What Does Hipster Mean to Meme?

I appreciate the Sartre call-out (1:17); however, to her point(s), I just happened upon the latest installment of Nitsuh Abebe’s monthly column for Pitchfork, in which he addresses the concept of irony as the guiding tenet of indie (read: hipster) culture, citing LCD Soundsystem and Hipster Runoff (both of which I’ve written about in a similar context).

You can’t possibly navigate the Internet without being able to understand both arch, knowing irony and all-out earnestness– but no matter how good your ability to figure out which is which, you will eventually run into items where you have no earthly idea how serious the author is.

–Nitsuh Abebe, Why We Fight #3: A Brief History of Knowingness and Irony,
Pitchfork, May 7 2010

In Abebe’s inaugural essay, he draws parallels between Joanna Newsom and Lady Gaga; the former recently spoke about the latter in an interview with the Guardian. (I was less impressed with the extended analogy of musical evolution that marked his second effort, though I’d like to read the Calvino story he mentions.)

More to come soon…

Henri Cartier-Bresson's portrait of Sartre is currently on view in his retrospective at MoMA

As with his entire body of work, Sartre’s theory of imagination refers to—and, naturally, affirms—his ontology, in which he explores Husserl’s tenet that “all consciousness is consciousness of something” in the context of the ‘detotalized totality’ of being-in-itself / being-for-itself dualism. Sartre postulates an admittedly underdeveloped notion of image consciousness in his early work The Imaginary (1940), though these writings are largely eclipsed by his later political [viz. Marxist] proclivities; nevertheless, his theory of imagination is a sufficient foundation of a phenomenological aesthetics.

Notably, Sartre implies that the imaginary (or ‘irreal’) has the same ontological import as the real: if the real is never beautiful, it is simply because beauty is, by definition, imaginary, where imagination is a permanent possibility of consciousness. A painting, photograph, film, song, performance, etc., necessarily transcends perception—i.e. consciousness of oil on canvas, ink on paper, a projection, an actor, etc.—as an object of image consciousness, which overflows with the meaning of the portrait (etc.): a particular arrangement of brushstrokes or sounds immediately presents itself to consciousness as an image or melody. The abstract, then, is that which escapes us in experience qua perception; colors transcend pigment to conjure mood or geometry.

Hence, Images (in no particular order):

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KEY:

1. Liu Bolin opening in Soho this weekend (I used one of his pieces to illustrate my very first blog post). (ArtCat)

Liu Bolin
On Fire
Eli Klein Fine Art
462 West Broadway (between Houston & Prince)
New York NY 10012 [map]
212 / 255-4388
April 30, 2010 – June 4, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, April 30, 6-9pm

2. Scott Campbell’s first solo show in NYC (OHWOW via S×H; also on Nowness)

Scott Campbell
If You Don’t Belong, Don’t Be Long
OHWOW
109 Crosby Street (at Prince)
New York NY 10012 [map]
April 29, 2010 – May 30, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 29, 6-8pm

3. Skye Parrott of Dossier curated a photography show at BAM

Younger Than I’ll Be
Curated by Skye Parrott
Natman Room
BAM Peter Jay Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Ave (between St. Felix & Ashland) [map]
Brooklyn NY 11243
718 / 636-4100
April 7, 2010 – May 23, 2010

4. Michael Joo & Damien Hirst: Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun? (S×H) [A: Yes.]

Michael Joo & Damien Hirst
Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun?
Haunch of Venison
Heidestrasse 46
10557 Berlin, Germany [map]
+49 (0) 30 39 74 39 63
May 1, 2010 – August 14, 2010

Hirst also has work at the Oceanographic Music of Monaco.

