It’s well established that PBR is The Beer to Drink (thanks, Castro!). But it shouldn’t be. The idea of a Hipster Standby is impossible; once enough people know about something it CANNOT still be cool. At the gym yesterday, homeboy with those BIG weights made tiny, tiny guns during the chorus of Paper Planes.
People are squeamish about shopping at Urban Outfitters; people are squeamish about reading Pitchfork; people are terrified, outraged and pissed off about being identified as hipsters. So the PBR thing makes no sense to me. I saw a dude with a t-shirt with a PBR logo that had replaced the words with “Mob Mentality”—nice idea, buddy, but the REAL way to effect change in people’s beer choice is to write about it on the internet.
But I don’t want to be one of those guys who just complain about something without proposing a solution.
KEYSTONE LIGHT
There are a number of really tragically similar products when it comes to light beers, but Keystone Light is the apotheosis of the Light Beer: it is the ABSOLUTE CHEAPEST, it comes in those hilarious TALL CANS, its name is FUCKING DUMB, and it tastes THE WORST. Let’s do this 7th grade writing test—argumentative prompt—style:
Keystone light is the absolute cheapest because it costs less than any other beers. So for example, because it has a lower price tag, and your income is fixed by the amount your parents give you per month, you can by more beers.
The tall cans serve to simultaneously remind you that you’re drinking beer—because only beer (and I guess Red Bull but come on) comes in that size of can—and that the beer you’re drinking is NOT a PBR. Derrida calls this phenomenon différance, a word worth knowing but too weighty to explain here. Suffice it to say that it’s a French neologism combining the words difference and “to defer,” and that it points to the way things can only be defined negatively—that is, by explaining what they are not—and to Derrida’s idea of an infinite string of signifiers deferring meaning indefinitely.
I feel like I cannot even begin to explain how terrible a name Keystone Light is. However, just try to come up with a worse name. See? You can’t. Also, you can call them “stones.” As in, “Oh fuck there’s only 19 stones left in this case I brought to the party and it’s the only beer in the fridge and people are bitching about being out of alcohol even though I told them they were welcome to some stones.”
This is the important part. Keystone Light tastes super, super shitty. This is good because no one will steal your beer. Also, it makes it impossible to drink outside of the party setting—it is impossible to drink a Keystone Light recreationally. These both contribute to the one true goal of any good party Bolshevik: to party.
But partying is more than just an activity. It’s a state of mind. I’ve been reading a lot of Dostoevsky criticism of late, and I’m especially intrigued by Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of carnivalization in Dostoevsky, which I’ll extrapolate to Keystone Light here. During a carnival, the everyday, mundane life is turned on its head. There is a spirit of infinite permissibility, and everyone is equal. Endemic to this radical equalization is a change in status, whether up or down, to the level of everyone. Because we are forced to change we are uncomfortable, and we combat this with alcohol. I’m not saying this is good or bad, just that it happens.
PBR has become everyday, has become comfortable. We have even become acclimated to the flavor, so it doesn’t even really taste that bad any more. FUCK THAT. Sitting around playing video games smoking weed and drinking PBR with your boys is comfortable. Going to a party, talking to people you don’t know, trying to get with chicks, and drinking Keystone Light is uncomfortable.
AND COMFORT IS THE GOD OF THE BOURGEOISIE. We are all bourgeoisie, like it or not, but parties are our opportunities to transcend that abominable comfort. Drink Keystone Light.
Old Major
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
A Truly Bolshevik Experience
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The most truly Bolshevik I have ever felt came this past weekend in Prague, Czech Republic, where the street signs look like this:
And the locals party by candlelight and in Cold War nuclear bomb bunkers. No joke. Read on, comrades:
So, stuffed absolutely full of delicious coffee and dessert and general revelry, we had quite a trek in front of us to reach the Zizkov district, where there were a large number of authentically Czech bars. I am a large fan of walking as far as possible, and on this particular occasion Abby was as enthusiastic of a walker as me, so our voyage past the train station and through various back streets and past Place Winston Churchill was quite nice, brisk, and cheesily happy. Passing some drunk Praguians (?) on the street, opening their beers on street signs was comforting. We had to be going in somewhat of the right direction! So we climbed another street and saw right in front of us the invisible entrance to Blind Eye bar (the best possible recommendation, Juliet, I felt right at home immediately, THANK YOU). The bar was almost jet-black and cheap beyond belief and we plopped down across from two native Czechians chatting in their indecipherable tongue to smoke cigarettes (indoors!) and look at pictures on Abby's camera. After a bit of exploring in the bar, we realized that there were a bunch of rooms that were hardly lit at all (and pretty much exclusively by candles). I got a drink called a Zizkov Liberator, which was enormous and tasted kind of like cream soda, but was too sweet for me to finish. The beer was Czech Budweiser, which I was into, and the very cute bartender was from Prague but spoke better English than me. Embarrassing.
I met a couple of guys at the bar who were happy to hear that I loved Prague and thought that South and North Carolina were the same place (I corrected them) and they told me that the Prague train station (where we had traversed to find this bar) was "the sketchiest part of the entire country." I told them I didn't find it sketchy in the slightest and they said exactly, the whole country is safe and it must be hard for me to understand coming from America. I said yeah, but it's mainly fear tactics and racism. They laughed. They were in the vein of all of the Czech people I had the pleasure of meeting, very very sweet and friendly and didn't hate me because I was American. I wanted to come to the Czech Republic after all!
Abby and I had agreed that we were both pretty tired and we did have a long walk home, so we weren't going to stay out too late, especially considering our obscenely early flight (9:30, but I am NOT a morning person). However, this was quickly reassessed when we met this group of Germans and Canadians who invited us to play foosball (thank god for all my years at afterschool programs) and swiftly to finish our drinks and accompany them to a secret techno club in a Cold War-era nuclear bomb bunker somewhere on this side of Prague. We had a map but their Czech friends had abandoned us, so we pretty much just had the instincts of one of the Germans (named Arne, but he said it would be easier for us to call him Bob, so we did) and this vague vague map. So we walked even farther, past a church, a grocery store, a TV tower covered with metal babies (weird, Juliet, I thought you were kidding but wtf) and chatted with the Germans and one boy from Austria wearing an Amsterdam t-shirt and the Canadians, who had been friends since they were young and were seeing one another for the first time in years, deciding to meet randomly in Prague.
We found the club, completely nondescript except for a bit of graffiti outside, under an overpass and a park. Walking in, the graffiti grew and filled all of the small, empty concrete rooms of the entrance to this club. After descending a long metal staircase past a climbing wall (?) we made in to the bottom and since I don't speak any Czech and the people at the door didn't seem to speak English, I illogically switched to French, asking how much the cover was and asking the pierced girls if they were having fun. Of course they didn't know what I was talking about but the cover was 30 Crowns (a little over 1 Euro) and huge beers 26 crowns (1 Euro). The club was almost empty, but I was just awed by the fact that I was actually in a Cold War nuclear bomb bunker where there was now very bad techno music and graffiti and people partying. The very few people that were there were very Czech and smoking what looked like crack, and later large amounts of hash and weed. My ability to dance to techno music without a beat (which you might think is oxymoronical - it's not) is pretty hard to harness, so I just sat with one of the Canadian boys and smoked cigarettes/drank beer and talked about lots and lots of things, including tattoos, traveling, the internet, cooking, beer, and in short, almost all of my favorite subjects, while Abby and the other Canadian danced. I have no earthly idea what time it was when they turned on all of the lights in the club, but we had been there for a couple of hours probably and decided to get out of there.
Luckily, in all of Europe they do a thing called "Non-Stop," which means 24-hours. This includes some grocery stores, sex shops, but the best of all is that it includes bars. So leaving the techno club and waving goodbye and (me still stupidly saying "bonsoir") we began to trudge back in the direction of Greater Prague in pairs. We stopped at a bar near Old Town and got a couple of beers and watched VH1 with the bartender, who did not speak English but for whatever reason, let us in for drinks and refused to let in anyone else. He was very funny and reading the paper/smoking cigarettes, and the four of us got personal and made fun of the Culture Club and David Bowie videos, along with the very bad version of classic Beatles that Paul did solo. After a while, we decided to continue to walk to the hostel where Abby and I were staying, since it was now very late and foggy and we weren't actually very far away anymore.
I was once again in charge of getting everyone to where they were going, my favorite thing to do at 5AM drunk and tired, taking advantage of the time change at 2AM (fall back! An extra hour in Prague!). We found it, stayed up for a while talking, and fell into a fitful sleep on the couch in the "Fun Room" of the hostel at about 6AM. At about this time, the Canadians awoke and decided to get back to their hostel for some real sleep. Lucky bastards, we had to meet our driver at 8, so our night was pretty much done. They were really wonderful and funny, and I am disappointed that life works the way it does, i.e. being extremely unlikely that we will ever meet either of them again. Oh well, now I know something about the geography of Canada, which, as an American, I had never ever been taught.
Planning on probably moving to Prague one day, to become a real post-Soviet kind of gal.
Proletarian Love from Lenin
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Noise-Porn Bro
A Character Sketch of a Sketch Character
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in…ya know…us.”
~William Shakespeare
The weekend following my foray into Sparks and its successive decadence, I was invited to a Drinking Olympics by my friend Janis Joplin. Earlier that week, the world found out Obama had lost his bid and Chicago would not be hosting the 2016 Winter Games. But come 9:45 Friday night, with five plastic barrels full of beer and a fridge stocked with all kinds of hangover, I discovered the games were in fact still being held on American soil.
As I walk in, I am immediately ostracized because I’m the only one who does not look like a circus act. I quickly learn this is a costume Party. As I keenly shake hands with Aladdin, Cowboy Woody, and other staples from my childhood, I’m told to stick my hand in a Yankees cap and pick my team. I drew a thin piece of pink cardstock from the Sorting Hat and found my way onto ‘It Ain’t Pretty Being Easy’. No, it is not.
But apparently it’s easy being pretty good at drinking games. We were near quadrupling the other teams by the end of the fourth round. Also, they were awarding bonus points at the end of the night for collecting can tabs from every beer we finished and for every shot we took in the kitchen. I took it upon myself to drink for the cause and make my way to the kitchen. There I met a girl who insisted I call her ‘Tuesday’. Though I gave her a hard time for it then, let me disclose my public support for her now: this is a great tactic to having people remember your name at a Party. Save for your name being something like Barack, it is not on the person you meet to remember your name; it is on you to get them to remember. My memory is limited and on-the-outs as it is; it’s imperative that I save it for the important stuff, like IMDB user ratings and lyrics to 90’s one-hit wonders.
