funny stuff

------------------------------------------------------------------------In Williamsburg, hipsters are taking eighties revivalism to a whole
other level.

By Carl Swanson

It hit "Alice," a gamine Chloë Sevigny–esque Williamsburg artist, that
crack was back very late one night last August. "I actually witnessed
peer pressure at Luxx," she says, referring to the Copacabana of the
Electroclash scene. "It was someone who wasn't comfortable with crack
but did cocaine, and their friends were like, 'Are ya in or are ya
not?' "

Luxx is hardly a crack house; they wanted to go party elsewhere. But it
wasn't the first time Alice had run across hipsters on the rock. And
while drugs are as much a part of the coercively with-it,
underemployed 'Burg scene as asymmetrical haircuts, the return of crack
is one eighties revival nobody was expecting.

Alice's initial reaction was I'm kind of freaked out by that, but then
her mandatory art-school blaséness kicked in: She thought, Oh, I don't
want to be square.

"I guess it started with coke and then everyone went broke, and so what
are you going to do?" says Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice, the
magazine of record for L-train riders. He's seen crack become trendy;
he's even smoked the stuff himself -- you can buy it near his office,
which is in a Puerto Rican part of the neighborhood. "Native
Williamsburgers can handle it," he says. "But then you have rich kids
who dive right in. They are going to ruin their lives."

Since that night at Luxx, Alice has seen crack passed around in the
back room of another local bar. It's yellow and usually smoked in
tinfoil or glass pot pipes; few people seem to accessorize with crack
pipes (yet). There's even one red-walled bar, owned by some slumming
liberal-arts-school grads, that's known as "the crack hangout," as one
disgusted art-scenester puts it.

Crack also seems to be making its way up the art-world drug
chain. "It's like that A. M. Homes story where the two suburban
straight people smoke crack all weekend and then just go back to their
lives," says Choire Sicha, director of Debs & Co. Gallery in Chelsea,
who has a friend who did it for his 36th birthday. "I think what was
once a stigma has gotten enough ironic distance to be funny or
acceptable."

"It seems like it's not frowned upon anymore," agrees Alice. "Whereas
before, crack implied that you're an uneducated scumbag, all of a
sudden it became classy. You're like, somehow, down with the streets."

All of which is disturbing news to Bridget Brennan, special narcotics
prosecutor for the city of New York. Crack use in general is "nowhere
near what it was like in the late eighties," she says. "Let's hope they
wise up."

Or maybe just get jobs. In the meantime, though, the return of crack is
posing some other problems. "Now when you say to someone, 'Are you on
crack?,' " complains McInnes, "they really might be."