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I had no idea Norelco was in the radio business, but here it is, a 1960s Norelco L6X38T AM/FM/SW radio, currently bidding for $10.
With 24 days to go, this Zenith Trans-Ocean 7000 is currently bidding for over $400 and the bidding has not stopped. Will it top $500? Seems like it, but we'll have to wait and see.
My neighbor recently had a beauty products party. About a week later, she and her husband were burglarized. Laptop computers, a huge $3,000 TV, jewelry, wedding ring--all stolen. Probably an inside job, if I can be an amateur sleuth.
Competing against the analog Tivoli Model One, which retails for $120, the Sangean WR-11 enters the upscale analog radio market at a respectable $89.99.
I'm confident that the speaker sound, build quality, and speaker sound, and FM reception is excellent. However, I am eager to hear reports of its AM reception, which for me remains its biggest question mark.
Featuring a huge 53 mm bezel, the TW Steel Diver watch is manly enough, but somewhat costly at $742.
Writing in shifting points of views from three major
characters in a fashion similar to Tom Perrotta’s best comic novels, Election
and Little Children, Chuck Klosterman, a satirical nonfiction writer, enters
into the comic novel fray with Downtown Owl and the result is a wise,
deeply-felt, often sarcastic, jaundiced meditation on the contradictions,
seething agonies, and absurdities of living in a small town.
Our three principal characters are Mitch, a down-on-his-luck
third-string quarterback for the high school football team who suffers the
affliction of being teased, perhaps even loathed, by his ongoing nemesis, Mr.
John Laidlaw, his English teacher and football coach. Laidlaw, who inexplicably
keeps his job in spite of the fact that he has a pattern of sexual
indiscretions with his students, refers to Mitch as “Vanna White” in his
ongoing mission to emasculate the high school boy. Laidlaw also forces his
junior class to read George Orwell’s 1984, the same year the novel is set.
Laidlaw wants to inculcate his students with the wisdom and life lessons from
Orwell’s novel about totalitarianism even though Mitch sees nothing new in
these lessons. After all, Mitch muses, living in a small town where everyone
knows your business, no matter how private, is a form of totalitarianism, but
knowing how Laidlaw despises him, Mitch keeps his caustic observations to
himself.
Our second principal character is Julia, who has arrived
recently to the small town from Madison, Wisconsin, to teach high school
history and social studies with the hope that once she builds her résumé, she
can get out of the small town. She learns quickly that being a new, attractive
single woman affords a mighty cachet and every man in town asks her on a date.
Of course, none of them hold any interest for her. Only the aloof, possibly
narcissistic former football hero Vance, who treats her with apparent
indifference, becomes her romantic obsession.
Our third principal Horace is an old widower who copes with
loss and suffering by maintaining daily rituals, including his three coffees a
day at the local café with his friends, cranky, misanthropic, sometimes
loveable good old boys who are prone to conspiracy theories and anti-government
pamphlets.
However ripe Klosertman’s targets of satire, Klosterman
never makes the error of simplifying his novel by taking a condescending
approach toward his characters. He understands the complexities that roil
beneath their blood and these complexities are manifest in many comic
situations to be sure, but the novel has a dark streak that addresses human’s
innate cruelty, the contradiction of needing belonging and personal distinction
at the same time, and the love-hate relationship the citizens of Owl, North
Dakota, have with the small town that both curses them with an inferiority
complex but at the same time gives them a sense of place and belonging.
Downtown Owl is more character driven than plot driven, yet
the characters are so real, believable, and compelling that I did not miss an
over arching plot. To the contrary, I found the characters addicting and I
couldn’t wait to find out their fates.
I give this novel the highest recommendation and in the
genre of exceptional novelistic satire I recommend the aforementioned Tom
Perrotta’s Election and Little Children and Magnus Mills’ Restraint of Beasts.
A big and bold chronograph watch in dark blue for under $200? It's here. The Nautica Chronograph N19521G boasts a 50 mm bezel and dark leather strap. One of the most tasteful watches I've seen, especially at that price point. Currently selling on Amazon for $195.