Janis Joplin arrived after getting off sentence (or as the bourgeoisie call it, work) and we were soon making a duck out the door, on to the next Party. A farewell was bid to the guy in the BoSox shirt who offered me “cheap but decent” acid and medicinal reefer from California. I dig in my pockets and pull out five silver tabs to hand to the scorekeeper, asking him if it’s a good idea to walk down the street with a sixth in hand. He said no, I cracked it in front of him, tore off the tab, and rejoined my friends. Janis’s friends Jim Morrison and Neal Cassady were visiting from Georgia for the weekend, and being a good hostess, she was determined to show them a good time. But after they barged in the door, raising a case above their heads in a Superman shirt (not, mind you, for the theme), I came to realize they were determined to make it a good time wherever they were. I can fuck with that.
The next pit-stop we make is a rock-climbing Party. Now, as I’ve had to several times since, let me clarify: this was a Party for rock-climbers. They were not climbing rocks that night. Kinda the inverse of the Middle School/Middle School-Themed Party. But enough semantics, more shame. This one was a little more chaotic in the bass-thudding, beer pong-playing sense, and right as I walk in, I spotted my first middle-school girlfriend surrounded by a pride of climberbros. Behind her laid a tub full of Everclear lemonade. I get like a deer near a salt-lick. Shuffling past Jimmy Eat World stockholders and fitted North Faces, I aggressively navigated the throngs. This was a treasure hunt and ex- marked the spot.
After a couple Solo-fuls of Everclear with a margarita chaser, Janis Joplin stole me aside and said Neal Cassady had gone home with a 37-year-old. “Score?” It was a dude, who lived across the street. Apparently Neal and Jim had scorched him so thoroughly in pong, his only way to rationalize the loss was to invite them back for a congratulatory bowlpack. We walked through the open front door to find them chiefing on a stool-high stack of vinyls. All I could gather—given the rollercoaster my sense of balance was riding—was a serial cough and a strained larynx.
“Sup…duuuudes…”
Darkness.
I wake up to a wall full of faces I don’t know. Shit. I’ve gotta stop doing this. My body feels like all moisture has been hand-wrung from it and my stomach feels like it’s been roundhoused by a bull. I reach into my pocket and pull out 5 beer tabs. What the fuck did I give him then?? My ONE Card is gone. I come downstairs to Neal Cassady and Jim Morrison opening the freezer and finding an open bottle of Everclear lemonade which has solidified into a slushie. What. Happened. I haven’t felt this confused since last weekend.
After spending a day in recovery, I met up with Neal and Jim on Franklin to head down to the Party Castro’s for the bash you’ve already read about. They’d taken a couple fakes and ran $70 top-shelf at a Mexican joint down Rosemary. Janis Joplin was still on the clock, so we had to bust into her place intruder-style and retrieve the case we promised to bring. Out the door in five minutes, we began heading up the street toward Cameron, when all the sudden we heard thumpin’ techno emanating from the dude’s ranch we were at last night. Shudders vibrating, all lights on, shadows from the back porch: place looked like a discothèque. We figured there must be a solid 70 to 80 people in there, and quickly concluded why the hell not. We followed the shadow around back until it winds to the patio where a lonesome figure was sipping on blush, pretending to conduct a symphony like they do in cartoons.
Dude:“Oh wha——hey?”
Us: “Hey. We were over here last night.”
Dude: “Go on.”
Us: “Sounds like you’re having a crazy Party in there!”
Dude: “Nope. Just me.”
(pause)
Dude: “You wanna come in and drink that beer?”
As soon I stepped inside, I realized how truly annihilated I was last night; I didn’t remember anything from this house. His entire living room was a makeshift studio, complete with soundboards, synths, and venue-sized speakers. His only piece of furniture, in the traditional sense, was a chewed-up futon opposite his DVD library of Star Wars and porn. And then there were the Legos, enough to build the entire place over again. If this were preschool, he’d be the coolest kid on the block. Though the neighborhood moms may be hesitant to let their prides and joys near a man with such a mammoth collection of cooter vids. This place was half playground, half Buffalo Bill.
He started rummaging around, flipping switches back and forth, messing with knobs, and creating the disharmonic sounds you get plugging guitars into amps. After about eight minutes of distortion and white noise, he turned to a speechless, regretful us.
“Yeah, man, I love me that real gritty ass shit. Word.”
He then began to regale us with his life-story. I felt like there were some holes here and there, and surely some details had been obscured by chronic chemical abuse, but he was such an earnest narrator, I didn’t have the heart to implement reason. Apparently he works for IT, though he hates computers and the internet. The only site he uses is MySpace, to get his DJ set off the ground. He’s never seen a fortune, yet he’s perfectly content with his situation:
“I never had a ‘nice car’…or whatever that is. I always told myself I’d rather just kick it here with my soundboards. Make my music, ya know. Some of these fuckin’ things cost just as much anyway. Like check this out---{holds up an orange mixboard}---look how many motherfuckin’ buttons this thing has! Whaaaaat?? {spins them back and forth rapidly} Hey! Whatcha doin. Whatcha DOIN.”
It was at this point we learned he could not read music, and instead just “felt” his way through his grooves. Trying to impose an abrupt death chair to this conversation, Neal Cassady sifted through his record collection and nearly jumped when he discovered Gustav Holst’s The Planets shoved deep in the mix. Having such an icon of modern classical on vinyl padded this guy’s cred ten-fold in our books, although it didn’t cushion us for what came next:
“Oh yeah, that. Well hey, if you like that…you’ll love this. The other week I was on a…downloading binge. Music, porno, whatever. Heh, heh. Anyway, my Winamp started up…while I was in the middle of this one video…and it just like…started recording, man. The audio and all. But I was like...far out! This kinda works. So I went back…after I finished the video…and dropped a phat beat to it. Duhrhreennrrhee. [sic] Check it out. It’s…one of my best.”
What ensued was one of the strangest musical journeys of my life. Essentially, he had looped the sounds from the porno—chicks moaning, guys shouting “Yeah, baby, yeah!”, various ‘Haarderr!’s, etc.—to an original composition of ambient electronica. His back was turned away from us the entire time, dancing about over his laptop, gleefully pointing out, “Wait! This is the best part,” about six times. Finally the lead vocalist came to an earthshaking climax, to which he accompanied a crescendo of noise and space rock. Neal quietly inched The Planets back into the shelf.
This is, of course, when Janis Joplin called me to say she’s gotten off work. I tried to step outside to avoid the soundtrack of Boogie Nights from filtering into our conversation, but one of the women starts squealing in ecstasy before I could get to the door, and I had to explain that we…hadn’t made it to the Party quite yet.
So congratulations to Noise-Porn Bro, honorary Bolshevik of the week. He lives life the way he wants and couldn’t care less what society thinks about it. He also loves him that gritty ass shit.
- Caesar
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in…ya know…us.”
~William Shakespeare
The weekend following my foray into Sparks and its successive decadence, I was invited to a Drinking Olympics by my friend Janis Joplin. Earlier that week, the world found out Obama had lost his bid and Chicago would not be hosting the 2016 Winter Games. But come 9:45 Friday night, with five plastic barrels full of beer and a fridge stocked with all kinds of hangover, I discovered the games were in fact still being held on American soil.
As I walk in, I am immediately ostracized because I’m the only one who does not look like a circus act. I quickly learn this is a costume Party. As I keenly shake hands with Aladdin, Cowboy Woody, and other staples from my childhood, I’m told to stick my hand in a Yankees cap and pick my team. I drew a thin piece of pink cardstock from the Sorting Hat and found my way onto ‘It Ain’t Pretty Being Easy’. No, it is not.
But apparently it’s easy being pretty good at drinking games. We were near quadrupling the other teams by the end of the fourth round. Also, they were awarding bonus points at the end of the night for collecting can tabs from every beer we finished and for every shot we took in the kitchen. I took it upon myself to drink for the cause and make my way to the kitchen. There I met a girl who insisted I call her ‘Tuesday’. Though I gave her a hard time for it then, let me disclose my public support for her now: this is a great tactic to having people remember your name at a Party. Save for your name being something like Barack, it is not on the person you meet to remember your name; it is on you to get them to remember. My memory is limited and on-the-outs as it is; it’s imperative that I save it for the important stuff, like IMDB user ratings and lyrics to 90’s one-hit wonders.
Janis Joplin arrived after getting off sentence (or as the bourgeoisie call it, work) and we were soon making a duck out the door, on to the next Party. A farewell was bid to the guy in the BoSox shirt who offered me “cheap but decent” acid and medicinal reefer from California. I dig in my pockets and pull out five silver tabs to hand to the scorekeeper, asking him if it’s a good idea to walk down the street with a sixth in hand. He said no, I cracked it in front of him, tore off the tab, and rejoined my friends. Janis’s friends Jim Morrison and Neal Cassady were visiting from Georgia for the weekend, and being a good hostess, she was determined to show them a good time. But after they barged in the door, raising a case above their heads in a Superman shirt (not, mind you, for the theme), I came to realize they were determined to make it a good time wherever they were. I can fuck with that.
The next pit-stop we make is a rock-climbing Party. Now, as I’ve had to several times since, let me clarify: this was a Party for rock-climbers. They were not climbing rocks that night. Kinda the inverse of the Middle School/Middle School-Themed Party. But enough semantics, more shame. This one was a little more chaotic in the bass-thudding, beer pong-playing sense, and right as I walk in, I spotted my first middle-school girlfriend surrounded by a pride of climberbros. Behind her laid a tub full of Everclear lemonade. I get like a deer near a salt-lick. Shuffling past Jimmy Eat World stockholders and fitted North Faces, I aggressively navigated the throngs. This was a treasure hunt and ex- marked the spot.
After a couple Solo-fuls of Everclear with a margarita chaser, Janis Joplin stole me aside and said Neal Cassady had gone home with a 37-year-old. “Score?” It was a dude, who lived across the street. Apparently Neal and Jim had scorched him so thoroughly in pong, his only way to rationalize the loss was to invite them back for a congratulatory bowlpack. We walked through the open front door to find them chiefing on a stool-high stack of vinyls. All I could gather—given the rollercoaster my sense of balance was riding—was a serial cough and a strained larynx.
