Ok, so, next Disney masterpiece.

Well, we have got this one idea. You’re gonna love it.

We’re thinking about basing it on one of the most depressing novels ever written. No no it’s ok! No-one’s actually read it because it was written in 1831. Also it’s really boring, despite being about gypsies and deformed people and sexual deviancy.

The protagonist? Oh, you’re gonna love him. He’s got this name no one can pronounce… it sounds like a cross between a motor scooter and an acquired brain injury. Oh and he’s super ugly. Seriously, really ew. Not ‘oh sure he’s The Beast but he’s still kind of hot in a lion/big cat way’ ugly. Proper ‘Jesus Christ did David Lynch do art design on this film!?’ ugly.

So ugly dude meets a Gypsy ‘dancer’ (coughprostitutecough) with a pretentious name, and she saves him from a mob of peasants who tie him to a big wheel and through shit at him. Did we mention he’s disabled? Yeah, he is.

And we’re thinking ugly dude can be voiced by an actor who has a IMDB board topic titled ‘YAY!!!! He’s still alive!’ (This is true. Poor Tom Hulce.)

Oh and the ugly dude’s ‘father’ is this crazy dude called Freddo or Frotting or something. He killed ugly dude’s mother and then tried to drown ugly dude in a well which people would then drink from and get dead baby bits in. Ew ew ew ew gross.

Froggy doesn’t kill ugly dude but instead makes him ring bells all day so he’s probably deaf now too, but when the ‘dancer’ seems to be macking on ugly dude (she’s actually just being polite), Frodo gets all crazy jealous and goes into this ‘I want to fuck you because you’re the devil’ routine. Oh and he sniffs her hair in a reeeeaaaallllllyyyy creepy way. In case the kids aren’t gnawing their own lips off in bewildered terror yet, we have this scene:

Oh, there’s a knight guy called Sir Pheobe who’s going to be voiced by… yep, you guessed it! KEVIN KLINE! Kind of obvious I know, but there’s just something so… what’s the word—chivalric? Yeah that’s the word— about those dulcet tones. Mmm. Manly.

Pheobe also wants to bone the ‘dancer’ but then some serfs get burned in a hut and there’s some musical numbers in the catacombs involving sewerage and human corpses, and the ‘dancer’ gets burned at the stake (it’s ok she comes back to life later. Is she a zombie? We’ll let the audience decide.), then ugly dude pours molten lead all over innocent passers-by, Ferrero, tries to rape stab the ‘dancer’ while screaming scripture but the he dies so PHEW.

Anyway it all ends happily when the ‘dancer’ tells ugly dude she JUST WANTS TO BE FRIENDS and arranges for a chinless peasant girl to feel ugly dude’s face (she’s hardly going to be fussy about what constitutes a ‘normal’ face) and then the mob of peasants carry ugly dude off into the sunset (probably to eat) and Pheobe and the ‘dancer’  get sacrilegious all over that Cathedral, baby.

Oh, we nearly forgot! Jason Alexander is going to be in it! You know, GEORGE!

When this song came out I was living in Vienna. One night we went to party up lots of stairs in somebody’s apartment and they were playing this song. It got really hot with all the people so we opened up all the windows to cool down. Later when we left the building the people in the other apartments poured buckets of water all over us. They hadn’t complained about the noise or anything, they just poured water on us.

What time of year was it? I asked. Were you there in the cold?

I was there from winter till spring, so yes, mostly very cold. Our landlady would light this little coal pot-bellied stove at 4pm every afternoon. But we never got home till ten at night, so it was always stone cold by the time we got there. We were cold; cold for months and months.

But then spring came and we were so happy. I remember walking through a park one day in early spring and coming across that famous statue of Mozart. I was just so excited I gave him a big hug.

May 1st is just the best time to be in Vienna or Prague, anywhere like that. May Day is the real workers’ holiday, there’s music on every street corner, everyone out partying.

This was also when she bought the infamous cape I now have.

My Mum was cooler at 19 then I will ever be.

I have a lot of sympathy for those people who became depressed after watching Avatar and realising that none of it actually exists. They can never visit Pandora, never run with the Na’vi, and never live in Hometree. The Avatar universe, though vivid, can never be real, at least not in an ‘I’m just nipping over to Pandora for a few days’ sort of way.

It’s practically metaphysical, this longing for a fictional world.

It’s how I feel about Ankh Morpork. Ankh Morpork, greatest city on the Disc, The Big Wahoonie, City of One Thousand Suprises! Oh that Melbourne should have such a reputation.

I accept that Terry Pratchett’s writing is not literary, whatever that means, and the humour is often more silly than actually funny. He uses cliché with wild abandon, and almost everything is the discworld is essentially parody.

But he is clever too. Terry Pratchett is a master of the ‘logical conclusion’. When he invents something, he knows how, when and why it was invented, and how it will go on to affect everything else. And his writing has the solidity and readability of long practice. And he likes wordplay. A lot.

Above all he understands tropes and their pull on our psyche. Sure, Sam Vimes is a cliché. He’s the quintessential hard-bitten cop with a heart of gold. He’s clever, streetwise and cynical, but forgiving, kind when it’s called for and utterly incorruptible. He gives more than half his pay the widows and orphans of dead watchmen. He always wins out in the end. He is a Character, capital letter and all.

But that doesn’t explain why I hear Sam Vimes’ voice in my head when I read the City Watch novels. Or why I know every line on his face, every expression and gesture. Or why I love him so much.  Those things only come when a piece of fiction stops being enjoyable and starts feeling tangible. It’s one thing to want to know what happens next, it’s quite another to want to be there when it does.

People sneer at fandom, particularly that breed of fandom that eschews the ‘real world’ for an invented one. I don’t really understand this, or, even if I do I don’t like it. I do understand the boredom of the non-fan (you may well be experiencing the sensation right now) when forced to endure the full catalogue of the fan’s knowledge (I’m getting to that bit). But sneering at the very idea of escapist fandom seems narrow, hypocritical and frankly mean spirited. So it’s not ‘real’. What are you, the real police?

I’ve never been to Ankh-Morpork. But I’ve never been to Berlin either. And I know Ankh Morpork considerably better now than I’m ever likely to know Berlin.

I know that Elm Street and Treacle Mine Road border The Shades, and that you don’t go into The Shades after dark. And it’s always after dark in The Shades. I know that Treacle Mine Road is named for the Treacle mines that were once a great source of wealth for the city and that Treacle deposits are the fossilised remnants of prehistoric sugarcane fields.

I know that there’s a new Watch House in Pseudopolis Yard (after the old one was burned down by a dragon from another dimension) and that the cemetery next to the Temple of Small Gods is where watchmen are buried in the glorious expectation of nothing very much (because after you’ve been in the watch for a while, it’s hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone you can’t see).  I know that the river Ankh is so thick that “even an agnostic could walk across it”.

I know that The Assassins Guild shares a wall with the Fools Guild and that The Particulars once had their headquarters on Cable Street. I know that’s where Sam Vimes first learned what people look like after they’ve been tortured. Most of all I know the names: Lobbin Clout and Dolly Sisters. The Shambling Gate and Misbegot Bridge. I know Nap Hill and Dimwell. I know which side of the Ankh you live on if you’re a toff.  I know Sator Square and Scoone Avenue. I know this city.

It’s as old as Rome and political as Florence. It’s as mythic as New York and chaotic as Mumbai. Mostly it’s London—erratic, teetering, comic London. But it’s really the every-city, the epitome of urban clamour, sucking in people and raw materials from the whole world and spitting out culture, thought, invention and ideas.

When I think about Ankh-Morpork, and the fact that no, I’ll never physically go there, never ‘proceed’ with Sam ‘That’s-Mistah-Vimes-to-you” Vimes, I am undeniably sad. I’m as sad as those Avatar fans. But maybe our sadness is better described as a kind of ‘nostalgic homesickness’. I feel the same about Ankh Morpork as I do about other places I’ve loved and had to leave. I long for its streets and smells and people and sensations just as people long for the town they grew up in, or the city they worked in for a year when they were 18. In both cases, these places exist in our minds and memory completely independent from any physical entity, or lack thereof. Physical existence is not a test these sorts of places have to pass.

Also I have a sneaking suspicion that Sam Vimes is major-league silver fox.

