Momento Mori Moustache Ride

Justin Smith decodes the hipster phenomenon at 3 Quarks Daily:

Hipster irony has to do with taste, not truth, and it only makes sense relative to a certain context of commitments and preferences, while what Socratic irony strives for is a contemplative detachment from all partis pris. In an absolute sense, there is nothing more in Death Cab for Cutie or Arcade Fire that commands one’s earnest and straightforward appreciation than there is in Boxcar Willie, Juice Newton, or Perry Como. From a certain perspective, it is all garbage, and from another it is all fascinating. Hipsters still hope to draw a distinction between the genuinely good and the merely humorously good, by means of a bivalent logic in the end no more subtle than the ‘cool’/‘sucks’ dichotomy through which Beavis and Butthead filtered the world.

'Sulu' responds to Tim Hardaway

Netflix

If you get a chance check out A Family Undertaking. It's less than an hour long but packs quite a whollop. I'm all for a return to home-based celebrations at death, and a cardboard box decorated by friends and family would suit me fine. The ill and quite old should not be carted off to sterile institutions for their final days--they should be at home with their nearest and dearest (one laid-out corpse in the movie is guarded by his dog companion, who sits under the bed growling at guests). The funeral industry too often whisks remains away from hospitals without families even knowing there are far cheaper options for their dearly departed. A scam of the first order.

A Family Undertaking includes touching footage of several home funerals, and follows two families through the deaths of loved ones. The Nebraska grampa who assists in the making of his own coffin is a hoot.

Also:

Good Riddance

Anna Nicole Smith was to insipidness what a black hole is to gravity. Nothing could escape the suction of such densely concentrated pointlessness, not even light. That her entirely expected death merits any mention by a media outlet purporting to be a "news" organization indeed signifies how retarded our culture has become. During a week when more than a dozen US soldiers and perhaps a thousand Iraqi civilians were croaked in a war concocted by ideologically blinkered buffoons whose machinations are at last being exposed in the Scooter Libby and Doug Feith investigations, the self-inflicted demise of some half-silicone trainwreck is about as newsworthy as the yellowing nail on my big toe.

I have to hear Donald Trump sing her praises on Don Imus? There's a noontime roundtable discussing her cultural significance on MSNBC? [Someone during this particularly un-illuminating segment actually intoned with all the gravitas due an expert in 'celebrity' that Anna "had a real reality about her." This in response to the question "Why did people care about her so much?"] Wolf Blitzer dedicates an entire afternoon to this veritable emblem of emptyheadedness? My local news outlets have to spend the ten minutes not relegated to weather or commercials each hour singing her praises?

A real reality. That's what I always think of when confronted by the likes of Anna Nicole Smith.