Doing a number on Numéro
Feb. 5th, 2008 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus1. The first thing to say is that I really don't much care for -- or about -- Numéro Tokyo, which is a niche feminine title in the Japanese mag market, a spin-off from French Numéro. I did vaguely notice French Numéro in about 1996 as a mag with editorial content beyond the call of duty, ie quite good, but never bought it. Looking at the Numéro Tokyo website, I'm irritated by the mag's campy, vampy covers, its boring Helvetica design values, and particularly by the decision to use Western models (we'll really know China has won the peace when Western women start reading localized versions of Chinese magazines featuring Chinese-only fashion models).
2. So why then am I writing today about Numéro Tokyo? Well, I'm not, really. It's a lot narrower -- and a lot wider -- than that. I'm writing about some interesting questions which came up when John Jay met Ako Tanaka and then when Marxy blogged about it. Jay is Executive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency in Portland, Oregon (a company I have tenuous ties with, having taken the Nike dollar from them at one point for some music). Tanaka is the editor of Numéro. Marxy is a marketing analyst specialized in the mainstream Japanese feminine press.
3. Jay did a guest blog for the New York Times last week about Numéro Tokyo. As a fellow information-sensualist, I liked Jay's intro a lot -- he describes lounging about browsing the art and fashion press until 3am at the Tsutaya Starbucks branch in Roppongi Hills, and contrasts it with Portland, where everything closes at 9pm. (Then again, if the sound ambience is as aggressive there as in other Tsutayas I doubt I'd last ten minutes. Or is that why Jay says he's in the outdoor lounging area?) Jay's account is refreshingly positive; Tsutaya is great, the editor of Numéro is "charismatic and straight-talking", the Japanese magazine scene is lively and competitive, the fact that editorial content is determined by advertising is "honest", and "it is no secret that the young women of Tokyo rule as the consumer engine, their influence and sophistication make them a highly sought after audience". Therefore "the best editors and art directors" vie to capture these people's attention. Editor Tanaka is "taking creative risks" and serving readers "with a high consciousness... very aware of the world". Everything in the garden is rosy -- as rosy as the Nobuyoshi Araki "flora porn" that illustrates the piece.
4. Now, this account is way too positive for Marxy who, however many blogs he launches (at last count he presided over five) sticks rigidly to the same theme: that Japan is in a slow downward arc from the glory days of 90s Shibuya-kei, when elite hipsters determined the direction of the mass market. In his Meta no Tame analysis of Jay's post in the New York Times blog, Marxy hammers this theme home once more: "The hipster culture of the 1990s has failed to win over the younger generation," he laments. "Every time I go to an “opening” or “reception,” I find the exact same people getting older and older, not parties over-run with young people... While the forward-thinking creative culture we [the hipster taste culture niche to which John Jay, his agency, and most members of Néojaponisme’s staff belong] tend to advocate had a lot of influence on broader mainstream Japanese culture in the past, that is not true anymore. If there has been a narrative for this group in the last few years, it’s certainly its fall from commercial viability."
5. Citing the failure of Tokion and Relax magazines as further evidence of the unfortunate detachment of elite hipsters from the mainstream, Marxy goes on to say that if the Japanese female consumer is leading the market, it's towards the aesthetic represented by massively successful mainstream magazines like Can Cam, With and More: "houndtooth-check coats and curly brown hair and bejeweled cell-phones". "The CanCam girls are a social movement in a certain sense, but since it’s not one we hipsters approve of, we tend to dismiss it," he concludes. "Almost no part of these popular magazines’ styling or cultural guidance has “trickled-down” from somewhere like Numero Tokyo."
6. Okay, that's Marxy's take, and I don't fundamentally disagree with it. I think he makes (between the lines, anyway) a good point about how progressive journalism (hipster elite creativity design culture journalism) is forever trying to make its own interests more widely relevant (and therefore less elitist) by implying trickle-down -- this month's niche development will be important in the mass market in a year or so, just you wait and see. And of course it very rarely is, but by the time we realize this the avant press is talking about something else, promising something else. It's a "trickle-down treadmill", if you like.