(P.S. for bona fide Discworld fans, listen to LCD Soundsystem’s New York I Love You but mentally substitute in Ankh Morpork. It’s uncanny: “Your mild billionaire Mayor’s now convinced he’s a king” “The cops who were bored once they’d run out of crime”)

Omegle conversation log 2009-12-09
You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: hi
You: Hello
You: So tell me, where would you most like to go in the world?
Stranger: im vampire i go to hell
You: Nah, I don’t believe in hell
Stranger: im vampire
You: and even if I did
You: I don’t think vampires would go there
You: you guys are ok by me
Stranger:
You: if it’s ok to eat animal blood, why not human blood?
Stranger: im a lady
You: I am also a lady
You: though I’d usually just say woman
Stranger: i haven’t drinked blood in 50 years
Stranger: human
Stranger: blood
Stranger: i wuit eith it
Stranger: quit imean
You: Wow
You: that must have been hard
You: worse than giving up smoking
Stranger: yes it still is
Stranger: that to
You: you gave up smoking AND blood!
You: Gee, you’re hardcore huh?
Stranger: no
Stranger: alternative
You: Ahhh
You: I see
You: yes, well, I don’t think people would mind you smoking if they realised what you were having to go without
You: though sometimes I think people are more scared of smokers than Vampires
Stranger: yeah me 2
Stranger: i was born in 1901
Stranger: 14 mai
You: Wow
You: that’s awesome
Stranger: :$
You: How was the First World War?
You: I guess you were only 13
You: you might not remmeber it very well
Stranger: no i don’t remeber my human life anymore
You: oh that’s a shame. I bet a lot of historians would like to talk to you.
You: So when did you become a Vampire then?
Stranger: when i was 18
You: Oh, were you dying in the great Influenza epidemic and some handsome Vampire saved you?
Stranger: no
You: pity
You: what happened then?
Stranger: i wanted to be vampire so i looked for them so i whas bitten
You: That’s pretty brave of you
Stranger: :$
Stranger: well if you want something it must happen
You: That’s a good motto for life
You: or, in your case, death
Stranger:
You: So tell me
You: what do you think of all these ‘Twilight’ vampires?
You: Any truth, or is it just silly?
Stranger: some things are right some are not realistick
You: Oh yeah?
You: what’s real?
Stranger: a vampire can’t be woth a human
Stranger: with*
Stranger: we are fast we drink blood
You: too tempting?
You: Would a vampire just be all up in that shit?
You: I expect a human wouldn’t stand a chance
Stranger: ? hoe do you mean?
Stranger: i don’t get you?
You: I mean, if a human and a vampire got together
You: the vampire would just find it too tempting to drink
You: is that what you meant?
Stranger: it’s hard to don’t think of blood, it torture me
You: Poor thing
You: If I were you I’d go back to it
Stranger: i think it’s impossible to be with a human with a hunger like me’
You: there’d probably be a lot of humans willing to let you feast on them
You: Yeah, that Edward Cullen is kind of a pussy
You: he’s probably not even a proper vampire
Stranger: yeah you richt ;P
Stranger: right*
You: So are you sexy? Are all vampires super hot? Or is that a lie too?
You: Oh and what about the glittery skin thing?
Stranger: well that’s not a lie, everything of me atracting people, my smell, my face everything, but that glittery thing is a lie
You: I knew it
You: Stephanie Meyer
You: what a dumb bitch
Stranger:
You: so how do you survive
You: if you don’t drink blood anymore
Stranger: animalblood
You: lame
Stranger:
You: seriously pal
You: go find some willing humans
You: Vampires are totally in now!
You: everyone wants to be one!
Stranger: lol
Stranger: it’s a torture not a passion or something
You: Oh really?
You: you mean there are no perks?
Stranger: i want to be normal
Stranger: like a human
Stranger: i want to sleep i want to get rid of the humanbloodhunger
You: oh that sounds so sad
You: maybe you hould get someone to stake you thorugh the heart
You: no, I take it back
You: don’t do that
Stranger: i want to ‘life’ i don’t want to be death
You: I’ll be your friend, vampire buddy!
Stranger:
You: is there any chance of reversing the process?
Stranger: no
Stranger: ;”9
Stranger: :’(
You: You know, you use a lot more emoticons that I expected a vampire would
Stranger:
You: but I guess you guys are pretty down with the internet
You: I mean, if you can’t go out during the day
You: I expect you spend a lot of time online
Stranger: yea i’ve got nothing to do
Stranger: can i have your emailedresS?
Stranger: mine is: **** (They did give it to me, but I’m not a total douche)
You: That doesn’t sound all that vampiric
You: ok
You: mine is: the_babel_fish@hotmail.com
Stranger: funny name
You: It’s from a book by Douglas Adams
Stranger:
You: man, I wish he’d been made a vampire instead of just getting a heart attack at the gym
You: maybe he was
Stranger: got 2 goo byee
You: you didn’t bite any middle-aged British authors?
You: ok
You: well
You: It’s been grand
You: and do yourself a favour,
You: get some human blood in ya
You: Byee!

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

I think my favourite bit was ‘humanbloodhunger’. I am going to work it into everyday conversation from now on.

When I was little I always wanted to be read to. It wasn’t enough to hear one short story then switch off the light. And picture books were useless, pallid little things. Where was the story? I wanted a good couple of chapters and, most importantly, I wanted to fall asleep while the reading was still going on.  That was key. If I woke up in the middle of the night I wanted more reading.

I hated lying awake in the dark unable to sleep. I’d lie there — happy, well-adjusted child that I was — sorting through my mind looking for things to worry about. Only listening to an absorbing story could distract me for long enough to fall asleep.  And a sufficiently distracting story would generally equal a well written one.

Luckily, my mother was a children’s librarian so the solution was pretty easy. Talking books. Everyone calls them audio books now, but I like talking books better. Every week my mother would bring home a couple of children’s talking books and I’d listen to them as I went to sleep or played in my room or wandered about with my walkman. I really liked talking books.

There’s some point I would like to make here about how talking books were a catalyst for me. How I owe them my love of narrative and my tricky relationship with actual, physical, non read-by-Nigel-Lambert books. I’m not really sure though. Possibly I am just too lazy to read if it’s even the slightest bit taxing. Hence why I can’t get through Paradise Lost, comedic anti-hero Satan or no.

I know I remember more when someone tells something to me than if I read it on the page. And I’m a terrible skimmer. A good book for me is one where I don’t want to skim in search of key plot points and dialogue.  Description and pretty language can go boil their heads. What I want really out of any narrative is jokes and plot twists. Which is why season 3 of Deadwood is the best — it’s the funniest.

At this point it seems appropriate to inform/remind you of the glory that was Helen Cresswell. She wrote about a gazillion children’s books in her 71 years, but the best were those about the Bagthorpe family.

The patriarch of the chaotic, surreal and continually malcontent Bagthorpes is Henry Bagthorpe. He’s what Bernard Black would be if he weren’t Irish. Henry Bagthorpe works as a writer for the BBC, and really, that’s all you need to know about him or the entire series. No one in children’s books has a job like that. He’s also a complete bastard of a character, petty and self important and argumentative. It’s fucking brilliant.

The Bagthorpes, Vlad the Drac, Pongwiffy and so many others that I can’t quite remember at this distance in time were products of children’s writers from the 80s and early 90s. Writers who had watched Monty Python and the Young Ones. They were funny. Not kid funny, but actual funny. You could tell that they weren’t just writing kids books because their other job hadn’t worked out.

And I met all these authors through talking books. Chivers Children’s Audiobooks are an English company who produced most of the talking books bought by Australian libraries. Even before I lived in England I had spent years there. And Chivers also had impeccable taste. If they had produced it, I knew I would like it. And their voice talent! Fuck. Every short-on-work British actor from Dench downward took a turn reading me to sleep in my suburban Canberra bedroom.

Talking books are the reason I got through Jane Eyre. They’re the reason I know the Greek Myths in some detail. They’re the one and only reason I finished True History of the Kelly Gang. They taught me how to unscrew tapes, cut out damaged sections and repair the whole thing without the library ever knowing the service I had rendered them.

Mostly they trained my mind to listen and remember. And though I only ever met one other person who even vaguely shared my love for talking books as a child, I know there are others out there, alone in their bedrooms, listening.

Just what is the problem with Mad Men? It doesn’t suffer from style over substance, which considering the sumptuous style of the show seems the obvious possibility. Nor is it soapy, predictable, badly written or ill conceived. But still, there is something lacking. Some vital ingredient that it hasn’t quite figured out.

I suspect that Mad Men’s failing is handling its mighty ensemble cast. It’s a difficult task, that character wrangling business. Fleshing out each character without sacrificing a strong protagonist, introducing new threads without letting the old ones drop, getting a balance between character types without seeming like one long Benetton ad. We need only look to Deadwood, of course, to see how a genius wrangles an unruly stable of characters.

It’s tricky stuff if you’re not David Milch. And of late Mad Men has been falling well short of that illustrious mark. Where the fuck has Peggy been this season? And Joan? Though after leaving Sterling and Cooper I struggle to see how she’s ever going to get the attention her character deserves. And Salvatore’s unceremonious sacking! Tell me this isn’t the last we’re ever going to see of old Sal!

The knowledge that Betty (and Don’s home life more broadly) were not originally going to appear in the show might explain the current imbalance. All those interesting characters we were thrown in the first episodes have had to be scaled back to accommodate for Betty and the kids. Isn’t it always the way?

More than the struggles with ensemble juggling, Mad Men has been, at times, a little flaccid for my taste. It’s beautiful, quite distractingly so, and it is certainly clever, but where are its teeth? Where are those gripping narrative arcs? I want more of everything and everyone in this show. I want follow-through and I want complexity. I don’t want things to be forgotten and glossed over. I really want to see these people live.

Which is why the latest episode, The Hobo and the Gypsy, was such a joy. There are, of course, several threads in this episode, but the big news was Betty confronting Don with his little shoebox of past lives. I didn’t think she would, and even when she did, I didn’t think Don would cave and finally reveal himself to her. But he did and it was glorious.

I’ve always liked John Hamm as Don, but I’ve never been convinced he’s actually an actor. In this episode he finally proved himself. The moment Betty summons Don into his own office and confronts him with those little silver keys, the panic on Don’s face is a revelation. For the first time he is truly scared. We feel his terror. We all know that moment, when you realise the jig is finally up, you’ve been found out and there’s no going back, the other person has all the power and you are utterly exposed and vulnerable.

Don is angry and scared and overwhelmed by panic (we’re also continually aware that Don’s boho-schoolteacher mistress is sitting waiting for him in the car outside, a brilliant touch which adds yet another layer of tension) and even when he begins to tell Betty the truth, finally, it is hard to believe it’s actually happening. Yet it feels completely right. Dragging out these revelations would have been tedious and condescending, and Mad Men for once gives us just what we want.

There are so many exceptional moments in this episode (Joan breaking a vase over her self-pitying drip of a husband would have been the highpoint any other week) but Don’s confession under the bright lights of his kitchen, that carefully constructed domestic paradise, is not just an episode stealer but a season stealer. Mad Men won our minds in the very first episode of the very first season but at long last it is making a bid for our hearts as well.

Now, if it could just lay off those thunderously obvious metaphors with which it so loves to whack us about the head, we might have a truly great show on our hands.

I am becoming increasingly sympathetic to Tom Ripley. He murders people, sure, but he does it because of his overwhelming desire, nay need, for the cultured, leisurely lifestyle of the born-wealthy (and because of his painfully repressed love for Dickie Greenleaf of course). How unjust that Tom, a clever, sensitive, intelligent man must devote his life to menial work when all he desires is the freedom to pursue the life of the mind?

When he is sent to Italy to find Dickie Greenleaf and bring him home, it is Tom’s first real encounter with the freedom of wealth. Dickie, son of a shipping magnate, lives in the tiny fishing village of Mongibello (Mongey to those who belong) and spends his days painting (badly), eating (too well), swimming, drinking and carousing with the locals. He is the magnanimous American abroad, smiling down from his humbly furnished house by the sea.

Once Tom has had a taste of this life, how could he ever willingly go back to the petty crime and dingy apartments he knew before?  Especially as Tom is much cleverer than Dickie, much more appreciative of the European lifestyle with it’s art and culture and language and style. If youth is wasted on the young, then wealth is most assuredly wasted on the wealthy.

And so Tom murders Dickie, he obtains his fortune, he marries an heiress, he oversees an elaborate art fraud. How much easier if Tom had just been born wealthy? Is it his fault that he was not? Can we blame him for trying to rectify this accident of birth? I don’t. I envy him his tastefully furnished house in the South of France and his classic tailoring and his leisurely routine of reading, learning, thinking.

Jobs are for suckas.

1. Flights.
Better than expected. But then again, I expected to vomit continuously before crash landing in the Pacific, so ‘better’ is not a difficult benchmark. In Melbourne airport I ran into a friend from a creative writing class who was also flying to New York with his partner. These sort of coincidences seem to happen to me quite a lot, and I almost expect them. It’s a small and infinitely strange world.
The only major stress was changing flights in LA. I had an hour to get from my long-haul flight from Melbourne to my flight to New York. If you’ve been to LA airport you will understand my distress at this prospect. LAX is the worst place on earth. No, really, it is. It’s one giant, angry, unhelpful queue. At the end of which you are felt up by airport security staff. And waiting in that queue when there is 20 minutes until your flight is due to take off —TAKE OFF that is, not finish boarding— is a special kind of torture. By the time I got to the front of the security queue and removed my shoes and took off my jacket and got out my passport and boarding pass and heaved my bag up onto to conveyor belt, there were only 10 minutes until my flight was due to leave. Then the security woman told me to put my shoes through the X Ray a second time. I was on the verge of tears at this point and begged to be allowed to run for my flight. The woman stared at me like I was an amoeba who had just shat on her rug, and said I had to put them through again. No exceptions. So I did. Then I ran. Yes, me.
Drawing on my vast reserves of good karma, I willed to plane to be late. And it was. I tend to have quite good luck with travel, so long as none of family are travelling with me. I was the last person to board, red faced and gasping, but I made it. One of the flight staff brought me a glass of water and patted me on the back in a matronly manner. This is something I like (perhaps the only thing) about United. All their staff are middle-aged, motherly, with an air of placid world-weariness which I find endearing. You can’t imagine them ever being particularly happy to see you, but if the plane goes down, they’re gonna know their shit.

2. Taxi Driver.
As mentioned in my status, was named Rosemond Phaniel. Excellent.

3. Bedford Avenue.
The hipster homeland. Though I can think of places in Melbourne that out-hipster it by a long shot. Nice place though.

4. MoMA
Was terribly jetlagged my first morning, so decided to put my inability to sleep past 5am to good use and get to the Museum of Modern Art early. Much too early in fact. They don’t open till 10:30, so I spent my time walking up and down the long line of film equipment vehicles which were parked in the street outside, hoping to see where there were filming or, better yet, some famous people. Sadly saw neither. Just lots and lots of white vans.
When MoMA finally opened up I went up to the top floor and began working my way down. Well, Jesus Christ MoMA. Want to calm the fuck down already? Don’t you realise that if you cram every great work of the 20th century into one space people might become a little overwhelmed? Seriously. Also it’s kind of selfish. Just saying.

5. The Strand Bookstore.
18 miles of books! As they proclaim all over the façade. I don’t know how they’re measuring that exactly, but there were a lot of books in this place. It is outrageous how much cheaper books are in the US. Oh! And, most excitingly, David Sedaris is talking there for free next Tuesday. I shall go along and see his funny little face and listen to his even funnier little voice.

6. Buildings.
I wish I knew more about architecture. I do know enough to be gobsmacked by the beauty of Manhattan however. The massive apartment blocks and skyscrapers around central park are especially impressive. The scale is just monumental. Utterly unhuman, in a good way. They speak so clearly of the industrialists and self-made-men of the early 20th Century, all trying to out-do each other in ostentation. I wish the mega-rich of today put their money into revolutionary architecture, rather than whatever it is they put their money into.

7. Grizzly Bear.
Bought a ticket on e bay to this sold out gig. Was, not surprisingly, amazing. All four of them have such beautiful voices and when, as an encore, they performed acoustically the whole room was enthralled. Gorgeous stuff.