5. Barzman’s “Pink Terror” = slow-motion video and Stephen Hawking over a hot beat. (Barzart via 3qd)

6. Faile & BAST bring their street artcade to New York (TBWE; interview on Gothamist; previewed at AM; previous [London] coverage))

Faile & BAST
DELUXX FLUXX NYC
158 Allen St (at Rivington)
New York NY 10002 [map]
April 30, 2010-May 27, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, April 30, 7:30-10:30pm

7. Maya Lin’s so-called last memorial What Is Missing at Times Square (DB)

8. Zaha Hadid for the 2012 Olympics in London (DB)

9. Longo-esque Trent Mitchell photography (ISO50 on FFFFound)

10. The Tribeca Film Festival saw the New York premiere of Tamra Davis’s documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (Nowness)

11. Bursts of Color in Public (KitsunéNoir via FFFFound)

12. Whistler’s Father (FFFFound via TBWE)

13. Dead or Alive at MAD (Animal)

Dead or Alive
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle (SSE Corner)
New York NY 10019 [map]
212 / 299-7777
April 27, 2010 – October 24, 2010

14. Marina Abramović Made Me Cry (via Marco Anelli’s flickr); for more on The Artist Is Present, Kottke aggregates so I don’t have to.

15. Shepard Fairey’s May Day marks Deitch Projects’ last hurrah. (Full mural image & coverage at AM (also on NYT); video and other news on Animal; listing on ArtCat)

Shepard Fairey
May Day
Deitch Projects
18 Wooster St (at Grand)
New York NY 10013 [map]
212 / 343-7300
May 1, 2010 – May 29, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 1, 6-8pm

16. Herzog & de Meuron Special (ArchDaily)

17. DQM Spring 2010 Lookbook (HB)

18. For the 13th-consecutive single-artist installation on the Roof Garden of the Met: bamboo. (NYT via Inhabitat)

…Twin brothers Mike and Doug Starn (born in New Jersey in 1961) will present their new work, Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop, opening on April 27. The monumental bamboo structure, ultimately measuring 100 feet long, 50 feet wide, and 50 feet high, will take the form of a cresting wave that bridges realms of sculpture, architecture, and performance. Visitors will witness the continuing creation and evolving incarnations of Big Bambú as it is constructed throughout the spring, summer, and fall by the artists and a team of rock climbers. Set against Central Park and its urban backdrop, Big Bambú will suggest the complexity and energy of an ever-changing living organism.

–Doug+Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú

Doug & Mike Starn
Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave (at E 82nd St)
New York NY 10028 [map]
April 27, 2010 – October 31, 2010

19. Peter Root’s Ephemicropolis; see also NYC in staples. (DB; making-of video)

20. Shanghai Expo 2010 Pavilions (Dezeen / ArchDaily)

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Not as coherent but also interesting:

Images from the earthquake in Yushu, China (Boston)

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Mother for Stella; see also: Fading Ads, Pickled in Pixels (NYT)

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Parting Shot: [the view from Brooklyn Bridge Park] Glowingly (Animal)

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Interpol goes in a new [art] direction. (BV)

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Nike Music Shoe revisited: it was Ableton all along. (Core77)

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fin.

Hipster. Reject the label or embrace it, Sisyphus does not envy you though your path is clear: you like art (check), music (check), design (√), fashion (√), film (√), food (√) and biking around Brooklyn to jam with hipster friends or go to (i.e. be seen at) art happenings and step out for smokes (√√√√√). And you blog about it (√). There is no possibility that you have freely chosen to do these things: the hipster is a sheep, a cartoon, a robot, a target market—anything but a living, breathing human being. The hipster is Sartre’s waiter.*

[It would be too easy to populate this post with photos from LATFH, Vice, Cobrasnake, Last Night's Party, Lookbook.nu, etc. etc., so we're going with photos from Beijing's Ren Hang, via Neocha Edge. Are Chinese hipsters more or less authentic than their Western idols? Is Chinese anything more or less authentic than Western versions of the same? Meta-migraine...]