7. However, I have a different take. I may be even more of a hipster elitist than Marxy is (possibly because I don't have to work in marketing, and therefore don't have to concern myself with dollar and circulation numbers). I don't actually care whether my values "trickle down" to the mass market; I do not require that process to legitimize what I do and what I like. When niche and mainstream meet, it's a double-edged sword. Sure, "hipster elite" values get to spread themselves through the mass culture, and that makes some hipsters and style mavens (Marxy's always harping on about Hiroshi Fujiwara and Cornelius) rich and powerful. But, in being diluted and copied and flogged to death in the mainstream, these values (which often start as semi-religious life-philosophies for some people) get quickly exhausted. Malcolm McLaren knew that when he put out the "Flogging a Dead Horse" Sex Pistols compilation, and Kurt Cobain knew it when he raised the shotgun to his head (no doubt as another Bush record came on the radio). Let me put it this way: ubiquity really is the abyss. Why is Creation Records no longer around? It's not because they had too few sales and too little impact. It's because they had -- thanks to Oasis, the band who became "familiar to millions" -- too many and too much.
8. I'm a "one swallow makes a summer" kind of guy. At any given point, I hate all pop singers except one, all magazines except one, all fashion designers except one, and all TV shows except one. But the one I love makes it all worthwhile. That swallow brings my personal summer. And, while it's really easy (and, in the digital mediascape, getting easier every day) to filter out the mass market pap, I don't discount the fact that that pap needs to be there to make the lone swallow possible. I'm quite happy to see the mainstream as a money-making mechanism which exists just for the subsidy of progressive minority forms. The lone swallow could not exist without an entire industry of crud, and the flamboyance of a Henrik Vibskov couldn't exist without an entire infrastructure of vanilla. I mean that in brute economic terms -- niche commercial artists need the mainstream to exist -- but also in terms of the relativism of taste and the processes of differentiation and distinction.
9. Ah, the relativism of taste. This is where Marxy -- despite being familiar with Bourdieu's book "Distinction" -- fears to tread. Marxy sees the dialectic between the niche and the mainstream in fairly simple terms: the elite taste groups who produce niche culture can either succeed or fail in going mainstream. What he doesn't seem to consider is that elite taste is produced by the mainstream, dialectically, in a Bourdieu-like "distinction strategy". It needs to be different from the mainstream, but not that different. Above all, though, niche culture must be designed to fail, because when it succeeds it fails too. By crossing over into the mainstream, niche culture stops being niche. Therefore you need to make new niche culture to replace it, new culture for people who want to distinguish themselves against the mainstream (that is, in reference to it, but negative reference) to embrace for the purposes of distinction. Nothing fails like success.
10. This actually contains some good news for Marxy: the hipster elite to which he belongs is not as sterile and separate and spent as he keeps saying it is. It's very intimately and vitally connected to the mainstream, although not quite in the way Marxy expects it to be (the way he hasn't seen happening since the 90s, and is a bit dewy-eyed and Golden Age-ist and retro about). I expect that's why executive creative directors at ad agencies pay so much attention to it. They weren't born yesterday. They see trend dialectics in a more complicated way than "Oh, we're not getting through to the masses".
11. The sole comment under Marxy's Numéro entry is from someone called Dudblankpathetic, who says: "People tend to make safe choices and play safe roles, and this has not much to do with creativeness, shifting the boundaries, pushing the envelope and other fancy words we adore so much... This is not a problem of Tokyo or Japan - this is mankind at its best and ugliest". And while that's a refrain Marxy (who tends to localize universal problems to Japan too much) hears a lot, we have to ask, is an aesthetic featuring "houndtooth-check coats, curly brown hair and bejeweled cell-phones" really such a terrible thing? As mainstreams go, that's a pretty benign one. Just imagine if your mainstream was the one I had to contend and flirt with in Britain early in my music career, for instance -- a mainstream consisting of aggressively mediocre major label A&R men, a bitchy music press and a toxic, venomous set of red-top tabloids which, at times, seemed to be vying to outdo each other in their condemnation of "pretentious" art, sex, refinement and beauty and their celebration of everything moronic, toxic, drunken and loutish. But you have to hand it to them -- they didn't put Chinese models on the front of their papers.
2. So why then am I writing today about Numéro Tokyo? Well, I'm not, really. It's a lot narrower -- and a lot wider -- than that. I'm writing about some interesting questions which came up when John Jay met Ako Tanaka and then when Marxy blogged about it. Jay is Executive Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy advertising agency in Portland, Oregon (a company I have tenuous ties with, having taken the Nike dollar from them at one point for some music). Tanaka is the editor of Numéro. Marxy is a marketing analyst specialized in the mainstream Japanese feminine press.
3. Jay did a guest blog for the New York Times last week about Numéro Tokyo. As a fellow information-sensualist, I liked Jay's intro a lot -- he describes lounging about browsing the art and fashion press until 3am at the Tsutaya Starbucks branch in Roppongi Hills, and contrasts it with Portland, where everything closes at 9pm. (Then again, if the sound ambience is as aggressive there as in other Tsutayas I doubt I'd last ten minutes. Or is that why Jay says he's in the outdoor lounging area?) Jay's account is refreshingly positive; Tsutaya is great, the editor of Numéro is "charismatic and straight-talking", the Japanese magazine scene is lively and competitive, the fact that editorial content is determined by advertising is "honest", and "it is no secret that the young women of Tokyo rule as the consumer engine, their influence and sophistication make them a highly sought after audience". Therefore "the best editors and art directors" vie to capture these people's attention. Editor Tanaka is "taking creative risks" and serving readers "with a high consciousness... very aware of the world". Everything in the garden is rosy -- as rosy as the Nobuyoshi Araki "flora porn" that illustrates the piece.
4. Now, this account is way too positive for Marxy who, however many blogs he launches (at last count he presided over five) sticks rigidly to the same theme: that Japan is in a slow downward arc from the glory days of 90s Shibuya-kei, when elite hipsters determined the direction of the mass market. In his Meta no Tame analysis of Jay's post in the New York Times blog, Marxy hammers this theme home once more: "The hipster culture of the 1990s has failed to win over the younger generation," he laments. "Every time I go to an “opening” or “reception,” I find the exact same people getting older and older, not parties over-run with young people... While the forward-thinking creative culture we [the hipster taste culture niche to which John Jay, his agency, and most members of Néojaponisme’s staff belong] tend to advocate had a lot of influence on broader mainstream Japanese culture in the past, that is not true anymore. If there has been a narrative for this group in the last few years, it’s certainly its fall from commercial viability."
5. Citing the failure of Tokion and Relax magazines as further evidence of the unfortunate detachment of elite hipsters from the mainstream, Marxy goes on to say that if the Japanese female consumer is leading the market, it's towards the aesthetic represented by massively successful mainstream magazines like Can Cam, With and More: "houndtooth-check coats and curly brown hair and bejeweled cell-phones". "The CanCam girls are a social movement in a certain sense, but since it’s not one we hipsters approve of, we tend to dismiss it," he concludes. "Almost no part of these popular magazines’ styling or cultural guidance has “trickled-down” from somewhere like Numero Tokyo."
6. Okay, that's Marxy's take, and I don't fundamentally disagree with it. I think he makes (between the lines, anyway) a good point about how progressive journalism (hipster elite creativity design culture journalism) is forever trying to make its own interests more widely relevant (and therefore less elitist) by implying trickle-down -- this month's niche development will be important in the mass market in a year or so, just you wait and see. And of course it very rarely is, but by the time we realize this the avant press is talking about something else, promising something else. It's a "trickle-down treadmill", if you like.
7. However, I have a different take. I may be even more of a hipster elitist than Marxy is (possibly because I don't have to work in marketing, and therefore don't have to concern myself with dollar and circulation numbers). I don't actually care whether my values "trickle down" to the mass market; I do not require that process to legitimize what I do and what I like. When niche and mainstream meet, it's a double-edged sword. Sure, "hipster elite" values get to spread themselves through the mass culture, and that makes some hipsters and style mavens (Marxy's always harping on about Hiroshi Fujiwara and Cornelius) rich and powerful. But, in being diluted and copied and flogged to death in the mainstream, these values (which often start as semi-religious life-philosophies for some people) get quickly exhausted. Malcolm McLaren knew that when he put out the "Flogging a Dead Horse" Sex Pistols compilation, and Kurt Cobain knew it when he raised the shotgun to his head (no doubt as another Bush record came on the radio). Let me put it this way: ubiquity really is the abyss. Why is Creation Records no longer around? It's not because they had too few sales and too little impact. It's because they had -- thanks to Oasis, the band who became "familiar to millions" -- too many and too much.
8. I'm a "one swallow makes a summer" kind of guy. At any given point, I hate all pop singers except one, all magazines except one, all fashion designers except one, and all TV shows except one. But the one I love makes it all worthwhile. That swallow brings my personal summer. And, while it's really easy (and, in the digital mediascape, getting easier every day) to filter out the mass market pap, I don't discount the fact that that pap needs to be there to make the lone swallow possible. I'm quite happy to see the mainstream as a money-making mechanism which exists just for the subsidy of progressive minority forms. The lone swallow could not exist without an entire industry of crud, and the flamboyance of a Henrik Vibskov couldn't exist without an entire infrastructure of vanilla. I mean that in brute economic terms -- niche commercial artists need the mainstream to exist -- but also in terms of the relativism of taste and the processes of differentiation and distinction.
9. Ah, the relativism of taste. This is where Marxy -- despite being familiar with Bourdieu's book "Distinction" -- fears to tread. Marxy sees the dialectic between the niche and the mainstream in fairly simple terms: the elite taste groups who produce niche culture can either succeed or fail in going mainstream. What he doesn't seem to consider is that elite taste is produced by the mainstream, dialectically, in a Bourdieu-like "distinction strategy". It needs to be different from the mainstream, but not that different. Above all, though, niche culture must be designed to fail, because when it succeeds it fails too. By crossing over into the mainstream, niche culture stops being niche. Therefore you need to make new niche culture to replace it, new culture for people who want to distinguish themselves against the mainstream (that is, in reference to it, but negative reference) to embrace for the purposes of distinction. Nothing fails like success.
10. This actually contains some good news for Marxy: the hipster elite to which he belongs is not as sterile and separate and spent as he keeps saying it is. It's very intimately and vitally connected to the mainstream, although not quite in the way Marxy expects it to be (the way he hasn't seen happening since the 90s, and is a bit dewy-eyed and Golden Age-ist and retro about). I expect that's why executive creative directors at ad agencies pay so much attention to it. They weren't born yesterday. They see trend dialectics in a more complicated way than "Oh, we're not getting through to the masses".
11. The sole comment under Marxy's Numéro entry is from someone called Dudblankpathetic, who says: "People tend to make safe choices and play safe roles, and this has not much to do with creativeness, shifting the boundaries, pushing the envelope and other fancy words we adore so much... This is not a problem of Tokyo or Japan - this is mankind at its best and ugliest". And while that's a refrain Marxy (who tends to localize universal problems to Japan too much) hears a lot, we have to ask, is an aesthetic featuring "houndtooth-check coats, curly brown hair and bejeweled cell-phones" really such a terrible thing? As mainstreams go, that's a pretty benign one. Just imagine if your mainstream was the one I had to contend and flirt with in Britain early in my music career, for instance -- a mainstream consisting of aggressively mediocre major label A&R men, a bitchy music press and a toxic, venomous set of red-top tabloids which, at times, seemed to be vying to outdo each other in their condemnation of "pretentious" art, sex, refinement and beauty and their celebration of everything moronic, toxic, drunken and loutish. But you have to hand it to them -- they didn't put Chinese models on the front of their papers.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 08:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 10:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:11 pm (UTC)Where does nature-based spirituality fit into your post-Protestant worldview?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:11 pm (UTC)my kindly friend the censor
Date: 2008-02-05 09:07 am (UTC)Re: my kindly friend the censor
Date: 2008-02-05 09:16 am (UTC)Re: my kindly friend the censor
Date: 2008-02-05 11:37 am (UTC)-r
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 09:11 am (UTC)I take your point that you need mass markets to have niche, and I am not in disagreement. I regret, however, that you are trying to paint my critique as a "cultural elite" lamenting the fall of cultural elitism, when I was more trying to pick out our natural self-biases. I think that CanCam is an equally valid consumer movement in Japan as CUTiE, but since cultural elites want to see their analogs around the world, Ebi-chan doesn't make the cover of books about Japanese street fashion. And objectively speaking, I have no problem with houndtooth-check coats and curly brown hair and bejeweled cell-phones. You just read my "subjective dislike" into it.
I've calmed down a bit about "my team" not being on the music charts or hip with the kids anymore, but yes, I can still listen to bands I enjoy. My problem is that when you are given a position to speak to the world about Japan, it's a bit silly to over-enthusiastically talk about the members of a former generation rather than what's actually popular. The reporting seemed mostly like a means to reaffirm the whole trickle-down cool-hunting philosophy.
M*A*R:X+Y
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 10:28 am (UTC)Actually, that's not true, we were much more ambivalent at the time. I remember telling Ivo (who ran 4AD) that we half wanted to be Haircut 100, half A Certain Ratio. At that point the only difference between those bands was that one was on a major, the other an indie label, and that one played salsa and funk riffs with session-player polish whereas the other played them deliberately (and interestingly) badly. Oh, and that one smiled while they sang and the other didn't.
