Post-Postmodern = Altermodern?

I picked up the newest copy of Adbusters today - a publication that I can't decide equals brilliance or neo-hipster arrogance - and I read a very interesting piece by a Douglas Haddow. Well, the first half of it was interesting anyway. The later half goes on and on on a droll anti-capitalistic tirade, which may have been interesting if it had said anything new or offered any new ideas on how to fix it instead of just lamenting about how awful it is. But the first half is all about the newly crowned Altermodern, taken from The Tate's Triennial of the same name, of 2009. It heralds that the Postmodern is finally dead, and the Altermodern has slayed the Warholian beast and taken the crown! Hooray!

Haddow makes very good commentary on Lady Gaga and Kanye West which I might go into later, but all his critique of Altermodern, thought up by French theorist/curator Nicolas Bourriaud, was so scathing I had to check it out. I must admit I hadn't heard that Postmodernism was dead yet, being that it is splashed all over every piece of media on the entire planet, and I was eager to see what had taken its' place.

So I headed over to the Altermodern Manifesto and as I read it, I swear I had multiple intellectual orgasms . . . Artists looking at multiculturalism and identity? Yes! Globalised perception? Oh yes! A stripping of a western centered ideal and moving toward polygamous, multi-national ideal on how to view the world?! YES, YES DON'T STOP!

Then, out of nowhere, it went soft. Why? Because I looked at the work in the show. I had thoughts and feeling streaming back to me as when I saw 2008's Whitney Biennial. The whole show, (with admittedly a few gems spread around within), was for the most part, a pure mess of sheepish artists with clearly no leader all, wandering about, taking up grass, chewing it up into cud for a bit and then spitting it out and calling it art.

The Tate's Triennial evokes the same response.

Not to be crass, but seriously, what the fuck man? Mr. Bourriard puts together this fabulous manifesto about global perspective and multinational artistic leadership, and this is it? If it is, then my friends, Postmodern is not dead at all. All it has done is pulled a Madonna and reinvented itself into something that encompasses new ideals but is really the same old mess deep down. And no offense to Madonna for comparing her to this.

Granted, I have not seen the show in person. And perhaps if I somehow do see it somewhere in its' entirety, I will eat every last one of words right down to the serifs. And in some ways, I actually do hope I'm wrong. Because if this is what the next wave of art is going to look like - not only does it not encompass anything the Altermodern Manifesto says - I think all of us other artists who are producing work that actually follows more of the manifesto will have our work cut out for us . . . no pun intended.

I will say that I agree with Haddow about one thing. If Altermoderism fails, it will be because it is an extension of Modernism in the first place. It fails to get at the root. And if it's anything the closing of the last decade taught humanity, it's that society needs a good uprooting not just a good weed-whacking.

Oh, and might I just add that the anti-capitalist Adbusters has an article praising Avatar . . . I'm just saying.

Perhaps I'm more relevant than I thought . . .

So tonight I accidentally misspelled my blog URL and put this into my toolbar:

http://justinrapaelroykovich.blogpsot.com

And instead of my blog, it gave me this.

So, this means one of three things:

One, that the rapture is coming and this is a divine intervention telling me so.

Two, that these people buy bulk blogspot addresses and just spam there way onto as many misspelled sights as possible.

Or three, my favorite, that someone actually saw my blog and decided I was enough of a heathen to then purposely redirect those who mistype my blog address to a website devoted to the rapture.

I'm sticking to reason three. It makes me feel that someone thinks I'm relevant enough to go out and try to direct people away from what I'm saying.

Obama-rama and The New World Order, Part 2

So speaking of those obsessed with The X-Files, I had on my Netflix cue a film called America: From Freedom to Facism, directed and produced by Aaron Russo. I love all this conspiracy theory crap, if for no other reason I feel like whether or not it's true, it makes one think about the things that should matter. Despite the fact that some claims are totally out there, there is always an element of truth in them that should be looked at. However, back in the day, Russo was a music producer working with many influential artists including Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Led Zepplin, etc. and he later directed Bette Midlar in The Rose. This film is about 5 years old, made during the height of the Bush insanity, but the gist is about the Federal Reserve and it's shadow elite that really truly run the government. Also included is how we are not constitutionally liable to pay income tax. Sweet! Given the recent economic situation, it's a timely revisit.

