From her website, Ms. Okrant coyly explains the impetus behind Living Oprah:
“I believe Oprah to be the single most influential person in the media today – especially when it comes to impacting women… I wondered what would happen if one of us committed ourselves whole-heartedly to her lifestyle suggestions. Would the financial and time costs of living as Oprah prescribes be worth the results?”
Honestly, there’s no way I could do something as masochistic as this. Beyond the everyday tedium of having to watch Oprah, read Oprah, and then do Oprah’s bidding, in the end I’m fairly certain I would not have learned anything new. I don’t need to be water-boarded, for example, to know that torture sucks, and I certainly don’t need to follow the half-brained, neoliberal, new age, new thought nonsense of Oprah frickin’ Winfrey to know that her ideologies are fundamentally corrupt. Ultimately, in my estimation of things, this life-style stunt amounts to a kind of death by a thousand cuts, and it’s definitely not worth all the hardship. I’d much prefer a quick and painless ending.
That said, I must admit that I’m happy Ms. Okrant was more courageous than me. She is clearly willing to subject herself to whole lot of costly, sanctimonious, froo-froo, snake-oil bullshit, and she should be lauded for her resolve through what must have been a very difficult year. But more than that, Orkant has decided to write about her experience and expose (we can only hope) the absurdity of Oprah’s worldview, to which I am exceptionally grateful. It’s high-time the suburban set were confronted with the dangerous bigotry of their televised savior’s magical thinking. Maybe Living Oprah, the book, is just the literary insight we need to finally stop ourselves from living Oprah, the phenomenon.
LINKS:
Living Oprah Blog
Chicago Tribune Article
NPR’s All Things Considered
MSNBC Report
Come on, dude! Everybody’s NOT doing it! Even the right Rev. Billy is playing his part with his Union Square Dance Your Debt Away party up in New York City! So get yer little bum out there and start NOT buying things!!!
Buy Nothing Day, Links:
UPDATE:
Clearly these Wal-Mart shoppers in NY state could use a little Buy Nothing Day. Just stunning…
]]>(See Rocketboom, Boing Boing, The Huffington Post, or the NY Times online Arts section for more details and imagery.)
I am particularly fond of the fictitious editorial, presumably written by NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, brilliantly titled “The End of the Experts?” In it the phony Friedman declares, “I will keep my opinions to myself.” He goes on to aks:
“…why are newspapers like the New York Times letting people like me make fools of themselves, mislead the American people, and, worst of all, give their wives a lifetime of ammunition? To err is human, but to print, reprint, and re-reprint error-mad humans like me is a criminally moronic editorial policy.”
Here, here, faux Thomas Friedman! For once, I couldn’t agree with you more. Let’s hope the publishers of the fake New York Times can inspire the publishers of the real New York Times to get real for a change.
]]>Question: can I put this thing on my bicycle?
]]>The artist is a British guy named Mike Stimpson, and on his redbubble profile page he has published (and apparently adopted) this telling quote attributed to American ’street photographer’ Garry Winogrand:
“I photograph to see what something will look like photographed”
Not to whine too much about it, but my initial response is annoyance. Admittedly, I’m a little sore on all these ironic ‘art projects’ that rely on retroactive repurposing of an original form. Didn’t Warhol kill that metaphor a few decades ago? I mean, is this high art, or just more posturing witticism from my iconoclastic, millennial cohorts?
That being said, I appreciate Stimpson’s interest in so-called ‘macro lighting.’ He really did put quite a bit of effort into setting up and reproducing these tiny snippets of global culture. I admire the dedication to an aesthetic… even if that’s all that’s there.
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OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets
What makes this fun little web button even more interesting is that it comes from a free online dating website called One Plus You. I don’t know if they’re making some subtle comment on the modern romantic experience, but this San Franciso-based start-up nonetheless has adopted an interesting marketing strategy: humorous widgetry.
Normally, I would find this stuff a little tedious. The infamous ironic sensibilities of my generation, deconstructed to no end in academia and beyond, has left me with an untold number of psychological scars. But lately, under the intellectual framework of “Vernacular Creativity” (Jean Burgess), I’ve had to quell my initial sense of distrust and look a little deeper.
It’s possible that these widgets and other webpage add-ons, now hugely popular on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc., are indeed expressions of cultural creativity. They might actually represent a uniquely democratic form of digital creativity, as seen through the filter of pop technology and pop media.
Right now, I’m still researching this phenomenon. My sense is that these small, coded visual forms (entirely free, mind you) are frequently created and distributed through an unmediated process separate from traditional systems of media control. The tools for producing widgets of this kind, like most new media, are readily accessible by average, everyday people. Thus, the mainstream and marginal are on a more level playing ground. Marketing and design departments of major corporations around the world share, essentially, the same cultural leverage as a kid in his garage with Photoshop and an FTP client.
One concern I have, however, is the process of cultural mimicry. To what extent do/will these webpage bells-and-whistles serve mainstream values and reinstate traditional hierarchies of power? If the creation of online widgets merely copies old advertising techniques–ie, misrepresentation or manipulation for financial gain–then the creativity of visual artifacts on the internet is somewhat less ‘vernacular’. Basically, it’d be a new form with an old function.
Questions:
Is there a ‘third space’ of widget-making?
What would radical widgetry look like?