Sick!
A friend of mine once told me that he considered it the ultimate sign of intelligence for one to be able to be thrust into a conversation and hold his own, so it’s easy for me to admit that I’m embarrassingly dumb about music, fashion and social life. (Not just those three subjects, of course, but for this solitary purpose, I’ll just cop to a few points of weakness.) My daily soundtrack consists of replaying certain songs on YouTube until it becomes time to loop another played-out track, usually by the same artist. When I do switch to iTunes, I’m stuck with Springsteen in my paltry library, which I never replaced when my hard drive crashed in 2007. I prefer khaki shorts while everyone here wears jeans; in my apartment, I wear mesh. And in this week’s New York Times Book Review, at the sight of the blurbed biography of a writer informing the world that she is “working on a book about the international super-elite,” I nearly started shuddering.
So, New York’s annual Fashion Fall Preview is not much for me. I thumbed through it for a week without settling on anything that was appealing before this morning, when I happened to flip to a profile described as: “California girls Harley and Cassie share a birthday and an ability to get the fashion crowd dancing through hard times.” I digested that cacophony—California, girls, California girls, girls named Harley and Cassie, fashion, crowds, fashion crowds, dancing, fashion crowds dancing, fashion crowds dancing because of two California girls named Harley and Cassie—before I started reading Tim Murphy’s story, just to divert my attention somewhere else. It begins:
Cassie Coane and Harley Viera-Newton, 22-year-old D.J. besties of the moment, are sick, sick, sick. Over a two-hour lunch at La Esquina, the duo—who’ve become the package-deal unit of party-soundtrack cool, 2010 edition—deploy the word about two dozen times to describe: vintage-print dresses; Cassie’s black 1997 Jeep Cherokee she just drove cross-country from L.A.; the Tints, Harley’s Cardigans-esque all-girl high-school band; what people in clubs say when they play early-eighties post-punk sets (“but they don’t really dance,” admits Cassie); melodies that inevitably are a part of a good “rager” (their preferred term for a track that gets people dancing); getting a $100 tip to go against their principles and play a Bon Jovi song; the American South, which Cassie says she’s obsessed with; their lives when they found themselves D.J.-ing a party at the club Le Baron in Paris during Fashion Week in March and invited some cute Canadian skater boys they knew over from Barcelona to hang with them.
“We were like, ‘Our life is sick,’ ” says Cassie.
Whoa! The story’s not all that long, and 2,000 words weren’t enough to educate me in the luxurious and fabulous ways of music, fashion, social life, California, 22-year-old girls, or—well, you know the rest by now. It was, however, a perfectly sick look at two 22-year-old California girls named Harley and Cassie, enough to make me think I knew more than I do.