Also, somewhat ironically, I got a letter in the mail today from the State of Virginia saying that I owe them a couple bucks and that if I don't pay it by a certain date, that they are going to go into my bank account and forcefully take the money. I, perhaps somewhat naively, didn't think that was legal. Lo and behold, it is. Granted, it takes a court order, but if you fuck with the fed, I can't imagine it would be that hard to get one. Makes me wonder, if that is constitutional? I don't know, but it was what I was thinking going into watching this movie.

I have to admit that I was terrified by the film, as all good propaganda is meant to do. I won't get into the lot of it, but Russo does a good job defending his points, and those points are actually kinda good. Points like, you know, that bankers should not be more powerful than the government, issues about The Federal Reserve being an independent banking institution separate from the actual government, that the main usage of people's income tax is used to pay off interest on the national debt not on national resources like roads, education, etc.

But here's always the thing with films like this: they take you for the ride, and then you come to find out all the back story behind it. Turns out Russo was good friends with Alex Jones, a right wing radio host/media entrepreneur whose latest film is on the Fall of the Republic, and . . . (drumroll please) Obama and The New World Order. Another serendipitous occurrence. You should check out the movie site, it's full of theories on the Anti-Christ. Just so you're prepared for the second coming and all.

Then, after a little googling, I come to find out on a blog that Russo himself owed almost $2 Million in back taxes. Really? Is that not somewhat a conflict of interest? I'm sure you will say, "well that's because he was choosing not to pay!" Well, $2 mil is a lot of money for an out of work movie director. I'm just saying. Then there are the issues of the tax organizations he interviews. For example, www.tax-honesty.org says that if you watch ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, or CNN that you are grossly misinformed. Hmm, guess which major news channel is left out. Then we come to find out that almost all of the people interviewed for this film are major supporters of Texas Republican Representative Ron Paul. *sigh*

And this isn't to say that Russo doesn't make some good points. For starters, his interview with former IRS Commissioner Sheldon Cohen is horrendous. Horrendous in the way Mr. Cohen responds to Russo's questions, and I find it difficult to believe that it could have been edited to paint Mr. Cohen in a certain light. I mean, the man basically says that the IRS is above the law. That's alarming.

At the end of the film, he also goes into the implanting of microchips into masses of people and how scary that can be. What that has to do with income tax I'm not sure, but it's still interesting. But then we find out that he's crazy and it makes all the stuff he says just seem like rubbish, which is disappointing. I kinda felt the same way when I first read Naomi Wolf's book The End of America, but at least Wolf is a semi-respected author who doesn't jump on all the conspiracy bandwagon nonsense. The difference is credibility. While Wolf goes out on a limb, at least she has the credentials to back her up. After researching the film, Russo's integrity takes a hit, which is a shame, because if he had done more research, this film could have been powerful.

And here's the thing: yes, these things should be investigated. I'm all for transparent government. Yes, The Patriot Act is detrimental to our democracy. Yes, the normal citizen should be more aware of their rights and do more proactivity to ensure them. But why aren't normal people saying these things? People who don't have to bring up the anti-christ when Obama's name is mentioned. Or Bush's for that matter. (Please, if that man was the anti-christ, I think we'd all make it to heaven.) And when normal people do say these things, why don't more normal people pay attention?

And here's my main thing with all of the conspiracy stuff: do I believe that things go on behind closed doors that the public doesn't know about? Of course. But I think the main problem in all of these theories of The New World Order and so on is that, like always, the notion of the human capacity is totally not even brought into the equation. Like 6 billion people are just going to go along and be like, "ok yes, please do all these horrible and nasty things." I mean, hello, does the French Revolution ring a bell? For every Louis XVI there is a Rousseau, for every George III there is a Thomas Jefferson, for every Bush Jr. there is a movement of Hope, for every Nazi Axis, there are the Allies (hopefully minus the 6 million murdered in genocide, but that is a different conspiracy theory all together), hell, for every Voldemort there is a Harry Potter. I mean, this is history repeating itself here. So what if a group of shadow elite global financiers do exist, they're going to take over 6 billion people? You all say it's happening now and yet our financial systems are failing and there is a global shift happening in the way that human beings not only view themselves, but their consciousness. So what if they do take over? It will only be a matter of time before another revolution, for that is human history. Not even those who own all the money on the planet can stop human nature from prevailing. And not all human nature is detrimental. Just ask Mr. Potter on the forms of old magic.

