It’s almost been a year since I painted my first mural, so I decided to collect them all and publish them in one super-duper mural project. The murals have largely been created for Zizzi, who use an artist in every restaurant they open or refurbish and always set a brief which is relevant to the local area. As such, I’ve found myself painting anyone from David Bowie to Winston Churchill to Buffalo Bill.

SPONSOR

All the trash of modern pop culture heaped in one place, Flash Glam Trash shows stuff like stills from long forgotten cult films, memes like people emulating the David Bowie lightening flash, Micky Mouse ears, or the documentary pictures of a man who photographs prostitutes. Sign up and add your contribution to the mire.

I found this excellent David Bowie doll in the general store at The Drake Hotel in Toronto (which is also one of my favourite places to play at) and I had to grab it. I subsequently found out that it is one of many created by Canadian artist Suzie Smith and she’s created a whole lot of other great stuff in various media which you can see at her site. I particularly like the folded hands and the interactive comic.

A Space Oddity comprises a remix CD, with 15 new versions of classic Bowie tracks like Heroes, Let’s Dance, and Ziggy Stardust, a 100 minute mixpiece with all these new versions mixed continuously, and also a movie, synchronising this mixpiece to a re-edited version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Produced by producer Fritz von Runte, Bowie2001 was just released on the Bowie 2001 website.

Were mullets ever really ‘in’? Okay, so David Bowie rocked a decent one during his Aladdin Sane period, but then Billy Ray Cyrus went and ruined it all with his tangled mess. Amongst the hirsute members of The Rate My Mullet website, this ubiquitous hairstyle has clearly never gone out of (or perhaps, more likely, into) fashion. Now you can vote on which mullet takes the cake. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

SPONSOR

We Fell To Earth’s debut album contains grains of that desert night ambiance. Richard and Wendy’s harmonise beautifully on the likes of Lights Out, but tasty electronics are never far away, notably on the pulsing, bleeping Sovereign. We checked in with Wendy Rae Fowler and asked her about the songs that we’re on high rotation on her iPod. She started with David Bowie’s Heroes [listen below]: ‘Dreamy. This song puts me in a good mood. I love to blast it and chase the animals around the house. They like it too. I love the desperation in his voice in the last verse. It makes me wish I was him’. [Read the rest of We Fell To Earth's Secret Playlist]

From the various responses I got from my previous post about hipster hate being misguided, most people defined a hipster as people who are very young (let’s say below 25), live off of their parents, and don’t contribute to the scene they glom onto. The problem I have with this is that in my personal experience, this is not how most people define hipsters.

Vice Magazine is usually derided as being a magazine made for and by obnoxious, overly irreverent hipsters, yet one cannot deny that they embody a certain scene altogether, and indeed contribute to the contemporary cultural landscape via their record label, their promotion of certain artists, and their video blogs covering everything from the Beijing rock scene and heavy metal in Iraq to sex tourism in Japan and the gigantic island of discarded plastic floating in the Pacific.

Indeed, Vice darlings Terry Richardson and the recently deceased Dash Snow are seen as the epitome of hipsterdom, yet Richardson is well into his 40s and both he and Snow are/were prolific photographers that most certainly were capable of paying their own rents in addition to supporting their massive drug habits. Many of the prolific artists in Baltimore, where I am, would be described as hipsters, regardless of how well they support themselves or the earnestness of their art, merely because they have mullets and child-molester glasses.

Still others who responded to my post suggested that irony was integral to the definition of a hipster, yet hip-hop kids today wear non-prescription nerd glasses, punks in the 70s wore torn school uniforms and swastikas, and peace-loving hippies before them wore army jackets, all as a sort of ironic inversion of what those cultural signifiers originally meant. When Kurt Cobain began the song Territorial Pissings with a line from The Youngbloods’ Get Together, he did it sarcastically.

A tattoo of Elmo may be retarded and intended as ironic, but had Sid Vicious grown up with Sesame Street, he too may well have gotten a similar image etched into his skin. That today’s 20- and 30-somethings have grown up more saturated with self-referential pop culture than any generation before is not their fault, and the sentiment behind a silly mustache may not be too far off from David Bowie wearing women’s boots, even if it is less classy.

Finally, I should qualify what I meant when I said that hatred towards hipsters was dangerously close to hatred towards immigrants – I didn’t mean to equate the two in terms of racial bigotry, but in both cases, people draw a line between who they consider insiders and who they consider outsiders. This line depends on a lot of stereotypes, generalizations, and assumptions that while not as virulent as ethnic hatred, are still on the same spectrum of reactionary prejudice.

The rhythms and melodies in this track by The Arcade Fire roll and roll with a wonderful, stuttering urgency, breaking down tragically and heroically in parts before regrouping again for its triumphant finale. Even the great David Bowie is humbled by the intensity of the delivery and the sheer brilliance of the songwriting.