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Okay, also that, although they both had black drummers, ACR let theirs become the lead vocalist:
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Actually, there are whole universes of textural and -- dare I say it -- spiritual difference between "Favourite Shirts" and "Knife Slits Water", but it's difficult to pin them down with mere words. Being dour and arty and indie and hip, I of course bought the ACR record, not the Haircut 100 one. But we were aware of both, and in a sense they're both using the same musical vocabulary.
I think a Shibuya-kei angled more towards ACR and less towards H-100 might have been a better one, but it probably wouldn't have shifted the units it did.
Re: A list of swallows?
Date: 2008-02-05 10:31 am (UTC)A list of swallows?
Date: 2008-02-05 10:15 am (UTC)wewillbecome.com
Re: A list of swallows?
Date: 2008-02-05 10:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 10:15 am (UTC)A Party that almost everybody you meet love to hate, but somehow still manages to grow stronger with every election.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 10:34 am (UTC)1) "we'll really know when China has won the peace when Western women start reading localized versions of Chinese magazines featuring Chinese-only fashion models"
I dont think that will ever happen because I don't think the dominance white people have at the forefront of fashion and design is entirely because we "dominate the world" economically. Of course, the wealth of the west (west = the predominantly white North America & Europe) has played a very large part in western advertising, marketing and fashion saturating the world, Im not denying that.
But I think theres another, more subtle reason at play too. I think white people as a race are quite unique in terms of how we look compared to the other races. What I mean by that when you look at the blacks, asians, orientals & hispanics (who as a whole make up the majority of the world population) they nearly always have black hair & dark brown eyes - the general level of aesthetic homogenity between them is much higher than that of white people. It makes white people stand out as the black sheep.
White people are strange in that we're the only race with vastly distinct variations in hair and eye colour. Theres hazel eyes which can be really light yellow, green eyes, blue eyes, grey eyes, light brown, dark brown, and all the in-betweens. Then you've got blonds, red heads, every variation of brown you can think of from really light to really dark to jet black hair. I dont believe its just economics at play, I think theres an aesthetic aspect to it all.
Take for example Japan. 98% of Japans population are oriental but 1/3 of advertising in Japan features white people. This trend is also apparent in Japanese video games -- there are a lot of white people in Japanese video games. Japan is a very rich country that produces its own cultural exports and products - why is there still this dominance of white people there? I think theres an aesthetic reason at play also.
2) I don't believe that Japanese youth culture has been on the decline due to the cultural apathy of Japans generation Y, per Marxy's estimations. I think Japan's youth is more interested in personal eclecticism and tiny in-groups than mass herding (which will sound strange considering the stereotypes usually associated with the Japanese). Isnt eclecticism what "hipsterism" has always been about?
I say this because of the sheer number of specialist magazines avilable in Japan. You wouldnt believe the amount of variety and flavors Japanese magazines come in -- you have magazines devoted to photos of people standing in different poses for graphic artists to draw to gay manga magazines specialising in individual fetishes -- every lifestyle and hobby is catered for. You can buy all this stuff on Amazon.co.jp.
In the west, we have mainstream and fanzine with very little inbetween. In Japan they have the entire spectrum, with much more variety. People dont flock to youth cultures to define themselves anymore, thats a thing of the past.
Maybe (and I say maybe because I'm not entirely sure) thats the difference between Japan and the west when it comes to hipsterism. In the west, "being a hipster", even though at its heart has always been about eclecticism, has been spun and manipulated into a culture -- you have vice magazine, American apparel, certain bands and music, certain venues, certain areas to live, certain fashions. It's faux-eclecticism with all the old rules, just more broad than before. Maybe Japan's youth truely has escaped that and thats why Marxy is struggling to find "the next big thing". Maybe Japans youth is all about person eclecticism, and if thats the case, im 100% for that because it's something I personally admire. Less cool chasing, more pleasing yourself.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:07 am (UTC)oh man you really do go where angels fear to tread. i'm loving it.
the 'white race' category is the biggest load of crap ever invented (indeed by white people) - of course you know the whole spiel of (christian) white everything else a dirty version of it. think the only yellow(ish) people i've ever seen come from scottland or ireland maybe germany and scandinavia.
as a genetically south europeaner i feel , racially speaking (whatever that really means) much more 'other' to those 'yellowish' people with funny red hair and beards than to say people here in japan.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:30 am (UTC)I never implied racial superiority, merely that theres an aspect to "the white race" that makes it quite bizarre compared to the rest of the world, and thats hair and eye colour, The variation in colours is broader. I think its unfair that youre bringing up comments like "(theres) white (and) everything else a dirty version of it".
