springtime in the masochist cafe
BROOKS, DAVID
Springtime in the Masochist Cafe, or, The Revolt Against Self-esteem By David Brooks You're in your twenties, born into the age of self-esteem. From your earliest childhood, television characters...
...The market being what it is, whole industries will spring up to cater to your rebellion against self-esteem...
...You've been named Star of the Week, Student of the Day, Kid of the Millennium...
...One young man wore baggy brown overalls with brown leather straps...
...The whole derivative stew is blended into flavor-lessness, each of the sub-eras stripped of its distinctive meaning, before being served to the young masochists at room temperature, to their complete non-satisfaction...
...At school, entire curricula have been established to enhance your sense of self-worth...
...When you begin to investigate, you will find that the fashion designers have marshaled their mighty energy to help you look as ugly and disreputable as possible...
...Her boyfriend will buy shirts several sizes too large so they can hang off his cadaverous frame...
...The white-trash look has inspired a lot of the sartorial self-mutilation of the hipsters...
...Giorgio Armani ads feature women with matted oily hair, bony anorexic chests, and sunken dark eyes that give them the pallid self-congratulatory demeanor of somebody who has just initiated a spectacularly successful suicide attempt...
...Sandra Bullock poses on the toilet for Detour...
...And it doesn't matter if you actually live in an upper-class suburb like Silverlake...
...They've crafted a hipness for post-O.J...
...Chic designers like Yohji Yamamoto now design rayon trousers perfect for a $2.99, all-you-can-eat family smorgasbord circa 1971 (although the Yamamoto pants carry a $450 price tag...
...The underground types used to stand for pleasure in their revolt against the repression of bourgeois life...
...If you can yawn big, you'll never go home alone...
...It takes hookers years of heroin and physical abuse to achieve this happening, hopeless style, but with some money and fashion sense, any bohemian can perfect the image in just a few months...
...Most people look good in black...
...Further out on Sunset Boulevard is a place called Toi's, allegedly a Quentin Tarantino hangout, that deserves an ad campaign of its own: Absolut Boredom...
...But today's masochists don't try to mimic black culture...
...But the masochist look is not just a shallow matter of fashion and appearance...
...And even though you are beautiful, you have to work arduously at being ugly...
...And no matter what we do—drugs, adultery, illicit fund-raising—nothing can mar that Inner Wonderful...
...The mavens keep declaring the look dead, but Detours magazine recently ran a fashion spread that showed a bunch of bruised, catatonic, barefoot men lying on seedy motel-room floors wearing Gucci suits...
...It began a few years ago when British stylists started taking their fashion cues from the very epitome of self-mutilators, heroin addicts...
...Helmut Lang, whose clothing line is available at Barney's and other high-end stores, is running ads showing a paler-than-pale woman with lifeless blond hair in a ripped, misshapen white tank top...
...America, an age of racial separatism in which whites are stuck with their own pathetic whiteness...
...Your shaving will be irregular, as if you were trying to gain admittance into His Majesty's Order of the Scraggly Goatee...
...A woman wore a dark slip with a fraying hem...
...After I saw the perfect masochist trudging across the 7-Eleven parking lot in Silverlake, I suddenly felt the need for a snack, so I crossed the street to the Back Door Cafe, where the regiments of the demimonde were drinking cappuccinos out of beer mugs...
...Their message was that each of us possesses an Inner Wonderful...
...If only to establish your own independence, you'll go through a period of stylish self-denigration and self-mortification...
...The rock singer Courtney Love popularized an American version of the junkie look...
...They want to project a heroic image of rugged dysfunctionalism...
...The loose cuff enhances the emaciated look, and it gives a suggestive glimpse of the blue veins of his forearm...
...There is no rage at the class structure, or at racism, or the generation gap, or uptight social codes...
...They are the ideal hues for uglification...
...Model Amy Wesson shows off her concentration-camp shoulders while downing a large can of beer at an industrial loading dock in her photo shoot for Surface...
...Then came the Broadway musical Rent and the Scottish movie Trainspotting...
...If you go to a club or coffee shop in a neighborhood like Sil-verlake or in the East Village in New York City, you'll notice immediately that black clothing is out...
...You'll go in for self-mutilation...
...You have been encouraged, appreciated, and applauded...
