The Bob-Lo boat (there were actually two of them, the Ste. Claire and the Columbia) was a magical, wondrous craft that ferried people from downtown Detroit to the magical, wondrous place known as Bob-Lo Island. Well, as magical and wondrous a place as you were likely to encounter at the mouth of the virulently polluted Detroit River where it dumped its waste into the similarly polluted Lake Erie, anyway.

The ride downriver lasted about half an hour, taking us past a dreary succession of chemical plants and steel mills that freely spewed their effluent into the water and the skies. But in those days that seemed perfectly normal.  Sure, it stunk, and sometimes it even hurt a little to breathe, but the thick air cast a hazy glow over everything, especially when the blood red sun was disappearing into the miasma and the Bob-Lo boat was making its languid way back upriver, carrying a load of weary but happy Detroiters home from their day of merry-go-rounds, picnics, and roller coaster rides. The band played, the teenagers and young adults danced, and the dwarflike Captain Bob-Lo made his way through the crowds, sometimes amusing, sometimes terrorizing the children who caromed around the deck like so many pinballs on a Force Ten sugar rush.

There were four decks, and I used to migrate from the top, with its glorious open-air views of the Ontario and Michigan riverfront, to the bottom, where I could peer right down into the deafeningly loud and stiflingly hot engine room, savoring the smells of the superheated oil coating the enormous piston as it thrust in and out with an almost alarming clank and thump.  But the true heartbeat of the ship was on and around the dance floor, and it was there that the serpent of sorrow crept for the first time into my Bob-Lo childhood Eden.

Most families, at least most families of modest means like my own, got at best one trip a year to Bob-Lo.  If you were lucky, you might get an extra visit or two by being invited along with a friend’s family, or maybe if your dad was in the Knights of Columbus or the Lions Club (mine wasn’t), there’d be a group outing in addition to your annual family trip.  In my case, I was used to going once a year and making the most of it.

But when you got to sixth grade, everything changed.  Beginning that year, and continuing in seventh and eighth, you got to go on a end-of-school Bob-Lo excursion, with, apart from a few token chaperones, no annoying parents to interfere with your fun.  As much as I was looking forward to this, I dreaded the other part of the tradition: the sixth grade trip was the first time boys were not only allowed, but actually expected to ask girls to be their date for the day.

Naturally, there was no end of talk and excitement over this prospect, to the point where schoolwork became little more than an afterthought during the last couple weeks before B-Day.  Having in the past always had a perfectly good time at Bob-Lo without dragging a girl along, I saw no reason to change things now, but the peer pressure was terrific, to the point where I was being asked a dozen times a day who I was going with, and being warned that I’d better choose someone soon “before all the cool girls are taken.”

My trouble was twofold: not only did I not particularly want to go with a girl, but worse, I couldn’t even imagine why some girl would want to go with me.  Finally, though, not wanting to be left even further out of the social mainstream than I already was, I made a list of three girls I didn’t actively dislike and who seemed nice enough that they might not want to hurt my feelings by rejecting me.  Having had no experience in asking girls for dates, and not much, for that matter, in talking to them at all, I approached the first girl on my list with the enthusiasm of a condemned man mounting the gallows and mumbled, “Um, you probably don’t want to go to Bob-Lo with me, do you?”

To their credit, none of the girls laughed in my face; they were, in fact, very polite with their prettied-up versions of “Thanks but no thanks.” But at the end of the day, I was left to accept what I’d expected all along: nobody in her right mind would want to go on a date with me, probably ever.  I still had a pretty good time, riding the usual rides, stuffing myself to the point of near-nausea on cupcakes, green grapes, and Vernor’s Ginger Ale.  As twilight neared I boarded the boat for home with the satisfied sense that when it came to enjoying the sublime pleasures of boat rides and amusement parks, girls were entirely dispensable.

But that comfortable bubble abruptly burst when I discovered that nearly all of my classmates were on or around the dance floor, and that some of them were actually dancing.  With girls, no less, with the girls they’d asked to come to Bob-Lo with them, and who, for reasons that continued to elude me, had said yes, they’d love to.

The band — I can’t see them in my mind’s eye, can’t tell you how many musicians there were or what instruments they played, but I can still hear them, even today — played slightly jazzed-up versions of the current Top 40 hits.  The only one I can remember — and it seemed as though they played it all the way home — was Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” with its plaintive refrain:

Because I want (yeah yeah)
A girl (yeah yeah)
To call my own
I want a dream lover
So I won’t have to dream alone

And in that moment a thick fog of hopelessness settled over me.  The song was telling my story: all my life I would dream alone, never even knowing for sure who or what it was I wanted, let alone having a prayer of getting it.  Hadn’t my failure with the three girls I’d asked been proof enough?  Why would I want to humiliate myself further?  I was 11 years old, and doomed.

The rest of my Detroit years would rush away in a wave of adolescent sturm und drang.  I didn’t bother asking any girls on the Bob-Lo trips in seventh and eighth grade, and then there were no more trips, because we were in high school.  I guess some of the kids went on their own — with dates, of course — but the school was no longer involved, and of course I was too old to go with my parents.  So sometime in the early 1960s Bob-Lo became little more than a bittersweet memory, and why I still think and dream about it all these years later, I don’t know.

I’ve always been quick to leave places — and to some extent people as well — and slow to let them go.  Even now, 45 years after officially moving away from Detroit, I still haven’t completely shaken its dust from my heels, and though I know it will almost certainly never happen, I sometimes catch myself speculating about what it would be like to move back there.  It would be so much cheaper than New York, I argue; I could live like a king.  I already know the accent; people there would be less pretentious and status-conscious (I don’t know where I got the latter idea; everywhere I’ve lived, from rural wilderness to great metropolis, people have been status-conscious, and as for pretentious? Well, they all pretended that they weren’t).

Of course, the Detroit I knew — and didn’t particularly like in the first place — is no longer there, vanished with the Bob-Lo boats, the steel mills and auto plants, the Motown hit factory, and over a million of its people.  Oh, how we used to complain about what a lousy home town we’d been stuck with — dirty, smelly, ugly, with nowhere to go and nothing to do — and of course in the rear view mirror of history that sounds crazy.  Who wouldn’t trade the post-apocalyptic ruin of today’s Detroit for the brash, brawling, cocky, thriving, and sprawling Motor City of yesteryear?

Well, quite a few people, possibly; while Detroit of the 1950s and ’60s was rolling in money and rich with opportunity, it was also rigidly segregated and un-self-consciously racist.  Its prosperity was also founded on a grand delusion: that America and the world could continue to consume ever greater volumes of fossil fuels and dump the detritus willy-nilly into the environment without ever suffering any consequences.