My very long and convoluted point in all of this is that the more I see all these movies about death, destruction, power manipulation, the rapture, the anti-christ, 2012, the end of the world and so on, the more I realize just how ingrained fear is in our society. It's like we're afraid of everything, even to the point where we get afraid to live. Do I believe in the shadow elite and the secret government plots and the plans of The New World Order? Does it matter? What I believe in is the human capacity for what is good. Sappy I know. Now that isn't to say that people need to get off their asses and actually partake in this democracy before it is swept out from under them, because they do. But that isn't living in fear. By doing that, we are living in hope, which from what I understand, is what Mr. Obama has been asking of us all along.

However I don't think I'm going to get out of paying my money to the good ol state of VA.

One thing I did learn from America: Freedom to Facism? That we had a supreme court justice named Felix Frankfurter. Man, the playground must have been hell for him . . .

I will also say that Russo died in 2007 of bladder cancer, with conspiracy theorists screaming murder. Cue X-Files theme music . . . now.

One last point: to Russo's credit, in some ways he's right. Our freedoms are no where near how the founding fathers saw them. Granted, we are in a totally different time and place then 250 years ago, and Jefferson said himself, that as things change with time, so much the laws of the country. But the things in the film that ring alarm bells: such as the woman in Florida getting tasered, the interview with Mr. Cohen, the willy-nilly printing of money by the Federal Reserve, the absolute power that people with money have across the globe, the actions of the WTO and the IMF, the micro-chip implanting thing combined with the government tracing of money by technology - these are all things that should be of concern. I am well aware of the fact that America is not as free as we would like to believe. But we're also not Iran. In fact, what this country needs are people as passionate about their freedom as the people in Tehran are. For if we are passionate about freedom in a time of peace from within, we will not have to be engaged with war from within in the future.

*****

On another note, in reference to something else I said in my previous entry, I always feel kind of awkward talking about race, kind of like I really shouldn't be saying anything, but because no one else does that I then kind of have to. I was reading this story on, once again Huffington Post, where critics of Avatar are saying that the movie is racist; you know, that the white guy has to go and pretend to be one of the heathens to then save them, because, well, the heathens obviously can't save themselves, so the caucasians come to the rescue once again. Only the interesting thing was that it was the caucasians who were saying that the movie was racist, while a black film professor was kinda "eh" on the subject and praised it as a stunning work. This makes me think that all this pontificating on white people's part, myself included, is just another form of repression. Instead of letting people of other races talk for themselves, the whites once again have to do it for them. Is this a fair argument? I don't know. I'll let the academics spend their time hashing it out. I don't want to steer people away from calling out prejudice. But I also don't want to force words into people's mouths, especially when whites already have a history of silencing.

Update, January 17, 2010: In the New York Times today, Frank Rich writes an interesting Op-Ed about Harry Reid and his current debacle with race. For the most part, exempting Michael Steele, most blacks are ho-hum about Reid and his comments, while for the most part it is the white conservatives calling for his resignation. Why are white people always more astounded by racism when it's them who are perpetrating it? Or, is it that minorities are just used to the abuse?

Obama-rama and The New World Order

As some may know - assuming you are like me and watched way too many episodes of The X-Files while in high school - there is a thought among conspiracy theorists that we as a society are moving toward a New World Order. That is, one unified global government that oversees all 6 billion of us as one big country. Or think of it like a corporation, kind of like how our government is run now, only on a global scale. Seriously, YouTube it. It'll come in great when you want to procrastinate on something.

