To be a slave to fashion one must keep their expectations wide open. What may be required to stay on the forefront of shifting trends is not necessarily a big wallet and a trip to fifth avenue. No, in the Aughts, for a casual look that was a la moment, you had to forsake the professional sartorial institutions altogether and rummage through piles of faded and old T-Shirts piled high at your local thrift store.
This is not a retro revival, this is irony chic. When searching for a Graphic-tee it's best to look for the most unexpected design possible. For instance, an old T-Shirt for a youth summer camp is good.... but a Jewish youth summer camp is better. Pop culture iconography is always a winner, especially if a shirt features characters from cancelled Saturday morning cartoons. Superheroes work too, but not if it's a tasteless mass-produced image from the past 25 years. If you are of an edgier ilk, tops stamped with shabbily silk screened images of old rock bands can give you a grungy vibe. Ironic text is a must, especially if the shirt features any religious messages. Product logos are f-u-n, especially if the logo style has been discontinued or if the product no longer exists. If the product is associated with childhood memories, like Cereal brands or long-forgotten toys and games, you've hit the graphic-Tee jackpot. 8-bit Video game imagery is a category unto itself.
It wasn't long before mainstream apparel companies appropriated the aesthetic and mass produced their own faux-vintage graphic tees. Urban Outfitters has made a whole business off of the aesthetic.
What is the appeal of the graphic tee? What does the childlike content of the imagery say about its wearer? Obviously, the primary function here is irony. Dressing like a walking billboard for a defunct company, or sporting an obviously dated design style is an extremely self-conscious way to dress. Not merely about "looking good" a vintage Tee gives an outfit editorial content. The shirt becomes a kind-of punchline. But, not simply an arch exercise in self-aware post-modern expression, there is a real Freudian undercurrent sustaining the popularity of the vintage tee.
By appropriating the symbols and imagery and graphical style prevalent in childhood - the wearers of Vintage Tees were almost always born in the 70's or 80's - the anxiety of nostalgia is abated. The real affection Vintage Tee wearers have for the products and companies and images featured on these shirts would, if exposed, threaten to neutralize the aura of cool and disaffection that young people in the Aughts cultivate as their default attitude. There are few things less apathetic than a child's excitement when playing with his new toy; few things more uncool than his face when he gets dropped off to summer camp for the first time. These feelings are confronted and then submerged, (or secretly indulged, depending on how you look at it) when the object of feeling is de-contexualized, slapped onto a shirt and literally worn on the outside of the body like armor made of irony. The vintage tee may be the height of cool, but underneath, its very warm and fuzzy.
One guy's list got so popular he made Santa jealous.
Website design has come a long way in the Aughts. From bland text based interfaces as aesthetically pleasing as the Wall Street Journal Stock Index to multimedia, flash enabled, graphically rich immersive "experiences," a well designed webpage is less a site one reads than a destination one visits. And yet, for all of Web 2.0's (as this era of the Internet is being coined) surplus of impressively designed webpages, there was one site that saw little need to adapt to the changing climate. One site that, despite being as visually bland as a box of generic cheerios, has established itself as one of the Internet's most popular destinations and a feature of social reality, that, like so much of the web, we could no longer imagine living without. It's a webpage that, if not single than helping handedly, destroyed the newspaper industry, gutting a financial model that could no longer sustain itself in a world where information exchange became both instantaneous and free. It's Craigslist! Your one stop find a job, buy a car, sell your toaster, audition a drummer, get laid, find a date, rent a prostitute shop for all your lifestyle needs. (Often in that order.) Craigslist is unpleasant, confusing, maddening, dull, mysterious, spam-filled and totally, absolutely necessary.
Craigslist didn't just find it's niche, it found everyones niche - on the site you could shop for just about anything that can be bought or sold (or given away for free) - from collapsible bicycles, to human labor, from a back alley blowjob, to a dinner companion for the opera - Craiglist was anything but limited. And unlike classified ads in print the call and response of posting and answering on Craigslist was near instantaneous. Craigslist was bland to be sure and almost wholly charmless but Goddamn if the site wasn't efficient at delivering the goods (both figuratively and literally).
Craigslist works because everyone agrees that it must. More local than eBay, less corporate than monster.com, and far blunter than EHarmony, Craigslist is the de facto location where everyone goes to engage in the marketplace. It's a cyber-bazaar; a wild, unruly yard sale-cum-newspaper classifieds section where any and everyone hawks their wares, prices always negotiable. Competition serves no one in this commercial model, the site only succeeds if there is one and only one place for everyone to meet and trade. Gradual migration to another similar site is a near impossibility. To the victor goes the spoils. Craigslist, being the first site of it's kind, capitalized on its initial dominance in online classifieds to become a nearly unstoppable force; by the time competitors tried to get a foothold Craigslist had staked its territory, dug out a moat, and erected battlements. King Craig rules.
Craigslist has inspired everything from off-Broadway shows, to Weird Al Yankovicparody songs, to psycho killers. Its stamp on American society is profound and unlikely to diminish any time soon. Pressure is always on for the site to sell-out, add ads, redesign its antiquated graphical interface. Something. But Craigslist plods on, conquering the the world a city at a time. All with only a staff of thirty and a founder who interacts with his sites users through the format of Haiku. Though he could sell his site for billions Craig is content with just millions; holding fast to his ideology of "direct democracy." As for myself? I just keep waiting to see if someone asks about me on Missed Connections.
Hollywood's biggest power broker worked out of a coffee shop.
The original title of Perez Hilton's now infamous namesake blog was "PageSixSixSix." It was the last instance of wit that Perez would ever display. In just five years this foul-mouthed, flame-y haired, even flame-yer acting, gutter minded chimichanga has gone from an unemployed freelance writer with $60,000 dollars of debt to the worlds most famous gossip blogger, a six figure salary and multi-media fame. In retrospect the Miami-born, NYU educated, Mario Armando Lavandeira's rise to Hollywood fame was as unlikely as his blog (or one just like it) was inevitable. As such, and as horrifying as it is to contemplate, Perez Hilton is one of the Aughts most emblematic personalities. Oy.
Stylistically, somewhere between a Michael Musto missive and elementary school bathroom stall scrawl, Perez Hilton, the site and the man, have come to define what gossip is in the new cyber-media. Walter Winchell he ain't, Perez was the first to realize that in the era of the mouse click and hyperlink, volume always trumps quality. Best to have forty hastily organized posts a day than five brilliantly pithy, well written ones. Grammar is for losers, sentences are passe. In the Internet area, a picture (of Clay Aiken with drawn on ejaculate running down his mouth) says 1000 words, none of which would be pleasant to read. Hilton's editorial standard requires only that the posts be in English, and even then sometimes you wonder...
Perez may get millions of hits a day but, for most readers, the actual time spent on the site probably lasts about as long as an extended piss or short shit; the experience is always excremental. Perez knows (intuitively, from experience no doubt) that surfing the Internet has bulldozed our attention spans to somewhere between badger and opossum on the phylogenetic tree. We now want our celebrity news digestible in one long gulp, like a frat boy finishing a six pack. You'd throw up if you were to sip it. A brief visit down Hilton lane on your five minute office coffee break can function as an emergency infotainment debriefing. It's gossip redux. A digital Page Six, distilled to bullet points and dirty pictures. Drained of all editorializing, the site is a who-is-doing-who and who-is-pregnant-now memorandum of the most crude kind. The frequent updates keeps its readers hitting refresh like lab mice clicking their feed bar. Communication hasn't been rendered this sparse since the heyday of the pay-by-the-letter telegram.
Perez did much right in his quest to become the self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media." Unlike other low-brow gossip sites like DListed.com or Pinkisthenewblog.com (or even more legitimate Internet gossip sources like gawker.com and it's subsidiaries) Perez's site was as much about the blogger's own cult of celebrity as it was the actual A-D Listers and celebutantes he reported on. You would go to his site to learn about Brangelina drama or the latest Britney Spears disaster scene, but you couldn't escape the man himself. Anything but camera shy, this zaftig trash-talker worked overtime to make his personal persona (not just his blog) synonymous with celebrity in the 21st century. The efforts paid off. Soon, the New York Times was writing articles and old media could no longer ignore this new Hollywood game changer. His inferno-topped visage became a fixture of the LA nightlife scene; soon he was the one in Paparazzi photographs. TV Specials and red carpet gabfests were only going to be a matter of time.
With the new medium of blogging being defined and re-calibrated in real time, the journalistic standards that held sway for decades in print media were, if not useless, totally ignored. Was a gossip blog more like a gaggle of friends pick-a-littling at drinks on a Friday night or was it a newfangled periodical column in the vein of Liz Smith, Cindy Adams and the legendary Page Six? (Or was a blog more akin to a logorrheic nutjob shrieking on a soapbox in Hyde Park?) Perez Hilton assumed the casual, loose lipped informality of private conversation but got an audience as massive as any of the genre's old warhorses. Controversy inevitably followed.
While Michael Musto may snarkily (Michael Musto eats his corn flakes snarkily) and obliquely allude to a well-known closet case's infamous same-sex orgies, Perez will provide pictures and commentary. For Hilton, himself an out and proud gay man, the Hollywood closet was only a doorway to success; he has little interest in protecting any public figure's privacy should they choose to hide their sexual orientation. And Hollywood is afraid, very afraid.
Both Lance Bass and Neil Patrick Harris had little choice but to announce their homosexuality after being backed into a closet corner by the scruple-free blogger. Though "Who's gay in LA LA Land?" has long been a favorite party game of homos from here to the land of Oz (lots of gays there), when such casual speculation finds its way online, the finality of putting the trashy gab in writing (even of the non-print variety) brings to bear a new whole roster of ethical and journalistic issues. But, of course, Perez is not a journalist. He is not a reporter. He is not the employee of a media company. He is a guy with a laptop. In essence, that's all he is or needed to be. This is the 21st Century. Recently, after the feeding frenzy over Miss California's anti-gay response to Perez Hilton's Same-sex marriage question (He later called her a "dumb bitch.") while appearing on the Miss USA panel, Perez has positioned himself as a GLBT activist, even showing up on legitimate talk shows to debate same sex marriage. Not all gays are having it.
Who's really not having it are the paparazzi who risk life and limb daily to get that million (or 500, more usually) dollar shot of Nicole Ritchie eating a corn dog. They struggle and toil only to have their "work" exploited by Hilton, who, as easy as a right-click, appropriates the fruits of their labor, defiles it with his magic markers, and then posts the image for all to see, making boffo bucks all the while. Enter the lawsuits. While it's hard to get worked up about injustices against the pawn-scum that are celebrity paparazzi, what was at stake in the case against Hilton was nothing less than the copyright status of images in the brave new world that is the Internet. In this instance the matter was settled out of court, leaving the precedent still nebulous; further lawsuits, whether against Hilton or other Internet picture poachers is all but inevitable.
As a fabulized, slenderized Hilton stands atop his mini-Empire of over-inflated importance, he must wonder, "How long can this last?" As self-made as any classic entrepreneur in the mythopoeia of the American Dream, Perez Hilton was neither the most original nor talented neophyte bloggerhead to reach for success, he was simply the one who got there first and knew what to do with it when he arrived. He is at once unique and emblematic. Is Perez Hilton really the Queen of all Media? In the age of the internet, you are what you say you are. So, Long Live the Queen.
For a Top Gun, acting sane was a Mission Impossible.
