Oops. We killed her. She's deleted her naughty little livejournal!

I stumbled to the bathroom and managed to get to the toilet and threw up until I was puking bile. Jules standing there in the shower looking down at me and looking dead said "if only I could hide it as well as you do." Then for different reasons I came close to a breakdown and suddenly hated him more than I'd ever hated anything, but he said head up, baby, this shit isn't new to you anymore, you never do anything you don't intend to. So I got over it, as one does, then a smile and a kiss and a fuck and a song and back to normal.

Electric Self

In Love with a Feeling

The person is thrilling, people who had thoughts really were chance. With that someone, no less. 

Beware the Indie Sleaze

This article was originally published in Frankie Magazine #20.

Regardless of your geographic tendency or sociological demographic, by the time you hit early adulthood, you will have had the misfortune of spending a Friday night at ‘The Cliché.’ The Cliché is a chain of nightclubs around Australia that use the same dingy decor and audio aftershave from DJ Lobotomy to attract a specific clientele. A Starbucks for sleazes.

Breath on nose. Hands through hair. Eyes on boobs. Foot in mouth. For honest, underground kids, the reality of the pub sleaze is a distant memory that no indie safehouse could ever rekindle. Or could it? Perhaps there’s a force at play more brazen and corrupt than any Dazza in a singlet, and who could inflict more emotional damage than Spiro the legal exec ever could. Let me introduce the concept of the Indie sleaze. A story that no Frankie reader should miss.

A few years ago, I happily did my head in about the paradox of approaching girls in bars. I felt like some social Archimedes sitting in the bath of my own self-loathing. If I start talking to a girl, won’t it be bleedingly obvious that I’m attracted to her and she’ll think I’m cracking onto her and hate me? You reeker! I exclaimed. Thus I did nothing but carefully implode on myself and grew so confident about the severity of my neuroses that I deemed them entertaining enough to express on stage. My mumbling, bumbling, fumbling stage act grew vaguely popular, to the point where I found myself in a verifiable position to speak to ladyfolk. To be honest, after a few years of hit and miss gigs and doing some serious ‘work’ on myself, I’d grown to be, oh and it pains me to say this, kind of confident. This did not fit in with my high school idea of myself or my stage persona at all. Frankly, it was becoming a real downer.

After speaking to these arty, bohemian girls, wrapped in grandmother’s wallpaper, eyes like manga moons through Venetian fringe, I detected a fragility that would be alienated by any bravado or showmanship. Despite the emotional rush of the after show, I had to ensure that I was no Pepe Le Pew to their…ah…the cat…that Pepe Le Pew chases around. So, drawing inspiration from another cartoon character, I modelled myself on Eeyore. With eyes and voice lowered, I found it wasn’t hard to draw from the well of low self-esteem that was constantly bubbling beneath me like the rivers of slime in Ghostbusters Two. I didn’t feel manipulative at all, if anything, I was being acutely honest, and taking an opportunity to offload my past tales of loneliness and frustration to someone pretty who seemed interested. Rather than pour on the charm and one liners, I’d pour on the insecurities and monologues. And with pink ribbon tied to my listless donkey tail, I was dubbed ‘the indie sleaze.’ A softie with a hard on. Where was the sex in the city episode about this?

The title was given to me by a girl who I met for debrief drinks a few months after a one night stand. Her complaint was that I’d been far too nice and sensitive and expressive and emotional for a fling, and that she’d assumed from my behaviour that it meant something more. “You’re the worst kind of sleaze,” she’d said. “At least with dodgy guys you know it’s just about sex.” By removing myself from the disaster men of ‘The Cliché’ I had managed to create a mutant hybrid of their behaviour which hurt girls even more. Whereas they’d be trying to feel her breasts, I’d be trying to feel her childhood. When they’d been breaking out of the house, I’d been breaking eggs for breakfast.