Whether I believe these crazies, (who are the left wing version of "birthers") - with the spliced videos of speeches, the calls to raise arms against the NWO army or the compelling thought that the NWO are really reptilian aliens who have returned to their planet to re-colonize us (hello, Tom Cruise? Don't you scientologists have the reptilian alien thing trademarked or something?) - isn't really the issue. According to an article in the Huffington Post today, these people may be onto something.

No, it isn't about reptilian aliens gosh darn it, but it is about the "shadow elite." Author Janine R. Wedel has just written a book appropriately titled Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and Free Markets. It's basically all about how people with money and power basically get whatever they want. Headline news, I know. I mean, we've seen this all along with the GOP and evangelicals, the whole congress and the health industry, the masses of white population throughout history . . . I mean, this goes back through time to imperialism, colonialism and so on. Wedel's point is that it's destroying our country, and she's right. I mean, Naomi Wolf has been writing about this since Bush Jr. and Naomi Klein wrote about our economics based on Milton Friedman were failing way before the recession. So what Wedel is writing about isn't big news to me, it's just a state of our affairs.

However this where The Big O comes in. And I will get this out of the way now: yes, I am a neo-hippie, tree hugging liberal, I make no qualms about that. And I will also say that while I make no judgements on Bush Jr. as a human being, I will say that he was the worst person possible to be president for 8 years, as we can now see. I will also say that while I have issues with The Big O, the thought of McCain and Caribou Barbie in office is, to understate it, horrifying. So Obama may have his problems, but the alternative was too scary to even consider.

However. Reading this article in Huff Post, (which I realizes tags me as neo-hippie, tree hugging liberal), and actually for a while now, I can't help but feel somewhat betrayed by the whole "Change" and "Hope" campaign. I mean, most of the country - even those who aren't Democrats - watched as The Big O got elected and we had tears in our eyes as he spoke that night in Chicago, along with most of America. There was partying in the streets. In my almost 30 years, I had NEVER seen a presidential election enthrall my generation like it did. The fact that young people, and minority young people, actually cared about an election was victory within itself.

I will also say, that no matter what Obama does in office - even if his presidency is a complete failure - what his election has done for race in in this country is worth every day he is president. I've had this argument with many a white person who tells me that it really didn't do that much and that to elect a president based on race is not only not patriotic, but but not democratic, etc. And while they have some points - mostly that Obama got 90% of the black vote, even over Hillary - his campaign singlehandedly paved new roads for minority leadership. What academics spend decades theorizing on and wishing into fruition, he did within the course of a couple years. And if you whities out there don't believe me, go have a conversation with a minority, specifically an African American about this issue. It would do you good.

Again though: However. My biggest hope with Obama taking office was that the days of the Bush monarchy would be long gone; that the US would be going back to a Democratic (and dare I say liberal) ideology for the country. And when I say "democratic" I don't mean party, I mean that the people would once again have say in the way that their country is run. This is turning out not to be true. The biggest thing that Bush ever did was to turn the nation into one of fear and hate while stripping away civil liberties. Through the indefinite "War on Terror" to the Patriot Act, we as a nation became afraid to do much of anything except elect officials to act on our behalf in bombing the Arabs. With the Obama campaign, it turned that fear into "Hope" and into "Change" - both of which we have yet to see fully.

We've come close: the almost closing of Guantanamo, Obama speaking at the HRC, Health reform, education stimulus, etc. But for each one of those, Obama did just the opposite of his campaign promises. For every Elizabeth Warren, we got a Timothy Geithner. For every across the aisle gesture in Bob Gates, we got an inside report on how Goldman Sachs, the main contributor to the Obama campaign, got a pass on Wall Street reform. And while I realize that some consideration must be paid to the way politics is played, my concern lies far beyond politics.

If Obama can't get his shit together, he is going to ruin a whole generation who were willing to participate in the way their country is run. And if we learned anything from the Shadow Elite, that's just what they want. That's part of the reason why this country is in the shape it is in now. Through fear, instilling apathy and under or mis-education, the government and those who run it have whipped the American public into submission. They have scared the masses into thinking that everything is out to get them and that there is no vision beyond what one sees right in front of their face. And while this has gone on way before Bush, Clinton, Reagan, etc, Obama is perpetuating it. Instead of going against The Patriot Act, he is enforcing it. Instead of speaking out, he is being muted, sometimes from within his own party. Instead of being the change he promised, he is becoming part of the problem not the solution. He is slowly being beaten down into the pegs of how Washington works, and he is accepting it.

