What’s Not Hot

Some Trends of 2012 That Ought to Be Over

 

We haven’t been dancing the Lambada in 2012, nor have we been wearing double-breasted suits, nor have we been obsessing over vampires. But we’ve still been doing a lot of stuff we ought to have stopped doing long ago. The question is what. In advance of “Who Says L.A. Has No Culture?,” a Zócalo event with Slate Magazine, we asked several observers of contemporary culture to weigh in on the trends of 2012. What are they already over?

I’m over outdoor music festivals

Although it may not be a cultural trend that originated in 2012, I’ve grown weary of the outdoor music festival. Coachella, I’m looking at you.

I wasn’t around to witness Woodstock, Hyde Park, Altamont, or any of the original gatherings that birthed the modern-day music festival. But I imagine them to be nothing less than awesome. Mud. Moonlight. Hippies. Drugs. Spontaneity. And, most important (for me as a style reporter, at least), actual cool fashion.

Instead of the leopard-printed platforms, generic fedoras, $175 cutoff shorts and various Made-in-China feathered accouterment that today passes for festival gear, back-in-the-day wearers sported clothes that showed off genuine personalities and meant something. The festival look wasn’t a “branding opportunity” someone saw on a fashion blog; it was a response to the establishment. Today, those who try to be fashionable at music festivals look like they’re trying way too hard, like someone dressing up as a hippie for Halloween.

Modern mega-fests don’t feel like authentic cultural moments but rather like bloated, overpriced spectacles complete with VIP areas, gifting suites, celebrity DJ-ed pool parties, and really boring, drone-like fashion.

Last year, one on-line daily deal provider even offered a private jet package to shuttle goers to and from Coachella. Personally, I like my music festivals the same as my air travel–sweaty, crude, and foul. It isn’t a real flight without a wheezing seatmate who forgot his Speedstick. And it isn’t a true music fest without mud and a disco nap in the back seat of someone’s Ford.

So peace out music fests. This year, I’ll be listening to Spotify on my iPhone from the comfort of my middle seat in coach. I’ll leave the Coachella fanciness to the kids and their designer fedoras.

Erin Weinger is the co-founder and publisher of StyleSectionLA.com, a website covering fashion, style, shopping and culture in Los Angeles. She is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer whose work has appeared in Entrepreneur, Style.com, Elle.com, Time Out Chicago, Angeleno, The Hollywood Reporter, InStyle.com, PAPER, Antenna, Palm Springs Life, Riviera, Departures and Los Angeles Magazine.

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I’m over Occupy Wall Street rebel art

If sellable anti-capitalist-art wasn’t stale in the fall, it’s certainly stale now. The Occupy movement inspired a new wave of pseudo-protest-art. Artists looking to support Occupy and cash in at the same time used Occupy to gain publicity and align themselves with rebellion enough to gain publicity while keeping the financial support of the 1 percent.

Perhaps the worst offender so far has been a London artist whose PR person sent me photos of his work at Occupy London in the same email that she tried to plug the artist’s upcoming gallery show, but he’s not the only one trying to cash in on Occupy.

Occupy-themed art even made it inside The Armory Fair, New York’s most prestigious art fair, with Sebastian Errazuriz’s folding-chairs painted with Occupy slogans. While Errazuriz’s work was on sale inside the fair, Occupy Museums was outside staging a protest.

I don’t want to suggest that no artist should make art in support of Occupy. What I am sick of is artists trying to cash in on it.

RJ Rushmore is a college student and editor-in-chief of Vandalog, a daily street art blog.

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I’m over unplugging

I think my pick for top whinge-worthy trend has got to be one prediction I could now shoot someone–namely myself–for. And that is that people want to disconnect and have downtime. From self-imposed digital Sabbaths to vacations where surfing means hitting the waves only, I cry foul because I simply refuse to believe it’s true. Technology is becoming seamless. It’s a part of our everyday, and I’m not convinced that we can, or should, go back to a disconnected place.

We’ll keep having backlashes against the latest online addiction du jour, but don’t call Dr. Drew just yet. I believe that in less than two years, technology will be so integrated into our 24/7/365 lives that disconnection will no longer be an option. So to all those people not ready to live a fully online life, get over that now, because as Google co-founder Larry Page said of his search engine, “We’re part of people’s daily lives, like brushing their teeth.” The day will come when it will be as hard to imagine a day without digital connectivity as it is to imagine a day without a toothbrush.

Blogger and trendspotter Marian Salzman is CEO of @ERWWPR and was PR Week’s 2011 PR Professional of the Year.

