Just checked out the new Lacoste Red site today, at the recommendation of John Drake. In theory, this is the kind of website that gives me nightmares. All flash, long intro before you actually get to the navigation of the site itself, loud music playing at you without warning–all the kind of stuff that I’ve considered a crime to do to a website for years.
But amazingly, I actually really dig this site. I get what it’s trying to do, and I think it’s pretty darn cool. It’s playing with the way you’re accustomed to a website behaving; reimagining the typical experience you’ve come to expect in your browser:
Part website, part music video, part special effects sequence, part fashion editorial, part video game, it definitely doesn’t feel like a standard website experience. I think in so much of “interactive” development we have become stuck in this mobius loop where we continue to create website experiences that conform to what website experiences are expected to conform to. The internet is full of this kind of boring but navigable (blogs) or pretty but useless (flash) tract housing. Which is why there’s really something to be said for experience design that can reimagine the way we expect to navigate the inside of a browser window, and create new and unexpected yet effective and compelling experiences there. Hope we may start to see more of it.
At Passover Seder a friend of my mother’s brought me a DVD of the movie Stilyagi (“Стиляги.”)
The movie is about a counter-culture youth movement that took place in mid-1950’s USSR. These kids would listen to jazz, dress in outlandish western fashion, with zoot suit jackets and skinny pants, style their hair into pompadours, call each other by American names like “Bob” and “Mel,” and in general behave in a flamboyant style that flew in the face of the Soviet norms. While it might be kind of bizarre for Americans to think of Boogie Woogie or the Happy Days wardrobe as “anti-establishment,” on the other side of the Iron Curtain, during the height of the Cold War, adopting Western culture was not only a shocking, subversive form of rebellion, it was totally illegal.
The Stilyagi constitute one of the most remarkable movements in the rich history of oppositional subcultures. What they had turned themselves into were walking cultural protests against Stalinism in one of its most paranoid periods. All that Stalin had melted into air, the stilyagi made flesh.
In the years after World War II, Stalin attempted to extirpate every aspect of American culture from Soviet life. Jazz, which had been played publicly in the USSR as recently as the war years, was now officially regarded as decadent capitalist filth; to even speak of jazz during this period was a criminal act. The same was true of anything American: It was all capitalist decadence, and it was all dangerous and usually illegal. In reaction, the stilyagi did not merely embrace American culture in secret; they actually appropriated American characters, as they understood them, and took them into public. Indeed, they borrowed American cultural geography (“Broadway”) and laid it over Stalin’s [Gorki Prospekt].
Their protest was not a matter of distributing banned poetry texts; it was a public act, complete with role names, costumes, and even a peculiar behavior that was intended to call attention to itself.
It wasn’t only the authorities with whom the stilyagi had to contend; it was everyone. Being a stilyaga was truly isolating, and the public reaction was brutal. Their fellow Moscovites taunted them on the sidewalks and on the streetcars, loudly criticizing their appearance, hurling insults at them, sometimes attacking them. Obviously, the Communist press took notice of them, terming them subversive and linking them to criminal elements. Inevitably, the police also went after them.
In his book “Refusenik: Trapped in the Soviet Union” Mark Azbel writes, “With the tacit approval of the authorities, roaming gangs armed with scissors attacked the stilyagi on the streets,” slashing their moddish clothes and long hair.
The term Stilyagi itself comes from the word “Style.” It roughly translates to “style hunters,” which makes sense considering that creating their outfits, which were completely removed from the sartorial norm, required having to hunt all over the black market. Ironically, the American title for the film is “Hipsters,” whose 21st century incarnation Adbusters credited with finally achieving “The Dead End of Western Civilization.”
In the finale of Stilyagi, the movie breaks from the 1950’s, and offers a little love letter of sorts to all youth culture. Enjoy:
The latest short film from London Squared Productions. Urban Anthropologists, Andy and Carolyn London interview some of New York City’s more overlooked citizens.
Just saw the trailer for the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation: The Informers – Check it (if you’re seeing this in a reader, click HERE to see the video).
Ellis is one of my favorite writers. There’s a lot of people out there who enjoy his writing in a disturbingly literal way (particularly the people who like American Psycho the best of his work), but I think he’s one of the most explicit satirists around. He’s like the modern Evelyn Waugh. There’s an irony that’s as sharp as Patrick Bateman‘s machete cutting through all of Ellis’s books. His condemnation of the modern, over-privileged, narcissistic, instant-gratification obsessed yet terminally insatiable, superficial, alienated, self-destructive, overindulged, psychologically damaged society, is wrought precisely through a celebration of its most hyperblolically psychotic, emotionally anesthetized elements.
And for some reason there’s something inexplicably captivating about these stories about these characters for whom inhumanity comes effortlessly. I’m no psychologist, so I have no clue why THAT’s the case, but that Ellis’s stories–the seminal of which are some 30 years old now–continue to resonate with each new generation, is a testament to the persistence of this pathology.
Watching the Informers trailer I remembered my first introduction to Bret Easton Ellis: renting Less Than Zero back in high school. At the time the story was already a decade old but its glimmering bleakness was still just as compelling. Looking back on the preview for Less Than Zero, which came out in 1987, it’s kind of a trip:
In contrast to the Informers, Less Than Zero’s version of pretty much the exact same story, told three decades ago, seems so sincere! Almost quaint. And yet Less Than Zero was considered so controversial when it came out. Perhaps in that time we have steadily been moving more and more towards the society Bret Easton Ellis always envisioned as a satirical cautionary tale. After all, the Informers isn’t just an 80’s “period” film. As unimaginatively literal as I thought the film adaptations of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction were, Informers looks like it might actually deliver on the kind of phenomenally allegoric treatment an Ellis tale deserves! Can’t wait to see it.
