12.25.2006

Random Thoughts

I think in the very near future, there will be a subset of historians that work exclusively with electronic data. Trolling online archives and digging through discarded hard drives, they will attempt to reconstruct the past. Imagine if stumbling across the long lost archives of Craigslist is viewed akin to unearthing Pompeii.

I just realized that Van Halen must have based their entire musical existence on the piece of guitar work in Crazy Train that comes right after the intro.

12.23.2006

Bizarre Bizarre

I went to the Bizarre Bizarre with my friend, Mike. We so hip. I didn't make it to last year's BB but I have been to Ladies Night, and whereas my reaction to Ladies Night was "whoa chickie, step AWAY from the glue gun" there was a lot less glue gunning and a lot more knitting. Make Magazine has inspired a whole shitload of hipsters into putting down ipods and picking up balls of yarn.

Now the knitting phemon has been going on for quite a while. There's the Stitch n Bitches or Knitting Bitches. Magazines. Parties. All sorts of yarny shit. But at the BB, I overheard the latest. Plain old knitting is not cutting it anymore. Now you must spin your own yarn. There was only one table selling unspun wool but the buzz was around if you listened to the cool(er) people behind the tables.

"Yeah, I've been spinning for like a year now."

I'm looking forward to next year when actual sheep will be shorn and flocks will roam Davis Square.

I know, my sarcasm is so much more GenX than GenY. I'm probably just jealous that my slightly younger counterparts have all this motivation to make shit out of construction paper. Actually, I think I'm annoyed that everyone thinks this is a new idea that they created and that it's become superhip. I used to get teased as a kid over that stuff. The 80's were not about being different in a home-made way unless you were truly punk and I wasn't old enough for that. Punk was a halloween costume, it's primary purpose getting away with wearing loads of makeup.

My sister and I made (bad) clothes for our Barbies out of papertowels and tinfoil. I spent months on hook and yarning a rug. I made a bag out of an old pair of jeans, using the leg to make the strap. I saw it on an episode of Rhoda and thought it was the coolest thing. My friends just thought I couldn't afford a Jordache bag.

My favorite pasttime as a little girl - one of my first memories - was sewing a boxful of buttons onto a pillow case. I would do that for hours. Recently when exploring that memory, I realized that at the time I lived in a place that we moved out of when I was five. I realized that my mother left me alone for hours with a sharp needle at like age 3. When I confronted her on her parenting skills she just looked at me and said, "Well, you never stuck yourself, did you?"

Same thing with yoga and vegitarianism. It's cool, but it's not new. I'm a flower child. Or a child of flower children or whatever. I grew up with lotus position and making bread and potting plants and recycling stuff and walking everywhere.

That stuff is majorly fun as a kid and as a college student and into adulthood, so I see the current appeal. As a teenager who grew up with it, that shit was BORING, hence the ennui of my generation. Alice in Chains did not knit on the road between shows. I don't know of any fans sewing I heart Billy Corgan sofa pillows.

In the 80s and 90s various versions of coolness included a tear somewhere in the clothing. Whether it was shredded and held together with safety pins or hair-band acid washed and pre-ripped bullshit, or the Flashdance sweatshirt or some ratty flannel from a thrift shop. Maybe that's the difference. We rummaged through thrift shops and said "that'll work" and kept things in their original state or destroyed them on purpose. Now its all, "I can FIX this. I'll just cut this and sew this and darn the shit out of it and it will be super cool." It's the hipster version of your mom telling you to "just put on a little lipstick". Optimism. Weird.

Anyway, the Bizarre Bizarre was fun. And there were some really cool things, like the decoupaged suitcases and men's ties with phrases like "gender fucker" and "hussy" on them amid the sea of poorly knit hats and overpriced T-shirts.

The best part of the Bizarre Bizarre was the line to get in. There was this older balding guy wearing one of those too narrow scratchy polyester sweatshirts with the big waistband - the kind normally seen in 1985 with ironed on kittens on it. His awesome sweatshirt was covered in primary color Wu-Tang symbols.

I bet he made it himself.