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I’m over Twitter and Pinterest whatever the hell else is next after that

I’m a journalist and, I suppose, a bit of a social butterfly. So this social media business should be right up my alley. I was a late arrival to Facebook, but I embraced it. Then Twitter came around and I thought I’d better keep up with the digirati, so I created a handle (@MamboBoy) and signed up. But for the life of me I could find no use for tweeting–or for reading other peoples’ 140-character masterpieces. And now comes Pinterest. I noticed many of my friends running to it like lemmings, and I liked the design of the homepage. So I signed up … and I haven’t been back since. Where do people find the time for all this? It’s no wonder our nation’s productivity is in decline. So you won’t be getting any tweets from @MamboBoy or any notices about my “pins.” I’ve got Facebook and I’m stickin’ to it. Now get off my lawn, you damn kids. And turn that jungle music down!

Oscar Garza is a news editor at KPCC-FM.

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I’m over men telling women what to do

You know what trend I’m totally over? Men in government and the media telling women what to do. What would happen if I declared: “I am a straight white Jewish woman with a liberal arts degree, which I think pretty much qualifies me to legislate what all men do with their bodies”?

I’m over the GOP Oversight hearing where five men testified on women’s health. It’s 2012 and late-to-middle-aged men are experts on women’s reproductive health? Then Sandra Fluke testified, arguing in favor of requiring private insurance plans to cover contraception coverage. I was over Rush Limbaugh before he called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” and someone who “wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex” and then “post the videos online so we can all watch.”

I’m over Foster Friess, the billionaire funder to the super PAC supporting Rick Santorum for President, who said, “And this contraceptive thing, my gosh. … Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

I’m over Virginia for introducing a bill that would require any woman getting an abortion to submit to the invasive procedure known as a transvaginal ultrasound, allowing a woman to “view her child.” “This was about empowering women with more medical and legal information that previously they were not required to get in order to give informed consent,” Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said on March 2. Yep, I’m over that.

I am over men trying to limit a woman’s power and autonomy and intelligence and choice, men trying to tramp these attributes down, make them secondary and therefore not so threatening. Maintain the status quo. I am over proposed legislation and verbal abuse and assault that makes 2012 look like an unenlightened, medieval period (or maybe even post-apocalyptic dystopia). It’s a twist on what Voltaire once said about inventing ways for the people in the power to stay in power. I’m pretty much over that.

Elissa Bassist co-edited Rumpus Women, Volume I, the first and most extraordinary anthology ever published by TheRumpus.net. She edits Funny Women, a humor column on The Rumpus. Peruse www.elissabassist.com for literary, feminist, and personal criticism. Follow her on Twitter @elissabassist.

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I’m over the Mayan prophecy claptrap

New Age bunkum about how Mayan seers prophesied the End of the World in 2012.

Yes, I realize this is not, strictly speaking, a 2012 trend in the sense of a trend born in 2012, but it is a trend that persists, against all common sense and despite withering fire from rationalists everywhere, into 2012.

As an atheistic freethinker, not to mention a make-mine-zombie-apocalypse type, I’m admittedly the wrong demographic for this shameless attempt to reinflate the tires of José Argüelles’s gently used Harmonic Convergence, but seriously, people: this brazen–if error-ridden–appropriation of Mayan culture by Etsy-shopping hipsters would bring a blush to Carlos Castañeda’s cheek. In a nation where, according to a recent Gallup poll, a scant 16 percent of the population–up, incredibly, from past years–accepts the godless, strictly Darwinian account of human evolution, this sort of flapdoodle is just not helpful.

I did my part to help stamp it out in my 2009 essay “Carnival of Bunkum” (which appears in my forthcoming essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts):

The stories we tell ourselves, as a culture, do matter. … Premonitions of the End of Days and prophecies of a Space Odyssey-like leap in species consciousness, in 2012, are just the same old bedtime story–a story we never seem to tire of hearing, about the moment (forever forestalled) when there will be ‘wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below,’ as the Book of Acts has it–when the sun will go dark and the moon will turn blood red and time shall be no more. The environmental crises and geopolitical pathologies of our times–rising C02 levels and suicide bombers’ and the sufferings of the wretched of the Earth, like the Guatemalan Maya–demand that we step up to our social responsibilities and engage passionately with the issues of our age. Placing our faith in wet-brained ravings about a ‘multidimensional realm of hyperspace triggered by mass activation of the pineal gland’ or ‘a dispensation of consciousness that’s more intuitive, mystical, and shamanic’ is a luxury we can no longer afford. We’re out of time.

Yet, like the persistent belief that Obama is a Muslim or the inexplicable German fondness for David Hasselhoff, New Age prophecies of a 2012 eschaton are impervious to fact or logic. And why not? It’s a rapture for hipsters too cool for Harold Camping but just credulous enough to make easy marks for the ayahuasca-vision shysters working the Burning Man-and-Esalen circuit. And who doesn’t love a good rapture?

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His latest book is the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (U. of Minnesota, April 2012). He is writing a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown. Dery will appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on April 21, 2012. More at www.markdery.com.

*Photo courtesy of sputnik mi amor_.