Grand Opening

by Link of the Day on March 13, 2006 | Trackback URI | Email This Post | 5 Views

Let us begin! The Link of the Day: INTERNET VIBES.

From “Ghost Shoes” (New Balances appearing ghostly in photos) to the destruction of the Internet via blogs, Internet Vibes offers a dandy perspective on the odd and curious. This is serious stuff, sometimes, wrapped in the most delicious humor you could imagine. Take for instance, this paragraph on Lacoste shirts:

Some time in high school I started having strong feelings about Lacoste shirts. My friends and I used to go to the rummage sale at the Congregational Church and find great old Izod/Lacoste stuff probably last worn at the Glen Ridge Country Club’s ’87 Fourth of July Gala.
I mostly liked Lacoste shirts because of the alligator; an image at once quirkily powerful and powerfully quirky (NON-DUALITY). I soon realized that the quirkiness was lost on most people. A substitute teacher saw me wearing a turquoise Lacoste shirt with a popped collar and said “You look like the bad guy from a John Hughes movie.” He was probably right, although I’m not blonde.

Unbelievable. And the handingly of being a non-Jewish ‘Jew’ living in America under the semi-typical progression of the Jewish-American family (I wonder if his grandparents refer to Israel using the first person — ‘we’)?

What is authentic for a guy like me? Fourth-generation Ivy League, deracinated, American Jew born on the UWS, raised in NJ to middle-class post-hippie parents with semi-Anglophilic tendencies AND propensity to put on Eastern European accents and use obscure Yiddish phrases. The obvious answer is that I, like all of us, should be a truly post-modern consumer, taking the bits and pieces I like from various traditions and cultures, letting my aesthetic instincts be my only guide. In fact, all of my friends (even the children of immigrants) seem to be in the same boat. We are BOTH disconnected from AND connected to EVERYTHING. Now we’ve transcended mere clothes.

Adding to this are slightly obscure and offbeat discussions. Even the non-sequitors hit a certain je ne sais quoi: