How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
If you go to NYU and think yourself a social enough creature, someone's probably told you about Rubulad, and that someone was probably wearing black denim and leering at you behind fake spectacles. (On sale at Urban Outfitters, $14.)
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My indictment of the obviousness of hipster culture aside (an obviousness that will be important later), you should know that, above all else, Rubulad demands that you be cool.
It demands that you, for the sake of an evening, be enchanted by the concept of a man in a fuzzy white bear suit strumming a torpid ukulele, down some ecstasy with a shot of absinthe and write about it on Yelp.com when you come plodding out of this flashy Bed-Stuy warehouse the next day at 6 a.m.
Rubulad, for the uninitiated, is probably the most famous of an otherwise pretty standard breed of party: the Brooklyn warehouse blowout.
The basic idea? Clear out an abandoned factory space, advertise like mad, get people to drop some cash at the door, cram 'em in, blast some horrible music, and encourage binge drinking and drug use. Voila! Fun.
Being an underground scene extravaganza — supplied with D.I.Y. accessories, like trippy papier-mâché art and trembling indie singers — Rubulad charges $15 at the door. And judging by the fact that half of New York City filled every square inch of this warehouse's many rooms, most people must have thought it was a pretty reasonable fee. Or not.
There's something that people like me (21-year-old NYU kids that read Gawker and Pitchfork) are expected to like about Rubulad. There's a lot of alcohol at the ready, some of it interesting (the above-mentioned absinthe), if you've got the money to afford it. There's freaky-looking flammable crap all over the walls and ceilings, a bulbous green light in one of the toilets and a table-mirror sprinkled with baking soda adjacent another. Moreover, Rubulad boasts live music — though most of it is really, truly garbage — an ample dance floor, packed as it may be, and even an outdoor space for those who aren't as inclined to light up next to the cardboard danglies inside.
And that's probably my problem with the whole thing. It is, like tight jeans and plastic glasses, painfully obvious at this point, almost entirely formulaic. Laden not just with factory-pressed hipsters, but pods of past-their-prime-forty-somethings that long to lean over their nephews' and nieces' beds and whisper about how they almost went to CBGB when they were 18, Rubulad is a stinging reminder of days-gone-by when the following comment, left by someone on Tribe.Net (a social networking site dressed in "Time Out" clothing), might have held sway: "Rubulad is the last bastion of this culture — the NYC culture which now is as [scarce] as people who [truly] understand and represent it. Thousands of artists, musical and otherwise, gathered at Rubulad and left a little piece of their soul behind, to enrich and forever alter the world of whomever walked passed [its] doors."
Please. As a venue for perhaps dangerously overcrowded drinking and drugging, Rubulad is completely innocuous — it certainly doesn't need to be part of anyone's life, and it certainly hasn't had much of an effect on mine. So why the glorification? It's over, guys: Even the thrift-store-shopping, warehouse-renting Brooklyn punks are miserable profiteering bastards in 2010.
