Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

[8bitagent]

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have things progressed since 1996, or regressed?

Haha, good ol mid 90's. I was in high school from 1992 til 1996...tho strangely this footage feels like its the early 90's.
I so would have wanted to hang out with these girls! I was that weirdo sophmore reading about Bryin Gysin, Burroughs,
reading Neil Gaiman/Alan Moore/Grant Morrison comics, listening to Bauhaus and Ministry, but there wasnt any other "freaks" at my
school. At least those girls had a pack of sorts! They woulda fit in in Portland or Seattle back then from what I've gleaned.

I miss that time as it was analog, however I think kids have had a strong sensitivity training since then. When I go to the mall I see a good number of
openly gay teens hanging with their mixed race friends; or kids dressing kind of unique. And it's all kind of accepted and the norm now. And I wish
it was like that back then...so some things have changed for the better. Maybe not the death of patience, concentration, and penmanship...

*EDIT* Good christ, in three years I'll be asked to attend my 20 year high school reunion. WTF? It was 21 years ago I entered high school...when I graduated Skinny Puppy's Process, Ministry Filthpig, Dead Can Dance Spiritchaser, Becks Odelay, Tool's Aenima, etc came out. Independence Day had just came out. Man, crazy. I feel like I'm still in high school.
I like this doc short tho. I was HEAVILY involved in underground publications/zines, so was always writing or trading zines, demos, mixtapes, art, etc in the mail. Blew the pants off email or facebook, that's for sure.

[IanEye]

i thought it was a nice time capsule.
it is odd, because of the general fashion sense of the times, i see little difference between the "clean" and the "dirty" in that doc.


"this is a song about the future. it's called 'Washing Machine'..."

[8bitagent]

i thought it was a nice time capsule.
it is odd, because of the general fashion sense of the times, i see little difference between the "clean" and the "dirty" in that doc.


"this is a song about the future. it's called 'Washing Machine'..."

Everything now has a slick, prepackaged Apple vibe to it. Movies are strictly graded in golden, teal and orange tones in post. Speaking of post, we're in post internet, post ironic, post everything
world. Everything in youth subcultures feels pre-planned...even the tumblr underground feels deliberate.

Aww...to simpler times when not everything was slick

[82_28]

16 Photographs That Capture the Best and Worst of 1970s America



http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 00541.html

[FourthBase]

16 Photographs That Capture the Best and Worst of 1970s America



http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 00541.html

Fashion-wise, where is this supposed "worst"? I just see best, best, best.

What in the hell was Mike Watt and Vedder going on about?
Kids of the 90's should have been defending themselves against the 90's
And the 80's, if any dared to look back and risk being turned into salty cheese string.
And the kids of the 00's should have defended themselves against the 00's.
And now the 10's.

[8bitagent]

16 Photographs That Capture the Best and Worst of 1970s America



http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 00541.html

1. I'd love to meet a girl like that, ha

2. I want that banana shirt.

3. Looked through all 17 photos...these all look gorgeous.

While I have a fetish for the weird post modern art deco memphis-milano aesthetic and vibe of the 1980's, there is a sort of muted
strangeness and beauty about even the uglier aesthetic of the 1970's. Orange vinyl couches, greeen walls...there's a doctor's office complex I go to
that is stuck in 1975. It's kind of cool.

The church hearings, where senators are smoking cigarettes and have big gawdy 70's leisure suits, mustaches and hair...so freaking awesome.
Oh and Taxi Driver...wow. Love that film.

[Luther Blissett]

I like this doc short tho. I was HEAVILY involved in underground publications/zines, so was always writing or trading zines, demos, mixtapes, art, etc in the mail. Blew the pants off email or facebook, that's for sure.

In the process of researching my design history project, I recently learned of the strength of contemporary zine subculture. I visited a local zine library and learned about the network through which these self-made zines covering any number of subjects (deaf culture, revolution, African American rights, poetry, food, dissent, etc) are produced and traded and only strengthened / supplemented by the Internet. It's been quite incredible. It's like there's a simultaneous increased respect for the objects and an austerity to it, compared to the 90's. I've even gotten in touch with one of the guys from "Resurrect Dead," who has been heavily involved in zine culture for years.

[Nordic]

I've noticed a few things counter to the OP.

For one, in music there's a sudden popularity of a folk sound. Mumford and Sons is huge. When was the last time songs with fucking banjos were huge hits on rock-n-roll stations? Then there's the Illumineers, and that duet by that Icelandic couple.

I am sick to death of Mumford and Sons btw, enough already. And that fucking Illumineers song. Or maybe its just that Los Angeles radio is SO fucking bad, I dunno.

But there's a lotta retro going on, which isnt socially observable time stopping. To me the time stopping is when you hear Eagles songs and "heard it on the grapevine" for the billionth time. The new retro is, imo, exemplified by The Black Keys, who use a surprising number of truly unusual and old instrumentation and percussion in their songs (and no banjos thank god).

Other than that i don't know what the fuck is going on.

Here's one huge thing that has changed: i know smell more fresh pot smoke out in the city than i do cigarette smoke. No shit. People smoking in their cars, every day i drive through clouds of it. Dispensaries on every corner, half a dozen within walking distance of my house. That shit is new.

Other than that it's the church of the iphone: everywhere folks are bowed at the heads, reverently gazing at the glowing magic tablet in their hand. I'm often one of them (and am as i type this, bored at work, in a near empty house in the mountains of Malibu) The texting revolution has changed the way we communicate -- my wife and now have fierce fights silently tapping away on our iphones from opposite ends of the house because this way the kids can't hear!! Hard to spell correctly when you're angry tho. At least if your fingers are as big as mine. On a real keyboard I'd probably do much better.

