I’ve been reading Kansai Cool, Christal Whelan’s book on culture in the region around Kyoto, Japan. It has a short but entirely fascinating chapter on the Lolita subculture.

What’s striking to me is just how closely the explanations given by Lolita adherents resonate with those I’ve heard from ostensibly quite different subcultures elsewhere in the world.

There’s a sense that the orderly aestheticism of the scene is a reaction to the confusion of the world, creating a structure of your own to sidestep the one forced on you. There’s the choice of clothing with the explicit intention of rejecting sexual attention:

“If I didn’t dress in this totally conspicuous and bizarre way,

I’d make friends and be popular with boys.”

The ornate dress then is clearly not worn to be sweet and demure, or become the object of someone else’s desire, but instead is an act of defiance. The hyper-feminine clothing creates a boundary around those who wear it. Empowered by an aesthetic that allows an imaginary flight from Japan, Lolitas seek sanctuary in a foreign time and place largely of their own invention.

And in the end Lolita emerges as — almost — the pursuit of feminism by the unlikeliest of means:

The outlandish costume challenged prosaic futures as office ladies (OLs) who prepare tea and make endless photocopies. Lolitas criticized the norm by standing outside it in bold visual contrast. They may have been merely stalling for time, but in that interim Lolitas created a space in which to dream of a possible self within an imaginable Japan.

Sady Doyle on internet bullying of celebrities. Amanda Palmer in particular. Having been a (small-f) fan since quite early on, I hadn’t realised just how much more fame she has achieved as a hate figure than as a musician. I’d vaguely assumed that the people reading diatribes were simply Amanda Palmer fans, disillusioned to find that their idol had feet of clay.

But in Doyle’s telling — and I think she’s right — the Amanda Palmer hate industry mushroomed far beyond that.

It’s hard to see how [attacking Palmer] was a victory for feminism. Or for music. Or for media: The fact of the matter is, a woman in her mid-thirties wrote, performed and released an album that was musically relevant and probably her best work to date; we responded by talking about her body, her personality and who she was sleeping with. We called her too loud, too self-assured, too ambitious. We wondered why she couldn’t simply live off her rich husband’s income, as if that isn’t a question that feminism has been in the process of answering for the past five decades. We affirmed that the artist’s persona mattered more than the quality of their work, and we affirmed that female ambition or self-confidence was a crime: That if you were a loud or aging or difficult woman, and you wouldn’t let us ignore you, we would turn our attention on you full-force, in order to burn your life down to its foundation.

I have an entirely clichéd adoration of Ginsberg’s

Howl

. I remember spending the winter of 2009 in a state of undirected euphoria. Somehow whenever I stepped out into the Berlin snow — unusually long-lasting that year, giving the streets a kind of crisp unreality — it was this poem rattling around in my head. It was the perfect reflection of a certain mood in me, in the city, in the communities I was ricocheting between. Tangled, manic, anguished, hopeful, terrified, frustrated and frustrating, and above all energetically, forcefully intense.

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
              torsos night after night 
       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- 
              cohol and cock and endless balls, 
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
              lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of 
              Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- 
              tionless world of Time between, 
       Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery 
              dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, 
              storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon 
              blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree 
              vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook- 
              lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, 

Here’s the full thing.

My filter bubble can sometimes be rather

too

effective at removing pop from my life, driving me to youtube binges to work out what on earth an Iggy Azalea is, or why people are talking about a Lorde who isn’t Audre. And, of course, to stay enough in touch to party with the High Court Judges — a clique which, inexplicably,

still

hasn’t lent its name to a psychobilly outfit.

Tove Lo, Habits. I like this a lot. It’s your standard despair-driven hedonism (“You’re gone, and I got to stay / high all the time / to keep you off my mind”). But this incarnation, unusually, makes the griminess feel real — “I eat dinner in my bathtub”.

Sia, Chandelier. And here’s another take on the Self-hating party girl, one that somehow didn’t connect with me. Perhaps it’s that the suicidal despair of the chorus (“I’m gonna swing from the chandelier”) isn’t echoed in the deflated-sounding presentation. Then there’s a video that’s clever and interesting, but not affecting — Lady Gaga meets Home Alone, a mime-artist ballerina bouncing off the walls.

