Seen the Scenesters Lately?

OK, so I haven't been out for quite awhile, and I spend my days with 6 year olds. I had not seen the "Scenester" Scene in Downtown Vancouver for a long time. In case you haven't either, please read on!

The crowd waiting to see 12o Days and Ratatat were total Scenesters. If you are not familiar with the term 'Scenester', please refer to the following:

According to the exprerts at Urban Dictionary, a scenester is:

A boy or girl who wears tight jeans, white studded belts, black band hoodies, bandanas, nerd glasses, 50's sunglasses, etc. They tend to shop at thrift stores because they're too "cool" to shop anywhere else. Scenesters think they're individual, but they're actually all just conforming to the current trends. You may find them listening to emo, indie, hardcore, synthpop, electronica, and many other subgenres of pop punk.

A Scenester guy might be heard saying, "I'm mother fucking X straight X edge X because it's cooler to be SXE when you could just not do drugs. I listen to the most obscured music as possible so you know I'm scener than you. My band is too cool to play at big venues. Actually, it's because we completely suck at playing music, but we're still too scene to play anywhere big."

A Scenester may hate the world while desperately seeking its attention.

Scenesters may wear any of the following:

Girls Fashion:-
Tight Trousers
Cheap Pumps
Dyed Black hair cut straight across the eye brow
Footless tights

Boys Fashion:-
Tight Trousers
All black converse
Dyed black hair swept across the face(sometimes with a blonde streak

More specifically, however, a scenester is a person who models the abstract and later specific behavior of individuals trying to make a claim on certain media,i.e. literature, art, books, poetry, movies. A trend will then arise of "packaging", at which point, genres will mix into socially acceptable grab bags of media and somehow spawn a fashion, normally causing these disillusioned individuals to start resembling the traits of characters, band members, and each other because he or she likes this " underground" lifestyle and wants to be accepted by a discriminating crowd. In short, the sucker thinks these people have all the answers and conforms to some " be- yourself-but-be-us-subcul ture". Scenesters can range from genres of music such as Indie, emo, hardcore, nerd rock,(math rock), metal heads, ska kids( skankers,Moonstompers), ravers, club kids, goth kids, mod kids,space rock,concept artists,retro throwbacks, punk, pop punk, to Donnie Darko fans and other cult movies such as Heathers or Velvet Goldmine,poetry by Bukowski or Frost, cartoons such as Sponge Bob or shows like Nip/Tuck and The Simpsons, books such as Catcher in the Rye, The Virgin Suicides, Valley of the Dolls, Ask the Dust, and occasionally, The Communist Manifesto,as most scenesters are anti-war and unless straight edge, are heavily into drugs and alcohol,nomadic,anti-reli gious,poor with rich parents, and slumming.

Essentially, Scenesters are their friends, although some people will like what they like and be accused of being scenesters by mistake. The smart scenester will say that is the case, because he or she knows it can't really be disproven except by baby pictures, second grade stories, and by God Himself.

Ratatat Rocks!

A couple weeks ago Erik and I were at a party where we overheard somebody mentioning that "Ratatat is quite possibly the coolest music in existence".

Incidentally, it just so happens that Ratatat came to Vancouver the following week, so Erik, my teacher friends and I bought tickets to see the show. Here's how it all went down:

Wednesday, March 28th 9:30pm

A boy in grey, skin tight ankle jeans stands in front of a maroon velvet rope. Music pounds through the wooden, guarded doors; deep bass penetrates all the membrane in my body. The boy looks young, though I am sure he must be at least 19. His oversized, white Chuck Taylor shoes scuff the grey concrete beneath. Years of petrified gum speckles the sidewalk. Club scene pointilism.

Po-Mo BS meets SoHo 80s retro

Ratatat takes the stage unassumingly. It is a night I will never forget. Chill beats crecendo as they slide through the infathomably small spaces between the warm oxygen molecules in the dark club.

It is not a music that one dances to grandly; rather, it takes hold of you so gently from the sliding door behind the house. Before long a hypnotic ressonance reprograms the electricity speeding through your cells and your being realizes its infinity.

In a room of 500 people, souls were speaking in languages that minds cannot read. Ratatat was the medium of the ethereal electronic exchange.

Pulse.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!


ARG.

Today sucked. I had my first lesson formally evaluated by the principal of Kitchener Elementary School and lets just say this: there are some lessons that fly, and there are others that crash and burn.

Guess which one this was?

Apparently it was so bad that he didn't even write anything down because it just wasn't worth it. And, he didn't want to talk things over until tomorrow because he had to think of what to say.

If I had an extra Paxil caplet right now, I would crush it up and snort it. Ok, well that is totally inappropriate and it is just an analogy. But, the point is that I am feeling anxiety. Despite him being quite a nice, resonable, experienced administrator, I never want to see my principal again.

Too bad that I need that professional reference so badly.
Arg.

Caught Red Handed!