We learned otherwise, and I imagine we’ve still got more to learn.  The riots, the gas lines, the crime wave, the collapse of the city’s infrastructure, the exodus of more than half its citizens, all left their painful imprint on this staggering, punch-drunk shell of a city.

Then what should pop on my iPod this morning but the Marvelettes, letting girls everywhere know they’d better watch out for that playboy, and for a moment it was 1963 again, baking in the summer sun as we gunned the engines on our 8 MPG Chevy hotrods and rolled down the Dix-Toledo Highway en route to a dip in the old stone quarry and maybe a lightning run across the state line for some firecrackers and 3.2 beer.

That was Detroit, too: the cars, the music, the exhilarating sense of freedom and possibility that, to be sure, mostly revolved around the idea that some day we’d make enough money or discover some kind of angle that would enable us to move away.  Crossing the Fort Street Bridge past the smudgepot forest of natural gas flares whose overpowering stink let you know you well and truly in the heart of the city, cruising up Jefferson past the abandon all hope, ye who enter here gates of Zug Island, or Fort Wayne, where newly minted 18-year-olds with scarcely a clue about what awaited them were processed and packed off to Vietnam.

In the midst of the haze and the smoke and the random brutality there’d be oases like Bob-Lo or Belle Isle, or the Detroit Institute of the Arts, its cathedral-like entrance hall covered by a Diego Rivera mural that I one day dubbed the Sistine Chapel of the working classes, the Detroit Historical Museum, with its haunting re-creations of city streets and storefronts from the mid-19^th century, the free summer concerts by the world-class Detroit Symphony Orchestra or our real hometown heroes, the Supremes.  Ted Williams bouncing a home run off but not over the roof of Briggs Stadium, Mickey Mantle lashing one off the face of the upper deck (but the Tigers still came from behind to win it), the lights of the Ambassador Bridge twinkling in the night as though they lit the path to Oz rather than the pleasantly mundane town of Windsor, Ontario.

Downtown was a phantasmagoria of commerce, industry and vice: three vast department stores that rivaled, some dared to whisper, even Macy’s or Gimbel’s in faraway New York.  Why, a fellow could get just about anything he needed somewhere in the vicinity of Woodward Avenue and its environs, be it a perfectly respectable suit of clothes set of furniture, or a thoroughly shady visit to a burlesque show or dirty book store.  It’s all gone now, some of it replaced or rebuilt elsewhere, much of it vanished forever like so many of 20^th century America’s certitudes and certainties.  Gone, and as my generation fades away, most likely forgotten as well, but all this was Detroit, and I dream of it still.

Oh, there’s one other catch as well: those who can’t keep up the payments for their new body part are hunted down by the film’s eponymous repo men and knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, after which the organ or joint in question is reclaimed.  ”I’m required by law to ask you if you would like an ambulance to be called or to wait on standby,” Jude Law tells an unconscious patient before slicing open his chest and repossessing his artificial heart.

I wouldn’t say I’m over the moon about Obama’s “government takeover of health care.”  I’d be considerably happier if it actually were a government takeover, because while I’m not fully convinced a single payer system is the best way to go, it’s got to be a vast improvement over letting the private insurance cartel run things.  But at the same time I’m inclined to think a public-private hybrid like the one that exists in Australia and a number of European countries might do the best job of providing universal care and keeping costs down.

Be that as it may, while I wasn’t enthusiastic about the watered down, attenuated version of health care that finally emerged from the House of Representatives, many if not most of my doubts were assuaged by the spectacle of Republicans railing against it like so many Kang and Kodos doppelgängers.  To suggest that John Boehner’s body had been inhabited by a malevolent space alien would be generous, since any terrestrial explanation for the dazzling array of illogic and untruth he and his colleagues have unleashed on the public these past weeks would reflect far less favorably on him.

Although I vote for Democrats most of the time, I wouldn’t consider myself an especially partisan person.  I never cared much for Nancy Pelosi, and my affection for Barack Obama has more to do with his ideals (at least as expressed by him) and his rhetoric than his political affiliation.  But Pelosi has certainly grown in my estimation as a result of her ability to steer this bill through Congress, and just when I was starting to lose faith in Obama’s willingness or even ability to stand up for principles and knock a few heads together if necessary, he’s come through just as I always hoped he could.

Yes, of course I’d like a robust (as they say) public option, and I’d like even more a federal rate commission empowered to put the kibosh on extortionate insurance prices (I just got hit with a 20 percent increase this year, which apparently is “moderate” compared to what some have been asked to pay), but let’s be realistic: the bill that got through the House yesterday is the most that we can expect at this time.  My guess is that Congress will have to revisit it when problems start cropping up and insurance rates keep rising, but at least we have (finally!) established that the government has a legitimate role in guaranteeing what private industry has manifestly failed to do: provide all Americans with reasonably priced and effective health care.

“Health care is a privilege, not a right” seems to be the latest talking point of Republican legislators and talk show hosts, which seems to fly in the face of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it reads, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Note: it says “rights,” not privileges, and how could you argue that life itself, not to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are not threatened — if not made downright impossible — by the lack of access to medical care?

The Declaration goes on to say: “…that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Hello, teabaggers!  Organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. All this blather about government having “no business” getting involved in health care flies right out the window when looked at in this light.  Sick people are not safe and happy; sick people are not at liberty to live their lives to the best of their abilities; in many cases, sick people lose even the right to life itself.  Organizing governmental powers so as to address this very real problem is as American as it gets; letting private corporations maintain a stranglehold over who does and does not receive medical care and allowing people to be bankrupted by illness is, on the other hand, downright unpatriotic.  It’s the sort of thing you would expect in a feudal or caste-ridden system, not the shining city on a hill that confused teabaggers make America out to be, all the while contradicting and undermining everything that was ever admirable about this land.
—
Larry Livermore is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He penned a column for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll for seven years, followed by a 14-year stint at the now-defunct Punk Planet. Check out his blog at www.larrylivermore.com, or email him at llivermore@gmail.com. This column was originally published on larrylivermore.com.

Another favorite is “triscuit crackers,” used to describe a boring, generic-seeming person. As in, “That girl in the beige sweater-set with those blond highlights is such a triscuit cracker.” This is mostly used in extreme bitterness when boys seem to prefer triscuit crackers to super awesome flavor-blasted goldfish. Like, um, me. And then I found out that other friend groups have similar names for these types of people — like “flat sodas” (why does it always seem to be food related?).

Basically my new dream is to make fauxpen happen. I want to invent a meme. I want to travel across the country, go to a sandwich shop, start talking to a stranger, and then have that person be like, “Wow, that guy is so fauxpen.” At which point I will dance with glee. And then fly back home. (This plan may be slightly flawed.)

