Twees're Good (except they're not)

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
nah, i know, was only being silly! It wasn't a well-thought through comparison on my part. @SecondLine

I should watch the first two series of the Killing in fact - i hear they're very good. I like nice jumpers too.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
it's still all fields around these parts....

yeah, that olde england stuff drives me nuts. Are farmers' markets part of this too? Seem to be.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I was trying to get round that kinda of Dennis The Menace/Walter the Softie dichotomy but implying the inherent normalcy inside the desire for niceness; slagging off the consumer desire for couples and mortgages and weddings I think gets away from just beating up Weeds, cos ultimately it's the advertisers we hate more than the stupid fucks who think that craft markets are to be enveloped and envied.

Yes, Dennis/Walter, that's exactly it, isn't it!

Is there that much of an association between tweeness and mortgages/marriage/kids/'settling down' generally? I mean, maybe there is, I'm not saying you're wrong. Interesting that you should have mentioned breeding though, as tweeness seems overwhelmingly to be a white middle-class thing but white middle-class people are less into breeding than just about any other demographic these days, aren't they?

Just blame capitalism and all should be fine.

Ha, yeah, that usually does the trick.

On the point about clueless people wearing T-shirts decorated with the trappings of counterculture or at least 'alternative' culture - be it punk rock, metal, biker culture, the occult or whatever - surely no-one here is so naive as to be genuinely surprised when someone in a Che Guevara shirt turns out not to be a headbanging Marxist revolutionary, or a 17-y-o girl in a Motorhead T-shirt from Top Shop isn't actually a hard-drinking, speed-addled heavy mentalist?
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
it's still all fields around these parts....

yeah, that olde england stuff drives me nuts. Are farmers' markets part of this too? Seem to be.

Oh god - the English Provender Company. Fucking 'provender'? Have we fallen through a time warp to 1750?

The thing is, great food is great and anyone who disagrees is clearly an idiot, but it's potentially very unwholesome for the idea of good food to become ponsified like this (farmers' markets, twee little bakeries/cake shops, 'artisanal' this-that-and-the-other). I like what someone (you?) said about how this contrasts with the Continental and especially French attitude that enjoying good food is a normal thing that ordinary people do all the time
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
surely no-one here is so naive as to be genuinely surprised when someone in a Che Guevara shirt turns out not to be a headbanging Marxist revolutionary, or a 17-y-o girl in a Motorhead T-shirt from Top Shop isn't actually a hard-drinking, speed-addled heavy mentalist?

obviously not now, but the first time I saw one of those ironic, or whatever, band T-shirts (prob the Ramones one), I was completely perplexed. It's a recent phenomenon, just as at one time, that photo of Che was only worn by people who (at least nominally) believed in what he stood for.

not saying that you would replicate the band's behaviour, rather that you'd just at the least like them, or know who they are if you wore their Tshirt, surely? The undercutting iof that basic expectation has only been around since 2003ish?

re last post, yep, it's the warping of good food into some status symbol that's the irritation, and the bizarre labelling of stuff, 'status labelling', really.

Yep, always banging on about the (possibly overstated) continental love for good food. When I went to Spain last month, still seemed to be in full effect everywhere, so...from what you said previously, Netherlands might be an exception?
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
And who the fuck are you?

This must be this new phenomenon where someone says something objectionable to someone random who doesn't even know who they are, thereby making themselves look like a dick. Which is presumably what the person saying the objectionable thing intended.

Obviously otherwise known as trolling. The question is, who has enough time to troll?
 
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SecondLine

Well-known member
This must be that new definition of irony where you say something dumb, then retrospectively claim "I was just being ironic" that I've been hearing so much about :D

Bob you're not having a very good strike rate with making sense here. If you're suggesting that what I said about playground dynamics wasn't ironic and I subsequently pretended that it was, well, you're wrong.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
obviously not now, but the first time I saw one of those ironic, or whatever, band T-shirts (prob the Ramones one), I was completely perplexed. It's a recent phenomenon, just as at one time, that photo of Che was only worn by people who (at least nominally) believed in what he stood for.