Lets say hypothetically there was a massive increase the sale of black models on the front of fashion magazines. If I was to say "I think the appeal is that black models are more voluptuous and the darker hair and skin tone gives them a sensual quality, its beautiful" nobody would have any qualms with this.
But as soon as you even mention something like "I really like the fact white people's hair and eyes come in so many different colours" Every apologetic liberal in the room suddenly starts to hear things that havent been said.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 01:04 pm (UTC)it would make sense to call blue eyed people a 'race'.
you don't know the viewpoint of a non-white person to whom "all white people look the same". obversly the differences between 'black people' are the as huge as between the white and there's a point in-between (not michael jackson) where you wouldn't know which is which.
the 'white' thing really is cultural studies 101 territory.
what you said if total neo-19th century anthropology really. not offensive though
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 01:28 pm (UTC)Im not trying to say "White people are genetically superiour and better looking", im not putting social or political importance on this issue. Im saying "I think models are selected based on their features, and hair and eye color plays a part in that"
I never said "all black people look the same" because they dont at all, but you'll never find a black person with red hair or blue eyes, or grey eyes, or blond hair, or light brown hair. You can dye their hair and give them colored contacts but it ends up looking artificial.
It just so happens "white people" have the largest array of colours to pick from. Thats all!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 09:41 pm (UTC)And if it's merely about variety, why just white people? Why not different shades of skin, different shapes of eyes, as well?
Of course I'm talking about magazines the world over now, not just Japan...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 02:18 am (UTC)as i said i don't think your arguement was offensive and i didn't get emotionally outraged about it, just that it's got nothing to hold on to at either end. (maybe it's easier to talk about japan where things are just a bit more fluid but there's nothing uniquely japanese about this) .
to directly link fashion-blondness for example with naturally yellow hair is , well, antropologically rockist (for lack of a better word). think of japan a few yers ago where even the more conservative salariimans would have light brown hair. it was and still is, 'natural' , no masquarading there. now that styles have somewhat changed they didn't revert back to some sort of original black-hair samurai japaneseness but moved on to a state where blond and brown hair is totally embedded in their fashion/style/appearance/self-representation DNA. so if by the mid 00s takeshi kitano goes bleach-blond , by that time there is ZERO connection with people in a different part of the world who are born with blond hair. his hair also looks far less 'artificial' than an edo-style ponytail or even than an 70s 7/3 salariiman hairstyle would.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 03:50 pm (UTC)http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/01/30/scieyes130.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox
"all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:11 am (UTC)I half agree that the Japanese are more eclectic -- my basic feeling is that there's a bigger margin of people in Japan who embrace what I think of as "enlightened" values. Look at how 60% of the retail OS market in Japan (http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2296/071114leopardmauls/index.html) is taken by the Apple OS, compared to less than 10% in the US.
I'm not quite sure why that is -- except that there are more bozos and slobs in the West -- but maybe the Western mainstream has some kind of cultural gene of resistance to aesthetic values which the Japanese mainstream doesn't have. Maybe it's related to the West's beer-processing enzyme genes, which many Japanese also don't have (which is why their faces get so red when they drink). Beer has undermined us! Our waistlines, at least.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:25 am (UTC)That figure is on the high side because it relates only to the month Leopard was released, but the Apple OS share in Japan is at least twice what it is in the West.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:44 am (UTC)This isnt about "better", only that the difference between white people is starker because of the vast array of hair and eye colours not found in other races. I said "black sheep", "standing out" not "better" or "interesting".
"your diversity argument seems to run up against the fact that if you scan a rack of Western magazines, all the women on the covers look pretty much identical (long blonde hair, the same "shield-shaped" face, and so on)"
Thats a stereotype thats not true And I didnt even have to look fair to prove it wrong:
We have blond, platinum blond, a red head, black hair, many shades of brown... I cant see the eyes so I couldnt tell you the color variation either.
"The aim of magazine editors is not to "reflect diversity" but to incite envy / aspiration and express paradigmatic authority via genetically superior examples of the master race"
Holy shit. Knee-jerk Liberal baggage spilling out all over the place. So now fashion editors are trying to promote politcal agendas? "genetically superiour examples of the master (white) race"? Last time I checked, fashion editors were about catching peoples attention to make money. Sex and beauty sells.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:57 am (UTC)Buying a MAC OS is more "enlightened"? lol What?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 03:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 11:00 am (UTC)Remember that post you made where you were slating Bowie for his chintzy tastes? You're treading into "indier than thou" territory yet again.
Only considering that which is a backlash to the mainstream legitimate is just a flipside of the mainstream coin. Where as the mainstream legitimizes itself through popularity, backlash culture just legitimizes itself in an equally superficial way - that its not popular.
I'm an advocate of self-expression. I can't advocate popularity dictating peoples tastes, but I also can't advocate anti-popularity dictating peoples tastes because its the same thing reversed with all the same pitfalls. I want freedom, not rules.
toad balls
Date: 2008-02-05 11:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 10:59 pm (UTC)This is exactly how I feel about music/art/etc. If it rows my boat, I ride along. If not, something else will.
If it's popular, hey that means "easier to find". If it's unpopular that means "I can easily spend personal time with the artist whenever our schedules mesh". Win-Win.
Oh, good job pointing at the pink elephant!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 02:49 am (UTC)The problem with this is that it is incomplete - we need to look at the processes involved in determining what is mainstream. Remember that especially in the case of pop music for example, the self-appointed 'taste-mongers' for the entire nation are a group of industry executives. They dictate what the public is bombarded with, what it can 'choose from'. Demand is in large part created by supply. This sort of culture is not produced due to demand from below, it is dictated from above, even though it later gains a 'sheen' of popularity.
for me it is not a case of mainstream versus anti-mainstream, popularity versus anti popularity. We should be looking at who gets to do stuff and who is gaining or losing in this system, and how it can be improved. Just looking at what's popular and what's not does not help us understand, as it is merely the end product of a complex -and highly undemocratic- production system.
"I'm an advocate of self-expression. I can't advocate popularity dictating peoples tastes, but I also can't advocate anti-popularity dictating peoples tastes because its the same thing reversed with all the same pitfalls."
You've created a rather pointless debate here. if 'anti-popularity' dictated tastes surely it would thus negate itself and become popular! ;-)
" I want freedom, not rules."
freedom TO or freedom FROM?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-07 10:27 pm (UTC)You're questioning who has the power to propel something into the mainstream. You're talking about corporations, but not everything popular is dreamt up by a corporation.
" if 'anti-popularity' dictated tastes surely it would thus negate itself and become popular!"
Not necessarily. Something can be popular in a subculture, but unpopular with the mainstream.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 02:57 pm (UTC)mainstream and the hip underground etc
haircut 100 dont really play salsa rhythms, just the odd conga touch
real salsa performers usually smile a lot.in its golden age, salsa was both mainstream and amazing. Nowadays a lot of it is pretty cheesy.
John Cassavettes didnt want his films to be watched only by film snobs. He saw things in success that were more important that money. But he failed to grasp what he needed to get there.
Elvis Presley. American artists need to be big. Only when everyone from all social classes is talking about it have you really made any difference.
Japanese mainstream TV used to be a lot more fun when it wasnt so PC and there was more to it than people saying oishii all the time.
otaku culture. real otakus vs akiba-kei.
smiling on stage vs not smiling on stage.
i dont think this argument has a solution.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 03:44 pm (UTC)To your mind, how do you seperate real otaku from akiba-kei?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 04:07 pm (UTC)So i believe that roughly there's 2 basic kinds of people around any given subculture that remain kind of consistent. There's the introverted kind who are really, really into their object of interest as a way to fill the gap of their lonelyness,
and there are the ones who feel they have interests, thoughts, desires that don't quite fit mainstream views but they are still very much the social type so they prefer to latch on to an existing subculture that hits close to home than to go on their own, or they considers themselves better than the mass and so go the hipper-than-thou route
i see this distinction at work in every niche culture. If its sexual fetish culture, youll meet people apparently into piss and poop who arent really into that they just tell themselves they are because they want some kind of kicks they cant get with their wives.