But it’s not so crazy to try and invent new words. My sister and her friends are all about “teen speak.” As in, they shorten everything and talk as if they are constantly Facebook chatting one other. Totes = totally. Probs = probably. Cleave = cleavage. Alright, this is totes obvs the best slang eves. And apparently there’s also “hipster speak,” which pretty much entails making a lot of ironic pop culture references. What a shocker.

According to The Hipster Handbook Glossary, there’s an entire hipster language out there, just festering in the dive bars of Williamsburg. Some highlights: “Jerry” (as in Garcia), means a stoner or a hippie. “Ishtar” is something crappy. And “the frigidaire” means giving someone the cold shoulder. As in, “That guy who said he would call totally gave me the frigidaire.” Which, hipsters be damned, is kind of an awesome word. I think I might steal it.

If I may be so bold, I’ve decided to suggest a few new words for hipsters. How about the “hamster” — the Hamptons hipster. We already have a word for trust-fund hippies (trustafarians), so why not a word for super wealthy hipsters who are slumming it in Brooklyn sublets? Or, in the vein of movie pop culture (a la Ishtar), how about “the twilight.” You could use it when your friend starts getting way too into a significant other. Like, if your guy friend is night-stalking his current flame and watching her sleep (because he loves her, obvs), you would say, “Tim always seemed so normal until he pulled that twilight and tried to suck Stacy’s blood.” Or you know, whatever.

Okay, fine, “the twilight,” is kind of lame. But fauxpen is seriously awesome, and I predict it’ll catch on quicker than ironic facial hair at an Animal Collective show. Help spread the word. Tweet it.

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Rachel Carter has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Girl Zone magazine and The Faster Times. She is currently living in New York and working on a young adult novel about ghosts. Visit her Pop Culture Blog.

That’s not completely true. In fact, I’d sensed an oncoming catastrophe at least as far back as October of 1967, which, as I remember, was when we stopped paying rent on our cozy little apartment on North Hamilton Street. If nothing else, I was at least vaguely aware that we were ultimately going to be homeless, and probably right about when the full, sullen force of a Michigan winter was about to kick in.

That wasn’t our intention, of course; the apartment, on the ground floor of one of the many 19th century houses that made wandering the streets of Ypsilanti a bit like time travel, was the nicest place we had ever lived. Oh, sure, it was a dump in many regards, and lacked most of the niceties – but also the sterility – of our parents’ suburban homes, but it had character. Had it been in our power, we might have stayed there for years, but we knew we had no such power, that life was inexorably spinning out of control, and that it was only a matter of time before our little world was relentlessly torn apart.

If pressed I could trace the origins of that foreboding to the day in mid-September, 1967 when we took LSD for the first time. I remember lying on a bare mattress on the living room floor listening to side one of Are You Experienced? and thinking that life would never be the same again. It wasn’t, either, and though the trajectory was not always straight downhill, the general trend was in that direction.

Until LSD entered the picture, things seemed reasonably innocent. A bit mischievous, perhaps, and certainly bereft of taste – I mean, we actually went around town wearing hippie love beads and with tinkly bells dangling from our belts – but essentially harmless. At least that’s what we told ourselves, even as evidence piled up to the contrary.

I’d met Darrell the previous spring when, through another set of unfortunate circumstances that mostly involved me being a jerk, I’d found myself living on the streets, and he let me move into his dorm room at EMU. I was nominally a student myself, though I hadn’t attended class since February (this was sometime in May). Between us we’d resolved that come autumn we’d turn over a new leaf, get an apartment together, get serious about our studies and, simultaneously become full-fledged hippies.

During the intervening summer we discovered marijuana – or rather, discovered where we could buy it on a regular basis – and that, without our noticing at first, began to change our perspective. We were still intending to go to class and study, but other things began to take priority, smoking pot as much and as often as possible being foremost among them.

Subtle and not so subtle changes ensued. Furniture gradually disappeared from the apartment to make room for the mattresses that made for easier lounging. Paranoid about the neighbors, we covered the windows with heavy curtains and lived in a timeless sort of twilight. The only decoration I recall was a giant poster of Allen Ginsberg wearing a sign that read “Pot Is Fun.”

And it was fun, at least for a while, or we wouldn’t have kept doing it. By now we’d made contact with a couple dozen other budding hippies, and if we weren’t hanging out at our place smoking pot and listening to music, we were at one of their houses doing the same. Still, we seemed able to cope – just about – with the demands of everyday life, even if our plans to attend school and get part-time jobs had been jettisoned when September was barely underway.

But once LSD entered the picture, everything else went out the door, including what was left of the furniture. The idea of paying rent became a meaningless abstraction, something that the bourgeoisie might be hung up on, but wasn’t going to trouble us.

By the time our landlady realized what a couple of deadbeats she was stuck with, October and part of November had slipped away. When she tacked an eviction notice to the front door on the first of December, you might think we’d use the month’s notice it gave us to make some plans or come up with some money, but instead we decided we needed a holiday and I bounced a check to buy us tickets to New York.

Christmas dinner was a can of corned beef hash and a store-bought pound cake, financed by pulling a wagon up and down the block collecting pop bottles, and then came New Year’s Eve, our last night before homelessness. Darrell’s parents had sent him a few bucks. What were we going to spend it on? More LSD, of course.

At midnight we went our separate ways, our plan being to find sympathetic and/or gullible college girls to crash with. Darrell, being a smooth talker and (at least prior to his hippie incarnation) dresser, had no trouble charming his way into a house one street over, but I, not so gifted in that department, was at a loss. Then I remembered two girls I knew who’d just moved into an old (c. 1845) stone house just off North Huron Street. They had what was nominally a one-bedroom apartment, but it had a lot of odd corners and cubbyholes and I could see it had potential. Better yet, they didn’t seem inclined to throw me out.

What had begun as two girls sharing a student apartment morphed within days into a full-on hippie commune known around town as Insanity House (a nickname given us by the other local hippies; it would be years later before I realized they hadn’t meant it as a compliment). Each night more people would come over to hang out and drop acid with us, and most of them seemed to end up living there. By late January I counted 34 people as more or less permanent residents.

I also counted the number of consecutive days that I’d taken LSD: 30. In one of those inexplicable bits of drug-fueled logic, I decided it was important that I continue taking LSD until my day count matched the number of people in our “family” (yes, we actually referred to it as such). Which I did, hitting 34 days on the 2nd of February. That night’s trip wasn’t too pleasant; we’d run out of both money and the good stuff, and whatever it was I managed to scrounge left me thinking that everything had become a photographic negative of itself. Worse, I had a sickening feeling that this time I’d crossed a line, that something in my brain chemistry had been permanently altered, and that things were always going to look this way.

