8 ms·

The Myth and Magic of California Style

81 points by pmcpinto 10y ago

alphonsegaston 10y ago
Why does every article on Racked read like a Patrick Bateman monologue, stripped of any sense of irony? It's as if aliens were writing about human society from the perspective of a banner ad.
- nether 10y ago
  I imagine every article about style/fashion/clothes sounds that way to HN readers. Consider pg's article on "submarines,” which to me was just a blithe lack of understanding of cyclical fashion, and his noble defense of wearing sneakers in professional settings. A fashion editor trying to write about trends in software frameworks would probably fare no better.
  - alphonsegaston 10y ago
    I actually find a lot of style and fashion stuff interesting. But there's something about the unsanitized corporate speech of Racked that is just unnerving. I know we live in an era where subtext is text, but this is more like parody as sincerity.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    The submarine article wasn't denying the existence of fashion cycles. I don't know how you got that message. It was about articles that exist to promote what someone wants to be the style, and which the journalist wrote about because a PR agent did the work for them. (Rather than because the journalist independently spotted a real trend.) There's a big difference between "oh wow react is on the rise, let me write about that" vs "a google employee fed me a prewritten article about how all the cool kids use angular, I'll just pass that on."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
killjoywashere 10y ago
While I see the merit to this article, keeping the 'whitewashing' theme alive in the public sphere, I have to say, with a twinge of regret, stuff like this helped put Trump in the White House.
- stephancoral 10y ago
  No, it didn't. Take your lukewarm half-formed boilerplate takes elsewhere
  - dang 10y ago
    Please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that.
    - stephancoral 10y ago
      Maybe you should start banning accounts that post milquetoast inanities
      - banachtarski 10y ago
        Are you a left-leaning parody of a Trump supporter? If so it's a pretty brilliant ploy.
      - killjoywashere 10y ago
        Perhaps you'd prefer Nicholas Eberstadt's recent article in Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
    - lightedman 10y ago
      Wouldn't your exact comment right now be considered unsubstantive since it's a redundant repeat of rules which should have already been read by the user? Here's something substantive for you, you should really get to work on getting rid of the nonsense all caps rule or fix your lack of italics notation for Braille users. Every Braille user I've sent here laments your utter lack of disability conformity such as italics notation, things which real hackers should've been able to do from day one. http://www.brl.org/intro/session03/symbols.html http://www.brl.org/intro/session03/symbols.html
roflchoppa 10y ago
SoCal does have a feeling of superficiality, you can pick up on it a little after people move back to the Bay from LA.... but then again the Bay so many people that have this feeling of entitlement that came outta no where.. just something I've noticed within the past 15 years.... On the flip side, there are also a handful of people that I met around from both areas that are down to earth. Maybe it's just high concentration.... or monkey see, monkey do.
- phamilton 10y ago
  As a SoCal transplant to the bay area, my biggest observation is that it's basically mandatory to "have a cause" in the bay area. It doesn't really matter what it is. It could be cycling over driving. It could be how you eat. It could be political activism. But it has to be something, or people look at you funny. Aside from the Venice Beach / Santa Monica scene (which is absolutely superficial), I find SoCal to be much more laid back. Live and let live, if you will.
  - thinkmassive 10y ago
    Somewhat ironically you must have an _approved_ cause, or you may be judged as much as not having one. To be fair I've found this is far more prevalent in SF than the South Bay, so I think that's where it comes from.
    - gydfi 10y ago
      I'd say it matters a great deal what it is -- for instance if your cause is the pro-life movement or the expulsion of illegal aliens then you might have difficulties getting social approval in San Francisco. I find it a hilarious instance of California insularity that the grandparent post thinks it "doesn't matter what it is" -- I'm guessing that he'd failed to consider the fact that non-left causes even exist.
      - mattlevan 10y ago
        You can't blame him. SF is a giant leftist bubble.
thinkmassive 10y ago