The New York Times recently ran a blurb on the (decline of the) hipster with a handful of decent and not-too-hateful comments. The piece cites Salon’s recent article on Hipsters+Food Stamps—which itself has elicited the usual anti-Trustafarian screeds and counterarguments in defense of food(ies), etc.—as the latest development in the ongoing culture war between “Young, Creative Urbanites” and regular people. Meanwhile, Adbusters is over it, which is probably for the best.

In any case, it’s worthy enough of an occasion to reflect on What Hipster Means to Me. (Ok so that’s probably an inappropriate, if pithy, exordium for what is intended to be a thoughtful, unironic and somewhat ambitious essay, but it was just too good to pass up.)

In other words, I’m not in denial about my hipster proclivities, so long as I might be granted the possibility of unironically self-identifying as a hipster. Similarly, Idolize Your Killers is (to borrow Wordpress’s felicitous phrasing) “Just another hipster blog”—lest we forget that meta-commentary is the trademark of postmodernity and, by extension, hipsterdom and digital culture alike.

Yet “hipster” has been a pejorative term for nearly a decade now—a pigeonhole, a pariah, or worse: a Platonic “idea of Hipster.” This archetype finds infinite variations of empirical manifestations, though it is never fully realized; instead, an individual is reduced to his urban outfit, fixed-gear bike or love of Animal Collective, etc.

A brief overview on the case against hipsters: as the indie nation evolved alongside American Apparel*, so too did pent-up indignation at their smug, unleashed most memorably in Adbusters’ seminal July 2008 cover story “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.” Time Out is known to dabble in hipster-bashing; Paste did its part last year; Gawker and Gothamist hit the hipster hot button when they want to pander for pageviews. (I’m sure I’ve omitted many a rant; those are just the media that come to mind.) Conversely, the proto-hip tastemakers at Vice have somewhat validated the hipster with VBS’s ongoing alt-journalism efforts, which are now featured on the likes of CNN and Huffington Post.

The hipster is commonly caricaturized with pairs of synonymous adjectives: superficial and materialistic, decadent and hedonistic, pretentious and narcissistic, vapid and empty. It’s more magnetic poetry than mad-lib: we’re young, educated, skinny, moneyed, tattooed, bearded / artists, music-lovers, foodies, fashionistas, cyclists, Brooklynites, etc. ad infinitum.

Which is a lot of words to describe a subculture that is commonly dismissed, if not derided, as the ultimate triumph of style over substance, of style over life. In a word, it is meaningless.

Alternately: no one aspires to be a hipster. You might aspire to look like one, dress like one, listen to hipster music as and like hipster things, but god forbid you become one of Them. Irony is free license to drink PBR in $200 jeans, to wear keffiyehs, and to like Lil Wayne; it’s a cheap thrill that comes at the expense of authenticity, but it’s not a zero-sum game.

However, that only applies to the adjectivial level: plenty of non-hipsters occasionally look hipster or do hipster things—I daresay everyone in my generation has dabbled in hipsterdom—but once you are one, once the dreaded H-word isn’t attached to a noun but is the noun itself, authenticity becomes the only thing that is off-limits. (Q: “Are you now, or have you ever been a hipster?”) To reiterate, it is Bad Faith in the 21st Century.

But now, a possibility of hipster redemption:

…these interests are the low-hanging fruit of a reconnecting citizenship: the first step.

Still new in respects to movements, the hipster is groping in the dark for authenticity. He does not claim to be an activist when he rides his bike, buys used clothes or works as a freelance designer, though he may have labeled himself as such a few decades ago.

–Illie Mitaru, “Reconsidering the Hipster,” Adbusters, December 2009

So is it actually possible to be an unironic / authentic hipster? I genuinely believe that Girl Talk concerts are fun, Shepard Fairey will be remembered (for Obama if nothing else), grass-fed beef tastes better, biking is healthy and enjoyable, and yes, American Apparel makes a decent, reasonably-priced cardigan.

But that’s so 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009… our history is undeniably one of trends, disposable or otherwise, and whether it’s high time for the “Helpster” or a new era of “’Fauxhemian,” we’ve come a long way from the hipster doofus.

Notes: The Williamsburg American Apparel recently fell victim to an act of ‘retail terrorism’—pick your poison: Village Voice, Gothamist, FreeWilliamsburg, or HRO (incidentally, AA advertises in all of the above media outlets)—though it is unclear as to whether the perpetrators were, in fact, hipsters themselves. Meanwhile, American Apparel has forgone the usual softcore porn for an ostensibly more authentic campaign by co-opting the hipster cred of Lookbook.nu for crowdsourced styling.

*I have no [egregiously hipster] illusions that this is an egregiously hipster allusion, but it is perhaps the most valid point in this entire misguided tirade. I studied Sartrean aesthetics (and busted my ass reading Being & Nothingness cover to cover) in college because I happened to find it interesting, not to be ironic, I swear.

Also, called it.

I need Adobe Caslon Italic...

NB: It’s a long one. With lots of words—over a thousand of ’em. And no pictures.

You’ve been warned.

I originally started this blog to chronicle my recent time in Beijing (as stated in the very first post) in the interest of providing a comprehensive account of my so-called Adventure in Chinaland as a pre-emptive measure to obviate questions about my Journey to the East.

(Even so, I must concede that there are certain egregious lacunae: lack of commentary on food and drink, Chinese style and retail habits, or details about my work and living situation. To my credit, I did start to sketch essays on all of the above topics—going so far as to commit (or condemn?) my thoughts on the above topics to the purgatory of Wordpress drafthood—with the full intention of publishing them while I was still in Beijing. But that’s no excuse, only a lesson learned.)

In any case, I should have expected that the number one question I would face upon my return from Beijing would be “How was China?” This was (and still is) a good question; since I’m too polite (and yes, too embarrassed) to direct people to IYK, I usually respond by paraphrasing blog entries or sharing anecdotes that are, for all intents and purposes, scripted (I’ve spent enough time revising most of the posts, published or not, to know them backwards and forwards). It’s as if the author of Idolize Your Killers is somehow living through me, or rather I am some kind of human RSS feed.

Conversely, none of my friends have acknowledged any of my China blog entries, probably due to poor self-promotion, insipid content, convoluted writing, or some combination of the above—not to mention the fact that the majority of the Beijing journal is now buried under two months’ worth of assorted links and half-assed re-memes.

Thus, I hesitate to call my initial blogging endeavor a complete success on two accounts: a shortage of timely, relevant and/or related posts, which was compounded by a lack of publicity, promotion and (in turn) motivation. I didn’t analyze web traffic while I was in China, but it’s probably safe to assume that I had even fewer readers than I do now, and I can’t imagine that many of my friends made it through more than a couple posts, much less visited the blog as regularly as I updated it.

Nevertheless, I found that I enjoyed blogging—for better or worse, I still see it as a mode of creative expression—and, if nothing else, the compulsion to share my thoughts as an ABC in the PRC made for a surprisingly felicitous foray into new media, not least because I was working in web design at the time. I’ve kept it up despite my belief that, whether a blog is intended to be a personal diary or a place to share ideas, a platform for short-form or a simple news feed, the populist medium invariably feels more like marketing than art (more on this below).

But here we are, and here it is. Even 100 posts in, I’m still getting a feel for blogging as a writer and a habit, but for now I’m satisfied with my current rate of just under one post per day, lest I compromise the quality of the writing and content.

Of course, this is a questionable assertion, considering that the frontpage is increasingly dominated by images and videos, which are good for skipping or skimming and might pass for content, but hardly qualifies as writing. In fact, the usual blog trappings of Interesting Things From Around The Internet have become precisely that; images, videos, links, event listings, etc. (not to mention objects and items, as per my pretentious pseudo-scientific taxonomy) are merely a way to borrow an editorial voice through a manifold of empirical instances, but fail to meet the standard of original content.

