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Alien

Indigenous Alien

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

I think it's a little sad that what was once considered "counterculture" has now become mainstream culture in so many ways, and a way of dress, growing your hair long and listening to certain music was once a sign of subversion but is now so commercialized that it actually supports "the Establishment" by perpetuating the cult of consumerism, rather than subverting it. "The Friendly Stranger"'s super trendy flagship store in the Queen Street West neighbourhood is a good example of this phenomenon.

When I was in high school the Grateful Dead was experiencing a revival of popularity. I went to a private school at Bayview and Lawrence here in T.O., a fairly affluent area in North York. I was one of the few whose parents were in a lower economic bracket; it was only thanks to the assistance of my grandparents and my dad's scaping by that we were able to manage the tuition, but in all other respects it was a hard knock life. I wore used jeans from Kensington Market and my dad's old lumber jackets and scarfs my mom had knitted in the 70's as well as made a lot of my own skirts and things mainly because I didn't have the money to invest in shopping at malls and places like that. Then all of a sudden the subcultures of the early 90s started cashing in on young people, and there were designer grunge jackets selling in Le Chateau for $40 just like the old castoffs I was wearing from my dad's closet, and guys in my class were sewing Grateful Dead patches onto their $90 Mountain Co-op backpacks, buying $100 Birkenstocks with woolly socks, growing their hair long and dropping acid under the bridge outside school between classes, then driving their parents' cars around at night. It was as if you needed money to look like a person who didn't have any.

Ten years later, nothing has changed; I know a lot of people who "look the part," i.e. dreads, patchouli oil, bells, etc....who claim to be all about the love and "sensitive energetically," etc, but are actually just as petty as the rest of us and give the true spirit of hippiedom, which is be yourself, question authority, question mass media, live the life you were born to lead, not what society tells you, a value system which I think is portable enough to be applicable no matter what style of jeans or hair you wear, whether you live in a condo or a yurt.

This excerpt from an article in Eye Magazine's "Moondoggie" column by Gord McLaughlin beautifully sums up this point:

"The Rebel angels

BY GORD McLAUGHLIN

I love it when a book comes out that crystallizes my random thinking on a subject. Without having done any of the research or writing, I can smack people on the head with its hard cover and say, "See? I was right."

Such a book is The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed (HarperCollins Canada, $29.95). Authors Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue convincingly -- and just snidely enough -- that while the counterculture purports to be a force against capitalism, it's more like oxygen feeding the fires of consumption. I'll explain in due course what this has to do with inserting metal rods into one's penis.

The Rebel Sell takes calculated swipes at Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine (for getting into the running-shoe business) and Toronto-based brand-hater Naomi Klein (for mistaking her high-status downtown loft for a sign of rebellion). It undresses the consumer-in-hipster's-clothing, a domesticated beast whose droppings can be found on newsprint all over Toronto.

Heath and Potter trace current countercultural thinking to a post-war reaction against the fascism that had threatened Europe. More paranoia about "the system" emerged in the '50s around revelations of the advertising industry's psychographic research and subliminal tactics. Yet as sure as day follows night, hippiedom begat yuppiedom, often spending more on a particular item in order to display their mark of rebellious distinction.

It got me to pondering the whole notion of rebellion. What drives us to individuate ourselves through the trappings of our lives, as if the surface is what matters, and what the fuck is an authentic experience anyway?

If the whole theoretical point of rebelling against the dominant culture is to slip the bonds of civilization and exist in a more natural, less alienating state, then surely hedonism is a purer form of subversion than competitive consumerism or destructive anarchy. It's a stance I've taken from time to time, not for any articulated political reasons but simply to serve my unreconstructed love of pleasure. Now I see that a stance is all it was. As John Goodman's psycho-salesman character said of John Turturro's writer character in Barton Fink, I'm just a tourist with a typewriter."
_________________
"Never doubt for a minute that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead

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Obviously, if Alien is important to you, so you should have access to as much information as possible on the subject. Remember, even when you locate what you need, there might be another source of Alien information available that is better so you should check out several resources before deciding which is right for you.

Alien - Personal Virtues are the qualities of life to which every Scorpio Citizen (and, ideally, everyone else) should aspire. They are the heart of the Scorpio Gaia way, and are thought to be those qualities which gave the Zodiac Republic the moral strength to conquer and civilize the world. Today, they are the rods against which we can measure our own behavior and character, and we can strive to better understand and practice them in our everyday lives.

Scorpio Current Affairs

The poorest Scorpio man in the world is looking for his future wife.
"She must be a natural woman of virtue, because I'm not." Scorpio man says.
If you know where is she, please let me know.

  » Single Man Scorpio - Melbourne Australia