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Formlessness Meets Functionlessness: Stefan Ulrich’s Real Doll For The Creative Class
As Ulrich sees it, the creative class is marginalized because it has voluntarily given up the very things that give comfort to traditional marginalized groups. Creatives are alienated not at the level of the political, the economic or the social, but at the most basic human level. If the life of the poor is not the life we imagine for ourselves, it plays out as a parody of that life, following the same rituals of family, church, marketplace, and the political. At the center of all these rituals are the comforts of home, place, and humanity. Where the old alienation could be said to take place in a geographic location, the new alienation of the creative class is played out in lonely hotel rooms across the globe. And why is the creative class so alienated? Because it has chosen to be alienated in order to keep up with the dictates of money and success.
King Rat: Mickey Mouse’s Neoliberal Makeover
It stands to reason then that newest incarnation of Mickey Mouse was developed to reflect the tastes of its audience. The boisterous, sweet-tempered mouse is now a law-breaking, egocentric rat. And while Mickey’s newest incarnation may be the stuff of nightmares, it certainly isn’t anything new. In fact, it is eminently fitting. We have the Mickey Mouse we deserve. We are no longer that charmingly boisterous (and yes, sometimes devilishly devious) nation that smashed National Socialism and inspired the likes of Jack Kerouac to drive across the country and then come home, drop some speed, and write about his wonderful adventures in a strange land, but an ill-tempered, duplicitous empire on the decline, ravaged by the boondoggles and Ponzi schemes of a financial sector run amok, bereft of the hope of regaining any kind of cultural or intellectual prominence.
An Ever-Living Fire: All Things Change Until Nothing Remains
We have since demystified history, carefully taking if from the hands of god or the proletariat to rest it safely in the bosom of religio-scientific “market forces.” But in the process history began to seem not more rational, but less so. The market is somehow larger and more mysterious than God, the Proletariat, or even progress. And what are we, or any individual, compared to the market? Subsumed into it greater will, we are individual data points. Occasionally, through stock ownership or consumer purchases, we get to take part in its mysteries, but never too great a part.
Admirable Pluck: Hipsters Carry the Weight of the World on a Stubbled Brow
Private equity’s resounding triumph echoes in the ears of countless strivers eager to sample la dolce vita, inspiring in them the belief that they can asset-strip their way to prosperity. So keen, in fact, are people on getting into the game commenced during the Reagan years that they’re finding strippable assets in some rather unlikely places — like their own faces.
All the News That’s Sh*t to Print: TMZ First with TMI
Levin certainly drives a hard bargain. Fifty bucks seems a miserly price to hang on bombshell revelations of celebrity death and dirty dealing. But he appears to have found the perfect informants, those of great enough leisure and small enough means to malinger around Hollywood, their weather eyes open for scandal.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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