In my experience, hipster parties are the ones at which people stand around trying to look cool, searching desperately for A-list hipsters to make new hipster connections to enhance their boring hipster lives. Hipsters do nothing. They are the parasites of any scene: too scared, too insecure, too fragile to show any cracks in their armor; too boring to actually create, to get outside of themselves, to risk seeming foolish, unhip.

Remember your earlier post about Dionysian revelry? My supposedly hipster party was meant to provoke such merrymaking: dancing above all. There was no entrance fee: we encouraged people to dress up and to bring a mixed tape or CD for a grab bag. If you wanted to, you could; if not, no problem. It was meant to be something akin to a kid's Halloween party or a silly slumber party. It was meant to be a celebration of summer, of our new household, a last chance to be stupid before some of us head back to school. The mixes were an opportunity to be creative, to put whatever you wanted on a tape or CD to share with an anonymous friend/stranger. You obviously took pleasure in and are proud of making your anti-mix, Jason...especially since you are now broadcasting part of it over the web. And you are apparently enjoying what some might call a very "unhip" mix you received. It's my sister's in fact (oops, there goes anonymity). She told me that her attitude in making it was one of "Fuck it, people might hate this, but these songs make me happy, make me want to dance." And what were you trying to do with yours? Shock? Provoke? Disturb? This all seems a bit reactionary. And -- you brought up Nietzsche so I'll keep bringing him up -- reactivity, as opposed to activity, creativity, affirmation, is the antithesis of the Dionysian spirit.

And costumes? Costumes allow people to become something else, someone else, for an evening. Where was yours? Were you too worried about seeming "uncool?" Would you rather have sat around and discussed our world of perpetual war? We all could have done that, Mr. Righteous. But next time, if you deign to make an appearance at another one of my parties, why don't you stop by after attending a local anti-war rally? Maybe the carnevalesque mood of the protest will lighten your party attitude.

Which brings me back to Nietzsche (ha!). He writes about active forgetting as a way to experience the present, to make manifest a Dionysian spirit. Read this before coming to our Halloween party or don't come. And, in the future, you shouldn't shit on your friends or you will soon be friendless. Don't you have more important things to write about, Mr. War Correspondent?

Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression that is responsible for the fact that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it (one might call the process ‘inpsychation’) as does the thousandfold process, involved in psychical nourishment—so-called ‘incorporation.’ To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness to make room for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight… […]—that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose and etiquette; so that it will be immediately obvious that there will be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness.