Un-hip Origins: a Dual History of Adhesives and Consumer Culture
By Cedric Rose

     At the time, all I really wanted to do was buy new treads before hooking up with my peeps in Manhattan. I give Newark International's Air Rail seven points on my airport monorail rating system. This, coincidentally, is the same rating London's Gatwick Airport's monorail received, Gatwick's not actually qualifying as a bona fide monorail but its Brits with their sexy Brit accents bumped it up a couple of marks.

     Next time you fly into New York, when the fasten safety belt sign lights up and your Embraer jet plummets through the braised atmosphere of New Jersey, don't be ashamed to crane your neck into your fat neighbor's personal space so that you can see out the window. The teeming interstate, the docks swarming with colorful shipping containers, rail yards like vines, entire wings of airports dedicated to major package carriers like an ant colonies to their queen. All of this demonstrates adhesion and the effort toward contradicting physical time and space while feeding society. And we haven't even gotten to social glue, so-called higher life forms' adhesion to rules and arbitrarily agreed upon norms. What you see is the adhesion of people to persons, of people to things. Can there be Hipsters without civilization? I am as little convinced of this as I am of a world without glue.

     I thought of my old friend and classical saxophonist par excellence, Wataru Sato, who once told me, following an exceptionally potent bong hit (back in dumb days of floundering naiveté when Sato and I thought marijuana would ultimately enhance our lives), that good drugs were so difficult to come by in the Japan of his youth that he and his friends would purchase large quantities of aircraft glue, or paint thinner - anything toxic and solvent - sit in a dark, enclosed room with these open containers and stare at a lit cigarette until its glowing tip became their whole world. This demonstrates two points: that substance can have a lasting effect on developing consciousnesses, both individual and cultural, and that minds often as not flee into microcosms when faced with larger, more difficult realities (in this case, the cut-throat competition of Japanese music schools).

     I made Penn Station with an hour to burn before I had to meet Pandolfi at his office on Park Ave. - which brings us to the single most mood altering substance yet synthesized by Homo Sapiens - a desirable which simply couldn't be without adhesives: modern, mass-produced shoes. Let's face it. The New York Subway System is little more than a portable underground shoe show-and-tell. You can't get that kind of foot exposure on the bus, except at the back. Someone told me New York was a good place to buy shoes. Amsterdam's better - far better.

     But yes, I bought shoes (Pumas, "elephant skin" and ochre - where the fuck, I ask, were the brown suede Pumas for which this dubious color combination was the surrogate? Granted, ladies and gentlemen: perambulating the base of the Empire State building, the Manhattan Mall, the various and sundry generic athletic-goods outlets in surrounding environs. And here we arrive at the gaping wound of confessional, the evidence, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that I am not a hipster, a truth which, every day of my life, both thrills and nauseates me.

     I am not proud. I changed shoes. How gauche is that? I sat my provincial ass down in Herald Square, changed shoes, threw the box in a can, put my New Balance in my backpack, tilted my gleeful feet from instep to outstep and back, exchanged sneers with occupants of the park (a light rain beginning), opened my umbrella, walked to Park Ave., took the elevator to the appropriate floor and busted in on Pandolfi in his cubicle squinting at his Mac.
     "The fuck took you so long?" (I didn't mention the shoes.)
     "My plane was delayed an hour at takeoff." (It was.)
     "Bingham and Messick are meeting us at Desmond's for a drink."

     Soothed by brown pints consumed between the wood-panel walls of Desmonds, Pandolfi remarked with some relish that the interior of the bar could just as easily be some dive in the town where, temporarily, Wendeln and I are forced to reside. Everybody got loose, and fast. Daley showed up demanding vodkas all around.
     "How's Wendeln?"
     "There's this new friend. Frankly I'm worried. He breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He hunts. He has a beard."
     They exchange embarrassed looks on my behalf.
     "A beard? Shut the fuck up?"
     To change the subject, I say: "So I bought new shoes."
     Pandolfi: "You what?"
     "Let's see them," said Messick, who had been at the jukebox, coaxing it to play Guns and Rose's Paradise City, a tune of which he has always been unabashedly fond.
     "Nice shoes," he says.
     "Let's see what those shoes will do for you this weekend," says Bingham.

