Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Young men once fretted over sculpting the future, not whether they were going to get a sweaty power-handshake. What happened?
Oct 28, 1999 | I went to a party for Details magazine the other night, with a friend of mine who is a low-to-mid-level movie star; everybody knows his face, nobody knows his name, and for some reason, only African-Americans are confident that he is a movie star at all. Our black brethren seem to have a much higher memory retention and recognition level for the more obscure celebrities, and a much more magical happiness upon spotting them in the flesh -- who knows why. "Love your work!" shouts the FedEx man, full of sweetness and light as we cross the street. "Thanks very much," mumbles Eddie. White people know Eddie's face but they always think he's someone else.
Eddie is the only reason we got into the party at all -- the ability of my name to spontaneously evaporate from guest lists is truly legendary. The big, fancy black door-guys all recognized him and hurried us importantly into the party (as opposed to making us stand in the long line of "sexy" people who were being forced to wait indefinitely behind the velvet rope, which, presumably, made those unlucky, low, uninvited pedestrian swine passing by the venue positively vomit with envy for the red-hot popularity of the empty room we were about to enter).
It was an impressive set-up: loads of modern lighting, fashion films on the wall, sleek bartenders and caterers running around in crisp Nehru jackets with electric trays. An African-American videographer shined his klieg light on Eddie and began filming us. Eddie happily turned his back on the camera like a Hollywood pro. I copied him. "Vincent Gallo and friend," the caption would probably read, later, in the edited version.
The party was full of tall, pouty, cigarette-thin, saucer-eyed girls with birth dates hovering around 1979, swaddled in rabbit fur coats and cowboy hats, being led around by the elbow by short, squat, loudmouth magazine boys with thick expensive glasses, loud sharkskin ties and boxy suits camouflaging their premature spare tires. Their personalities were all infected with the raw, metallic twang one gets when exclusively cruising for sex or money or connections to one or the other or both. It was kind of horrid and sad, all that young potential and energy, waddling into blind, obedient pursuit of the unthinking commercial pleasures provided by the Corporate Lust & Greed program. All those supposedly "hip," smart and pretty people standing around as anonymous and dead in the face as fly corpses in a lightbox.
The highlight of the evening was a performance by MTV/Viacom-approved performer Moby. Moby, who looks like a bald, sickly version of Howard Jones without the oversized yellow pants, launched into an abrasive, hammering techno-kraut-crushing machine beat and began yelling into his microphone while Windex-blue lights flooded the unfeeling faces of the uninterested, "cool" audience.
Only one short, fat office girl really got down and danced to Moby. Her enthusiasm was distastefully retardataire to the rest of the vodka-sanitized glow-worms, who leaned away from her lest her hardy involvement soil their boredom. The apathy in the room was louder than the fucking band.
It became amazing to me that youth culture ever meant anything. Rock 'n' roll was once an actual movement that people lived for and loved and cared about. Young people once had attention spans long enough to absorb subversive ideas. Young men fretted over sculpting the future and not just whether or not they were going to get a Cohiba cigar and a sweaty power-handshake and some thin pussy that night.
