Farmers' Markets / Hacker Farm / Boreddrillard

Well it was a little mini apology on the endnotes of an article on Spring Breakers that appeared on the comments of this via the increasingly filmic Reykjavik Sex Farm that got me thinking...

Certainly the term "Farmers' Markets'" and their associated direfolk - the Mumfords, the AlexBlurs - has now become an dreary code for a new form of hatred; the one shared by Hipsters, the accepted one and, until fairly recently, this seemed odd for someone living in a rural(ish) location, surrounded by ACTUAL EXISTING FARMS (TM) on all sides, for a number of reasons:

1) farmers' markets as I knew them were scruffy, broken affairs, punctuated by people who couldn't spell or count with frightening 'Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight in a canoe' expressions...

2) they were cheap ways to buy vegetables

3) chilli-jam was sold, but only to those who's taste buds had been blasted with cigarettes and

4) they mostly just sold very cheap scrumpy and, er, calvados, which flipped yer eyes inside yer head (and which was probably just cast-offs and bad pints from the Babycham orchards)

Now the irony, of course, is that even these farmers' markets are starting to become "Farmers' Markets" and this seems almost too Baudrillardian to be true. A quick look at some of the prices in a market I used to go to all the time because it was cheap and you can settle on the terrible inexorable march of progress capitalism - now dirt on carrots signifies 'authenticity' (as, indeed does the term Earth itself, which seems to have nothing to do with earth), now the distortions in shape are Art, and Art is anything structured to not look like Art.

Digital tics are bonfires, of course. We all fall for it. IX Tab crackles are fire crackles AND sampled fire crackles. There's a Merry Go Round that you can't get off because it refuses to accept it exists at all.

Once the last ACTUAL EXISTING FARM has been flooded out the market (replaced by a Bangkok style floating market - *quick clap* how niche!) the simulacrum will have taken over entirely and places like Somerset will themselves be flipped over into a Hyper West Land, perhaps even using and accommodating IX Tab and Hacker Farm et al as a new sign of the Old-E West.

It's exhausting keeping behind the game.