ethics

It's a little too late for me to be writing a full-blown essay on this tonight. But I was just flipping through a photo essay from the Washington Post titled: Recession in the Rust Belt and became disturbed by what seems to be a poverty aesthetic.

Update: This morning Emily West, a prof at U Mass, posted this Slate article on Levi's new "Go Forth" ad campaign and it's use of iconic Walt Whitman verse, and dramatic imagery such as; "children playing in run-down neighborhoods, an embattled business executive surrounded by an angry mob, and young people frolicking in blue jeans", to produce a feeling of "squalor and anxiety" paired with what you might call a pioneer spirit.

After setting the ominous tone, the spot goes on to portray youth in distressed jeans, carrying heroic signage. Slate's Seth Stevenson proposes that the ad "acts as a galvanizing call to generational action: Times may be tough, but we've been here before, and America's youth will not be broken." Yes, and the first action will be Googling Walt Whitman, the second, paying full price for a pair of 501s.

So it's early on a Saturday morning, I have several hours to kill before breakfast plans materialize, so I finally have some time to think about that post I wanted to write a few weeks ago:

So tonight, a post about gender, appetite, weight-lifting, saying yes, and being alone. Wait for it....

I had to borrow my room-mates coffee this morning and I gotta say his 'fair trade', 'organic', 'fancy-packaged' stuff is much better then my vacuum packed old-man playing chess outside espresso.

Uh, you know which serves as a kind of introduction to the following links. Since it can be demonstrated that my room-mate is kinna a 'hipster' (though more like a hippie-ster? He plays bike polo and likes charcuteries, and believes in local agriculture and has designer dirty jeans instead of just plain dirty jeans). And I am a cheap Jew, who likes to pay less then 4 dollars for espresso.

But both of us, even if we try to deny it, are somewhere in the universe of hipster, not skinny-jean wearing but certainly downtown-living irony embracing, Flight of the Conchord watching etc...

Which is why this article on Hipster Racism hurts. I have noticed in myself a lot of the tropes that the author suggests are a mask for racism. As in "I am so funny, and so *aware* that I cannot possibly be a racist as I make this hilarious racist joke."

Unemployed? More like funemployed in the Globe and Mail.

I actually knew this was coming down the pipe since a friend of mine was invited to submit his 'funemployed lifestyle" for this article. I happen to know that my friend is a pretty hard-working freelance web developer, so I am not sure if he ever did that.

Anyways, I just want to register my absolute displeasure at the headline, subject and premise of this article.

Perhaps if the headline were: