Author: MHB

  • Mischief Party – Rooftop Invite

    The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire

    Ze Mischief crew is back, back from vacation.
    So good revelers clean thy slates, gird for libation.

    Wednesday, 8P, August Twenty Seven.
    Find us on a roof, address 305, Avenue Second.

    Ye microbrew Butternuts will be free on tap
    To slake thy thirst with their mighty Pork Slap.

    Pranksters will be on hand, eyes sparked with glee.
    To join us, dear friends, just RSVP.

  • Urban

    Urban

    89?

    The word ‘urban’ is often used as ad industry shorthand for black/latino people, as noted by our friend Amanda. Even though we are in the business of communications, few folks speak simply about race. This can make for very circular conversations about casting and locations, some funny, some SMH.

    05?

  • HelloooooNurse

    restless pen syndrome

    Earlier this month in the hipsters hoods, Barbarian Group executed a brilliant subway campaign for Hello Health. I’d been meaning to wax poetic ever since seeing it, but been busy busy. Luckily for yall, the Barbs wrote about it here.

  • Pineapple Express, A Bromantic Comedy

    a very bromantic pic here

    The film Pineapple Express brings forth the new genre of Bromantic Comedy. How new is this term? It ain’t yet on Wikipedia.

    Over the last few years, Hollywood has taken male bonding to a new level of intimacy, far more sensitive than Lethal Weapon. Entourage, Superbad, 40 Year Old Virgin and the forthcoming Bromance.– all of these are about male friendship and openly speak to the fact that Guys Have Feelings. (‘feelings’ being historically ‘unmanly/queer’) While the scripts are rife with jokes about being gay, the stories are grounded in the pursuit of punani.

    Not so in Pineapple, a film in which many of the male characters are painted with unasked/unanswered question marks about their sexuality. Women are used moreso for comic relief than to reaffirm the hetero status of the characters. So if this film makes a tidy profit, I do wonder what the next step in this narrative trend will be.

    Wtg5bTU_4bs

  • Andre 3000, The Sartorialist and Us

    shine on you crazy diamond

    Raafi and I first met at a bar in Brooklyn back in ’02. There was much drinking and debating, one topic being which OutKast album is better – ATLiens (mhb) or Aquemini (rr). Months later, I was listening to RR’s choice while picking olives on a farm in Paganico. Through my head went the thought hmmmm that dude Raaf might be right. And now one of our heroes – The Sartorialist – bumped into another hero – Andre 3000 – not too far from that farm. So now I bop out into the night and leave you with the story.

  • Blame It On My Wild Heart

    My friend Court hearts Stevie Nicks and sent me this below clip with a note that “…this is one of my faves, watching it I always have this dual elation and sadness.” And now I can’t get the song out of my head.

    ePqn6BDB098
    I find this duality true in many songs that I love, be it Luna, Ghostface or Fleetwood Mac – the tracks often evoke both emotions during a 3 minute spell. I wonder if that’s what nostalgia might be constructed of too?

    Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic

    Even if authorial intent is one thing, audience interpretation can remix and recontextualize the meaning. One man’s song of joy is another’s sorrow song. It reminds me of painter Robert Motherwell, who once recounted that he “respected a collector who returned one of my “abstract” pictures to the gallery, saying it was too tragic in feeling for her to be able to look at it every day.”

  • Hipsters

    we real cool

    Adbusters claims hipsters to be the Death of Western Civilization. Hyperbole, yes, but also navelgazing BS. Even though they may wear different clothes and sneer across lunch tables, Adbusters and Hipsters are cut from the same cloth. The culturejamming content the mag praises is lauded by the very hipsters they deride.

    We lurk late

    The thesis of the Adbusters argument is as follows: Ever since the end of WW2, Western subcultures have worked to subvert dominant paradigms and their oppression of art/love/race etc. As the power of punk and hip-hop lost their true pluck, the aesthetics of rebellion mashed up to create The Hipster. Alas this Hipster whirlpool is sterile like a mule, unable to create new content/Meaning, zombies subject to trends and adverts. Thus Western Civilization is toast, faced with “a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.”

    Some truth there, but the sky aint falling.

    Since we now live in the quickening of an instant era, anything that catches as cool will spread as fire. Unavoidable and certainly leads to repetition in NYC. But if we burn our fort, what does Adbusters truly expect us to do? Go East/3rdWorld and jack ‘culture’? Make the post-colonial claim that foreign lands are so much more authentic/ pure/real? Do something meaningful, be like Bono and um, ‘save’ Africa?

    We jazz june

    Just as ‘Alternative’ music became mainstream rock, “Counterculture” (as evinced by The Hipster) is now folded into mainstream culture. The singular Hipster aesthetic has ossified and is now no different from the uniform of a preppie/jock/hiphopper etc.. But the costume of tight jeans and a Keffiyeh is simply a collection of visual cues that signify membership to a group, just like baggy pants or pearl earrings. So Counterculture aint dead, it just might now be looking different.

    Both the West and The World are currently living in an unprecedented state of remix and creation. There are more tools of authorship, identity and distribution than ever before – and these tools bring forth new sub and countercultures, ones that may have been ignored not only by the mainstream, but also by the dominant counterculture. Possibly even by Adbusters, who close their article with this strangled swan song.

    We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

    Good Heavens. Rather than cueing dirges, I wanna know why Adbusters is looking at the hipster to signify the progress or failure of Western Civ. Makes me think that the mag is well out of touch, lapping at the pool of cool irony and now indistinguishable from those they once tried to bust.

    we die soon?