Today’s ride had two near vomit moments. One came while busting out eight LT intervals with some supra-LT vo2 max sprinkles thrown on top for a few minutes at the end of each charge, came out to more than 50 minutes at or above threshold while climbing. So got a few moments of that my stomach feels like it’s smelting my internal organs right now or something.
The other moment came when I was finished climbing and spinning around the hood. For the second time in two rides I came across one of the archetypical tableaus in my neighborhood—the in medias res hipster photo shoot. This entails 2-14 people standing around dressed like third graders in 1983 (short gym shorts, high striped tube socks, nuthuggers, etc) sitting around while one marginally attractive member of the group, usually a girl who looks underage for that ‘American Apparel’ effect, poses in front of lights while a photog douchebag snaps away. The other day it was some kind of hipster golf photo shoot happening in Elysian Park.
Today it was a much larger throng more towards the n=15 end of the spectrum lounging in front of a big city-commissioned graffiti piece that has bikes, Zapatistas and a few other ‘subversive’ elements in the mix. I passed them on my way up Sunset, thought about stopping and taking my cameraphone out and snapping a pic, then I thought, fuck that, why would I stop my ride to photograph a visual stereotype that is as common in my neighborhood as gangbangers, tagging, bike theft and bird shit? They were there on the way back as well and I noticed that as props they’d painted a set of speakers to match the mural.
This aesthetic completely eludes my grasp. I don’t get it. It makes less sense to me than Goths, who were the first subculture that really left me scratching my head and feeling like an old man. While that look is totally homogenous and codified as well, there’s something really irritating about an entire generation fetishizing a look and spirit of an era that never existed the way they imagine it did. It’s like Regan’s view of the ‘50s. Never was, never will be.
I’ll know some kind of real wholesale cultural change has occurred when the fashion world turns the fucking page and at least jumps forward 5-7 years (bringing us into the grunge era—or will we have to suffer a hair metal fashion fetish first?).
$.02
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