The kids don't stand a chance

This article from anti-semitic anti-establishment mag Adbusters has been causing a stir among various fixie-apologists around town.

Style-wise, it's weak sauce, though this one line is Hall of Fame shit:

The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks.

And for a piece calling out the fundamental shallowness of of hipster culture, this ain't exactly the Mariana Trench of insight. Perhaps that's the point-how do you deconstruct something so empty?-but strip away the academic jargon and all that's left is grumpy old man kvetching about the kids. And that's my shtick, motherfucker.

I suppose internet success is measured by the length of the comments thread, making this article the damn DaVinci Code, but that's not much to hang your hat on. I have some limited first-hand experience with how touchy hipsters in this town can be: getting their goat is not much of a challenge.

In conclusion: someone please please punch this guy.

*Speaking of hipsters, this site is either the worst perpetrator of hipster crimes or the most brilliant satire since that Obama New Yorker cover. In this po-mo age, I'd say its both.

Ch...ch...changes

As you can see, I've messed about with the template here. It's a little squished at the moment, but I'm working on that.

Linkage

I've added some links on the sidebar for you to check out. Or not. I don't care.

Why so serious?

Caught "The Dark Knight" last week. Despite the critical praise and word of mouth hype, I found myself feeling let down. This rare dissenting review sums up why:

The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.
...
But the psychological twists in The Dark Knight—especially the transformation of Dent into “Two-Face”—are baffling as drama. They play as if they’d been penned by Oxford philosophy majors trying to tone up a piece of American pop—to turn it into an uncivil Shavian dialogue, Don Juan in Hell with mutilations and truck crashes.

Oh, the verbiage probably wouldn’t matter if those truck crashes were any fun, but the tumult is spectacularly incoherent. Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action. He got away with the chopped-up fights in Batman Begins because his hero was a barely glimpsed ninja, coming at villains from all angles in stroboscopic flashes. There are more variables here, which means more opportunities to say “What the f--- just happened?”

That pretty much covers it. Even Heath Ledger's much ballyhooed final performance as The Joker disappoints: it's good, but I was surprised at how limited his screen time was. The film felt overstuffed: too many characters (making the Harvey Dent/Two Face plot line the linchpin of the story was a fatal mistake), too much expository dialogue and superfluous action sequences (the bit where Batman goes to China was completely uneccesary). Maybe it's the fact that moviegoers today are forced to shell out $12 for a matinée, and thus demand more bang for their buck. A shame that seems to translate into such bloated and incoherent products.

Do you believe in magic?

B.C. transportation minister Kevin Falcon does.

"My opinion is, as the price of fuel goes up, it will change the technology of what we're driving, whether it's hydrogen or solar-powered or electrical-powered vehicles, which I think is most likely. That's the weakness of the Peak Oil projections.

"I think the bottom line is, we'll all be driving something. So you just can't ignore the infrastructure."

Does this technology currently exist in an economically viable form? Well, no. Nor is there any reasonable expectation that such alternatives will emerge anytime soon (well, there's biofuels. Oh. Wait.) So I have to wonder: what the fuck are you talking about, man?

That a paid in full member of the ruling class should buy into such technotriumphalist jabber is no real surprise, but in terms of public policy, this is faith-based shit right here. It's one thing to claim that, in the future we will all be conveyed to and fro by magic, four-leaf clover-eating winged unicorns, quite another to implement a massive publicly funded four leaf clover planting campaign. Or something.

Time for a parade!

Mark Steyn (right) and supporters celebrate today's decision by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to dismiss a Muslim group's complaint against Maclean's magazine. Steyn, a known musical theatre aficionado, penned the 2006 article that prompted the complaint.