I know, I know. the word ‘dancing’ is in the title of the song; therefore you’d think I would have put this video under the ‘totally un-rad’ category. but honestly, I don’t think you can classify what Bowie and Jagger are doing in this three minutes of ambrosial delight as dancing. it’s more like palpably homoerotic seizuring, and I’m loving it. I’m also loving their literal interpretation of the line in the song that goes: “it doesn’t matter what you wear / just as long as you are there,” with Jagger showing up to the video shoot in the same clothes he was wearing while doing handiwork around the house earlier that day, and Bowie arriving in what I can only assume is his grandmother’s bridge club outfit and his creepy downstairs neighbor’s trenchcoat. I’m just glad that said trenchcoat conveniently blows up at the end of the video to allow the already-wowed audience prime viewing of Bowie’s triumphant final buttshake, perfectly synchronized with Jagger’s. well played, lads, well played.

This is upsetting to me because I have a relationship of high regard with the White Russian (and a few of its variants) that, according to this article, puts me in a difficult spot. David Wondrich, drink correspondent (resident alcoholic?) for Esquire, calls the White Russian, “the mark of the hipster”. Never mind how awesomely close that sounds to “the mark of the Beast”; will my fondness for White Russians be marred by it’s new designation as “the subject of experimentation at cutting edge bars”?

I’ve taken my time to try and think rationally about this. One shining ray of hope is that this is the New York Times here. Reading an article in the NYT about anything it deems “hip” gives me an uncomfortable, cringing sensation similar to what I imagine seeing my mom walking out in public wearing skinny black leggings, an oversized neon-colored t-shirt, and David Bowie-esque eye make-up would produce. Somebody has to keep the vast, white suburbs of Westchester County, Long Island, and Bridge-and-Tunnel New Jersey up to date on what all the cool people are doing in “the City” so they can plan their weekends accordingly, and the New York Times delivers.

The absolute lameness of any kind of cultural, lifestyle, and fashion commentary the New York Times has to offer gives me some hope. Perhaps they’re so far behind on anything culturally relevant that this disturbing trend has passed. Or maybe they just mistook the aging, grimy alcoholic in the Christmas sweater who happened to be at whatever bar was “in” that week in Brooklyn for an aging, grimy hipster in a Christmas sweater at whatever bar happened to be “in” that week.

But if the hipster denizens of the Lower East Side and the pale, non-threatening parts of Brooklyn really are embracing this most uncool of drinks, then what does this have to say about me? Does it give me more or less hipster street cred if I only ever drank White Russians in my dorm room wearing sweatpants and would never order one in a bar? Do I need to reevaluate my relationship with the White Russian if I want to keep my self-respect?

My answer to this is no. It is impossible to smear the White Russian with the snot of hipsterdom. Firstly, it would be impossible to drink a White Russian ironically. To do so would be denying that they really are fucking tasty. I’m pretty sure the only beverages that you can consume ironically are ones that taste like piss – PBR I’m looking at you. Secondly, drinking White Russians takes a certain amount of desperateness that would be difficult to feign while living on your parents’ money in some over-priced apartment in Greenpoint that used to be home to a cute Polish grandmother who got priced out by her landlord because he knew that he could rent it for twice as much to your pasty-ass from Connecticut. Besides, any hipster willing to get him or herself drunk on these delicious little calorie bombs isn’t worth the nautical star on their chest. No self-respecting hipster would jeopardized their ability to wear the same size jeans as their little sister. They don’t smoke all those cigarettes for nothing you know.

So, in the end, my relationship with the White Russian has emerged from this trying episode stronger than ever. And anyone who drinks White Russians for any other reason than they’re a tasty way to get sloshed is a punk who deserves to get punched in the nose and have their fake granny/grandpa glasses broken. Case closed.

Oh, and this thing about Hot Chip “inventing” something called the Black Tarantula? Fuck that shit. Then I invented something called the Guerrilla Russian when Jess and I made our own Kahlua on the community kitchen stove in the dorm.

imagine, if you will, a water bottle. a water bottle 750 mL in volume, perfect for intense hydration sessions, and attractively labeled a ‘lightweight traveler [registered trademark].’ except this water bottle is not filled with water. oh no, my friend, this lightweight traveler [registered trademark] is filled with sour mash 80 proof Kentucky straight Bourbon whiskey. well, imagine no more, ladies and gentleman, because these convenient plastic bottles of booze are sitting on shelves in liquor stores everywhere, just waiting for you to use them to break those pesky open container laws.

Jim Beam not only markets these bottles as lightweight travelers (which, to be fair, is an accurate description – they’re plastic, so they don’t break when they fly out of your car’s poorly-designed cupholder when you brake suddenly because you were too busy rocking out to Vampire Weekend while the car in front of you stopped to make a turn, and in addition they have a bottletop fashioned for minimal spillage and optimal drink-straight-out-of-the-bottle-age [perfect for when you get rejected from yet another barista job at a fair-trade cafe in Billburg]), but also somehow managed to get a trademark officer to approve such obvious tomfoolery and encouragement of illegality (ostensibly by sending aforementioned officer crates upon crates of the product). these enviable achievements give the James B. Beam Distilling Co. of Frankfort, Kentucky, USA an indefinite but obviously substantial amount of cool points.