While a high volume of short posts means that each idea is less consequential, it also places a greater weight on longer “READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY” posts such as this one. Despite the fact that I hate reading my own writing, I constantly do so in an effort to improve it… or, more accurately (and perhaps tellingly), control it. Suffice it to say that I’m constantly struggling to break the vicious cycle of dissatisfaction, doubt and abortive insight that is known as editorial content.

On the other hand, as I suggested earlier, IYK (like most, if not all, blogs) also represents a conscious attempt to market myself as a brand by 1.) associating myself with a universe of images, artists, bands, brands, other blogs, etc.; 2.) offering a tantalizing—but perhaps ultimately unsatisfying, guarded (or even censored) and/or altogether insignificant—glimpse into an otherwise unfathomable mind; 3.) purportedly transcending average hipsterdom (only to find that this is just another thing added to the Internet’s contents); and 4.) demonstrating impeccable taste, discerning judgment and a particularly critical eye—in other words, a point of view—in all of the above pursuits.

But these deluded self-imposed criteria for success largely ignore the Spirit of the Internet: to connect people and ideas. (Note that this definition applies to art and marketing as well.) Short of an obnoxious and pointless survey of my meager readership, I really have no idea as to who constitutes the audience of IYK in its current manifestation: friends? Friends of friends? Enemies? New Yorkers? Beijingers? Spammers? Prospective employers? Or maybe just people searching for “aeroplane january mix“?

Or, as I would hope (with trademark, borderline-cliché ambiguity): everyone and no one… though in truth, IYK is still mostly for myself.

Meanwhile, the lack of reader comments—online and off—has perpetuated the weird schism between the blog and real life: it seems utterly asinine to bring up IYK in conversation (”Oh yeah I blogged about that last week…”) but I have no idea if my friends actually read my blog. In retrospect, China afforded a distance that precluded self-consciousness, i.e. no chance for this sort of awkward situation, insofar as I was writing for an audience (real or imaginary) thousands of miles away. Until, of course, I got back to New York and decided to keep on bloggin’.

Still, I have to assume that returning visitors are probably people I know—I highly doubt that strangers searching for an image of “kehinde wiley michael jackson” are taking the time to read my thoughts on why I took up smoking in China (short answer: everyone was doing it), much less coming back for more.

So, dear reader, whoever you may be: I will proceed with what may or may not henceforth (slash already?) be regarded as the content-generation & organic growth phase of Idolize Your Killers. Which is marketing bullshit-talk meaning: more of the same but better.

Always better.

As for how China was: for a while, my deeply unsatisfactory default answer was simply that “it was a different scene”—a sufficiently vague response, which captures the essence of my experience there without yielding any sense of what it was like whatsoever. I have since opted to characterize those two months as a time of little responsibility and freedom to explore the city as I pleased: equally equivocal but with somewhat relatable themes of exploration, self-discovery, re-visiting a homeland, etc.—still complete bull for sure, but at least it’s a point of view.

In the meantime, you can expect pleasant diversions such as this one:

It is only fitting that this first (duly) reblogged post is from Kottke.org:

I was really into fractals in college (I know…) when I was making rave flyers (I know!) for a friend’s parties in Iowa (I know! I know! Shut up already!). Anyway, the thing that I really used to love doing with this fractal application that I had on my computer was zooming in to different parts of the familiar Mandelbrot set as far as I could…

–Insanely Deep Fractal Zoom, Kottke.org

These posts may or may not be accompanied by superficially related mp3s (as yielded by a cursory search of the ol’ music library).

» Apparat – Fractales Pt. 1 (3:34) – 5.8MB mp3 @ 227kbps

So I’ve finally finished importing the first months’ worth of (mostly China-related) original posts from the makeshift blog that I set up on my old/new portfolio site, Who Are Who—old because it’s been my home on the web for some time now (and will be so for the foreseeable future); new because I was redesigning it from scratch at the time.