Leaked Bellevue Case Study
The patient, a Caucasian male in his mid forties, was admitted to the ward after displaying erratic and self-destructive behavior on and off for the past ten years. Immediately it was apparent that he was in need of treatment and intensive analysis. Initial attempts at psychological evaluation were met with passive aggressive hostility, the patient repeating the phrase "Help Me Help You" over and over again - a clear attempt to undermine the dynamic between doctor and patient. This was the first manifestation of what we later determined to be a chronic and unique case of manic narcissistic personality disorder, complimented by low-level schizophrenia and conscious seizures. We initially misdiagnosed him as bi-polar assuming that the manic episodes would have to subside into depressive periods. To our surprise, the manic phases persisted indefinitely. We have rooted out the cause of this pathological condition as a combination of repressed and confused sexual proclivities, social isolation, continual and persistent positive reinforcement for bad behavior and indoctrination into a religious cult.
An inflated sense of power and self-worth were the first clues to the patient's narcissistic temperament. The condition would manifest itself most prominently through the outrageous claims that the patient would make. In one instance he claimed that at the site of an auto accident, amongst the entire crowd only he could help the situation and assist those in peril. The exalted status he held himself in made his psyche easily susceptible to indoctrination by a religious cult, the cult's ideology acting as a reinforcing mechanism. His existing belief that he has privileged insight which others lacked became a part of his religious faith. The cult then feeds on the patients psychological dysfunction, increasing the schizophrenic episodes to the extent that, by the time he came to us, the patient believed that human beings descended from an alien race implanted on earth in volcanoes which were then destroyed by nuclear weapons. The patient, now fully convinced of his cults dogma, makes it a mission to convince others of his beliefs, overstepping the boundaries that should restrain him from offering up opinions on topics he is not qualified in any professional way to address. If under interrogation, the patient immediately attempts to put his inquisitor on the defensive, reversing the power roles so that his own authority cannot be questioned. He may even dismiss criticisms outright, accusing the questioner of being "glib."
For such an individual external coordinates of success must be maintained at all costs. The cognitive threat of failure could pop such an inflated ego. Sexual health and a satisfying romantic relationship are important criteria in any healthy persons analysis of their own well-being but with a pathological narcissist however, it is merely the impression that counts in his evaluation. This being the case, the patient will overcompensate when discussing his love life, in this instance, jumping fast into marriage and wildly exclaiming his affections to anyone in earshot. This super-abundance of excitement brought about what can only be described as conscious seizure in the patient, forcing him to jump and flail wildly. It is important to note the imbalance between the hysteria manifested by the patient and the quiet anxiety emanated by the partner who is, of course, passive, and seemingly powerless. The display of affection by the patient is directed less at his partner than at the world in general, a signal that what concerns him is not the relationship but his perception of himself in the eyes of, in Lacanian terminology, the Big Other. Romantic gestures are big and broad and ludicrously predictable (the patient proposed to his new wife at the Eiffel Tower, for instance); it's a performance of life not a living of one.
Within the mania there are still massive mood swings. In an indoctrination video that the patient made for his cult the subject displayed an alarming ability to shift from fiercely intense testimonial to wild, uninhibited and unprovoked laughter and then back to steely jawed instruction. This persistent manic energy throughout the panoply of emotions is the most disturbing feature of this patients pathology. It's hysteria on Cruise control.
Our advice is for the patient to take his protein pill and put his helmet on.
The bad news: We're all fucked. The planet is now a phlegmatic, feverish, invalid. Mother nature is looking more and more like Grandma Moses each day. Hard to believe for some but, if science is to be trusted, it seems that pumping carbon emissions and pollution into our environment unabated for a hundred years eventually takes it toll. Who woulda thunk it?
What's going to happen according to those nerds in the know?: Temperatures will continue to rise. Even one or two degrees upwards will wreak total havoc. Eventually, ice caps will melt, polar bears will go the way of the woolly mammoth, and the Kevin Costner film Waterworldwill come to seem less a Hollywood debacle and more like the most prescient of documentaries. (Yes, in the future the oceans will be ruled by a leather clad Dennis Hopper in an eye patch.) I, for one, have already bought some beachfront property...in Nevada.