I was at a festival a few years ago and I saw this guy wearing a T-shirt with the AC/DC logo picked out in sequins, and I just thought "Oh you prat". Then there's those Led Zeppelin 1977 tour shirts you see people wearing and it makes me think "you clearly haven't sat through the 27-minute live version of 'Dazed And Confused', you haven't earned the right to wear that shirt".

I don't really do 'joke' T-shirts but this one is great:

M-Che_400x400_2_jpg_400x400_upscale_q85.jpg


That's the kind of post-modernism I can get behind.

Yep, always banging on about the (possibly overstated) continental love for good food. When I went to Spain last month, still seemed to be in full effect everywhere, so...from what you said previously, Netherlands might be an exception?

I think when people talk about "European" food culture, what they really mean is French and Mediterranean. There's probably a reason Britain doesn't have that many Polish, German or Scandinavian restaurants - good PR on the part of southern European food is probably a part of that, but it's not the whole story.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
white middle-class people are less into breeding than just about any other demographic these days, aren't they?
If 'breeding' as a term implies some rationalisation of the natural process of having children perhaps the middle class way of having kids, fewer and in later life, when the 'objective circumstance' are most favourable is actually the highest example of breeding. In comparison with the relaxed, natural and easy way that poor people have kids the white middle class emphasis on choice and becoming a parent 'for the right reasons' resembles in itself a kind of 'breeding', except what is bred is not children but members of a family unit.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Christ, by 'breeding' I just meant 'having children'. That's quite an analysis you've got there.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I guess it's an inescapable effect of having a very developed economy but it's notable that for most people who have a 'career' (meaning a job that might 'go somewhere', I suppose - something you'd study for at university and then 'work your way up through', in other words) the economically optimum time to have kids is now lagging behind the biologically optimum time by a couple of decades, especially for women.

[Please note the ' ' in this post - of course lots of people who've been to university end up in dead-end jobs or on the dole and people who've never been do all sorts of cool shit, so whatever.]
 

slowtrain

Well-known member
Slowtrain, i think you're having a turn. You usually say very sensible things, but this is madness. I've said some pretty mad things in this thread, so I feel qualified to point this out.

I just remember he did a song about bashing his girlfriends teeth out.

Maybe he was being ironic?

I'm not sure, I thought it was quite cool at the time.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
The thing is, great food is great and anyone who disagrees is clearly an idiot, but it's potentially very unwholesome for the idea of good food to become ponsified like this (farmers' markets, twee little bakeries/cake shops, 'artisanal' this-that-and-the-other).

I like what someone (you?) said about how this contrasts with the Continental and especially French attitude that enjoying good food is a normal thing that ordinary people do all the time
How many ordinary French people do you know, though? My (somewhat scattershot) experience of yer actual French food culture has been fairly mixed...

I sort of see what you mean, though, although I'd say that it's more to do with shit food becoming universal and normal than good food becoming socially exclusive. Also, the whole farmers' market / artisan cheese / traditionally handcrafted venison sausages thing feels a lot like a temporary response by aspirational middle class foodie fashion to exotic stuff not being exclusive any more. It's kind of a natural tendancy of fashion to try to keep ahead of the masses, and where previously you could do that by eating first Italian and then Spanish or Thai or Japanese, now you can get thai green curry paste in Asda and sushi in motorway service stations you have to do it by discovering wonderful local artisans and traditional recipes for obscure cuts of meat and so on.

All this goes on entirely independently of the fact that Japanese food and Thai food and fresh local food are all basically good ideas all along... and, come to that, that in practice the majority of actual real people tend to be hep to this and to bumble along somewhere in the middle of what's been fashionable and supposedly universal and what it's supposed to have wiped out and replaced.

Arguably a lot of what's being described as 'twee' in this thread - the selfconsciously handmade, the old-fashioned, the anti-modern - is a similar response to a brand of shiny ergonomic modernism that's become universal and affordable...
 
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Slothrop

Tight but Polite
"Putting the materialism back into dialectical materialism."

But nah, I don't know nuffink bout Hegel. If anything it's closer to Stephanie Thornton's 'subcultural capital'...
 

computer_rock

Well-known member
not sure what's hegelian about your post. i guess you might be describing successions of ideas which sort of have internal contradictions, but that seems like a it of a stretch. still hegel needs to come up in more discussions because he is dissensian to the core lol
 
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