My questions is where is the fire of hope and change now? Yes, he's only been in office a year and perhaps I'm not giving him enough credit for what he has tried to change. But he's become very soft spoken as of late. Sure, he could be worried about his re-election - he might not want to ruffle too many feathers before his next term. But if he doesn't start doing something soon, I'm not so sure he will get a next term. Then it will be back to the cycle of Washington puppets we've had all along. And signs of this are already happening. Everyone was so psyched when the Dems got full control over congress. Now what has happened now? Like always, the Dems go and fuck it up and the 2010 elections might once again shift everything. And this isn't to say that I'm against change or balance of power. But change should be for all not just for some. No pressure or anything, but if Obama can't fix this, it will never get fixed.

Actually scratch that - If Obama can't fix this, it won't get fixed until we as Americans become so afraid of the power our government has and we fix it ourselves. And I'm not talking tea parties and protests here, I'm talking about really separating church and state, limiting lobbyist influence in Washington, allowing ourselves to chose how our health care is run, not allowing corporations to run our elected officials, choosing to have affordable higher education so that we can compete globally, really knowing what it is that we are putting into our bodies from commercial food suppliers, treating all living things with respect and not just for consumption, etc etc etc. All things we should have the right to, not have to fight for. Why are we having to fight our government (via the corporation) to lead healthy lives?

For the most part, every time speak to most people about politics, they really don't give a shit. And this is cross-generational. I think the last time I spoke to a common person who actually knew what was going on in our government was from the WW2 era. Why? Most likely because they had to know what was going on. It amazes me when people tell me that politics "doesn't effect them." What the fuck?! Politics doesn't effect you? Really? It's twice as bad when it's a minority: racial, sexual or gender. It does effect you, everyday. It effects you in ways you never think about because some, perhaps the "shadow elite", like it that way. They don't want you to think about it because they don't want you to think about the power that you actually have, that you are given with citizenship to the US. This country was built on it's people. But now it's built on money. Yet that can change. There is hope. It's in us. And hopefully it's in a very charismatic man we elected president.

With the recent uprisings in Iran coming to a boil yet again, I can't help but long for a change in complacency from with the American public. Even the freakin' tea parties were some relief, albeit misguided. What this all boils down to is not whether the "shadow elite" are controlling us or whether we are being enslaved by alien reptiles, or even about how our constant morally skewed government is running things. It's about us. It's about us taking change and making the change. So after school special I know. But if The Big O doesn't get his shit together, then it's up to us to help him. We are just as much to blame as he is. The hope and change campaign hasn't ended, so why are we now sitting down expecting it just fall in our laps? I mean really, how American is that? "Oh, well I hoped and I prayed to lose weight, so I'm just going to sit here and munch this cookie dough and wait for it to happen!" Yeah no. Go out and take it. And make Obama help us get it back.

That's me and my soapbox for right now. I will say this though: no matter how bad things get, whenever I see Michelle Obama and her guns in the White House, I thank Jesus that it's her there and not Cindy McCain. The gay in me loves seeing a strong and fashionable woman back in the WH. See, there is always hope.

***Update, January 9th, 2010***

I was reading ArtForum's end of the year wrap up, and I saw Okwui Enwezor's top 10 list. In reference to my comment above about Obama and race, I thought the following piece from him was interesting. Although it does put more pressure onto Obama: not only does he need to live up to the standards of the American people, but Enwezor puts forth the call to live up to the international expectation as well. God speed, Mr. President.

"A year ago, my contribution to Artforum's annual rite of taking stock of the immediate past ended with a wish to see the transformation of candidate Obama to President Obama. In that wish lay my hope for what Giorgio Agamben might call the coming American community - or, to use the terms favored by the candidate himself, for a more perfect and equal nation. No event of this entire year, and perhaps no event for years to come, could rival the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as America's first postcolonial commander in chief. It was a wondrous scene to witness: Americans, with the eyes of the world on them, both watching and taking part in an epoch-making event - the son of a Kenyan foreign exchange student becoming the country's forty-fourth president."