The good news: It was cool to be a harbinger of doom. There was no easier way to be "with it" than to decry the fate of our planet and mock those rubes who would deny the existence of climate change even as they suntan in January. And rubes they are indeed. There are few emotions as self-satisfying as justified pessimism in the face of delusional optimism. Convinced that climate change is nothing but a socialist plot to regulate commerce, the far right, though convinced of impending Armageddon by any and all other means, nonetheless refuses to believe that we could ever do anything to our environment that would threaten our well-being. The good lord said nature was there for our use after all. So, it was empirical fact vs. faith based denial. Um, score one for science. The problem is, of course, just how bleak the scenario really was. No one wants to hear about their inevitable destruction. Pandora's Box cannot be left wide open, hope must be maintained.
Enter the patron saint of the new environmentalism, the maharishi of green, the philosopher-king of Eco-alarmism, Al Gore. A dejected and bloated Gore left the 2000 election embittered and in shambles; a should-be president with no country to lead, what was the former VP going to do with himself? The answer, become earth's biggest hero since Captain Planet. There was something charming and professorial about his slide show of eco-terror, not the hippest of ways to spread his gospel of green. And yet, put that slideshow (OK, powerpoint presentation!)on film, release in theatres across America and you have yourself a major documentary hit. Two Academy Awards (Yep, even the song won!) and a Nobel Peace Prize later and the green movement had reached its apotheosis.
Now everything is green. Celebrities are green. Companies are green. CARS are green. CARS! Kermit was so wrong. Being green is a marketing ploy now, a signifier of a person or product being "with-it." Shedding the granola eating, hemp attired persona that typified environmentalists in the past, the environmental movement could count on movie stars to be their poster boys. Leo DiCaprio drives a hybrid and flies commercial, private jets use too much fuel. Less glamorous, Ed Begley Jr. has gone all the way, living in a "green" house and driving a converted electric VW rabbit. It's all about eliminating your "carbon footprint," one of the Aughts most pronounced coinages.
Is it all for nAUGHT? Though Gore would have you believe that changing your light bulb will change the world, I can't help but fear we are deluding ourselves about our own ability to divert the rolling boulder of climate change. China and India are on track to surpass the USA in almost every criteria of industrialization, including carbon emissions. America has passed no real laws or regulations that addressing the issue in any serious, systematic way. We couldn't even stand in solidarity with the rest of the civilized world and join the Kyoto protocol. What we have instead of policy is fashion. Instead of solutions we have "crisis awareness." Instead of leaders we have trendsetters. Own a hybrid car? Awesome. Seriously. But China is still poised to pump more pollution into the environment than any nation has in the history of the world. And they all ride bikes! Everyone doing their part may not be enough, and until we realize as a nation and as a world that a political solution in the only solution (if there is a solution), I'm afraid all the good intentions and Hollywood endorsements wont be worth the price of a gallon of dirt when we find ourselves canoeing over the Sahara.
It was the unlikeliest of comebacks. Unlike the Western, a film genre that, though dead, (or at least sputtering and wheezing like Doc Holliday after some saloon fisticuffs) inspires a perpetual reverence in critics nostalgic for the All-American mythos, expansive cinemascope vistas and moral clarity that are part and parcel of the genre, the movie musical had no such luck maintaining its highbrow cultural cache. The genre had cascaded down from the heights of popularity to near total irrelevance, musicals coming to seem a relic of a bygone era in American society, the social upheavals of the Sixties negating the overt sentimentality and escapism that had come to be associated with the genre. Whether this reputation was deserved or not matters little, the proof was in the pudding: the genre's biggest hits were either syrupy paeans to music, love and family (The Sound of Music) or acerbic, witty insider showbiz stories (Singing In The Rain, 42nd Street), neither of which could succeed in connecting with an increasingly disillusioned and sentiment-averse populace.