Here I
was trying to model my flabby middle-class suburban existence after the hipster
and I didn’t even know what a hipster was. What a lost ignorant soul I was,
floundering to become some image of cool when in fact the image was largely the
product of my grossly misinformed imagination. This became evident when I
opened the pages of Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself to the historical origins of the hipster. What I
read was not pretty and was rather disgusting. The hipster was in fact an
immoral charlatan, and a dangerous one at that. It was difficult to digest, but
from reading Mailer’s description of the hipster, in his original form, I
concluded the following:
The Hipster Is a
Marginally Employed Criminal. Thinking
himself above work due to his superior intellectual gifts and his refusal to
compromise to the institution, the Man, or whatever, the original hipster was
our first slacker, the sloth trapped in perpetual adolescence, the parasite who
rationalized his laziness by painting himself as someone too good for work. The
first hipster was an emotionally-arrested dolt who saw himself as better than
the rest of us and who saw holding a job as something that was beneath his
dignity.
This
type of hipster became adept at hiding his laziness and apathy behind an
elaborate screen of nihilistic aphorisms. He was fond of quoting Ecclesiastes
which states that no matter how great our achievements we are all doomed to
turn into dust. Since all aspirations are doomed to futility, the hipster was
resigned to an inert life of low expectations. Or put a different way, there is
the famous scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall where Alvy Singer’s mother
complains to the family doctor that her son isn’t doing his homework. Alvy
replies: “The universe is expanding. Everything will fall apart and that would
be the end of everything. . . . What’s the point?”
What
is annoying about the original hipster was his dependence on sour grapes to
justify his lack of achievement. For example in the 1960s, some hipsters
indulged in countercultural sham during their nomadic, “soul-searching”
adolescence when it was easy to reject middle-class values and home ownership
because they had no resources. But as soon as they made it big in the stock
market or enjoyed an inheritance, they forgot all about their hipster
treatises, which they had once so fondly disseminated with blow horns and
microphones. Well-fed property owners, they now barricade themselves in gated
communities while they look at the riffraff from afar, usually with the use of
their home security surveillance cameras, hoping the mob “out there” does not
get too excited by the very hipsters doctrines of mayhem these recovering
hipsters used to promote.
In
other words, the original hipster was both a fraud and a malcontent who was
either too lascivious, too slothful or too disenfranchised to commit himself to
an ideal or a work ethic but who pretended to be superior to the rest of the
world by expounding a philosophy that inverted his abysmal character flaws as
virtues to others and himself.
This
was the kind of person I truly despised. And here I was, earnestly trying to be
a hipster, the very thing I’ve always hated. What other horrors awaited me
regarding this charlatan? There were plenty more.
The Hipster as
Nihilist. According to Mailer, the hipster
saw death as inevitable. Either we would die from nuclear holocaust or die the
slow death of conformity to society’s square ways. Therefore, the hipster
concluded, there was nothing to do but tune out of society, reject common
morality, and encourage one’s Inner Psychopath. I could never be like this, for
as a child my father once told me: “Never flirt with a man’s wife or
girlfriend, never insult a man’s family, and never use a man’s toothbrush
without asking first.” My father drilled into me the idea that there is a
strong dividing line between right and wrong. Even if I wanted to, I could
never be a nihilist.
The Hipster as Moral
Relativist. The hipster denied any
absolute truth or reality because he believes that all our life experiences are
doomed to a muddled ambiguity and are subject to infinite, arbitrary
interpretations. His belief in the futility of pursuing absolute truth is the
foundation of all his other beliefs. First, there is no right or wrong, no
moral paradigm, no universal law to govern his behavior or to compel him to
participate in the shared values of the community. Second, he believes, like
Thomas Hobbes and Alexander Hamilton, that man must, in the absence of an
innate conscience, contrive a variety of laws, a “social contract,” to keep the
barbarians from taking over and that those who are in power can most effectively
inculcate these laws into the masses by proclaiming these laws to be “natural”
or “divine.” The hipster is resigned to the widespread belief of this “lie”
since he deems the collective delusion of divine or universal law a prudent
manner to keep the “savages” relatively tame. Of course, the hipster does not
need these contrivances. He is in his mind elevated above the savages, yet
ironically he gives his Inner Psychopath license to behave more savagely than
the rest of us.
