The Arbiter Of Cool
The year is 1988. The place, a college town in Upstate NY. I'm a freshman, and an atypically young freshman at that, as I burned out on high school in my Junior year, wiped out with a nervous breakdown followed by a bout of mono, and got my GED as quickly as was legally permissible, and headed straight for the nearest state University to commence Real Life.
There were two tribes in our campus centre (youth culture always splits itself in two, as them vs. us is the easiest way of defining a newly hatched adult identity.) My tribe, the Hipsters (this word had not been tainted with its 00s association - it still harked back to Beatniks and The City - New York, of course, not our pathetic local town) and our arch enemies, the Art Fags.
The Hipsters gathered around the campus food coop and its accompanying record shop - we were marked by our politics (radical) and our music (hardcore and punk, SST and Alternative Tentacles.) Art fags, wearied by nearly a decade of Reagan-Thatcherism, were not thought to have politics, and their music was effete European synthpop - all sneeringly dismissed as "Depeche Mode." Hipsters majored in *real* subjects, like politics and and philosophy and journalism (or even hard sciences like physics and maths.) Art Fags, of course, studied art and design and fashion - or even worse yet, English. Hipsters dressed in lots of leather (or black denim if they were vegan) and flannel and spiked their part-long part-shaved hair up into elaborate crests. Art Fags wore clothes from Boy and Contempo and dressed like, well, art fags.
I was told, by one of the arbiters of who was "scene" and who was not, that I was always sightly suspect. After all, my favourite band was not Crass, but Bauhaus, and I was suspected of preferring the sell-outs New Order to the sainted Joy Division, and what's more, my major was "Public Communications" (a weird catch-all division that would in a few years evolve into "New Media") which was decidedly more art school than journalism. Still, my politics were unimpeachable. As part of a radical feminist student group, *we* had occupied a university office while they had stayed in the coop and debated. What's more, my father had actually *held political office* for a socialist (OK, the Labour) party. So I was grudgingly accepted as Hipster, rather than Art Fag.
I tried to be as tribal as I could, because this was the first genuine Scene I'd been accepted into in my life, but I had my doubts.
The thing was, the most *interesting* people I knew, the ones whose thoughts were beautiful and original and challenging, the ones whose musical tastes were most expansive - they didn't dress like punks at all. In fact, when I met up with a penpal at an all-ages VFW gig, the Arbiter of Cool was suspicious of him for dressing like a "hippie" (more proto-grunge, really, with the benefit of hindsight, but still.)
I suppose it was a kind of shorthand more than anything else. If you saw someone with a mohawk sitting on the steps of the campus centre, you could go over and ask them how much they hated Reagan, and have a friend for the next semester. But a friend I met this way confessed to me that the AoC would only greet her when she spiked her hair up, but would blank her when it was down. Did her personality change with her hair? I didn't think so.
I remember the moment it all changed. We were sprawled over a picnic table outside the campus centre, eating hummus and taboule from the food coop, when AoC turned to me, and asked me, pointedly, about my friend V. "There's such a dearth of *real* punk rock girls around here," he mused. "It's so refreshing to see a real punk rock girl again."
I gaped at him, not quite knowing how to answer. V was my best friend from high school, who'd been home for the weekend. I'd proudly taken her to one of the Scene parties, desperate to show off my new, cool friends. But V, as much as I loved her, had the musical tastes of the redneck community where she'd grown up. She owned Grateful Dead records, FFS, she had Rush posters on her walls when I met her. She'd been forced to keep her precious collection of books (sci fi and fantasy mostly) in a locked chest because her mother thought they were "untidy." We started to expand each others' horizons. I began a campaign to educate her about music, about literature, about art - and she educated me about life outside of books - sex, drugs, shopping. I lost my innocence, gratefully - she lost her ignorance, not always so gratefully.
But punk rock, punk rock she was not. The clothes she'd worn to the party had been borrowed or adapted. My old Sex Pistols t-shirt. Heavy metal slut boots were easily enough adapted to look punk - and a black leather miniskirt. A motorcycle jacket customised with a few studs and a lick of paint. Her hair, her heavy metal mop - we crimped it and teased it out to the size of a small bush and we painted her face with black lipstick like Siouxsie Sioux.
And this boy, that I'd taken to be the arbiter of our Scene, he looked at her and he didn't see that her favourite band was Led Zeppelin and that she had voted Republican, like her parents and her grandparents. Our Arbiter of Cool looked at her, and saw her leather jacket and her spiked hair and said "This, this is a *real* punk rock girl."
Yes, we were teenagers - of course it's as shallow to judge people by their favourite band as by their punk rock costume. It's the quality of a person's soul that counts, not the quality of their record collection *or* the spikiness of their hair. But I learned a lot about image and about Arbiters of Cool on that day.
Flash forward ten years, my brother and I sitting in a posh bar in NYC, and he laughingly quotes Oscar Wilde "I have never met anyone who did not turn out to be exactly what I thought them to be within 5 minutes of meeting them." I looked at him carefully and shook my head, thinking how deceiving his own Young Republican costume was. I knew then, as I know now. My favourite people are those who do *not* turn out to be exactly who you thought they were within 5 minutes of meeting them.
So the violent revulsion in my previous post, to Arbiters of Cool who would make you pay to stand in a queue to be judged worthy of entry by bouncers - this is where it comes from. Not from arrogance, or from insecurity, but from this.