so thats it. Its something i think about a lot because i see myself at the end of a long and gradual transformation from straight otaku to a more open and more social person with no really obsessive interests and im trying to gauge how much i have lost and won in the transition, and its funny to see the same transformation apparently happening on a larger scale in akibahara
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 10:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-07 01:09 pm (UTC)I live in Hinoo, far west of shinjuku in the chuuo-sen, right after tachikawa. An old wooden shack with 3 rooms and a nonfunctioning furo for myself, adjointed to a better heated house whose (working) furo and kitchen i can use
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-07 02:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-07 02:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-05 02:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 12:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 02:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 03:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 01:05 pm (UTC)as far as I know, magazines like Japanese versions of Numero and Vogue only survive on ads. they don't sell many copies like Non-no or CanCam. Numero and Vogue Nippon are magazines without readers. The same goes for LEON. The contents are written for brands who pays for ads...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-07 01:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-06 01:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-07 06:00 am (UTC)Haven't you considered that you only perceive the vast diversity of "white" people because that's how you've been conditioned? I am distinctly "Asian" looking but when I went to a rural black neighborhood in South Carolina, children came out and yelled, "hey, look at the white person!" Similarly, I doubt that people in a remote Chinese village necessarily distinguish between blonde and red haired Westerners, although they may be more attune to the subtle, or not so subtle, differences among the 56 different ethnic groups comprising the nation (so goes the party line...). Indeed, Europeans were historically referred to as red-haired barbarians (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=red+haired+barbarians+&btnG=Search) in both China and Japan.
You could further split linguistic hairs by noting that again, in both Chinese and Japanese, green and blue were commonly referred to as the same color (qing in Chinese, which can also refer to "black" cloth; aoi in Japanese), so it's entirely possible to imagine a Chinese or Japanese person who can't even distinguish the difference between the hazel, blue or green eyes in which you take such satisfaction. To be fair, the Chinese, at least, have a rich literary array of names for different shades of blue-green.
One of the amusing things about this blog is seeing all the ways people interpret Japan and Japanese culture. Nevertheless, I find your comment disturbing because it reflects the naive assumption that a unified visual regime connects individual modes of perception when the well-worn cliche of the glass half-empty or half-full suggests otherwise. Often, visitors to another country impose their native visual regimes upon the host environment—contributing to the experience of foreigness—thus I had the odd childhood experience of a visiting friend informing me that Tokyo is nothing compared to El Paso. Having never been to El Paso at the time, I was at a loss for words.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-07 07:55 pm (UTC)"Haven't you considered that you only perceive the vast diversity of "white" people because that's how you've been conditioned?"
No, because I can see for myself the diversity of hair and eye colours seen in "white people". Blacks, asians, hispanics and orientals are predominantly blacks and browns. There are a few green eyed asians but the diversity of colours possible is nothing like that exhibited in whites. If you have evidence to the contrary by all means, show me and you'll change my opinion.
Oh course, this argument starts to get murky when you include people who are mixed race, it also gets murky when you try to define what counts as white, or what counts as asian or black. Im merely talking in generalisations here, because generalisations are the platform of the entire "why do white people dominate modeling?" argument. Maybe a lot of the people we assume are white aren't really "white"? Maybe they're mixed raced? who knows.
Taking this into consideration, my argument should have been this:
"I argue that the popularity of "stereotypically white features" can at least partly be attributed to tastes, as exhibited by the fact Japan is a rich, predominantly homogeneous asian country, but 1/3rd of its advertising features people exhibiting stereotypically white features. They're choosing models who have stereotypically white features."
" I doubt that people in a remote Chinese village necessarily distinguish between blonde and red haired Westerners"
Youre arguing that chinese people born in a remote village cant tell the difference between yellow and red. I dont buy that.
"Indeed, Europeans were historically referred to as red-haired barbarians I doubt that people in a remote Chinese village necessarily distinguish between blonde and red haired Westerners"
You've unwittingly proven my point. Westerners werent called "Red headed barbarians" because the chinese and japanese cant tell the difference between brown, red, yellow and black. Westerns are called "red headed barbarian" because red hair is one of the most distrinctly striking features of the white race.
The Nation of Islam is famous for one of its members coining the phrase "blue-eyed demons" to sum up the white race. Thats not because they dont know that all white people dont have blue eyes, again, its because blue eyes are a very distinctive ad individual feature of the white race.
"green and blue were commonly referred to as the same color"
That doesnt mean they cant distinguish between the colours, that just means culturally they've lumped those two colours into the same group. If a chinese of a Japanese person wanted to be specific about blue or green they would say "leaf colour" or "sky colour" even those the leaf and the sky were both "blue-green".
"I find your comment disturbing because it reflects the naive assumption that a unified visual regime connects individual modes of perception"
Disturbing? naivity is only disturbing if its used for promoting hate. Im not. get it into perspective please.