“It’s a common language,” says Buchman. “You have images of the ocean, sand, and pretty people smiling and laughing, and that’s universal.” Yep, as everyone knows, California invented beaches. There were no "beach kids" before California, and everyone who grows up elsewhere on any coast is emulating southern California.
- setr 10y ago
  The particular form of beach kid immortalized (to the extent of maybe a few decades more) on californian beaches Which is a style replicated, distinctly with the californian beach in mind, in other locales Obviously not because californian beaches were the pinnacle of beaches, but because the media treated it as such, and entered a positive feedback loop to entrench its (current) position there In the same way, the East Coast has beaches are associated with yuppies and yatchs, and the hawaiins with hawaiins and tourists Its an image ingrained within the American conciousness; regardless of whatever "true" merit it might have, the descriptive language is universal (to all who consume american media, and media deriving from it).
  - asveikau 10y ago
    > In the same way, the East Coast has beaches are associated with yuppies and yatchs, I am going to guess you haven't spent a lot of time in New Jersey.
    - bryanlarsen 10y ago
      Exactly. Style comes from what the media portrays of it, not the reality on the ground.
    - mkane848 10y ago
      Seaside "beach kid" here, our beach culture is most definitely NOT any of that shit. Sure, it exists as an outlier (some of the families have owned property down here forever, super wealthy, etc), but the main things that come to mind for beach culture are just the simple things like the boardwalk, beach, and the local shops. The yuppies and yachts mostly come from NY and elsewhere ;)
santaclaus 10y ago
I'm not really sure where this idea of a laid back California comes from... in my general experience people seem way more agro on BART and Muni and around the bay than in NYC. Hell, even in LA when going out for drinks bouncers and such seem way more keyed up than on the east coast (or the north west).
- deaddodo 10y ago
  Californian here. Completely opposite experience, especially SoCal vs the Northeast. NYC, Boston, northern Virginia, etc...always seemed like people were much more uptight and kept to themselves. Boston especially, you seem to have to get through like 4 layers of rudeness/offputedness before people open up to you...which doesn't always seem worth it. Meanwhile, going to a friends' party in San Diego or Los Angeles and I can walk out with 4 new friends/acquaintances, which lead to more invites and potential connections. And the differences only get further expounded professionally. I regularly go to work in a T and jeans. Sometimes even board shorts, when summer gets toasty enough. I would never dream of doing any of that working for any companies I've interacted with on the East Coast. In fact, it's regularly something they'll bring up in conversation. There's a plethora of reasons behind those differences and neither is necessarily bad, but that's where my opinion of "laid back" versus not stems from.
  - alpha_squared 10y ago
    Anecdotal as well, I suppose, but my experience is similar. I grew up and lived in LA for 20 years, frequenting San Diego (SD) once or twice a year on average before moving there for about a year. I've been to some of the large cities (St. Louis, Newark, Boston, Detroit, NYC, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento) and now live in Seattle. Northern California (NorCal) is very different from Southern California (SoCal), which itself is very different than any other place I've been to. The sun, the sand, the year-round summer-like temperatures -- it all feeds into the lifestyle. This was much more pronounced in SD than in LA. I had trouble conversing with random people on the street or elsewhere in the Northeast or Northwest (Midwest was actually easier than SoCal). The near-constant pleasantness of the weather encourages you to be more active and "out" more often. It was a very regular thing in SD to go watch sunsets on the beach (regardless of season) after work. The proximity to the border made it pretty hard to find a bad Mexican food place and the tacos -- oh, the tacos -- were amazing. There are whole companies (mostly startups) that brand themselves as a "go surf in the early morning, come to work later" sort of place. There certainly is a myth and sort of "magic" to it that I don't even think the movies and media capture.
aorth 10y ago
> Mine starts at birth, in San Diego. [...]. I realized that California didn’t belong to me soon after moving out East. I was also born and raised in San Diego, but left ten years ago, and it feels weirder and weirder every time I go back. Meanwhile, everywhere I am in the world—Thailand, Kenya, Bulgaria, England, etc—I see California t-shirts or hear Tupac rapping about California on the radio. So I've also felt and wondered about the myth (legend?) of "California" over this time. :)

