The Party:

In my reckless pursuit of material for this site, I went to an electroclash party recently to find out just how fucking annoying it would be. And of course it started to get almost unbearably annoying even before I went to the party. It all started with this hipster email party listing a reader suggested to me — I won't name names here — but since I 'subscribed' to this list I have not had a cyber-moment's peace away from the intolerable barrage of crap spewed out without the benefit of basic copy reading or, apparently, even a humble estimate of what the parties in question will actually be like. It's a good thing they post this goddamned list online because if they issued this in print, it could safely be regarded as the single most offensive and wasteful event to befall the printed page since Motley Crue's biography. Another winky hipster badge, to be sure. The 'description' said something like 5 bands, small cover, and open bar upstairs, and a few bands and bar downstairs. Anyway, it was at this shithouse bar called the Right Bank, and the clientele downstairs looked like a bunch of shipwrecked bridge gnomes with eye infections. When we got upstairs there was a classic raffish hipster pussy acting as doorman — ironic T-shirt pulled tight over an egg-lumpy torso that might have looked pleasantly mannish five years ago before he plumped out and shaved his chest hair into a diamond shape. He wore vomitous woolen slacks with black socks. The hand stamp was think blue and bleeding and I twisted my wrist to get a look, it was a face, some famous face — it's, it's, oh god — It's fucking Pikachu. I've got a giant bleeding aqua Pikachu melting all over my hand. This is cutting edge. I forked over my six dollars and the doorman sighed heavily and aligned my crumpled bills. The room was dark and long; it looked like somebody's apartment. There were black garbage bags eviscerated and hung with masking tape from the cielings and red light bulbs dangling. At one end of the small room there was the 'music' obscured by a crowd of dark, seemingly dumbstruck viewers and there was a makeshift bar at the other end framed with a big jagged piece of butcher paper sprawled with the message for bar-goers: "Pabst Keg: $2 Cup" This revelation seemed to beg another bizarre question of party planning mechanics — why the stamp? Anybody with the instinctual advantage of being under 21 would likely achieve the equivalent party effect by listening to loud Joy Division in the dark whilst masturbating in the comfort of his or her own bedroom. Oh wait! Of course! People might sneak in to this party.

The Crowd:

My initial impressions of the electroclashster without having the advantage of actually hanging around them proved fairly well grounded. The crowd consisted of about 50 people divided squarely into two categories: Dumbstruck hipsters and snide electroclashters. It's rare to see Williamsburg hipsters looking genuinely dumbstruck, and I will credit the electroclashsters for this — the regular mesh cap and sweaterbelly hipsterati crowd seemed to waddle around the narrow hall confusedly looking for a wall to lean on, bumping into each other and perpetually ending-up in the bathroom line — while the electroclashsters gathered like soot-covered lemmings around the music (I dare not call this a band) bobbing and waving, eyes closed and hands aloft ala Ganesh. Since this is such a 'groundbreaking' and utterly original 'movement' I have only one anchor of pre-hipster comparison from my past: the electroclashsters are just a bunch of pasty-face new wave and Goth wannabes with fashion mullets. Many looked like standard mesh-caps hipsters that had been literally tarred and feathered. The girls all seemed to be bruise-eyed bathroom-stalled coke-sniffing art school cockstuffers who talk right into your ear like they're about to bite it off. And the guys, well, here's the conversation I had with the only one I talked to:
"Hey," he said.
"Hello," I said.
"So, uh, are you like, into this music or what?"
"What," I said.
"I said, are you into this music?"
"No. It was a joke. I heard you the first time."
"Oh. Uh. What?"
"Nevermind," I said.
"Oh, uh, cool. Do you have any coke?"
"No."
"Oh, uh, cool."

More On This Later.

I am pleased to announce that my latest Hipster Snapshot Of The Week can be read here at www.nypress.com in the New York City section. And Happy Thanksgiving, whatever that means.