Fight Club
Fight Club is a 1999 film based on the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It was directed by David Fincher and stars Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter. Norton plays the unnamed narrator, discontent with his white-collar job, he forms a "fight club" with soap salesman Tyler Durden, becomes embroiled in a relationship with him and a destitute woman, Marla Singer. Palahniuk's novel was optioned by 20th Century Fox producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Jim Uhls to write the film adaptation. Fincher was selected because of his enthusiasm for the story, he developed the script with Uhls and sought screenwriting advice from the cast and others in the film industry. He and the cast compared the film to Rebel Without a Cause and The Graduate, with a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising. Fincher used the homoerotic overtones of Palahniuk's novel to make audiences uncomfortable and keep them from anticipating the twist ending. Studio executives did not like the film and restructured Fincher's marketing campaign to try to reduce anticipated losses.
Fight Club failed to meet the studio's expectations at the box office and received polarized reviews, becoming one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the year. Critics praised the acting and themes, but debated the violence and moral ambiguity. Over time, however and public reception towards the film has become positive, the film found success with its DVD release, which established Fight Club as a cult film; the unnamed Narrator is an automobile recall specialist, unfulfilled by his job and possessions, has developed severe insomnia. He finds catharsis by posing as a sufferer of testicular cancer and other afflictions in support groups, remedying his insomnia, his bliss is disturbed by another impostor, Marla Singer, whose presence reminds him he is attending these groups dishonestly. The two agree to split which groups they attend, but not before they exchange contact details on the premise of switching groups at short notice. On a flight home from a business trip, the Narrator meets and interacts with soap salesman Tyler Durden.
The Narrator returns home to find. Deciding against asking Marla for help, he calls Tyler, they meet at a bar. Tyler says. In the parking lot, he asks the Narrator to hit him, they begin a fistfight; the Narrator is invited to move into Tyler's home: a dilapidated house in an industrial area. They have further fights outside the bar; the fights move to the bar's basement where the men form Fight Club, which meets for the men to fight recreationally. Marla overdoses on telephones the Narrator for help. Tyler and Marla get sexually involved, Tyler warns the Narrator never to talk to Marla about him; the Narrator quits his job. Fight clubs form across the country. Tyler recruits their members to a new anti-materialist and anti-corporate organization, Project Mayhem, without the Narrator's involvement; the group engages in subversive acts of vandalism and domestic terrorism troubling the Narrator. After the Narrator complains that Tyler has excluded him, Tyler leaves the house; the Narrator realizes. When a member of Project Mayhem is killed by the police during a botched sabotage operation, the Narrator tries to halt the project.
He follows a paper trail to cities. In one city, a Project Mayhem member greets the Narrator as Tyler Durden; the Narrator returns to his hotel room and calls Marla and discovers that she believes he is Tyler. Tyler appears and reveals that they are dissociated personalities in the same body; the Narrator blacks out. When he returns home, he uncovers Tyler's plans to erase debt by destroying buildings that contain credit card records, he apologizes to Marla and warns her that she is in danger, but she is tired of his contradictory behavior and rebuffs him. He attempts to turn himself into police, but the officers are members of the Project, he attempts to disarm the explosives in one building, but Tyler subdues him and holds him at gunpoint on the top floor. The Narrator realizes, he fires it into his own mouth, shooting through his cheek, Tyler collapses with an exit wound on his head and disappears. Project Mayhem members bring a kidnapped Marla to the building. Holding hands, the Narrator and Marla watch as the explosives detonate, collapsing buildings around them.
Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, a soap salesman that the Narrator meets on one of his business trips. Edward Norton as the Narrator, an unnamed traveling automobile recall specialist who suffers from insomnia, he adopts a number of nicknames, including "Jack", "Cornelius", "Rupert" and "Travis". Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer, a woman whom the Narrator meets who goes to support groups for catharsis. Meat Loaf as Robert Paulson, a man whom the Narrator meets at the testicular cancer support group. Jared Leto as Angel Face, a fight club recruit included in missions for Project Mayhem. Zach Grenier as Richard Chesler, The Narrator's boss. Holt McCallany as The Mechanic, a high-ranking and loyal member of Project Mayhem. Additional roles include: Thom Gossom Jr. as Detective Stern, a police investigator who looks into the Narrator's apartment explosion.