Okwui Enwezor in ArtForm, December 2009, page 172.

Explosions in one's pants.

Really, we are going to start forcing people of certain nationalities into mandatory pat-downs and searches? Why don't we just make them wear a patch on their jackets so we can identify the jihadists from the rest of civilized society? Then we could just farm them into camps where we can educate them on all the best ways to be westernized and believe in Jesus and teach them our more enlightened ways! It is our burden after all. Because anyone with a burka, a Qur'an and a passport from Pakistan must be a terrorist. Just like anyone from the US or EU must be an imperialistic, racist capitalist.

Not to mention the fact that we are really worried about people blowing up our planes with underwear bombs? Really? I mean, I've heard about explosions in one's pants before, especially ones that most conservatives get all up in arms about, but this is ridiculous. If the highest terrorist threat I have to worry about on a plane is someone trying to light a bomb in their underwear, while people are looking on, I think I'll take my chances without having to indict 14 other nations on assumed terrorism. It's amazing to me that we always want such understanding from those nations on why we are such decent peoples, and yet we do nothing but invade their countries and treat them like heathens.

Above all of this, the fact remains that when we all need to stop living in fear. Do threats exist?, of course. But our constant privileged paranoia is not making us any safer, it's only making us bigger targets due to our ignorance.

Bolded emphasis below is mine.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=F5BC265E-18FE-70B2-A86A363EFDB4A591 U.S. tightens international air security By: Mike Allen January 3, 2010 02:50 PM EST

All travelers flying into the U.S. from foreign countries will receive tightened random screening, and 100 percent of passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries will be patted down and have their carry-ons searched, the Obama administration was notifying airlines on Sunday. The more stringent Transportation Security Administration rules, to take effect at midnight, follow the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner headed into Detroit from Amsterdam. “These are changes that weren’t widely in place for all carriers or countries on 12/24,” a senior administration official told POLITICO. “These are sustainable measures that are a significant enhancement of our security posture. TSA will continuously review these measures with our global aviation partners to ensure the highest levels of security." All passengers from countries on the State Department’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list – plus all passengers from other "countries of interest" such as Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen — will receive “full body pat-down and physical inspection of property,” the official said. The countries on the State Department list are Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria. Other countries covered by the TSA directive include Afghanistan, Libya and Somalia. A complete list was not released. A much higher percentage of all travelers from all foreign countries will receive such screening than is currently the case, the official said. "The screening “could also include explosive detection technology or advanced imaging technology where it’s available,” the official said. Kristin Lee of the TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, announced: "Today the Transportation Security Administration issued new security directives to all United States and international air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010. The new directive includes long-term, sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners.” In other words, there will be a new normal for international travel into the U.S. The “enhanced security measures” apply to “all international flights to U.S. locations, including both U.S. and international carriers,” the official said. “All international passengers will be screened and the majority of passengers will be screened using threat-based or random measures, the official said. “ These are designed to be sustainable measures that are a significant increase in our security posture. The measures apply to all “passengers with passports from or itineraries through State Sponsors of Terrorism and ‘countries of interest.’” “This goes beyond simply looking at passports and now looks at itineraries from and through countries of interest,” the official said. “This is a significant step forward.” Lee said in her statement: “Because effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders, and as a result of extraordinary cooperation from our global aviation partners, TSA is mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are State sponsors of terrorism or countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights."

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

Death to Hipsters: a)! or b)?

OK. I'll give you that this article is a bit cynical - which I think is a hypocrisy within itself when compared to the huge cynicism that hipsters carry around with them. However. Though I can't determine if the use of hypocrisy is a style used to unite two ideologies or if the author just doens't recognize their own cynicism, the piont about the use of counter-culture to then further divide people is so true and so damaging. True revolutionary ideas do not involve bitching about corporate music while sipping lattes, it involves true acceptance and understanding of why the things that we are against exist while having compassion for those who follow them - while we try to make a change. The bolding below is my added emphasis.

