Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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There’s Something About Zeitgeist

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Zeitgeist. In one of those late nineties years it got to be a popular term to bandy about in conversation, though not one that could be easily defined. Paradigm? Sure, you can pick that up from context. Modernity? Its word root tells you the whole story. But Zeitgeist? It was always used in association with (pop)cultural trends, but in my anorexic teenaged mind all it did was draw up a picture of Linda Blair reading a little bit of Vogue every time her head spun around to the front.

You can look at the dictionary definition, but i think to really understand this work you need to understand another accompanying term: Jumping The Shark. It originated on Happy Days. The internet pretty much specializes in defining Shark Jumping, so i won’t bore you with an extended explanation. The short of it is that when something very popular becomes uncool or passé, it has jumped the shark. It has reached the end of the cool spectrum. People at the water-cooler are now openly mocking it, when at one point they were climbing over each other just to talk about it.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is zeitgeist. Z is the way you can measure of whether or not something even ranks on the sliding scale of coolness to begin with. It’s like a Technorati or a Blogdex of culture at large; a cultural trend-line. Z is the difference between invisible and up-and-coming, between Visqueen and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, between Line of Fire and CSI: My Ass.

Z can be a undertow you are swept into and a crest that you ride upon. To further beleaguer my metaphor, depending on how far upstream in cool river you are, you will get early indications of new phenomenon. I tend to have good advanced warning of new music, decent knowledge of upcoming movies, and relatively no knowledge of hip technology stuff.

I have prepared three examples to make light of this, but you’ll have to come back after i get out of class to see what they are (see, isn’t that responsible of me?).

Red v Blue

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God, i should really know better than to open up Metafilter just before i’m ready to put a post to bed. As if there’s not gonna be any interesting links at MeFi. Nope, never happens.

We’ll start with the easy stuff. This map scares the shit out of me. Red areas are concentrations of Democrats, blue of Republicans. It scares me ’cause:

A) Aside from that one odd spot in South Dakota i don’t even see any heavy red marks

B) Good grief, looking at it this way i can see the logic behind thinking that liberals are really a tiny, mostly coastal and urban voice that’s screwing things up for everyone else. Ahhh, bask in the self-loathing.

C) Electoral College results seem almost inevitable if you assume most Americans are partisan voters.

D) It says a lot about self-segregation. That’s what The MeFi Post is about, though i think the more informative read would be this Atlantic article’s remarks on Thomas C. Schelling.

Schelling’s research with artificially constructed societies informs us that like prefers like. Seems elementary, you might think. Yes, it’s elementary if every citizen wants to live somewhere where 80% of their neighbors are similar to themselves — so long as they don’t specify what demographic the other 20% should be made up of, they’re most likely just going to wind up in a big 100% block of homogeneity.

The revelation (for me, at least), is that even if you say “i’ll be happy if just half of my neighbors are similar to me” you will eventually become a part of a stratified neighborhood that looks a lot like the scary map (see figure 2 in the article, via another MeFi thread). Of course, most people think of halfway immersing themselves with a different race, culture, or political viewpoint makes them incredibly open minded. And, furthermore, who doesn’t want to find at least one out of two faces to be sympathetic? Still, it says very significant things about human psychology, the basic nature of discrimination, and maybe even why Democrats can only win certain southern states.

Good lord, that took forever. Maybe we’ll let that be a post all by itself. Yes. The other dozen links soon to follow.

Webbing the Log

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Good lord i accumulated a lot of links while i was doing homework last night. Old-me would hoard them like the squirrel that fell through Lindsay’s bedroom ceiling, but new-me just wants to get them out there so that i can find more! Cause i am a WEB LOGGER. I LOG the WEB.

(Sorry, i had to explain that to a stupified class of Communications majors yesterday. At least my professor actively mocked them.)

You can watch Walmart from almost any angle these days, but this economist article is great sum-up if you’re doing an academic project. Link from daily favorite Largehearted Boy.

How real is American Idol? An excellent report on The Motown Episode remarks on the (sometimes huge) difference in sound between seeing a live taping and watching the show on television. I wish there was a reliable source that provided this kind of analysis every week.

Hockey player takes out a hit on his [male] lover? Or, a study in failed anger management combined with mediafucker agent? Or, trying to kill mediafucker agent? You be the judge.

Why am i not still reading more miserable crap every day? Oh, wait, i am. Lisa, oh Lisa, when will our weekly lunches resume? Probably in July. By-the-by, When i add you to the sidebar again, you will be listed as Libertine Seahag.

I generally don’t know what the fuck is going on on my Primary Ballot after i get past the bit about Senators, which is why The Committee of Seventy is a good thing — a century-old Philadelphia political watchdog group that tracks and explains the ballot. This came to light as i found out that, apparently, a fellow high school thespian of mine is running to be the Representative for Center City, abetted by fellow fellow thespian Ariel. The man is Andrew Hohns, and i’m linking him because i think it’s sad that an article about how his opponent has the gayborhood locked up currently tops his domain in google rank.

