Chagal4's Blog

Do the new hipsters remember being dead drunk and
Hungry in alphabet city…going comatose and twitching
On bare mattresses, stained charcoal and greasy
By candle light and flashlight and no light?
Do they still screw suburban girls to the tune of
Bad poetry and scratchy music…and whispered dreams
About a better world’s impossibilities?
Do they walk for hours thinking of a word…finding it
Have a toke…forgetting it…sitting for hours
Thinking of marigolds and silver buttons?
Wear watches, do they? Keep dates and appointments
Do they? Hide money in their socks…do they?
Do the new hipsters think any patch of grass is
Central Park? Do the new hipsters invent languages and
Strange sounds to fill the corners of the coffee house?
What fucking coffee house? Starbucks ain’t no coffee house.
So…bushy beards and curled moustaches…skinny jeans
Over work boots and lumber jack shirts…and horn
Rimmed glasses…and fixie bikes and beer. I want them
To be smart…doesn’t mean that they aren’t, just means
That I don’t know if they are.

I remember the old days and nights. People always say
They were great. They weren’t. They were just days
Like days we have now. Today will be somebody’s
Old days someday. Some people will say they were great.
For others…not so much. That’s why nostalgia is selective.
It’s propaganda for mock history.

The old hipsters were around ten minutes before
The Kennedy years…After Korea, before Vietnam…
The Bay of Pigs…civil rights…lynchings
(Now there’s word to conjure with.) The old hipsters
Pissed in alleys and cursed the sky…suspected
The American dream was a fucking lie.
Came back from Korea with broken eyes…frozen smiles
And suddenly again…kids in green with guns…helmets
Boots and bundles of body bags…flying off to
Somewhere else…Is this the way it is?
This is the way it is.

Do the new hipsters remember the fins on the 58 Cadillac?
Diana Dors? The Rig Veda? Jerry Lee Lewis? Do they
Roll joints in torn pages from The Fountainhead?
Do they like to go fishing?
Watch international films and argue about subtitles?
Do they pass out drunk on bar tables…but
Go outside to smoke?

I like the idea of hipsters…for the images
They bring to mind. I’ve seen them in Paris, New York
And Montreal…Maybe it’s always the same guy…I like it.
It reduces the density of Armani and Zegna. It keeps
Ralph Lauren in some kind of perspective.

Crazy isn’t it…so many questions. You see some people
Sort of like us who apparently choose to set themselves
Apart from us and you wonder…What does that say
About us? And no…that isn’t confined to the safely
Labelled so-called (Who is it that decides to label others?)
Hipsters.

I’ll keep a warm thought for hipsters…as if they care.
The ones I’ve seen ride bikes, they’re anti-fashion
But they got style…and they make me smile.
With all of the other shit that’s going on.
That’s good enough for me.

Blues
Jan. 22, 2014

I just read that Canada’s hundred richest executives had made the average salary of most Canadians by noon on January third. Some had made it by the end of New Years day…and I’m certain there are thousands of wealthy folks around the world who zip past the “average salary” milepost before breakfast. Little factoids like that used to warm my heart…because I knew that some day the wretched excess of these people would awaken a mighty wind in the souls of the working people and they would rise up and eat the rich and stamp out evil and corruption and injustice everywhere. The poor would stay up all night and sew their own superhero costumes by the light of salvaged candles while singing hymns about the new world their children would inherit. Well, this particular delusion no longer sits in the corner of my mind, eating popcorn and watching the movie of my life. The rich will always be with us…just as the poor will always be with us. Nor are the extreme gaps between the very rich and the average earner anything new (although the fierce growth of the disparity since the 1980’s is really obscene). History tells us that the separations have always been huge…often incalculably (great word) greater than the ridiculous numbers that started this rant. I don’t know why the capitalist apologists bother about spreading the propaganda that these executives are “worth every penny” or that they contribute more or that “wealth generates jobs and builds the economy”. Please…not all true and it’s well past the point where we (the ordinary people) can bring it all down…No, they will do that themselves, probably by pushing the disparity gap to a breaking point. We all know the romantic stories about great wealth scavenged through some scheme or another, used to build the big family pile (Downton Abbey style)…and two generations later the profligate heir pisses it all away on horses and hookers and unbelievable stupidity. Alas, even that story has a happy ending when the filthy rich widow appears on the scene, marries the dumb-ass  and after touching up his tarnished gilt edges…leads him to god and the mending of his stupid ways. Please…wealthy widow lady…stay home…let the dismal idiot fade away like a bad smell. We’d like to think that it’s not a pattern that repeats itself but it does. And we have tycoons today that buy and sell football teams…super yachts and city blocks with barely a thought. Do we care where those Russian oligarchs got their dough? Hell no. What about all those dot com billionaires living on the same street, each in a house the size of a city hotel. Did they have the area tested for earth quakes? How much time do they actually spend on those yachts? Do they go out with a fishing rod for an hour or two on a sunny day? Cruise around the harbour with a few pals catching some rays?