“Sup…duuuudes…”
Darkness.
I wake up to a wall full of faces I don’t know. Shit. I’ve gotta stop doing this. My body feels like all moisture has been hand-wrung from it and my stomach feels like it’s been roundhoused by a bull. I reach into my pocket and pull out 5 beer tabs. What the fuck did I give him then?? My ONE Card is gone. I come downstairs to Neal Cassady and Jim Morrison opening the freezer and finding an open bottle of Everclear lemonade which has solidified into a slushie. What. Happened. I haven’t felt this confused since last weekend.
After spending a day in recovery, I met up with Neal and Jim on Franklin to head down to the Party Castro’s for the bash you’ve already read about. They’d taken a couple fakes and ran $70 top-shelf at a Mexican joint down Rosemary. Janis Joplin was still on the clock, so we had to bust into her place intruder-style and retrieve the case we promised to bring. Out the door in five minutes, we began heading up the street toward Cameron, when all the sudden we heard thumpin’ techno emanating from the dude’s ranch we were at last night. Shudders vibrating, all lights on, shadows from the back porch: place looked like a discothèque. We figured there must be a solid 70 to 80 people in there, and quickly concluded why the hell not. We followed the shadow around back until it winds to the patio where a lonesome figure was sipping on blush, pretending to conduct a symphony like they do in cartoons.
Dude:“Oh wha——hey?”
Us: “Hey. We were over here last night.”
Dude: “Go on.”
Us: “Sounds like you’re having a crazy Party in there!”
Dude: “Nope. Just me.”
(pause)
Dude: “You wanna come in and drink that beer?”
As soon I stepped inside, I realized how truly annihilated I was last night; I didn’t remember anything from this house. His entire living room was a makeshift studio, complete with soundboards, synths, and venue-sized speakers. His only piece of furniture, in the traditional sense, was a chewed-up futon opposite his DVD library of Star Wars and porn. And then there were the Legos, enough to build the entire place over again. If this were preschool, he’d be the coolest kid on the block. Though the neighborhood moms may be hesitant to let their prides and joys near a man with such a mammoth collection of cooter vids. This place was half playground, half Buffalo Bill.
He started rummaging around, flipping switches back and forth, messing with knobs, and creating the disharmonic sounds you get plugging guitars into amps. After about eight minutes of distortion and white noise, he turned to a speechless, regretful us.
“Yeah, man, I love me that real gritty ass shit. Word.”
He then began to regale us with his life-story. I felt like there were some holes here and there, and surely some details had been obscured by chronic chemical abuse, but he was such an earnest narrator, I didn’t have the heart to implement reason. Apparently he works for IT, though he hates computers and the internet. The only site he uses is MySpace, to get his DJ set off the ground. He’s never seen a fortune, yet he’s perfectly content with his situation:
“I never had a ‘nice car’…or whatever that is. I always told myself I’d rather just kick it here with my soundboards. Make my music, ya know. Some of these fuckin’ things cost just as much anyway. Like check this out---{holds up an orange mixboard}---look how many motherfuckin’ buttons this thing has! Whaaaaat?? {spins them back and forth rapidly} Hey! Whatcha doin. Whatcha DOIN.”
It was at this point we learned he could not read music, and instead just “felt” his way through his grooves. Trying to impose an abrupt death chair to this conversation, Neal Cassady sifted through his record collection and nearly jumped when he discovered Gustav Holst’s The Planets shoved deep in the mix. Having such an icon of modern classical on vinyl padded this guy’s cred ten-fold in our books, although it didn’t cushion us for what came next:
“Oh yeah, that. Well hey, if you like that…you’ll love this. The other week I was on a…downloading binge. Music, porno, whatever. Heh, heh. Anyway, my Winamp started up…while I was in the middle of this one video…and it just like…started recording, man. The audio and all. But I was like...far out! This kinda works. So I went back…after I finished the video…and dropped a phat beat to it. Duhrhreennrrhee. [sic] Check it out. It’s…one of my best.”
What ensued was one of the strangest musical journeys of my life. Essentially, he had looped the sounds from the porno—chicks moaning, guys shouting “Yeah, baby, yeah!”, various ‘Haarderr!’s, etc.—to an original composition of ambient electronica. His back was turned away from us the entire time, dancing about over his laptop, gleefully pointing out, “Wait! This is the best part,” about six times. Finally the lead vocalist came to an earthshaking climax, to which he accompanied a crescendo of noise and space rock. Neal quietly inched The Planets back into the shelf.
This is, of course, when Janis Joplin called me to say she’s gotten off work. I tried to step outside to avoid the soundtrack of Boogie Nights from filtering into our conversation, but one of the women starts squealing in ecstasy before I could get to the door, and I had to explain that we…hadn’t made it to the Party quite yet.
So congratulations to Noise-Porn Bro, honorary Bolshevik of the week. He lives life the way he wants and couldn’t care less what society thinks about it. He also loves him that gritty ass shit.
- Caesar
Thursday, October 22, 2009
A REFUTATION, AND SOME MUSINGS
But not in that order. Musings are easier because they require less coherence, and coherence, I’m finding, is not a side effect of vicodin.
The main thing that separates, in my mind, a Party Bolshevik from a party proletariat is self-awareness. Be it a blessing or a curse—or as is always the case with binary definitions in the real world, both—it is our responsibility take a good hard look at the practice of partying because we are fairly uniquely well situated to do so. I see here a rare confluence of intellect, affability, the willingness to write recreationally and the inexorable need to party; it seems irresponsible to let this go to waste.
Now I’m fully aware that this entire endeavor is couple of dudes and chicks writing some bullshit so that we and maybe 8 other people can read it. And I’m also fully aware that it’s far easier to make grandiose plans than to even begin to follow through with them. But part of Bolshevism, and in fact the most important part, is that the REAL Bolsheviks were one of hundreds or thousands of “revolutionary circles” in Russia and Europe, all of whom spent all their time talking bullshit about how they were gonna overthrow the government and institute a worker’s paradise—BUT THE BOLSHEVIKS DID WORK, SON.
So call me Old Major if you like, but what the fuck else are any of y’all doing with your time? It is just a fact that writing is the best thing you can do to improve yourself intellectually and make yourself more marketable for any profession not involving steroids, and if writing about bullshit is the impetus I need to write anything, then so be it.
But so what I’m calling for is an increased dedication in the form of more essays (yeah let’s call them essays) but maybe even more importantly, an improved discourse about what we write. As it is, it seems like we’re talking past each other, and that needs to change if we’re to improve. We all have things to learn from each other stylistically, grammatically and thematically, and I assume we’re sufficiently adult to give and receive criticism rationally.
On a related note, I’d like to propose a rather large project, one that could give our outfit a more solid framework for how we do business: I’d like to define “party” by deconstructing the elements which make it up. By isolating the integral aspects of the Party, my hope is that we can purify our methods and thus move closer to the Party in its ideal form.
I anticipate an objection to this plan because its one I would have made as recently as this summer—that by analyzing “fun” we make it impossible to truly enjoy ourselves earnestly, Beyond [to bastardize Nietzsche] Irony and Post-Irony. That’s terribly naïve. We are all self-conscious, and to pretend that we can be selectively self-conscious is a childish conceit.
Vicodin’s wearing off so I’m done. Look for a refutation in the near future—here’s a hint it’s about Keystone Light.
-Old Major
The main thing that separates, in my mind, a Party Bolshevik from a party proletariat is self-awareness. Be it a blessing or a curse—or as is always the case with binary definitions in the real world, both—it is our responsibility take a good hard look at the practice of partying because we are fairly uniquely well situated to do so. I see here a rare confluence of intellect, affability, the willingness to write recreationally and the inexorable need to party; it seems irresponsible to let this go to waste.
Now I’m fully aware that this entire endeavor is couple of dudes and chicks writing some bullshit so that we and maybe 8 other people can read it. And I’m also fully aware that it’s far easier to make grandiose plans than to even begin to follow through with them. But part of Bolshevism, and in fact the most important part, is that the REAL Bolsheviks were one of hundreds or thousands of “revolutionary circles” in Russia and Europe, all of whom spent all their time talking bullshit about how they were gonna overthrow the government and institute a worker’s paradise—BUT THE BOLSHEVIKS DID WORK, SON.
So call me Old Major if you like, but what the fuck else are any of y’all doing with your time? It is just a fact that writing is the best thing you can do to improve yourself intellectually and make yourself more marketable for any profession not involving steroids, and if writing about bullshit is the impetus I need to write anything, then so be it.
But so what I’m calling for is an increased dedication in the form of more essays (yeah let’s call them essays) but maybe even more importantly, an improved discourse about what we write. As it is, it seems like we’re talking past each other, and that needs to change if we’re to improve. We all have things to learn from each other stylistically, grammatically and thematically, and I assume we’re sufficiently adult to give and receive criticism rationally.
On a related note, I’d like to propose a rather large project, one that could give our outfit a more solid framework for how we do business: I’d like to define “party” by deconstructing the elements which make it up. By isolating the integral aspects of the Party, my hope is that we can purify our methods and thus move closer to the Party in its ideal form.
I anticipate an objection to this plan because its one I would have made as recently as this summer—that by analyzing “fun” we make it impossible to truly enjoy ourselves earnestly, Beyond [to bastardize Nietzsche] Irony and Post-Irony. That’s terribly naïve. We are all self-conscious, and to pretend that we can be selectively self-conscious is a childish conceit.
Vicodin’s wearing off so I’m done. Look for a refutation in the near future—here’s a hint it’s about Keystone Light.
-Old Major
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Bolsheviks take a field trip!
Last weekend, my dear friend (purely a platonic relationship, which is an important detail to know for later) and I embarked on a short road trip to visit my sister, who is a student at the University known as Georgetown. While it was on our agenda to visit some cultural sites, it was obviously more important to hit up some Georgetown parties. Well, my friends, mission accomplished.