Tuesday, 5:06pm

Ok, I am not a hip hop teacher. I don't know what came over me and made me think that I could make 6 year olds learn hip hop dance from me. As it turns out, more than half of them have already taken a year's worth of hip hop lessons and basically 'schooled' me and made me look like a grandma.

Today I discovered that nothing is funnier to grade 1s than finding out that a teacher stinks at something they are good at.

After about 5 minutes the kids, in their brutally honest manner, squealed with smug delight, "Ms. Nordstrom totally sucks at hip hop!"

After the 6 year olds decided that I was to be made a spectacle of, the kids demanded that I show them the various moves again. "Ms. Nordstrom, Ms. Nordstrom!! Try Krumping again!!!" "Ms. Nordstrom, show us your kick step again!!!"

They goad me, hoping to bust a gut at the teacher's expense.

I diffuse the situation by having the 'experienced' hip hop dancers take turns teaching the class one move at a time. Then, I thanked my lucky stars that it was music class again, and I was off the hook for a whole 40 minutes of teaching.

This day of teaching totally frazzled me. After I got home from school today I frantically dropped everything in the hallway, and B-lined to the wine rack. Don't worry, I don't just turn to alcohol without considering other coping options. But journalling or yoga just didn't have the same appeal as the 'nectar of the gods' (according to the Greeks).

So, I scramble to find the corkscrew, and flip open the label cutting blade. I slice open the metalic foil covering the cork in one fell swoop.

Is that blood? I look down at my hands. They are primary teacher hands: covered in finger paint, overhead projector pen, and glitter. Bloody glitter.

I press on, continuing to drive the corkscrew into the bottle deeper and deeper. Through it all, red rivulets stream down my hand but I am finding my wine opening groove and I won't stop till I am dead or dying. The wine is finally uncorked. Mission accomplished. I pause for a moment to admire my handiwork, and I realize that the whole time I was trying to open the wine, I was actually 'krumping' (or some offensive variation of krumping). No wonder I ended up slashing myself through this process.

Aha, I have a stash of band aids in my bag for emergencies. I grab a paper towel and wrap my thumb while I one handedly unzip my back pack. In true primary teacher style, I grab fistfulls of pipe cleaners and Robert Munsch books out before I get to the much needed band aids.

Things are starting to get dire, and I begin to think that I should probably have this wound assessed by a doctor. It is deep. There is now glitter stuck in it.

Yeah I should probably go to the clinic, but I just opened a bottle of wine. Its a 2006, but still.

The Sea of Tranquility

The following is a vignette from Thursday afternoon:

The grade 2s from my class were summoned to an extra music block at the end of the day. That leaves me with 10 grade ones to occupy for 40 minutes. I love music, so the interruption to my class schedule is not irritating. And, fortunately for me, at Kitchener Elementary, there are like 8 blocks of music per week...music is all the time!

With all the crazy requirements for curricular instruction these days, teachers have less and less time for reading stories to kids. It maybe happens once a week if they are lucky. So, what better time to have a story than now, I think to myself.

For the first time in ages, the one student in my class who has behavioural issues is actually present and spending time in the classroom like the other students. I ask him if he would like to choose two stories for me to read.

Yes, he would like that job very much. Ziggy comes back to the carpet with a pop-up book that is a little too young for the class, but I read it anyways.

It is a silly little book about animals that crunch and much at lunch time in the zoo. Or something like that, I am not completely sure.

I read the story with lots of funny voices. The monkeys all had British accents. For some reason that's just how monkeys talk in my mind. The kids loved it. They are rolling on the floor laughing.

I turn to the next page and a big, gay-looking elephant pops up. Thank goodness that a little girl in the front row puts up her hand just as I open the page because I am desperately searching in my mind for a way to do this elephant's voice that isn't a really offensive stereotypical gay impression. Nothing comes to me.

Paula very earnestly and matter of factly states the following "Some people shoot elephants and harvest their tusks for ivory."

Hmmm. For a grade 1, this is quite a comment to make during the reading of a pop up story book at carpet time. No voices for the elephant are coming to me, so I take her comment and go with it.

"Yes, that is right, Paula. Some people do kill elephants for their tusks." I say acknowledgingly.

"Nooooo! No they don't! They tranquilize them and so they just fall asleep and then they take the tusks out!" Ziggy, the behavioural child interjects.

"What does trankalize mean?", another student asks.

Ziggy tells the grade 1s about tranquilizing, and how "the animals get hit with darts, and it doesn't kill the animals, just makes them fall asleep. They fall asleep for a while, then they wake up, shake it off, and get up and go".

Pretty succinct, I don't need to add anything there.

The students are thinking about the new word they learned, when I notice that another student who is fascinated with death (which is troubling for a first grader...don't worry, he's involved with the school counsellor), keeps whispering "I'm going to kill an elephant, kill, kill, kill it."

I give him the disapproving teacher eye as I see another kid put his hand up and without being called upon, he says in his long, slow, whiney kid storytelling voice, "Myyy moom saaays, that when I'mmmm baad, that she wishes...that sheee could giiive me horrrse trankalizers".

I am still holding the big, gay elephant pop up book.

