Carles has been actively lobbying his readers for the title, and is handily walking away with the vote with hanging chads falling out of the pockets of his (alleged) skinny jeans. Are you going to let this happen to Kari Farrell, who not only lived the hipster lifestyle, but also ran away with all their cash? Or Dov Charney, who clad suburban regiments in the uniform of the Hipster Youth? Or Princess Coldstare who singlehandedly caused the Great Blizzard of 2009 with her icy gaze when she found out she was losing the contest to a blogging upstart?

It appears that Gawker's Hipster of the Decade contest is like a trucker hat. First the hipsters think it's trashy, then they ironically love it, and then they hate it for being played. Right now we are in the second phase. Next week — when we close the voting — they'll be selling it at Hot Topic and 14-year-olds will be wearing it to middle school.

Street Boners and TV Carnage points out that Vice's sellout supreme (hey, I'd take the money too!) Gavin McInnes thought the whole thing was "gay" until he found out he was losing to Carles. When the Boner Boys asked McInnes why we should all vote for him his response was, "I don't know. I'll piss in a bowl of Corn Flakes and eat it." We would say that was definitely "gay," except we once saw someone do that on stage at The Cock when means it's so gay without quotation marks so it can't be "gay," so it must be "hetero" or maybe "breeder?" God, this self-referential irony thing is making my head hurt.

Just go and vote, OK. Democracy is so old it's cool again, like a satin Mets jacket that says Buster on it that you bought at Beacon's Closet.

That's what this recent Financial Times profile of the Vice empire tries to grasp. It starts by looking at Vice's lavish, quarter-million dollar Halloween party and asking the very good questions: "$250,000!? Wha—-huh!? Where did they get all this money?" Here's where: Vice increased its revenue from $45-64 million in 2008 alone. Turns out it's all about what you DO AND DON'T, and we had a foul-mouthed former Vice intern annotate the various tips and tricks contained in the FT piece that you, too, can use to build a successful alternative magazine/media empire.

DO: Become an Ad Agency

With Virtue, [Vice's in-house ad agency] the business has become a one-stop shop for youth branding. At the same time as charging premiums for advertising in its own pages, the company produces video content, photoshoots and other work for less than more established advertising agencies thanks to its network of 4,000 freelance creatives from around the world.

4,000 freelance creatives! In addition to the magazine, website, Viacom-backed online video channel, record label, book publishing house, film studio and London pub (!), Vice should think about opening a chain of over-priced coffeshops to give those freelancers somewhere to park their Macbooks.

DON'T: Be Corporate

The company has always been marked by an anti-establishment approach that has infused its editorial and business approach. Only now, for example, is the company starting to create hierarchies and line managers.

Fuck hierarchies. The only thing a hierarchy is good for is to give you something to fuck your way to the top of. Line managers, though, I can deal with; just depends on what kinds of "lines" they're managing, if you catch my drift...

DO: Have an "incredibly sophisticated" audience that gets why you work "with brands and for brands"

"Since day one, we have worked with brands and for brands," explains an unapologetic Mr Simon. "We are completely transparent in what we do. Never in any of our communications will we find a cheeky way to get one over on our audience. The audience is incredibly sophisticated."

Here's how sophisticated Vice's audience is: One time, I met this girl at the Charleston and I told her I was interning for Vice. And she's like "Cool, let's go back to my place fuck." So, we go back to her place, she puts on some Finnish electronica, then calls up her ex-boyfriend and asks him if he wants to come over and have a three-way with a dude who works at Vice. He said no fucking way. But still, she was totally into it!

DON'T: Let Sketchers Advertise in Your Magazine

But while Vice's reach is global, it remains targeted at a large niche and advertisers are required to fit with this brand image. For example, it has rejected advertisers, such as footwear giant Sketchers, when they have not fit with its image.

I believe it was the great philosopher Plato who once said: "There's just something about Sketchers that screams, 'I am poor.'" Seriously, Sketchers put the "S" in "Trailer TraSh".

DO: Think Big

"We can produce better content than is on TV for pennies in the dollar and put it on phones and TV," says Mr Smith. "Eventually when we get to 25m unique [users] and have all the biggest brands in the world underwriting it, we go to Google and say, ‘If you turn on the jets we'll be the biggest network in the world and overtake MTV'."