Late that night I found myself raving like a lunatic to a bunch of strangers in an apartment near campus. Desperate to impress them, I told them how Insanity House was actually a revolutionary organization, and that though we financed ourselves by a combination of stealing and selling drugs (true), our real work involved sabotaging government and corporate institutions to oppose the Vietnam War and bring down the government (a complete and utter lie). I bragged that we were making bombs and were going to take out the local draft board (also a complete lie), and when somebody asked how I was going to avoid getting arrested, I breezily assured him that I had a “system” that made it impossible for the police to pin anything on me.

“Sounds like you’ve got it pretty well figured out,” said a mustachioed character who’d been introduced to me as Maurice. “Can you get me two kilos of weed?”

“No problem,” I lied. In fact, I’d done almost no drug dealing on my own, not least because it was impossible for me to hang on to any amount of drugs without using them and/or giving them away. Most of the dealing that supported Insanity House was handled by a hard-boiled but soft-hearted (maybe a bit soft-headed as well) woman named Winnie, who’d somehow inveigled some local drug barons to advance us 300 hits of LSD. Unfortunately, we’d ended up eating almost all of it, and the money from the little bit that was sold mostly went to finance late-night pizza parties and the like.

Winnie was freaking out, not knowing how she was going to pay back the money, and the rest of us were freaking out, not knowing where we were going to get more acid (food was mostly an afterthought and rent had never been thought about at all). As a result, and also because I was feeling fried from my previous night’s experience (the latest rumor was that the CIA was putting speed in LSD to sabotage the hippie movement, which in my mind explained why I hadn’t been able to sleep well lately), February 3 was the first day since New Year’s Eve that I didn’t take acid. Winnie had disappeared, and the rest of the Insanity House crew sat around disconsolately staring at the walls and wondering what was going to become of us.

She showed up the following morning bursting with good news: she’d managed to talk some Detroit dealers into fronting her another 50 hits of acid. “But this time we really have to sell it all,” she insisted. “Then maybe we can start getting back on our feet again.” She added that the Detroit dealers were not hippies, they were gangsters, and would probably kill us if we stiffed them.

Having conveyed that cheerful bit of information, she pulled me aside and handed me the vial of acid. “Hide this somewhere safe,” she said. “If I hang onto it, everyone will be asking me to give them some, and you know me, I just won’t be able to keep saying no.” Considering my own track record, I thought this was a strange request, but I’d actually come to be viewed as a sort of quasi-leader of Insanity House, no thanks to any merits on my part, but possibly because everyone else seemed even crazier than I was.

I buried the vial under a few inches of snow at the back of the yard before leaving to set up the marijuana deal I’d talked myself into two nights earlier. At the last minute, a fit of paranoia overtook me. What if someone had seen where I’d hid it? I looked around for a better hiding place; not seeing one, I stuffed the vial back into my pocket.

Maurice – what kind of name was that for a hippie pot dealer, I asked myself? – picked me up in his car, and we drove to Ann Arbor. We parked on Forest Street, just off South University, and I told him to wait there while I went to the dealer’s house. Michael, a soft-spoken grad student, hadn’t been expecting me, and looked at me as though I were crazy when I asked for two keys. “I’ve never had that much marijuana here,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen that much marijuana.”

“Okay, I’ll take what you have,” I told him, which turned out to be four ounces, and the most marijuana I’d ever seen in my life. I took it back to the car, told Maurice there’d been a misunderstanding and that it would be a day or two before I could get the rest of his order. He didn’t seem perturbed at all, just sat there staring straight ahead. “Well, guess we’d better get back to Ypsilanti, then,” I said, but Maurice still didn’t say a word, nor did he make a move to start the engine. In that same instant I saw two rough-looking men come running toward us from across the street. They were both carrying guns pointed in our direction.

“Maurice, get the hell out of her now!” I yelled, but he continued to sit there as the car door opened and I was dragged onto the sidewalk and handcuffed. They frisked me quickly before hauling me down to the police station; it wasn’t until the second search, conducted just before they locked me in a cell, that they found the vial of LSD. Ironically, that was only a minor detail as far as the police were concerned; at the time Michigan’s laws against marijuana were far more severe than those against LSD. The LSD might have gotten me a year in jail; for sales of marijuana I was looking at 20.

So that was how I spent February 4, 1968. Overall, a bit of a bummer, as the hippies liked to say. However, it was not quite over yet. Sometime a bit before midnight, the police cut me loose, for reasons I couldn’t comprehend at the time, but which I later learned involved them wanting to shadow me and see who I might lead them to. In an all-night planning session with the Insanity House brain trust, fueled by – naturally – still more LSD, it was decided that I’d go underground (it was all the rage in those days) and wait for the revolution.

At dawn I set out for New York City in my friend Jay’s ‘41 Mercury. No headlights, so we couldn’t drive at night, and no heater, which meant that even swathed in blankets we were miserably, miserably cold. We got stopped by cops in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but the warrant hadn’t gone out for me yet. A couple weeks later, the FBI came looking for me at Jay’s parents’ house in Flatbush.

His mother covered for me “as long as I never see you around here again,” and I bounced around the country, to Ohio, back to New York, then to California for the rest of the year before it sunk in that the revolution wasn’t going to happen soon enough to save my ass. Eventually, when all the hubbub had died down, a lawyer was able to broker a deal that left me serving only minimal jail time and a couple years of probation. By 1969 things were more or less back to normal. Insanity House was long gone, of course, busted and trashed by the cops as soon as they realized I’d slipped away, and Jay, the kid who drove me to New York, was dead of a heroin overdose, his body left behind at a rest stop on the Rhode Island Turnpike by his buddies who didn’t want to miss the rock festival they’d been headed for.

Jan, the girl I’d been paired up with at Insanity House – as the alpha-couple, we’d had our own “room,” a closet big enough to accommodate a single mattress – got religion, married a preacher, and, the last I heard, had five kids. A couple years earlier she’d been talking (literally) to trees and insisting she was reincarnated from a cat. I hung around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor a while longer, but it just wasn’t the same anymore, and as soon as my probation was up, I got the hell out of there. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Ann Arbor, and try to visit from time to time, but Ypsilanti (Ypsi-tucky, as the locals often call it), with its brooding Gothic houses and the dark, baleful cloud that seems to hang over the place on even the brightest of days, still scares the hell out of me. I’ll go there every once in a long while, mostly as a way of reminding myself that I’m still free to leave.
—
Larry Livermore is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He penned a column for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll for seven years, followed by a 14-year stint at the now-defunct Punk Planet. Check out his blog at www.larrylivermore.com, or email him at llivermore@gmail.com. This column was originally published on larrylivermore.com.

