I have been watching some music videos and i have come to the conclusion that i want to be in physical pain at all times. It seems pretty trendy in the mainstream-hipstre-indie-music-video-scene today. I think being in pain must be something God created to help remind us that we are alive and that any minute He could strike us dead for being so mainstream and closed-minded. I think being in a load of pain means you are pretty indie, because you are taking chances and going against the grain of society- which is typically dangerous and can lead to various painful side-effects such as the glasses tattoo kid.
Perhaps you can judge the level of authenticity of an indie kid by how much pain he/she is in. If their forehead isn’t leaking blood, perhaps they are just an entry-level poseur, if that. Being in pain is an adrenaline rush. It makes life uncertain. You aren’t playing safe anymore. You are living for the moment because it will probably be your last, tbh.
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I want to get mauled by a pack of wolves.
I want to get assaulted by a man on the street.
I want to get stoned on a sailboat.
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I want the blood dripping from my gaping wound to remind me that my pulse is still pulsing and my heart is still hearting. I want to feel alive.
got a new track for you to listen to from the band secret cities.
“The band began with 4-track cassette tapes flying through the mail back and forth between the Easternmost to the Westernmost borders of North Dakota. MJ Parker and Charlie Gokey were barely 15 when they met at band camp, but a shared love of psychedelia and scads of secret, unheard songs between them drew the pair together. Many years later, after the addition of drummer Alex Abnos Secret Cities has emerged with a cocktail of Spector-esque doe-eyed romanticism, electronic flourishes indebted to minimalist composers like Terry Riley, the noisy, art damaged sensibilities of late psych groups like The United States of America.”
Their new record label, Western Vinyl (here we go magic, j tillman), has boasted that “Pink Graffiti pt. 1 finds toms stomping beneath watery strings and synths, steadily building and changing until its final, cathartic climax”. I couldn’t have said it better myself, tbh.
You may know secret cities already if you’ve been following gorilla vs bear, aquarium drunkard, or various other old school blogs since 2005 in which those blogs highly praised the band, then known as white foliage.
i don’t have a farkast for you this last week of february, but i do have a band for you to check out instead – holiday for strings. they are a swedish pop band featuring pony of thieves like us and john of peter bjorn and john- both of which received top spots in my best albums of 2009. the band will release a new album in a couple of weeks entitled favorite flavor. i’ve enjoyed the album so far for sure, the vocals resemble paleface imo, which is certainly a good thing. be sure to head over to their myspace or official site for more information. for now, enjoy a few tracks by holiday for strings and their associated acts.
this week, i will be posting covers and remixes of songs that i liked before the remix or cover, and even better after (mostly). i hope you enjoy. and be sure to check out the original versions as well.
*note: mp3’s for sampling purposes only. the source of the mp3 is credited in the media player [thanks guys]. if you represent an artist or label and want a track taken down, just let me know [unclefarkus@gmail.com].
so lately, i have really been trying to understand the concept of a hipstre and what one really is. i had planned out inside my head an entire blog post exploring different aspects of the subculture. being as i am certainly not a hipstre (or at least don’t consider myself one), i had little experience and few examples to know real knowledge of what one really is. most of all the knowledge of hipstres that i do have has come from reading hipstre runoff and listening to his blog radio show on sattelite radio for the past few years. i figured that would be a good place to begin my research of what a hipstre is by learning about both ‘carles’ and his readers. in the end, what i found was that ‘carles’ is not a hipstre at all, rather a successful businessman in pursuit of the merican dream like everybody else. just a survivor of a cruel world. a leader and an innovator. he just so happens to know a lot about relative indie music and internet memes that his minions of ‘wanna-be hipstres’ poop their pants over – information that gets him mad money from advertisers such as american apparel and the twilight soundtrack people as well as a paycheck from xm/sirius. information that also lands him ‘hipstre of the year’ [via some electronic poll on a mnstrm website]
in the end, i decided to scratch the idea of a blog post (for now, at least) investigating the hipstre subculture, but rather, dedicate a post to the man/woman/it that fascinates me so much more and has influenced my internet presence for a while, to a point to where many of my readers probably gave up on their uncle farkus. probably got mad. they didn’t understand. but losing those few readers has gained me so many more. real ‘friands’. even though we’ve never met. i have one person to thank for that. a man who has given me a place to ‘fit in’. ‘be myself’. that man is ‘carles’. who is he? what is he? what’s his ‘real’ name? is it even a he? where does he live? what’s he like? is he serious? does he have a birth certificate? was he born in merica? is he an uncle too?
is this ‘carles’?
i decided that the best place to begin my research would be by investigating popular theories that have been circulating the blogosphere for a while now. theories claiming that ‘carles’ is either bebe zeva or tao lin. or perhaps even an ‘idea’, rather a combination of posts written by ‘carles (either really named ‘charles’ or ‘carlos’), bebe, tao, and possibly other various parties such as ‘becca’ or ‘that black guy’.
examining these theories put me no closer to the true identity of ‘carles’ than catching a fish on an airplane puts you to the ocean (unless the airplane has crashed into the hudson). after spending weeks getting to know the ‘real’ bebe zeva [via formspring, facebook, twitter, and tumblr], i became convinced that she is truly just a huge fan, perhaps the biggest fan and ‘official face’ of ‘carles’ and the hipstre runoff brand.
while i think the young lady could certainly write blogs for hipstre runoff that match his level of quality, i found no evidence to suggest that she has or that she is indeed ‘the carles’. the same can be said in regards to tao lin.
evidence does suggest, however, that ‘carles’ and tao are ‘friands’ in real life. perhaps meeting in college as ‘pot luck’ roommates at a design school who became ‘bros for life’ and joined progressive university clubs while pursuing their creative interests together giving each other 98% of their support the whole time [via making music].
