New Year, old complaints

Happy 2008. Here's some bile to get things started right.

This old-ish Sun article on privileged middle-class jackasses slumming it at Downtown Eastside bars pisses me off for a number of reasons. First, that there are kids who hope to achieve some cred by rubbing the hems of their $300 jeans against the grit of the underclass is not news. This type of class tourism has existed for as long as there have been privileged middle-class jackasses looking to temporarily escape their cloistered existence for a little bit of local colour. I'm glad to see that some of the people quoted recognize this, but I doubt that level of self-awareness is the norm. To wit:

Anna Zarzynfki, 22, comes regularly to this dance night at the Astoria. She says it's the low incomes of most of her young friends that is shaping the Hastings Street hipster scene.

"We're like the Mods of the year 2007," said Zarzynfki. "The reason we go to these dive bars isn't because it's a fad. It's because it's all we can afford. Economics always influences subcultures."

Mmhmm. I betcha $200 she learned that last bit at university. The real giveaway that it's not economics as much as elitism is the smugness and self-satisfaction that drips from these twats like a cocaine nosebleed:

"People are tired of going downtown where every club is the same," says Musgrave.

"It's just the same meatheads fighting the same guys and the same chicks that look like hookers."

In the DTES, it's all brawling crackheads and the chicks don't just look like hookers. Authenticity!

"I think a lot of people, myself included, are over downtown just because of the thugs-are-us mentality. There's an alternative needed."

Ah, well, how lucky for you to have that option. I have to wonder, though, what the inevitable gentrification that will follow the migration of the Great Neon Hiptard will mean to those DTES denizens who don't have the luxury of picking their spots when a scene is declared "over."

"These are kids who are more intellectual in their musical tastes and are less inclined to mix downtown with the thugs from the suburbs," says Biltmore manager Richard Roloff, aka DJ Dickey Doo, on the phone from the Canary Islands, where he is working as a DJ.

Uh, Dick? Reading Pitchfork and downloading Daft Punk remixes does not an intellectual make. As for the suburbs remark, from whence do you think all the little spandex-clad faggorts who pay money to watch you press keys on your laptop came?

The new-school Biltmore is aimed at Emily Carr School of Art types, says Roloff. "These are people who don't want to hear Beyonce."

Well, they do, but they don't really mean it. Look, dude, let's not pretend that there's some fundamental difference between the budding conceptual artist from West Van looking to get wasted and laid in some East Hastings bar and the frat boy engineering student looking to do the same on Granville. And no, having a photoblog is not a fundamental difference. To paraphrase Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: "You are all equally worthless." (As an aside, I do find it amusing that these hipsters have such disdain for the thug life, given how many of these 90 pound weaklings adopt the trappings thereof: gang signs, bling, shitty hip-hop, etc. Oh, I forgot: it's okay when it's ironic.)

And finally, the swirly tip on this turd sundae:

DJ Turkington lives in a cheap (for Vancouver) apartment in nearby Strathcona. He's done two years of liberal arts courses at Douglas College. He serves food at a restaurant and sells clothes at American Apparel.

Its like the a c.v. of someone applying for the job of "ridiculous asshole."