OVERALL LOOK PREDICTIONS

#1. The Amish

We all know that hipsters like irony. But some of them also like sincerity. Ironic-sincerity? Sincere sincerity? Whatever. I recently learned about this whole reemerging hipster movement in LA called the New Sincerity Movement, which is mostly just about artists acting super sincere and playing really unironic folk music. Which got me thinking; maybe hipsters are getting sick of irony. Maybe 2010 is all about being crazy sincere. And no one is more sincere than the Amish. Plus, think about it: they wear statement hats. They like suspenders. They have structural facial hair. I mean, hipsters are already halfway to Amish anyway. I predict 2010 is the year they’ll fully commit. And maybe start farming all over Williamsburg.

#2. Superhero Chic

According to Paste Magazine, we’re currently in the hipster age of the Meta Nerd. Lots of glasses without frames and ironic suspenders. But come on hipsters, I think we can get even nerdier. How about superhero chic? Think larping, but with less role playing and more irony. We all know that everyone loves superheroes. Since hipsters are basically just wearing elaborate costumes anyway, it’s time to take the plunge and put on some green tights and a mask. Or an entire Iron Man suit. It’s pretty much a hipster outfit anyway: hard to walk in, takes a lot of effort to get into, tight in weird places.

#3. Vikings

A year ago, every other skinny 20-something guy in New York City was dressed in flannel and had a huge beard. 2009 was all about the fake glasses and the pocket protectors. But I predict they’ll be a mountain man resurgence in 2010. Times 100. Meet: The Viking! This guy doesn’t wear flannel, he rocks huge fur pelts. And he wields a big axe (he wishes). As far as I know, weaponry is a totally untapped hipster market. Maybe it’s time they all started carrying around cross bows and battle-axes. It might be a little more manly than a ukulele. I’m just saying.

HOT NEW ACCESSORIES

#1. Gas Masks

Hipsters love a good useless accessory. Monocles, tiny instruments, fanny packs. The more useless, the better. But instead of just being useless, accessories in 2010 will become aggressively dysfunctional. Like a gas mask. After all, gas masks obstruct almost all of your senses. And unless some chemical warfare starts happening, they’re beyond useless. Hipsters will love them. I predict we’ll start seeing these paired with skinny jeans and neon sunglasses over the eyeholes.

#2. Chaps

Skinny jeans have been popular for far too long. It’s time for them to evolve. And since they’re getting skinnier and skinnier, what’s the next logical step? For pieces of them to start disappearing. Like the ass pieces. Or, if that’s too obvious, maybe an ironic calf cutout. Or a strategically placed thigh hole. But let’s face it, those jeans are getting so tight they’re bound to start ripping anyway. It’s time to cut out the middle man. Literally.

#3. Crocheted Beards

I predict that in 2010, everyone will start crocheting beards for themselves. It’s the perfect combo of ironic facial hair and unnecessary effort. Can’t you just see all those hipsters on the subway click-clicking as they create a super warm mustache? You could have a pink beard, or a neon blue one, or a – oh what? This already exists?

It’s official. I’m a genius.
—
Rachel Carter has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Girl Zone magazine and The Faster Times. She is currently living in New York and working on a young adult novel about ghosts. Visit her Pop Culture Blog.

West of Rome,
Just East of the border
In a static-y Ramada Inn,
Polishing his boots and pummeling his liver,
Steeped in the dark isolation,
Just what business does he have around here? -Vic Chesnutt

“Do you remember the first time you heard West of Rome?”

I was standing in an Athens, Georgia bar, circa 1995, when I was asked that question. My interlocutor was a complete stranger to me then, but we soon became close friends. It was the kind of question that transcended the usual music geek bar banter. Vic Chesnutt’s 1991 album was a touchstone for me in the same way that Elliott Smith’s early demos made such an enormous impression on many of my younger friends. In that way that only music can, Vic’s songs weaseled their way into my DNA. They were secret code that only I and a certain special elect understood. They were the gold standard.

And so I answered: “Yes, actually…I do remember the first time I heard West of Rome.”

Vic Chesnutt died of an overdose of muscle relaxants on Christmas Day. He was 45 years old. The rumors that he was in a coma started swirling Christmas Eve. From what I can tell it was Kristin Hersh who first let slip on her website that it was a suicide attempt. Of course that didn’t surprise a soul who knew anything about Vic’s life and career. It would have been more surprising if it had been natural causes. Chesnutt was suicidal most of his life. He talked about it openly. He wrote and sang about it. It was his own personal cross and he bore it with honesty and, yes, good humor. It was exactly that sort of paradox that made him such an essential artist.

For the uninitiated, Vic Chesnutt was born in Jacksonville in 1964 and raised in Zebulon, Georgia. There were musicians in the family. He learned to play the trumpet, messed around with the ukulele, pecked around at the guitar, and tried his hand at writing songs. He played in cover bands. But in 1983, Chesnutt’s world tilted on its axis. He was 18 years old the night he got drunk and rolled his car into an Atlanta ditch. The accident left him paralyzed from the waist down and with only partial use of his hands. After a short and ill-fated stint in Nashville, he landed in Athens. It was 1985.

When you’re tied to a wheelchair, you have plenty of time to catch up on your reading. By Chesnutt’s own rendering, he shoplifted a beat-up copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and immersed himself in the words of Auden, Whitman, and Dickinson. By the end of the ‘80s he was performing solo shows at the 40 Watt and was considered one of the rising stars of Athens’s fertile scene. It was Michael Stipe who took Chesnutt into the studio to record his first two albums: Little in 1990 and the seminal West of Rome in 1991. He would eventually release 13 records and perform and collaborate on many others.

Vic and I were not friends. We did, however, have mutual friends and acquaintances. We ran in some of the same circles. We crossed paths maybe four or five times in the five years I was in Athens but it was always at a bar or club and our conversations rarely went beyond the usual pleasantries. A couple of my buddies who knew him better said he could be pretty obstinate, but in my experience he was unfailingly polite and unassuming. We once had a strange conversation about the Beatles’ White Album and I was pretty certain I’d pissed him off. Later I was told he was just messing with me. And then there was one eminently forgettable evening when I ran into him at a late night watering-hole called “Lunch Paper.” We swapped shots for over an hour in complete silence. I was enduring my own little dark night of the soul and I wasn’t in any mood for conversation — even with one of my artistic heroes. He liked that just fine. When the bartender yelled “last call,” I stood up to pay and my knees went a little wobbly. I looked over at Vic and he smiled and said, “See? Every once in awhile these wheels come in handy.” Off he rolled into the heavy night.

