The state of the economy.....

[Faust]

Not worth taking an fx risk. Just covert as needed, or lock in if it's at a level you're comfortable paying rent at, etc., but it's not something you can "beat" so be wary of people advertising something like that.

Also none of this is real financial advice, so take with a grain of salt.

Agreed. 1.10 is pretty fucking sweet given where we have been for the last 5 years or so.

[Arkady]

Link please, I missed it.

Typo, was referring to what he'd posted not wrote: http://www.theguardian.com/business/...crosoft-google

Edit: And thanks guys, will proceed without currency fuckery.

[Faust]

As to the gentrification, it's a much more complicated issue. Though Shucks's points are valid, there is more to it, such as the question whose neighborhood is it? Is it anyone's? How far back do you want to dig? All the black and hispanic neighborhoods were Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other European immigrant groups' half a century ago. In the US, if you read Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, you'll get a very different picture. Theirs is a vanishing culture of a very different kind.

Also, I can't say I have much against hipsters who open cafes and nice restaurants. Have you eaten in New York 15 years ago? There was no place to get good bread, good coffee, and a decent meal that did not break the bank. I am not against any of this at all. And NY was much more dangerous.

What I am against is that hipsters prepare neighborhoods for the very people that displace them - the bankers and lawyers and media execs - the haute bourgeoisie. That's who my ire is aimed at - these fucking soulless parasites who only understand money. And Berlin is still very far from that.

I also object when food becomes "culture." I mean, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? Every New York Times article talks about hipsters moving to LA or Detroit and it's like "they have good coffee, too!" Really? THAT's your cultural experience? That shit drives me nuts. I love food and good coffee as much as the next bon vivant, but don't call it culture. I mean it's culture as custom, but not culture in a sense of spiritual search and fulfillment.

[Arkady]

Cosign that across the board.

Well, I'll have to let you guys know how my wanton destruction of the local pre-kale culture goes.

[Arkady]

I also object when food becomes "culture." I mean, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? Every New York Times article talks about hipsters moving to LA or Detroit and it's like "they have good coffee, too!" Really? THAT's your cultural experience?

My hilarious Russian psychoanalyst father thinks this type of shit is symptomatic of a greater ill as far as the American mind goes.

I remember him looking at a brochure for Harvard and saying "Arkadiy, this mentions food 26 times and academics 12 -- you cannot go to this place."

[Fuuma]

The problem is the standardization of formerly distinct neighborhoods and cities. Luxury burgers and NYC-minimal with some driftwood tables for all! This doesn't start with the marketing executives but comes quickly with the initial wave of coolization. Note that measures like rent control and even having the owner of an apartment be required to live there can definitely help on the economic front but it doesn't solve the central problem of the unnaturally savage destruction of local characteristics. Kale as will and representation.

[Fuuma]

My hilarious Russian psychoanalyst father thinks this type of shit is symptomatic of a greater ill as far as the American mind goes.

I remember him looking at a brochure for Harvard and saying "Arkadiy, this mentions food 26 times and academics 12 -- you cannot go to this place."

No food culture to speak of brought the return of the repressed craft beer.

[Faust]

The problem is the standardization of formerly distinct neighborhoods and cities. Luxury burgers and NYC-minimal with some driftwood tables for all! This doesn't start with the marketing executives but comes quickly with the initial wave of coolization. Note that measures like rent control and even having the owner of an apartment be required to live there can definitely help on the economic front but it doesn't solve the central problem of the unnaturally savage destruction of local characteristics. Kale as will and representation.

What local characteristics? The 24hr bodegas or the Chinese restaurants in NY? Those look more indistinguishable to me than gourmet burger places. We aren't talking Duane Reade and Chase on every block here - that's the pernicious stuff. You are barking up the wrong tree, really.

[Arkady]

Fuuma I'm devastated you passed on "coolinization" for the double entendre.

[Fuuma]

Fuuma I'm devastated you passed on "coolinization" for the double entendre.

I nearly went with coolemic.