...The whole heroin canon is depicted here: from Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground to the Sex Pistols and now the Primitive Radio Gods...
...Rogers to Big Bird have been lovebombing you with messages about how special you are...
...The ugly look has now spread to bohemian neighborhoods everywhere...
...But now to revolt against "Free To Be You and Me" and the MTV mainstream, the rebels have to side with dysfunction...
...Between songs there was some desultory clapping, but mostly people just stood there, cigarettes dangling from lifeless fingers...
...times with their left sleeves pushed up to their elbows...
...So when it comes time to rebel—if you are the sort who does rebel—it's going to be self-esteem itself you rebel against...
...Photographers like Corrine Day and Craig McDean were shooting these hollow-eyed anti-fertility goddesses, cold and clammy with the junkie sweats, someDavid Brooks is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...It allows diners to sit in a cul-de-sac of alienation, making the same rock-rebellion gestures as their big brothers and sisters, as their parents, as their grandparents...
...You'll want to be overlit so that your features are bleached out, and underdressed so that none of your moles goes unnoticed...
...And, at least for a time, you will join the masochist economy...
...You may get your clothes designed by Chandi Lancaster, the creator of the depressingly erotic fashion line C—t Clothing...
...This is a lost generation with no one to blame but themselves...
...In their junkie-inspired stupor, the masochists are actually snobs...
...Since the countercultural terrain has been drained of liberation and self-love, the only way to rebel is to grasp the Inner Miserable...
...And in their revolt against self-esteem, they have actually created a perverse form of self-love...
...Even though you never actually do heroin, you have to appropriate the look...
...Thus, you'll not only want to look like a veteran of hundreds of porn movies, you'll want to act that way too...
...The tables and chairs have been beat up and the filthy carpet has been splattered with paint...
...The masochist look has signaled an important shift for the demimonde...
...But even the wannabes have mastered the masochistic attitude of utter boredom...
...The Gap now advertises a line of checked shorts your grandfather wore with knee-high black socks while mowing his lawn in the early 1960s...
...If there's anything original in this pose—and probably there isn't—it is that its aficionados are not blaming society for their alienation...
...It helps if you bruise easily, but if you don't, you'll want to show wide expanses of blotchy epidermis that brings to mind the tortured consumptive look of your 19th-century progenitors...
...Suddenly the demimonde is having less fun than the regular monde...
...It shows the parade of youth revolt reduced to a musty tradition, a Lenin Museum of the counterculture...
...But the air of pure ennui derives from the memorabilia on the wall...
...It's a restaurant with overly spiced Thai food that tries to look like a dive...
...K-Mart clothes, purchased secondhand at Goodwill, are the very thing a heroin addict might be seen in on a bleak Tuesday afternoon...
...The band, called "It," launched into a set with a sound that could be called "mainstream alternative," and everybody in the club just stopped and stared in the manner of zombies watching television...
...It's also got an important spiritual dimension...
...The self-esteem movement had to spawn this sort of reaction...
...And he'll keep them unbuttoned to the mid-chest level, so everyone can see the randomly spaced splotches of chest hair and the bones protruding from his sternum...
...The only makeup that appears in the masochist ads is blue or black around the eyes (for both men and women...
...Her brown-and-black tank top clung tightly, leaving no rib to the imagination, and her black bra-straps dangled loose over her shoulders...
...It gives just a hint of death pallor...
...Recently in Silverlake, an arty Los Angeles neighborhood east of Hollywood, I saw a young woman who could have served as a model for sexy masochists everywhere: skin paler than death, blank Sylvia Plath eyes, proudly post-hygiene hair, and a body as stretched and sickly as a Soviet chicken...
...Her baggy brown jeans hung so low you could see the top of her black underwear and a touch of pelvis (a protruding pelvic bone is the height of eroticism for today's emaciated avant-garde...
...You can always feel good about yourself because that's the real you...
...The easiest way to signal your rebellion is through your appearance...
...To rebel against mainstream self-indulgence, they have to stand for masochism...
...Traditionally, white hipsters have aspired to be black...
...Another wore shorts with brown and yellow checks...
...Brown and orange are in...
...In their hopelessness, there is hipness...
...Most people look terrible in brown and orange...