Stocked with Ron Batron (some rum my other sister had so graciously brought back for me from Guatemala), some vodka and of course, some Everclear, drinking was not to be a problem on Friday night. Adding to our liquor, my sister’s friend came to dinner with two twelve packs of not bud light, natty light or some other cheap beer, but instead with Corona Extra and Sierra Nevada. “So, this is what it’s like to drink real beer,” one of my new friends pointed out. Right he was and delicious it was. As the evening went on and the drinks were drank, my sister’s apartment started getting quite fun, complete with drinking games, a dance party and plenty of laughter all around. However, as fun as the apartment festivities were, we all agreed it was time to go out and find a legit party. Parties we would find, but legit they were not.
One often finds them self in a classic weekend dilemma: which party should I go to?! As different texts from different people made us aware of different parties around Georgetown, we had to make a final decision, at least for which would be the first party we attend. We decided to hit up a theater party. Not a good idea. Now, the campus at Georgetown is extremely small, especially when compared to UNC. I’ve heard on numerous occasions students complaining about their long treks from their dorm to the cafeteria. Now, I’ve probably seen the entire campus in the three years my sister has been a student at Georgetown and I am quite certain that no trek can take more than a mere 3 minutes, perhaps 5 if there’s some construction detours. However, once you leave the University gates, walks can expand to, eh, perhaps even 15 minutes. Granted, this is still nothing compared to Chapel Hill, but in the cold rain, it can be a bit of a nuisance. So, my point is, at Georgetown, this was a long walk for a party that ended up being less than thrilling. When at first arriving, my new Georgetown friend Alex and I walked downstairs to the keg. I grabbed the nearest solo cup, cleanliness not being a concern at this point, and started to fill my cup, but then a scary man showed up. His long, rather greasy hair was the first indicator of bad things to come, but when he began asking who we knew there, things got bad. I found out 2 years ago at Georgetown that the performers of art really don’t appreciate people showing up to their parties of they didn’t actually see the performance. Bullshit. I spouted out the name of the kid who told us about the party and it seemed to work. I thought I was safe. And then he asked for 5 bucks. Now, as I’ve explained before, I’m not cool with paying at parties of people who I don’t know. I mean, I do realize that the cost of alcohol does add up and it is very helpful to get come contributions, but my sister had just hyped up the fact that parties never charge for drinks here, so I was rather disappointed, that’s all. Not to mention, this was Georgetown, dammit. I’m fully aware that most of these students spend more on their name brand handbags than I spend a year at UNC. They can afford to provide a public school student with some booze. Well, they obviously weren’t keen on doing that and whereas I usually find ways around paying for drinks, I realized there was no getting out of it here (we’d later find at least 2 other people checking your hands for the indicator that you’d paid for your cup already). To make it worse (or better?), I hadn’t even brought cash with me, but luckily Alex, in his chivalrous ways, paid for my cup. Thank you Alex!
Somewhat frightened of the other party goers, the group of us spent most of the party in the laundry room. Becoming restless, we decided to leave, so we took advantage of their liquor cabinet and headed out to the next party, but not without making some new friends first. As I left the theater party, I noticed a group of guys standing in the doorway next door. So, I decided to walk on over and as I neared closer, I smelt something special. “I smell marijuana coming out of your house,” I loudly exclaimed. Their laughter told me I was correct, so I began a delightful conversation with them and even found that one of them was a Tar Heel (just a fan, I think, but I was excited). Anyway, we talked for about 15 minutes and then left to go on our merry way. The next party was even more disastrous as well as more blurry. I really can’t recall much more than the fact that there were like five people there and it was really awkward. So, we decided to leave. This is where things get frightening children and I will warn you that if you have ever thought about not drinking, you may want to stop reading this now, as this could severely aid in a poor decision to indeed stop drinking. I was just about to enter the sidewalk when I hear a screech from behind me. That’s when I saw her, my poor sister, ass on the ground and struggling to get back up. In an excessively drunken stupor, she had fallen and hit her head on bushes, the house- we’re not quite sure. Point is her head was bleeding a good amount and the concerned sister that I am, I got pretty nervous. Realizing the cut was not nearly deep enough to require medical attention (i.e. GERMS), we hauled my sisters ass back to the apartment, an endeavor that took a good half hour in the rain. We thought we were safe when once we got back, but my sister’s night was not over yet. We were just tucking her into bed when I heard a faint whisper. “I’m going to throw up Ethel.” As I rushed to get a bowl, the disturbing sound of her throw up hitting the ground struck my ears. It appeared I was too late. I was worried to let her go to sleep, still slightly paranoid that she had a concussion or that she’d possibly choke on her own barf, but eventually I had to give into her requests to let her go to bed, and off to sleep she went. The next morning, needless to say, she was feeling less than well.
The next day was spent primarily eating and also preparing ourselves for the highly anticipated triathlon initiation party. My sister, who is on the triathlon party, had told me all about this special event and it was one I could surely not pass up. Now, she unfortunately had to babysit, but with the help of her friend, we had an in to the party even without her. We (regretfully) prepared for the night with a few too many shots of vodka, but donning spandex running shorts and a tank top, I needed some liquid warmth to face the cold weather. We arrived at the Georgetown gate to find about a dozen people stretching. We then began jogging and as the rest of the people chanted the Georgetown fight song, my friend and I decided to start singing the UNC fight song, of which I knew about one line, which was luckily “Go to hell Duke!” Georgetown students hate Duke too! The light jog soon turned into a full on run to the triathlon house. Now, being that I work out mmm, about once a semester, the run, combined with the liquor, proved hard on my body. I arrived at the house relieved and tired, but my exercising had just started. After playing a round of Never Have I Ever, in which you drink Franzia every time you’ve done something, we prepared ourselves for the epic Beer Mile. Let me explain. In the beer mile, one must chug a beer, run a quarter mile (with hills I might add!), chug another beer, run another quarter mile, etc… until you’ve ran a mile and chugged four beers. Originally, I had planned to skip out on this part. I wasn’t, after all, even joining the tri team. However, feeling ambitious, I decided to participate in my first ever Beer Mile. I started out strong, feeling pretty good after the first lap. The second one went okay too, but upon completing the second lap and chugging our third beers, every girl except for me began barfing. The sight was horrific, and nervous that I’d face the same unfortunate fate, I decided I’d skip out on the third lap. So, I hid behind the porch and once the girls started coming back, I just chugged a beer right along with them, pretending that I too had just completed my third lap. Then, having had some rest, I joined them for the fourth lap. Successfully deceiving the team, they all praised me for my well done job. Perhaps I really had only done ¾ of a beer mile, but I was still proud of myself. One must take pride in every small achievement and for me, drinking and exercising at the same time (or just exercising at all), is an accomplishment indeed!
Beer Mile completed, the jungle juice (our version of PJ) drinking began and thus so did the kissing. And when I say kissing, I mean pecking between my friend and I; something most of our friends would recognize purely as a friendly gesture that often happens when the two of us get drunk. However, I can see why strangers would misinterpret this and when the team captain walked into the hallway just as my friend laid a small kiss on me, he got the wrong idea, saying that he “knows how it is.” During the remainder of the night, this fellow asked me no less than 5 times if my friend and I were going to “do it.” My persistent “no’s” didn’t work on him. Soon, others began to ask if we had come to the party together and if they didn’t ask, they awkwardly and obviously talked about it as we were dancing. It was uncomfortable and I wondered why they were so curious. I guess Georgetown students don’t get much action.
Ready to leave, obviously so I could share a night of passionate love making with my special friend, we headed off to the infamous Philly P’s, known for their buckets of ranch of which people take generous helpings of for their pizza. Being more of a minimalist myself, I opted to enjoy the delicious pepperoni pizza sans ranch. Let me tell you, it made the walk home, once again in the rain, almost bearable.
And so, the night was over and thus our weekend of partying at Georgetown had come to an end. It was certainly an experience and if anything, I gained some leg muscles. Surely can’t complain about that.
Looking forward to partying with my fellow Bolsheviks again!
Ethel
Stocked with Ron Batron (some rum my other sister had so graciously brought back for me from Guatemala), some vodka and of course, some Everclear, drinking was not to be a problem on Friday night. Adding to our liquor, my sister’s friend came to dinner with two twelve packs of not bud light, natty light or some other cheap beer, but instead with Corona Extra and Sierra Nevada. “So, this is what it’s like to drink real beer,” one of my new friends pointed out. Right he was and delicious it was. As the evening went on and the drinks were drank, my sister’s apartment started getting quite fun, complete with drinking games, a dance party and plenty of laughter all around. However, as fun as the apartment festivities were, we all agreed it was time to go out and find a legit party. Parties we would find, but legit they were not.
One often finds them self in a classic weekend dilemma: which party should I go to?! As different texts from different people made us aware of different parties around Georgetown, we had to make a final decision, at least for which would be the first party we attend. We decided to hit up a theater party. Not a good idea. Now, the campus at Georgetown is extremely small, especially when compared to UNC. I’ve heard on numerous occasions students complaining about their long treks from their dorm to the cafeteria. Now, I’ve probably seen the entire campus in the three years my sister has been a student at Georgetown and I am quite certain that no trek can take more than a mere 3 minutes, perhaps 5 if there’s some construction detours. However, once you leave the University gates, walks can expand to, eh, perhaps even 15 minutes. Granted, this is still nothing compared to Chapel Hill, but in the cold rain, it can be a bit of a nuisance. So, my point is, at Georgetown, this was a long walk for a party that ended up being less than thrilling. When at first arriving, my new Georgetown friend Alex and I walked downstairs to the keg. I grabbed the nearest solo cup, cleanliness not being a concern at this point, and started to fill my cup, but then a scary man showed up. His long, rather greasy hair was the first indicator of bad things to come, but when he began asking who we knew there, things got bad. I found out 2 years ago at Georgetown that the performers of art really don’t appreciate people showing up to their parties of they didn’t actually see the performance. Bullshit. I spouted out the name of the kid who told us about the party and it seemed to work. I thought I was safe. And then he asked for 5 bucks. Now, as I’ve explained before, I’m not cool with paying at parties of people who I don’t know. I mean, I do realize that the cost of alcohol does add up and it is very helpful to get come contributions, but my sister had just hyped up the fact that parties never charge for drinks here, so I was rather disappointed, that’s all. Not to mention, this was Georgetown, dammit. I’m fully aware that most of these students spend more on their name brand handbags than I spend a year at UNC. They can afford to provide a public school student with some booze. Well, they obviously weren’t keen on doing that and whereas I usually find ways around paying for drinks, I realized there was no getting out of it here (we’d later find at least 2 other people checking your hands for the indicator that you’d paid for your cup already). To make it worse (or better?), I hadn’t even brought cash with me, but luckily Alex, in his chivalrous ways, paid for my cup. Thank you Alex!
