— David Simon on why he created The Wire (The Times Online) is a great, fifteen page read.

For the last few days I’ve been watching the series back-to-back again and I’m sure The Wire shows television can indeed be a medium for serious storytelling. There are fortunately many other examples of good television throughout its history, but perhaps not as often as it happens in cinema. But I have no doubt in my mind The Wire is surely among the five best pieces of moving image art I have ever seen, besting the best of movies. If you consider its five seasons as a 3000 page, five volume script, it’s perhaps the best piece of writing ever done for an audiovisual medium. Every piece matters as Lester says, and the way everything fits in the end is a thing of true beauty.

— Adbusters calls the ‘hipster’ The Dead End of Western Civilization (via Drive-by Blogging).

I may not agree on this overly dramatic tone, as hipsterism must be seen as something aligned with the fact that in a way Art History stopped somewhere in the late 70s. So, in the same way postmodernism means there are no longer vanguardists fighting both the art market and the previous vanguards, youth subversion too became postmodern, ceasing to truly exist.

I don’t even think hipsters exist. There might just be too many obnoxious douchebags, overgrown tweens caught in a loop of consumerism, peer pressure and a fix for vacuous praise, for as long as their parents can support that. Most will hit head-on against a brick wall after college, when faced with poor salaries and a job economy much worse than the economy that gave their parents material progress and enough of a surplus to generate their hipster douchebag children in the first place. Others will be lucky and have enough money to continue being obnoxious douchebags for the rest of their lives.

Same as it ever was.