Saturday, September 11, 2010

Thank You For Telling Me Vodka is a Ponsy Drink

I Went and saw Xiu Xiu play last night. It was really great. You should buy their albums. The show made me all swoony like a schoolgirl. I got emotional. My medication was making me shaky. I talked to them afterwards, and made a dick out of myslef I think. But they were really nice. I talked to Angela about how music and writing destroy ego and Jamie about how other people's horrible stuff can make your horrible stuff feel less, becuase there's less lonelyness, some kind of community..... I'm not sure. I'm typing maybe kind of like Ariana Reines with some kind of naïveté and direct sentences, because I don't know how else to say things at the moment. I really like her writing but don't normally write like her. I hope it doesn't make me sound like a dick or a hipster. I don't understand the idea "hipster". The people who would be them hate them. It confuses me. I don't have enough money to be one I think. This writing is going nowhere. I really like Xiu Xiu anyway. Here are links to some of the songs they played.

Grey Death
Dear God, I Hate Myself
Chocolate Makes You Happy
Save Me, Save Me
Sad Pony Guerilla Girl
Fabulous Muscles
Crank Heart
I Luv the Valley Oh!
Boy Soprano

12 comments:

Kate Durbin said...

I was just saying this about hipsters tonight. No one wants to be one.

I'll be one.

Ross Brighton said...

Speaking of which, I just found this:
http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2010/09/scientific_proof_nobody_hates.php
"scientific proof that nobody hates hipsters more than hipsters"

Ross Brighton said...

I think the problem is the hang up within (anti)hipsterdom on authenticity - hence retro vintage etc, designer stuff - aura. And being labeled a hipster punctuates that autheticity. maybe. Something liek that.

Joseph Ernest said...

I think 'hipster' is a nicer title than 'scenester' or 'faggot' etc. I think that hipster is maybe an ideal though that nobody can realistically achieve? The moment you put on a shoe that shoe becomes a less desirable shoe (<not a metaphor (actually about shoes.). Hipster status is defined by the possession of something (be it abstract or literal) unpossessable and so once possessed it's no longer a hipster signifier? I don't know. Sorry.

Ross Brighton said...

Don't be sorry Joseph. I too don't know and am sorry. I suppose it does actually spring from the eighties (though not the spectral decade of nostalgiac retro-ism).... stuff like DeLillo's Americana, where the "American Dream" is characterised as the continual desire to see one's self embodied in the third personal pronoun, a libidonal desire for unsustainable continual movement (hence Keroauc...) while at the same time the videodrome is being constructed, Baudrillard and Jameson are announcing the end of history (and thus temporally experienced subjectivity).... there is something strange about the collision of middle class consumption and retro nostelgiac insistence on authenticity. There's a desperation to this search for a concrete I that is about 20' tall. Aside - has anyone written anything on the phallicism of the graphemic first person? Kate? Other Kate (Z) if she's lurking anywhere?
Um, I think I said everything I wanted to before penises got involved.....

Rachel Fenton said...

I thought I read about a penis - a penis puts a smile on your face:)

Surely it is impossible for anyone to be a hipster after the first hipster was certified, oops, I mean classified? Because as soon as more than one person is then they are automatically not anymore...like the Roland Barthes Death of the Author thing whereby identifying it becomes its own paradox. Hipsters can only exist in isolation. Like Highlander "there can be only one"...
Hipsters are booming in the recession...

Ross Brighton said...

Yeah it's interesting - there's the tension between individualism and community. There's also the tension between the largely western-capitalist invested concept of individualism and a anti-capitalist backlash implicit in the retro-ism as well (cf 80s comment, and my post a while back on Radiohead). The only way to assert that individualist self is through consumption (if your not an artist(e) - and if you are, there's what I mentioned in the post I was talking to Angela about, about ego etc) - after all, is there an ostensable difference between this cult of self-concious originality and self-assertion and Ayn Rand-brand Exceptionalism? (qualifyer - this doesn't mean that people *aren't* individuals, I'm talking about being really hung up on it. And we're more than that -implicit in the 'we'- we are communal). That however is in constant antagonism with a deep-seated, dysphoric disillusionment with trans-national capitalism... you get these wierd aporia and lacuna and moments of extreme cognitive dissonance. Its kind of interesting I guesss.

Ross Brighton said...

reassertion in spite of the comment steam tangentiality: I love Xiu Xiu.

Joseph Ernest said...

Anything to do with an intense desire to escape the self entirely and become the other? Obviously this is inherently impossible. And thus nobody will ever call themselves 'hipster' because becoming an authentic 'hipster' is not something one can achieve.

Rob said...

The hipster is just the ideal neo-liberal subject, right? Contradicted by all sorts of returns to the local, an obsession with the boutique but guided...iPhones? Axes: http://kukkurovaca.tumblr.com/post/699419032/i-still-dont-get-this-fucking-hipster-axe-trend

Ross Brighton said...

@Joseph - more a delezuian becoming-multiple I think. The fact that it lurks in pronouns may be something. Plurality?
@Rob - Yeah, but didn't Brett Easton Ellis do that 25-30 years ago? Or maybe Fredrick Barthelme? That stuff feels hipster to me, through it's surfaces and refusal of engagement or emotional investment. Which I don't like. I have problems with certain types of irony.

Rob said...

Interestingly, what has been said here in many ways mirrors the recent opinion piece in Sunday about the rise of the hipster. Though I'm interested to what extent the whole thing is actually worth discussing. As an aside, any idea who this blog belongs to pinktexta.blogspot.com/ ?