i think it is very viable as well that ‘luis’ from shoplifting from american apparel is ‘carles’ [via both having hispanic names and being a 'chill' bro]. and i think it is perhaps even possible that ‘carles’ is on the cover of lin’s upcoming novel, richard yates [via being ironic/anonymous].
as for becca, the black guy, and the many other ‘imposters’ on hipstre runoff, i am led to believe that they are, in fact, ‘carles’. simple observation will reveal that nothing fishy is going on there. no hackerbro. no retirement. just ‘carles’. just doing his thing. just bein alt.
after concluding that ‘carles’ is in fact one person and not a combination of popular fans + friands, i began to attempt to find out more about ‘carles’ himself through direct contact with the blogger/businessman himself. sadly, this method has proven mostly ineffective. no emails, tweets, etc from ‘carles’ other than a few aim chats where ‘cool bro’ was used a few times. i even asked jake fogelnest, the dj bro on sirius xmu radio who ’supposedly’ works with ‘carles’ if he could share any information with me. negative. maybe carles does reside in texas.
it was after this that i began to wonder if carles was even a real person. what if he was a computer? programmed by steve jobs or dov charney to get ‘mad hits’ on the internet while promoting a certain product to a certain group [via mass amounts of mac lappy + am appy references]?
believe it or not, this theory, as crazy as it may sound, was my leading theory for 2 whole days. i had planned to write an entire 2 more paragraphs to this blog explaining why. i was especially convinced when ‘indie the robot’ hosted the hipstre runoff show feat. ‘carles’ on sirius xmu a few weeks back.
i had no idea what to think. what if robots were actually taking over the world [via flight of the conchords], one subculture at a time. ‘what if perez hilton is a robot too?’, i asked my friand, crentist on mrrev. i was growing increasingly worried that everything i had been reading/believing/embracing for the past few years was all in vain. perhaps daft punk was behind it? robin williams. bicentennial man.i didn’t know. this haunted me for days. but then, suddenly, that all changed overnight. literally.
i had a dream [via black history month].
in my dream, i was back to being 9 years old. i went to the home of my friand, ‘daniel’. we were best bros. we took karate together and watched goosebumps together and stuff. but one day, as i was going to his house, i accidentally knocked on the door to the house of daniel’s neighbor. a woman came to the door. she was ugly. she was wearing a mechanic uniform and smelled like cigarettes. her hair had been permed and she was wearing a noticeably large amount of makeup on her cheeks. she asked me to come in for a drink so i did. capri sun. strawberry kiwi. it was cool. she said ‘what are you here for?’ and i told her i was here to play with daniel. and she had no idea who i was talking about. i said, ‘you know, your son’. she looked at me for what must have been 2 dream years and finally said, ‘oh, you must be talking about the boy next door’. and i said ‘oh i am at the wrong house’. she then told me i should invite her son, ‘carles’, to play with us. i told her ‘no’. i don’t play with ‘buttholes’. i then proceeded to go to daniel’s house and we played in his backyard. after playing for some time, a little boy wearing skinny jeans, funky hair, and a keut british accent peaked his head over the fence and asked if he could play power rangers too. we told him no. he was a faggot. and he should go away. then i woke up or something.
i am not kidding. that dream happened. last night. i feel like all dreams mean something. i can’t remember that part of my life too much to know for certain if the dream ever happened in real life, but if it didn’t happen exactly that way, i am pretty sure something extremely similar did happen to ‘carles’ as a child+tween. ‘carles’ was probably the kid who got picked on by the other kids. forced to play alone. listening to the bands that would later influence animal collective. living in suburbia. always on the brink of burning his house down and crashing a plane into his high school. he didn’t do that though. he persevered. he made it. he had ‘extraordinary ideas’. he is a blogger. making ‘mad money’ from a business model that only continues to expand into what i predict will eventually be a unique ‘alt social networking website’ comparable to tumblr+twitter+myspace+googlewave.
carles has given so many memes a reason to live. ‘hipster grifter’, ‘amber lamps’, ‘fake justice’, ‘kanye west’, ‘me’, ‘you’, and far too many tweens to count. he makes our life meaningful through authentic bros and meaningful alts. he helps us ’stay ahead of the curve’ known as society whether it be through memes, fashion, or music. whether ‘carles’ is a ‘true’ hipstre or not is irrelevant. what subculture any of us are a part of is irrelevant. what matters is that ‘carles’ made it. we made it. we are here. were are alive.
- ‘carles’ (ceo of the hipstre runoff brand) [via 'the twitter']
let ‘carles’ be an inspiration to us all. as we think upon his journey through hard times as a child into a mysterious bro on the internet who has a large following of loyal fans and friands, willing to do anything for him. ‘carles’ has inspired many. and in the end, it doesn’t matter the true identity of ‘carles’. residential address, dental records, and fingerprints aside, all that matters is that our friand ‘carles’ is alive and well somewhere in the blogosphere. doing what he does. for us. for the scene. for the love. for the money.
so who is ‘carles’?
i am ‘carles’.
he is ‘carles’.
they are ‘carles’
kings of leon are ‘carles’.
yall are ‘carles’.
we are ‘carles’. [via we are the world]
<3 u ‘carles’.
<3 u hipstre runoff brand.
<3 u becca.
<3 u amber lamps.
<3 u bebe zeva.
<3 u hipstre runoff fanbase.
<3 u ‘quirkly lil hro tweets’
<3 sirius xmu blog radio.
<3 u tao lin.
h8 u p4k.
will ‘carles’ win hipstre of the decade in 10 years?
he already has tbh.