There were two tribes in our campus centre (youth culture always splits itself in two, as them vs. us is the easiest way of defining a newly hatched adult identity.) My tribe, the Hipsters (this word had not been tainted with its 00s association - it still harked back to Beatniks and The City - New York, of course, not our pathetic local town) and our arch enemies, the Art Fags.
The Hipsters gathered around the campus food coop and its accompanying record shop - we were marked by our politics (radical) and our music (hardcore and punk, SST and Alternative Tentacles.) Art fags, wearied by nearly a decade of Reagan-Thatcherism, were not thought to have politics, and their music was effete European synthpop - all sneeringly dismissed as "Depeche Mode." Hipsters majored in *real* subjects, like politics and and philosophy and journalism (or even hard sciences like physics and maths.) Art Fags, of course, studied art and design and fashion - or even worse yet, English. Hipsters dressed in lots of leather (or black denim if they were vegan) and flannel and spiked their part-long part-shaved hair up into elaborate crests. Art Fags wore clothes from Boy and Contempo and dressed like, well, art fags.
I was told, by one of the arbiters of who was "scene" and who was not, that I was always sightly suspect. After all, my favourite band was not Crass, but Bauhaus, and I was suspected of preferring the sell-outs New Order to the sainted Joy Division, and what's more, my major was "Public Communications" (a weird catch-all division that would in a few years evolve into "New Media") which was decidedly more art school than journalism. Still, my politics were unimpeachable. As part of a radical feminist student group, *we* had occupied a university office while they had stayed in the coop and debated. What's more, my father had actually *held political office* for a socialist (OK, the Labour) party. So I was grudgingly accepted as Hipster, rather than Art Fag.
I tried to be as tribal as I could, because this was the first genuine Scene I'd been accepted into in my life, but I had my doubts.
The thing was, the most *interesting* people I knew, the ones whose thoughts were beautiful and original and challenging, the ones whose musical tastes were most expansive - they didn't dress like punks at all. In fact, when I met up with a penpal at an all-ages VFW gig, the Arbiter of Cool was suspicious of him for dressing like a "hippie" (more proto-grunge, really, with the benefit of hindsight, but still.)
I suppose it was a kind of shorthand more than anything else. If you saw someone with a mohawk sitting on the steps of the campus centre, you could go over and ask them how much they hated Reagan, and have a friend for the next semester. But a friend I met this way confessed to me that the AoC would only greet her when she spiked her hair up, but would blank her when it was down. Did her personality change with her hair? I didn't think so.
I remember the moment it all changed. We were sprawled over a picnic table outside the campus centre, eating hummus and taboule from the food coop, when AoC turned to me, and asked me, pointedly, about my friend V. "There's such a dearth of *real* punk rock girls around here," he mused. "It's so refreshing to see a real punk rock girl again."
I gaped at him, not quite knowing how to answer. V was my best friend from high school, who'd been home for the weekend. I'd proudly taken her to one of the Scene parties, desperate to show off my new, cool friends. But V, as much as I loved her, had the musical tastes of the redneck community where she'd grown up. She owned Grateful Dead records, FFS, she had Rush posters on her walls when I met her. She'd been forced to keep her precious collection of books (sci fi and fantasy mostly) in a locked chest because her mother thought they were "untidy." We started to expand each others' horizons. I began a campaign to educate her about music, about literature, about art - and she educated me about life outside of books - sex, drugs, shopping. I lost my innocence, gratefully - she lost her ignorance, not always so gratefully.
But punk rock, punk rock she was not. The clothes she'd worn to the party had been borrowed or adapted. My old Sex Pistols t-shirt. Heavy metal slut boots were easily enough adapted to look punk - and a black leather miniskirt. A motorcycle jacket customised with a few studs and a lick of paint. Her hair, her heavy metal mop - we crimped it and teased it out to the size of a small bush and we painted her face with black lipstick like Siouxsie Sioux.
And this boy, that I'd taken to be the arbiter of our Scene, he looked at her and he didn't see that her favourite band was Led Zeppelin and that she had voted Republican, like her parents and her grandparents. Our Arbiter of Cool looked at her, and saw her leather jacket and her spiked hair and said "This, this is a *real* punk rock girl."
Yes, we were teenagers - of course it's as shallow to judge people by their favourite band as by their punk rock costume. It's the quality of a person's soul that counts, not the quality of their record collection *or* the spikiness of their hair. But I learned a lot about image and about Arbiters of Cool on that day.
Flash forward ten years, my brother and I sitting in a posh bar in NYC, and he laughingly quotes Oscar Wilde "I have never met anyone who did not turn out to be exactly what I thought them to be within 5 minutes of meeting them." I looked at him carefully and shook my head, thinking how deceiving his own Young Republican costume was. I knew then, as I know now. My favourite people are those who do *not* turn out to be exactly who you thought they were within 5 minutes of meeting them.
So the violent revulsion in my previous post, to Arbiters of Cool who would make you pay to stand in a queue to be judged worthy of entry by bouncers - this is where it comes from. Not from arrogance, or from insecurity, but from this.
posted by Masonic Boom | 11:58 am
1 Comments:
I think people like the safetiness of it. You don't have to react to the person and maybe 'miss your cue', but can react to the persona instead, which is also the persona of hundreds of other people you've known so it's less likely you'll screw up somehow.
There's such a deep, damaging insecurity to that sort of thing that I can't stand it anymore. I can deal with the superficiality of it all because I'm about as deep as a glass of water myself, but it's painful to see the insecurity. Ass-clenchingly so.
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