     On subsequent shoe shopping expeditions, Messick would purchase a yellow and green pair of Sauconys. Ryan, whose flight came in at about eleven that night, was looking for a pair of brown dress shoes. I can only hope he got some when he got back to Detroit. The others were already up to their ankles in eye-catching footwear. All of this apparently autoerotic narrative is here reproduced to corroborate a point: the mind body connection which, taken to its extreme, in the context of Empire in the early stages of decay sets up a feedback loop of sorts: kids acquire crap. They develop an appetite for crap. The crap gets all up in their heads to the point that the crap more-or-less inhabits their heads. Rampant materialism. This, however, is not to say that it is shallow materialism. It masquerades as such. Of course you will find no evidence to contradict the shallowness. You must simply believe. Before I got too drunk that night, I had the thought, ripped off on some level from Blake, that excess leads to wisdom. Everybody knows that's crap. To all but the most masochistic, monasticism is a total drag. Balance is the thing. I'd been reading Herzog.

               ...the cheerful voice of Ramona calling him to a life of pleasure
               on the thrilling wires of New York. And not simple pleasure but
               metaphysical, transcendent pleasure-pleasure which answered
               the riddle of human existence . . . Ramona had passed through
               the hell of profligacy and attained the seriousness of pleasure.
               For when will we civilized beings become really serious?
               said Kierkegaard. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will
               diffuse hell through all our days.

     We couldn't spend all night getting lacquered at Desmonds. Duncan would be landing at La Guardia at eleven. A sculptor who'd been rendered quadriplegic by a nasty accident a year prior, Duncan was back on his feet and very much in command of his nervous system. Still, he needed a drink or two and a destination for his cabbie and we were, at best, a flotilla of besotted wastrels. Pandolfi and Bingham's dog needed walking. We all went to take out the pooch. And then we needed food. We needed drinks.

     The neon on the Soda Bar was out, rendering it useless as an easy target for Duncan, but the fish and chips were excellent. Our pool game was a travesty, but our bellies were full. Duncan called. He'd ditched the cab and was standing in the rain about ten blocks away. We got him. More rounds ensued. And that's the thing with adhesion. It's one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Compared to stickiness, gravity is pansy-ass. I'm not suggesting that some invisible, gooey strand, ready to snap back like bubblegum, connects any group of good acquaintances. It has nothing to do with that. It's the adhesion of mind - the desire it exerts on one person, which acts as a powerful repellent to others. Music's a great example: if Dave Matthews is your thing, well, I'm sorry, but there are places for people like you. The rest of us have our Pretty Girls Make Graves, our Yanni, our Shins, our Ratt and our Matmos. So what? Fuck you!

     But the glue that really makes it all work, the whole steaming mass of a modern age in which we find ourselves: that super-tacky-glue of desire, relies for attraction on separation. The fashion industry would go bankrupt without geographical separation and decreasing zones of fashionable-ness. As every new style migrates from its cosmopolitan epicenter to outlet malls far out in the uncharted spiral arms of the interstate system, the buying public gets diluted with confused ideas about what looks good. What are they wearing in New York? Baggie jeans and thigh-high lace-up-converse sneaker boots? Who knows? On MTV I saw P-diddy's ladies wearing 'em.

     In a nutshell: delayed gratification, only at every step along the way, you don't know how much more delayed your gratification is. If the end of the world is coming, Clemens quipped, I want to be in Cincinnati, where everything happens ten years late. Imagine some gestalt version of the real thing, an empire in which things happened as one big wet sneeze. Who wants to live like that? Someone has to buy last year's goods, and I don't know about you, but it's not going to be me.

     Somehow we made it home. Messick got the hiccups, so we had to hang out under a Clinton Hill scaffold. Actually, I needed to pee. I got some sort of roofing tar on the Pumas. What are you going to do? Scotch Guard everything you own? Messick promised to serenade me with Chuck Mangione in the morning and the lights went out. I lay in bed, one foot on the floor and, in the center of a spinning room, wondered if adhesion had in some ways been taken too far. Take certain depilatory methods. Take Napalm.

     What intrepid mind can unflinchingly conceive of a world without Post-its, without mail samples of cold cereal, without box wine and without, I shudder even to suggest it, shoes? Not because box wine is good, but because it throws so many of the good things in life into stark relief. Consumerism as we know it, hinges on glue. The next day we would go shoe shopping for real.

     "And so," Marty Stouffer might say, if he were to do an episode of Wild America on Americans, "intoxicated on their consumable goods, the consumers' diet and insatiable appetites fuel their yen for fashionable merchandise, which they happily slurp up. Will they eventually suffocate on glue fumes and emissions from their factories? Or will they learn to adapt and, ultimately, in the noble struggle of life, to persevere, to survive. I'm Marty Stouffer and this is your Wiiiiiild America."