Thus, I became so paranoid at being known as a sleaze that I lost all my confidence, and went back to good old fashioned sitting in the corner at 2am staring at girls out the sides of my glasses. I was miserable, and genuinely felt like I needed saving. Now, that’s when the offers really flooded in.

Climbing Back on the Chair of Obscurity

So.​.​.​ Just a littl​e note.​

When going​ to a party​ in the bush,​ try to avoid​ creek​s.​ The poten​tial of you falli​ng in there​ while​ high IS high.​ It may appea​r funny​ at the time espec​ially​ if it's a someo​ne else'​s expen​se.​ Howev​er when the come down kicks​ in and you look down at yours​elf not even wine can help sedat​e you now. You tend to cry, and trust​ me, cryin​g while​ comin​g down after​ falli​ng in the creek​ and being​ in the bush all night​ is not at all prett​y.​

Secon​dly,​ leave​ your phone​ in a safe place​.​ I have been throu​gh 7! SEVEN​!​ mothe​r fucki​ng phone​s in the past six month​s and now it's just sad. 

Furth​ermor​e,​ try to avoid​ socia​l exper​iment​s while​ at the hopet​oun (​rock'​n'​roll club)​ no one was impre​ssed and at the end of it you just end up feeli​ng like somew​hat of a twat.​ 

In refer​ence to my subje​ct line,​ I'm climb​ing back on the chair​ of obscu​rity to make this year work in my favou​r in every​ aspec​t.​ Who knows​,​ maybe​ i'll even attem​pt to quit smoki​ng those​ damn,​ flavo​ursom​e,​ mmmm cigar​ettes​.​ 

Peace​ Leah xx

wow baby thats some dahl

Overheard on the New York Subway....

Guy on cell, in monotone with no pauses: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, I need you, I need you, I need you, bitch. 

(hangs up)

Pictorial

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

COVER STORY

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. (Cover story of Adbusters Issue #79.)

I

‘m sipping a scummy pint of cloudy beer in the back of a trendy dive bar turned nightclub in the heart of the city’s heroin district. In front of me stand a gang of hippiesh grunge-punk types, who crowd around each other and collectively scoff at the smoking laws by sneaking puffs of “fuck-you,” reveling in their perceived rebellion as the haggard, staggering staff look on without the slightest concern.

The “DJ” is keystroking a selection of MP3s off his MacBook, making a mix that sounds like he took a hatchet to a collection of yesteryear billboard hits, from DMX to Dolly Parton, but mashed up with a jittery techno backbeat.

“So… this is a hipster party?” I ask the girl sitting next to me. She’s wearing big dangling earrings, an American Apparel V-neck tee, non-prescription eyeglasses and an inappropriately warm wool coat.

“Yeah, just look around you, 99 percent of the people here are total hipsters!”

“Are you a hipster?”

“Fuck no,” she says, laughing back the last of her glass before she hops off to the dance floor.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

***

T

ake a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

This obsession with “street-cred” reaches its apex of absurdity as hipsters have recently and wholeheartedly adopted the fixed-gear bike as the only acceptable form of transportation – only to have brakes installed on a piece of machinery that is defined by its lack thereof.

Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.

“These hipster zombies… are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents,” wrote Christian Lorentzen in a Time Out New York article entitled ‘Why the Hipster Must Die.’ “And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”

With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles.

***

Standing outside an art-party next to a neat row of locked-up fixed-gear bikes, I come across a couple girls who exemplify hipster homogeneity. I ask one of the girls if her being at an art party and wearing fake eyeglasses, leggings and a flannel shirt makes her a hipster.

“I’m not comfortable with that term,” she replies.

Her friend adds, with just a flicker of menace in her eyes, “Yeah, I don’t know, you shouldn’t use that word, it’s just…”

“Offensive?”

“No… it’s just, well… if you don’t know why then you just shouldn’t even use it.”

“Ok, so what are you girls doing tonight after this party?”