8. Objectified.
Went to see the new film from the guys who made Helvetica (the film, not the typeface, though the film is about the typeface). It’s all about industrial design and the ideas and processes that go into every single manufactured object around you. Spent the whole subway ride home staring at screws and zips and railings. Great film.  Plus, the extended trailer for In The Loop, the film of the excellent British series, The Thick of It. Let’s just say I am really excited. Choice line:
“It’ll be easy peasy lemon squeezy”
“No it won’t, it’ll be difficult difficult lemon difficult”

9. Central Park.
Is awesome.

10. Crying in public.
I walked past the New York Historical Society museum and decided to go in (on the strength of a poster for a Lincoln exhibition they were holding—sorry Jess, it’ll be over by the time you get here, but I took lots of pictures for you). It was interesting in a low-key kind of way. Not much stuff, but some nice information about New York’s landmark buildings, early paintings of the area, artefacts etc. Then, in one corner of an obscure cabinet, was a small collection of things from the World Trade Centre site. A jar of dust, some fragments of glass, a warped dali-esque clock stopped at 9:04. And a transcript of a phone call made by a man on one of the planes that crashed. He was calling his Dad and describing what was going happening on the plane. He told how a stewardess had been stabbed and how passengers were being sick because the plane was flying so erratically. He didn’t think the pilot was in control anymore. He said he thought they were being flown to Chicago to crash into a building there. He told his Dad not to worry. That if it happened it would be quick. Then the transcript records a woman’s scream and the call ends. The man was travelling with his wife and small daughter. Reading this I was suddenly overcome by tears. I sat in front of the case and cried to myself for at least ten minutes. Something about this man, calling his Dad to reassure him that his own death will be swift… I find it an excruciatingly painful idea. Perhaps it’s disingenuous of me to react like that. I didn’t cry when hundreds of thousands were killed during the tsunami, or at the Chinese earthquake or at pretty much any other disaster ever. Perhaps I’m just crying because it happened to westerners like me. But what can I do about that? It’s such a hard thing to talk about without being either insensitive to those who genuinely suffered, or conversely buying into the jingoistic mythologising of 9/11, but being here, enjoying this incredible city, I am overcome by the vast chasm of sadness that 9/11 is in this place.
And on that mightily depressing note, I will end. Tomorrow I’m thinking Coney Island perhaps, or just another day of aimless yet fruitful wandering around the city.
Until then.
xx

Usually I really couldn’t give a fuck about the pro/anti hipster debate. I admit that even writing that sentence made me cringe a little. Surely we all know by now that there are douches aplenty on both sides? Yet recently the anti-hipsters seem to have become considerably more outspoken and deranged (see Brad’s excellent blog post and the piece it refers to for a taste of the debate).  It takes a lot to overcome my natural laziness and apathy, but sometimes you read something so inane, so ill thought out, so downright stupid, that it merits a response. Such was my reaction to Douglas Haddow’s anti-Hipster rant.
So let’s start with some broad strokes on the topic of “Historical Perspective” and why it’s important to have one.
Mr Haddow’s argument seems to be that countercultures after WWII contained within them the genuine desire and possibility for social change and progression, whereas hipsters, because they are devoted to an essentially hollow and vacuous aesthetic, are simply pawns of the system, or, dare I say it, The Man.

First of all, what about the counter-cultures that existed well before WWII? Dandyism? Romanticism? Bohemianism? Does Haddow think youth counter-cultures are something new?

Secondly, I would like to direct a hearty FUCK OFF to the notion that youth counter-cultures were somehow purer, more radical, successful, influential and composed of more intelligent and engaged young people than any youth culture of today.  Young people—in fact why limit foolishness to the young—all people are generally helpless, sheep-like fools, susceptible to fashions, cliques, cults, and the pack mentality. We want to feel like we ourselves belong to a group, whilst at the same time excluding others from the same group. This is why countercultures thrive.

They do not thrive because anyone wakes up one day and realises they want to overthrow the capitalist state. They thrive because someone wakes up one day to find that their best friend has shoved a safety pin through their earlobe. Oh, and so has that cute boy from the club the other night. And that hot girl in the grade above them has too. That’s why young people became punks. That’s why young people became Mods or Rockers or New Romantics or Emos or Hippies. And sure, Punks might have been more overtly political than most current counter-cultures, but I am inclined to see this much more as a quirk of that particular group than of a sign of the imminent destruction of Western civilisation.

Punks were political? Well Mods liked scooters and Hippies liked paisley. So what? These are simply the markers of a particular group.  Which is not to say that the political nature of some counter-cultures was disingenuous, but nor should politicisation be the venerated hallmark of a ‘worthy’ youth counter-culture. Most counter-cultures have not been overtly political, and even when they were, being political was as much about showing you belonged as wearing puffy shirts was about showing you were a New Romantic.