Why the hipster must die

http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/features/4840/why-the-hipster-must-die

A modest proposal to save New York cool

By Christian Lorentzen

Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it die the day Wes Anderson proved too precious for his own good, or was it when Chloë Sevigny fellated Vincent Gallo onscreen? Did it vanish along with Kokie’s, International Bar and Tonic? Or when McSweeney’s moved shop to San Francisco and Bright Eyes signed a lease on the Lower East Side? Was it possible to be a hipster once a band that played Northsix one night was heard the next day on NPR’s Weekend Edition? Did it hurt to have American Apparel marketing soft-porn style to young bankers? Was something lost the day Ecstasy made the cover of the Times Magazine? Or was it the day Bloomberg banned smoking in bars? And how many times an hour could one check e-mail and still have an honest, or even ironic, claim on being cool?

Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.

It was in the real-estate section of one of the city’s lesser dailies, under the headline luxury seems to be set for the lower east side, that I found an astonishing remark attributed to Michael Desjadon, the director of sales at Massey Knakal: “The profile of the typical renter in the area is changing from the ‘counterculture hipster’ to the ‘more mainstream’ hipster and young professional.”

“I wish I’d thought of this phrase, but we call the Lower East Side ‘the last real neighborhood in New York,’” Desjadon, an amiable fellow and a patron of LES bars, told me when I called him up. “The mainstream hipster,” he explained, “is not an artist or a musician. He has an office job, and wears one hat to work and another at night.” Presumably, the latter is a trucker—or a porkpie—hat.

The mouth of a real-estate agent is rarely the source of truth, but Mr. Desjadon knows his territory (and is no doubt cashing in on this knowledge). He has unwittingly explicated the transformation of the hipster into the “indie yuppie,” an avatar we might imagine as the fusion of Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik. The indie yuppie is (literally) the child of the bobo, and just as his father the baby boomer did, he has learned to simulate rebellion while procuring and furnishing a comfortable two-bedroom. His haircut may be asymmetrical, but his dog never misses a walk. And around the corner, sleeping on couches, neophyte slackers dream until they wake up late for their temp jobs. The savvy among them soon grasp that they’ve arrived at the party too late.

Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.

Of course, hipsterism being originally, and still mostly, the province of whites (the pastiest of whites), its acolytes raid the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity in the pot. Similarly, they devour gay style: Witness the cultural burp known as metrosexuality. As the hipster ambles from the thrift store to a $100 haircut at Freemans Sporting Club, these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod.

All isms seek dominance of human affairs, and in this, hipsterism in New York City has proved more virulent than any of its forebears. (Punk, after all, never really broke—except in the form of hipsterism.) At last there was nothing left for hipsters to do but to convert the squares, take them to the bar and let them pick up the tab. Secrets were shared. The hipster hooked up with the common consumer; he woke up a zombie.

How can this be undone? I propose that the only hope for a reanimated bohemia, if not a dezombified hipsterdom, is civil war.

Hipsters in their present undead incarnation are essentially people who think of themselves as being cooler than America. But they are afflicted by that other ism sociologists made an industry of decrying in the 20th century: narcissism. The late prophet of our current moment, George W. S. Trow, posited that television had obliterated the context of American life. The only refuges remaining were TV, God and the self. Young people who live in cities notoriously shun God and television to cultivate themselves. Now, as the age of MySpace comes due for a backlash and the former teen idols of our crypto-ironic fascination start to show their age, the time has come for the hipsters in the garden of Union Pool to open their eyes, realize that they are surrounded by jackasses and milquetoasts, and stage their own dive-bar putsch.

The fault lines are clear enough already. We know that there are Sweet hipsters, who practice the sort of irony you can take home to meet the parents, and there are those Vicious hipsters, who practice the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark.