No, my interest — my obsession, really — with Vic Chesnutt was and is with his words. And even there I want to tread lightly. Some years ago in another piece I referred to him as the “Poet Laureate of Athens, Georgia.” That implied that being a great songwriter wasn’t enough — that the popular song was somewhere down the ladder of artistic forms. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Through the complex interplay of his words and music, Vic made pop songs that were great art. They were crystalline miniatures that somehow could encapsulate the human condition in all of its pain and absurdity and humor. He had this singular ability to take you to the abyss — to sing with brutal honesty about human frailty and failure, about going toe-to-toe with those inner demons, about hurting those we love most, and to express his anger, unhappiness, self-loathing, and self-doubt — and then with excruciating ease, turn a phrase that could double you over with laughter. By laying bare his fragile and flawed humanity, he made us all a little more human. That was his monumental talent.

His live performances were just as riveting. He seemed such a diminutive figure when he rolled out onto the stage but as soon as he started telling stories you could hear a pin drop. Even when he played the “World Famous 40 Watt Club,” in front of an audience notorious for talking over the performers, Vic ruled the roost. No one would have considered interrupting a Vic show. It just wasn’t done — even in that hipster hell.

I’ve wanted to write seriously about Chesnutt for years. I hoped one day to do a long interview with him for Verbicide. I figured that now that I was back in Georgia the opportunities to talk to his friends and family might present themselves and I could do an even longer piece. Why not? Even with his personal life in turmoil, his career was on an extraordinary trajectory. In interviews he often expressed doubts about himself and his music, but he was an avid collaborator constantly hooking up with world-class musicians who felt compelled to help him to achieve his vision. Lambchop, Widespread Panic, Bill Frisell, Van Dyke Parks, and Elf Power were just the tip of the creative iceberg.

But nothing prepared diehard fans for the sonic paradigm shift that came with the Jem Cohen-produced North Star Deserter (2007). Cohen convinced Chesnutt to record the album with a bevy of Constellation Records artists including members of Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Godspeed You! Black Emperor along with Fugazi guitarist Guy Picciotto. That same indie-rock supergroup reformed for this year’s release, At the Cut. The band took Chesnutt’s deceptively simple songs and contributed all sorts of layers and textures. That process proved incredibly inspirational to Chesnutt who reported in an interview with the music blog, Aquarium Drunkard, that the recording sessions had proven so powerful that he’d gone home and written 15 new songs.

Within weeks of wrapping up the recording of At the Cut, he went back into the studio with his longtime friend and mentor Jonathan Richman. Richman had a very different aesthetic agenda in mind. No accoutrements. Strip away all the artifice. Sit Vic in front of a microphone with just his guitar. Let him play. The result is the stellar Skitter on Take Off, an album so naked and raw you can hear Chesnutt breathing on some of the songs. As aural experience, it couldn’t be more different than either North Star or At the Cut. And yet Vic’s visceral power — the power of his words — is still there. Skitter is a quiet little album that packs an emotional wallop. The bottom-line is that 2009 witnessed the singer/songwriter at the absolute peak of his creative genius.

And now he’s gone. A suicide. In early December, in an interview with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air Chesnutt talked about his struggles. He admitted to attempting suicide “three or four times.” But as he put it, “It didn’t take.” He talked about the anger and resentment he felt when he was revived and realized that he had survived. “I’d be like, how dare you?,” he told her. “You know, how dare you people interfere in…what was obviously my life, my wish?” But then Chesnutt went on to say that as time went by — as he put distance between himself and the suicide attempt — he’d feel increasingly happy that he was alive, that he had tasks to complete before he could go.

The question that provoked Chesnutt’s frank admission concerned the song , “Flirted With You All My Life.” In the song, Chesnutt’s protagonist literally flirts with death.

I’ve flirted with you all my life,
even kissed you once or twice,
and to this day,
I swear it was nice,
but clearly I was not ready.

When you touched a friend of mine,
I thought I would lose my mind,
but I found out with time that really,
I was not ready,
no, no, cold death, cold death, oh death,
really, I’m not ready.

Gross was quick to interpret the song as “heavy” and dark. In fact in obituary after obituary written since Christmas Day, we’ve inevitably had to encounter this particular song. It is a song about suicide; Vic committed suicide; how profoundly tragic it all is. But Chesnutt pointed out just the opposite. In the Fresh Air interview he corrected Gross: “This song is a joyous song, though. I mean, it’s a heavy song, but it is a joyous song. This is a break-up song with death, you know what I mean?”

So why now? Why cash in your chips when you’re on such a hot streak? How the hell should I know? I will say this, however (and I’ll say it because it enrages me), the man was in constant pain. His disabilities worsened over the years. He endured multiple surgeries and incurred massive debts — this in spite of having health insurance. Chesnutt reportedly owed Athens Regional Medical Center as much as $70,000, and those evil parasites sent the Sheriff a-knockin’ with the good news that they were threatening to take his house. That prospect horrified him. He was afraid to go to the hospital for any further treatments. According to Chesnutt, “I mean, I could actually lose a kidney. And I mean, I could die only because I cannot afford to go in there again. I don’t want to die…just because I don’t have enough money to go in the hospital. But that’s the reality of it. You know, I have a preexisting condition, my quadriplegia, and I can’t get [decent] health insurance.”

Did the American health care system kill Vic Chesnutt? Probably not, but to argue it didn’t have some role in this sorry episode is a flat-out lie. Vic’s friend, Jem Cohen, put it this way: “Vic’s death, just so you all know, did not come at the end of some cliché downward spiral. He was battling deep depression but was also at the peak of his powers, and with the help of friends and family he was in the middle of a desperate search for help. The system failed to provide it.” A fund has been set up to help the family pay off these debts. (http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/vic/)

There is nothing easy about this story. There is no way to reconcile its many paradoxes. Vic was an immensely complicated person. But one thing we can say is that a righteous noise has gone out of the artistic universe. That is a loss that affects us all. Each and every one of us. Vaya con dios, Vic Chesnutt. One day maybe we’ll catch up with you out there on that lonesome stretch of highway just west of Rome.
—
Mark Huddle teaches African American History and Popular Culture at Georgia College and State University. He writes from a bunker at an undisclosed location somewhere in central Georgia. He can be contacted at mark@scissorpress.com.

"Evolution of the Hipster" from Paste magazine

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been walking around your neighborhood for a while now, going: “Who are these cool kids hanging out on their stoops wearing neon sunglasses and talking about Vice? They look so aloof and ironic! How can I become one of them?”

Well, you are in luck, my friend. I’m here to show you the way. Because aside from a general air of apathy, there are certain aesthetic elements you’ll need to invest in if you truly want to become a hipster.

Here they are, the top five hipster essentials:

#1. Skinny Jeans

If you want to be a hipster, your number one investment is skinny jeans. Stat. Look, sometimes a cliché is a cliché because it’s true. And hipsters are not hipsters without skinny jeans — the skinnier the better. Plus there are lots of great places you can find them. Like American Apparel. Or Urban Outfitters. Or maybe you can just take your regular jeans and cut out about 12 inches of fabric. Extra hipster points if you find them in a crazy color. Think hot pink, or electric blue, or neon orange. Actually, just envision an acid-washed Easter egg. Now make that happen on your legs! Remember: you’re not a hipster until you’re rocking ostentatious sweaty denim.

#2. Structural Facial Hair

When it comes to facial hair you really can’t go wrong. At least as long as you don’t shave. No one likes a baby-faced hipster. But the mountain man? Hot! The Fu Manchu? Sounds great (and not at all skanky)! Seriously, even a Hitler-stache is fair game. Try taking a razor and just sort of attacking your face with it. I guarantee someone is already wearing this look in Williamsburg. Also, no more washing! A true hipster is afraid of only one thing: water. Well, that and bears.

#3. A Pointless Accessory

In order to be a true hipster, you need to carry around at least one pointless accessory. Perhaps you have a ukulele just sitting in your closet collecting dust. Pull that baby out and start walking down the street with it! Have an old fedora lying around? Why not put it on your head? Any dapper hat will do (as long as it won’t actually keep your head warm). There are endless possibilities: glasses without lenses, suspenders with tight pants, a neon fanny pack, even a monocle. Just make sure that whatever accessories you’re rocking have absolutely no discernable point.

#4. An Ironic Tattoo

It’s a well-known fact that hipsters are always trying to out-ironic one another. Sometimes they’re even so ironic they actually become sincere again. What better way to prove that you win irony than by getting it in permanent ink on your body? Try getting a tattoo that just says “tattoo.” Or a mustache on your finger that you can hold up to your upper lip at parties. If you’re going to be a hipster it’s time to fully commit. With your skin.

#5. A Shoe/Pant Combination that Makes it Look Like You Ride on the Special Bus

If you’ve followed steps 1 – 4, by now you’ve got the tight pants, the jaunty cap, and the ironic ink. You’re almost there! There’s just one missing element: the special bus shoe/pant combo. It’s time to go buy some white ’70s tube socks, with or without stripes. These can be paired with any type of shoe –- though FYI, every hipster loves a brightly-colored sneaker. Then, slap on your skinny jeans and make sure your socks stick out as much as possible, and voila! Forrest Gump moves to Brooklyn. And gets way more self-aware.

Congratulations! You have arrived in hipster-dom. Now it’s time to go make friends with other hipsters. This can be tricky; you will need to remember to act like you don’t care about anything. And to stay away from “sensitive” topics, like primetime TV. Why not try these conversation starters: “Hello, I also only go to that obscure coffee shop down the street where they only serve fair trade coffee grown in Brazilian rainforests. Starbucks is so the devil.” Or, “Of course I was at that show the other night. Nerdy Girl and the Technical Thing is totally happening. I like their use of the ukulele.” And if you need any more inspiration, check out “Evolution of the Hipster,” by Paste Magazine.

Once you’ve made friends with other hipsters, you have truly made it. And this is where we part ways forever, as you are no longer interested in “One Tree Hill,” and I don’t want to talk about the benefits of neon leggings.
–
Rachel Carter has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Girl Zone magazine and The Faster Times. She is currently living in New York and working on a young adult novel about ghosts. Visit her Pop Culture Blog.

Anyway, this is a super fun game, I promise. And if you’re really bored, you can even take it a step farther and create whole personas for your bands, with nicknames, albums, and song titles. I’m currently a member of The Snow Ponies, and my alter-ego is Jasmine Sparkleberry. Our first album is called Needles in the Sand. First single: “Seasonal Muffintop.” And no, I have no musical ability. Just a lot of free time, apparently.

I realize that poking fun at indie band names on a site largely devoted to indie music is a tad crass. But come on. The other day I was looking up music from, um,”The Vampire Diaries,” when I stumbled across the band We Were Promised Jet Packs. The music was great: soaring melodies, lovely folksy voices, blah, blah. To be honest, I had a hard time paying attention to anything but the name. Jet Packs? Seriously? As far as I’m concerned, if you name your band after the assurance of futuristic flight equipment you’re pretty much fair game.

What blows my mind is how so many different bands have similarly absurd trains of thought. After listening to both Margo & The Nuclear So and So’s and Florence + The Machine in the same day, my friend declared that Nerdy Girl And The Technical Thing is now her new band name. And look at all the lupine-inspired bands: Wolfmother, Wolf Parade, Sea Wolf. Or for the more arboreally inclined: The Wooden Birds, The Wooden Sky, Woodpigeon. I’m personally a big fan of declarative and imperative band names: Clap You Hands Say Yeah, I’m from Barcelona, and I Would Set Myself on Fire For You. Whoa Emo. Check out this list of the worst band names of ‘07 for a total round up (and fair warning, there is a category called “Rape.” Which is about 100 kinds of disturbing). My favorite? Happy Mother’s Day, I can’t read.

Not only do indie band names make a fun game, they also serve some practical functions. Specifically when it comes to indie band name generators. Anytime I need to name a party on Facebook, I just head over to Cool’eh magazine for some inspiration. This is how my last Halloween party got named Satanic Shakedown Explosion. I’ve also generated (and kind of fallen in love with): Cobalt and the Beholder, Wine? and Chinese Slack Water. Which, actually, are all pretty awesome band names. And may already be playing in Brooklyn somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that indie band names become any less ridiculous. I just want to make sure everyone is gaining maximum enjoyment from this indie practice. So next time you’re hanging out and someone says something like, “this room is full of flashlights and underpants.” Just say, “Flashlights And Underpants is my new indie band name.” Because where would the world be without unnecessarily long, mildly offensive, absurdist band names? A sad, sad, place, that’s where.

__

Rachel Carter has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Girl Zone magazine and The Faster Times. She is currently living in New York and working on a young adult novel about ghosts. Visit her Pop Culture Blog.

An uncomfortable fact presented itself to me like a sudden invasion of cold water that startles one while bathing and makes him wary of the shower’s stream. The fact, like all facts, a wandering meme, an incomplete analogy, is that a typical bottle of shampoo found in hypermarkets and hyper’tailers throughout the Occidental world is manufactured almost entirely from petroleum products (I don’t cite source because it is very bourgeoisie). I cringed to think about the black sticky stuff running down my face, but oil is amoral, I realized; it is the pursuit of it that is bloodthirsty. Troubled by the conclusion that was clear, but which I feared to confront in my own mind, I computed the following figures.

There are six quarts of blood in the human body (Column No. 3); one hundred thousand Iraqi civilian deaths from violence since 2003, and four thousand six hundred-sixty-nine American and coalition deaths in Iraq. While ignoring the death in Afghanistan and Iran and the disfigurement occurring everyday in the oil rich Middle East, those numbers represent approximately six hundred and twenty-eight thousand and fourteen quarts of blood spilled in the last few years, ostensibly for the stability of the world’s energy market — that is, the oil business.

If I modestly were to use thirty-two ounces of shampoo every two weeks, then I must wonder how many of those ounces are sanguinary. How many barrels of the oil used to produce that innocuous product were shipped directly from a war zone? Since I cannot know the answer with precision, I have been forced to reason that for as long as I lather that Pert-Plus Shampoo-Conditioner into my scalp it is thick crimson coagulated blood that slips down over my nose and shoulders. When I rinse it out it’s the foaming misty splatter of an old Iraqi pensioner that lands on the shower floor. When you rub the stinging soap from your eyes, it’s the soupy gore that used to make up the little boy you babysat for five dollars an evening while his parents went out for dinner. He grew up and signed up and our country said that our standard of living is tied to the steady supply of oil and that he should die to keep it flowing.

I wondered, pensively wasting water (Column No. 11), how can a just and free a society require war to keep the prols in ‘poo? Shuddering at the thought, I contemplated my own filth. This is the fearful thought; that I am complicit in the death and destruction of lives anonymous to me for the fleeting commodity of washing my hair. Once the thought is loose it is an insurgent critique (Column No. 2), and I cast my eye over all things, the mountains of things that I owned, that endless jumbled strings of things paraded about by everyone that I know, that I saw. Polyethylene, polyolefins, polystyrene, boxed in cellophane and bagged in thin sheets of plastic, paid for with little slabs of plastic. The money-go-round that wiser people than I have been warning about and railing against since 1840 became clear; I saw clearly how the purchase of a bottle of shampoo feeds the cycle of retail and finance, how a dollar is lent by an industrialist to his employee to buy his product made with resources in a foreign land that his employee’s daughter has been shot down for. I endeavored, drunk with anger, to blow holes in the supply line, but as I looked around I saw full-bodied ignorance, manageable, stylish apathy: silent allies of the reactionary.

Inside the minutes of the debate from the D.D.S., I found a series of counter-arguments. Challenges to the notion of rebellious self-reliance, and the doubt that they represent confronted me as well. “We are too busy to do without the convenience that commodity represents; we cannot live well without it; we’ve worked hard, we deserve it.” They sound like cheap hollow advertisement jingles to me now. The gnawing guilt of bloody shampoo insisted that I make some effort to remove myself from the cycle of exploitation represented by every little Thing in my cupboards and closet, and I was inspired by the examples of the Rhizome Collective and Another Sky Press, Scott and Helen Nearing, all of the other examples of self-sufficiency. They interrupt that flow of blood money that swirls around the sewage of usurers and mercenary contractors, because the thing itself is the weak link of the chain of dollars and yuan that binds manipulated and marketed peoples. We can refuse to participate; we can make our own shampoo.

The following recipe uses Dr. Bronner’s castile soap as a base. The Yellow Jack’s have heartily endorsed this operation over the years; Bronner’s founding principles include the belief that “we are all brothers and sisters and we should take care of each other and spaceship earth.” I doubt that Paul Mitchell worries much about brothers and sisters around the world when he buys up his refined petrol detergent base from some Halliburton subsidiary. The recipe is straight forward, and any local grocery store with organic products will have everything that one needs to make it:

one part Dr. Bronner’s;

one part liquid aloe vera;

two parts water;

few drops of orange extract.

After shampoo, an entire household worth of products beg to be subverted. We can keep finding ways to do for ourselves, to make and repurpose and abstain from participating in the market economy that makes war profitable. We could organize our efforts, but that’s exactly what got the Rhizome in trouble (Column No. 1) and it’s why the D.D.S. eventually likened hygiene to soldiering. Force and coercion will always be employed by the moneyed to protect their property (Column No. 6) and since I am no revolutionary and have never advocated the violent overthrow of anything, I should be prepared to be pummeled repeatedly. Therefore I have chosen to write under the pseudonym Benny Lovero. I shouldn’t have to, but there is a war going on, and there is blood in my shower now. We are bled out in the battles between two lies; those of hard economy and those of insidious parochial dogma. Everyday we bleed a little more as the chains that are subtle, invisible and abstract tighten and chafe and squeeze our chests tighter, forcing us all to march from work to shop to glowing television and back again to pay for war. So we sweat and spend and wait to die in Baghdad and Oakland and Paterson and Richmond and Lawrence. The sweat and blood will mix with anger and frustration and become a sick, slimy film that saturates the skin. We should scrub it off.

Moving to New York City three years ago was a little bit of a culture shock. All of a sudden I was confronted with things like “public transportation” and “Starbucks.” If I sound like a cliché, it’s because I was one – I grew up in a small rural town, and New York was pretty daunting. Every time I got my bearings I had to figure out something else. And this included the people. It turns out that I-bankers, short for investment bankers, is a term for guys who wear polo shirts, go out in the meat-packing district, and have enough money to pay for dinner. Brooklyn “green” moms only give their kids organic food while fighting campaigns for breast-feeding rights. And then there are the hipsters.

Like hippies and punks of the past decades, hipsters are the new cornerstones of alternative youth culture. But instead of believing in free love and/or preaching anarchy, hipsters like to listen to indie bands, wear skinny jeans, and do everything ironically.

I like irony as much as the next person. Actually, that’s not true. I’m diabolically sincere, especially when it comes to cheesy pop culture stuff. I like so much stuff unironically. Things that are not cool for anyone to like. Things like “One Tree Hill.” And Twilight.

But living in Brooklyn puts me in the heart of the hipster world. Many of my friends fell out of the womb in skinny-jeans. In the past few years, I’ve developed a healthy appreciation for hipster culture, even as I recognize that I can never truly be a part of it (fedoras just don’t look good on me).

Therefore this column is a chance for me to blend two things I love: hipster stalking and pop culture. I’m going to “out” hipster culture. Well, sort of. It’s kind of tough for me to write anything without mentioning Robert Pattinson, so fair warning, there’s going to be a lot of cheesy stuff mixed in with the too-cool-for-school. But if the word “hipster” leaves you scratching your head, think of me as a hipster-culture translator — or, if you’re a hipster-in-training, as a big fat warning sign. Because let’s be honest, if it’s gotten to me, it’s probably no longer cool.
—
Rachel Carter has an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Girl Zone magazine and The Faster Times.  She is currently living in New York and working on a young adult novel about ghosts. Visit her Pop Culture Blog.