When I was in year Seven, my truly excellent History teacher, a man by the name of Ken Smith (who had the unfortunate habit of gesturing using only his middle fingers, giving the us the constant impression that he was flipping us the bird—then again we were a class of twelve year old girls, so maybe he was) overheard my friend and I discussing the old ‘where would you go if you had a time machine’ question. I wanted to see Queen Elizabeth give the “I have the heart and stomach of a King—and a King of England too” speech, while my friend wanted to go back and meet Roald Dahl or something equally pathetic. Mr Smith listened to us, and then, calmly but firmly made a comment to the effect that we were naive little fools. He pointed out that we lived in a time of unprecedented wealth, health, education, safety, and peace. He doubted we would survive a day in either of our desired destinations (I didn’t raise the objection that my friend only really had to travel to the 1980s to fulfil her wish) and that there was nothing more foolish than romanticising the past. “Compared to the present, the past was a disease-ridden pit of misery” he said, or words to that effect. And this was a History teacher talking. Someone who had spent his life studying and teaching the inglorious past. What an insightful man Mr Smith was.

In his article Haddow draws our attention to a few particularly vile examples of Hipster-dom. A 17 year boy who “lives for the scene” and only wants to have his picture taken.  A group of girls who say they “don’t like that term” when asked if they are hipsters. And 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.”

Oh come on. Is Haddow seriously suggesting that these people are douches BECAUSE they are hipsters? Trust me, 17 year old boys don’t need any help to act like narcissistic arseholes. The fact is, and I’m pretty sure they did a study that confirms this, 99% of people are idiots. And because of the high idiot-to-awesome person ratio, you’re bound to find that in any sub-culture there are a fuck-load of idiots. That’s not the sub-culture’s fault. That’s just humanity being the glorious, stupid, fucked up thing that it is.

Haddow’s article also reeks to the high heavens of petty sensationalism. The fact that an article which proclaims hipsters as the “dead end of Western Civilisation” is the cover story of Adbusters, a magazine who’s readership is presumably largely made up of the very people denigrated in this article, points pretty blatantly to this as an act of Hipster-baiting. Anyone who proclaims that Hipsters signal the end of Western Civilisation is either lying to appear controversial or is a short-sighted, ill-educated, reactionary fool. I wonder which camp Haddow falls into?

People will always flock to counter-cultures and exclusive groups. Some young people become Hipsters, some middle-aged people join country clubs, some old people go to Bingo. Everyone just wants to belong. Yet somehow, it is almost always the young who fall victim to this kind of vitriolic criticism. I must have missed the bit where a desire to wear skinny jeans, fake spectacles and a V-neck American Apparel shirt was deemed the final sign of the forthcoming Apocalypse.

Hipsters are no better or worse than any other sub-culture that has come before. There are plenty of Hipster douchebags, but then there are plenty of douchebags out there, ready and waiting to become hipsters. Perhaps the problem is that hipsters, for various reasons, tend to be wealthy, educated, middle class, and hence more visible in society than many other counter-cultures, making them an easy and soft target.

On a final note, I’d like to remind readers of a similar, and equally bizarre, backlash that took place in the late 1970s.  The ‘Disco Sucks’ movement was equally convinced that Disco spelt the end of ‘genuine’ music and ‘authentic’ culture, whatever the fuck that means. To quote the ever-reliable Wikipedia:

In the late 1970s, Disco music and dancing fads began to be depicted by rock music fans as silly and effeminate… Some listeners objected to the perceived sexual promiscuity and illegal drug use that had become associated with disco music. Others were put off by the exclusivity of the disco scene, especially in major clubs in large cities such as the Studio 54 discotheque, where bouncers only let in fashionably-dressed club-goers, celebrities, and their hangers-on. Rock fans objected to the idea of centring music around an electronic drum beat and synthesizers instead of live performers.

Sound familiar?
Now, let’s all try to keep a little perspective here.

2. Did that guy just heckle a Bergman film? He knows he’s dead right? And that it’s a film?

3. How did all these homeless people afford memberships?

4. Did that woman just shush you for switching your phone off?

5. Is it open day at the local asylum again?

6. Is that girl from my Cinema tute?

7. Is that girl from my Cinema tute too?

8. Where do I sit in the Hipster/Looney Venn diagram of this audience?