Glory Hallilujah..

I know the end is near now.

How?

The Adbusters cover story is blasting hipsters.

Fuck, if that isn't the final solution of self-hatred curing itself, then nothing is or will ever be.

A little history--I used to be a self-loathing graphic designer. I was on top of the corporate world (in a sense--I had international clients and my own firm but little interest in making money so didn't make any huge money, just enough for Italian bikes, Gore-Tex, travel, fancy beer and regular Thai food). When I was there, I was simultaneously on top of the hipster world (backstage on the Seattle scene before and in its heyday).

I worked 6 or 7 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week, 4 or 5 months a year.

The rest of the time I traveled, fucked off, slept and tried to think of productive things to do. I also did a significant amount of volunteer work. And hung hard.

I was a hipster par excellence and relatively unabashedly so. I worked in a dirty, smelly, huge, raw loft in the middle of downtown and rode my bike to work every day. I was also a DJ and in a band. (Previous gigs--espresso jerk and bike messenger. THis was 15 years ago or so).

Anyway, the only magazine I felt worth it's salt was Adbusters. And a similar anti-advertising rag called Stay Free, which was very similar but ten minutes ahead and more punk. And more fun and loving.

Not that I could read either, I just recognized that they were on the leading edge of culture and media.

But it was implicit that they were hipsters. Uber-hipsters. What on earth else could you call moping, over it graphic designers who wrote for the just as over it cultural elite? Who thought that writing and better design would save the world and art couldn't do shit?

Mayakovsky?

Anyway, for as whatever as these mo-fos were, I certainly didn't know and couldn't find anyone who knew more than them. I was them and they were me. (At some point, I'll tell you about my "liberation capitalist" company T Hree--which was two thirds what Adbusters should have been and one third what White Gold became. All mixed up into a beautifully unprofitable mess.)

Fast forward fifteen years or so and the counterculture has both grown and fractured so much that it's hard to find a head anymore. But if there was one mass media publication (I saw it at the checkstand at Whole Foods, after all--it's not like I was rummaging around some hippie newsstand)--if there was one pub that led the mainstreaming of hipsterdom charge it would be Adbusters. Not Utne, definitely not The NAtion, not Spin or Rolling Stone and not Details or Interview. (It sounds strange to include those last two, but they used to be important, along with Paper--for a minute, Mondo 2000 and maybe even Wired a tiny bit. And Dirt, Sassy and Grand Royal kind of.)

Anyway, if there was one demographic descriptor that could be applied to that same leading head it would be hipsters.

How this microscopically wide leading point of the head split and attacked itself today, I have no idea. It would almost be worth buying it to try to figure it out. (Maybe it's a battle over rent controlled apartments in Williamsburg.)

I know for certain they don't listen to different bands, like different politics, buy different products, eat different food, like different restaurants, take different classes or wear different clothes. So--what would make them different? Eyelash inclination? How often they wash their American Apparel socks?

It's not like they're two separate people in the same relationship, or two separate eyeballs on the same head, they're the indivisible heart and soul of the same beast.

It's a split that can't be survived. One symbolic of an entirely and comprehensively fractuous society.

Anyway, I say hallilujah completely unironically--because you can get to heaven either way--through believing belief (the mainstream or Western tactic) or through disbelieving disbelief (the counterculture/Eastern approach).

Evangelical Christians are working on believing belief, Adbusters and hipsters are working on disbelieving disbelief.

Both paths lead to ultimate, transcendant, belief, of course. But with believing belief, the appearance of a superficial, judgmental, supplicant's belief covers any real knowing right up until whatever precipitates real knowledge.

With disbelieving disbelief, irony, weariness and distance covers everything until knowledge appears--until the disbeliever decides to apply his disbelief entirely, and disbelieves his own disbelief as well as everything else. (Disbelieving everything else only is a lazy, self-serving, and trite disbelief indeed.)

From this realization, it's a short freefall--some would say relaxation--to a rock solid, eternal, knowing and ultimate belief. Because this belief has tried everything, said everything, and inhaled, in my opinion, it has the chance to be more real or more solid--more appealing--that a naive believer's belief. Folks leave the Evangelicals for the hipsters because Evangelicals are about as appealing (culturally, sexually and epistimologically) as a polygamists' housedress.

We must be getting close. It's like in the Matrix when the attacking machines split and then join again--finally overwhelming the defenders of Zion. Except this time the two droid channels have different instructions and collide into each other with radical ferocity--saving the beleagured city below. (I have no idea how to spell beleagured.)

First you blast big government and corporations. Then the media, then capitalism--or all of these. You blast the other--your father and mother. The state. The church.

Then you blame your friendcs, cool kids and hipsters, then yourself--then you realize that blame only gets you more blame. And attack only prolongs war.