O.K. so I’m no longer holding my breath for the day that I hear that the entire yacht basin at Cannes went up in smoke…or that a whole flotilla of super yachts was last seen heading into the Bermuda Triangle. I still care that the huge disparities between rich and poor are connected…I still believe that for somebody to become that wealthy…many people have to become very poor. I still believe that extremes of poverty breed war and disease and death and an endless chain of misery…so therefore it is also extreme wealth that breeds these things. I don’t believe we can eradicate either extreme…but I do believe that we have to wake up and understand that they need to be moderated…the extremes need to less extreme. Our culture expends quite a lot of energy and thought to fight poverty…we need spend at least as much energy and thought to fight the excesses of wealth.

It’s 2014 and my cultural heroes for this year are a small and terrible musical group from Russia. If they ever put out a record we should certainly buy it…but maybe not play it…even if you understand Russian. Besides, you already know what they’re saying. Pussy Riot…Damn! when they let those women out of jail they jumped right into Putie’s face…I wanted to climb through my T.V. screen and give them everything I had in my pockets.

It”s Friday night and the car won’t start…the birds won’t fly…and they say there’s a snow storm coming. Seems like a perfect way to start the new year. I’ve been neglecting my blog lately…I know because a couple of good friends told me so…I stopped for a while because it seemed to me that I was ranting every time I sat down to write and I figured I might have been taking things a little too seriously. Not that there isn’t a plethora of things to be taken seriously…I swear I could find five things to rant about damn near every day. Sometimes it’s not a case of what to rant about but rather what to ignore.  I suppose the problem for me and a lot of others is that the burden of ignoring this stuff builds so much frustration. I wish we could do more…I always wish we could do more. Around this time of year I hear a lot of people promising to be better people. A few years ago I just couldn’t go with that anymore and I figured that I would promise myself to do the best that I could…added a couple of sensible senior citizen caveats and let it go at that. It seems to me that we’d all be better off if we didn’t wait until this time of year to make these promises. Maybe we could do it once or twice a week. After all, you have to wonder where all of these promises go. They don’t just hover in mid air, watching to make sure. They go to the “promise lounge” , hang around with other promises…compare notes…make bets…have a few drinks…and peek out the window every now and then to see how we’re doing. When we all wait until this time of year to make those promises…well…there’s a traffic jam outside the lounge and a line up to get in. Very uncomfortable time for promises. Increases the chances that most of them will not be fulfilled. Once or twice a week though, I’ll bet that lounge wouldn’t be too busy. 

My car will start tomorrow. It’s minus 25 right now but it will warm up to minus ten tomorrow and the birds will climb out of bed and get busy again. It won’t snow until Sunday…and it’ll go away in the spring. I’ll be back in ranting mode in a week or so but for now, I hope you all have a fine New Year and that at least some of your promises make it to the lounge before last call.