Wednesday, December 27, 2006

This just in: Motorcycles aren't that hip!

Dear hipsters: Having been inspired by the crass commercialism of the holiday season, I’ve decided to chronicle a few high-priced entry points our peers use to prove their hip credentials, starting today with motorcycles. Here’s a brief history of the biker culture, and even a little advice for those seeking a quick route to hipness on a hog.
Any suggestions for future hip topics? Leave a comment or email me at aweinstein@tallahassee.com. And enjoy…

Subculture: BIKERS
Notable Quote: “Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.” - Hunter S. Thompson
Date of Birth: Road warriors aren’t born. They’re built out of busted spare parts.
Icon(s): Anything you can slap the words “Harley” or “chopper” on.
Stuff You Have To Own: A fully-stocked Snap-On tool truck to follow you around.
People/Things You Have to Know: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, by Thompson; Easy Rider; American Chopper, on the Discovery Channel.
The Beginning of the End: When your bald uncle Earl quit his job at the brokerage, divorced Aunt Mae, and bought a Fat Boy.
Worst Gross Corporate Spin-off: The limited edition “Orange County Chopper” trim package on a Dodge Ram. Fifty grand for a pickup truck? A male-enhancement drug prescription would have been cheaper.

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Dude, don’t even bother. Seriously, bro.

You ain’t the first guy or gal to think that owning a crotch rocket is the fast track to hipness. Shoot, you’re not even the ten millionth. You might have had an outside shot, all the way up into the early 90s, when there was still a gritty grain of truth to the classic biker archetypes: unwashed, leather-bound mercenaries; shaggy, dope-lovin’ hippies; freedom-loving vets and wild children, all rolling down the sun-burned asphalt on their American-crafted hogs, POW banners and freak flags rippling in their wakes. But that’s all dead now.

Blame Mrs. Bamman. I sure do.

But first, a little history.

Rebel Without a Helmet: The Alpha and Omega of Hip Biking

It all began, lo those many decades ago, after the war. The big war, that is - the one they call Double-you Double-you Eye Eye. A generation of young toughs went off to biddy battle and returned hardened, horny, and hungry for wide open spaces and loud noise. This isn’t true of all those granddaddy bikers, of course: a lot of them were simple no-goodniks raised without respect for any laws that weren’t physical. Real men, who understood the operation of a shovelhead Big Twin engine better than they could fathom the mechanics of a white-bread society that watched The Donna Reed Show and read Good Housekeeping. Inevitably, they banded together in gangs. Some did it to look out for their brother man and share in the hip magic of wanderlust. Some did it just to have backup while enjoying a good bender or a beat-down at the road stops.

Now, it’s true that the American motorbike renaissance was underway long before America liked Ike. But between 1947 and 1969, several key events cemented motorcycling’s reputation as the hip activity of the late 20th century. These include:

1) The Hollister Invasion. It was just two years after the Big One ended that the inhabitants of this sleepy little California town met the Great American Biker Gang – and pooped their collective pantaloons. A handful of rowdy boys on hogs rode in, drank a few saloons dry, and popped a few wheelies. Life magazine did a photo montage on the Hollister ruckus, portraying the biker gang as a greater danger to young America’s virtues than your typical nude communist horde. (Incidentally, this West Coast burg’s hand-wringing orgy is probably the big reason there’s now an Abercrombie-owned retail clothing franchise for teenybops named, oh so originally, Hollister. Remember! Hollister Invasion? Hip. Hollister Clothing Company? Burn that mother down.) On the plus side, biking culture exploded after Hollister, and even gave us one of history’s hippest films:

2) The Wild Bunch. This was Hollywood’s over-the-top interpretation of the Hollister incident, complete with a sneering (and amazingly skinny) Marlon Brando. The key here is to remember that everything and everyone Brando ever did was hip, at least up until around 1975, when he apparently decided to swallow Dom DeLuise and Zero Mostel whole. The Wild Bunch, though, was a hip revolution in its own right: it created the myth of the mysterious renegade rider who, when asked what he was rebelling against, simply replied, “Whuddya got?” It also gave birth to an entire genre of gloriously bad biker movies, the sort of campy pulp fiction that made Reefer Madness look like public broadcasting.

3) Hell’s Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson was just another gentle freak with a steno pad and no permanent address until he penned this exposè article and a book of the same name – a project for which he endured several life-threatening pummelings at the meaty hands of the biker gangs he was investigating. Now, for reasons that will be made clear a later blog on Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson was the hippest mother ever to walk erect under that star we call a sun. Therefore, anybody who kicks the living crud out of Hunter is, ipso facto, hipper than hell.

4) Easy Rider. This movie, released at the drug counterculture’s shining apex, not only gave biker culture its widest audience of all time; it convinced America that the laid-back, pot-crazed hippie could ride, too. It also drew national attention to the gathering “chopper” craze, whereby perfectly adequate Harley-Davidsons were chopped down, rearranged, and prettified to enhance the rider’s sense of individual style. We should also give it credit for popularizing the “sissy” bar, a clever device to help hold more cargo and keep your riding partner from falling off.

In spite these watershed moments, however, motorcycle hipstasy suffered a series of terrible shocks in the late 1970s. First, the hardcore gang bikers were getting either too geriatric to balance their Roadsters or too rusty serving prison time for their special crimes. Second, thanks to those industrious Japanese, the faster, stylish sportbike – forever after known as the rice burner or the ninja cycle – began to supplant the traditional dirt bag’s heavy cruising chopper.(Note: If you want to be hip, avoid sportbikes at all costs. If, however, you aspire to be Asian, Eurotrash, or a fire academy washout who has not yet come out to his techno girlfriend, then by all means, do it up.) Third, even as the entire motorcycle industry suffered a steep decline in sales, motor enthusiasts of all ages and means arrived at a stunning conclusion: the Harley had become an unreliable piece of crap. Those few chopper-crazy gearheads left standing in this era were in serious danger of failing the hiptitude test.

Harley-Davidson and the Marketing Man

But then, as we all know, something happened to the hog on its way to the trash heap. What was this juggernaut, this major miracle of motor sports?
In a word:

Schwarzenegger.

That’s right. When the soon-to-be Guv’nur reprised his role as a gun-toting, lazy-tongued automaton in Terminator 2 (which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like being a Republican), his Best Actor in a Supporting Badass Role was his Harley-Davidson Fat Boy. Over the next few years, Harleys and choppers experienced a popularity explosion.

Sure, it’s a little ironic – all that fuss over a machine… brought on by a movie in which machines are man’s mortal enemies.

But no matter. Harley-Davidson and the chopper culture soon became undisputable icons of Americanismo. If you wanted a piece of the US of A to call your own, all you needed was a Harley-built bike.
Or a Harley keychain.

Or a Harley t-shirt.

Or Harley floor mats for your Toyota Prius.

Which is great, because flea market schlock with the Harley logo is about all most Americans can afford. You can still conceivably grab an old 883 on e-Bay without putting up your youngest offspring for collateral, but that’s about all that’s within reach of us lowly mortals. Which brings us to the biggest reason why Harleys are no longer hip, the reason I mentioned Mrs. Bamman, my high school AP Calculus teacher:

Yuppies love Harleys. Darned dirty yuppies.

You know the sort of person I mean. The one whose experience with a tuning fork doesn’t extend past middle school band practice; the guy who, if he ever uses the term softtail in conversation, is referring to his wife’s rump before he broke down and wrote a check to the Pilates studio. Stockbrokers, publishers, lawyers. And, yes, schoolmarms like Bamman, a disciplinarian who used to wear her Harley boots and Harley jacket to school before cruelly drilling us on derivatives and integrals and areas of conic sections. Which is great for her, really. I mean, she used to go to Daytona and Sturgis with her husband, and the whole, expensive hobby was obviously within her family’s means. But I never made that much money as a high school teacher, and I don’t entertain the illusion that I’d have been hip if I did and I blew it on a V-Rod.

Is this a little unfair to the few endangered, garden-variety, mouth-breathing highwaymen that remain riding after all these years? A little, perhaps. But they know better than most that the industry doesn’t need them as much as it used to.

Likewise with the chopper-customizing phenomenon, which was spurred on by the reality-TV phenomenon, which was spurred on by the blithering-idiots-with-televisions phenomenon.

Thanks to that shameful spiral, you can now spend your hard-earned leisure time watching true maestros compose bikes worth as much as houses, then run out to buy junk with the maestros’ logos on it as a pathetic substitute for buying the bike itself.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Jesse James, Indian Larry, the Teutul boys, and whoever’s monopolizing the Discovery Channel now, they’re all master craftsmen. And they’re hip as hell.

But you? You’re so not.

Okay, okay. if you’re still keen on achieving hip-ocracy with a bike, bear in mind the following rules of thumb:

1) If you build or repair bikes, then bully for you. You just might be hip.

2) If you build custom choppers, then you can be mondo hip. But only if you adopt a campy moniker, like Jesse or Indian Larry.

3) If you buy a chopper, then you are too frigging rich to be hip under most circumstances. Exceptions only for those who made their fortunes as tattooists, certain hip musicians, mechanics, or side-show participants.

4) If you own one of the following bikes and it was made before 1990, then you are hip: BSA, Indian, Norton, Triumph, Vincent, Harley, or Honda. If you own all of the above, then you are Jay Leno or Keanu Reeves, and you are indeed hip as heck.

5) If you own a Honda Gold Wing, you can still be hip, but only if you:

a. are over 55;

b. intend to never drive over 30 mph; and

c. are excited by the idea of blocking all the poor shlubs behind you for the entire length of the no-passing zones on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

6) If none of the above rules apply to you, then you are virtually hopeless. My advice to you?
Visit your Harley dealer. Buy the shirt. Then burn it.

That’s a little hip.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Jeb... the good neighbor?

Folks: I need your help.

I need stories! Let me explain:

Since I was a young pup studying AP American history in high school, there's been one seeming constant in my life:

Jeb.

For, you see, ever since that fall of '94, John Ellis Bush has either been running for something - or actually has been running something - in our sunny state. And, like him or hate him, he's been such a fixture for such an eon that it's funny to realize pretty soon he'll be gone, back to private citizenship down in Miami, someplace nice like Fisher Island.

But even funnier is the realization that, for the last couple of months, the Jebster and I have actually been, like, neighbors. We mortal civilians don't usually see heads of state as groovy people like ourselves - especially when they've got two presidents in the immediate family - but I got all the reminder I needed the first time I went jogging around my midtown house off Adams Street.

Yep, that would be the time I was heading toward Monroe and wondered, "Hey, what's that country-club looking joint with all the limos?" It didn't have a sign, but then, it didn't have a closed gate, either. What it did have, I discovered, was some way of notifying a bunch of suited, sunglassy dudes with earpieces that they should come out and say howdy to the dumb jogger.
Thus did I learn that the Bushes were my neighbors.

Since then, I've done a lot of wondering: What does that family do for fun in this town? Does the Gov. ever unwind, like my pops (and like the Gov.'s brother), by doing unnecessary yardwork? Do the Bushes host a book discussion club? How about a Super Bowl party? Do they eat sushi? A reliable source informed me of a Jeb sighting not too long ago at 50-cent night at Movies 8, but that's about all the straight dope I've ever gotten.

That's where y'all come in.

I'm looking for your stories. Close encounters of the Jeb kind, that's what I want. Did he compliment your puppy at Lake Ella? Did he get the green olives on a slice at Decent Pizza? Does he eat Indian at Samrat? Did you lap him on your daily joggin circuit? We've spent so many years focusing on the governor as Mr. Big Statewide Deciding Man, that I'd really like to hear what kind of a Tallahassee creature we had in that big ol' house for so many years.

Ground rules: keep it clean, keep it polite, and keep it honest. If you want your anecdotes to be publishable, you've gotta give me some kind of contact info for follow-up. (Don't worry, I won't pass it on to the NSA or anything.)

So how about it? Send those stories. Either post a comment or drop me a line at aweinstein@tallahassee.com.

And don't forget your Pop Candy!

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Breaking News: Kids have sex in college!

So the FSView recently reprinted a New York Daily News article about how my beloved and expensive alma mater, Columbia University in the City of New York, is in fact a house o' learnin' for perverts and sexually promiscuous liberal weenies. As evidence the NYDN reporter cites a bunch of nude soirees, some piped-in porn and the Columbia administration’s hands-off attitude.

A couple of responses pop up in my head.

Number one: kudos to the FSView staff for giving 'Noles students yet another area to stress about. First, they slip in the party-school standings, then their football team becomes a Division I also-ran, and now they're told that they lack the libidinous mojo of a couple of granola-crunching, hemp-wearing Ivy Leaguers.

Number two: If it is true, it's news to me since I graduated in the '02, and it's news to this guy, too. My impression of the school is that, controlling for radical feminists and rabble-rousers, mad geniuses, smarmy fumbling intellectuals and the incredibly unattractive, the desirable dating pool in the Upper West Side is remarkably small.

I mean, for the love of all that’s holy, they gave their BDSM club a Latin name. Now really, how alluring is that? It's hard to deconstruct orientalism, critique dialectic reason and calculate Riemann sums and still get your sexy on.

Also, consider that the writer of the article works for the Daily News, which is clearly in a race to the bottom with the Fox-owned New York Post. The boys in that back room have had it out for Columbia for a while. Apparently it has something to do with the fact that the more education you acquire, the less likely you are to believe the daily dreck that falls out of Bill O'Reilly's mouth.

(Which reminds me. Remember when Bill O'Reilly settled that sex-harassment lawsuit? Something about a loofah or a falafel in the shower. Man, what's up with all that sexual perversion at Fox, huh?...)

Anyway. The big question in my mind is: Is this news? Is anyone – especially in Tallahassee – surprised that sex becomes important to teenagers who move out of their folks' homes, live in close proximity to their well-groomed and image-conscious peers, and are told by their professors to subvert the dominant paradigm? That's not ivory-tower liberalism: That's growing up.

Sure, it may occasionally mean power tools in the hands of children. And it may be more than most can or should handle. Heck, it may even be a mortal sin.

But before you go casting them stones, check yourself and your own worldly desires.

And call your kids at college. You know, just to be sure.

(Any thoughts from the peanut gallery? Post a comment, already.)

(And feast on an orgy of USA Today's Pop Candy.)

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Did you miss the punk summit?!

I hereby declare 2006 to be The Year the Whippersnappers Learned Their Place. I have read the writing on the wall, and it states that listening to your elders is not as lame as previously reported. Just look at politics: George Bush Jr. got himself into a fine mess in Iraq, and he's turning to a gaggle of his father's old friends to fix the fracas.

Well, in case you missed it, a similar meeting of the minds kicked off Wednesday night with a similar purpose: It was a summit on the direction of punk music, convened by the Beta Bar and lorded over by the original Circle Jerks. And like any good punk show, there was much rejoicing, a little fighting, and a curious number of underage teens experimenting with leather and safety pins. A strange, new punk value was instilled, too: A solemn responsibility to hear what the old men have to say.

The Jerks, of course, are now venerable granddaddies of the L.A. hardcore scene that birthed them about 1979. That bears repeating: 1979. That's six years before the majority of Wednesday's crowd was even born. Also not born yet: Green Day, Good Charlotte, Blink-182, and numerous other Hot Topic teen bands that do for punk what Zima does for beer.

