So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 39) How punk culture is saving the nation's shopping malls and churches
Happy Thursday night/Friday morning. Got any interesting plans? Tell me via email or Twitter -- I would love to know what y'all get up to.
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In 1985, Seventeen magazine ran a small feature titled "Muffy Goes Punk," which had the usual tips on how to spice up prep staples with punky touches. I remember it mostly for the respectful letter to the editor that appeared a few months later, where the teenaged correspondent argued that punk wasn't a fashion style but a conscious mindset based on rejecting mainstream consumer culture and creating your own alternatives.
(Looking back nearly 30 years later, it's remarkable that a teen magazine run on the proceeds of Love's Baby Soft ads would even print that letter.)
In 2014, you can find articles where Punk Domestics are cited in a piece on canning; learn how an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. has teamed up with punk rock bands to host benefits for assorted charities, or marvel at how punk rockers have revitalized a Stockton, CA, shopping mall by using it as a performance venue.
So what? It's interesting to see how punk culture has deftly rummaged through some of the ruins of mainstream culture (shopping malls, anyone?) and begun creatively reusing or reimagining these relics. Punk has even stepped into organized religion, stressing that Jesus may well have been the original punk rocker.
Who cares? Punks are aging -- but according to the people who chronicle them, there are plenty of teenagers gravitating toward the ethos. There's also a bit of the everything-old-is-new-again feeling: punk rose as a movement during the economically and socially turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Now, as we grapple with another set of financial challenges and culture wars, there's a broader cultural yearning toward a life less dependent on the modern consumer infrastructure.
Bonus reading: I have recommended Kaya Oakes' Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture before, but I'm also going to suggest you read Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.
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Computer hardware vendors will still get rich selling tablet computers, but not as rich as expected. Two major tech analysis firms, Garner and IDC[*], dialed back their sales projections for tablets, estimating that sales of the devices will only grow by 11% this year -- growth that looks puny compared to the 50+% growth tablet sales had from 2012-2013. The reasons for slowing tablet sales are twofold: People hold on to tablets for a long longer than analysts expected them to, and consumers in the market for Internet-connected devices are more likely to buy a smartphone.
So what? Tablet lifespan is estimated to be approximately three years. The tablet-replacement question has people scrambling to figure out what people will buy when they're in the market for a new device. Also, the people who are responsible for sales figures had not considered the pass-along factor: When parents are done with their iPad, they're passing it along to the kids and buying themselves a new one, not ponying up for new tablets for everyone.
Who cares? The fact that people hold on to their tablets longer may indicate that consumers are beginning to define the use cases for their computer ecosystem independent of the tech media, their IT department or analysts. (Shocker!) It also suggests that there is a natural saturation point for tablets; the current sales pattern sugests that there are two tablet computers for every five Americans. The odds of the ratio getting lower are not in tablet sales' favor, but they're not entirely gone; the defining line for electronics market saturation in the U.S. is the 50% mark.
[*] Ethics alert: They are the research arm of the company that employs me.
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My mom wanted me to comment on Kimberly Guilfoyle's contention that young women are too stupid to vote, and I am nothing if not a paragon of filial devotion, so here goes:
Women are more likely to vote than men are.
Seventy percent of young women attend college, and they are 33% more likely than young men to earn a college degree by the time they are 27; this makes them a significantly educated coterie. (So, you know, possibly capable of editing a Match.com profile and remembering the headlines.) They're also much more likely to vote Democrat (63% of young women identify as a Democrat, compared to 28% of young women who identify as Republican) and are widely credited with carrying the vote for President Obama in both 2008 and 2012.
So what? Guilfoyle's remarks were not actually aimed at young women; they're aimed at people who want to believe that young women don't deserve to form a political opinion or exercise their right to vote. It's whistling past the graveyard: by dismissing the very aptitude of women as voters, one can ignore the significant gender gap between voters (and how women consistently break left).
They're also aimed at the same people who dismissed young, single women voters as "Beyonce voters" earlier this year, so called after Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed young women only cared about access to health care and birth control because they lacked husbands to take care of them.
Who cares? Likely not young women, who are incredibly unlikely to make up Fox News's viewing audience on any given day: the median viewing age of a Fox News viewer is 68. What does make Guilfoyle's remarks interesting is how they deviate from the current trend in rightward media to downplay any gender discrimination in the U.S.: A recent trend in right-leaning media is the attempt to defang the idea that the Republican party is hostile toward women (check Google News for "war on women" and the first two pages are right-wing op-eds talking about how that idea no longer has any currency with women). When the news outlet most closely associated with the Republican party tells women they're too dumb to vote, it only provides Thinkpiece Economy with fodder for the argument that the GOP's woman problem is here to stay.
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Your pop culture notes of the day: If you have not seen the student film The Life and Death of Tommy Chaos and Stacy Danger, set aside ten minutes and do so now. The movie's aesthetic? "Wes Anderson meets Ridley Scott for tacos at this really great strip-mall place in Hermosa Beach." I also recommend going to the official site to get a feel for the timeline on the making of a ten-minute film. It will give you new respect for the focus and tenacity artists bring to well-crafted fare.
Also, I am going to be on tenterhooks to see if Constantine is watchable. (I'm not asking for "good," I'm asking for "enjoyable.") It's a comics-based TV show, but the protagonist, John Constantine, is a wizard who does as much harm as good. As this Flavorwire overview of must-read Hellblazer volumes notes:
If portals to Hell are opening up around the country, it’s the result of economic collapse and governmental ineptitude as much as the result of Constantine drunkenly mumbling the wrong incantation.
John Constantine was conceived in Thatcherite England, but in today's U.S.A., where:
Polling by Gallup shows that since June 2009, in the heyday of the new Obama presidency, public confidence in virtually every major institution of American life has fallen, including organized religion, the military, the Supreme Court, public schools, newspapers, Congress, television news, the police, the presidency, the medical system, the criminal justice system and small business.
The only institutions that Gallup tested that showed slight improvement from June 2009 to June 2014 were banks, organized labor, big business and health maintenance organizations. Even so, all four of them had the confidence of just roughly a quarter of the population or less.
Constantine may be the comic character for our times too. Here's hoping the show is watchable.
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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "I remember there was an issue with a gratuitious picture of The Rock, but when ...?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was September 4, 2014, btw.)
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