which is the least that one ought to expect from a socially conscioius hipster. Actually, i hadn’t planned on going out tonight but Laiyean was headed over to Shuffle, and this was the only night that she was to be in town before leaving again. The show there was the MC 10z or something like that: all i know that was i go in there, and it’s a damn miasma of cheap smokes and there are plenty of standard issue hip hop outfits walking around. Laiyean and Linda decided to stay outside, where there plenty of other people outside, doing what in the US would be called “loitering” in front of convenience stores, with open bottles of beer which leather skinned migrants would hunt for and crunch into aluminum pancakes while their children gripped tightly onto the wilted roses they try to sell to foreigners.
There were tons of foreigners, I guess myself included–but i guess i wasn’t so egregious as to sit on the monkey king coin operated “rides,” though i think if i Had a coin and some privacy i might have tried it. yeah, they sat on those, drinking beers and sending SMSs to people they thought had the lowdown on what was cool and happenin’ in the city tonight. ONe of them said, “we can’t call X, he hasn’t even been here and we have; if we have to ask him what’s cool, he’s gonna be on an ego trip forever.” Of course they said this in a more american and slightly less grammatical fashion, which made it more interesting.
I’m reminded of what Dan was saying about people at Harley’s who, for some reason I cannot quite fathom, looked like busboys and waiters. I don’t know why he’d be down on the working class, the proles are what make the country what it is and keep the good name of socialism from being completely consigned to the dustbin of history. But i know exactly what he means, people seem pretty fuckin’ random dude these days.
speaking of random, I hung out with a multinational and multi-ethnic group of lesbians tonight after leaving Shuffle, and they made this video of their lives, which was well produced since the filmmaker behind it, one of them, is well versed in this techie film editing stuff. It had a soundtrack, a decent rhythm (that most basic aspect of montage) as well as slice of life shots in quickie marts, supersoaker battles outside apartments, and candid conversations on femme-butch ratings of each other: 1 being most femme, 10 being most butch. I thought it was quite interesting, not just because of the natural predilection for “subcultures” but because it seemed to be a awww how sweet recording of their lives, full of small, silly, moments that to my mind, would never be worth recording–but which by the very fact that they are recorded are transfigured into something meaningful, something very intimate, something very real.
Unfortunately, the only subculture that i really belong to is the people who spend way too much time and money at Boonna and don’t even get laid for all the hipster cachet they’ve accumulated in this manner. Bogus.