Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture - Softcover

Oakes, Kaya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805088520 ISBN 13: 9780805088526

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 2009

Synopsis

A lively examination of the spirit and practices that have made the indie movement into a powerful cultural phenomenon

You know the look: skinny jeans, Chuck Taylors, perfectly mussed bed-head hair; You know the music: Modest Mouse, the Shins, Pavement. You know the ethos: DIY with a big helping of irony. But what does it really mean to be "indie"?

As popular television shows adopt indie soundtracks and the signature style bleeds into mainstream fashion, the quirky individuality of the movement seems to be losing ground. In Slanted and Enchanted, Kaya Oakes demonstrates how this phase is part of the natural cycle of a culture that reinvents itself continuously to preserve its core ideals of experimentation, freedom, and collaboration.

Through interviews and profiles of the artists who have spearheaded the cause over the years―including Mike Watt, David Berman, Kathleen Hanna, and Dan Clowes―Oakes examines the collective creativity and cross-genre experimentation that are the hallmarks of this popular lifestyle trend. Her visits to music festivals, craft fairs, and smaller collectives around the country round out the story, providing a compelling portayal of indie life on the ground. Culminating in the current indie milieu of music, crafting, style, art, comics, and zines, Oakes reveals from whence indie came and where it will go next.

About this title

About the Author:

Kaya Oakes is the co-founder of Kitchen Sink magazine, which received the Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Magazine in 2002. Currently a writing instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, she has lived the indie life for more than twenty years.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction: Scenes from an Independent America, 2007
After a hot and stuffy Fourth of July, hungover and weary revelers woke on the fifth to find the San Francisco Bay Areae covered in a more typical summer blanket of fog. As Friday the sixth rolled around, the organizers of Oakland’s Art Murmur, a monthly gallery walk that had recently grown into a full- blown hipster street fair, expected that the crappy weather and lingering sour stomachs from barbecue and beer would probably keep people at home. It was a prospect welcomed by some of the store owners on the route in question. Art Murmur has become something of a conflict between scale and idealism. Launched a year earlier by three scrappy, funky galleries within a block’s proximity of one another whose owners hoped to attract a bigger clientele, it rapidly attracted a cadre of young and middle- aged indie artists, musicians, crafters, and hangers- on who, enticed by the prospect of an artists’ community, began to crowd downtown and West Oakland in search of cheaper rent and the camaraderie of other artists. Lower Telegraph Avenue, where the Murmur occurs, had in the 1980s and ’90s become home to several sketchy bars and boarded up businesses, as well as a brisk trade in male prostitution. Visitors drawn to the area by its newer populace of artists are likely to spot paint- spattered eccentrics in skinny jeans among the neighborhood’s majority population of immigrant store owners, street hustlers, and newly arrived loft dwellers, and all those skinny jeans wearing artists love congregating on First Fridays. More than once, the cops were called by unfriendly neighbors intolerant of the influx of noise and crowds that broke into the usual run- down but quiet monotony of the street. A recent crackdown on drinking on the block due to crowd control issues followed, and signs posted on street corners notify patrons of the ban. The festivities had even taken a violent turn at the May Art Murmur, when someone took a pipe to the head in a fight. Jen Loy, one of the owners of Mama Buzz Café and Gallery, which has, in its three years of business, become a combination play house, gallery, and per for mance venue for the local indie set that frequents the Murmur, leans over the counter and confides that "hopefully with this weather everyone’ll stay home." Jen is tiny— just under five feet tall— but her size belies a tough personality and limited tolerance for bullshit. Over the past few months, her job on First Fridays has become half police work, half counseling service, and she’s getting tired of scolding her ostensible peers. Jen wipes down the café counter as she speaks, clearly alert to the particular annoyances the day will bring. A customer tries to transfer her pint of beer to a take- out coffee cup, earning an admonition from Jen and a shake of the head. Jen and her business partner Nicole Neditch bought Mama Buzz from its previous owner when the revival of Oakland’s art scene was in its nascent stages; only one other gallery, Ego Park, was in the neighborhood at that point, and it was more of a home and studio space to its owner, Kevin Slagle, than a full- time gallery. But Mama Buzz tapped into a need in the neighborhood— a need for a gathering space, a need for the sympathetic ear of the two young, creative women who owned it, and a need for affordable coffee and food in a neighborhood with few restaurants and grocery stores nearby. Within a year of the café’s opening, business had grown and, with it, the neighborhood began to change. But Mama Buzz was just part of the changing face of the neighborhood where the Murmur takes place, which went from being an affordable area for artists to being home to a Starbucks, a Whole Foods, and multiple loft buildings within a couple of years. Similar transformations in formerly undesirable neighborhoods were taking root around the country: Brooklyn, a mostly sleepy and seedy place in the sixties and seventies, was discovered by artists in the eighties and is now swarming with hipsters and baby strollers as rents increase and condo developments pop up along with the arrival of chain retail and grocery stores like Trader Joe’s, American Apparel, and Urban Outfitters; the west side of Portland, Oregon, a haven for small art galleries for years in the eighties, is now home to designer lofts, a massive Whole Foods emporium, and a Restoration Hardware store that threaten the artists who preceded them, and similar shifts are occurring in Chicago’s Wicker Park, Providence’s west side, and even in farther- flung outposts of in de pen dent art like Omaha and Missoula. In Oakland, the evolution went like this: more collective and shambolic galleries moved into lower Telegraph in the wake of Mama Buzz and Ego Park, including 21 Grand, a mixed per for mance space and gallery. They were followed by Rock Paper Scissors Collective, a DIY dream space of zines, hand- sewn objects, printmaking classes, and knitting nights, and, most recently, two slick and Manhattanesque art spaces that stick out among the tattered buildings housing neighboring galleries like upscale loft developments stick out among nearby derelict flats and liquor stores. Esteban Sabar Gallery opened in early 2006, its owner having in turn been priced out of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, which had become home to tony boutiques and pricey restaurants. Sabar’s gallery reflects the upscaling that is beginning to bleed into lower Telegraph; on that foggy July evening, as patrons squeezed into his gallery’s multiple rooms and gawked at tasteful black- and- white photos, he waved a Chinese paper fan in front of his face and, in response to a question about the swelling size of Murmur crowds, sardonically replied, "That’s a bad thing?" Sabar has never been secretive about his ambitions for his gallery, whereas his neighbors at Mama Buzz and Rock Paper Scissors are beginning to feel overwhelmed and resentful of the crowds. Around the corner from his space, the recently opened, slickly designed Johansson Projects hosts a show called "Wunderkammer," a mixed- media set of sculpture mimicking the seventeenth century’s "cabinets of curiosity" and their collections of mammalian and aquatic skeletons and remains. A large- scale painting of a blowfish done on a mirror is selling there for fourteen thousand dollars; around the corner at Rock Paper Scissors (aka RPS), you can purchase, for five bucks, a knit cozy made to house a mix tape. The crowd is equally high and low, rich and poor, young and old. Younger people still outnumber the more monied San Franciscans and the hill- dwelling, Prius- driving types Sabar admits he’s trying to attract. Still, there are a number of graying heads in the crowd, mixing with the kids in jeans, ponchos, elaborate facial hair, and eyeglasses of every conceivable shape and size. The street outside RPS is closed off to traffic, and tables are set up where artists hawk T-shirts, buttons, burned CDs, and other homemade crafts. At one table, a shopping cart stuffed full of thrift- store clothing is labeled with a handmade sign reading "Pick a garment, pick a screen." The available assortment of print images displayed on the table features mostly stylized appliances like toasters and eggbeaters. Patrons also have the option to pay five dollars and have a custom- made item cranked out right then by the bearded proprietor, an affable guy in his late twenties who’s sporting a battered railroad cap along with a shirt identical to the ones on the table. At another table, two dreadlocked African American teenage boys in basketball jerseys try to hype the crowd and sell a mix CD they’ve made of "authentic Oakland hip- hop." At another, two women in their thirties wear

About this edition

• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0805088520
• ISBN 13: 9780805088526
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256