As I have mentioned before, I’ve left the old blog more or less intact, though I have seen fit to make minor revisions and omissions during the process of reformatting the text and images for the new (current) version of IYK.

Additionally, I’ve decided not to import the series of “Drawings” posts to Idolize Your Killers: these now constitute a ‘drawing log‘ (=glog?) on Who Are Who.

That said, I would also like to take this opportunity to announce that the aforementioned portfolio site, Who Are Who, is more or less finished—I still need to sort out some browser compatibility issues and I may continue to add content, but it’s entirely functional (and hopefully decent-looking) at this point, which is what counts.

Of course, that’s the easy part… now to actually create some artwork..

It’s pretty stupid and boring.

Honestly though, I don’t really know why I’m doing this—especially without photos, which might somehow justify the tedious and grossly underdeveloped prose. (It reads like something I would’ve written for a 9th-grade English class.) The closest approximation of a rationalization I can come up with is that I’d like to have some really terrible, shameful writing on the record to spite the rest of the content on my blog.

It’s also littered with hip NYC namedroppings and a cast of ancillary characters who barely qualify as devices. There is no symbolism or allegorical value to speak of. I’ve done my best to minimize foreshadowing… but that’s asking a lot and I’m not that good of a writer.

At best, it’s an exercise, an uncharacteristically intimate portrait of contemporary bohemia, largely unembellished albeit esoteric to the point of being skewed. At worst, it may be remembered as the first symptom of an otherwise untold descent into madness.

We’ll see how long it says online before I decide to delete it. (I’m tracking stats now so I’ll know exactly how many people clickthrough and read it.)

9:55 – Wake up. Already off to a late start. iTunes shuffle is doing a pretty good job of keeping me in bed (a few incongruous songs in a row is a sign to get my ass up), so I read about 15 internets—the Times, Gothamist, Hypebeast, Designboom, etc.—on my MacBook Pro before venturing into the kitchen to fix some breakfast. I think about making a donation towards Red Cross efforts in Haiti.

11:11 – I spend the rest of the morning working on a new version of my resume, which I started yesterday afternoon. (I’ve decided that I don’t like the bulleted list format for my previous work experience, but I’m struggling with paragraphs, which inherently look dense and unreadable.) It’s not going well.

At some point my roommate Tony wakes up and we probably shoot the shit for a while. He suggests that we get some lunch. I have leftover pork fried rice, which I made yesterday, but I decide that it will be just as good, if not better, for dinner.

12:52 – He wants to try a Filipino place called Umi Nom, a couple blocks up Classon, on the corner of Dekalb. I consider bringing my camera but I don’t (their website happens to have decent photos). We talk about Twitter during the short walk.

Umi Nom’s sign is painted over a ‘Coin-Operated Laundry’ sign. The logo suddenly reveals a striking similarity between Helvetica Neue Condensed—which I’ve been using for the header of my resume—and Impact, a font that I’ve never particularly liked (though it works for Umi Nom). As for the interior, the decor is natural and elegant, unambiguously Asian without seeming generic or contrived.

We end up splitting a grilled pork belly sandwich and a Filipino dish called Tapsilog. They are described (in the online menu, which presumably echoes the print one) as: “sliced pork belly, atchara, cucumbers, sweet chili aioli” and “house cured beef tapa, garlic fried rice & 2 eggs scrambled or fried,” respectively.

Both dishes are excellent. The sandwich is basically a Bánh mì (atchara is pickled carrots and daikon): the sweetness of the sauce complements an equally generous portion of super-tender meat, while the vegetables cut the richness and add texture. The beef, on the other hand, is at once more and less familiar: warm slices of jerky over a sparsely seasoned jasmine rice with two fried eggs and an essential side of rice vinegar. The beef itself is delicious; the rest of the calories are tasty but the dish seems less coherent as a whole.

2:02 – I get back home and back to work, alternating between researching potential employers and revising/reconfiguring my resume.

2:37 – I need coffee. I make coffee (a cup and a half worth of French press). I drink coffee.

