"Some motherf****rs are always trying to ice-skate uphill"

I suspect that this has been the case for some time. But having just been forwarded the video to Silversun Pickups' "Lazy Eye" by my good friend Dan, I've finally realized just how prevalent it has become.

The "it" in this case is not easily definable. It's a tendency. A zeitgeist, perhaps, though it's more physical, less abstract. A construct may be most accurate, though the word instantly brings to mind terrible images of neo-feminist post-Marxist academics dipping my testes in a vat of liquid nitrogen. But I digress.

I'm talking about the modern hipster, and his or her almost ubiquitous manifestation as the waifish, sad eyed slacker thoughtfully shaking his greasy hair out of his face while somehow managing to front a popular band or make a movie. For examples, see bands like: the aforementioned Pickups, The Field (sorry Cosmo), Shout Out Louds, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and (it kills me to say it) the Strokes. And, of course, movies like: The Puffy Chair; Four Eyed Monsters; Me, You and Everyone We Know, and the perversely concurrent The Chumscrubber and Thumbsucker.

The thing is that I actually like most of these artists. And even among those that I don't, I suspect that many of them are pretty interesting and unique - at least as much as any of us can be. I'd like to believe some asshole producer somewhere is telling them to really bring out that "slacker" look by not eating for a week, or bathing only at gas stations. Or at the very least that these guys were the only ones from Topeka High who wore white Chuck Taylors and skinny black jeans and carried a copy of Rimbaud in their back pocket. But the truth is that even if the Monkees were the first kids in their hometowns to sport mop tops and weren't just a completely manufactured product of the National Broadcasting Company, they'd still go down in history as a shitty alternative to the Beatles.

Creative and consumer markets reward those who are the first to make a trend popular. Note that this is different from saying that they reward those who actually create the trend (if that were the case, all the kids (including me) would be throwing out their copies of Rushmore and "Siamese Dream" in favor of Five Easy Pieces and The Jesus and Mary Chain's "Psychocandy"). So all you contemporary artists, take note: it's time to try something new.

Unlike most critics, however, I have a solution - at least in the Silversun Pickups' case. Namely that during the song's climactic bridge at minute 2:47, the entire smoky club's population sprout fangs and have a go at each other's jugulars. In addition to providing a superficial level of entertainment reminiscent of the opening rave sequence in the Snipes/Dorff masterpiece Blade, it would also function on a beautifully self-referential level i.e. the slacker malaise reaching such depths that it literally requires an act of vampiric mass suicide in order to attain that holy grail of hipsterdom: being cool.

The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent

I was listening to "Taking Tiger Mountain," the final track on Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, when I read that Kurt Vonnegut had died. The song's opiate guitar plucking and simple lyrics [We climbed and we climbed, / Oh, how we climbed / My, how we climbed / Over the stars to the top / of Tiger Mountain / Forcing the lines through the snow."] seemed sentimentally appropriate.

I read most of Vonnegut's books when I was younger, and to be honest they've all kind of blended together. The one image I will never forget is a sketch he made within the text of Breakfast of Champions, in which he mentions a "wide-open beaver." He proceeds to draw the semi-aquatic rodent, then indicates that this is not the beaver of which he writes. Below it he draws a woman's vagina, which is, in fact, the beaver in question.

I must have been about thirteen, which would explain any errors in my recitation. It also explains the tremendous fascination with, and fear of, female genitalia I've had ever since.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.