Wednesday, November 08, 2006
What I did on Melbourne Cup Day. I had a very boring Cup Day. I dragged myself out of bed, severely hungover from the Horses! party, and went to the office, where I did work in the morning. Then I had much-needed dumplings and hot'n'sour soup for lunch, followed by gelati. Then I went back to the office, where I did nothing in particular. Y'know. Checked MySpace. Checked Mess+Noise. Checked blogs. Listened obsessively to Icehouse albums. (I considered writing a post about Icehouse, but it kinda got away from me.) That took me through to about 8pm. Then I met a friend for dinner on Brunswick Street. Then I went home and read the Melbourne Times in bed.
Pretty exciting, huh.
Lately I have been worrying about what a dirty hipster I am becoming. It's like the narrative arc in any 'transformation' movie, from Can't Buy Me Love and Teen Wolf to Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada. The hero or heroine starts off as a well-meaning dork and turns into an ostensibly popular monster who has a moment of crisis when someone from his/her old life disgustedly confronts him/her. These scenes almost always end with the dorky past-person shaking their head sadly and saying, "See ya," before walking off, leaving the hero/ine in dismay.
For a while I could pretend I was doing 'field research', that I had a degree of detachment from the 'scene'. But that position became untenable a couple of weeks back when Tash and I won a bottle of vodka at an iPod DJing night at Honkytonks. We were all-girl R&B duo Plump'n'Rosie (Nell-E Plumpkin and Rosie Fantail), and we were wearing hotpants, boots, ridiculous bling, and matching oversized white t-shirts with "Plump" and "Rosie" on them in pink glitter letters. And we loved it. It wasn't in any way ironic.
I want to work through this issue of affect in hipster culture, as I have to give a paper about it in under a month now. I don't know what this has to do with Cup Day. My Cup Day says more about my dreadful aptitude for procrastination than anything else.
Pretty exciting, huh.
Lately I have been worrying about what a dirty hipster I am becoming. It's like the narrative arc in any 'transformation' movie, from Can't Buy Me Love and Teen Wolf to Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada. The hero or heroine starts off as a well-meaning dork and turns into an ostensibly popular monster who has a moment of crisis when someone from his/her old life disgustedly confronts him/her. These scenes almost always end with the dorky past-person shaking their head sadly and saying, "See ya," before walking off, leaving the hero/ine in dismay.
For a while I could pretend I was doing 'field research', that I had a degree of detachment from the 'scene'. But that position became untenable a couple of weeks back when Tash and I won a bottle of vodka at an iPod DJing night at Honkytonks. We were all-girl R&B duo Plump'n'Rosie (Nell-E Plumpkin and Rosie Fantail), and we were wearing hotpants, boots, ridiculous bling, and matching oversized white t-shirts with "Plump" and "Rosie" on them in pink glitter letters. And we loved it. It wasn't in any way ironic.
I want to work through this issue of affect in hipster culture, as I have to give a paper about it in under a month now. I don't know what this has to do with Cup Day. My Cup Day says more about my dreadful aptitude for procrastination than anything else.