Other pressures pushed musicals even more away from the limelight. Advancements in camera technology allowed for more location shooting; with the shift to natural light and real locales the artifice of the sound stage was rendered sillier and sillier and if there is one thing a musical needs to sustain credulity it's artifice. The real death knell for the movie musical was the usurpation of show tunes by Rock 'N Roll as the hegemonic standard for popular music in America. Those who held onto affection for show music got more and more cult-like and ostracized from the mainstream. Musical theatre and musical cinema, once the most mainstream popular art forms in America, came to be associated almost entirely with older urbanites and, above all, homosexuals. When Oliver! won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1968 the victory was Pyrrhic; you can have a coronation for the king after the revolution if you like, it doesn't change the fact that the castle is trashed and the queen already beheaded.
Efforts were made at rehabilitation (HAIR, Cabaret) and, later, resurrection, (A Chorus Line, EVITA) but all was in vain. Musical movies were decidedly uncool, so entrenched in an antiquated style of filmmaking (and equally calcified ideological perspective) that no cultural defibrillator could bring the genre back to life. Until the Aughts.
Love him or hate him, there is no question that Baz Luhrmann and his hyperkenetic, maximalist aesthetic breathed new life into the corpse that was the movie musical with his 2001 hit Moulin Rouge. A love story as hackneyed as anything in a Jeanette McDonald/Nelson Eddie classic, Moulin Rouge aspired to turn the genre's vices into virtues. A epic romance supplemented by overwrought love songs with purple lyrics? Check. A glamorous showbiz setting? Check. An artificial mise en scene employing clearly unrealistic settings that smack of the theatrical? Check. Just edit the thing like you're Vincent Minnelli on a Meth jag and you've made a modern musical classic for a post-MTV Generation. Employing a melange of musical genres ranging from Whitney Houston power ballads to Jule Styne charm songs and beyond, Luhrman displays less a catholicity of taste than a post-modern desire to incorporate the entirety of 20th Century popular music into his own meticulously crafted, hermetically sealed universe, a world baring little relation to the bohemian Paris it ostensibly represents. The gambit paid off and Moulin Rouge proved a box office smash, clearing the air for other movie musicals to climb mount improbable and achieve mainstream success. If only Mr. Luhrman's vision, for all it's contemporary stylings, included content and characters that weren't as creaky as a Parisian flat's floorboards.
With Rouge convincing Hollywood executives that a little razzle dazzle was on the menu for the American public, it became only a matter of time before the eternally postponed film version of Kander and Ebb's classic musical Chicago would finally get its cinematic bow. Helmed by Broadway director Rob Marshall making his big screen debut, Chicago was an unprecedented success. Hewing close to its source material, Chicago was a big, splashy, sexy, bootlegged cocktail of a movie with a chaser of satire. The biggest moneymaker in Miramax history, Chicago dominated awards season, taking the top prize at the 2003 Academy Awards, the first time a musical had done so in over three decades. Though the dance sequences (or should I say sequin-ses) were over-edited and the performances less revelatory than many critics claimed (Did Queen Latifah really deserve that Oscar nom?) Chicago was still something of a revelation, a Broadway show transferred to a different medium with near total success. receiving acclaim from both critics, laymen and, toughest to please of all, theatre queens.
Suddenly, cineplexes were flush with singing and dancing, but, the new welcoming attitude toward movie musicals inevitably led to overstretching; lapses in judgment were inevitable. Sadly, two high profile projects threatened to derail the genre's revival altogether, making Chicago look more a one-off than game changer. A juggernaut when it landed on Broadway, The Producers was inevitably destined for a cinematic treatment after Chicago proved that movie musicals could still rake it in (and help boost slagging ticket sales on the Rialto as well). Already a cinema classic with starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, this new Producers was playing with fire before a frame was filmed. Having first-time director Susan Stroman behind the camera didn't help; all her inventiveness and wit went flat when asked to think in two dimensions. The Producers was little more than a record of the stage show, pickled and canned for posterity.