Somewhat frightened of the other party goers, the group of us spent most of the party in the laundry room. Becoming restless, we decided to leave, so we took advantage of their liquor cabinet and headed out to the next party, but not without making some new friends first. As I left the theater party, I noticed a group of guys standing in the doorway next door. So, I decided to walk on over and as I neared closer, I smelt something special. “I smell marijuana coming out of your house,” I loudly exclaimed. Their laughter told me I was correct, so I began a delightful conversation with them and even found that one of them was a Tar Heel (just a fan, I think, but I was excited). Anyway, we talked for about 15 minutes and then left to go on our merry way. The next party was even more disastrous as well as more blurry. I really can’t recall much more than the fact that there were like five people there and it was really awkward. So, we decided to leave. This is where things get frightening children and I will warn you that if you have ever thought about not drinking, you may want to stop reading this now, as this could severely aid in a poor decision to indeed stop drinking. I was just about to enter the sidewalk when I hear a screech from behind me. That’s when I saw her, my poor sister, ass on the ground and struggling to get back up. In an excessively drunken stupor, she had fallen and hit her head on bushes, the house- we’re not quite sure. Point is her head was bleeding a good amount and the concerned sister that I am, I got pretty nervous. Realizing the cut was not nearly deep enough to require medical attention (i.e. GERMS), we hauled my sisters ass back to the apartment, an endeavor that took a good half hour in the rain. We thought we were safe when once we got back, but my sister’s night was not over yet. We were just tucking her into bed when I heard a faint whisper. “I’m going to throw up Ethel.” As I rushed to get a bowl, the disturbing sound of her throw up hitting the ground struck my ears. It appeared I was too late. I was worried to let her go to sleep, still slightly paranoid that she had a concussion or that she’d possibly choke on her own barf, but eventually I had to give into her requests to let her go to bed, and off to sleep she went. The next morning, needless to say, she was feeling less than well.
The next day was spent primarily eating and also preparing ourselves for the highly anticipated triathlon initiation party. My sister, who is on the triathlon party, had told me all about this special event and it was one I could surely not pass up. Now, she unfortunately had to babysit, but with the help of her friend, we had an in to the party even without her. We (regretfully) prepared for the night with a few too many shots of vodka, but donning spandex running shorts and a tank top, I needed some liquid warmth to face the cold weather. We arrived at the Georgetown gate to find about a dozen people stretching. We then began jogging and as the rest of the people chanted the Georgetown fight song, my friend and I decided to start singing the UNC fight song, of which I knew about one line, which was luckily “Go to hell Duke!” Georgetown students hate Duke too! The light jog soon turned into a full on run to the triathlon house. Now, being that I work out mmm, about once a semester, the run, combined with the liquor, proved hard on my body. I arrived at the house relieved and tired, but my exercising had just started. After playing a round of Never Have I Ever, in which you drink Franzia every time you’ve done something, we prepared ourselves for the epic Beer Mile. Let me explain. In the beer mile, one must chug a beer, run a quarter mile (with hills I might add!), chug another beer, run another quarter mile, etc… until you’ve ran a mile and chugged four beers. Originally, I had planned to skip out on this part. I wasn’t, after all, even joining the tri team. However, feeling ambitious, I decided to participate in my first ever Beer Mile. I started out strong, feeling pretty good after the first lap. The second one went okay too, but upon completing the second lap and chugging our third beers, every girl except for me began barfing. The sight was horrific, and nervous that I’d face the same unfortunate fate, I decided I’d skip out on the third lap. So, I hid behind the porch and once the girls started coming back, I just chugged a beer right along with them, pretending that I too had just completed my third lap. Then, having had some rest, I joined them for the fourth lap. Successfully deceiving the team, they all praised me for my well done job. Perhaps I really had only done ¾ of a beer mile, but I was still proud of myself. One must take pride in every small achievement and for me, drinking and exercising at the same time (or just exercising at all), is an accomplishment indeed!
Beer Mile completed, the jungle juice (our version of PJ) drinking began and thus so did the kissing. And when I say kissing, I mean pecking between my friend and I; something most of our friends would recognize purely as a friendly gesture that often happens when the two of us get drunk. However, I can see why strangers would misinterpret this and when the team captain walked into the hallway just as my friend laid a small kiss on me, he got the wrong idea, saying that he “knows how it is.” During the remainder of the night, this fellow asked me no less than 5 times if my friend and I were going to “do it.” My persistent “no’s” didn’t work on him. Soon, others began to ask if we had come to the party together and if they didn’t ask, they awkwardly and obviously talked about it as we were dancing. It was uncomfortable and I wondered why they were so curious. I guess Georgetown students don’t get much action.
Ready to leave, obviously so I could share a night of passionate love making with my special friend, we headed off to the infamous Philly P’s, known for their buckets of ranch of which people take generous helpings of for their pizza. Being more of a minimalist myself, I opted to enjoy the delicious pepperoni pizza sans ranch. Let me tell you, it made the walk home, once again in the rain, almost bearable.
And so, the night was over and thus our weekend of partying at Georgetown had come to an end. It was certainly an experience and if anything, I gained some leg muscles. Surely can’t complain about that.
Looking forward to partying with my fellow Bolsheviks again!
Ethel
This Was A Midterm I Wrote About Beer
(A Note From the Party Castro: For one of my classes, we had a take-home midterm we could write about pretty much anything. So I wrote about Pabst Blue Ribbon. Here it is, in all its resplendent glory. The stuff at the end isn't very interesting but it was part of the assignment so whatever. Enjoy Plz.)
For the entirety of my time as a practitioner of the deplorable practice of drinking beer, I have noticed that Pabst Blue Ribbon, also known as PBR, has been claimed as the brew of choice for the, er, “hip” set. This essay attempts to understand why this is so.
By the 1990’s, the Pabst Brewing company had found its market dried up. It was holding on for dear life, even going so far as shutting down its breweries and outsourcing the production of its signature product to Miller.
At the start of the decade, a funny thing happened – Pabst’s sales began to pick up, especially among the “bike messenger crowd,” as one New York Times article hilariously put it. “Bike messengers” of course refers to hipsters and indie folks and the like. As the decade progressed, Pabst found itself once again enjoying a fair chunk of the cheap beer market, mainly by selling its beer to hipsters by the shedload.
There was no given explanation for this. The most notable association that Pabst had until the early 2000’s shared with the indie culture was a tangential one: the character of Frank in the David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet yelled at a guy about how he shouldn’t drink Heineken and instead drink Pabst Blue Ribbon. It’s a pretty memorable scene, but it’s not enough for an entire subculture to adopt a single product as its flagship beer.
Before I really delve into why someone would want to drink PBR, I think it’s important to consider why someone wouldn’t want to drink it. First of all, Pabst’s flavor, even compared to other cheap beers, is not heralded. A quick poll of my friends asking their conception of PBR’s taste elicited such responses as, “soggy bread with a hint of iron,” “a cool mixture of horse’s urine and the juice that accumulates at the garbage bags,” and the comparatively laudatory, “drinkable.” So it’s clear that we’re not dealing with the most delicious product here. Nor does Pabst have the least calories of a cheap beer – one twelve-ounce bottle of Pabst has 153 calories as opposed to the 95 calories in Busch Light. Over a six or seven beer drinking session, those extra 58 calories can add up in a very tangible sense.
So if PBR tastes like shit and makes you fatter than beers of comparable price and quality, why the hell would anyone want to drink it? I attribute the Pabst phenomenon to three major factors: aesthetics, economics, and identity.
First off, PBR containers share many of the aesthetics present within indie culture. PBR’s minimalist design and basic color scheme jibes with the indie tendency to favor, well, minimalist designs and basic color schemes. Additionally, PBR cans and bottles look old, as if the label design hasn’t been updated since like the 1950’s. And indie people often have a fascination with all that vintage, be it shopping at thrift stores or purchasing music on vinyl – if it’s old-lookin’, chances are a hipster is into it. PBR’s appeal on this front is understandable.
Second of all, Pabst is cheap. This cannot be understated. The indie/hipster crowd tends to include vast quantities of college-age kids, and the 18-22 set are often perpetually short on funds. The fact that PBR is so aesthetically pleasing, plus that it only costs about fourteen dollars a case at the Harris Teeter in Carrboro, contributes to its significant popularity amongst the hip.
The deciding factor of Pabst’s widespread indie acclaim, however, is without a doubt connected to the question of representation. Pabst was so low on funds by the 1990’s that it had ceased to spend money on advertising. It was a product without an image to project – while most manufacturers of cheap beer could afford producing expensive commercials using such symbols as scantily clad women, football, and “manly” catchphrases to pitch themselves towards young, beer-swilling males in search of masculine roles to fulfill, Pabst had nothing.
I posit that since Pabst was a brand without a face, hipsters in their love for all things obscure embraced the company’s beer, since it offered them an opportunity to project their own image upon a beer instead of having another beer company’s pre-existing image thrust upon them. Clearly, the company recognizes that this is what’s going on, since to this day it advertises minimally yet still enjoys an ever-increasing market share.
Were it to advertise, it could very well undermine itself due to the rapid-changing nature of what is “hip,” and how hipster culture tends to exhibit a backlash against something once it gets too popular. The brand’s lack of advertising allows its image to stay fluid. Say that Pabst were to have endorsed the Kings of Leon circa 2006. This would have seemed like a pretty solid move at the time; the Kings’ wily Skynyrd-meets-Strokes sound had massive appeal with the indie set, but by the time 2009 rolled around and “Use Somebody” was emanating from every department store speaker in America, PBR’s association with a band who had “sold out and got popular” would be a detriment to its “authenticity.”
Pabst is today so closely associated with hipster culture that through the mere act of drinking a PBR is grounds for being labeled a “hipster” by one’s friends. By drinking a Pabst these days, one is making a statement about one’s tastes, interests, sociopolitical views, etc. What once began as breaking away from pre-existing structures with regards to beer-drinking has become a structure in and of itself.
