cleansing exercise (maybe you needn’t read?)

alright, we’ve been down the vice magazine fallout road before…. suffice it to say that i don’t like to think of myself as a dilletantish fetishist of the whatever-of-the-moment, but i also smell a rat when faced with contrived criticisms of its “elitism” as summarized in the word ‘hipster.’ seven times of ten it’s the pretentious who claim to be suffocated by pretentiousness, methinks. i know this because i’ve been this. this was, like, the first new mode i learned after the more gutteral versions of passive aggression they peddled at OLS. maybe it’s just that this critique so often comes from artists speaking of artists better known or liked then them.  but maybe i only learned this from being called pretentious my whole life.  the point is this exemplifies the odd, neither-here-nor-there situation in which modernist ideas of some kinda vanguard ‘outside’ of things have been so thoroughly “incorporated into the spectacle” or whatever that we all know goddamn well that assigning underground and mainstream’s as stupid as calling your mirror image by another name. hell, “the economy” and “war”‘re more and more spectral everyday: if we’re gonna even pretend to be adults here, maybe we should spare ourselves admonishments about keeping “it” “real.”

as rupert suggested when he was writing how Bread interest’em more than Can, we’ve all seen how a certain ‘tyranny of the weak’ adheres to the self-styled underdog avant-garde chaps. the chaps’d suggest that their cassette-only  label eschews ‘pretense’ by only distributing its output to their pot dealer, downtown coeds and the other guys working at the other pizza joint with the other cassette label (it gets a lot of undue credit for basically biting early f/i, but they’re nice guys, so…)

besides, it’s kind of dumb to call ‘elitist’ what’s basically a fashion magazine… it’d be like calling clouds ‘airy’ or some such. and if we’re going to shit on vice, shouldn’t we shit on’ em for being offensive? or maybe we just think they’re wrong about stuff? i also think the ‘pretentious’ or ‘elitist’ or ‘hipster’ accusation comes out when people disagree with someone or something and they don’t have the savoir-faire or energy to say why. it’s like moralism in that way; it’s an evocative, effective shorthand, or a placeholder for what we assume’s good sense.

anyway, all of that just cause i’ve been writing a factsheet for distribution to a popular audience today, and i felt like breaking into this kinda prose-y-oh. all those convictions’re what’d pass for ‘common sense’ on this block/blog, and you could probably’ve recited them without me having to write ‘em.

vice is just wrong on this ‘Do,‘ anyway…. at least it’s wrong for this here Eugene, OR, where rockabilly’s about as rebellious as sandals. so help me cripes, i couldn’t name a full-blown punk rock group in town that’s not either of the “black leather gene vincent zombie pabst” or “black tee black work pants pabst” mold. well me, i’ve always found the blzps to be generally boring’er and jockier than the btbwpps. maybe the next time a bunch of those blgvzps play i’ll walk to the front of the bar with a refrigerator box filled with switch-blade combs and pour them on the floor, thereby 1) evoking that earth crisis incident in which the dude in fake fur caught a beating, and 2) “setting the tone” for taking the blgvzps thing to “the next level.”

of course i won’t do that, nor should i. half of the blgvzps i’ve met have been fine, and its none of my business anyhow, and god bless and best wishes… it’s just that the hair gel and leather thing…well, it’d be hypocritical given my own weird late 90s vibe (quoth the dragon: ‘you look like a session guy from the counting crows’ -  i doubt he meant steve cropper.)

seriously though, who plays the legit punk rock in eugene? i personally think the squids’re there maybe 1/3 of the time, but they’re other things besides. i guess the underlings?

but given all that spectacle-talk above, i hope you won’t answer this question. i ask it not too plunge somebody else into “keeping it real;” it’s more like pulling out an older baseball card and wearing it as a hat.

fin.