It’s a vicious cycle. They (hipsters) keep making art. We (normal Brooklynites) just don’t get it. They keeping making art. We just don’t get it. They keep making art. We just don’t get it.
Our simple, uncultured minds can’t look past the pseudo-zaniness and child-like paintings, sculptures, projects and performances to see the deep, deep meaning of it all. You see, to fully understand the deep meaning of this incredible art vibe that is infiltrating and blessing our once bland and boring borough, you have to have been born outside of New York City in a suburban or rural setting; have learned about NYC through various sitcoms, magazines and blogs; or learned about it through texts and emails from a pioneering bearded and nasally friend who has already made the voyage.
So now I bring you to a hipster or as he would like to be described – art revolutionary – named Matthew Silver who has been on the pages of Diehipster.com several times before as the Bedford Avenue Dancer. See HERE and HERE, and HERE. It’s a good thing Matthew has discovered his talent - which allows him to afford to live in one of the most expensive (artificially inflated) parts of the country. Below are two more recent videos of this genius that we will never understand – unless we were one of the 100,000 artists who recently moved to Brooklyn. Before you watch them, I just want to say with all joking aside: Matthew, you are a complete waste of space and oxygen. You are embarrassing. No – you are not just some care-free, quirky, urban art fanatic. You suck. Watch all your fucking YouTube videos out there over and over again; the amount of normal people actually stopping to watch you or applaud you is almost non-existent compared to the number of people that just walk by you in disgust or don’t even realize you are there. That is a sure sign that you should stop this behavior. YOU ARE FUCKING HORRIBLE AND EMBARRASSING. I would have more respect for you if you held ANY kind of job and never acted like an attention-starved 9 year old again.
i wish someone pushed him onto the tracks at myrtle/wykcoff. i only had to watch for 2 seconds to hate this guy like poison.
that’s the 1st thing that came to my mind also… if not that, at least punch him in the face.
Spic-spic-spic, spic-ity-itch!!!! Are you a spic? You sound like a spic…hanging out here with a bunch of spic lovers. You want to beat someone up? Then beat up a spic in McCarren Park like these kids did:
http://gothamist.com/2012/07/12/teen_speaks_about_getting_beaten_wi.php
Spic-spic-spic, it’s always the spics…
Spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-spic-ity-itch!
Jealous of little dick much Stevie?
I’m now convinced more than ever that Stevie lost his Meghan to some Latino. Poor Stevie. Even GG Allin causes him penis envy.
What the f**ck is this – “Jerk de Soleil”?
Jerk de Soleil!!! Great phrase man.
Good one!
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! Fucking great!
Nice!
hahahahahahahahaha oh god this made my lunch time
Haha, nice one
Also featured on this site back in the early days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTEnY19HrOA&feature=relmfu
Here he is back in 2007 when he first arrived in Billyworld. Thank you Mr and Mrs Silver for sending your son to be our artistic savior. We never knew what real art was before he showed us the way.
Unfortunately I live a couple of blocks away from Bedford Avenue, so I’ve been subjected to him and this sort of crap just about every day. I remember when Vera Cruz, the restaurant he’s in front of, was a tiny little shoe repair shop. Back when this dickweed would have been straight-jacketed and brought to a psychiatric unit.
Ash your cigarettes into a jar full of water for a week or two (or get your friends to if you don’t smoke). Fill a spray bottle with the evil stinky black shit that results (filter it so you won’t clog your spray nozzle). I think you know what to do next.
FYI I’m in Melbourne, Oz. A great city for arts and food and music and culture in general, but a more hipster-friendly town you won’t find in this nation – there are ironic fucking spectacle frames and “bushranger beards” and shoegaze bands and flannel shirts (that cost $80 but look like the $8 ones from the supermarket) and wool caps during shorts-weather everywhere I look. The thing is, these prats stopped being “alternative” a long time ago and are now an identifiable marketing demographic, if the ad campaigns for certain local beers are anything to go by. Hear that, you hairy ironic shits? You’re so adept at drawing attention to yourselves that the fucking advertisers are using mock-up hipster models to sell consumables to your sustainable pompous arses.
I remember doing stupid things like this…
…when I was 8 or so.
I grew out of it long ago, like most people.
Jesus Christ, why can’t someone punch this cunt in the face on camera?
That’s the wrong thing to do. Seriously. I knew plenty of this type in grade school and high school (yes, I grew up in Culdesacia), and they take the beatings as vindications that they’re right and everyone else is Wrong. The best thing to do is what the vast majority of the people on that subway train were doing: ignoring the fuck out of him. If they look at him and snort, he’ll just work harder at his little Ritalin-deficit temper tantrum. If they tell him to shut the hell up and leave them alone, he’ll let loose a 45-minute vowel movement as to why he’s a genius and they should be honored to be on the same train as him. If they beat the shit out of him, he can cry “I’m being oppressed!” and beg for funds for his hospitalization. And if someone were to take him out back and put a large-caliber bullet through the vacuum in his skull, he’d be held up as a martyr by hundreds of other try-hards hoping to get his level of attention. (And they wouldn’t be trying so hard if Mommy and Daddy had taught them that tantrums get ignored, but that’s a different story.)
That’s why the best thing to do with this little turd is what you’d do to a three-year-old who decides to throw a full-bore fit in the middle of a grocery store. You don’t smack him. You don’t yell at him. Just walk away, not making eye contact the whole time. Either he’ll get his shit together and act like a rational human being, or he’ll go somewhere else where his shit-flinging chimpanzee act will get the response he so desperately craves. Now, if his parents come out to New York and beat the living fuck out of him with a baseball bat, I’d pay admission.
This is what happens when “progressives” are allowed to breed. I’ve seen kids who crave attention because their parents completely ignore them. In this case this manifests itself more into wanting friends or being part of a team, which isn’t so bad.
Then you have Twatwaffle McGhee over here. Here’s a wastrel who obviousley grew up with no boundaries. Wanna stay up all night and eat Ho-Hos? Write on the newly painted walls (of your own house, the neighbor’s and your aunt’s)? Want to go to school dressed as a nazi milk maid. Sure snookum’s you’re a special, creative snowflake!
Probably the only thing in life I’ve done correctly is make my nine year old aware of sh*theels like this, how not to be like them and how they ruin society.
This summer he has one of these snowflakes in his swim lane – which also included three other kids – all of which swim with my son in the fall and spring. They’re fine tuning themselves for a meet, Like my son they take swimming VERY seriously.
This little S.O.B just wouldn’t let up. For 90 minutes he was acting up, goofing off bothering the other kids.
So practice is over. Snowflake prances into the locker room, followed by my son and the other kids in his lane.
A few minutes pass and I her a nasally scream. My son walks out with his bag, grabs my arm and says, “let’s go. now”.
Huh?
C’mon dad. Now!
I turn around to see Snowflake yelling for his mom. . He has what appears to be a first rate wedgie. On his forehead is an imprint of a circle.
“Did you do that”?
“…I helped with the wedgie. Let’s go…”
“What the hell happened to his head?”
“Combination lock. C’mon…let’s go!”.
NExt practice, The kid is in my son’s lane again. No theatrics. Nothing.
Wedgies for hipsters… perfect. If only they weren’t wearing such tight jeans. Worth a try though.
Hey, hey, don’t blame this on progressives. Every I know came from progressive loins and none of them act like this fuckmonkey.
Everyone*
Define “progressive”. I dont get that term. The only people I can think of that aren’t “progressive” would be radical Muslims an maybe Amish. I mean aren’t we all progressive? Doesnt time keep on tickin’?
“Progressive” is the new/old word for liberal. FDR originally coined it and Hilary Clinton revived it.
Oh, sorta like a zombie. Or Godzilla. I get it now. Another word for “Douchebag.”
Progressivism predates FDR. The term was used in the 1912 election to describe Wilson and the dems as well as Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose faction of the Republican party. You can thank them for prohibition and the current nanny-state shithole we reside in. and FDR did fuckall, WWII has helped him to be historically rehabilitated, but the 30s were an abject failure in terms of policy. The term is nothing more than an attempt to put a shine on the turd of govt expansion into private life. After all, that’s “progress”.
What Urban Infidel said.
I don’t use the term “progressive” in the classical sense. FDR was a progressive and he
led us through WW2. Kennedy was a progressive as well. He gave NASA it’s start.
No I use the word progressive much like progressives use the term “Nazi” or “Conservative”. To me progressivesare the OWS crowds, hipsters and parents who raise their kids to believe they are the center of the universe. They’re the people set out to destroy society.
I apologize if I’ve offended and true progressives.
No, not everyone is progressive by any means if you’re talking about a majority of individual members wanting social evolution. For example, the current resistance to legalizing gay marriage is a pretty clear case of most people preferring conventional social models and so vote accordingly. That’s an active, not passive, effort to resist social progress.
now everyone is going to bitch about u bringing up politics into this. ;D
let’s just say that there’s some really bad parenting here in the cases of those over 30 and still doing this stuff
i can excuse the college kids and 20s. but when u r 35 and going around doing this stuff and NOT making money as an “artist” (and i guarantee u this guy isn’t making money) then it’s been a decade overdue for a REAL CAREER.
There are performance artists that everyone here would hate that make a living for themselves and aren’t grant, welfare or mommy&daddy leeches. They are so few I could probably count them on both hands and toes. They also have real acting and design skills so there you go… It takes skill sets to make an honest living and not be a leech.
I certainly agree with the typification, and know exactly who you’re talking about, but a better term is “helicopter parents” and “spoiled brats.”
My dad has a cousin in Staten Island. Just retired from Key Food where he worked as a butcher.. He’s been an artist all life. raised two kids, owns a vacation home. He continues to make a really nice chunk of change painting murals, portraits, etc…IN HIS SPARE TIME. He laso never had a need for natural light, a loft, coffee houses, unicycles, or performance artists impersonating orangutans on goof balls. Supplies were cheap because they were included in his estimates.
Sure hipsters would laugh at his art and call it “mainstream” kitschy or “pedestrian”.
But I don’t see many B-burgers making enogh at their art to buy a vacation home.
You’re overlooking their potential customers: mommy & daddy back in Wyoming.
I find loud and public ridicule quite effective. Especially if you have chicks with you to laugh along at this clown.
Now that works, too. It probably explains why Stevie continues to come over here and shit all over the place, because he doesn’t have to see the girls he lusted for in high school laughing in his face. (Admittedly, he didn’t see it back then, either. It’s kinda hard to hear the laughter when the anime club is giving you a swirly.)
Ed Sanders: There’s a problem with opening your act to the gutter. I mean,it’s like dabbling in Satanism, or experimenting in certain life-styles, or certain types of drugs, that open you up- I mean, I’m not a religious person, but you open up that crack, it can get you. So you have to be careful.
The problem with the hippies was that there developed a hostility within the counterculture itself, between those who had, like, the equivalent of a trust fund versus those who had to live by their wits. It’s true, for instance, that blacks were somewhat resentful of the hippies by the Summer of Love, 1967, because their perception was that these kids were drawing paisley swirls on their Sam Flax writing pads, burning incense, and taking acid, but hose kids could get out of there anytime they wanted to.
They could go back home. They could call their mom and say, “Get me outta here.” Whereas someone who was raised in a project on Columbia Street and was hanging out on the edge of Tompkins Square Park can’t escape. Those kids don’t have anyplace to go. They can’t go back to Great Neck, they can’t go back to Baltimore. They’re trapped.
So there developed another kind, more of a lumpen hippie, who really came from an abused childhood- from parents that hated them, from parents that threw them out. Maybe they came from a religious family that would call them sluts or say “You had an abortion, get out of here” or “I found birth control pills in your purse, get out of here, go away.” And those kids fermented into a kind of hostile street person. Punk types.
-page 21-22, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
…
Oh, I’m going to have to disagree here Leroy in terms of ignoring temper tantrums.
I learned not to throw a tantrum after my first one. It was lightening fast corporal punishment right there in the aisle; decisive, painful, and left no room for doubt about the connection between my action and my mom’s disapproval of my behavior. Mothers have to learn a wicked good aim LOL Before I could even start that toddler, overly dramatic cry to what is the shock of being stopped, rather than actually physically hurt, she said in a very even tone, no fury or anything,”I told you to stop it. I meant it. Do NOT act like that.” Plop kid in cart, ignore crying, and carry on shopping. And that was that. It never happened again. My folks were too busy and worked too hard to tolerate trying to drag around a bunch of screaming brats. We learnt to obey Mom because if she got so stressed she had to turn to Dad….well, lol…that was NOT something you wanted to face and usually only heard stories of from an older sibling.
I think Matthew was raised to be kidult on a perpetual Disney ride. Reality means nothing. It has no value to grown boys, and I do MEAN ‘boys’. I don’t know anything about his education or if he bothered with it or how much of a business mind he actually has about it all. He’s at least learned some SEO tricks. A boy can say to himself,”All I have to do is wear a superman cape in the subway a couple times of week and the ad revenue from my youtube vids etc etc etc, pay the rent” And maybe that’s all that type of mentality needs for themselves. But I think he’d have to be actually quite nuts to think when he’s 50, ANYONE will find his behavior amusing. They have built so much emphasis onto the value of youth, that they are all doomed to cannibalize each other and run around in fits of panic when they turn 40. Which, personally, I would find hilarious to see them inherit the mantle of “Oh no, a wrinkle..omg omg omg” and a mad dash to the plastic surgeons office. It won’t help, because their neices and nephews who will be hitting THEIR twenties, will have ZERO tolerance, I suspect, for any of them.
psssttt, hey stevie…..Karma’s a bitch and its name is Die Hipster.
Because they’re too busy ignoring him.
Although all the videos make me want to rip his molars out with a pair of vise grips. It’s the subway video that tells the story. The guy is an instigator. I don’t see any quirky Zooeys and Ethans – just normal working stiffs. Typical of unsophisticated real NY-ers.
A fitting ending would be if all the commuters would have pulled him down and beaten him to a pulp – with the subway door unable to close because his head was in the way.
Folks – this is what happens when you have helicopter parents. They heap praise every little bowel movement and non-accomplishment you do. Then you move to Brooklyn to take the world by storm
and realize that the world (save for Gothamist) doesn’t really give a crap about you. So mommy and daddy pay your bills
and you become more and more desperate for attention. I’ wouldn’t be surprised this guy ultimately resorts to serial killing, walking into a propeller or blow himself up to make his mark.
So out of desperation, you do this.
I think he’s more of a wannabe instigator. Like you said, no Megans or Zoeys around to impress; so he goes even more ape because nobody’s playing into his deranged game. The normal people just ignore him, hoping he’ll either take it somewhere else or STFU. Or maybe commit suicide. The boy is really ripe for a nice long vacation in a soft room in Happydale.
I would love to take a North Korean cop standing on the DMZ facing South, and set him about oh, twenty feet from Matthew anywhere he goes and all the time.
The rigid, unmoving body and expressionless, unreadable face and eyes just staring would not be very amusing to HIM for very long I assure you. He’d try, without success, to move the soldier. Then he would try to ignore him because he thinks that’s what the soldier’s doing. But the soldier never goes away and has that powerful vibe that causes onlookers to wonder what he is capable of. But the soldier never answers, and this makes the pondering worse in their heads. It would come faster in Matthews head, especially if the soldier could be wherever and whenever Matthew went somewhere. Like a good Japanese horror flick lol.
No need to punch him, but a good bit of psychological warfare might push him into the therapists office and out of the subways.
Or just wait for a subway accident to happen. He’s bound to slip running around in satin ballet shoes eventually.
This isn’t art. I’ve seen plenty of performance art in my time, going back to the early 80s. And as stupid and annoying as it was, this is worse. Now it’s all about being as openly juvenile as possible. They should just start publicly wearing diapers already and get it over with.
The Bronx is the last bastion of real New York. This Matthew guy would be shot dead if he pulled any shenanigans on a downtown (or uptown) # 2,5,4,6, or D train.
I think parts of Staten Island are still hipster no-go zones too.
Nah, south Brooklyn has ZERO. I love it. I protect it.
As do I. You would not believe how much my blood pressure has come down. Which is funny when im on the F and in goes through Neuiw Breuekelyn I start to stroke out again.
You’ll occasionally find a dead one in the dumpster on 18th Ave and 68th near the produce and fish markets.
Right near where I am…..i swear it wasnt me! hahahahaha
Is that a kazoo in your pocket or did you just see a dead hipster?
Don’t worry the invaders from Calihiowiscopennyltucky will make their way to Bay ridge. I foresee Sunset Park as being the new DMZ – no longer the Greenwood cemetary.
I’ve seen them in Sunset Park. Only a few right now. It’s just a matter of time..
Greenwood is their playground. Concerts, tours, poetry, dancing. Respect for the dead ? Consideration for mourners ? Oh please ! How bourgeois.
The villiage Voice has a writer named L Nichols that draws cartoons while waiting for his food of local restaurants.He recently discovered Roll N Roaster in Sheepshead,Sheepsheadbites.com gets wet when they hear anything about the hood so they seemed to enjoy the idea of having these Brooklyn bedbug breeders and even offered a suggestion of what to order next time they visit.Guess what I saw walking past this weekend,A bike rack outside with 3 bikes with 14ft seats,I didn’t have to inside to see what visited.
You definitely notice that these little performances by culdesacia’s finest Caspers never seem to take place on the 4/5/6. Why isn’t adult infant Maddox, and his one person Megan-with bangs and granny dress fanclub taking the opportunity of using the captive audience on the 4/5 express when it goes from 86th to 125th St. without interruption? I’m sure we all know the answer to that one.
On another note, if I see one more summer scarf today, I’m gonna snap. It’s getting fucking ridiculous.
Yesterday I was temporarily trapped in an tiny elevator with a Meghan and a bearded Caleb (both in white tank tops showing off their nasty pasty hairy skin, he with a fedora and a summer scarf). For a moment, I almost went all “Drive” on them, except instead of kissing the Meghan, I would have ripped out her eyeballs with her own femur. Alas, the moment passed…
Here’s some hipster art I shot yesterday in my sorely lamentable nabe of Williamsburg. Now these transplanted fools are mocking us.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46896052@N00/7556202346/in/set-72157630543765852
And Grampa can kick your pasty little ass right into the river. Little shits. Worse than graffiti…
wow that is actually racist as hell….so much for liberal idealism…all they need is their 4th reich to rise and they’re all set…
Clearly a Lucied Frued / Francis Bacon rip off …. as usual totally unoriginal. Muppets.
Lucien
What a fucking tool! Go back to Ohio with your high-wire act! Oh like ya you need your face twisted off! That would be art you fucking pencil-neck waste of space!
He’s from Jersey.
From National Review:
“….Sometimes on Sundays I take my boys to a Starbucks, get them snacks and a Sunday paper, and we read the comics pages together. I figure this is a family tradition that won’t live on for much longer; actual dead-tree newspapers may be a rare sight by the time they grow up. We have our local Starbucks, and the staff there is warm, and welcoming, and immensely patient about the thermonuclear explosion of crumbs and spills that my boys inevitably leave in their wake.
But a few weeks ago, we went to a different Starbucks, one not far from a playground in one of Arlington’s nicer neighborhoods. And the clientele was . . . different. You know the type: Beard. Skinny. Vintage t-shirt. Probably a piercing or two, definitely a tattoo. If they lived in New York, they would live in Brooklyn.
And while none of these guys fainted in the presence of two small boys demanding updates on the latest from Brewster Rockit, Red and Rover, and Spiderman, I definitely got the feeling that our presence was disruptive to their perusal of the New York Times book-review section or their work on their screenplay. Nothing vocal, just regular disapproving looks in our direction. How dare a breeder like myself desecrate their temple of almost-urban cool.
I dare not lash out too much at slackers; a couple of wrong turns in life and I could easily have turned into a character in a Kevin Smith movie. But if parenthood is indeed the harder choice, it would be nice if appreciation of it could be found more widely in society. Hey, you in the Starbucks comfy chair, in the retro glasses, carrying your stuff in a messenger bag, looking at my boys as if they’re pint-sized Huns coming to sack Rome — there’s a whole world out there beyond your comfortable, sheltered existence, full of poop and runny noses and toilet-training misadventures and stepping on a Lego piece barefoot in the middle of the night. We’re only ensuring the propagation of the species, fellas. A little patience for our brief interruption of your child-free world would be appreciated.”
This is great
Hipsters? Child-free world? Ha! Maybe they think so….
Hipsters seem to despise the living shit out of anybody who does anything… or at least anybody who tries hard at something that actually matters (they’ll love you well enough if you are trying hard to get attention, but if you’re trying hard to put food on your own table, you’re horrible).
With them disliking parents, there’s even more reason. They thrive on being the center of attention… but for anyone who is a parent, they know they can’t get that person’s full attention, because there’s a kid who actually NEEDS that attention.
Plus, they can’t afford to be seen around children, because then who would call them adults?
Hipsters don’t want to be seen around kids because they can’t come to terms with the fact that they AREN’T kids anymore. They want to avoid all adult responsibilities or flip them to fit their very weak mindstates and stay perpetually young.
Like today. I was in this vintage store that buys and sells clothes and had a garbage bag of old clothes to sell. This young kid who had to of been like 13-14 comes in looking at all these shoes and bags and stuff wearing an Obey hat. He talks to me. I say what’s up to him. He asks me “you like that vintage stuff pretty much” and I wholeheartedly admit to it. He says to me you ever heard of Obey (The Shepard Fairey Street Art Product/Brand/Tage/Poster/Legend/whatever)? And I say, I’ve known about Obey for years! But I generally was just talking to the young kid and treating him with respect and valuing his opinion cause when it comes to the stuff i like, I’m not afraid to talk to people about no matter who they are.
Hipsters would never do that. They think they’re too good for that and that’s sad and
pathetic. They seem to have no respect for kids, the elderly, anybody that works a job that isn’t “creative”, anybody that isn’t from the same (familial) income bracket and that’s just wack as hell to me. Some of these types (i say this as a 27 year old)…I just have to shake my head at them anymore. I honestly can’t even consider them adults. and that’s because they don’t want to be. They don’t understand that one doesn’t have to sacrifice their individuality or tastes just because they get older and have to work and fend for
themselves. Don’t me Mr. Mid-Life Crisis Harley driver but don’t be the 43-year old College student/guy on the couch either.
I’ve worked with kids all over the place too…from skateboarding related events, to community organizations. No hipster would do that stuff unless it involved forcing someone’s 8-year old to listen to their prefabricated drivel about their idealistic lifestyles
and how they “should” grow up and what they should be into.
Listen Pat, you WANT the hipsters to stay free of childbearing. Trust me on this.
When hipsters breed shit (literally) like this happens:
Meet “Elimination Training”
This is a childrearing method designed by hipsters that believes that babies should never wear diapers. Yep. It’s just like it sounds. Let the loaves relieve themselves “naturally” without diapers, anywhere.
http://www.diaperfreebaby.org/
“Elimination Communication (EC) is NOT potty training.”
Sure, but these guys ARE full of shit. Did I just get vaulted into the darkest pesthole of the Third World? Did they just emerge from the Stone Age? WTF??? That’s beyond stupid.
You know Caleb and Zoey won’t pick up the “deposits,” they’ll just wait for them to compost naturally. And that, gang, is child endangerment.
Well little MoonBeam’s deposits are holy and smell like roses, or so says Caleb & Zoey the proud hipster parents that let Jr. take a dump at the table next to you at the diner.
I’ve noticed many situations where the hipsters create biohazards – their bedbugs, lice infested beards, composting in their apartments, etc etc. It’s only natural that they’d have hipster junior “eliminating” while youre trying to enjoy your sandwich.
Pretty soon all of you will get to watch Meghans new performance art – squatting in the dirt there in brooklyn with her large cankles and dumpling planting a dumpling on your sidewalk.
They could just bottle it and sell it as ‘night soil’ for the ‘local’ rooftop farms.
I’m here to tell you that if hipster junior takes a shit on my sandwich I’m going to take hipster duhddy outside and beat his ass. ARREST ME.
Depends™.
As much as I hate National Review (mainly because it functions as a welfare scheme for fuckwits like Jonah Goldberg), this guy is pretty dead on.
Do not come to South Brooklyn or S.I. you spoon-fed fucking talentless skell!
What if someone, anyone, no names in particular, stood up, whipped it out and pissed on him ?
Would that qualify as performance art , critique or merely a misdemeanor ?
Inquiring minds want to know.
He pisses on art, you piss on him.
* fin *
Only if it winds up on YT.
This is a brilliant idea. If someone were willing to *risk* arrest for pissing on this guy – just say for sake of argument, there were such a person… I don’t see the cops arresting.. lol
This is not only stupid, but offensive to genuine people with mental problems who can’t help acting like that.
Matt Groening said it best years ago in Life in Hell – How to annoy a performance artist – “Didn’t I see that on The Gong Show?”
THIS.
And the SOB knows that he’s mimicking the behavior of the mentally ill in need – but he doesn’t care and in fact enjoys it. he enjoys the attention of course. he perpetuates scorn, prejudice and mistreatment of the mentally ill.
so true
Yep, that shows how long Matt Groening lived in Portland. It also showed how little patience he had with the famed Portland Coma (waiting incessantly for someone else to do the work, and then rushing in to take credit and payment after the real work was done) that he no longer lives in Portland.
I hate to say it like this, but I would love to murder this guy and anyone else who is like him. These are the fucking people displacing us from our homes. Fuck them. This is why some of us have to move into ghettos and more hood areas.
wut.
You know none of this shit (and I’m talking about the usual panhandlers as well) is tolerated on the suburban Metro North, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroads but we have to put up with it. Next time this happens , we all need to pull out an insurance policy and start to sell it very loudly, to drown out these scumbags. About 1.23 in after the TCM commercial, you will see my point.
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/224553/Take-the-Money-and-Run-Movie-Clip-Good-Day-s-Work.html
This is supposed to be “performing”? Maybe it’s just my artistically deficient brain (after all, I live out here by Coney Island, where I’ve never seen a single cultured artist who has all the time in the world to teach me, not here), but it looks to me more like this guy sat and brainstormed everything he could think of to attract attention. Negative attention, at that. It would be great if someone put in to have him committed.
Too bad something like this doesn’t happen to him. Performance art work accident:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2170971/Illusionist-rushed-hospital-hook-eye-trick-goes-hideously-wrong.html
We can only hope!
Hahahhahahaha that would never happen to a hipster, because that requires that your show actually involve props and equipment that didn’t come from a day care center.
You mean he couldn’t be persuaded to eat live hand grenades while swinging from a wire?
One can only hope. If I ever see him somewhere, I’ll make that suggestion. Now, that’s a performance I could really enjoy.
If it weren’t for security cameras and damn i-phones I imagine this cumstain would be knifed up like a thanksgiving turkey by every normal self-respecting passerby!
I mean, that’s the thing that pisses me off; he’s gonna get in the face of some laborer coming off a 12 hour shift on a construction site who is just sitting there half dead waiting to get home, crack open a cold one and catch an inning or 2 of the Mets or Yanks before passing out; Matthew the adult infant attention whoring piece of shit is gonna make his noise, and is gonna get fuckin rocked when the poor guy just can’t take anymore. By the time the dude gets in his door, there will be a lawsuit from Matthew the piece of shit’s enabling Midwestern daddy waiting for him.
If this turdpile fell on the tracks as the train was approaching, I wouldn’t make the slightest attempt to help him.
what these fucks don’t understand is that those of us who do and would punch him, are neither afraid of jail or lawsuits
i’m honestly amazed that they have managed to propagate in brooklyn, but saw the shift back around ’98/99…oh, and ‘so-bro’ is very much on their iRadar’s….when a ‘ NY REAL ESTATE’ app is boldly advertised on youtube….well…..
I love performance art, but when it actually has meaning. This here is just sad and painful to watch. How old is this guy anyway? Looks 33, but acts like 7.
Oh lord. Warning some NSFW stuff here…
Must’ve smelled like the Fulton Fish Market. PU!
HHAHAH! Seriously. That part left my mouth hanging open.
I’m almost embarrassed for them. What’s wrong with these people?
The guy in plastic bull head chained outside has a wife expecting a baby that night and he’s laying like garbage in the street like that. Where does one even begin?
One has to sacrifice for one’s “art.” Instead of “Son, I remember the day you were born” he’ll be saying “Son, the day you were born I was lying shoeless for hours on a Brooklyn street wearing a bull’s head.” Hopefully the son will smack him upside the head
How does ANYONE see this shit and think it’s good?
We had this guy on here before too. The day he lay on the street in the blue cow mask, his son was being born in the hospital. Talk about classy.
Ah.. It’s the first time I’m seeing it. This is a big part of the reason why I rejected the art world a long time ago even though I was an artist. It was too silly even then and the inhabitants and their art, generally insufferable. I just couldn’t play along with the bullshit.
Can we move the chain from the light pole to the SUVs bumper?
More from Rob Andrews, “the Minotaur.”
http://www.andrewsautomatic.com/index.php?/ongoing/grappling-door/
I can’t fucking understand this. I mean….what fucking useless shit.
Useless and BO-RING!
—
Jumping in a Pair of Air Jordans 1,000,000 times
Performance
Location variable
Ongoing
—
Nothing says “art” like having a half-assed Greco-Roman exhibit with one guy wearing dirty undies.
Hey Look. Hipsters have found yet another creative way to spread diseases.
http://www.andrewsautomatic.com/index.php?/projects/blood-draw/
The minotaur is rolled out and bled. The blood is sold with old malevolence for stiffness, strength, more energy, another chance, erasure. He’s left behind after the deal. Malingerers take what’s left over and shake his chains. Or walk away.
English Kills Gallery
with Rafael Sanchez
In participation with Maximum Perception Performance Festival
Brooklyn, NY
January 15, 2011
Duration: 35 Minutes
scroll right to view
:05 is a great shot of meghan’s cankles
This guy is just a total disgrace, and a public nuisance, really. His “art” fails in every way. If I was on that train, I would have elbowed him in the nose.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays the latest superhero. The Hipster Beater.
OMG I HATE THIS DOUCHEBAG he even has a pathetic attention-whoring facebook page which I want to report for abuse- I feel abused for having had to look at it
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Matthew-Silver-the-Great-Performer/276288122399733
His FB page is nearly as bad as his ‘art’.
What really needs to happen folks, not violence, but a few to go out there, tackle the bearded fucks into an alley and SHAVE THOSE NASTY ASS LICE INFESTED NESTS OFF OF THEIR STUPID FACES. that is all.
There is an upside to this. Gut busting belly laughs are good for your health
and this column and its subject matter provide a lot of those!
I love how that one guy, missing a tooth, was like “Im making fun of you…shut up”
I mean, if that guys making fun of you…..well, you are the lowest of low.
He needs to be committed, this video footage can be used as proof.
And I’ve noticed a disturbing trend here at die hipster:
hipsters abusing the comments section with their performance art. long repeating text screeds and other nonsense.
we really need more muscle cleaning this shit up. this aint north brooklyn. no performance art allowed please! love all my pals here and die hipster!
They prove our point with their behavior — especially with the racist shit. They really are their own worst enemies.
“You see, to fully understand the deep meaning of this incredible art vibe that is infiltrating and blessing our once bland and boring borough, you have to have been born outside of New York City in a suburban or rural setting; have learned about NYC through various sitcoms, magazines and blogs; or learned about it through texts and emails from a pioneering bearded and nasally friend who has already made the voyage”
HILARIOUS
it’s just a matter of time before somebody who’s actually crazy shoves a screwdriver through this idiot’s eyeball. He’s not crazy; he just an attention seeking parasite with time on his hands. Just you wait, this waste of life will end up getting shanked.
that 2nd video should be entitled : “The birth of your inner talentless moron”
1000% true…i kill his videos seconds in simply because i find him so BORING…if it were 1978 and he were andy kaufman, it would be mildly amusing….but it’s just….nothing…
Talk about NOT understand art. A Hunters point building made from/with oxidized iron aka Rust..
East of East – http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2012/07/getting-rusty-in-lic.html
Not understanding art – http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2012/07/hey-that-rust-is-supposed-to-be-there.html
The complainers about rust on the sidewalk are WRONG – the sidewalk is the pre-construction sidewalk and the finished facade system does incorporate a gutter system that catches all the runoff. Only the final sewer drain connection for that gutter is pending, which is why we haven’t repaved yet.”
Great blog! Bookmarked it. Thanks!
I made a comment the other day that a good majority of these hipsters seem to be Jewish, and of course I was vehemently disagreed with but last I checked Silver wasn’t a gentile name.
You were disagreed with because your statement was inaccurate and it reeked of race/ethnicity baiting (a tactic favored by hiptards to paint the readership of DH as racis, anti-semitic or even anti-White). I DO notice a disproportionate number of Jews among hipsters in the SAME WAY I notice a disproportionate number of Jews in the punk, hardcore, skinhead, underground hip-hop, and metal scenes. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb (much like you did) and say the number of Jews in metal and hardcore scene alone outnumber the jews in the hiptard scene. The only thing this implies is that Jews are attracted to subcultures dealing with art or music. Speaking of Jews, I think I’ll put on some Necro or Ill Bill.
I agree with facethefacts….as a Jewish artist myself, we dominate the art and music scene.
I’m half Jewish and a NYC native, so what the fuck is YOUR problem?
I (unfortunately) had to cross through Union Square this past Tuesday evening, and I’m 99% sure I saw this fucking skel peddling for cash while smashing computer parts on the curb. I’m just glad he’s out of Brooklyn.
Well you see, Union Square is on the exact same latitude as the Bedford Avenue L Train Stop so the hipster feels safe to do all the attention-whoring activities they do in Brooklyn.
You know what really pissed me the fuck off? People were actually paying attention to him. He had a captive audience. I fucking pray that a bus swerves to miss a cat, careens into the park and smears everyone into a skidmark.
And I say 99% sure because he actually had a sign that said “The Great Matthew S***er”. At the time I couldn’t remember his last name from a glance, but after reading this post and seeing his face, I’m positive it was him.
Plain and simple… This hump definitely needs a serious ass kicking! Artistically done, mind you, with crowbars and sledge hammers, his blood spatters on a canvas. Then he can say, “he died for his art.” His death became is art and people would remember him for 12 minutes and move on to the next living excrement pontificating on the streets of New York.
Yes and to cap off this hipster beating, tap into your “inner child” like a one-year-old and defecate on his General Grant beard. He wouldn’t know the difference in smell.
How long before Mr. Silver and his crew of hipster sissies are over here complaining about “violence” and “threats” and “being oppressed for being an artist?” 3…2…1……
I couldn’t even watch it more than 30 seconds through! What a silly embarrassment. What’s even sadder is this guy actually believes hes got talent. Guess he came up in the”everybody’s a winner and you’re so unique” childhood.
Let your hate flow thru you:
http://www.maninwhitedress.com/
Now you’ve done it DH. Now you’ve unleashed the demons from Hell. The hipstrinity of Stevie, Edd and Matthew Silver will torment this site for all of eternity (or all three of them get beaten to pulp, whichever comes first).
Let the hating begin:
http://www.maninwhitedress.com/?p=2207
I’M NOT A HIPSTER – I’m a village idiot.
Posted on July 14, 2012 by Matthew
So this guy wrote about me from his site http://diehipster.wordpress.com/
He doesn’t author his articles. He’s got a potty mouth. I can’t take him seriously and so I’m posting his article on my site. I believe in my work, I make people laugh, simple. Hipsters don’t busk for money. I’m not a hipster.
The actual link: http://diehipster.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/real-brooklynites-just-dont-understand-art/
# of comments on this single post by Die Hipster: 193
I didn’t see any of his posts on his stupid blog that had any comments. I bet he gets the most traffic ever this week from people going there from the link you just posted.
Oh, and that guy just looks like a village idiot.
“I’m a village idiot”
Well, he’s half-right.
I want to stab this guy. I couldn’t get through 10 seconds of a single video
I dunno. I think he’s a pretty talented comedian.
Musta gone to CCA.
HERRO STEVIE!!!
You’re so easy to figure out. Hell, I bet you secretly lust for Matthew in those little shorts he wears. Do you fantasize about being sodomized with a rubber snake too? Does he make you feel good after losing your little redhead?
You are wrong. Mathew whatever is NOT a hipster.
He is something else. That you don’t get.
He’s a complete moron and his parents are likely ashamed that he carries their genetics. What else do I need to “get?”
I’ll give you that — he’s definitely something else. He’s not a hiptard but, something a hiptard aspires to be. I don’t know what species he is. Like a hipster, he’s annoying as hell — but unlike a hipster, he’s authentically/genuinely annoying as hell. He has “annoying” down to a science. He has mastery of his “annoyingness”. He can turn it off and on. Hipsters can’t do that. They’re annoying even why they’re trying not to be.
Perhaps it’s the good mood that I’m in (I”m feeling pretty “live and let live”), but I saw him get punched out (scripted) in one of his non-live videos (the one about him farting) as well as as some self-deprecating humor — not very hipsterish. I would still love to see him running like hell from a group of Hells Angels or Chingalings.
FUCK! “They’re annoying even WHEN they’re trying not to be”.
Ah, the old ‘you just don’t GET it’ line from every artist wannabe throughout time.
When someone writes a boo, it is NOT up to the reader to determine what the author intends. It’s up to the author to convey it. If the reader even says,”I don’t get it.:” that in itself is a valid criticism. But you don’t BLAME the reader for ‘not getting it’. It’s the AUTHORS job.
I better stop before my desire to SCREAM SOME SENSE INTO YOU by using CAPS gets out of control. Argh…
Silver’s ‘work’ is not work. He’s, at best, a prop performer beneath even Carrot Top. You wanna drag out toys and hammers and pots and pans and wires and blankies and diapers and then shout at people passing by. Wow, what amazing effort!! What attention to detail and proof of study!!! What…what…what antics!! (sarcastic tone intended).
Hate to tell you this, but GG Allin and Karen Finley were there before you and they did the whole concept of confrontation and abstraction much, much better. Which is saying something but I’d bet you just wouldn’t ‘get it’.
lol
‘boo’ should be ‘book’, sorry..
Pingback: I’M NOT A HIPSTER – I’m a village idiot. | Matthew Silver
Why is he allowed to “perform” in the first place? Does NY not have laws preventing people from scamming tourists by pretending to be mentally challenged and homeless? I mean, why is he not being charged as a con artist? He is either SERIOUSLY mentally ill and should be placed in protective custody or he is a con artist. Either way, he’s a waste of space and shouldn’t be allowed to act like that in public (unless he is actually mentally challenged). He has no respect for people with real mental struggles.
Sadly, I know people just like him… they’re everywhere. I finally started deleting all hipsters from my Facebook friend list when I couldn’t stand their bs updates anymore. What upsets me the most is that it’s my peers who are ruining everything from cities to art and even parts of our language (like “quirky”). I wish they would get a job like the rest of us artists who are responsible for our own lives. I would be ashamed to be 35 and have my hand out like that! I have already had to begun supporting my parent. These people need to grow the f up.
Pingback: I have a Hater. He thinks I’m a hipster. | Matthew Silver
Ha! So you’re saying you would rather have him stop?! How much fun would that be? NONE. It would be as fun as reading this article. You missed the point… Wake up. Life is all around you and you’re missing it by writing shit like this. Matt Silver, I applaud you.
And he’s so annoying it makes me want to rip his head off and shit down his throat.
Either you’re actually Matthew or you’re a sad sack of gullible shit.
actually – real brooklynites DON’T understand art, lol. you guys (both hipster and the new “anti-hipster” hipsters) are products of a reduction in arts education funding from the last decade – and a recession that turned you guys into “professional critics” because you need to justify being uneducated. sure, he’s annoying, maybe you don’t think he’s the greatest artist – but why this turns into a hate-post is… well, i think it says more about you than about him. True story about the reduction in arts education. Liberals said it would affect the youth of today – and it did.
I’m a native. My parents were artists. I’m an artist. This guy sucks. Plain and simple.
Yeah. The fact that you cite your parents being artists as any cred for you as an artist, i think says it all. (“You know my dad owns a car dealership!”). Let’s say what’s really going on here. He’s getting more attention than you think he deserves and you’re bagging on him for that. That’s great. Maybe he does get more attention than he deserves – but that’s different from saying that he’s a bad artist. Also “Plain and simple” is not an argument. This is what i’m saying about lack of arts education.
I have no ‘cred’ according some some little snot nose Matthew Silver fan? That’s funny. Maybe you need a refund on your arts education.
you’re a fukkin idiot. THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES! This is not fukkin art and you are a fukkin moron for believing it is.
Playing the lowest possible common denominator [ranting like a 30 something-year-old infant] in a confrontational way just to get attention is not actual art. There’s no ‘there’ there. Since he’s just looking for attention, well he’s got that. And here we are just a bunch of New Yorkers having fun mocking him. Isn’t that the point? He’s got our attention for 15 minutes. Why all the outrage?
Those who are getting all serious about “The Great Performer” need an ideology check.
Okay – this is slightly better in terms of getting to an actual critique. You feel that he’s doing something like shock art – which has been criticized for just trying to grab people’s attention. But – there’s a long history of art that tries to play on the interaction with the audience in ways that can be new. Richard Serra probably – any person who does an installation piece – anybody who does performance art. Incidentally – i’m not getting all serious – i’m just really trying to understand, at minimum what you’re saying. This is more clear than what you said before.
Well at least, unlike Serra, Silver hasn’t killed anyone. …yet..
No, urban. I said the fact that you cite your parents as cred is pretty telling of what you think about art. I actually haven’t said much about Matthew Silver – and even hypothesized that he might be getting more attention than he deserves. You need to work on your reading comprehension skills. (As a blogger, you don’t feel that journalism requires that?). Maybe it wasn’t just arts education that declined in the last decade…. Barone. You need to learn a really basic distinction between two questions: “what is art” and “what is good art”. Are you saying that he’s not good art, and just being hyperbolic? Or are you just being willfully dense? I’m not trying to be insulting, i’m really just curious.
Really? Telling of what? I love art. I went to The Art Students League on 57th Street, an historic un-accredited art school, just for the love of art, not for a degree or for prestige.
http://www.theartstudentsleague.org/
YOUR entire argument is not only illogical, but it also serves to prove exactly what is being observed by others here. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what I’m saying since you all believe in ‘getting it’ LOL
Let’s get something nice a sparkling clear – and to the shock of many of my fellow colleagues here – I went to art school. More specifically, I attended a school in the prestigious “East Coast Consortium of Art Schools” … I’m not going to tell you which one but, it’s an important one. I do believe this qualifies me to critique Mr Silver’s “art” in the instance that you feel our other fine participants here are somehow “unqualified” for being “guidos” or whatever label you wish to attach. “Guidos” are artists too. And so are a whole bunch of non-hipsters.
Mr. Silver is a hipster through and through. He’s even go the lice infested beard. There’s nothing artistic about anything he does, he just stinks and and has a stinky beard. That’s my critique.
The best thing that could happen to Mr Silver is for a couple of old school guidos to take him in an alley and teach him to man-up.
Barone – i’m not looking for cred in the sense of credentials. I was ridiculing what’s her name for not providing an explanation, and instead giving credentials. The minimum requirement for presenting an argument in this context is to provide reasons for your belief that he is not an artist (that would be real credentials). Unlike what’s her name, I think i see some reasons here. You feel that his act is very simplistic – it has no depth to it? And so because of that, you feel that his getting a lot of attention is undeserved, and that he is not what you feel he claims to be – a great artist of some sort – because that is inconsistent with being simplistic. Am i getting closer?
How is he any different from the insane and/or severely intoxicated bum on the subway who takes handouts from uncomfortable people who wish he would just go away? As with that bum, people only stop to see the train wreck… very few actually see him as an artist, much less do they take him seriously.
And he doesn’t make people feel uncomfortable because of their restrictive ideals – he makes them feel uncomfortable because his behavior is so far outside of the norm that people wonder if they should call the cops and help him get some kind of treatment. Some of them believe he is severely mentally challenged and support him to feel good about themselves. Others are hipsters who are so high on their own farts that they can’t see that their behavior is inappropriate and embarrassing.
He is not even skilled at the performance art he attempts. Some of us still feel that standards are important. Without them, we have a society where everyone is average or below average and we often don’t give or receive high quality goods and services. If he were performing in private venues only, I wouldn’t care about his vocation. It is one thing to sell tickets to your sad excuse for a show. It is another thing to ‘perform’ in public areas where people are basically forced to walk past you to get where they are going.
This is not a matter of native NYers (or anyone else) not understanding or appreciating art. NYC has roots in the arts that are deeper than most other places in the US. I do think it is interesting that outsiders have the balls to act like they are the lifeblood of a city that is so vibrant and full of all kinds of culture – and existed this way long before they ever dreamed of ‘going urban’.
My biggest objection to Mr Silver, aside from his “art” being as ugly as his lice infested beard, is that he is perpetuating problems for the truly mentally ill by mimicking their behaviors in public. WHERE IS MR SILVER’S EMPATHY AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY?
Exactly
How is any different than ‘bums’? Nice.
Hmm..let me count the ways…
The vast majority of homeless people are in that condition for many reasons but here are a few to cite: 1) there is a high percentage that suffere drug and alcohol abuse issues and/or 2) have been gravely abused during childhood that led to a variety of maladaptive behaviors with various repurcussions and/or 3) a series of combined layoffs resulting in environmental devestation and/or 4) unexpected and catastrophic illness impacting already financially destitute or seriously challenged living expenses.
Hipsters like Matthew otoh, while certainly behaviorially challenged are well past the point of normal parenting and choose to remain financially dependent on aging parents. So, who are the real ‘bums’ exactly?
In all that psycho-babble about reductionism, a concept that I don’t think you really grasp, I think you’re missing a serious point here: It’s the talent that makes someone an artist not the degree. The talent is inborn and art school serves only to hone those talents. And it does not take an art degree or a masters degree of any sort to tell the difference between a good artist and a fucking hack. Anyone who has to resort to shock performance to get themselves noticed as an artist is the lowest form of life in the art world. Pure hey look at meeee-ism.
There’s too much over emphasis on the credentials and not the merits of the art or its criticism just as there’s too many talentless hacks who’ve convinced themselves that they’re “gifted”.
Here we go again…
…typical hipster response. All critique = ‘Hate’.
Similar to a little child getting scolded for doing something wrong and whining,”Why are you being meannnn to meeeee?”
Grow the fuck up already.
Your cynicism is really ugly. Matthew Silver is sincere about what he does. Get to know him personally. He’s not some attention-starved rich kid (and he’s about as far from the stereotypical idea of hipster as anyone you could imagine). He is a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool weirdo. I wish there were more.
Preston: your wish has come true. I want you to put on a silly costume and act like a retard in a subway. See??? Anybody can be like Matthew; we just choose not too for obvious reasons. Also let me ask you – why does he do all his “performances” in hipster infested areas? Funny how he never stands on a Brighton beach corner and acts like that, isn’t it?
My respect for the dude would go up 100% and then some if he performed in the more “ethnic” or “risky” areas where there’s a chance he’d have to really “suffer” for his art.
Fuck his “sincerity”, Preston. his nonsense is not skillfully creative, thought-provoking, or even dangerous. He definitely is seeking attention with his annoying half-ass “performances” (that any fruitcake with unlimited time can pull out their ass) and doing this shit in some of the country’s most expensive neighborhoods. Also, which is it? Is he a self-promoting “artist” with zero talent or a mentally-challenged “weirdo”?
How anyone can look at the world today and think there aren’t enough people who’ve jumped on the bandwagon of being “weird”, I don’t know.
You want to stand out and be weird by the standards of your peer group? And you want to do it in Williamsburg? The most individual, alternative, quirky thing you could do there is to get in shape, get a traditional job and get a conventionally attractive girlfriend.
Why doesn’t he give that a go if he wants to be “different” in 2012? Why don’t you? Then I’ll credit you with original thinking.
Larry the Bedford Ave. Ranter was alot wierder, more dangerous and actually alot more fun to watch. Even better was watching hiptards and frat boys/girls try to engage in conversation with him. He ran all over their asses.
This Writer doesn’t seem to understand anything about “art.” It is a big mistake to think that hipsters make art. They don’t. They make a cool parties, events, and even exhibitions, but they just make everything “cool” and “consumable.” Is Matthew Silver a hipster? I don’t think so. He is an absurd anti-artist as a lunatic/comedian. He claims himself to be a “great performer.” This statement is a joke by itself, which challenges and ridicules the pretentiousness of what is properly considered “performance.” While his performance looks a series of nonsense at the first sight, a close examination reveals that he is constantly addressing the fundamental issues in our lives, such as love, friendship, absurdity of existence and art-making itself from a variety of perspectives. This article only reveals the writer’s ignorance.
I completely agree. Matthew Silver plays the fool, something that the writer is too afraid to play. These are the pathetic ramblings of a frightened cynic. Very sad. This blog serves only to perpetuate the privileged, judgmental attitude of which it claims to be opposed. Why would any of you want to strip this city of any more personality? Obviously, this person does not understand The Great Performer.
Shave that fuckin’ pile off of your upper lip and then we can talk.
Pretentious much? Kick rocks you fauxhemian tryhard.
Click through his profile to his facebook page for a real laff -
Art & Philosophy Graduate – check
Minimum wage “chocolate artisam” – check
“experimental film instructor” at some place called 3rd Ward – essentially a space paid for by parents where everyone plays all day – there’s no actual business or business model for this place that i can see
4 years out of college and he’s still not making a living.
I think the ghost of Steve Jobs should sue for plagiarism.
Then the fool is being duly mocked. That’s the whole point of his schtick, right? It is you who have missed his main point entirely.
What the hell is that on your head?
He isn’t really “playing the fool.” He’s just trying to get attention. We think he looks foolish, but that’s not his point. He thinks he’s showing people how you be quirky and zany in the world or whatever, and that he’s speaking out against people for looking down on those who are non-conventional, but the fact that he’s only doing this in areas where people approve of that kind of thing shows that he isn’t just doing it to look like a fool, and there’s no on he’s trying to get this “message” out to. He preaches to the choir.
Plus, nobody’s gonna get any credit in my book for intentionally trying to look foolish, even if that were what he’s doing. The way life plays out, all of us ending up being fools at one point or another. Pretending to be foolish is just as chicken-shit as pretending that you’ve never played the fool. It’s like he’s saying, “Look at me! I’m not a fool! Every stupid thing I do is done on purpose and has a point!” But that’s not true, so fuck him.
I personally consider Matt Silver’s shenanigans to be more akin to “shock for the sake of shock” and “IRL trolling” than to “art”. I’ll even go against the general consensus of my fellow DH readers and say that Mr. Silver can be entertaining AT TIMES (he’s mostly annoying to the nth degree and runs the risk of getting chin-checked). He described himself as the “village idiot” and I’ll go with that.
You’re only partially right about hipsters — they don’t create art. When they’re not posting pretentious screeds about who does ,or doesn’t understand art, they’re bastardizing, plagiarizing and cheapening art. You can’t throw a rock at a crowd of oxygen wasting fauxhemian assrags without hitting a talentless, self-proclaimed “artistic type”.
As far as “cool” hipster parties and events go — lol! There is nothing cool about hipsters. Nada. “Cool” is what hipsters strive for and what always eludes them — no matter how hard they try.
Most of us here are no strangers to “shocking” or “unconventional” expression, and Mr. Silver really isn’t doing anything new since shock- based performance art is nothing new. When he was still consuming oxygen, GG Allin also constantly addressed “the fundamental issues in our lives, such as love, friendship, absurdity of existence and art-making itself from a variety of perspectives. ” Despite this, I’d be hard pressed to call GG’s expression art — even though it’s definitely closer to the traditional concept of art.
well.. let’s see – I think GG Allin was genuinely mentally ill. I think most people would agree with this. At the same time, he actually did make something that resembled art/music. His stuff was rough, crude and violent. GG was no sissy like Mr. Silver. He also didn’t live off of his parents like the staycationers in Brooklyn do. He was rough, often homeless, and on enough drugs to supply an entire hospital surgical division. Hipsters WILL NEVER be GG Allin because they are too soft.
That being said. I never got into his stuff. But I do know a lot about “performance art” and unfortunately it’s devolved into “do whatever you want and call it art.” And actually, it’s not just performance art suffering from this nowadays, it’s almost ALL ART and it’s due to the hipster saturation in art. .. The parenting philosophy that has brought us the foam padding the entire world so that little Xander never has to be an adult has also infected us with “do whatever you want and call it art.”
I’ll keep this story short – but recently I had another experience with this. I work as a designer and happened to be on a job with an old washed up hipster that’s lived on welfare most of her life having kid after kid and not taking responsibility decides that she’s now a “designer.” Ok fine. Well turns out that now the company is in about 100k to it’s forehead in lawsuits. Why? Because the “pretend designer” was ripping stock icons and putting them inside an app product and releasing it for sale in the app store. LOL
ART is FIRST a skill – like math or writing or chemistry. SECOND a “talent” – The skill part is the most important one.
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with GG’s music, and a WTF?/hate with him as a person. There was definitely something wrong with GG’s wiring. However, as you have mentioned (in so many words), GG was the “real deal”. What you saw with him is what you got.
You are 100% on target when you say “ART is FIRST a skill . . . SECOND a “talent” – The skill part is the most important one”. Here’s another perspective . . . I would also say, that “talent” is the raw, base material (the molten steel) and the skill is everything else which hardens and shapes that steel into a sword (sorry, it’s Manowar Saturday). I said this on 9GAG a while back, but traditionally art is valued because it’s often something that not everyone can do.
For example, the Japanese “Sumi-e” monochrome landscape paintings (inspired by the Tang Dynasty landscape paintings) are valued because of the skill of the Zen monk’s brush strokes which takes years to master. Despite the fact the paintings are monochrome, the realistic tones give the illusion of color — it’s as if your mind fills in the appropriate colors. The paintings are also aesthetically/visually pleasing. The Japanese seem to be big on visual aesthetics and it appears to permeate nearly all aspects of their culture. What can be said of hipster visual aesthetics? LOL!
Hipsters who are, for the most part, talentless hacks need a nebulous definition of art. If “everything is art”, then you can’t laugh hysterically at these morons who expect accolades and recognition for shit that literally ANYONE can do if they cared. Truth be told, hiptards only care about the recognition and status that comes with being an artist. If a hiptard can get away with taking credit for someone else’s expression (it’s happened before), they will do it without hesitation.
I think it’s great you’ve raised the topic of these zen masters and their work. .. The old washed up welfare-hipster-pretend-designer at the company I mentioned pissed me off so badly that I ended up leaving the job for fear that she would drag me into her lawsuit-in-the-making activities. We didn’t get along at all. You see, the fact that I had skills and standards made her cry and accuse me of being intolerant with OCD. Yeah. When you take pride in your WORK you have OCD to these hiptards.
You did the smart thing by leaving that job. People like her will try to ruin your life and, with a convincing enough sob story, will have the court and the state backing her play.
I’ve dealt with people of her ilk — not hiptards, but run-of-the-mill incompetents who hated to be reminded of just how worthless they were. These are the people who would always try to find fault with your work or find away to blame you for the their own fuck-ups. They’re good at maintaining a facade of competence, but as time (their enemy) wears on, their worthlessness becomes apparent to all.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make, I don’t think you do either, and I’m not entirely sure there is one.
Let me “analyse” your comment in the same way you tried to do with his performances. From what I can tell, you threw a list of pretentious pseudo-art critic cliches over your argument to disguise the fact that it doesn’t really pick a side, doesn’t back up any of its claims, and shuffles to a conclusion of “stop being a hater.” While your argument looks a series of nonsense at the first sight, a close examination reveals that you are constantly trying to justify liking something with zero substance because you’ve begun to work out just how embarrassing the trend you’ve decided to be part of is about to become. This comment only reveals the writer’s insecurity.
Whatever this maggot does has already been done by Andy Kaufman. He’s a hack. Nothing spectacular.
A few disconnected points: 1. This guy isn’t what I would call a hipster (I understand that a hate-hipsters site dedicated entirely to hating hipsters needs to air on the side of labeling many things “hipster” that mightn’t otherwise be so labeled). 2. I don’t think it matters as much as it is being implied that it does, where these “brooklyn ‘artists’” were born, where they came from, or where was born the audience that either “gets” them or doesn’t “get” them. 3. Personally, I was born in NYC. I’ve lived here for all but four years of my life; and this guy isn’t the end of the world to me, nor adversely inspiring enough for me to want to punch him. I’ve in person seen him do his thing, twice; and when I did it was a fun, unexpected, diversionary moment of my day. 4. There is lame, overly-simplistic art that has a sense of conceptual entitlement, and it’s findable everywhere; it has very little to do with geography, birthplaces, influxes, gentrification, or recent trends. 5. I don’t think this guy is lame. 6. I actually think he’s daring-er than people spending time emoting at their keyboard over how great it would feel to punch him.
Wrong, it has A LOT to do with “geography, birthplaces, influxes, gentrification, or recent trends” as those things are part and parcel of the modern hiptard phenomena. HIPSTERS are at the forefront of portraying ubiquitous “lame, overly-simplistic art that has a sense of conceptual entitlement” as some kind of new vanguard in modern art. 98% of their art is shit. The other 2% is either recycled, plagiarized or simply OK.
‘Daring-er’?
Honey, all you have to do is write ‘more daring’. Is that so difficult? ‘Daring-er’ is a kind of word mangling that marks you out as a hipster flunkie and probable Silver apologist.
Yeah, the guy and his routine do not trouble my day one bit, and I believe such hardened hate should be reserved for “deserving-er” types. In that sense alone, I’m not a “probably,” but rather a certain “Silver apologist.”
I think you’re desperate to read a lot into a hyphen. It’s the way the thought arrived at my mind, so it became how I typed it.
I’ve never lingered in a small town in the U.S., let alone a major city, where I didn’t soon find perpetration of too-easy, shyster art (even if a town has one and a half art galleries to its name, there’s usually some tucked away in a corner). We live in New York City, which earlier than we can recall has been a place where people from all over the world have come to first try out the art inside their typically young and evolving mind, or refine it before a larger audience. It’s not all going to be so-to-speak gold. I think it’s brave to be this guy, Silver. My opinion of his flailing, wailing performances doesn’t arrive tethered to much of the predisposition of him personally, that do the opinions of the majority here.
I think his particular “art” (or , if you prefer, his “antics”) leaves hims pretty vulnerable, at least in the traditional sense of vulnerable, and I believe there something worthy of interest about that, for its own sake, even before begins the more logical debate of the quality of it as “art.”
And let’s add one more important point here to this whole “performance art” shenanigans -
The tenured staff at art schools perpetuate this brainwashing in their “performance art” departments. None of these kids are going to have jobs and the ones that do, will likely end up working as strippers.
These are the hard cold facts. All of these idiots needs to be fired from their jobs for turning out a generation of NON ARTISTS
This is very true. I had a close friend who attended a prestigious private art school on the East Coast. She had always been creative and ‘different’, but art school changed her. She focused quite a bit on performance art – even stuck around for the Master’s. When she graduated, she couldn’t find work within her field and turned to sex work. By that time, she was also deeply engaged in hipsterdom (including constantly manipulating her parents for money well into her late 20′s and early 30′s). A year ago, she moved out to CA to pursue a career in porn.
Now, before some of you flip out on me, I should tell you that I don’t judge my friend for her vocation (I do judge her for being a hipster lol). However, I have seen the places where her vocation has harmed her and it isn’t pretty. I also am not dissing art school. As an artist who has to do other things to pay the bills, I would love to take time off for art school… but I have too much on my plate. I’m simply agreeing with Barone and sharing related experience.
Reality – as cruel as it may be – is that Matthew Silver is at best a panhandling street performer and at worst a con artist. His actions amuse a few, confuse many, and disturb others. He begs for money while mocking disabled people. That isn’t art and it certainly doesn’t make him special or gifted. I hope he will get some help, begin practicing proper hygiene, and work on getting a job that doesn’t involve acting like a total moron while begging for money. I’m not holding my breath.
Such a sad story and I am sorry to say that these art school “performance art” departments turn out record numbers of sex workers, both female and male, yes the boys too. I have seen and heard your story with my own eyes and ears dozens of times.
Performance Art is a scam. It’s a scam when it’s taught by itself and leads to a degree program. It’s not a theatre degree so forget about any acting creds to get even an average joe acting job like a stand in. It’s nowheresville. The only career route is the sex business or barista. Or MAYBE… if you fuck the right people, MAYBE a teaching position of some sort in a “performance art” program IF you have a Masters. Maybe. There are what a handful of “performance art” teaching jobs in the whole country?
But let’s step back a moment – sex work in my book is an honest days work for an honest days pay. Nothing wrong with that. Needs to be legal, just like weed. It’s certainly more honest than what Mr. Silver is doing for a living! But the thing is, you don’t need a Masters or even a BFA to work in the sex business. So why waste your time in performance art studio for this?? Just get right to it.
If performance art is taught in art school it needs to happen in a one course scenario, an elective, if you will. Whole departments specializing in this need to be dissolved completely for the scam they are pulling on both students and the taxpayers.
I respectfully disagree that sex work, which is an extremely generalized term, should be legalized and equating it with pot.
You can find many legitimate sources, usually from former sex workers themselves, that will explain the immense devestation such ‘work’ wreaks in the lives of those folks.
There are far fewer such cases of degradation for the average stoner.
a job isnt everything Fuckface. dont worry too much about others..focus on your perfect job driven life. You will die on your job for you job and your wife will most likely be out there fucking a hipsto while you are job loving the job life with a job. you sucking big T
Matt (or Stevie),
My perfect job driven life has given me my own apartment, a car, a pension plan, savings and work I truly enjoy doing. I am not dependent on parents or anyone else for a living, I can get any woman I want (right now anything over $40k will do that) and I will be proud to look back on my life and count my achievements.
You, on the other hand, have what exactly? An embarrassing, pointless, meaningless, circus act (which no self-respecting circus would touch with a 50 foot pole) which makes you look like a toddler throwing a tantrum. I’m only surprised you don’t throw poo around the train. You don’t make money off it so what the fuck are you living on? Mom and Pop, I thought so. Look in the mirror and ask yourself, how much money you have burnt through to live in Brooklyn while acting like an autistic retard. Don’t you feel ashamed of yourself? What have you got planned for when the money runs out and the drugs wear off? Will you have a pension? Do you even have a girlfriend (or a boyfriend)? Or are you a pedophile (I think I know the answer to that one already)?
Matthew Silver, you are a failure as a human being, an embarrassment to your family and a disgrace to Brooklyn. You are not funny. You are just annoying. Your act is not funny and if people are laughing, they’re laughing at you for being a total dipshit.
Now fuck off and die already.
(PS, if you’re really Stevie, substitute “Transsexual Vampire” for the above and the rest applies to you too. If you’re Edd, substitute “Boring Filmmaker”.)
That’s right you worthless fuck, I am going to die upright in my chair WORKING. Why? Because I love to make lots of fuckin’ money! Now, don’t sit there and act like you don’t use money! You use money. OTHER PEOPLES MONEY. You’re not “holy” and special because you don’t like work, you’re just a piece of trash.
Now that’s a Stevie response if I ever heard one!!!
Whatever. He makes my Monday oodles better and that’s all I need.
I love the morans are here to cry about our opinions on performance art. Bring it, bitchez.
Its just the “I’m here to freak out the squares” mentality some of these hipsters have. He will have to move back to his parents house in Connecticut eventually. Hopefully they’ll take him back.
You seem properly scared since your on a website talking about how much they effect you. Score one for the freaks negative infinite farts for the normal cunts that make the world boring
I saw this guy Friday evening, doing his thing in Union Square. Tom Green wants his act back.
grow up idiots. Stop judging hipsters…let them be. you have too much time on your hands to criticize people for what they are wearing. you sucking big C…
I’ll stop judging you fauxhemian fucktards when you stop being oxygen wasting pieces of shit. Until then, do like the REAL subcultures which came before you (you know, the ones you pathetic posers shamelessly rip off), and suck it up. Last I checked, hipsters aren’t getting physically attacked by cops, rednecks, jocks and more established rival subcultures. When I was coming up, looking “different” in the wrong place or around the wrong people was potentially fatal. What do you have to worry about? Some words on a computer screen? LOL! Fucking pussy.
^ This!!!
REAL NEW YORKERS? Really? “Real” New Yorkers have apathy down to an art form and can IGNORE things that annoy them. They can tell you to “fuck off and die” with a single glance– and without uttering a single word. They keep their noses in their Wall Street Journals as they make their way to their boring, artless jobs. They can step over both sleeping homeless people and piles of terrier droppings without missing a single stock quote on their smart phones. The author of this blog comes off like some annoyed Southerner who jest don’t git all them arty-faggy types. Why don’t you start a blog about following REAL NEW YORKERS around as they go about their days waiting in line at Starbucks and shopping at H&M– that would be really compelling.
It would still be more interesting than a blog following a hipster around taking aimless walks while smoking cigarettes.
“Why don’t you start a blog about following REAL NEW YORKERS around as they go about their days waiting in line at Starbucks and shopping at H&M– that would be really compelling.”
Because causing severe butthurt in oxygen wasting morons like yourself is so much more satisfying.
I met Matthew Silver a while back when he was invited as a special guest to a film festival in Minneapolis. I enjoy his films even though I don’t completely understand them. “Not understanding” compels us either to find perspectives that re-enforce our ignorance, or compels us to educate ourselves on perspectives that foster a new understanding. Hate-mongering only compounds our ignorance (whether spiritual- or knowledge-based ignorance), and negativity is a poison to our (creative) mind.
What really left a lasting impression on me, and the reason I feel blessed to have made his acquiescence, was the look in his eyes. Matthew’s eyes, although they show some pain, are bereft of negativity, overflowing with joy, and exuding a unadulterated fascination with the living moment. Save for the real yogis I have met in my brief lifetime, I have never met anyone else whose eyes sustain a palpable, and ultimately humble appreciation for… simply being alive.
You met the guy and you like him. Fine. However, you’re going overboard if you think the verbal jabs at him on this site constitutes “hatemongering”. He’s a controversial figure in a public arena whose art (for the sake of argument I will refer to his expression as such without using quotes) grates on the sensibilities of many. Because of this, negative reactions are to be expected.
I don’t get it, it’s like everyone and their brother gets butthurt over EVERYTHING these days. Musicians and artists of decades past, constantly received negative feedback about their music or artistic output — and they were far more talented than the hipster dilettantes playing at “artist” today. In the past, “haterade” was expected. Nowadays, people get butthurt and blog about it. Mr. Silver, yourself and his other fans all need to develop thicker skins. I personally don’t have nearly as much venom for Mr. Silver as I do the average hiptard. For some reason he doesn’t trigger that feeling of “smack the shit out of this fool” hostility the way hiptards do. At the risk of appearing as someone who has “gone soft” on hipsters and things related to them, I kind of pity the guys and simply consider him “annoying as hell” and rather unsightly (he looks like he smells bad too).
“Matthew’s eyes, although they show some pain, are bereft of negativity, overflowing with joy, and exuding a unadulterated fascination with the living moment.”
More importantly, who pays for his gentrified rent and iPhone in the “living moment”? I’d be overflowing with joy too if I didn’t have to work for a living and have unlimited leisure time.
I especially love these kind of posts, where they try to sound all “moving and eloquent” and do some kind of impression of a speech by a civil rights leader.
Credit to “Ian” though, that second paragraph has to be one of the most unintentionally funny things I’ve read all year. It sounds like what the senator would’ve said at the end of Godfather Part 2, if instead of being about mafiosi, the film had been about 14 year old emo poets.
Seriously Ian, you did more than just meet him, didn’t you? You fell just a little bit madly in love with him, did something not quite appropriate, and he turned out to be carrying a camera.
“Matthew’s eyes, although they show some pain, are bereft of negativity, overflowing with joy, and exuding a unadulterated fascination with the living moment.”
Yeah, and his pupils are the size of dimes.
oh dear gawd…ANOTHER “Ian”…
yeah, what the world needs is another pushing 40 year old male who calls a blister a ‘wound’…
That crap is ‘cute’ when you’re 17. At 22 it’s annoying. At 27, it’s worrying. At 36, it’s pathetic. And it gets ever more pathetic with each passing year. I guarantee you when you are 66, have no savings, your parents are dead, and your siblings are too strapped themselves trying to pay the mortgage and feed their kids, all your ideological ‘art’ bullshit will come not to an abrupt end, but one with an ever increasing sense of lonliness and poverty.
Build your communes now, kids. You’ll need ‘em. If future gens are as cannabailistic and parasitic as yourselves, good look getting old at all.
“Not understanding” compels us either to find perspectives that re-enforce our ignorance, or compels us to educate ourselves on perspectives that foster a new understanding.
Dada is the last refuge for a failed artist.
^This
“I feel blessed to have made his acquiescence”
That word does not mean what you think it means. If you want to parade around the internet, sounding all verbose and pretentious, buy a dictionary first.
I don’t need thick skin. You do. For the harm you think you are doing to others but is actually self-inflicted.
I’m not the one who posted sanctimonious bullshit reeking of pretentiousness about “hatemongering” on a blog titled “die hipster”. Get over yourself. I’m not doing harm to anyone by posting on this blog you idiot. I live in Minneapolis too. You much rather me throw ASCII jabs, than jabs of the physical variety. If I were throwing the latter, then you’d have an actual reason to complain about “harm”. Count your blessings and shut up.
You don’t need thick skin? Since you wouldn’t be commenting on this in the first place if you had it, I suspect you actually mean you don’t WANT thick skin.
If you’re ever going to live outside a hipsterised bubble community – which, at some point, you will have to – you will quickly learn that thick skin is sometimes necessary in the adult world, because you can’t spend your entire life making sure you only ever meet people who want to play the “effete, tortured intellectual artist” role on their parents’ dime.
And there are worse ways to learn that lesson than by being harmlessly made fun of on a blog. No one in the real world thinks this kind of thing is harmful, no one in the real world thinks we imagine it to be harmful, no one in the real world would ever associate the word “harm” with an anti-hipster site in the first place.
If you go out of your way to avoid growing up beyond about 11, the world will keep on looking like a very painful and cruel place to you and it won’t be anyone else’s fault. Not having a thick skin is your CHOICE. You’re not allergic to growing one and we don’t have to make allowances for you.
There’s nothing self-inflicted about the irritation here. Silver is an obnoxious fuckwit whose schtick boils down to annoying a captive audience. You’re in love with this stupid beardo, I get it. We’re not.
Dude, get over the shit. Making fun of people is one of the oldest forms of entertainment the human race ever came up with. We all like that shit. Don’t lie. If you’re tell me you’ve never made fun of somebody / gossiped about somebody in your life, I say you’re a fucking liar.
Nobody goes through their whole life without being made fun of, and nobody goes through life without ever making fun of anyone. I don’t believe it for a damn minute. Talking shit never hurt anyone. At least, if it did we can chalk it up to natural selection. If you’re the sort that kills himself because somebody doesn’t like your art, you really, really need to stay the hell out of the gene pool.
Great point.
Die Hipster said: “I would have more respect for you if you held ANY kind of job [...] ”
I wouldn’t. Just because a hipster has a job does not change the fact that they are a hipster.
When hipsters have a job in Brooklyn it just means that one less person with something to contribute to the city does not have a job.
Just because they have a job in new york does not mean they are “from New York” and they were not “born in Brooklyn”. They were born in white middle class suburbs.
Everything they do is shit.
Just because a hipster has a job only makes them a hipster with a job. Hipsters are a social cancer. Hipsters with jobs still wear hipster clothes, they only go to hipster places, they have only hipster friends and hipster fads and all the other annoying things that hipsters all do.
And I hate those hipster glasses, and I mean it. I hate indie music, I hate their tattoos, their Converse shoes, and all that. Damnit I hate indie music… “it’s too Mainstream” “look at meeeeeee”
Above all I just hate everything about hipsters, mostly their minds and attitudes, the way they talk, and their shit sucking faces.
Done.
my IQ went down after reading these posts. this discussion is really, truly without any intellectual understanding. thank you, you sad depressed lonely people. I wish everyone to find friendship and love one day.
So you have chosen to play the “intellect v. ignorance” card and the “bitterness v. happiness” card.
I openly invite you to a) try to start an intellectual discussion with us and b) try to educate us on how to be happy.
I guarantee that the same thing will happen to you as has happened to everyone who came before you and tried the same arguments. That is, you will be completely out of your depth and your “enlightened intellectual artist” façade will collapse within, at the most, 10 posts.
Given enough time, if you don’t end up replacing the talk of intellect with a weak attempt to sound like a tough guy, and/or replacing the talk of happiness with a desperate whine about how you still haven’t got over your problems in high school, I’ll dress up as a hipster for a whole week.
Go on. Surprise us. Tell us something we haven’t heard before. Be an edgy unpredictable artist.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Well put. I’m sure he/she/it will come back under a different handle while employing a variation of on or more of the standard hiptard responses/cliches covered in http://diehipster.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/look-what-i-found/
So most posters are saying mathew is lame for doing his thing and you so much better than him for idly talking shit on the Internet. At least he’s out of his apartment, the annoying hipsters are the cunts posting comments tell you what – Texas rules
No, the annoying cunts are the public nuisance that Matthew Silver is, and people like you, who talk shit on the internet about people who talk shit on the internet. Hypocrite.
Get the fuck outta here with your noise
Dear Nate,
Engaging in the WILLFUL suspension of disbelief is not being open minded. It’s lazily checking your brain at the door and it’s done because anything else might cause you to, ultimately, take responsibility for the choices in your own life. It’s called ‘growing up’ for a damned good reason. Make-believe is the world of little boys. Are you legally old enough to live on your own and support yourself? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you need to step into manhood and realize it does not lend itself to the mindset of a boy. Your choice. But accept that the Men in this world will find you pathetic, deplorable, and weak and will treat you accordingly until you accept and conduct yourself with the knowledge that you are no longer a little boy. Your parents will be surprised, pleased, and relieved to live what’s left of their lives with the knowledge that they were not total failures as parents.
Get out of the nest and fly little bird…
I’m a lil boy with a naked pee pee and all. Men with big guns and jobs scare me
Hopefully this shows up (I don’t know much about posting images in wordpress), but out of the majority of hiptards withing a 3 mile radius of me who fancy themselves as “artists”, I’d be surprised to find one who could pull this off:
When I was stationed in Japan, there seemed to be no shortage of talented people. What made them different from the common Fauxhemian was (besides actual talent) was their humility and lack of pretentiousness. If you ran into a japanese artist or musician who acted “weird” it was because he/she actually was weird. I miss Tokyo.
Fuck, the pic didn’t come through. Direct link:
http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/528138_10151935877645230_138994461_n.jpg
This fucknut Matthew Silver has got to be the biggest loser of all time
I’ve lost the will to live after watching the first video
People hang themselves. People hang each other. Whole congregations.
At the end of a dock a rope pulls and pulls around a post. The rope is greasy with algae. The rope unthreads in the current and in seventy five yards will be undone and feather down to the murk and dissemble futher into feed for hundreds of smaller things.
We eat each other and we eat each other. The empire moans.
A bright light flashed across the sky.
Things die. But when the voices died, death died.
The sediment of language is gone, and now time is a drone, and time is not a drone.
The things we’ll miss are vapors. The missing itself is a vapor.
There are no causes. There is no cause. How can i look at my son knowing thse things? He will have no son. He will have no passings on. It’s the ranging and the acceleration that tells a story.
What if one operated outside of time? Outside of fear. Into the void so to speak. The loss of the material. A cricket screams for eternity.
The kite keeps flying.
These are the moments that last forever.
I met a woman on a hill, but she wasn’t woman at all. She was a dusting of clover. She was a shaft of light. She was a sickness blooming. She was a chancre on the hill. She was the dream.
The shudder. So much death is relative. The constant death. We are contracting. This is contraction and loss, and an opening moment. Mountains move. The crust is removed, and the last man dies. The last woman’s hand closes around the wrist of a sister. There are no heavens. There is no heaven. There is the quiet, and the movement of the breath of a god. Your name.
Was it always about proof?
That there was meaning? That there was an actual story.
End of Empire is the sound of evey letter collapsing in on itself. Every sign falling from its hinges.
Every breath forgiving it’s sound, and blowing ether.
I knew that we were going to die. I knew there were fish in the creek. The pink sun. The clouds are lace. It’s the sounds that are different now.
I see catfish in the creek. I know I’m dying. I know I should be dying. I want to die. I want the oblivion. I want the scratch.
I fry the ground. The rocks are in my my teeth. I pull the grass out of my mouth. I don’t know what grass is.
We never knew the rivers would raise. That they were full of so many fish.
The rock turns around and around. There’s that fast motion sun. Time is what’s different. Human time is over. Time in which something happens and something happens right afterwards.
This is crawling time. Killing time. Insects on every blade of grass. The rocks tumble from buildings and structures.
A herd passes through a plain. There’s the sound sound of killing.
Even on the warmth there is a run. The hot. This is where I can plunge into the ground and push up. In between the pass and places. In between the church. And the lot.
Every boat sunk in the harbor.
Weather stations spinning. Reporting. Satellites have fallen and plants over take them.
A skein of growth over the structures that we held so dear.
Moss grows in your bed. Your roof is vapor. Your wires are eaten. Your letters are paste.
The voices are gone. The ceaseless yammering. The chattering of chimps. The thousands and millions and trillions of pieces of symbols and way finders flown and flung around are sunk.
The talking has stopped. There are other ways to find the way now. They’re old. They have to do with light and cuts of wind.
The wind. This is an illusion. In this environment the wind should be almost felt. Everywhere the grass is tall and unwieldy but you can read currents of the wind. We invented the idea of the djinn to satisfy ourselves about the wind. Sworling djinn.
Come wind. Come djinn. Write the story of the land ghosts.
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This loser can’t even get his FiFi towel to give him some. He should be in a bukkake film in which he is the cum dumpster.
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the hallmark of hipster “art” is that it has no substance. This fits the bill!
At the end of the pier: deep water. The sun blacks, the feet scuff, and the designations were never yours. Or mine.
I greatly pity this poor, sick man. Someone needs to take him in and take him to get psychological treatment for whatever the fuck his problem is. Bipolar disorder? Schizophrenia? Psychosis?