3:30 – My resume is looking a little better. I’m finally satisfied with the copy but it still looks too busy and I can’t seem to get the spacing right.

I eventually have a (possibly deluded) epiphany and rework the header.

4:24 – I was hoping to finish by 4:30 (I specifically put on an album that would end by then) but it takes longer than I planned, as these things often do; any later and I would risk sending out cover letters at the end of the day, which I generally don’t like to do. I was also trying to squeeze in a bike ride while it was still light out, but I’m already past that point before I realize it.

I put on the another album, Disc 2 of The Bang Gang Deejays’ 2007 mix Light Sound Dance, hoping to finish before its runtime of 1:13:21.

5:14 – Coffee helps, but I still end up cutting it close. In my haste, I almost forget to hotlink the brand new PDF, so I have to spend a few minutes doing so in Acrobat. I finally send it nearly an hour after my self-imposed deadline and, just as I’ve finally prepared for my bike excursion, the album closes with “Sometimes” by Les Rythmes Digitales, a personal favorite.

5:39 – It’s not that cold out and I work up a little sweat during the 15-minute ride. It’s a straight shot up Classon to Kent, which takes me within a block of Brooklyn Bowl, my first stop.

5:58 – I’m trying to locate my keys, which I’m 95% sure I lost at Brooklyn Bowl on Saturday. I’ve been using a spare set since then, but the set that I lost has the only extant key to my U-lock, so I’ll have to buy a new one if I don’t track it down.

6:06 – No luck. I leave my name and number but I’m not expecting a call back. I head over to my friend Sean’s apartment.

I remembered to bring the Modern Sky Records compilation that I bought in China as a cheap and somewhat relevant gift (this was one of my preparations). He pops it into the CD player. It’s not that good: most of the songs are either too 90’s alt-rock or weirdly jammy.

Sean is also seeking employment (in independent music, hence the relevance) for some time now and we complain about job hunting, among other things.

7:32 – We eventually decide to grab a slice at Vinnie’s (instead of falafel at Oasis); the PFR will be just as good, if not better, tomorrow. I know Sean’s roommates to varying degrees and I decide to leave my bike at his apartment since I don’t have a usable lock. I smoke my first cigarette of the night. He has to stop at Matchless to pick something up. I wait for him outside, since I haven’t finished my cigarette, and I take the time to arrange to meet my other roommate Diego at Raandesk Gallery (see Images).

7:48 – The funny guy isn’t at Vinnie’s today. An older guy takes my order and somehow my slice is done before the two girls who ordered before me.

7:58 – On the way out of the restaurant, someone greets me on the street. I recognize Matt—a casual acquaintance at best—but he’s with someone and they keep walking in the same direction that Sean and I are going. We’re maybe ten feet behind them and it’s kind of awkward.

Sean and I part ways a block down the street when I head to the subway. I’m halfway down the stairs before I realize I’m behind Matt and his friend. Thankfully, one of them has to get a ticket so I pretend not to see them to save face and I walk about three quarters of the way down the platform, to the subway car that is closest to the NQRW transfer at Union Square. I don’t see Matt.

8:15 – The trains are pretty fast so I make good time to Madison Square Park, where I meet up with Diego. We find our way to 16 W 23rd Street, 4th floor, which appears to be some kind of shared office space that has temporarily been converted to a gallery.

The show is ok. While I knew that Jason Bryant worked in Kehinde Wiley’s studio, I learn that the two artists in the show—Bryant and Kevin Cyr—actually met while working for Wiley.

Cyr was actually the main attraction for me, since I was under the impression that his camper bike or kart would be on display. I’m disappointed to find that there are no three-dimensional works in the space, only paintings. I eventually conclude that Cyr’s ‘vehicular portraits‘ would make a good childrens’ book (I mean this in the best way possible).