“Ummm… We’re going to the after-party.”

***

Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice, who recently left the magazine, is considered to be one of hipsterdom’s primary architects. But, in contrast to the majority of concerned media-types, McInnes, whose “Dos and Don’ts” commentary defined the rules of hipster fashion for over a decade, is more critical of those doing the criticizing.

“I’ve always found that word [“hipster”] is used with such disdain, like it’s always used by chubby bloggers who aren’t getting laid anymore and are bored, and they’re just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable,” he says. “I’m dubious of these hypotheses because they always smell of an agenda.”

Punks wear their tattered threads and studded leather jackets with honor, priding themselves on their innovative and cheap methods of self-expression and rebellion. B-boys and b-girls announce themselves to anyone within earshot with baggy gear and boomboxes. But it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it.

***

“He’s 17 and he lives for the scene!” a girl whispers in my ear as I sneak a photo of a young kid dancing up against a wall in a dimly lit corner of the after-party. He’s got a flipped-out, do-it-yourself haircut, skin-tight jeans, leather jacket, a vintage punk tee and some popping high tops.

“Shoot me,” he demands, walking up, cigarette in mouth, striking a pose and exhaling. He hits a few different angles with a firmly unimpressed expression and then gets a bit giddy when I show him the results.

“Rad, thanks,” he says, re-focusing on the music and submerging himself back into the sweaty funk of the crowd where he resumes a jittery head bobble with a little bit of a twitch.

The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks. While punk, disco and hip hop all had immersive, intimate and energetic dance styles that liberated the dancer from his/her mental states – be it the head-spinning b-boy or violent thrashings of a live punk show – the hipster has more of a joke dance. A faux shrug shuffle that mocks the very idea of dancing or, at its best, illustrates a non-committal fear of expression typified in a weird twitch/ironic twist. The dancers are too self-aware to let themselves feel any form of liberation; they shuffle along, shrugging themselves into oblivion.

***

P

erhaps the true motivation behind this deliberate nonchalance is an attempt to attract the attention of the ever-present party photographers, who swim through the crowd like neon sharks, flashing little blasts of phosphorescent ecstasy whenever they spot someone worth momentarily immortalizing.

Noticing a few flickers of light splash out from the club bathroom, I peep in only to find one such photographer taking part in an impromptu soft-core porno shoot. Two girls and a guy are taking off their clothes and striking poses for a set of grimy glamour shots. It’s all grins and smirks until another girl pokes her head inside and screeches, “You’re not some club kid in New York in the nineties. This shit is so hipster!” – which sparks a bit of a catfight, causing me to beat a hasty retreat.

In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.

What they may or may not know is that “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.

***

“If you don’t give a damn, we don’t give a fuck!” chants an emcee before his incitements are abruptly cut short when the power plug is pulled and the lights snapped on.

Dawn breaks and the last of the after-after-parties begin to spill into the streets. The hipsters are falling out, rubbing their eyes and scanning the surrounding landscape for the way back from which they came. Some hop on their fixed-gear bikes, some call for cabs, while a few of us hop a fence and cut through the industrial wasteland of a nearby condo development.

The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Hipsters to the Core

My Comment in Reference to the Article Above 

What a compelling argument you make. I'm from Sydney and it's very much alive. Rock 'n' roll then became indie then became a mixture of electro rock (I'm so postmodern I write everything in wingding's) shite. The rockers from the early naughties have all grown out of their skinny leg jeans and have become ( I think ) actually quite cool. They don't feel the need to put themselves on display. They are like cats on the prowl at night. As for the hipsters, they will go 10 kms out of their way to go to that bakery to eat quiche and smoke a cigarette while sitting in the gutter. But when it comes down to it they are actually quite tame. They're jealous, Pompous pricks. Some go as far as wanting to appear down and out, when in actual fact their dad's bank account is big enough for them to fly to Italy for the summer.

 

I believe they are pretentious and fake.