OneRepublic, counting stars. I like it — country-infused pop at 120bpm, christianity with a touch of rebellion, a video of cheering up the old folks at a prayer meeting. It feels like a toned-down take on Kipling’s If (“Old, but I’m not that old / Young, but I’m not that bold”). I can’t quite believe “Make that money, watch it burn” is a shout-out to the KLF. Wouldn’t be wonderful, though, to see these crooners triumphantly self-obliterate themselves in the footsteps of the Justified Ancients?

Ylvis, What does the fox say? This is such gloriously silly fun that I can’t quite believe it isn’t from the 80s. To be paired with Chinese star Rollin Wang’s even more bonkers zoological offering, Chick Chick

LSD has gone the way of space exploration. The psychonaut is now an object of retrofuturism just as much as the astronaut. They’re relics of a time when we could believe in progress and exploration, whether of inner or of outer space.

I’ve never been able to work out why that is. So many aspects of the counterculture have made their way into a mainstream which has become inclusive to a fault. You can blame it on drug busts, on the rise of alternatives from MDMA to cocaine.

But I can’t quite believe that explanation. I think that somehow the acid culture was too modernist, too rational. The appropriation of the Dow slogan “better living through chemistry” shows as much — this was the continuing pharmaceutical research into areas where others feared to tread. Huxley and Leary were believers in progress, in infinite possibilities which could be revealed by crossing the frontier of the mind.

It’s that optimism which seems so out of joint today. Even the people who do drop acid treat it more as hedonism than shamanism. Few people consider the drug as a means to self-discovery — and those who do will find themselves looking back to 40-year-old texts for guidance, since there are so few people writing similar tracts today.

Because it’s never a bad day for some William Blake:

The Japanese slang phrase zenbei ga naita… means, literally, “all America wept”. But young Japanese actually mean “It’s nothing special” by the phrase. Japundit explains:

“When many U.S. films open in Japan, they are accompanied by posters claiming that American viewers were moved to tears. But such films have little emotional impact on viewers here. So Japanese filmgoers have learned, apparently, to disregard such promotional claims as largely meaningless.”

via Momus

Would you dodge taxes, if you were sure you could get away with it? Absolutely you would, according to standard economic theory:

In the benchmark economic model, the key policy parameters affecting tax evasion are the tax rate, the detection probability, and the penalty imposed conditional on the evasion being detected.

But that doesn’t match reality, argues this paper on so-called “tax morale”. All but the slimiest of us have

some

inclination to pay up. If we didn’t then tax revenues would be far, far lower than they currently are.

Some economists have attempted to measure this. One way is to look at what gets paid in the absence of enforcement. There is absolutely no enforcement of the church tax in Bavaria, but 20% of people pay anyway. Or you can assume that migrant entrepreneurs bring attitudes to tax with them. In the US, there’s an 8% gap in tax evasion between Nigerian-owned and Swedish-owned companies.

When you need to pee, you’re less likely to believe in free will.

Ridiculous as that may be, it fits into a consistent pattern. If you’re tired or horny, you (on average) believe less in free will. Likewise if you’re epileptic or suffer panic attacks.

The researchers are keeping their evidence secret, so let’s generalize a bit. The more you are at the mercy of your body, the less likely you are to imagine yourself as choosing your own destiny.

I’ve no idea how free will was defined (again, because paywall). But it fits perfectly into the wider story of how the belief in autonomy and free choice correlate with privilege. So you have billionaires convinced they have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, while thanks to learned helplessness, if you’ve spent a lifetime being shat on, you probably expect it to keep happening whatever you do.

Did you ever expect to worry about a shortage of cults?. Ross Douthat summarizes an argument from Peter Thiel:

Not only religious vitality but the entirety of human innovation, he argues, depends on the belief that there are major secrets left to be uncovered, insights that existing institutions have failed to unlock (or perhaps forgotten), better ways of living that a small group might successfully embrace.