Author: jenniferhodgson

Writer, editor, researcher

I’m spending Saturday afternoon tip-tapping away at my keyboard catching up on a spot of freelancing work. I’ve a bit of a kink for this sort of thing; I’m helping a London university reorganise some of their webpages, and it’s exactly the kind of nitpicking, data-efficient zealotry that I love. Joe is listening to some ambient noise in the next room that more befits a floatation tank than a sweaty desk occupied by one mighty close to finishing his PhD.

This morning, on a tipoff from a friend, we went to find breakfast at a newly-opened bakery at the end of Gloucester Street. Rounding the corner, we cased the joint: called Dozen: Artisan Bakery, white facade, tiny amounts of produce displayed on slate tiles, artful bread and so on. The counter was manned by Aussies. My next sentence we still pre-verbal as Joe shot me the “here we go again” look: ‘I suppose you wanted twee confectioner ladies’. Well actually no, I thought, that’s not the kind of authentic I was after this particular morning.

Shutter shades signal end of Western civilisation…

It’s okay Douglas Haddow, I hate hipsters too!

Adbusters loses cool over them polaroid-toting, soft porn-aping, keffiyah-wearing gits. Comes off like extract from highschooler’s journal:

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum.

and, moreover:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Far more on the money is this: the Onion‘s Hipster Archive.

Hex Induction Hour

Like Joe’s, at the moment this blog might better be subtitled Things That Have Aroused My Ire Today. I’ve given the righteous indignation a rest today – though only just, BBC3 schedulers take heed – to serve up these morsels of weird on the web. I wrote about the worst of the internet last week – these outrageous compilations of estoterica and maverick science are some of the best, I think.

Professor Hex compiles strangenesses here

The Heavy Stuff searches for wonder with Husserl

The Anomalist

News from a lost neighbourhood

File under: the Rightful Uses of the Internet.

P.S. On a related sidenote, here’s a snippet from the most incongruous of publications, the Yorkshire Post, about West Yorkshire spiritualists.

Jennifer Hodgson versus the Sunday supplements

I wrote the below on a protracted train journey between Hull and Norwich, thinking this awestruck article about Random Shit’s internet hidey-hole would be the only snippet in my sheaf of weekend newspapers to arouse my ire. Oh, how wrong I was. It seems last weekends’ newspapers were positively brimming with the kind of think pieces Joe tries to confiscate from me for my own good.

The piece in question was a profile of ‘meme hothouse’ 4chan, one of an ever-proliferating raft of articles serving up bite-sized portions of the worst of digital culture (read: stuff young people like) with a hefty portion of wonderment, incredulity and the Emperor’s new clothes. A old media/new media hatefuck, if you will.


I don’t think I Can Haz Cheezburger was quite what internet visionary Vannevar Bush had in mind. Writing in 1945, Bush imagined tools for man ‘to access and command the inherited knowledge of all the ages’. On the present, the internet’s transparent democracy has rendered a portrait of the human psyche as giddy playground of neophiliac ephemera. Digital utopians huddle together at academic conferences and it falls to a bunch of tech-savvy US liberal arts postgrads to really take the internet for a spin through experiments in digital literature. The rest of us fiddle about trying to monetarise our blogs. Disappointing.


Anyway, when I returned home Joe’s day-old copy of the Guardian presented this wretched front-cover piece of navel-gazing and all bets were off. You win, Tanya Gold!

See also:
Will Digital Literature Go Mainstream?
Observer Woman Makes Me Spit

We get what we deserve?

Dear June Sarpong,

I think I get your sentiment but I definitely don’t dig your arrogant, ill-thought out new media opportunism.

June Sarpong’s new lipstick n’ politick blog, Politics and the City, is noteable as a hateful conflation of two particularly doh-brained phenomenae: the latecoming demographization of women as media consumers (see also the truly horrible Observer Woman Magazine, Mamma Mia, most things associated with the SATC jamboree 2008 ) and the compulsion to talk down to one’s audience as some vaguely-imagined – possibly dribbling – lowest common denominator. The result could be subtitled, as Lost in Showbiz puts it, “Women: Is the News Too Hard for You to Understand?”

However, just as the internet taketh away, it giveth: the collective “wtf?” that met Sarpong’s new venture at its launch two Monday ago was most heartening.

Anyway, good luck with your portal, June.

J x

A trip into Space




I spent vast swathes of the school holidays on the East Coast in a tourer caravan permanently pitched in a holiday camp close to Filey, the name of which no one could ever agree on the pronounciation of. We rarely made it as far as Whitby; its seventy mile-or-so distance made it just out of my travel sickness range. This past weekend, up that way visiting J’s parents in Richmond, we got there – bagging the front seat of the car always makes childish kinetosis more tolerable.

Glasto


We’ve been watching the BBC’s Glastonbury extravaganza, coverage notable for this snatch of screentime, during which Zane Lowe isn’t the biggest idiot in shot*. I’m something of a Sofa Zealot about Glastonbury due to its ability to artificially infuse that International Sports Event Feeling (ISEF). I’m a sucker for the ISEF as of circa Italia ’90; crowds, singing in unison, squelchy overflows of public emotion, the slight air of menace, the lump in the throat. The BBC’s Glastonbury programming could probably do to do away with the Television Presenter School of enthusiasm and go for a bit of Nessun Dorma instead.

Nonetheless, I’m always impressed by the BBC’s tireless quest for the With It, which reached its excelsis this year with programmes fronted by an assortment of Random Shits (your less-endearing Naughties incarnation of Viz‘s Student Grant), joined on their Habitat pouffes by a succession of blokes with interesting trousers. As with an increasing number of my encounters with popular culture lately, I got the unsettling feeling that at twenty-four, I am no longer part of their target demographic. My little brother, however (hi Andy!), is clearly front and centre.

And the music? Amy Winehouse was a they-can’t really-show-this-on-telly cheap thrill, redeemed by signs of genuine wit, Lupe Fiasco gained a new fan in Joe and the Verve were more insurance advert than standing on top of a hill. The sound was bloody awful, Massive Attack were dour and Jay-Z… well, he was better than the Ting Tings.

*Disclaimer: I’m sorry Zane, that was unkind. I very much appreciate your enthusiasm for New Music and your Stoned Tigger delivery. Apols.