cce blog

i'm in harper's!

last week i was awoken by an early-morning phone call from buddy ben to hear an astounding fact: i'm in this month's Harper's! why? to answer, first let yourself drift back to summer 2003: i'd recently moved from back to NYC from HK, "flash mobs" ruled hipster NYC, and trucker hats were starting to die off.

well, it turns out that the mystery figure behind the former trend (and perhaps the latter?) was Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper's. known previously only as "Bill" to the media, his identity had been a secret until now (though apparently not to the psychogeographic art practitioners at Glowlab). that's him in the photo, wearing a trucker hat.

he's finally provided the last word on flash mobs, in a lengthy essay detailing the whole phenomenon. of course, he now claims it was all part of a grand, multi-phase art experiment/investigation into scenesterism; as a result, the article is full of silly pseudo-scientific figures that all you grad students and paper-readers out there will surely appreciate.

i'm on page 64 (the online, serialized version of this essay has not yet reached this section):

In the media coverage of flash mobs, the most curious undercurrent was the notion, almost a wish, that they would someday become something serious. ... Bloggers tended to share this vision, and as the Mob Project persisted in its absurdism they began to chafe. Even those who did not want the mobs to espouse explicit politics nevertheless hoped they might begin to demonstrate in some way to the surrounding spectators. For example, MOB #6, in the Times Square Toys "R" Us, was the largest and arguably most successful of all the mobs, but almost unanimously the bloggers panned it. "Another Mob Botched," was the verdict on the blog Fancy Robot: "[I]nstead of setting the Flash Mob out in public on Times Square itself, as everyone had hoped, The Flash Master decided to set it in Toys 'R' Us, with apparently dismal results." SatansLaundromat.com, (a photo-blog that contains the most complete visual record of the New York project) concurred -- "not public enough," the blogger wrote, without enough "spectators to bewilder." Chris from the CCE Blog wrote: "I think the common feeling among these blogger reviews is: where does the idea go from here? ... After seeing hundreds of people show up for no good reason, it's obvious that there's some kind of potential for artistic or political expression here."

should i be proud of my literary fame? i'm just glad that [a] the omission of my last name makes this difficult to find on Factiva, [b] the marking sic does not appear anywhere nearby, and [c] the quote doesn't make me sound completely like a ridiculous blogger. or does it? my sentence is used to summarize other bloggers -- it's meta-blogging! about flash mobs! crap. i guess that is pretty ridiculous. you may read the quoted entry or the more anti-mob entry before it and please let me know if i do, in fact, sound like one of those, err, whiny pretentious bloggers.

finally: wow, 2003! that's two and a half years ago! finding the quote had me perusing my blog archives and, inevitably, the rest of my neglected site, and i kept thinking: man, blogs and personal websites don't date well. i really should go through and get rid of large chunks of glib undergraduate content.

Posted by cce at March 12, 2006 10:34 AM | TrackBack