81 points by pmcpinto 10y ago

Why does every article on Racked read like a Patrick Bateman monologue, stripped of any sense of irony? It's as if aliens were writing about human society from the perspective of a banner ad.

nether 10y ago
I imagine every article about style/fashion/clothes sounds that way to HN readers. Consider pg's article on "submarines,” which to me was just a blithe lack of understanding of cyclical fashion, and his noble defense of wearing sneakers in professional settings. A fashion editor trying to write about trends in software frameworks would probably fare no better.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  I actually find a lot of style and fashion stuff interesting. But there's something about the unsanitized corporate speech of Racked that is just unnerving. I know we live in an era where subtext is text, but this is more like parody as sincerity.
- SilasX 10y ago
  The submarine article wasn't denying the existence of fashion cycles. I don't know how you got that message. It was about articles that exist to promote what someone wants to be the style, and which the journalist wrote about because a PR agent did the work for them. (Rather than because the journalist independently spotted a real trend.) There's a big difference between "oh wow react is on the rise, let me write about that" vs "a google employee fed me a prewritten article about how all the cool kids use angular, I'll just pass that on."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

killjoywashere 10y ago

While I see the merit to this article, keeping the 'whitewashing' theme alive in the public sphere, I have to say, with a twinge of regret, stuff like this helped put Trump in the White House.

stephancoral 10y ago
No, it didn't. Take your lukewarm half-formed boilerplate takes elsewhere
- dang 10y ago
  Please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that.
  - stephancoral 10y ago
    Maybe you should start banning accounts that post milquetoast inanities
    - banachtarski 10y ago
      Are you a left-leaning parody of a Trump supporter? If so it's a pretty brilliant ploy.
    - killjoywashere 10y ago
      Perhaps you'd prefer Nicholas Eberstadt's recent article in Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
  - lightedman 10y ago
    Wouldn't your exact comment right now be considered unsubstantive since it's a redundant repeat of rules which should have already been read by the user? Here's something substantive for you, you should really get to work on getting rid of the nonsense all caps rule or fix your lack of italics notation for Braille users. Every Braille user I've sent here laments your utter lack of disability conformity such as italics notation, things which real hackers should've been able to do from day one. http://www.brl.org/intro/session03/symbols.html http://www.brl.org/intro/session03/symbols.html

roflchoppa 10y ago

SoCal does have a feeling of superficiality, you can pick up on it a little after people move back to the Bay from LA.... but then again the Bay so many people that have this feeling of entitlement that came outta no where.. just something I've noticed within the past 15 years.... On the flip side, there are also a handful of people that I met around from both areas that are down to earth. Maybe it's just high concentration.... or monkey see, monkey do.

phamilton 10y ago
As a SoCal transplant to the bay area, my biggest observation is that it's basically mandatory to "have a cause" in the bay area. It doesn't really matter what it is. It could be cycling over driving. It could be how you eat. It could be political activism. But it has to be something, or people look at you funny. Aside from the Venice Beach / Santa Monica scene (which is absolutely superficial), I find SoCal to be much more laid back. Live and let live, if you will.
- thinkmassive 10y ago
  Somewhat ironically you must have an _approved_ cause, or you may be judged as much as not having one. To be fair I've found this is far more prevalent in SF than the South Bay, so I think that's where it comes from.
  - gydfi 10y ago
    I'd say it matters a great deal what it is -- for instance if your cause is the pro-life movement or the expulsion of illegal aliens then you might have difficulties getting social approval in San Francisco. I find it a hilarious instance of California insularity that the grandparent post thinks it "doesn't matter what it is" -- I'm guessing that he'd failed to consider the fact that non-left causes even exist.
    - mattlevan 10y ago
      You can't blame him. SF is a giant leftist bubble.

thinkmassive 10y ago

“It’s a common language,” says Buchman. “You have images of the ocean, sand, and pretty people smiling and laughing, and that’s universal.” Yep, as everyone knows, California invented beaches. There were no "beach kids" before California, and everyone who grows up elsewhere on any coast is emulating southern California.