...You have to practice anhedonia and perfect your inability to experience pleasure in any form...
...they took all the illicit fun that used to be countercultural and made it mainstream...
...Poor skin tone is the foundation of it all...
...They can punish themselves with the parched sameness of it all...
...And if you are a mid-level rock or movie star and you are photographed in a hip magazine, you'll want to show plenty of skin, but in a spirit of sleazy ennui...
...Up front, three or four groupies tried to bounce to the music, but the rest of the crowd was utterly immobile...
...You'll want it known that things that are pleasant for other people, like sex, are for you nothing more than boring forms of self-abuse...
...From Norman Mailer to Jack Ker-ouac to Mick Jagger to early Madonna, blackness has represented a superior world of liberation, soul, and risque fun...
...T-shirts that zip partway down the front, one of the excrescences of the excruciating 1970s, were also back in evidence...
...On my foray into L.A.'s heart of hipness, I stopped by several clubs including the Viper Room, the Sunset Boulevard club where River Phoenix overdosed...
...So you'll start smoking compulsively, preferably in places with bad air circulation so your eyes can keep up that red-rimmed, teary look...
...It's not just about denigrating yourself on the outside...
...He will never button his sleeves...
...And what could be more conducive to self-hatred than that...
...Every bit of clothing and every artifact is derived from the past— from '60s thrift shops, from Saturday Night Fever, from mod or glam or punk or skaters or zoot suiters or The Brady Bunch or Bing Crosby or bowling leagues or the Little Rascals (in one club I even saw a woman bringing back the Gertrude Stein look, with a dumpy dark sweater and a long wool skirt...
...From your earliest childhood, television characters from Mr...
...But unlike the punks or the grunge rockers before you, who were vaguely anti-sex, you'll want to be sexy and have sex—only in a way that is utterly degrading...
...You have to pretend that deep inside you there is this awful dysfunction, that no matter how many platinum records you make or successful fashion shows you put on, you still have this Inner Miserable that signals your rebellion against the sunbeams working in the guidance counselor's office...
...They used to stand for freedom in the revolt against the restrictions of the establishment...
...they look down on people higher up the social scale...
...Most of the locals seemed to work in the music industry— doing quite well, as a matter of fact—and their apparel was fashionably hideous...
...And if you are ugly, you still have to work at being ugly, because in this world those who are effortlessly ugly get no credit...
...The Viper Room now caters to kids from the Valley as much as to the people the Valley kids are aping...
...Clothes are allowed to have color, of a sort...
...It's not for nothing that the band U2 recently announced their world tour at a K-Mart, while wearing polyester shirts and vinyl jackets...
...Remember, you're not only rebelling against the official self-esteem authorities, like teachers, but also the whole army of social hygienists who preach self-enhancement...
...Yet one has to admit it's a cool form of non-fun...
...The authority figures of self-esteem grew up on New Age mush and social libertinism...
...This put the next generational rebels in a bind...
...So you'll spend a lot of time talking about the scene in Flirting With Disaster in which Patricia Arquette has some guy lick her armpits...
...You still have to nurse your Miserable just to keep up your creative-rebel bona fides...
...Of course she is wearing no makeup, so the drab color-lessness she projects is just right for an afternoon spent lounging around the state mental hospital...
...And music must also be robbed of its joy...
...You'll get some lowlife with a needle and a drinking problem to engrave a tarantula tattoo on your chest...
...And you'll layer your hair coloring, blond highlights on top, black underneath—to suggest cavernous greasy depths...
...You'll uglify yourself, with scruffy chin-sproutings, baggy prison pants, oily hair, and that abused-hooker look you see in the fashion magazines...
...you'll drive a metal rod through your face and call it body piercing...
...And now, if you want to see high-priced models with the I-Just-Overdosed-in-My-Underwear look, you can open the fashion magazines or turn on a rock video and there they are...
...Bijou Phillips, who was one of the models in the seminal Calvin Klein kiddie-porn ad campaign, poses in ripped tacky underwear in a seedy hotel room for her profile in Arena...
...The masters of the masochist style have achieved such self-abnegating perfection that they will not even leave any residue when they are gone...
...To be part of this counterculture, you must distinguish yourself from all those self-indulgent baby-boom hedonists who now teach English at the high school...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 29
