WHAT ABOUT STYLE
THAT AIN'T EVEN yr style
another styles of men


Friday night Pillow and I were talk talking about (gulp) that Tavi and her blogsite and (gulp gulp) those harpies at blogsite Jezebel who L.O.V.E. her serious. And, specifically, a weeks long interchange between Tavi and her fans (@Jezebel and stuff) about Sassy Magazine, her collection of Sassy Magazines, lots of scans. It is remarkable to observe women in their twenties and thirties embracing/celebrating the embrace/celebration of their own Youth Information by a starry-headed tween receiving it for the first time....it's really clarifying the butter for me----I'm getting flashes of Gestalt!

I have two memories of Sassy Magazine:
---About 8; dentist's office waiting room; someone has left the issue with Kurt and Courtney on the cover underneath their seat; I bring it home (it's not so transformative or special to me).
---About 9; my friend's hot older brother's girlfriend leaves an issue on their sun porch; I pick it up and leaf through it, but I can hardly recall its contents because we found a Penthouse Magazine under hot older brother's bed that same afternoon and its contents (stuff hot older brother thought was hot) left a greater mark...At the time, I had subscriptions to Seventeen and Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and I liked to buy YM too. I watched Aarron Spelling shows and tons of network sitcoms and My So-Called Life and the full MTV. I listened to "alternative music station," 96X, and shopped for "grunge clothes, skull caps, baby tees, babydoll dresses, barrettes, body suits, mini-backpacks, body glitter, ankhs and sunflowers" at Contempo Casuals and The Limited Too (and [thrills!] Todd Oldham and Betsey Johnson, in moderation).....these were the popular choices, the choices that "might bring me in the range of older and sexy (??!!!)," that ranged from childish to child-tryin'-to-be-a-teen-ish.

Between 1990 and 1995 (Sassy was published between '88 and '96), Courtney Love and Brenda Walsh and Kurt Cobain and Taylor Dayne and Six LeMeure and Chloe Sev- and Donnie Wahlberg and Janet Jackson and Joey Lawrence and Snoop Dogg and Cher Horowitz and Axl Rose and Rayanne Graff and Perry Farrell and Whitley Gilbert (and and and) were, for me, as one---a lot of "grown" folk. I got to feel cool by absorbing and reflecting any of a conglomerated-"adult material," and by, in turn, rejecting kid stuff, being a kid.

As far as I can tell, Sassy was an (possible) origin point for some still-kicking Popular hipster-ism as conceived by Generation-X (like, Chloe Sev- and Spike Jonze were interns and there were DIY projects), a volume full of spunky angst and a load of anti-Pop/anti-Big80s sentiment, cynicism, some irony, 70s redux. The teens (and writing/editing 20-somethings) of Sassy got to feel cool by dividing up my conglomerated-"adult material" into columns/piles of YES and NO, indie/"hip" (YES) and commodified/canned (NO). This was the essential line of "still-kicking Popular hipster-ism as conceived by Generation-X."---REJECTION, REJECTION of Pop and everything. One might call hipter-ism rejection-ism with a complicated strand of ironic acceptance (that is really just more rejection). This ironic acceptance strand morphed/mushroomed until it became the foggy/unwieldy/apolitical and mean punto del hipster-ism in the Aughts.

So, maybe in this naturally occurring 90s redux (of which I have been a willing participant since 2006, in my hollow fashion), people young and older, are attempting a return to "purer" ideas of hipsterism/rejectionism, feminist political ones, indie/'zine/vegan ones. And good on them. But I'll never be able to draw out stuff that wasn't there to start with: anti-Establishment feeling (WE LOVE AN ESTABLISHMENT!).
WE LOVE LOVE LOVE AN ESTABLISHMENT.

See, Tavi (how random to even know who she is, Internets!) wrote this about Sassy,

So, in 1992 or 3, Birkenstocks and Uggs were in a magazine that focused on more obscure fashion for dorkier teenage girls. Nowadays, an outfit from Pink or Abercrombie is incomplete without either of these shoes, and a gold-plated iPhone whose memory is overloaded with Justin Bieber videos can commonly be found conveniently hidden inside an Ugg boot as part of texting-during-class strategies. Not quite sure what to make of this.

It makes me a little sad. What does she mean by "obscure" and "dorkier" (I think these represent some of the Great Lies of hipster-ism), and why isn't she texting her friends in class?
Justin Bieber and decorative cell phone covers and passing notes in whatever form are GREAT. And klar-ly Tavi gets hers by feeling suspicious of and superior to "commodity culture cheerleaders"--the olde high school insider and high school outsider story--which is NOT ENLIGHTENED (and just runs and runs). It's anti-fun, anti-human, quite sinister, really.
She'd do best to understand both worlds, "inside" and "outside." In so doing, she would find there is little space between them (especially now)...that they don't even exist except in real-talk education and money matters (like, those are the only things that divide us, when they do). And that knowledge enough to navigate it ALL (while being ultimately self-reliant) is key...
(Anyhow, her "schoolyard outsider/dork pose" feels super disingenuous now that she's famous.)
Tavi throws around the word "subversive" when discussing Sassy Magazine. She thinks Generation X was subversive. She is wrong; Generation X was not subversive. They were all tragic about how they couldn't be subversive like their parents had been/done, about how the old subversive material had been consumed and rehashed so totally by "the Man," about how their parents had become "the Man."
OMG Whatever!
Subversion (how vague) without real socio-political ends (vaguer still, sorry) is subversion-as-style. And that's cool. But Tavi, being so young, and her nostalgic Gen-X fans at Jezebel, being so narrow, seem convinced that subversion-as-style is more meaningful and legit' than most other styles. And it just ISN'T.