Imagine that: It'll be like a hipster Tower of Babel, bringing together all the slightly-differing types of hipsters from all over the world and uniting them in a glorious three-day outdoor indie music festival. We'll call it: The Dell Celebration of Universal Brotherhood.

So we were warned from the outset that Smith brought a certain, er, perspective to the table.

Normally mere readers are not privileged to see the workings of a celebrity interview; that is, the long minutes of kissing up before the tape goes on. And even the kissing up when the tape is rolling usually discreetly finds its way to the cutting room floor before the final version of a Q and A goes on. In the interviews of my own career, I have worked tirelessly to shield my readers from the shamelessness that goes on in your typical profile.

But seeing as Smith was interviewing his five-year buddy, it seems he wanted to paint a scene not just of interviewer and interviewee, but of two bros just you know, like, hangin'.

Below are a few of the gotchas Smith threw down at Jonze, talking about his new adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are:

• Well, I think you did a great job on the writing, but when I was watching the movie I was thinking to myself that this must have been a hard sell to a major studio for a tent-pole release. This is obviously a big film, but it's also so intimate and artistic…

• I was thinking that this was a very brave film for you to have made because you made art even though it's financed by a conglomerate and there are so many millions of dollars involved and so many pressures against it. That's incredibly brave, and I'm proud of you.

• It's going to be huge. Are you nervous about that? You're not a public guy, and you made this thing for five years and it's your little baby and everything, and now it's going to be in, like, People magazine. You're gonna be in People! Can you believe it?

• Wow.

• That's really pretty amazing.

• It must have felt insane to finally see it all put together.

• Are you excited?

• Eat it and then lick it? 

Answers to these bold inquiries available at Vice.

[Image via North Korea Propaganda posters, which is an awesome site.]

Vice 2007, for its photo issue.
Oh good grief, who let those guys get in? Unclear. Somehow they managed to get on the roster to cover the 2007 Airirang Mass Games following several months of back-and-forth, but while North Korean officials left many of their colleagues at a consulate somewhere in "northern China" the Vice guys ingratiated themselves by getting drunk and joining a nationalist singalong with some North Korean "girls" from the Secret Police.
Key findings: They are among the only 15 spectators at the games, which feature 100,000 competitors. They find it impossible to determine whether anyone truly believes, or is simply lying about believing, all the shit they shovel about how North Korea is a glorious country whose model of self-reliance is the envy of all the world.

At the end of the museum tour, you must put on a tie before entering the final room, where you are permitted to view a wax sculpture the Chinese made of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung. You have to bow to the statue and speak in a whisper. After us, these Korean women came out of the statue room bawling their eyes out. They’d met their Great Leader. We were like, “Come on, it’s a wax statue.” But to them, it’s almost like they’ve really met him. They save up money their whole life to come to the museum done up in all their finery, tiptoe up to this statue, and cry their eyes out. And it’s really kind of a shitty statue too. One of the guys we were with said it looked like an old 1950s ad for hemorrhoid cream or something. He was right. It was sub-Madame Tussaud’s quality. (Oh, and they had a wind machine blowing its hair, like it was basking in a gentle breeze. We are not kidding.)

Parade 2007, for its "Who Is The World's Worst Dictator?" Issue
How did they get in? Contributing editor David Wallechinsky is the vice president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, so he could apply under a slightly less hard-hitting guise than Parade.
Key findings: Basketball is popular in North Korea, according to Wallechinsky's minder, because Kim Jong-il says “playing basketball will make us taller,” he notes, adding that "reports say that 7-year-old North Korean boys are 8 inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts."


Pyongyang, a 2005 graphic novel by French Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle
How'd that guy (heh) get in? On a work visa from a French Canadian animation company that, mindblowingly, outsources animation work to Pyongyang. (We are not sure how that fits in with the whole "self-reliance" part, but okay.)
Key findings: North Koreans who've visited Paris speak only of the beggars and traffic. A friend to whom he lends George Orwell's 1984 returns it two weeks later complaining that he doesn't "enjoy science fiction."




The New York Review Of Books, 2003, for a story called "A Trip To North Korea"
Huh. But NRB subscribers are not stupid at all! So how did they get in? The author is a novelist with family ties to the North who manages to slip in as a supposed delegate of some pro-North Korea group in the U.S.
Key findings: The author seems to go in with as open a mind as she can keep and then sort of starts to lose it. There are four lousy planes on the tarmac when she arrives in Pyongyang. She stays in what should be the country's most luxurious appointments and there's no hot water and very little electricity. She comes across a procession of dancers practicing for a parade in Kim Il Sung Square and is told they've been practicing for two straight days — in temperatures below zero. And in a country where nearly all books are banned, Gone With The Wind is a national favorite and Scarlett O'Hara, according to a publisher, is "the new bourgeois heroine," about which the author says "it occurred to me that it is not only a story about a civil war between North and South, but also about Scarlett, who chooses her homeland over everything. And, of course, the North wins."

Related: From Hell With Love [Time Asia]
Journey Into Kimland
The North Korea Of The Privileged
The Hidden Gulag

*Oh, his slang is outdated, you say? Yeah, check out Pyongyang, asshole!

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Slavery now
Current mood: thoughtful

Hello Friends, i'm writing this little blog to find out what people consider slavery and freedom. I've had these ideas in my mind since i was a child and they are starting to make my life really hard now. Well lets see.... My idea of slavery is not having a choice of what you want your life to be like, not being allowed to make decisions to better your life, being forced to live a certain quality of life, and my list goes on. I guess the easiest way for me to explain is by showing you how we live as americans. Why in america is everyone given a social security/tracking number at birth, is this really something necessary or government convenience. Why are all americans taught white history , when this is one of the most diverse places in the world? Why are their private schools even in elementary , is this to make certain members of society more elite ? Why are we forced to pay for education(college) that is vital for our survival in our nation? Is this a way to keep certain social classes contained and to lead them into becoming products of their environment. I know that their are such things as scholarships and loans, but what does that really mean when we could just look out for our well being. With banks closing so rapidly, what are you going to do with your hard earned money my friends and where will your money go. Are you going to continue you to pay taxes for living in a country founded on stealing,raping,lying. Paying taxes is something that peasants did because kings forced them to.Do we really want to stay ignorant, broke, deceiving, scared of one another. If all power went out tomorrow what would you do, would you be able to start a fire, would you be able to grow your own food, would you have drinking water, knowledge of how to catch and clean a fish, or even shelter. If our president declared marshal law what would you do? My friends we are all slaves in this country, i hope that you are ready for survival of the most efficient. Please teach yourself a trade or a skill, something that you can actually use if shit really hits the fan. You have to think what is graphic design going to do for you when your starving?

Some key pieces from the lawsuit:

Then it has this story called "I Peed On My Gran's Head," which, while amazing, isn't perhaps as hard-hitting as they might have wanted:

I went back to my hometown and stayed at my grandmother's house for a couple of days. One night I went to a local bar with some old friends and got really drunk. Somehow I staggered back to my gran's house and went to bed.

In the morning, all bleary-eyed, I got up and started eating breakfast. As I was doing this I noticed my grandma dragging her wet mattress out to the balcony to dry. She was silently fuming and refused to talk to me. Finally, after an hour of me asking her what was wrong, she started crying and asked me, "Are you proud of yourself?"

I had no idea what she was talking about. She proceeded to tell me that I had gotten up in the middle of the night, stumbled into her bedroom, unzipped, and started pissing on her bed while she was sleeping in it. With my pee raining down on her, she shouted at me to stop, but I screamed back at her, telling her to fuck off, and then toddled off to bed.

Musical Bonus: Golden Hours by Meatus Murder

Desperate Iraqi Refugees Turn to Sex Trade in Syria [NYT]

Other characteristics of the Vice intern: rolling up to the office around 11, wearing Nikes, wearing the Gross Jar shirt, thinking the LES is the "greatest place on earth" and spending way too much time at Max Fish. Oh, and failing to pay rent. Loser. Too bad the Gawker Roommate Service isn't up and running. Yet. Or ever, come to think of it. You all would kill each other. Then again, material!

Earlier: Gawker's Like/Hate Relationship With Vice

Reports the Chicago music blog Transmission:

The first advert, which detailed a hipster's homoerotic fantasies involving Jay-Z, largely passed without comment. But when a follow-up featured a passing dis of hip-hop clothing line Triple5Soul; the mag's editors — fearing a loss in revenue from a staple sponsor — pulled the band's card post-haste.

UPDATE: Vice emails: "The 'banned' ad in question actually did run in Vice."

Kuff 'Em If They Can't Take a Joke [Transmission via Philebrity]

Earlier: Team Party Crash: 'Vice' Magazine Girls Issue at 205