The Hipster as
Misanthrope. The hipster is resigned to
his belief that he cannot truly know another person or even himself. All his
perceptions of men, women, gods, and demigods are “guesses.” His attempts to
grasp a firm understanding of someone, no matter how painstaking, are doomed to
fail since his “understanding” is influenced by mythology, self-interest,
tribalistic prejudice, and unconscious fears and desires. His belief in the
futility of knowing or understanding another person compels him to a life of
solitude. Friendships are shunned for two reasons. Either people are not
enlightened as he is and not worthy of his company or they are as misanthropic
and depressed as he is and therefore they have nothing to talk about since
their agreement regarding the emptiness of life also makes for feeble and
redundant conversation. Perhaps a third reason he avoids his fellow hipsters is
that their presence reminds him that he is not as unique as he would like to
believe.
The Hipster Is a
Wannabe Soul Brother. The original
hipsters were Caucasians who would have traded in their left nut to be a Soul
Brother. Posing as someone oppressed by a totalitarian system, the hipster
identified with the oppressed black man and the black man’s courage and
resourcefulness to cope with the Man. This position was the coolest of the cool
and so the Caucasian hipster aspired to be a Soul Brother and found yet another
way of being annoying, obnoxious, and fake, even as this self-described hipster
claimed to long for authenticity.
The Hipster Is a Phony
Existentialist. According to Mailer, the
existentialist never conforms to society to the point that he is blind to his
real desires and aspirations. But to live out one’s desires without a sense of
purpose is to be a phony existentialist. With no moral vision other than the
conviction of sating his lusts, the hipster is a phony existentialist whose
desires are forever disconnected from a higher purpose.
The Hipster Is a
Psychopath. Enjoying a “narcissistic
detachment,” the hipster learns to make the gratification of his base desires
and the living out of his “infantile fantasy” part of some sophisticated
philosophical code. In other words, the hipster made himself into the premier
bullshit artist.
The Hipster Is an
Evangelist for Despair. The hipster
believes there can be no real order, only an illusion of order. Chaos is the
norm. The reasons for this are simple. One is that people of good will and high
scruples tend to be incompetent and abysmal in their self-promotion so that
they rarely enjoy positions of power that would spread their harmony and good
will. The hipster agrees with Henry James who observed that “morons and madmen
reign in high places.” Their reign results in chaos, incompetence, corruption,
and a complete lack of accountability.
The
hipster makes it clear that he is not shocked by the grotesqueries of the
powerful; he has come to expect them and in fact almost relishes in their
egregiousness, the worse the better, for the travesties of the powerful feed
the hipster’s appetite for cynicism.
It
should be noted that the hipster rejects the notion of self-improvement. He
believes that we are forever stuck in whatever predicament we find ourselves
in. This is because the overwhelming forces that stamp us as human beings—our
genetic code and our environment—defy any notion of “free will” and personal
transformation. Whether we are lazy, self-pitying, cowardly, melancholic,
concupiscent, it does not matter. We are hard-wired a certain way so that our
defective personalities do not respond to our most arduous attempts at change.
As the Chinese put it, “Mei banfa”—nothing
can be done.
Overcome
by the giddiness that he has “discovered” that life has no meaning, the hipster
feels the need to trumpet his message of despair to others. The reasons are
several. The first is to assert his intellectual superiority over those who the
hipster believes live in a childish illusion of absolute reality and moral
order. The hipster is so proud of the enlightenment he has found that allows
him to, like Nietzsche, live “beyond good and evil” that he wants to make sure
others know of his grand accomplishment. With a hearty flair, he will therefore
advertise to the world that he has read and reread Fredrick Nietzsche’s Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, Albert Camus’ The
Myth of Sisyphus, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot, Franz Kafka’s The
Trial, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being
and Nothingness, and E.M. Cioran’s The
Trouble with Being Born, On the
Heights of Despair, and the Short
History of Decay. Possession of this Holy
Canon of Hipster Musings will make the hipster exuberant, a condition that is
contrary to the depression he is supposed to feel from reading the masters of
nihilism and existentialism.