RENT, though faring better at the Box Office, was even more creatively bankrupt. Directed by the middling, eager-to-please Chris Columbus, RENT was filmed with an almost naive literalness that served to highlight, not minimize, the shows flaws, mainly, its weepy melodramatics and occasionally self-pitying attitude. (Itis based on an Opera after all.) Michael Grief's original theatrical staging was deliberately icy, sparse and unsentimental; it's what gave the musical its gloss of "coolness" and made the lachrymose storytelling palatable. Without inventing an analogue in cinematic terms, the musical fell flat, disappointing a small army of RENT-heads for whom the show was the I CHING, King James Bible and Hammurabi's code rolled into one.
And there was more. The Phantom of the Opera, the movie. Yeah, that happened. The High School Musical series proved that young people couldn't get enough singing and dancing in their entertainment, the more toothless the better. Puppet wrangler and Lion King wunderkind Julie Taymor made a psychedelic Beatles musical called Across The Universebut few cared.Though Dreamgirls won Jennifer Hudson an Oscar and made 100 Million domestically, the expectations for the movie were so sky high that modest success felt like a disappointment. Hairspray got John Travolta back where he belongs: in a fat suit, high kicking. The public couldn't stop the beat, minting the John Waters adaptation a cool 118 Million domestically. And, when an actress named Streep agreed to sing some songs by a band called Abba for the film version of the tourist-friendly claptrap known as Mamma Mia the box office was bound to be good. 600 Million Dollars later, mouths are still agape. The winner takes it all indeed.
The best of the lot was Tim Burton's blood soaked adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Nary a sequins in sight, Sweeney was unlike any musical movie ever made. A horror film as much as anything, perhaps only Burton, with his unique brand of carnival macabre, could supply the delicate combination of menace and mirth that Sweeney trades in. Brechtian tropes be damned, Burton's Sweeney was an old fashioned thriller, a Hammer horror creepshow with better art direction (it's only Oscar win). Oh, and in this horror movie, the monsters sing. The film was critically lauded and performed modestly well at the box office, though a massive smash was probably never in the cards for Sweeney; some projects are simply too brilliant and original to fit into any proscribed marketing model.
With Rob Marshall's adaptation of Nine set for release this December starring a starry a cast of Oscar favorites, there is no doubt that the movie musical is hitting a stride. A Miss Saigon film is already in the works and one can imagine that it's only a matter of time before Wicked gets a celluloid makeover. When Hugh Jackman, the actor most destined to star in a movie musical (can Carousel happen, like, NOW?), hosted the Oscars this year and announced while opening a big production number "The Musical Is Back!" what could one do but agree and rejoice. The Musical IS back. It's really great and all that jazz...
Bobo: Bourgeois Bohemian.
Fag: Homosexual Man.
This Bobofag is a New Yorker through and through- even though I'm from California. I'm a lover of theatre, cinema, literature, music and pop culture. As a self-confessed pseudo-intellectual young urban homo, I troll the internet looking for (intellectual) stimulation and palliatives from tedium.
but a Jewish youth summer camp is better.
but not if it's a tasteless mass-produced image from the past 25 years.
Product logos are f-u-n, especially if the logo style has been discontinued or if the product no longer exists.
If the product is associated with childhood memories, like Cereal brands
or long-forgotten toys and games,
you've hit the graphic-Tee jackpot. 8-bit Video game imagery is a category unto itself.
What is the appeal of the graphic tee? What does the childlike content of the imagery say about its wearer? Obviously, the primary function here is irony. Dressing like a walking billboard for a defunct company, or sporting an obviously dated design style is an extremely self-conscious way to dress. Not merely about "looking good" a vintage Tee gives an outfit editorial content. The shirt becomes a kind-of punchline. But, not simply an arch exercise in self-aware post-modern expression, there is a real Freudian undercurrent sustaining the popularity of the vintage tee. 