As for Bryant, I was familiar with his photorealistic portraiture beforehand though I am rather surprised to see that he has incorporated trompe-l’oeil imagery (drawing inspiration from well-known skateboard graphics) into his latest work. I am undecided about this new development.

In any case, the complimentary wine helps.

8:42 – We leave. It’s still nice out, so we walk to Union Square. I smoke my second cigarette on the way to the Strand, my first time back since I returned from China. They’ve moved the bag check. Everything else is pretty much the same.

9:18 – We catch the L train right away even though I had to wait in line to refill my Metrocard.

9:31 – I decide that I want to get my bike from Sean’s apartment tonight instead of retrieving it tomorrow. Diego switches to the G train at Lorimer while I surface to figure out how to get my wheels. Sean’s still at Public Assembly so I call his roommate David, who I also know from college because we both had the same Arcade Fire shirt freshman year.

David doesn’t pick up but I figure it couldn’t hurt to walk to their place and try the bell hoping that one of their other two roommates might be home. As I walk under the BQE overpass at Union, I see a couple guys doing tricks on fixed-gears. I wonder if one of them is John Prolly.

9:49 – No one’s home. I arrange to pick Sean’s keys and listen to my iPod on the walk to and from Public Assembly. I smoke my third and final cigarette of the night on the walk there and I think about recounting my day in a blog post and donating money to the Red Cross.

10:24 – I get my bike.

10:33 – I return Sean’s keys.

10:50 – I get home.

11:00 – I start writing this blog entry.

Fin.

Photo via Arrested Motion / Scribemedia.org

Over the weekend, the art world was abuzz with rumors that notorious New York art dealer & gallerist Jeffrey Deitch was in “discussion” with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) concerning an open director position. Blogs and newspapers alike speculated as to the potential significance of the high-profile, highly unorthodox (and unprecedented?) appointment of a private dealer to full-fledged directorship.

The LA Times broke the news moments ago (tweets are piling in), though many insiders already suspected Deitch’s appointment to be a foregone conclusion by this morning.

I can’t pretend to know enough about the upper echelons of art dealership or museums to offer anything that might pass for profound insight, but I’ll certainly be following this story closely as it unfolds… especially concerning the fate of Soho institution Deitch Projects.*

*I have a semi-storied relationship with Deitch Projects: I worked on Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe’s “Black Acid Co-Op” as an intern and I covered the Dash Snow Memorial for Hypebeast. More recently, my cropped jpg of Kehinde Wiley’s Michael Jackson is somehow ranked higher Arrested Motion’s original in Google Image search, and has been a weirdly steady source of web traffic in these early days of IYK. I guess a little web formatting can go a long way towards SEO.

Due to fatigue (compounded by jetlag) + holiday festivities, the blog will be on a brief hiatus until next week.

Beijing Capital International Airport Website—this is how I will always remember Beijing

Some brief thoughts (afforded by the inimitable medium of blogging) as I finish packing—

China by the numbers:
–43 blog posts
–6 drafted posts about China that may or may not see light of day
~250 cigarettes
~150 km (running)
~200 km (walking)
~3.5 websites designed/launched

Things I will miss: cheap food, cheap alcohol, cheap cigarettes, lower cost of living in general, D-22, Asian pears every morning, free lodging and meals, having a maid, 798 Art District, Gulou, the Bridge café, and not really having any responsibilities whatsoever.

Things I will not miss: the slight language barrier, slow Internet, blocked Internet, packed subways, an hour-long commute to work each way, spitting, and godawful Chinese taste as reflected in the ultra-gawdy aesthetic in everything from architecture to fashion.

Things I missed: friends, NFL regular season football, Sportscenter, Mad Men, Jersey Shore (?), Neon Indian/Glo-Fi/Chillwave, tacos, biking, cheese… you know, the little things.

Placeholder image; no time to come up with anything better for now...

As far as I go
As far as I know
I’ve always got
A place called home

Across all the seas
It’s fine by me
‘Cause I’ll never be
Far from home

–Tiga, “(Far From) Home”