Monday, March 27, 2017

Glossy Magazines

Glossy Mag

I did a Mt. Tabor walk this morning, as Spring was in the air. I'm thinking back to our Wanderers Equinox celebration, which I didn't blog about. A lot of my favorite characters were there.

This time I stopped in at Common Grounds for coffee and magazines.  Dwell is for the one percent, jealous to have homes in magazines, where they might be depicted drinking coffee and reading Dwell.

TIME is still trying hard to be the voice of sobriety, these many wars later, the truly "presidential" American voice, in contrast to new waves (generations) of media that more openly advertise spin doctoring. 

Of course we see TIME as propaganda, but that's not a bad word, just old fashioned Latin.

A second after explaining what truth really is, these journalists get all know-it-all about True Korea and what "we" should do with "our" nuclear weapons or whatever.

Leave it to the Voice of Discorporate Authority (the man behind the curtain, some emperor with no cloths) to give us a good read about what's so in the world.

We can trust TIME to sound worldly, also pop and hip, not unlike the BBC in so many dimensions, with lots of advertising. Not the tea leaves I look at usually, but sometimes I'll wedge it in.

Oh yeah, what really hit me as ironic was all the hype for trailer park living, for those at the other end of the spectrum from Dwell readers, in some socio-economic sense. These are the "undersavers" we're told (no spin there, right?).

Never mind that architecture ("exterior design") has again failed us again, that we're falling back on solutions from the 1950s for the boomer retirees. How imaginative, right?  Your American Dream come true, Mr. and Mrs. Rinkydink.

And to think, some were thinking the Year 2000 would be like The Jetsons with jet packs and all the rest of it. At least we get to talk with our search engines and other so-called "smart" devices.  The Dwell people get to talk to Amazon.


The article on Camille Paglia and her free speech position, wanting universities to butt out of speech policing, was interesting. I can see why that'd spread.

I think generations sometimes talk past one another, like when a father continues to talk to a little girl long after a woman has taken her place.

The new kids on the block grew up watching Breaking Bad (a soap opera) and aren't about to let geezer-boomers tell them "how it really is" because what do they know really?  Just go back and read the older issues.  How well did they serve us then?  I suppose your answer might have something to do with whether you read Dwell or not.

Recycling a Vision