[Fuuma]

What local characteristics? The 24hr bodegas or the Chinese restaurants in NY? Those look more indistinguishable to me than gourmet burger places. We aren't talking Duane Reade and Chase on every block here - that's the pernicious stuff. You are barking up the wrong tree, really.

Maybe you see it less because people are mainly copying the globalized version of American culture?

[Fuuma]

This insight, radical enough for 1993, now gets a commonplace “fit to print” version in the well-meaning bourgeois paper of record, where the Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan recently took issue with a self-congratulatory tone he’d noticed among educated elites when it came to their global-minded tastes, their ability to channel surf between high and low culture, European and non-Western. “Elites today must recognize that they are very much like the Gilded Age elites of old,” he writes. “Paradoxically the very openness and capaciousness that they so warmly embrace — their omnivorousness — helps define them as culturally different from the rest. And they deploy that cultural difference to suggest that the inequality and immobility in our society is deserved rather than inherited.”

from this (unrelated to our discussion)

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-16/the-intellectual-situation/too-much-sociology/

[Shucks]

i like that quote. a lot. thx for posting.

[trentk]

I also object when food becomes "culture." I mean, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? Every New York Times article talks about hipsters moving to LA or Detroit and it's like "they have good coffee, too!" Really? THAT's your cultural experience? That shit drives me nuts. I love food and good coffee as much as the next bon vivant, but don't call it culture. I mean it's culture as custom, but not culture in a sense of spiritual search and fulfillment.

Faust - I agree that someone who drinks high quality wine with dinner just b/c they can afford it and it is better than the cheap stuff, or who drinks higher quality coffee just b/c it is better than starbucks and ends engagement there is engaging in an interesting form of cultural experience. However, tea certainly can be elevated to the same cultural heights as literature, painting, or whatever, and I don't have anywhere near as much experience with coffee and alcohol connoisseurship as I do with tea ... but I wouldn't at all be surprised if those forms of connoisseurship can be elevated as well.

With tea, just to illustrate the complexity of the subject - I've been seriously interested in it since ~2007 and still learn new things. (Most recently, that taiwanese high mountain oolongs can be processed in such a way that they are vaguely reminiscent of a fermented japanese green tea called awa-bancha, and that they can also have a weird cotton-candy / carmelized type sweetness. (The presence of this sweetness may have solved a ~8 year mystery for me, as back in ~2007 I had an aged taiwanese oolong so strangely sweet that - even though it was from a high-quality vendor, I wondered whether it was artificially sweetened. Now, I think the sweetness I was tasting was an aged version of the sweetness I tasted in the young taiwanese oolong I recently had)). Also, I recently shared a 60's & an 80's baozhong with a friend who is into wine but who is only beginning to develop an interest in tea - and he said that if I didn't tell him they were the same type of tea w/ a 2 decade age difference, he would have thought they were 2 different varieties. There are already tons of different types of tea, and with how much difference age can make even when considering the same type ... the complexity is overwhelming.
There's a fragment by Novalis or (KWF) Schlegel about how artists who have trouble understanding the inner psychological/emotional world but are adept with understanding the external world (e.g. landscape paintings) shouldn't worry about it too much ... b/c if they dive enough into the outer world they'll end up also understanding the inner, and vice versa for artists with the opposite problem. Following that aphorism, I think engagement with any inherently rich/complex medium ends up helping one better understand psychology, culture etc. (Not ends up as in that ends up being the final/only aim of the medium, just that it ends up intersecting with that).

Would be interesting to start a thread for discussing experiences of approaching fashion primarily through a psychological/cultural/emotive lens, and how that ended up also teaching one about innate/formalist aspects of fashion, or vice-versa.

Perhaps most fundamentally, learning how to decode the complex sensory data that is presented to you in tea drinking could remind you what it is like to first encounter a medium - before you know its grammar - and jolt you into to some degree rawly experiencing other mediums and keeping the interpretative frameworks you have learned/developed which are true to the experience, and shedding those which are false constructions.

Re: "spiritual search and fulfillment":
Since tea can attract new-age psuedo-eastern spiritual-kitsch types .... the challenge is not with finding spirituality in tea, but with finding out how to pursue an interest in tea while avoiding excessively spiritual people.

B/c this is a fashion forum, I'll note that there is a famous story of Louis Vuitton attempting to buy a korean tea bowl, which the artisan refused to sell to him:
http://mattchasblog.blogspot.com/200...and-louis.html . (Faust, I remember you were really impressed with Hagi ceramics when I posted about it in the tea thread - its pretty hard to fully appreciate tea related ceramics without seeing how they interact with tea. Kindof like having one's experience of fashion limited to frontal shots of runway looks.)

The Leaf Magazine (http://www.the-leaf.org/) has a number of quality articles on tea and tea-culture ... I would be pretty surprised to encounter someone who has browsed it and still thinks tea isn't a cultural experience.

Not having access to well-developed capacities in all senses makes it harder to abstract from particular senses perceive & understand general abstract qualities / concepts / cultural tendencies / schools of art which are too abstract/general to be isolated to particular mediums.

Jona of InAisce is into tea, would be interesting to hear what he has to say about how tea influences his worldview & aesthetics.


This passage from Huysmans' A Rebours is about perfume not tea, but illustrates well how scents can be intertwined with general cultural qualities:
"Step by step, [perfume's] history followed that of our language. The perfumed Louis XIII style, composed of elements highly prized at that time, of iris powder, musk, chive and myrtle water already designated under the name of "water of the angels," was hardly sufficient to express the cavalier graces, the rather crude tones of the period which certain sonnets of Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later, with myrrh and olibanum, the mystic odors, austere and powerful, the pompous gesture of the great period, the redundant artifices of oratorial art, the full, sustained harmonious style of Bossuet and the masters of the pulpit were almost possible. Still later, the sophisticated, rather bored graces of French society under Louis XV, more easily found their interpretation in the almond which in a manner summed up this epoch; then, after the ennui and jadedness of the first empire, which misused Eau de Cologne and rosemary, perfumery rushed, in the wake of Victor Hugo and Gautier, towards the Levant. It created oriental combinations, vivid Eastern nosegays, discovered new intonations, antitheses which until then had been unattempted, selected and made use of antique nuances which it complicated, refined and assorted. It resolutely rejected that voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by the Malesherbes, the Boileaus, the Andrieuxes and the Baour-Lormians, wretched distillers of their own poems.

But this language had not remained stationery since the period of 1830. It had continued to evolve and, patterning itself on the progress of the century, had advanced parallel with the other arts. It, too, had yielded to the desires of amateurs and artists, receiving its inspiration from the Chinese and Japanese, conceiving fragrant albums, imitating the Takeoka bouquets of flowers, obtaining the odor of Rondeletia from the blend of lavender and clove; the peculiar aroma of Chinese ink from the marriage of patchouli and camphor; the emanation of Japanese Hovenia by compounds of citron, clove and neroli.

Des Esseintes studied and analyzed the essences of these fluids, experimenting to corroborate their texts. He took pleasure in playing the role of a psychologist for his personal satisfaction, in taking apart and re-assembling the machinery of a work, in separating the pieces forming the structure of a compound exhalation, and his sense of smell had thereby attained a sureness that was all but perfect.

Just as a wine merchant has only to smell a drop of wine to recognize the grape, as a hop dealer determines the exact value of hops by sniffing a bag, as a Chinese trader can immediately tell the origin of the teas he smells, knowing in what farms of what mountains, in what Buddhistic convents it was cultivated, the very time when its leaves were gathered, the state and the degree of torrefaction, the effect upon it of its proximity to the plum-tree and other flowers, to all those perfumes which change its essence, adding to it an unexpected touch and introducing into its dryish flavor a hint of distant fresh flowers; just so could Des Esseintes, by inhaling a dash of perfume, instantly explain its mixture and the psychology of its blend, and could almost give the name of the artist who had composed and given it the personal mark of his individual style."

[Arkady]

Who's having a charming day?

"More than $5 trillion has been wiped off the value of global equities markets since China’s shock devaluation."

Non-existent liquidity so even people sitting behind HFT algorithms can't sell: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-0...ng-flash-crash

Correction, my ass.