BONUS KEYWORDS SECTION:
Binary: By using terms like “hipster” and “indie,” I realize that I’m creating a binary that doesn’t really exist between the “hip” and the “mainstream;” these “hipsters” are “indie” to what, exactly? The terms are bullshit because they lump people into groups that presuppose certain things about them which probably aren’t true. However, I’m using the terms anyway because they denote a certain group of people who may share common tendencies with regards to dress, musical tastes, sociopolitical views, etc. I realize that I’m contradicting myself, but it’s whatever.
Aesthetics: Hipsters may tend to gravitate towards PBR on the basis of aesthetics; the minimalist design of the label dovetails with the hipster tendency towards basic outfits such as white v-neck t-shirts, cut-off jean-shorts, and slip-on Vans sneakers (sample outfit; I fully realize that "indie" fashion exists on a very large continuum. The fact that the bottles and cans look old remains consistent with the hipster desire for vintage items.
Labor: Because PBR is so cheap, it grants the generally-poor indie set an easier economic opportunity to obtain it; it takes less labor to generate the income necessary to purchase a six-pack of Pabst than it would to obtain a six-pack of, say, Magic Hat. Additionally, Pabst does not produce its own product; its outsourcing of its main labor to Miller might cause a backlash with the hip set, seeing as they trend towards corporate independence.
Symbol: Pabst has become a symbol of a certain lifestyle. That is to say, by walking around a party holding a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, you are denoting an affiliation with hipster culture.
Structure: In the early 2000’s, drinking a Pabst was a way to break away from the identities offered by beer advertisers, “cutting through the cultural grass” so to speak. Today, drinking a Pabst now denotes that you’re now going along with pre-existing beer drinking structure, which could create an upcoming Pabst backlash which might lead to a new beer being chosen by the hip. Such is the cycle of culture. I couldn’t really get into this in my essay, but it seems that Miller High life, with its new camouflage can design and altogether “zany” image that it’s pitching, has a pretty decent shot of being the new hip beer of choice if the "bike messenger set" wants to choose their beer brand ironically by buying into an ad campaign that they would have a natural tendency to shun due to its altogether sophomoric, heteronormative-skewing ad campaign. Or it could be Keystone, due to its relatively low-key advertising practices and dirt-cheap price. Or hell, it could be Busch Light since it’s the recession and the beer seems to be on a perpetual sale at Harris Teeter, making it the absolute cheapest beer available around here. Only time will tell.
For the entirety of my time as a practitioner of the deplorable practice of drinking beer, I have noticed that Pabst Blue Ribbon, also known as PBR, has been claimed as the brew of choice for the, er, “hip” set. This essay attempts to understand why this is so.
By the 1990’s, the Pabst Brewing company had found its market dried up. It was holding on for dear life, even going so far as shutting down its breweries and outsourcing the production of its signature product to Miller.
At the start of the decade, a funny thing happened – Pabst’s sales began to pick up, especially among the “bike messenger crowd,” as one New York Times article hilariously put it. “Bike messengers” of course refers to hipsters and indie folks and the like. As the decade progressed, Pabst found itself once again enjoying a fair chunk of the cheap beer market, mainly by selling its beer to hipsters by the shedload.
There was no given explanation for this. The most notable association that Pabst had until the early 2000’s shared with the indie culture was a tangential one: the character of Frank in the David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet yelled at a guy about how he shouldn’t drink Heineken and instead drink Pabst Blue Ribbon. It’s a pretty memorable scene, but it’s not enough for an entire subculture to adopt a single product as its flagship beer.
Before I really delve into why someone would want to drink PBR, I think it’s important to consider why someone wouldn’t want to drink it. First of all, Pabst’s flavor, even compared to other cheap beers, is not heralded. A quick poll of my friends asking their conception of PBR’s taste elicited such responses as, “soggy bread with a hint of iron,” “a cool mixture of horse’s urine and the juice that accumulates at the garbage bags,” and the comparatively laudatory, “drinkable.” So it’s clear that we’re not dealing with the most delicious product here. Nor does Pabst have the least calories of a cheap beer – one twelve-ounce bottle of Pabst has 153 calories as opposed to the 95 calories in Busch Light. Over a six or seven beer drinking session, those extra 58 calories can add up in a very tangible sense.
So if PBR tastes like shit and makes you fatter than beers of comparable price and quality, why the hell would anyone want to drink it? I attribute the Pabst phenomenon to three major factors: aesthetics, economics, and identity.
First off, PBR containers share many of the aesthetics present within indie culture. PBR’s minimalist design and basic color scheme jibes with the indie tendency to favor, well, minimalist designs and basic color schemes. Additionally, PBR cans and bottles look old, as if the label design hasn’t been updated since like the 1950’s. And indie people often have a fascination with all that vintage, be it shopping at thrift stores or purchasing music on vinyl – if it’s old-lookin’, chances are a hipster is into it. PBR’s appeal on this front is understandable.
Second of all, Pabst is cheap. This cannot be understated. The indie/hipster crowd tends to include vast quantities of college-age kids, and the 18-22 set are often perpetually short on funds. The fact that PBR is so aesthetically pleasing, plus that it only costs about fourteen dollars a case at the Harris Teeter in Carrboro, contributes to its significant popularity amongst the hip.
The deciding factor of Pabst’s widespread indie acclaim, however, is without a doubt connected to the question of representation. Pabst was so low on funds by the 1990’s that it had ceased to spend money on advertising. It was a product without an image to project – while most manufacturers of cheap beer could afford producing expensive commercials using such symbols as scantily clad women, football, and “manly” catchphrases to pitch themselves towards young, beer-swilling males in search of masculine roles to fulfill, Pabst had nothing.
I posit that since Pabst was a brand without a face, hipsters in their love for all things obscure embraced the company’s beer, since it offered them an opportunity to project their own image upon a beer instead of having another beer company’s pre-existing image thrust upon them. Clearly, the company recognizes that this is what’s going on, since to this day it advertises minimally yet still enjoys an ever-increasing market share.
Were it to advertise, it could very well undermine itself due to the rapid-changing nature of what is “hip,” and how hipster culture tends to exhibit a backlash against something once it gets too popular. The brand’s lack of advertising allows its image to stay fluid. Say that Pabst were to have endorsed the Kings of Leon circa 2006. This would have seemed like a pretty solid move at the time; the Kings’ wily Skynyrd-meets-Strokes sound had massive appeal with the indie set, but by the time 2009 rolled around and “Use Somebody” was emanating from every department store speaker in America, PBR’s association with a band who had “sold out and got popular” would be a detriment to its “authenticity.”
Pabst is today so closely associated with hipster culture that through the mere act of drinking a PBR is grounds for being labeled a “hipster” by one’s friends. By drinking a Pabst these days, one is making a statement about one’s tastes, interests, sociopolitical views, etc. What once began as breaking away from pre-existing structures with regards to beer-drinking has become a structure in and of itself.
BONUS KEYWORDS SECTION:
Binary: By using terms like “hipster” and “indie,” I realize that I’m creating a binary that doesn’t really exist between the “hip” and the “mainstream;” these “hipsters” are “indie” to what, exactly? The terms are bullshit because they lump people into groups that presuppose certain things about them which probably aren’t true. However, I’m using the terms anyway because they denote a certain group of people who may share common tendencies with regards to dress, musical tastes, sociopolitical views, etc. I realize that I’m contradicting myself, but it’s whatever.
Aesthetics: Hipsters may tend to gravitate towards PBR on the basis of aesthetics; the minimalist design of the label dovetails with the hipster tendency towards basic outfits such as white v-neck t-shirts, cut-off jean-shorts, and slip-on Vans sneakers (sample outfit; I fully realize that "indie" fashion exists on a very large continuum. The fact that the bottles and cans look old remains consistent with the hipster desire for vintage items.
Labor: Because PBR is so cheap, it grants the generally-poor indie set an easier economic opportunity to obtain it; it takes less labor to generate the income necessary to purchase a six-pack of Pabst than it would to obtain a six-pack of, say, Magic Hat. Additionally, Pabst does not produce its own product; its outsourcing of its main labor to Miller might cause a backlash with the hip set, seeing as they trend towards corporate independence.
Symbol: Pabst has become a symbol of a certain lifestyle. That is to say, by walking around a party holding a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, you are denoting an affiliation with hipster culture.
Structure: In the early 2000’s, drinking a Pabst was a way to break away from the identities offered by beer advertisers, “cutting through the cultural grass” so to speak. Today, drinking a Pabst now denotes that you’re now going along with pre-existing beer drinking structure, which could create an upcoming Pabst backlash which might lead to a new beer being chosen by the hip. Such is the cycle of culture. I couldn’t really get into this in my essay, but it seems that Miller High life, with its new camouflage can design and altogether “zany” image that it’s pitching, has a pretty decent shot of being the new hip beer of choice if the "bike messenger set" wants to choose their beer brand ironically by buying into an ad campaign that they would have a natural tendency to shun due to its altogether sophomoric, heteronormative-skewing ad campaign. Or it could be Keystone, due to its relatively low-key advertising practices and dirt-cheap price. Or hell, it could be Busch Light since it’s the recession and the beer seems to be on a perpetual sale at Harris Teeter, making it the absolute cheapest beer available around here. Only time will tell.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Party Bolsheviks Throw A Party! (Bolsheviks)
So, throughout the history of the Party Bolsheviks, we’ve taken you through vast expanses of out drunken shenanigans. We’ve given you manifestos as to how to live your partying life. But as of yet, we haven’t told you about any of the parties that we ourselves have thrown.
If I may reference my original post, I expressed a strong distaste towards throwing a large gathering, citing that “I’m not trying to have a bunch of random-ass people all up in my house drinking my booze and making out with other random-ass people on my couch.” My roommate shares this sentiment with me and earlier this summer, we made an agreement to never ever ever have a huge fucking party.
Allow me to be the first to say, friends, that last weekend we reneged on this oath. We reneged like a motherfucker.
We decided that last Saturday night was the perfect night to step up and have a little get-together, as there weren’t any parties happening to really speak of (that we knew of at least – readers who wish to point out that there were like thirty parties we didn’t know about last weekend may do so in the comments). So we fired up the old Facebook, created an event for the party, and got to inviting our peeps.