The Hipster Scoffs at
Marriage and Monogamy. Further isolating
the hipster is his pessimistic attitude toward marriage. Since the hipster
believes we are hopelessly blind to one another, he looks upon marriage as a
complete sham. As he sees it, living with a spouse for fifty years,
contrary to Hollywood’s glorious narratives, does not lead to a continuously
evolving intimacy that finds its happy conclusion with physical and spiritual
oneness. The best case scenario for the hipster is to simply acclimate to his
spouse’s annoying habits, her quirks, her chafing remonstrations, and her
unpredictable mood shifts. But getting used to her presence is hardly “knowing”
her or enjoying a sense of nuptial unity. The marital arrangement simply means
the hipster must increase his tolerance for friction and irritation in what for
him is not so much a marriage but an interminable prison sentence. Needless to
say, the hipster’s low expectations of marriage do not provide enough
motivation for him to seek matrimony. Rejecting the sacred bond of marriage,
the hipster seeks orgiastic pleasures of hedonism and deems married people as
joyless squares. The closest mouthpiece for this position of living the life of
an incontinent, pot-smoking satyr today is comedian Bill Maher who flaunts his
hedonistic lifestyle on stage while poking fun at the sexually starved married
masses.
For
all his pessimism about love, romance, and marriage, why does the hipster tend
to be so giddy? For one he feels that having no laws, natural or otherwise,
gives him license to get in touch with his inner tomcat. Since he believes we
are biologically hard-wired in a way that contradicts society’s notions of
morality, he feels no need to prick his conscience with such dreadful and
unnatural burdens as generosity for the less fortunate or fidelity to his
mate. Determined to repel the inevitable criticism he will surely suffer
for conforming to the excesses of a hedonistic satyr, the hipster will be
prepared to retort any admonishments. To defend his incontinent carousing, he
will be well versed in the huge body of anthropological and bio-psychological
work that proves conclusively that primates, including man, are incapable of
monogamy. He will love to cite studies that show that over 95% of married men
cheat on their wives and that in fact the number is probably higher, something
like 99.99%, since men tend to lie on the various questionnaires that ask about
their faithfulness. He will also love to throw in the “fact” that all married
Parisian men have mistresses. He will point to other cultures as well where
having a mistress or a concubine is a common fact of life and he will take
great delight in showing that the more metropolitan, educated and productive
classes embrace the illicit pleasures of the demimonde while it is the backward
peasant classes who cling to primitive, oppressive notions of marital fidelity.
In a
patronizing fashion, hipster will concede that fidelity is a “good idea” for
the mentally-challenged masses who need a crude moral structure in order to
keep society relatively intact. As long as the bovine hordes stay married and
make their mortgage and car payments, the economy and the metropolis should
enjoy a modicum of stability. However, the nihilistic gasbag, fancying himself
too smart to be duped by artificial moral laws, sees his debauched existence as
proof that he is a member of an elite club of hipster intellectuals who are
unshackled by backward society’s “neurosis” and “hysteria” that that have
afflicted the Herd.
So
this was the original hipster: A pseudo-intellectual, nihilistic selfish, lazy,
back-stabbing carousing psychopath. If this is what a hipster was, then screw
it, my hipster quest was over. But Zevon made it clear, the hipster had evolved
into something sweet, and true and noble. The hipster had become something
worthy of my devotion and fortitude. A new hipster had come onto the scene. But
I, like many others, did not know who this hipster was because I was not yet
hip. My education was incomplete.
Paul links us to some Sanyo Internet Radio developments:
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Sanyo-Canada-Inc-913601.html
High resolution product images are available athttp://www.marketwire.com/sanyo/.
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