Also in the political arena: Shocking no one thought of this before. God knows my blood boils…

Meme-Tracking: Page 23, Sentence 5

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I am decidedly anti-meme myself, but yesterday Alison featured a quirky one:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 23.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I am surrounded by stultifyingly dull school books, which have rendered my answer as: “His seat faced toward the door, and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an acquaintance, a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and general sense of commotion which her own entrance into a railway-carriage was apt to produce.” (From the stunningly boring House of Mirth.)

Much more intriguing than my answer to the meme is the question of where it came from. And, furthermore, why the twenty-third page? Should i start counting from the first complete sentence? What book started all this? In my quest for knowledge, i backtracked from Alison, who got it
via Dave
via John Biesnecker
via John Hicks
via Greg
via Michael
via Keith
via PeterMe
via Caterina
via David Chess
via Long Story, Short Pier
via Elkins (ah, see, now we’ve crossed over to LiveJournal)
via happy_potterer via sternel, who doesn’t directly attribute the source, but points to PegKerr who was “infected” by
kijjohnson
infected by Mckitterick
infected by Bob Howe who, lamentably, attributes two sources (Silvertide and Curmudgeon), though it seems clear that the former got it from the latter who got it from kricker.

Here, the chain becomes tangled. Kricker attributes two sources: pbsage who got it from cynnerth. The latter indicates that s/he received it via seamusd whose journal is friends-only and cannot be viewed by the public. S/he claims to have seen it first at Kricker’s journal. Kricker confirmed his/her attributions, and points out that seamusd had posted about it first. However, lower in that exchange Seamusd reiterates that it originated from Kricker.

It is increasingly hard to find journals closer to the meme-source via google, as there is a proliferation of hits that occurred after the LJ-to-domain-blog leap in the middle of my chain, especially after being featured on such highly-linked sites such as Bluishorange, PeterMe, and Caterina. Interestingly, on LJ pages the meme is often accompanied by a few other recent memes which do not appear to have made the LJ-to-domain jump (or, at least, not on such a large scale). What does this say about the nature of the LJ community vs. blogdom at large? Where did this meme come from? Can you find a higher, earlier link than Seamusd?

You’ll Get Older Too…

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A great ed-op on teenagers and first amendment rights. It made me think about how different it is to be a teenager now than when i started out as one ten years ago … i never had to carry the weight and memory of a Columbine or a 9-11 on my teenaged shoulders, my daily interactions shadowed by their historical prominence. I never had metal detectors, or school uniforms. I can’t imagine being suspended for writing a story with a hostage situation or for stating that Barbie is a Lesbian.

Today i spoke at our Accepted Students day, in front of almost three thousand people — high school seniors and their families. My remarks were mostly pre-scripted, and included the indisposable cliché of “I sat in your place five years ago, and blah anxious blah scared blah never even been kissed, et cetera so forth yakkity yak.” I’ve said it before, and i’ll be saying it again tomorrow morning at 11:32. Today, though, today was different. Today, halfway through my the sentence, i realized how significant the statement is — i have been there, in their place, and i lived to tell. I can never go back to the idle dreams or the blithe naivete.

I am a scant seven weeks away from being a college graduate, and i have never had the occasion to feel all that old during my college experience, but today drove home how i have become more similar the parents than the students; the former raptly nod along to my points in sympathetic agreement, while the latter view me as a mutant over-achieving neo-adult freak out to unfairly raise the expectations they will be held to. The students gave me those huge, blank, sheep-like eyes; how can i help but condescend to them a little? They don’t realize quite what they’re getting into. How could they?

After opening remarks Aim & i spoke to a small group of Communications majors, and we were bubbling with incredulous laughter the entire time as we realized that we were the nearly-adult examples that were being held up to aspiring students. The funny thing is, we so totally are; as we spoke about our oft-derided Senior Projects i saw parents’ eyebrows raise so far as to meet their hairlines while students glazed over as we glossed over what we consider to be the banal details. Two thousand pictures. One hundred thousand dollars. A visual commentary on the depressed economics of her hometown. A complete script of materials and suggested best practices for the committee to use as necessary. To the parents it’s thrillingly real. To the students, it’s just another obstacle to leap.

Afterwards, the two of us tiptoed through a conversation with one particularly aimless student and his family I told them “Drexel is a school where you have to reach for what you want. If you want a cookie cutter program, don’t come here.” Aim and i ran into them later as they slunk out of the room and towards the parking garage, their Drexel dream discarded. The uber-positive cheerleading Admissions Counselor in me cringed at losing a family. Yet, an hour later, i don’t feel bad. When i was seventeen i wanted the most perfectly cut cookie for my college career, and i didn’t wind up getting one. Instead, to mix metaphors, Drexel let me know that i could make my own cake. And eat it too.

So, woe is to them, those poor beleaguered teenagers with their restricted speech and their college searches. If i am any indication, they cannot possibly realize what lies in store for them, and they will not realize how good they have it until it’s too late. How could they ever be made to understand: the joy is in the process.


The joy is in the process.

I just hope they have the sense to have realistic goals or to pick a school with a co-op program, cause otherwise they’re gonna be fucked.