"Oh dear, Matthew, I am sure she is just kidding", I sputter as I am laughing almost uncontrollably. The kids don't quite know why this is so funny, but they laugh along with me anyway. That's the great thing about kids, they are always game for a good laugh.

And then, the elephant voice comes to me. I read the pages like the elephant is a Southern Belle. It works out nicely. "I'll have an ahce tea, and an oatmeal cookie" the elephant drawls to the zoo keeper.

The kids are in stitches, and by the end of this ridiculous pop-up book, so am I.

Bartender, a round of horse tranks, please!

Idioteque

Sunday, 12:32pm -A young man walks through the Lougheed Mall in Burnaby, BC. He is lost in a familiar place. Approaching the food court, he is searching for something but makes eye contact with nothing and nobody. Strangely, no one seems to see him either. What are you looking for? I wonder. I recognize the journey. Here, he is allowed everything under the sun; but, he wants nothing, though the things speak to him suductively, whisperingly.
hissingly, he seems to decide as he strides past me.

I am not going to lie, I am standing in line at the KFC (one of the more unethical corporations in the world, I should add). I instantly recall the memory of this mystery person.

He looks so out of place. When I first saw him, he passed by like a ghost. Like he knew he didn't belong, as if he was walking on the fringe of this world. Like simultaneously being inside and outside of a room.

An instant later, the tall, young man ascends the food court escalator and wears Kurt Cobain fashion before grunge was a mainstream product, packaged up to be bought.

On his back, a Bob Marley backpack.

As I am waiting at KFC, I find no less creative explanation as to what this poor soul was doing in the deafening food court of consumerism at the Lougheed Mall, than this:

After a 3 month trip to Tokyo (specifically to Yakuza hash bars),the young man travelled to the Maldives (this is where Starr Jones was vacationing before the Tsunami of 2005 hit South East Asia...why this random fact of insignificance infects part of my brain, I am unsure), where he was abducted off the beach by aliens. They dropped him off in the hub of his homeland (North Burnaby at the Lougheed Mall).

12:36pm- the young man searches, but finds meaning nowhere. 'No, there is nothing here for me,' he resolutely decides.

I imagine there is something sorrowful in his decision to leave it all and go back with the aliens, which is probably why nobody wants to look at him in the mall.

Up the escalator. He looks as bewildered as I felt when I returned from Trinidad. I remember my first foray into grocery shopping after being away in Trinidad: two hours later, when I had failed to return, Erik went out to look for me. He found me staring blankly at a display of maple syrup. My shopping cart was still empty. Did you know that there are 33 different kinds of syrup? Confronted by so much, how does one choose? The young man is wary of such conveniences.

Looking upwards, he notices that the sky is overcast.

My nuggets combo is cold. (for the record, I was at the mall eating genetically modified, hormone injected, antibiotic dependent chicken deep fried in trans-fat, while waiting for my non-environmentally friendly dry cleaning to be ready at the local Asian triad/money laundering/human trafficking ring/Dry Cleaning business)...but at $1 per shirt, who can complain?

"Go back to the aliens, commrade", I think.

12:42pm - raaaaah, raaah.

KO'd by George Foreman

Erik is lost in perplexity.

"I thought we were just gonna leave that!" he said in bamboozlement.

"We did", I agree, "we left it for a year".

The lovely Erik stops in his tracks, mouth gaping blankly, head a skew, with the words "does not compute" flashing urgently behind his glasses.

I have managed to put off my entire day of school work for 4 hours already, and just as I am moving toward my giant stack of marking, it dawns on me that it is nearing the 1 year anniversary of the BBQ Turkey Burgers...FROM HELL!!! (did I mention they were from Hell???)

So naturally, I decide that the spirit of the evil, demonically possessed BBQ Turkey Burgers FROM HELL must be exorcised from this Burnaby apartment immediately...I set out to clean the George Foreman Grill.

I must really want to procrastinate if cleaning the George Foreman Grill (a task that I have put off for almost an entire YEAR) seems more interesting/important/urgent than my actual work.

Erik shakes himself back to reality, mutters something about 'craziness' under his breath, and walks away.

For all of you who have ever had the pleasure of owning a George Foreman grill (and if you do, I am not talking about the first two months of having it when the teflon was so shiny and uncarcinogenic looking, and chicken kababs just slid right off the fabulous thing, and you diligently only used the specialized bevelled cleaning tool just as specified by the instructions...THAT IS A LIE DIPPED IN A DREAM!!!), I am talking about the, "I really think it's best for all of us if we just throw it away now...I mean, cut our losses and move on, ya know?" that happens at about one year in to owning the damn thing.

For Erik and I, I am specifically referring to the moment when the BBQ Turkey Burgers FROM HELL came into our lives.

Approximately one year later, as my fingernails are torn and blackened from the offending BBQ sauce, I find myself imagining that this must be exactly what it is like to clean Satan's toilet. And somehow, this is better than whatever else it is that I am supposed to be doing right now....oh yeah, school work!

'Well, still better,' I decide.