Then there's gasoline at basically five bucks a gallon which greatly changes how you think about driving. And that ain't gonna change as long as the speculators and mother killers and father rapers have figured out how to charge us as much as they possibly can for this blood of our civilization. It changes how you think about driving pretty much anywhere.

[IanEye]

Besides photos of people using payphones there are no photos of "can you believe we used to wear shit like that?"




Socially observable time stopped around 2001.
Perhaps there could be a better term for it.
But it stands in my eyes.

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we sit outside - we argue all night long
about a god we've never seen
but never fails to side with me



you ride the waves & don't ask where they go
you swim like lions through the crest
& bathe yourself in zebra flesh

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you're obsolete
my baby




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[justdrew]

[Luther Blissett]

The new Yo La Tengo album is amazing.

[IanEye]

[Joe Hillshoist]

I just realised .. re the title of the thread - its the Simpsons fault.

[Novem5er]

To be honest, I don't agree at all with the original article. At least, not in the "culture hasn't changed in 20 years" bit. Is he saying you can't take a girl from 1993 and tell her clothes from 2013? Watch an old episode of Saved by the Bell or even Seinfeld.

Hmmm.

Maybe the original article isn't too far off the mark. I actually just sat here for 5 minutes trying to think of more examples, other than women's fashion. Yes, the clothes of 1993 would look out of place in today, but honestly, it's because those clothes were basically leftovers from the 80's. Neon, big shoulder pads, big hair, guys in acid washed jeans.

Let's look just 5 years later: 1998. Okay, the neon is gone, hair is brought back under control, and it's also the year I graduated high school. I work with a lot of young people now, like teenagers, and to be honest... they could basically be kids right out of the 90's. Most of the baggy pants are gone, but not always. They have been replaced with skinny jeans... which are really a fad from the 80's. Skinny jeans would look out of place in 1998, but not 1993 (funnily enough). Peirced ears, faux-hawks, plad shirts, shirts with big logos. Hell, these kids are even wearing Vans on their feet... just like I did in 1998.

Music? Meh, there's some good stuff out there now, but I don't know if it's a strong enough change to mark a cultural shift. Folk rock? Yes, it's more popular now, but it's "retro". Electronic-infused pop music? It's just that the bass has been turned up and the bpm has been upped. Everything is on overdrive.

Skrillex versus the Chemical Brothers or the Crystal Method? Both "techno" and they are different sounding, but I don't think either would be out of place if taken out of time. The rap music has more elctronic beats to it, but it's all just pushed to "overdrive"... nothing the Wu Tang or Lil John couldn't have done 15 years ago, but each chose to balance the levels better. Yeah, basically music is the same... just louder.

However, I pose one major difference, one that is hard to define. Take a kid from 1998 and drop him into a bunch of kids today. They might look the same and talk the same, but can you imagine that retro-kid seeing everyone with their phones? Facebook? I think that perhaps "culture" has stopped, but our interactions within that culture have evolved, for better or for worse.

There are some better things about it. Kids of different races mix together WAY more than they did when I was in high school. Kids listed to different types of music WAY more than they used to (a country AND rap fan???). Gays are much more accepted by most people, however the insults of "gay" and "fag" are dropped constantly... even when the people are more accepting of gays. It's weird.

It's like our technology has jumped by leaps and bounds, but the cultural changes have slowed to a crawl. Is there an inverse relationship between the two, perhaps? While technology has always advanced, did it's steady pace force the people to reinvent themselves culturally every 20 years?

I wil say that the young people I am around are some of the laziest, most self-centered people I've ever come across. I hate saying this because EVERY generation says this about the younger generation... but still.

[justdrew]

http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2013/04/brezhnev-capitalism.html

...In his recent On Critique, Luc Boltanski argues that repetition becomes the key trope of political actors who seek to avoid moments of critical or objective judgement. Words are recited, truths are repeatedly affirmed, routines are performed repeatedly, for fear that otherwise questions might be asked. This is different from, say, a company audit or an evaluation, in which there is a ritualistic element to it, but the outcome is unknown, unless it has become corrupted in some way. My feeling is (and I discuss this in a book I'm just finishing) that neoliberalism has entered a post-critical, repetitive phase, in which certain things have to be spoken - delivery, efficiency, security, competitiveness - but in order to hold the edifice together, rather than to reveal anything as objectively 'delivered', 'efficient', 'secure' or 'competitive. Political systems which do not create space for critique encounter this need for mandatory repetition immediately, as occurred to state socialism.

Neoliberalism was a political system in which the world was put to the test in some way, it was simply that the tests employed were those which privileged price and entrepreneurial energy. I don't want to defend this form of testing, which is often cynical, bullying and depressingly unsympathetic to other valuation systems. But there was often some consistency about it and the capacity for an unexpected outcome (for instance, that local economic diversity might be revealed to be more fiscally efficient). Look at Westfield today, however, and you see an economic culture being repeated, without any sincere sense that this represents 'choice', 'efficiency' or 'regeneration', nor any sense that things might have turned out differently even if this had been known. The point becomes to name this as 'efficient' and that (e.g. Peckham Rye Lane) as 'inefficient', and try and avoid or suppress evidence to the contrary. The fear arises that provable efficiency might involve abandoning one set of power structures in favour of another. And so economics becomes a naming ceremony, not a test.
...