"...hallowed be thy name."

Imagine this, if you will:

A home-made hipster, art-chic bitch with a self-haircut, loafers and cigarette in hand. One Emily Carr grad who would dry shave her bush for experimental film, and who would threaten to prank future tenants by, “hiding used, and bloody tampons around the apartment”.

Do you have a clear image in your mind?

Thankfully, there were no biohazard booby-traps left for me in my room, but other than several hundred cigarette butts in a ceramic tray outside and a corded off rope set which she later returned to snap up, this previous renter’s ‘homey touch’ was dusted away quite quickly by us.

Except:
About 30 CD albums sitting on an Ikea-esque wire rack in the living room.
During my last night at that apartment, I spent 3 hours ripping almost all of them onto my hard drive. I write “almost all of them” because said Artist took off with some of the best discs (in my opinion) and discarded their cases. Calculating.
Anyway, I never really got round to chancing a listen to those hipster hymns until now. And I am not disappointed. What I hold here in my hot little iTunes library are the definitive secrets to life as a With-It Young Artist In Vancouver. As of yet, I have not had the sudden urge to tie my hair up in an extra-high bun on the top of my head, or read Vice Magazine. Yet.

I realise this post is turning into an alarmingly drawn-out jab at Vancouver Hipsters, if they even exist. I get that everyone is just ‘trying to be’. Love and above, I’m just ‘trying to be’ a person. I have nothing personal against the alternative groove the so-dubbed ‘hipsters’ in the downtown are playing at, I would only like to express fully, my inability to ever be that cool. How do they do it?

No matter how many Value Village outfits I rock with socks, no matter how many underground, undiscovered, un-sell-out albums I own, no matter how much I suffer for my art, no matter the degree to which I make fun of others for not being cutting-edge-scene-knowledgeable, I will just never be like them. Even though I try. I try so hard.

So now, all I’m left with are these songs, as there are little to no hipsters in the Nanaimo area to even shake an unlaced Doc Marten at. It is as if I’m the petite dreamer gazing up at the glowing night sky searching for my favourite constellations, wistfully wishing that it was me up there, the astronaut in a space suit cleverly modified to accommodate my top-o’-the-head bun and jagged bangs. The Alternative one with a vintage still film camera taking slightly out of focus, yet striking photographs of the first cigarette being enjoyed on the moon.

I hope it’s a Lucky Strike Red.

“Impossibly long percussion solo with background ambient recordings from a no-doubt,European train station.”