Choosing who to invite via Facebook to your party is one of the most challenging tasks one can ever be faced with. You’ve really got to reconcile how many people you feel comfortable with having over with how many people you feel obligated to invite just as a nice gesture, even though you secretly hope they won’t come. You hope to attain a happy balance where all of your close friends come, along with a few other people whose company you enjoy but may not get to see all that often.
In order to achieve this certain golden ratio, we invited a hundred and seven people. Thirty-seven accepted our invitation, thirty-five said they might come, fourteen said they weren’t coming, and like twenty-one didn’t say shit back to us with regards to their presence.
Being the rational, sane humans we are, my roommate and I assumed that only thirty-seven people would show up to our little fiesta, and bought alcohol accordingly – we got two handles of vodka, from which we were going to make a bastardized version of cherry limeade.
Since the party wasn’t supposed to start until Saturday at 10:30, the Party Trotsky, Old Major and myself decided to embark upon a little experiment – day drinkin’. Trotsky and I started at 3:30, drinking Old Crow like it was our job, until around 5:15 Old Major and his posse rolled on up, (naturally) stolen liquor in tow. We knocked back a few brewskis acquired through extralegal means and deemed it time to do something stupid. Old Major and I decided that this could best be accomplished via playing Frisbee. With a record. As those readers who have seen Shaun of the Dead know, record-as-projectile actually works pretty well, assuming both parties are throwing the record with a measure of accuracy and catching said record competently. And. . . guess what? Competent we were not. Because we were drunk. As Old Major launched 20 Great Rock Hits of the 70’s! at me, the wind caught it and blew it off course, and despite my best lunge to put my body in front of the album, it hit the ground and shattered into a million pieces. Game over. Kids, this is why you don’t drink.
After wasting the dollar I spent on that shitty record at Backdoor Records with some drunken ineptitude, it was to go get some pizza. T’was delicious, and to my infinite pride, dear Old Major set the high score on the joint’s Ms. Pac-Man machine.
Old Major and his crew parted ways with us post-pizza, and Trotsky, my sober roommate, and myself returned to our abode, for Trotsky and I to sober up, as well as my roommate and I to clean. Clearly, I had some mad multitasking going on up in this bitch.
Around 9:45, Old Major and company turned back up, this time bringing an amount of people with them that could best be described as “a fuckton.” That was great, except for the fact that we hadn’t gotten around to making the punch yet. All further plans for cleaning were scrapped and pretty much the entire group of us set out to pouring a bunch of shit in the punch bucket. Here’s an inventory of what went in this shit as best I can remember:
-One gallon, Mr. Boston® brand vodka
-Three gallons water
-One gigantic thing, red Kool-Aid mix
-Four can-sized things, Limeade Concentrate
-One Jar, Maraschino Cherries
-Two Limes, sliced
Anyhoo, we hung out and drank, the party growing at an expected rate, for roughly an hour. Many Party Bolsheviks contributors showed up, including Caesar and Ethel Rosenberg, though sadly Madame J couldn’t make it as she’s currently “studying” abroad in France, trying to bag herself a Frog. Good times were being had, your gracious hosts were hosting graciously, etc.
About an hour after the punch had been made in its original iteration, Ethel Rosenberg and her friend, in their infinite wisdom (read: they were bein’ bitches), decided that the punch would be better serviced by a gallon of Squirt, and told me so. To which I, intoxicated past the point of tact, responded, “Whatever.” Ethel was none too pleased at my apathy, and her friend and she set about to providing the punch with a gallon of Squirt, which I guess in retrospect was a good thing because it spread the punch out and allowed it to last a lot longer.
And why was it necessary to stretch the punch out? Because motherfucking everybody showed up. You know how it works – an invited friend tells a friend, then that friend tells a friend, etc. which is how by, like, midnight, roughly fifty people were inside my house.
Being a good communist, I was cool with the amount of people in attendance, figuring that the enjoyment of the masses was the enjoyment of me. The only thing that really got my goose so to speak was how the hell were we supposed to get all these people drunk? Our Squirt-augmented punch quickly ran out, but it turned out that there was no need to fret at all, as people stayed bringing beer up in my house.
Around 2:00 in the morning, the place thinned out considerably, and I took it upon myself, now free of hosting responsibilities, to black the fuck out, which I’d been threatening to do for a few hours at that point.
The next morning I woke up with a splitting ache at the base of my neck, a searing need for a banana, and the satisfaction of a party well thrown.
I realize it took me almost a week to write and post this, but have no fear. The Party Bolsheviks is not dead, not dead by far. Inspired by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, we plan to drink wine out of empty Diet Coke cans tonight. Surely a worthwhile blog post will ensue.
Love,
The Party Castro
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The French Bar Experience: Take One
Last week I met a couple of nice young French boys with my friend Caroline along the Seine. One, aptly named François, seemed especially cool and spoke very good English so we weren't totally confused by each other and so through the ever-useful tool of Facebook, we contacted one another and made plans to go out for drinks on Friday night. However, I was feeling a bit sluggish, especially with the rain occurring in its very French manner of pouring insanely for 20 minutes and then stopping for an hour so that puddles may form, and then starting again profusely. But once I texted Abby, her enthusiasm was contagious and I, without washing my obscenely dirty hair, put on my new sweater and a scarf (crucial accessory) and trudged out the door to the RER.
Met Abby, went to weird Australian bar to meet François where my main concern was that I didn't really remember what he looked like. ("I don't know, he's French-looking, I guess.") But we found one another and he was with 3 friends who all spoke varying degrees of English but mostly French and we all went to the hookah bar. For the record, French people are ALL ABOUT hookah. They call it "shisha" (the whole hookah, not just the tobacco) and pretty much every French person under the age of 30 either has a hookah or smokes it religiously. So, we sat outside for a shisha and chatted, in varying degrees of Franglais, about jobs and Paris and classes and tattoos and pretty much whatever. They were all very nice and funny, except for one named Clement who was basically silent, but he comes into the story later.
Then we chose to go towards "Saint Mich" (which is French slang for, you guessed it, Saint Michel) to roll and smoke a joint (which French people do on the street or in the park, pas de probleme). It's not technically legal, but it's Friday night there's shittons of people around and cops aren't going to just come up to you and fuck up your life like they will in the US. Of course, as soon as we began to walk it started pouring rain, so we retreated under an awning of "Claire's" the tacky mall jewelry store for our little sesh. I was pretty tired and not the most lively that I can be, so I was kind of weighing the options of going home soonish. But the boys were very cool so I elected to not be a huge pussy on a Friday night. What kind of girl am I?
So, then we went to this little street right by where I used to have class by Notre Dame called Rue de la Huchette, which is just a little tiny primarily pedestrian street lined with bars and restaurants and apparently this place that we went to which was unbelievably fancy and Parisian, with loud loud bad pop music and overpriced drinks and tons of gorgeous people and steep stairs. So we danced and the two remaining boys, François and Clement (the silent guy) bought us shots and after a couple of drinks and a wee bit of dancing, no part of me wanted to go home anymore. Clement ended up just being shy and not speaking a lot of English, which of course was the reason he wasn't super-chatty with us and our bad French accents. But after a few drinks, talking to anybody is a million times easier, in French or in English (but especially in French), so we friendlied it up after our third vodka-champagne shot (surprisingly delicious, even for my diminishing palate for vodka in every form).
One point: the boys insisted on paying for pretty much everything we drank until Abby pulled out her credit card and laid down the law that she was going to buy shots now, no questions asked. But, as a former person with money sometimes, it was a HUGE treat to get treated for once, as opposed to having other people taking advantage of my generosity and "live your life" nature. I was basically ecstatically happy at #1 being out with French people, especially French boys and #2 dancing ridiculously to bad pop music (including the millionth time I have heard "I Got A Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas since I've been in France).
Funny anecdote: A tall blond French boy came up to me and asked me to dance, and me, being friendly and carefree and slightly drunk, started to basically salsa with him so as to chat and avoid him trying to molest me. I learned that his name was Mathieu, he was 19, extremely handsome, and also a super duper creeper. First class. Within 3 minutes of meeting me, he felt comfortable caressing my cheek and hair, which made me basically burst out laughing and mouth "HELP ME" at Abby over the shoulder of his creepy white sweater. She did, pulling me back towards her and yelling "desole!" at poor Mathieu. Luckily 5 seconds later he had some drunk 25-year-old sitting on his lap. We made fun of him for the rest of the night.
Drunk and happy, we smoked cigarettes in the cute little cave-like smoking room downstairs (since you can't smoke inside anywhere in France anymore - luckily everywhere has huge door-like windows for the cafe crowd). And as will happen in even numbers of boys and girls, we had sort of paired off with our respective French boys: me with François and Abby with Clement formerly known as the asshole. At 5am we left the bar, Abby and I happy that the metro started to run again in 30 minutes, rendering our late-night transportation worries non-existent. We proceeded to amble around the streets of Paris in the 5eme for about 45 minutes, pretty much just making out in the most Parisian of ways (i.e. in public, although I suppose that at 6am there's not a whole lot of public). The French are all about keeping their love out in the open though, and the only other people on the street at that time were doing basically exactly the same thing as us, with slight variations and specific destinations. Arrived home, delirious with joy, champagne and exhaustion, at around 7am.
Champagne should be drunk at every occasion. - French Proverb
Jesse S. Rice-Evans
"The Party Lenin"
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Buying Liquor in France
This deserves a repost from my personal blog at:
The most different thing about my lifestyle in France that is even comparable to back home is the accessibility of alcohol. Now, despite living with or being very close with various over-21s (either fake or actual), it is nevertheless frustrating and idiotic that I cannot go into a grocery store and buy a 6-pack of Magic Hat, for no other reason than that I like to cook with it, much less get drunk upon it.
So, needless to say, a huge incentive for me to come to France (drinking legally) was magnified when dear Alejandro told me that not only could I buy alcohol, but I could drink it. Outdoors. Without a cup. Wherever I wanted. And, as Ms. Hilary Walker and her town of Savannah Georgia know from my trip there last spring break, drinking outdoors while exploring is one of my Top 5 Favorite Activities of All Time.
Day #1: Abby and I meet, discover our mutual love of non-menthol tobacco products, go get lunch and have wine. Then we grocery shop and pick out the cheapest bottle of red wine we can find (me bringing the bottle opener from home was a good idea!) and go drink it on the roof of the Foyer. While this is thrilling, I have bought wine before at home, even without the fakest of fake IDs. The real joy comes on day #2.
