The hipster ethos, as promulgated in Vice Magazine, is indistinguishable from Ayn Rand's Objectivism

The wages of sin. Vice, May 2004.

'You and I listen to more music than anyone in the history of civilization. I don't mean more than your friend or that guy on that message board who seems to know about every buzz-worthy leaked CD before anyone else, but rather, more than any previous generation of active music fans. Think about all our MP3s and CDRs, the stuff we actually buy, and then add in the music we hear once and immediately declare isn't worth the 45 seconds we spent with it. It almost seems ridiculous, because ultimately, few of us would be willing to recommend more than but a few songs (let alone albums) to anyone outside our close-knit music circles. Digital media was supposed to satisfy the audiophiles with better sound and the businessmen with yet another kind of product to convince us...' [continued page 259 of 'Issues in Audio Marketing Today']

http://www.cc.utah.edu/~cjw4761/main/pict/suprandc.jpg

Re: Rand I do like it that she named herself after her typewriter.

I don't like the look of Heat because it's one of those faux-American British mags that came along with cluttered page layout and clunky faux-American typefaces and reviews of Hollywood rubbish. It's a classic 'inferiority complex exploitation' magazine for British people who wish they were, you know, Robert De Niro.

yes, i was about to say.

Whereas Vice is a mag that came to New York from Canada and made Americans wish they were Canadian.

it's a handy soundbite, but i don't think vice made anyone wish they were canadian. seriously.

The fact is that Vice on the screen would clearly be Harmony Korine, not Sofia Coppola. In other words, it would be a lot closer to a Fassbinder film than an Air album.

Blount has never been more OTM than about Vice/LiT.

ya'll fucking poop-dick canadians gotta get fucked somehow, eh? CANADA IS A BURNT BITCH

here's Vice editor Chris Nieratko, by the by, doin' a li'l "racial, not racist" humor in the website's "About Us" section:

http://viceland.com/issues/v10n6/htdocs/staff/iheartnj.jpg

Did you like that bit, J0hn? Did it sound like a whore wrote it, or the editor of Vice pretending to be a whore? Is it usual to read about Dworkin and MacKinnon in free mags? Do you think this article demeans women?

It was all right, I guess. When I lived in Portland most of my friends were prostitutes - guys, mainly, working near the Justice Building around 13th & Taylor. My own experience of their attitudes - toward life, their line of work, the people they met up with, and so on - does not closely mirror that of the article's author. Contempt for the tricks seemed limited to guys who'd entered the trade out of actual empty-stomach hunger; my closest friends were guys who whored because it was hard for them to find work elsewhere: the market for waiters being flooded, and my friends not having any professional training (my best friend, Brad, being dyslexic and unable to complete classes without severe kill-me-now level frustration), and job interviews being somewhat embarassing when your manner of speech outs you before you've finished saying "hello." Maybe all these are/were just excuses, I dunno. But the seven or eight working guys I was pals with and the three or four working girls who liked to hang around with them weren't real "In your face! This is what bein' a WHORE is like, yeeeah!" about it. The girls I knew talked more about going to community college and getting a CNA than about, say, the sort of thing covered in the "youth" section of Vice's A-to-Z.

Not to call into question somebody else's experience, of course - just wondering if the article mightn't have been better written as a "how it was for me" than as a "what it's like" sort of thing. Not un-entertaining, though. 6 outta 10.