addendum: I was at a (totally cool, absolutely awesome) concert (that far surpassed any derivative, uninspired shit you were listening to this weekend) last night and, to my horror, there were several people dancing. and not only were they dancing, but they were dancing directly in front of me with great zeal, which both hindered my view of the band and blatantly clashed with my completely enviable and impressively nonchalant slight foot-tapping. have you minions learned nothing from Katie and I? have we led you astray by falling off our bikes and or/chairs while in Germany/on a news program? did some guy in a cardigan (from Abercrombie and Fitch, might I add) tell you that dancing at concerts was not only copacetic but encouraged? because if you think Kevin Bacon-esque levels of footlooseness are okay, you are horribly horribly wrong. if there’s anything you can fit in your sperm-reducing skinny pants, it’s this undeniable truth: COOL KIDS DON’T DANCE. ESPECIALLY WHEN I’M TRYING TO TAKE AN ~*ARTSY*~ SHOT OF THE BAND WITH THE WAY-BELOW-SUB-PAR CAMERA ON MY REFURBISHED TREO 680, FOR CHRISSAKES.

Visual evidence that I am failing in my mission to be able to ride around Frankfurt on a bike without looking like a jackass or angering German drivers and pedestrians. Falling off a bike is embarrassing; I would know, as this is not the first time it’s happened. But falling off your bike AND ripping your pants in a spectacular way is probably the ultimate in embarrassment. While this might be somewhat acceptable for a 4 year old, I’m 22. Double jackass points for me. And let’s not forget to mention that now that I am without my favorite black skinny jeans, all the other cool kids won’t want to play with me. They’ll point and laugh and ask me if I buy my clothes at Abercrombie and Fitch (or its German equivalent).  Travesty!

I’ll probably have to go out and buy a keffiyah and start smoking clove cigarettes now to make up for it.

Now excuse me while I go hide myself in shame and embarrassment and mourn the loss of my cool status (and my favorite pants).

the best part is the impending doom/increasing levels of awesome the watcher feels 11 seconds in as the first leg goes. at first I was going to give this guy cool points for maintaining such a nonchalant attitude after it was the clear the chair was having none of him, but the behemoth nature of his inevitable fall instead makes him a fucking nerd who is totally encroaching on my park bench space while I am trying to absorb Hunter S. Thompson, Jesus H. Christ.

cool kids can irreparably damage furniture, but only in a non-fatal way: you can take a large chunk out of the dining room table from trying to open Bud Light beer bottles on it too many times, but if you cause the whole infrastructure of the craigslist-obtained piece of floral decor sectional to fall in on itself, no one who(se parent) pays rent in that apartment is inviting you to the Galapagos for at least three weeks.

Agreeing to release information to Chinese government about who’s searching what in exchange for market access doesn’t help either. And don’t get me started on those lame-ass holiday themed homepages for the search engine.

But maybe this is all a rouse. Maybe Google is keeping its awesomeness shrouded in its outward squareness, thus making its awesomeness that much more subtle and ironic (read: awesome), which then results in a irony induced awesome vortex? Why do I think this?

Simple.

It doesn’t get much more awesome than that.

to this Katie and I respond, confidently and with much better grammar than the question itself: HUMAN! WE ARE HUMAN! thus, we are not dancer(s). perfectly rational and scientifically proven logic would then follow that since Katie and I are the epitome of cool, the cool kids don’t dance, or at the very least they aspire to create the smallest amount of body movement possible when at events such as ‘concerts’ or ‘weddings’ or ‘dance parties.’

so now you want us, the cool kids, to tell you if you yourself are cool or are dancer, as if we have time to look at your myspace profile while leading busy, productive, and ostensibly quite awesome lives to determine such a fact. or, perhaps, you’re done with the whole having fun when music is playing thing and want to be trained in the cool arts. either way, do not fear, because we are here to help.

the easiest way to become a cool person is to observe other cool people and then do whatever it is that they’re doing. this philosophy can be summarized in a popular Tibetan saying: hipster/monkey see, hipster/monkey do. below are two examples of cool people not dancing while total fucking losers are.

example 1

I know, I know. those dancers have so many things going for them: scarves, pastel shorts, oversized sunglasses. but trust us, those two guys, invariably inebriated off of PBR, are the cool ones. look at their nonchalance, their devil-may-care attitudes. definitely pros.

example 2

I know what you’re thinking: this is just a typical Coldplay concert. WRONG! this was a Williamsburg festival of indie post-punk, post-hardcore, dance rock bands chock full of synth and drum machines that no one has ever actually listened to but will mention several times loudly to their friends on the J train. as soon as the music started, everyone stormed the stage and broke out into various interpretations of the running man, the electric slide, and the polka. except Katie and I. being the cool, debonair beings we are, we sat back and absorbed the music for its base aesthetic value rather than fall victim to the superficial and deadly seduction of that sweet Casio sound.

QUIZ TIME!

okay, by now you should have a pretty good idea of what makes a cool kid. the next picture has no bright red arrows or empty seats as cool aids (Kool-Aids?). try to see if you can figure out who the cool kids are:

did you guess that girl with the stripes doing some sort of one-person Mexican wave? that guy waving his hands in the air like he just doesn’t care? that kind of short, special-looking guy lifting his shirt up in sheer defiance of the system? those other people? well, if you guessed any of them, you’re WRONG. not only are all of these losers having a good time, but that exhibitionist is drinking Miller Life. you’d never catch me, Katie, or any other cool kids at a total dweebfest like this.

so, hopefully now you’re all a little cooler. or at least a little stiffer. and if you ever find yourself in later posts doubting how cool Katie and I are, you probably dance in front of mirrors by yourself, dickweed, so why don’t you go put in some Britney Spears and leave us alone.