Day #2: Exploring further, more grocery stores! And, not unlike my parents' home state of Nebraska, the French sell liquor in grocery stores. Behind the cash register, on the shelf, you grab it, clutch it cheerfully, pay (much lower liquor tax), and go outside and jump up and down. My first purchase: a little flask-like bottle of Label 5 whiskey. Cheap, burns your lips, delicious. I wanted to cry I was so unbelievably happy.
To test out Alejandro's incredible proclamation, I wander into Jardin Lux with my whiskey, take a tentative sip in front of the first uniformed person I see. They don't even look at me! Part of me wants to start yelling "HEY I'M DRINKING LIQUOR OUT OF A GLASS CONTAINER IN PUBLIC AND I'M UNDER 21 ARREST ME" but first of all, they wouldn't know what I was talking about (English) and 2nd, they don't give a shit. There are immigrants to harass, after all.
Day #3: One begins to abuse the privilege of buying alcohol by going out to "bars." This is a concept I never really understand, for at bars, you are paying much more for the amount of space that you physically take up at the bar and not your actual beverage. In France especially, wouldn't you just rather take up public space and drink your own alcohol purchased from NOT AN ALPHABET STORE BUT A GROCERY STORE??? Since you can drink outside, it saves you, to put it bluntly, a fucking shitton of money. Bars will try to charge you 6 Euros for 50cl of beer. Not happening.
Day #10: You begin to realize that every other human wants to go to bars, and you understand, since maybe they didn't have a fake ID at age 17 like some people (ahem) and have never even been to a bar. You'd like to go out too. So what's the cheapest way to do this? The joys of being an American lady are embraced by the European man: the purse. Put a little bottle of whiskey in your purse, order a Coke or nothing, go to the bathroom and make a mixed drink, or just take discreet pulls from your stash in the corner of the bar. Nothing could be easier. And the Belgian boys will inevitably buy you a drink anyway.
Day #Nuit Blanche:
Talking with fellow programmers who also enjoyed Nuit Blanche, many of them were aghast at my kahones in just walking down the street with a huge bottle of whiskey. "Don't you know you can't drink in public spaces here?" I'll believe that shit when a cop stops me for drinking on the street, in the police station, on the metro, on the Seine, in the garden. I think 2 things when confronted with this type of behavior: #1 what fucking country do you think we're in? And #2 your family must be loaded since you went to bars all night for kicks. Then I think the third thing: it's been 6 weeks and you have yet to grow a pair and realize you're in Paris. Stop worrying all of the time. Stress shortens your life. And wine makes it better.
Day #Today:
French class is tedious, so I go to the nearest grocery store and scoop a Heineken tall boy for less than 2 Euros at about 2:30 this afternoon (about the price of a Coke Light bottle, and frankly, much more entertaining) and proceed to people-watch in the square next to my school building, drinking my delicious and refreshing Heineken and listening to dance music.
And not only are you allowed to drink, but you are, in fact, encouraged to as well. Wine shop employees enthusiastically show you the myriad French reds, imported whites. Grocery store clerks reach to the highest shelf and hand you your alcohol with a knowing and wide smile. Yes, the French truly are backwards and stupid, to let people drink alcohol in a culture that doesn't giant stigmas above the stores where they go to buy it, nor do they hand out tickets for sitting outside with one's friends, laughing after a long day of school or work, winding down with a bottle of wine. They're really confused as to what's important, obviously. Just like their seafood isn't fresh.
HINT: It is.
Jesse S. Rice-Evans
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A night through the shroud of five chemicals
Greetings fellow proletariat partiers! This is the Party Trotsky here with a recap of this weekend’s debauchery and general funness, and yes, funness is now a word. Blow me spell check.
The weekend was begun Friday night with the Party members gathering and participating in a little pregaming at the party Castro’s humble abode. Beers were shared, liquor was imbibed, and fun was certainly had, but there was a certain something missing, that little thing that puts a twinkle in your eye and a stumble in your step. And as a fellow revolutionary was leaving to make a beer run, that little thing suddenly made itself quite obvious to me: we needed some alcohol infused energy drinks, specifically the brand known as four Loko. I immediately made this revelation known to the rest of the party, and Party Castro and I happily gave up our hard earned capitalist pig reserve notes in the hopes of obtaining some. Sadly, it seems that our date with three or four Fours was not meant to be, but instead our friend came back with something almost as good, and that my friends is a four pack of Sparks, another alcohol infused energy drink which I like to refer to as cocaine in a can. With our thirst for drank quenched, the majority of our party ventured forth and made the walk to the next party, which promised to be slightly larger than your average get together.
A note about this party: having been in the planning process for several weeks, along with the fact that there were more than a few registered kegs, we assumed that this party would be busted sooner rather than later, and several Party members chose not to indulge their habits beforehand, myself included, just in case Carrboro’s finest were also planning on attending.
But as we arrived to the party, it appeared that our worst fears were incorrect, and the one hundred plus people in attendance were in no danger of being scooped up in an ALE raid. So we entered, positioned ourselves comfortably in the courtyard, slightly adjacent to the maelstrom of limbs and sweat that was the dance floor, and proceeded to drink free beer and observe what can only be described as at least 60% of the hipster population of Carrboro. A good example of the nonsense that was going on is an occurrence that happened to me, when a trio of clearly fucked up people approached and offered me some illicit substances. I’ll go into this in greater detail shortly, but let’s just say the exchange was a success. After I returned, some of our group decided that it would be in our favor if we returned to Castro’s home and pounded some Sparks, AKA cocaine in a can baby! So we once again made the trip back, slammed down the aforementioned Sparks, became not a little tipsy, and made our way back to the party without any negative instances. The rest of the night was went as most parties go, we hung out and attempted to look cool/hip, then decided to make our way back to the original casa in order to get more drunk. I left the larger Party group and retired to a new location in order to smoke some of that devil’s weed that the capitalists use to placate the masses. Always a good end to the night. Anyhoo, commence Saturday.
As I mentioned above, I was offered some illegal and exotic substances by a sketchy individual, and I took him up on his offer, as it has been a coon’s age since I partook in the substance, which suffice to say was a popular psychedelic in the 60’s. Waking up the next afternoon, I readied myself for the experience, stuck it in my mouth, and walked purposefully into the woods. Note: while this sub story may not fit into the Bolshevikian events of the night per se, it will come into play in a few sentences, so quit yo bitching. After taking said substance, I felt pretty fucking good, and trip back to my childhood ensued as I discovered a babbling brook with all manner of critters with which to mess with. Snakes, salamanders, and fish are much more exciting when your brain is feeling a little loosey goosey.
After wandering in the woods for several amazing hours and slowly beginning the long trip down, I prepared myself for the next major event of the day, the very same Middle School themed party that the last post mentioned so eloquently. After putting on my heavily edited 2002 Jump Rope World Championship shirt and cargo shorts, and dousing myself with a stolen spray of my roommate’s cologne, I was middle schooled out. I met up with several Party members, and as the middle school antics would not start for several hours, we involved ourselves with the actions and events that the prior post dealt with, which included, naturally, a splendidly spontaneous dance party. I myself was feeling extraordinarily good, as my brain was filled to the brim with various different chemicals. I had the entirety of the sixties hippie experience still coursing through my veins, and I believe this allowed me to become extremely fucked up in a short period of time, while mostly keeping my composure. Along with the psychedelic, I had quite a bit of the reefer, several different types of alcohol, one of which was of course, a Sparks, a cigarette, which is rough on my old bones (don’t laugh), and then of course the various energy giving chemicals within the Sparks. Let’s just say I was feeling alright.
After quickly becoming inebriated on these chemicals, we decided to make the trek all the way across the apartment complex to the middle school party, which in my state was quite awesome. Several members of the Party and I immediately began helping out our buzz with a bit of the free PJ that was situated in a large tub on the counter. One of the hostesses of the party was also kind enough to give me a piece of banana bread that had some extra ingredients in it, most notably weed. It was at this point that I began to have serious problems seeing, and therefore decided to perch myself in the kitchen. It was also at this point that my group, unbeknownst to me, had collectively decided to leave this party and move to the next one. I was in no state of mind to argue or ask what the fuck was going on, so I went along for the ride. After walking for a bit, we came upon the second party, which was going quite nicely. Dancing, plenty of people, all the usual things were taking place. The group I was with took up positions on the backside of the house, and started to mingle like nothing else.
We had been at this party for maybe forty-five minutes, when I saw a mass of people begin to flood from the back room, and then heard the cries of people yelling “COPS!” I turned and was suddenly face to face with a nice lady who held out her hand and asked for ID. I declined, and turned and followed the rest of the party, jumping the back fence and running up the street, escaping to sweet freedom. As me and my remaining Party member, Castro, regrouped and prepared to make the move to safer ground, a friend requested that we walk back with her and obtain her purse, which she had so thoughtlessly left behind in the mad dash. We obliged, and in doing so ended up getting stuck back at the same party that we had just escaped from. As it turns out, this would be beneficial for Castro, for quickly after we returned he, in the sequence of about 30 seconds, met and began making out earnestly with a girl we’ll refer to as slightly-above average Sally. Sally and Castro continued their blossoming relationship, and I began looking for a way out of the party. A friend was heading to his place to have a smoking session, and I decided that this was my ticket out. I told Castro of the plan, and he decided to feel the girl out and give her one last chance to come with. Unfortunately, it was not in the cards for Castro, and his lady gave him the cold shoulder. Tragic shit, truly. We pressed on and made our way to the living room, where Castro stopped to conversate and dance with the hostess of the party. As I despaired of ever leaving this party, the door happened to open and who did I see waiting outside? 3 unhappy members of the policia. I grabbed Castro and bolted for the back door, bypassing most of the party, who had still not realized what was happening, even though this was the second time it had happened in two hours... We made our way out, conveniently through the same route which we had used about an hour and a half ago for the same purpose. Now, in the process of all this, I became understandably quite excited and not a little upset, mentally and stomachly (it’s a word, look it up), and I paused, projectile vomited most spectacularly, and continued running, only to be stopped twenty feet away in order to projectile hurl once again. My apologies to Castro for the slight mess on his shoes. In my defense, you try taking in 5 different substances in an 8 hour period, throw in two escapes from the cops, and we shall see how well you do.
-Party Trotsky
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