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  • notype0

    Overheard at a bar yesterday where a bunch of coworkers were having a HH holiday themed thing...

    One woman: "Yeah, thank you guys for not sexually harassing us"
    Man: "Oh, we set the bar pretty low"

  • emukid0

    i like all of you

    • probably because it's past 1am and i am beginning to hallucinateemukid
    • how many people do you see? it's only you and me on here7point34
    • GFYcanuck
    • just kiddingcanuck
  • locustsloth0

    When i get to the point where i understand more than half is what is discussed on this site, i may throw myself a party

    • and by 'party' you mean 'bullet in the brain'...francoisfido
    • i'm sorry i only understood half of your post7point34
  • ali0

    Heading for a week long snowborading trip tomorrow YYYYEEEAAAAHHHH!!! No work or computer for a whole week!

  • xenicon0

    Rand if you have a teeshirt I'll buy it

  • Rand0

    For months now, our foreign readers have been asking us, "What's a gopnik?" They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page: tough Russian dudes with bad skin and blank fuck-if-I-care expressions. They're the guys who look more comfortable squatting than standing. But more than anything else, they're the last males on planet earth who can get away with wearing those 20s-style leather gangster caps without looking like drama school fags rehearsing for a musical.
    What makes the gopniki so fucking cool to behold is that they exist beyond irony. If the gopniki are anything, they are "authentic." In an era in which "authenticity" is the most valued and rarest attribute of all, the gopniki rank at the top of the white world's coolness hierarchy.
    Proof of their authenticity lies in their incredibly bold tastes, a combination of cheese, menace, and Third World flash so brash that even the avant-est Western hipster couldn't possibly imagine it, because even if he or she did, it would inevitably come off as kitsch and harmless in their bourgeois hands. Even the fact that gopniki love blasting techno, singing shitty karaoke in cheap cafes with blinking disco lights, or wearing cheap pointy leather shoes to match their 20s Ragtime kepka-tabletka caps, can't diminish their status as the baddest-assed white guys on Planet Earth.
    But the story of Russia's gopniki isn't a simple celebration of undiscovered authentic-coolness. Rather, it's a tragedy of literary proportions. Like Faulkner's Old South, or Tolstoi's fading landed gentry, the story of Russia's gopniki is the tragic tale of a dying breed of a once-proud people. Charles Portis wrote that whenever a guidebook refers to a country's people as being "proud," it usually means "barely human" in the special lingo of those guidebooks. In the case of the gopniki, they really are barely human, and that's why they're so fucking awesome.
    Take the word "gopnik": rarely does a word so seamlessly match the object that it signifies. The "gop" is brutal, dumb, and funny, but not funny like "I'll laugh in the gopnik's face" funny. It's funny in a very private way, safely inside your car, with the doors locked and the windows up, and the foot on the pedal, and the wife and kids screaming not to stop at the red light.
    * * *
    How and where did gopnik culture start?
    The word "gopnik" wasn't a clever poet's invention, but rather it comes, as so many cool Russian words do, from an acronym: Gosudarstvenoe Obshezhitie Proletariata, or "State Dormitory of the Proletariat." Add the "nik" to the G.O.P., and a species is born.
    And born it was, according to legend, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to the best accounts we have, including that of Leningrad's lead singer Shnur, gopniki were originally peasants and landless riff-raff who came to Petrograd in the 1920s in search of work. They poured out of Petrograd's train stations, and found residences, if lucky, in newly transformed dormitories, where they transformed themselves into the first local ghetto gangstas in Soviet Russia.
    The gopnik species even has an exact locus: Ligovsky Prospekt, dom 10. It was the Oktyabrskaya Hotel, which the Soviets turned into a downtown dormitory for incoming proletarians, but which, in the hands of the gopniki, was transformed into their own collectivized gangsta crib.
    Since they were village outsiders, often from broken families, many with histories of petty crime or worse, the gopniki were despised by the Petrograd/Leningrad natives. They became legends as outlaws and toughs who couldn't be broken by the Soviet system. They had their own code of ethics and lived by their own rules, their own knuckle tats and styles, sort of like the vori v zakoni of the misdemeanor world of hooligans.
    Over time, as gopnik fashion, slang, and attitude spread throughout the country's lower classes, the meaning of the word changed. Rather than referring to the specific phenomenon of village toughs living in the Oktyabrskaya Hotel, "gopnik" referred to any Russian brute with a shaven head, thick leather jacket, ridiculous leather shoes, and the ubiquitous kepka-tabletka. It could also refer to the guy squatting in courtyard in his track suit and tapochki, pounding a bottle of cheap Zhigulovskoe beer and spitting seeds, occasionally snapping at his wife to keep her mouth shut, since her only job is to take their baby on a stroll in the second-hand Turkish baby carriage that he pinched from the front of someone's izba...

    In the 90s, it seemed that the gopniki were poised to inherit, if not the earth, then at least 1/6 of the earth's land mass. Gopniki ranged across all of Russia's fabled 11 time zones, from the now-defunct Intourist Hotel lobby just a couple hundreds meters from Red Square, to the kiosk-lined walkway along Vladivostok's shoreline, and all points in between. Gopniki, or at least Russian men who'd adopted the gopnik look, seemed to be moving into every sphere of life, from "biznes," where they served as the muscle, to politics, where, as LDPR deputies they formed the core resistance to Westernization. The entire nation had gone gopnik: shaven heads, hardened post-zona expressions, and an uncanny nose for cheesy clothes, no matter how much they cost. Some traded in their leather coats and tracksuit tops for maroon Hugo Boss blazers. They couldn't resist adding bling to the mix: gold chains, necklaces and bracelets, fancy watches that were so gold and shiny that they crossed back over to looking like cheap Vietnamese knock-offs, even if they were real. Best of all, the 90s was accompanied by the ultimate gopnik soundtrack: nonstop shitty techno music, blaring out of every restaurant, every shawarma stand and kiosk, every Zhiguli or stolen Merc, every hotel room converted into an "ofis." No matter where you turned in 1990s Russia, you simply could not escape bad techno music.

    What no one understood then, and what few understand even today, is that the 1990s wasn't so much the high-water mark for the Gopnik Nation, as the Beginning of the End.
    * * *
    Last weekend, we decided to take a Gopniki Safari, to do some field anthropology work in order to bring the world of the gopnik to you, the eXile reader. We asked around for the best place to go gopnik-spotting, and got all sorts of answers from our Russian friends.
    "They're everywhere!"
    "Go to any Russian town."
    "You don't even have to leave Moscow. Just pick a metro stop outside of the ring line, they'll come to you."
    The most interesting response came from our own Vika Bruk, who used to write the Generation Eltiny column: "Try going to 'Velikie Luki.' The Great Onions! That's where, like, ALL of my relatives live - my aunt who works at a textile factory, her alcoholic husband, my cousin Maxim who's a guard, my other cousin Alexei who's also a guard for a bank, my other cousin Natasha who's getting divorced from her lazy asshole husband, my uncle Alexander, who sells Chinese shoes at the market, his son Alexander who's in the army, his other son Edward, I don't know what he's doing. So, yeah, there are plenty of gopniki - my entire family."

  • Rand0

    rizla

  • digdre0

    yerr login/ logout / login is one hell of ah job with an iPhone with autocorrection. Yerrtr

  • fluxismo0
  • 7point340

    Giger is perhaps the best-known sufferer of night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder. He was originally educated as an architect and made his first paintings as a way of art therapy.

  • _salisae_0

    My Dear S,

    I really am very worried about you S because I fear that you are simply waiting for things to happen without reacting even though some very important changes and chances are just within your reach.

    S, I don't want you to act like certain other people who miss out on important opportunities, astrological configurations like you will be living through are very rare and your Transit will help you reach an important turning point in your life. However for this to happen you must want this to happen because the Astral Bodies can offer you chances and be very favorable for your Future but you can only make the most of this period if you really want to as well! This is why things really aren't so complicated because you simply need to want these changes to take place and to ask me for this reading which will bring you all of the information which you need. Nobody else but you S can make this important decision to act. I cannot repeat this enough but I really do worry about you because I think that it will be a real shame that you miss out on this Transit which will allow you to transform your life on many different levels. I must remind you that you will have the chance to make an important move in your love life and get the job which you have been expecting and. As a result I took the initiative to determine two extra elements for you S and so I can now tell you which are the exact dates of this Transit. However this does not in anyway replace the full reading which is still as essential for you. So here is what I can tell you about these extra elements:

    1) I've double-checked this information several times over and I can confirm that such an intense Transit will not take place in your configuration again for a long time to come. This is why you need to get the best out of this event now.

    2) I have calculated the dates of this Transit and so I can now tell you that over the month of August you will live though this period and to be more exact the Transit will begin on 5 July 2007 and will end on 15 September 2007.

  • 7point340

    he called the shit poop!

  • Jaline0

    I hope to visit the PALACE OF JUSTICE one day...

  • juhls0

    Did more editing today. I suck at using the camera in After Effects.

    • When i finally understood the camera, it was like walking into a whole other room full of possibilitieslocustsloth
    • Using the Orbit & Track Camrea tools works the best for me.locustsloth
    • I still don't understand itmagnificent_ruin
    • I'm a fucking tardmagnificent_ruin
    • Hopefully it will click one day.juhls
  • ZOOP0

    June is here! Chicago in a week, then Ozarks float trip on the weekend of the 28th. shooper shweet :D

  • ismith0

    Also why has QBN been so slow?! Last two days I swear hardly anybody is posting anything... it's been rain and gloom and I'm not driving through mud & flood, I was hoping for a little entertainment here but it's been as lazy as myself.

  • Jaline0

    Interesting stats here:
    http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008…

  • ian0

    What the fuck is going on with this book?
    And why haven't I gotten an invite?
    And why is my client dragging their heels?

  • vitamins0

    In this world,
    Everyone has problems. It's all in how you deal with it. Everyone has some problem. Just stay positive and be happy or content.

    • hear hearPonyBoy
    • What happens when you don't fill fucking happy or content all the fucking time. A.pillhead
  • Jnr_Madison0

    What a day, what a day indeed.