Sooner or later you just decide to try vulnerability. Not because you're corny or happy or nice--but because there's nothing else left.

You don't leave irony because you feel great and are revved up and ready to go. You slink off alone because you're fucking hurt from all the sarchasm, in jokes and put-downs. Just like you don't leave the mainstream because you're stronger than it, you leave it because you're sick and tired and there is no where else to go.

It's a delicate exorcism--because the hipsters are us. We are adbusters as well. And if we are eventually to end up more loved and happier, we have to be more more certain of ourselves. It's no simple operation to skim off the fat without taking off a hunk of meat or some delicious broth. Since the patient is alive, any gouges are going to hurt.

Let me put it this way, Adbusters doens't make anything, they just critique things that others have made. Even their shoes are a critique of other people's shoes.

The counterculture is no different--it doens't make itself vulnerable or express it's desires--because it wants what it considers superficial and unholy: sex, money and happiness. So it just ends up recycling what was already cool--what is already mediated and safe. What is already counterculture.

It runs from the "normal", warm, and calm just as dig doggedly as the mainstream runs from the weird. If the mainstream doens't love anything, the counterculture loves only drama--after a while both are just as boring.

HIpsters--Adbusters included--are just as uptight as a Southern Bat=ptist preacher--they just have different "issues" or reasons.

Let me put it this way, after I wrote my book I started buying and wearing the most beautiful clothes I could find--$800 cashmere sportcoats, $200 pink shirts and $500 bench-made shoes. I looked like a million bucks and would tell anyone who asked exactly what I wanted to do--make art, make money, get laid--whatever I felt like I wanted to do. I started to live like I wanted whatever happened and no matter what anyone--cool or not--said.

When I started, I was rock-solid in with the in crowd. I knew top indie filmmakers and #1 indie rock stars. I knew lots of people that owned labels... etc. It's not cool to say you're cool, but I'm not cool anymore so believe me when I tell you I was. The kings and queens of the scene were at ratted-out parties at my house. We were so cool we didn't even hang out with mainstream punk or rock bands. We all knew bigger--stadium/Intl./SNL--bands, for example, but they weren't cool enough for us. (Though we did like some of their wives and nannys and would gain entry to their practice spaces/houses/pools and weren't above playing music/chilling/swimming there when they were out of town on occasion.)

Anyway--nothing was cool enough for me--that was the whole thing. The less you think is cool, the cooler you are, duh.

And believe me when I say that being cool didn't do shit for me.

Not shit. I was the most depressed I had ever been at the height of my cool (and the height of my money--as a designer, I was basically paid to be cool. After I lost my cool, I couldn't even convince my previous clients to hire me on a sympathy job).

When I started wearing nice clothes--and by this point I was more of a starving artist than I had ever been, living on credit cards and by selling my musical gear--I felt this was the logical punk progression. If punk was really dead, then sharp was the new messy.

And since punk, or hip, was so huge, then the way to show the new squares (who were really the newly minted hip) was to flip the script on em.

They were only into the shit now that it was safe, neutered and Hot Topic. They were conspicuously absent when you could actually get hated on, yelled at, go broke or lose your privledge for the shit.

Needless to say, my redefinition of punk--my out-punking of the punks--wasn't a huge success. (There's a great book about this in Thomas Man's Antonio Kroger--also check out The Anarchist Banker by Pessoa.) My hip friends took to my cleanshaven, clean, upscale punk like I had fucked their girlfriend. Which is to say not at all.

I've since loosened up my look, but I still like the good--read expensive--shit. Unabashedly and unapologetically. I'll scream quality from the mountaintop.

And I still believe in free markets, ambition, drive, self adn all that other shit that's taboo in both the counterculture and at Adbusters.

There's no difference between material quality and spiritual or mental quality. You have to put the right one first, or course, but they aren't at all mutually exclusive--that's some stale-ass fearful thinking.

It's unfortunate that we have to learn it this way, of course, because there's a huge attrition rate. It's not cute, fun, or even necessarily safe to learn love by hating hate, but it does work.

Anyway, if you're still here and still interested, the future is ready to be dropped. It won't be at current price points, of course, but it's ready-made.

The bottom line is that almost no-one in the counter culture because they're original, they're in there because it's the best thing going. They didn't create its values, mores or artistic forms, they just prefer them over mainstream offerings.

Just as the mainstream became too stifling for the freespirits of the 30s and 40s (and even earlier for a few real weirdos--and I mean weird lovingly)--today's counterculture is suffocating.

Today's counterculture doesn't allow almost anything. It doesn't like warmth, money, fucking, responsibility, fun, being in charge, ambition, leadership. The mainstream may be one dimentional, but the counter culture is only two-D.

What's coming is 3-D.

I can mothafucking-m-u guarantee.

I've been putting the shit together for ten years.