Dude, who even knows.
Post with 17 notes
Realizing that the thing about the 2000s, certainly at least in my LA experience – neo-disco “blog house” DJed parties with photographers and not like, scene scene kids, but like the Mis-Shapes, Cory Kennedy, the kind of scene that “scene” was gesturing at, rooftop parties at art collectives, VICE magazine, hipsters – is that those are all recapitulations of things that originally came about in the load-bearing context of heavy hard drug use – heroin, cocaine, benzos and other pills – and were a little silly in our generation.
VICE started out (as government-funded CanCon) in Toronto when it was a beat, heroiny (but not white-flighted. Canada!) city. Back before they sold out (and were richly paid) a sort of raw-dadly “don’t be fucking junkies, kids” was part of Gavin McInnes’ schtick.
And then I went to a free VICE party in Hollywood sponsored by Colt 45, which was funding it and giving free tallboys because before the ‘08 crash alcohol companies just gave it away to establish brands with us urban (pre-social media use) “influencers” and I guess the “indie sleaze” 70s vibe (I used to live two blocks from the original American Apparel store!) matched up with the “hey, remember Billy Dee Williams?” branding. But it just… no. We were a wild, free, and fun-loving crowd in that we were in our twenties, but…
I mean, part of it was we were the back-to-the-city generation, and that was the kind of authentic grittiness we had romanticized about the last time white life was lived in cities, the 1970s. Of course we were middle-class white, like 70s cities or the places where the headline meth and Oxy waves weren’t.
Ecstasy kinda came back but they called it “Molly” and held “raves” in stadiums
Xanax was kind of a thing but as an anxiolytic it’s kind of a combination of benzos that don’t fuck you up and cocaine that doesn’t get you speeding (cocaine is not only a stimulant but an anti-anxiety agent; when cokeheads tell you all about their brilliant idea for a screenplay/world domination scheme it’s cause they’re not only amped up but disinhibited)
Coke was kind of a thing, Gawker all “can you imagine! there’s a coke bar in Brooklyn (that surely sells trampled-on shit) called Kokies!”
But that was kinda the suburbanites thrilled at their urban worldliness that they could even find anything harder than weed now, one $60 bag at a time, it wasn’t really sybaritic excess. Even at post-warehouse sunrise afterparties where we got naked in the hot tub there were never piles of cocaine or anything, and we mostly made jokes and left by 9
Sparks, that was our thing. Coming before Four Loko, it was the wild speedball combination of malt liquor and caffeine, that’s how adventurous we were.
Post reblogged from sideblog for the siterunner of bogleech.com with 219 notes
Hey folks
If any of you were 18 to 24 in the early 2000s i need to know what that time period was like for you? I barely remember it and I was 15 in 2009?
Media was kind of getting samey already but the internet was still like this amazing new frontier most older adults knew nothing about, goth culture was huge, 9/11 and the war on terror remained the big debate and everyone was certain George bush Jr. was the dumbest, most destructive political figure we could ever possibly have.
I don’t really remember much else but that weird cultural environment. A lot of it was ultimately boring or sad.
I was pretty bubbled in college for for a lot of it. “Alternative rock”, the thing for self-respecting white teens in the 90s went through a kind of declassing as the music industry, cycling through microgenres, moved on to rap-rock/“nü metal” – invoking the “college rock” label of proto-alternative I called it “some college rock”.
Proto-“hipsters” started to show up, early on they could have a kinda gore aesthetic and use gimmick names, it suddenly strikes me this is where a lot of “Suicide Girls” came from. Heavy tattooing became a thing. Stars on the collar/waistbones.
Blogs became a thing – political and “warblogs” often from people with some bylines but not a huge reputation, also some new stuff. Gawker was still largely about the excitement of moving to the Big Apple to get into media after college. Did you know there’s a coke bar named Cokies?
Internships.
Reality TV and game shows got big at the expense of sitcoms.
Post with 24 notes
So when I first moved to LA I lived in Los Feliz and I don’t know why but there was def. a 24 connection. Looking it up I don’t think it had sets at Prospect Studios, but maybe the LA location shots were based out of there?
Anyway, “drunk Kiefer Sutherland” was the neighborhood mascot, I was there once when he bought the bar a round at the Drawing Room. Across the street, when an episode aired Ye Rustic Inn would do a thing called “Jack Bauer Power Hour”, you put your money down and get a shot of beer each minute, a shot of whiskey every time he kills or tortures someone and some other things, some of the crew came out to witness the finished production that way
Also Mary Lynn Rajskub, the indie comic who played girl-in-the-van Chloe, had one-woman shows at the atheist church down the street, the “Center for Inquiry”. I remember the one about giving birth and becoming a mother was called “Mary Lynn Spreads Her Legs”