Frankly, it's gotta be more than a little depressing for the boys in the band to watch the hardcore scene slouch toward a state of capitalist-fueled entropy. Especially for Jerks like Keith Morris of Black Flag fame and Greg Hetson, who strummed for Bad Religion (both of which are, um, kind of a big deal): They suddenly find themselves headlining all-ages shows, half-packed with clarinet-playing honor students who dress as Slipknot members for Halloween and use charge cards to purchase do-it-yourself fashions already done beforehand by Vietnamese sweatshop workers.

As Morris put it onstage, complaining about the Warped Tour punk world, "Maybe we're all just a bunch of old guys, and these 13-year-olds don't get us."

Nonetheless, they took a wild stab at making themselves understood.

The undercard played admirably, with Switchblade Cheetah making its argument in 45-second bursts. In the Wake Of...'s back-to-basics sound reassured the older crowd that it had, in fact, arrived at the correct address. Bless their hearts for blasting out a cover of Minor Threat's "We're Just a Minor Threat," whose opening chords were received like heavenly manna by those of us whose memories of the 1980s are not all programmed by VH1.

Then there were the Lower Class Brats, whose licks and riffs were almost as meticulous as their glam makeup and outfits. Too bad the lowest class of all - about five skinheads and various other of Darwin's walking jokes in the mosh pit - tried to ruin this danceable major-chord set by stomping the doe-eyed teens in the front row.

By 11 p.m., the statesmen had arrived to hold court. Despite their age issues and political alienation (in his between-song ruminations, Morris touched all the typical anti-government, Bush-bashing bases you would expect him to), the fogies made an appeal for punk unity, emphasizing the chorus from their song "The Crowd": "All the world lives here." Tossed into the appeal were an hour's worth of timeless classics - "Behind the Door", "Back Against the Wall", "Fortunate Son" and "Wild in the Streets" (which was broken up by a pit fight, then resumed with gusto).

Most valuably, the Jerks were gracious enough to provide the audience's nubile novices a few free lessons in the basics, hearkening back to the first wave of punk with a cover of Robyn Hitchcock and the Soft Boys' "I Wanna Destroy You" and saluting L.A. forebears the Plugz and the Weirdos.

By the time the boys' four-song encore culminated in "Depression", kids wearing Against Me shirts had found common ground with those of us who still think Bad Brains and the Damned are required listening.

Now, if only we can get those whippersnappers to turn off the MTV and eat their vegetables.




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Sunday, December 03, 2006

Quebec: Hip or Dip?

Since I've developed a terrible malaise that renders me incapable of writing anything meaningful, I've decided to play a new game with my hipster's apprentices: 'Hip or Dip?'
This is an occasional feature in which we will explore a place, issue or person to discern whether said entity is endowed with pure, concentrated hiptitude or is, in fact, just really dippy.
Case in point: Quebec. Yes, that Quebec. Now, before you get all knee-jerky on me and reply that nothing vaguely related to the French can be hip (except maybe being terrible at fighting), let me remind you that without Quebec there is no Montreal, and if you didn't already cognize this, lemme hit you with some more knowledge, Socrates: Montreal is hipper than your mama's eighth-grade greaser crush.
On the other hand, those crazy Quebecois (I don't care if it's spelled right) have begun to beat the drum of independence again, even managing to secure a symbolic nod from Canada's parliament. Which, frankly, requires a lot more energy than any true hipster would be willing to dedicate.
But then again... Let me rest my case for Quebec's ultimate hipness on this clip of a longer comedy skit showing up on Canadian TV stations. What's going on there, you ask? Apparently, that's our intrepid Great Decider and the Canadian Prime Minister, sharing a moment of political solidarity in a tent meant to remind you of a certain 2005 Oscar-winning cowboy flick. That polite gentleman at the tent door who excuses himself in French? That would be the Quebec independence party's big cheese.
Wait. You mean there's a politician up there who's willing to publicly spoof himself, his boss and our own commander in chief?
Hipness, thy name is Quebec.


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