Category Archives: Postirony

They like cheap labor, but not their humor

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Nacogirls-Brown
Apparently some Americans are not quite ready for rasquachismo, the Mexican practice of folk kitsch appropriation (I blogged a while back about it here). When NaCo, my favorite Mexican design outfit (I blogged about them here) offered T-Shirts at Macy’s proclaiming “Brown is the new white,” vociferous and scared anti-immigration activists pressured the retail giant to pull the T. Too bad. People need to take their cultural status less seriously. After all, it is the irony of all ironies that those of European descent who are so against Mexican immigration call themselves “nativatists.” I wonder how those from the First Nations think about that? Still, the fact that NaCo is in Macy’s means the battle is being lost. I recall that Gabriel García Márquez once said that Latin American didn’t need to invade the US with armies. It would take over with telenovelas (soap operas). The sooner the better!

Advertising Age – Hispanic Marketing – Kitsch Is Key to Apparel Maker’s Branding Effort:

Macy’s, however, quickly found that not everyone is amused by NaCo’s sense of humor. Its T-shirt with the fashion-parody slogan “Brown is the new white” drew immediate fire from a conservative anti-immigration website, generating e-mails to Macy’s threatening a boycott and online rants about racism and immigrants trying to take over America (one poster pointed out a possible link between Macys’ red-star logo and communism). Fox News did a story, and Macy’s pulled the “Brown is the new white” shirt.

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Cheeky post-climate change ads

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Desiel

Is this advocacy or ad-vocacy? The postironic aspect is that somehow this scene (and the others linked to in the Washington Post article below) assumes that despite global warming, normal activities like leisure and consumerism will go uninhibited. Hmmm.

High-Water Marketing – washingtonpost.com:

In print ads promoting its spring/summer collection, the Italian-based clothing company depicts landscapes that have been transformed by environmental disaster. The proud buildings of Manhattan and the presidential faces of Mount Rushmore are half-submerged in water from melted glaciers. Paris is a steamy jungle. Life looks pretty awesome, though. Diesel’s models are dressed fashionably if barely (to accommodate the weather) and they lounge amid this hip dystopia in glamorous unconcern, fanning themselves or applying suntan lotion to one another’s tawny backs.

The images are stamped: “Global Warming Ready.”

The beauty patch

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Nicodermcq


Who could have imagined five years ago that nicotine patches would compete with commercial tobacco companies for attention and ad dollars. Moreover, in a strange twist of fate, the product is shopped as a beauty aid. But there you have it. This ad is also in line with the trend to use deconstruction techniques as a persuasion tool. If you are a teacher, you may want to use this to compare with a cigarette ad in your classroom to promote a discussion about beauty as a sales instrument.

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Anti-commie culture jams

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anti-cheWho said all culture jammers are lefties? (Discuss amongst yourselves.) Here’s a T-shirt company unafraid to use our tactics against us, and I love it! Sure they are distasteful, but they are funny in the same way that “Let’s kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” is funny. But seriously folks, they are spot on with the Che thing. Rather than checking facts at the door, people should reconsider this Che craze. Did you know that Che had his political enemies shot? Just because the most beautiful boy in the world played him in a movie with sepia tones doesn’t mean we should see things through the same crimson glasses. Che is corporate rebellion!

You might also want to check out the Hillary Clinton egg yolk separator and incense burners.

Nuke the Moon

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nuke-moonHere’s the crappy thing about our culture today: I can’t tell anymore if I’m a total sucker. Is this another Yes Men prank?

The campaign is called, “nuke the moon.” Strange thing is, there is some rationality to this irrationality. The argument is that if the US as a superpower acts totally crazy, then no one can predict what it will do and fear its insane, random application of power (sound familiar?). If you have read any Chomski, you will know that this is a real military strategy practiced today. But it doesn’t always work. Think Iraq.

Anyhow, read at your own peril. This poor blogger really hates hippies way too much.

Nuke the Moon:

“My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim,’Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonalds before they think I don’t like them.’

But why stop there. We’ve got like tons of national parks; we surely wouldn’t miss just one if we nuked it. Our excuse will be that we heard a drug dealer was hiding there. Then the foreign nations would be like, ‘Sacre bleu! These Americans are nuking themselves! Surely they will think nothing of bombing us! Let’s adapt their vapid culture as our own so they might consider us one of them.’”

Duality sucks dept: postirony

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“…Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they’re shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they chooose to ignore….Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution.”

The Savage Girl, Alex Shakar

Other postirony commentary found in the Googlesphere:

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Punk terrorism????????

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London-CalllingExcuse me while I cry for a moment. Some poor cad in London was hauled in by the police for singing along to The Clash‘s London Calling, which begs the question: Had punk been invented today, would it be considered a terrorist movement? Can paranoia withstand the leitmotif of our era, “irony”? Speaking of irony, punk has became a trendy fashion devoid of its serious politics in which it decried war, fascism and racism. This story is a sorry, sad twist and insult to the late-great Joe Strummer who was a tireless advocate for peace and justice. But irony of ironies, wasn’t “London Calling” also used in a Jaguar commercial? Hmmmmmm….

Check the lyrics for yourself here.

Briton held as terror suspect over song – MSNBC.com:

LONDON – British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said on Wednesday.Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport in northern England and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off.The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash’s 1979 anthem “London Calling,” which features the lyrics “Now war is declared — and battle come down” while other lines warn of a “meltdown expected.”

(Via MSNBC.)

Postironic punk superstarlet

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tiataquilaOK, the phenomena of Tila Tequila caught my eye (literally), giving me pause about the nexus of celebrity culture and social networks. Her bio reads like a manifesto of post-irony, the sad, commodified afterlife of punk’s impact on capitalism.

As you can see in the comments below from her MySpace page, she bemoans the shallowness of American media and celebrity culture while at the same time celebrating her punk-rock DIY ability to became a starlet sex symbol, as if that somehow makes the cause noble. It doesn’t really matter to me, the point I wanted to make is that this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the punk ethic of DIY (do-it-yourself) being described as a tool for getting famous. This smacks a little of the self-importance of Suicide Girls, which if you haven’t heard, is an “alternative” lifestyle erotica site (again, no judgments, I’m just observing the strange, circuitous path that punk has taken from rebellion culture to commodified rebellion). She’s now one of these readymade multitask artists: cover girl, recording artists, and who knows, movies to follow. Curiously, in her bio she said she grew up in a Buddhist temple. May she have happiness, may she live in peace, may she be free from suffering! (And I mean it, this is not post-irony!) And yes, I got suckered into it too.

From www.myspace.com/TilaTequila:

“Never more than now has celebrity been celebrated so unbrokenly, no unabashedly, and so much without merit. Being famous now has become it’s own reward. Consider American Idol, and ridiculous and addictive shows that somehow instantly translate stardom into celebrity. Tila Tequila has used simple, and some might agree Punk DIY ethics to create her stardom, one fan at a time. Not only is she the hottest property in MySpace, which means she’s one of the hottest women in the world, but she’s almost finished her debut album, and on the crest of an ever rising wave.”