Alternative culture
Alternative culture is a type of culture that exists outside or on the fringes of mainstream or popular culture under the domain of one or more subcultures. These subcultures may have little or nothing in common besides their relative obscurity, but cultural studies uses this common basis of obscurity to classify them as alternative cultures, or, taken as a whole, the alternative culture. Compare with the more politically charged term, counterculture. List of subcultures History of subcultures in the 20th century The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed, Joseph & Potter, Harper Perennial, 2004, ISBN 1-84112-654-3 The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Thomas, University of Chicago Press, 1998, ISBN 0-226-26012-7 Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, essay collection, WW Norton & Co, 1997, ISBN 0-393-31673-4
Do it yourself
"Do it yourself" is the method of building, modifying, or repairing things without the direct aid of experts or professionals. Academic research describes DIY as behaviors where "individuals engage raw and semi-raw materials and parts to produce, transform, or reconstruct material possessions, including those drawn from the natural environment". DIY behavior can be triggered by various motivations categorized as marketplace motivations, identity enhancement; the term "do-it-yourself" has been associated with consumers since at least 1912 in the domain of home improvement and maintenance activities. The phrase "do it yourself" had come into common usage by the 1950s, in reference to the emergence of a trend of people undertaking home improvement and various other small craft and construction projects as both a creative-recreational and cost-saving activity. Subsequently, the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning. DIY is associated with the international alternative rock, punk rock, indie rock music scenes, indymedia networks, pirate radio stations, the zine community.
In this context, DIY is related to the Arts and Crafts movement, in that it offers an alternative to modern consumer culture's emphasis on relying on others to satisfy needs. It has become prevalent in the personal finance; when investing in the stock one can utilize a professional advisor or partake in do-it-yourself investing. Italian archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a 6th-century BC Greek structure in southern Italy that came with detailed assembly instructions and is being called an "ancient IKEA building"; the structure was a temple-like building discovered at Torre Satriano, near the southern city of Potenza, in Basilicata, a region where local people mingled with Greeks who settled along the southern coast known as Magna Graecia and in Sicily from the 8th century BC onwards. Professor Christopher Smith, director of the British School at Rome, said that the discovery was "the clearest example yet found of mason's marks of the time, it looks as if someone was instructing others how to mass-produce components and put them together in this way".
Much like the instruction booklets, various sections of the luxury building were inscribed with coded symbols showing how the pieces slotted together. The characteristics of these inscriptions indicate they date back to around the 6th century BC, which tallies with the architectural evidence suggested by the decoration; the building was built by Greek artisans coming from the Spartan colony of Taranto in Apulia. In North America, there was a DIY magazine publishing niche in the first half of the twentieth century. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated offered a way for readers to keep current on useful practical skills, techniques and materials; as many readers lived in rural or semi-rural regions much of the material related to their needs on the farm or in a small town. The DIY movement is a re-introduction of the old pattern of personal involvement and use of skills in the upkeep of a house or apartment, making clothes; the philosopher Alan Watts reflected a growing sentiment: Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence.
In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is in terms of abstractions, it trains you to be some kind of cerebral character. In the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college- and recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes, but it related to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the 1960s and early 1970s. The young visionary Stewart Brand, working with friends and family, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, published the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog in late 1968; the first Catalog, its successors, used a broad definition of the term "tools". There were informational tools, such as books, professional journals, courses and the like. There were specialized, designed items, such as carpenters' and masons' tools, garden tools, welding equipment, fiberglass materials and so on — early personal computers.
The designer J. Baldwin acted as editor writing many of the reviews; the Catalog's publication both emerged from and spurred the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, do-it-yourself attitude of the late 1960s. Copied, the Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence. DIY home improvement books burgeoned in the 1970s, first created as collections of magazine articles. An early, extensive line of DIY how-to books was created by Sunset Books, based upon published articles from their magazine, based in California. Time-Life, Better Homes and Gardens, Balcony Garden Web and other publishers soon followed suit. In the mid-1990s, DIY home-improvement content began to find its way onto the World Wide Web. HouseNet was the earliest bulletin-board style sit
Walden
Walden is a book by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings; the work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance. First published in 1854, Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau used this time to write A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; the experience inspired Walden, in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development. The book can be seen as performance art, a demonstration of how easy it can be to acquire the four necessities of life. Once acquired, he believed people should focus their efforts on personal growth. By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection.
Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. Thoreau makes precise scientific observations of nature as well as metaphorical and poetic uses of natural phenomena, he identifies many plants and animals by both their popular and scientific names, records in detail the color and clarity of different bodies of water dates and describes the freezing and thawing of the pond, recounts his experiments to measure the depth and shape of the bottom of the "bottomless" Walden Pond. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, see if I could not learn what it had to teach, not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all, not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, publish its meanness to the world.
Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden opens with the announcement that Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond living a simple life without support of any kind. Readers are reminded that at the time of publication, Thoreau is back to living among the civilized again; the book is separated into specific chapters, each of which focuses on specific themes: Economy: In this first and longest chapter, Thoreau outlines his project: a two-year, two-month, two-day stay at a cozy, "tightly shingled and plastered", English-style 10' × 15' cottage in the woods near Walden Pond. He does this, he says, he supplies the four necessities of life with the help of family and friends his mother, his best friend, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson; the latter provided Thoreau with a work exchange -– he could build a small house and plant a garden if he cleared some land on the woodlot and did other chores while there. Thoreau meticulously records his expenditures and earnings, demonstrating his understanding of "economy", as he builds his house and buys and grows food.
For a home and freedom, he spent a mere $28.12½, in 1845. At the end of this chapter, Thoreau inserts a poem, "The Pretensions of Poverty", by seventeenth-century English poet Thomas Carew; the poem criticizes those who think that their poverty gives them unearned moral and intellectual superiority. Much attention is devoted to the skepticism and wonderment with which townspeople greeted both him and his project as he tries to protect his views from those of the townspeople who seem to view society as the only place to live, he recounts the reasons for his move to Walden Pond along with detailed steps back to the construction of his new home. Where I Lived, What I Lived For: Thoreau recollects thoughts of places he stayed at before selecting Walden Pond, quotes Roman Philosopher Cato's advice "consider buying a farm carefully before signing the papers." His possibilities included a nearby Hollowell farm. Thoreau takes to the woods dreaming of full of leisure, he announces that he resides far from social relationships that mail represents and the majority of the chapter focuses on his thoughts while constructing and living in his new home at Walden.
Reading: Thoreau discusses the benefits of classical literature, preferably in the original Greek or Latin, bemoans the lack of sophistication in Concord evident in the popularity of unsophisticated literature. He loved to read books by world travelers, he yearns for a time when each New England village supports "wise men" to educate and thereby ennoble the population. Sounds: Thoreau encourages the reader to be "forever on the alert" and "looking always at what is to be seen." Although truth can be found in literature, it can be found in nature. In addition to self-development, an advantage of developing one's perceptiveness is its tendency to alleviate boredom. Rather than "look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre", Thoreau's own life, including dull p
The Affluent Society
The Affluent Society is a 1958 book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to outline the manner in which the post–World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, perpetuating income disparities; the book sparked much public discussion at the time. It is credited with popularizing the term "conventional wisdom". Many of the ideas presented were expanded and refined in Galbraith's 1967 book, The New Industrial State. Former U. S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called it his favorite on the subject of economics; the Modern Library placed the book at no. 46 on its list of the top 100 English-language non-fiction books of the 20th century. The "central tradition" in economics, created by Adam Smith and expanded by David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is poorly suited to the affluent post–World War II U. S. society.
This is so because the "central tradition" economists wrote during a time of widespread poverty where production of basic goods was necessary. U. S. society, at the time of Galbraith's writing, was one of widespread affluence, where production was based on luxury goods and wants. Using production, or gross domestic product, as a measure of U. S. society's well-being omits important measures of personal well-being. GDP neglects differences in output. For example, "An increased supply of educational services has a standing in the total not different in kind from an increased output of television receivers." Production has risen to its paramount but unwarranted status because it is held in grace by both Democrats and Republicans. Galbraith writes: On the importance of production as a test of performance, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats and left, white and minimally prosperous black and Protestant, it is common ground for the Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, the President of the United States Chamber of Commerce and the President of the National Association of Manufactures.
American demand for goods and services is not organic. That is, the demands are not internally created by a consumer; these such demands - food and shelter - have been met for the vast majority of Americans. The new demands are created by advertisers and the "machinery for consumer-demand creation" that benefit from increased consumer spending; this exuberance in private production and consumption pushes out public investment. He called this the dependence effect, a process by which "wants are created by the process by which they are satisfied". Galbraith believes America must transition from a private production economy to a public investment economy, he advocates three large proposals: the elimination of poverty, government investment in public schools, the growth of the "New Class." Galbraith outlines the two types of poverty to better understand potential remedies. Case poverty is related to a specific individual and insular poverty is an island where nearly everyone is poor. To fund social programs, Galbraith believes in the expanded use of consumption taxes.
The "New Class" consists of schoolteachers, professors and electrical engineers. Galbraith ends the book with another appeal to the importance and need for investment in educating people: “Whether the problem be that of a burgeoning population and of space in which to live with peace and grace, or whether it be the depletion of the materials which nature has stocked in the earth’s crust and which have been drawn upon more in this century than in all previous time together, or whether it be that of occupying minds no longer committed to the stockpiling of consumer goods, the basic demand on America will be on its resources of intelligence and education.” History of economic thought Marshall Sahlins articulated in 1966 the theory that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. Abridgement of The Affluent Society
One-Dimensional Man
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a 1964 book by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which the author offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the Communist society of the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both these societies, as well as the decline of revolutionary potential in the West. He argues that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, industrial management, contemporary modes of thought; this results in a "one-dimensional" universe of thought and behaviour, in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behaviour wither away. Against this prevailing climate, Marcuse promotes the "great refusal" as the only adequate opposition to all-encompassing methods of control. Much of the book is a defense of "negative thinking" as a disrupting force against the prevailing positivism.
Marcuse analyzes the integration of the industrial working class into capitalist society and new forms of capitalist stabilization, thus questioning the Marxian postulates of the revolutionary proletariat and the inevitability of capitalist crisis. In contrast to orthodox Marxism, Marcuse champions non-integrated forces of minorities and radical intelligentsia, attempting to nourish oppositional thought and behavior through promoting radical thinking and opposition, he considers the trends towards bureaucracy in Marxist countries to be as oppositional to freedom as those in the capitalist West. One-Dimensional Man was the book. Marcuse criticizes consumerism, arguing that it is a form of social control, he suggests that the system we live in may claim to be democratic, but it is authoritarian in that a few individuals dictate our perceptions of freedom by only allowing us choices to buy for happiness. In this state of "unfreedom", consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs, by ignoring the psychologically destructive effects, by ignoring the waste and environmental damage it causes, by searching for social connection through material items.
It is more irrational in the sense that the creation of new products, calling for the disposal of old products, fuels the economy and encourages the need to work more to buy more. An individual loses his humanity and becomes a tool in the industrial machine and a cog in the consumer machine. Additionally, advertising sustains consumerism, which disintegrates societal demeanor, delivered in bulk and informing the masses that happiness can be bought, an idea, psychologically damaging. There are alternatives to counter the consumer lifestyle. Anti-consumerism is a lifestyle that demotes any unnecessary consumption, as well as unnecessary work, etc, but this alternative is complicated by the extreme interpenetration of advertising and commodification because everything is a commodity those things that are actual needs. In a 1964 letter to The New York Review of Books, Georg H. Fromm, William Leiss et al. outlined the major themes of the book as follows: The concept of "one-dimensional man" asserts that there are other dimensions of human existence in addition to the present one and that these have been eliminated.
It maintains that the spheres of existence considered as private have now become part of the entire system of social domination of man by man, it suggests that totalitarianism can be imposed without terror. Technological rationality, which impoverishes all aspects of contemporary life, has developed the material bases of human freedom, but continues to serve the interests of suppression. There is a logic of domination in technological progress under present conditions: not quantitative accumulation, but a qualitative "leap" is necessary to transform this apparatus of destruction into an apparatus of life; the analysis proceeds on the basis of "negative" or dialectical thinking, which sees existing things as “other than they are” and as denying the possibilities inherent in themselves. It demands "freedom from the oppressive and ideological power of given facts." The book is pessimistic about the possibilities for overcoming the increasing domination and unfreedom of technological society. One-Dimensional Man was the book.
Critical theorist Douglas Kellner writes in Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism that One-Dimensional Man was one of the most important books of the 1960s and one of the most subversive books of the twentieth century. Despite its importance, it was—due to its subversive nature—severely criticized by both orthodox Marxists and academic theorists of various political and theoretical commitments. Despite its pessimism, represented by the citation of the words of Walter Benjamin at the end of this book that "Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben", it influenced many in the New Left as it articulated their growing dissatisfaction with both capitalist societies and Soviet communist societies. Philosopher Stephen Hicks argues that the book's popularity marked "a strong turn towards irrationality and violence among younger Leftists."The philosopher, Ronald Aronson, wrote that One-Dimensional Man is more prescient Marcuse could have realized and that it is more relevant today than ever.
Repressive desublimation Totalitarian democracy Minority rights J. L. Talmon Drux Flux, an animated short inspired