On the Sweet end of the spectrum, The Believer lavishes its literary and pop-culture idols with a uniform layer of affection that renders it near impossible to distinguish the great from the mediocre. This aesthetic of relativism grants everybody an A for effort and allows anyone projecting the image of an artist to conceive of himself as such. It proliferates as a social plague among hipsters who invite their entire address book to readings, shows and art openings. The e-mails arrive, and though it is known in advance that the art will be nothing much,the trek is made. The avant-garde illusion ultimately sustains itself on free beer.

As the war claims its casualties, the Sweet may discover that behind their aesthetic relativism is an impulse more political than cultural: They are rightfully activists. Their cause has emerged in the form of global warming, and I would not be surprised if the color of cool in their future is green. Along the way they might rediscover a concept hipsters have lately had little use for: love.

Meanwhile, among those who adopt the Vicious pose, a lighthearted scorn perfected by Gawkeris roundly applied to the objects of pop celebrity, both talented and (mostly) otherwise. The effect is akin to dipping sushi in wasabi sauce: The flavor is a little less bland, but it’s still mostly rice. The hipster who keeps up with the antics of Hilton, Lohan and Spears does so sneeringly, and her knowingness introduces one degree of difference between herself and the Midwestern housewife who buysUs Weekly at the Wal-Mart checkout line.

When I asked Gawker managing editor Choire Sicha whether it was possible to ignore talentless celebrities, he responded with the remorse of a custodian of cultural decline: “Everyone can, and should, be ignored. We were warned about this situation we find ourselves in by philosophers, and well before it happened. It’s just too bad we weren’t warned by celebrities, or we would have listened to them.”

So the Sweet will turn on the Vicious, and the Vicious will shun the Sweet. The sniping in the blogosphere will escalate, and turf wars will ensue. Power will be consolidated in the frontiers of the outer boroughs as the Vicious tighten their grip on Bushwick and the Sweet flee south to Kensington and Windsor Terrace, or give up and move to Queens (better yet, to their rightful home: the West Coast).

If they can vanquish the Sweet, the path for the Vicious is less obvious. A good first step might entail purging the lawyers and bankers lurking in their company. But on the other hand, those guys are good at footing the bill. Another tactic would require the conversion of snark to self-criticism, and that would necessarily involve ignoring no-talent celebrities, and mean an end to playing it safe. The safest game in town—in fashion and music especially—is retro, and if there is no Ezra Pound in corduroys out there to say, “Make it new,” let me be the one to say, “Stop making it old.”

What distinguishes the zombie hipsters at large today from the “white Negroes” Norman Mailer described in the 1950s is a lack of menace. The original hipster—Mailer had in mind James Dean and the Neal Cassady who inspired On the Road—was a “philosophical psychopath” who might steal your car and drive it to Mexico. The myth of menace survives in the pages of Vice,but the magazine’s signature feature—the “Do’s and Don’t’s”—suggests a safe path to transgression, a notion as oxymoronic as the “mainstream hipster.” Mailer, who traced hipster psychosis to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, would likely point to September 11 as the event that left hordes of twentysomethings whispering, “We would be safe,” to quote the Sweet hipster novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. Menace is now lost on anyone older than 20. It is left to those born after 1990 to move to town, frighten the zombies away, destabilize the real-estate market and restore something unsavory to what used to be called hip.

***Be Sure to check out the link to the actual article for some more interesting discussion and other links to rebuttals. Also, check out Ad Busters recent essay on the same topic, "Hipster: The Dead End of Western CIvilization." -JRR

Details Magazine: "douchefag"?

Yo Details-

Next time you want to hit the gays over the head with all they do wrong (i.e. "Rise of the Douchefag", Dec. 2009, pgs. 78-80), you may want to make sure that in the previous month's issue, you didn't have a gay dude make out with a straight girl. You know, kinda revokes your credibility a bit. (See Adam Lambert).

Despite the fact that what you were getting at was kinda true, unless you're gonna have the balls to call out every other minority on all their shit, I would appreciate it if you left the judgement of all us "fags" to other publications that wholly identify with us rather than just display fashion and then ridicule it's readers. I mean really, how many straight men do you honestly think read Details?

Last I checked, you "straight" guys had plenty of your own issues to wrestle with, why don't you concentrate on those for a bit longer.

Thanks in advance,

J