the web that they’ve got an entitlement to be anonymous. This makes clear they don’t.” Jaron Lewis, a lawyer, said here to FT.

Bloggers are concerned. “Anonymity is one of the strengths of the internet, not a weakness.” says Tom Reynolds who blogs about his job in the London Ambulance service. He fears people might stop posting interesting, thought-provoking blogs for fear of being prosecuted for writing from inside the public service sector or large corporations. What will remain is PR fluff.

In the Telegraph, Shane Richmond argues that Nightjack “shed light on his work and brought the public a view of policing that could only be done anonymously.”. He maintains newspapers should be protecting people like him.

As for Horton? According to Lancashire Constabulary he has been spoken to and has been issued with a written warning. Certainly does not sound too serious. May he revel in his publishing deals, TV contracts and film rights.

Should you be worried, here are 7 ways to blog anonymously. The best bit of advice is to simply try not to win big literary awards.