One Less Vice

A few hours after receiving the e-mail announcement that the Vice store in Silver Lake would be closing, I arrive at Sunset and Sanborn on a recent Saturday to see if the boutique bearing one of the most popular brand names in hipster culture will depart quietly, groaning the soft moan of other declining mom-and-pop shops, or if it’ll go down with the self-important panache its clientele projects at every opportunity.

At about 2:30 p.m., I enter the one-room storefront, which for the past three years has anchored Sunset Junction’s mini–Melrose commercial strip. Indiscriminately parked racks of everything-must-go designer clothes, mountainous stacks of moving boxes, and what appears to be a last-minute installation of pink and yellow galoshes all fight for meager amounts of floor space with employees sporting knowing grins of raison d’être cool and a herd of customers who desperately desire to possess that look.

Not that these customers don’t have it already, mind you — no trucker hats or faux-hawks here. They’re almost as cool as the "50-70% Off" merchandise they’re sifting through — especially the Scylla-and-Charybdis Valley girls planted at the front of the store in homemade off-shoulder blouses and pointed-toe pumps who are rummaging through hangers while double-fisting Charlotte Lorday dresses and ignoring polite requests to "excuse me" because the ubiquitous iPod buds in their ears drown out not just the mediocre drum & bass blasting the entire store, but needless social interaction as well.

The closing announcement came as somewhat of a surprise. You’d have figured that if anyone could survive moribund economic activity in this hipster quadrant, it’d be Vice, which formed as an underground zine in Montreal in the mid-’90s and has since become a small, Brooklyn-based media empire involved in the career rise of numerous internationally known artisans, from photographers Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley to Brit-rap storyteller The Streets. If this primary troth of cool, relied upon by young irony-saturated fake nihilists to maintain their vaguely depraved art-fashion cachet, was closing its Silver Lake outlet, could it spell the beginning of a hipster sunset on Sunset? If that’s the case, Vice couldn’t give a drowning rat’s ass, discounting the Silver Lake store as expansion baggage left over from the dot-com boom, baggage that had less and less to do with Vice’s blueprint for media takeover.

"Honestly, we didn’t start the magazine to sell $300 pants," says one of its reps, when reached by phone in the 718. Instead, like any company that helped earmark and popularize an aesthetic, Vice’s plans for world domination are content-based. They involve front-burning movie and music deals in which the magazine’s editors are writing films for Spike Jonze’s production company and pushing records that Beauty Bar DJs will soon tell you they heard way back when (the shit-hot U.K. grime-rap compilation called Run the Road being the most immediate example).

But of course the DJs and the ghetto-fabulous slummers will always have to look the part. So when I return to the store on Sunday afternoon, mere hours before its final curtain, Vice’s business is still booming despite the biblical rain trying to wash this particular corner clean. Some racks are noticeably thinner — the Morphine Generation tees and sweats seem to have been attacked by the designer trash–conscious — while others spotlight an expiring 15 minutes: "Free t-bag with every t-bag purchase" reads a sign beside an overstock of Day-Glo aerobics skirts.

In the very front of the store is the kind of mix-and-match pile you see on a sidewalk at the end of a moving sale — or an eviction. Boxes of old videotapes and catalogs, a knife set, a computer monitor and printer, a tub of plaster.

"Are these for sale?" I ask incredulously.

"Anything in particular you interested in?" answers the clerk with the faraway eyes and the five o’clock shadow. He’s been spying on my note-taking since I entered, but at this moment his retort doesn’t seem filled with the privileged knowingness of hip brand association. He’s just another hourly worker ready to go home.

—Piotr Orlov

Rock & Roll Cemetery

Linda Cummings arrived at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in a white, backless, nearly see-through mini-halter dress, white fur jacket and white high-heeled go-go boots. Not exactly site-specific attire, but then again, she is Johnny Ramone’s widow. Various celebs milled about, including Anthony Kiedis, who showed up wearing a Johnny Ramone–style hairdo to go with the anorexic-model type on his arm. The crowd included everyone from mohawked gutter punks in leather jackets and bondage pants to businessmen in three-piece suits.

They had all come for last Friday’s unveiling of the Johnny Ramone memorial statue. Ramone (born John Cummings) died in September from prostate cancer at the age of 55. But unlike Rudolph Valentino, Virginia Rappe, Mel Blanc, Peter Lorre and bandmate Dee Dee Ramone, whose remains all reside at the cemetery, you can’t dig up Johnny’s bones here — he was cremated instead (and his wife kept the ashes).

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