setr 10y ago
The particular form of beach kid immortalized (to the extent of maybe a few decades more) on californian beaches Which is a style replicated, distinctly with the californian beach in mind, in other locales Obviously not because californian beaches were the pinnacle of beaches, but because the media treated it as such, and entered a positive feedback loop to entrench its (current) position there In the same way, the East Coast has beaches are associated with yuppies and yatchs, and the hawaiins with hawaiins and tourists Its an image ingrained within the American conciousness; regardless of whatever "true" merit it might have, the descriptive language is universal (to all who consume american media, and media deriving from it).
- asveikau 10y ago
  > In the same way, the East Coast has beaches are associated with yuppies and yatchs, I am going to guess you haven't spent a lot of time in New Jersey.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    Exactly. Style comes from what the media portrays of it, not the reality on the ground.
  - mkane848 10y ago
    Seaside "beach kid" here, our beach culture is most definitely NOT any of that shit. Sure, it exists as an outlier (some of the families have owned property down here forever, super wealthy, etc), but the main things that come to mind for beach culture are just the simple things like the boardwalk, beach, and the local shops. The yuppies and yachts mostly come from NY and elsewhere ;)

santaclaus 10y ago

I'm not really sure where this idea of a laid back California comes from... in my general experience people seem way more agro on BART and Muni and around the bay than in NYC. Hell, even in LA when going out for drinks bouncers and such seem way more keyed up than on the east coast (or the north west).

deaddodo 10y ago
Californian here. Completely opposite experience, especially SoCal vs the Northeast. NYC, Boston, northern Virginia, etc...always seemed like people were much more uptight and kept to themselves. Boston especially, you seem to have to get through like 4 layers of rudeness/offputedness before people open up to you...which doesn't always seem worth it. Meanwhile, going to a friends' party in San Diego or Los Angeles and I can walk out with 4 new friends/acquaintances, which lead to more invites and potential connections. And the differences only get further expounded professionally. I regularly go to work in a T and jeans. Sometimes even board shorts, when summer gets toasty enough. I would never dream of doing any of that working for any companies I've interacted with on the East Coast. In fact, it's regularly something they'll bring up in conversation. There's a plethora of reasons behind those differences and neither is necessarily bad, but that's where my opinion of "laid back" versus not stems from.
- alpha_squared 10y ago
  Anecdotal as well, I suppose, but my experience is similar. I grew up and lived in LA for 20 years, frequenting San Diego (SD) once or twice a year on average before moving there for about a year. I've been to some of the large cities (St. Louis, Newark, Boston, Detroit, NYC, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento) and now live in Seattle. Northern California (NorCal) is very different from Southern California (SoCal), which itself is very different than any other place I've been to. The sun, the sand, the year-round summer-like temperatures -- it all feeds into the lifestyle. This was much more pronounced in SD than in LA. I had trouble conversing with random people on the street or elsewhere in the Northeast or Northwest (Midwest was actually easier than SoCal). The near-constant pleasantness of the weather encourages you to be more active and "out" more often. It was a very regular thing in SD to go watch sunsets on the beach (regardless of season) after work. The proximity to the border made it pretty hard to find a bad Mexican food place and the tacos -- oh, the tacos -- were amazing. There are whole companies (mostly startups) that brand themselves as a "go surf in the early morning, come to work later" sort of place. There certainly is a myth and sort of "magic" to it that I don't even think the movies and media capture.

aorth 10y ago

> Mine starts at birth, in San Diego. [...]. I realized that California didn’t belong to me soon after moving out East. I was also born and raised in San Diego, but left ten years ago, and it feels weirder and weirder every time I go back. Meanwhile, everywhere I am in the world—Thailand, Kenya, Bulgaria, England, etc—I see California t-shirts or hear Tupac rapping about California on the radio. So I've also felt and wondered about the myth (legend?) of "California" over this time. :)