“6. sarah and i would ‘bond’ more if she won the contest”

- OK, this is funny but hard to “cover.” Tao Lin’s publishing company Muumuu House Brandon Scott Gorrell held a short story contest with a $7 entry fee. Tao submitted a story under his girlfriend’s allowed his girlfriend to submit a story that he’d given her for eight different reasons, the sixth (and our favorite) which we’ve posted above. He ended up winning the contest and now people are accusing him of embezzlement. Note: She gets to keep the title and prize money. [via the fiction circus via spiersblr]

Update: We just received the corrections above in an email from Tao. He says that The Fiction Circus article is almost entirely incorrect, and that would we should be better fact checkers in the future. Point taken. You can read his account of the whole thing here. There’s also a forum here for participants to air their feelings about the contest; most of them don’t seem pissed off.

“I went on a 5 day bender when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to pay. I returned to my apartment at 9 a.m. All of my belongings were outside. Black people and brown people were rummaging through my shit, leaving most of my American Apparel + thrift clothes but taking all of my technological items. Everything that made ‘me’ was in an alley by a dumpster. Even my IKEA furniture and the HOT/LEAN POCKETS from my freezer. Record player + 80% of record collection was recovered.”

- A heartbreaking snippet from “EVICTION A TRUE STORY BY CARLES” [via Hipster Runoff]

Related links: The Hipster Grifter

Today at Flavorpill, we took the L Magazine’s Brooklyn cred quiz and scored a “Brooklyn Newbie.” We reminisced over the pre-photoshop days with the 30 most controversial album covers ever. We laughed out loud over Hipster Runoff’s fear “that Bjork doesn’t realize that she’s a huge meme.” We liked this visual manipulation of Twitter feeds. We wondered if American Idol will ever be the same after Lady Gaga’s performance — and what Simon really thought of it. We thought Mickey Rourke + Megan Fox beats Mickey + Evan Rachel Wood. And finally we rolled our eyes at the latest Rolling Stone cover: “Lil Wanye Goes Rock.”. When Katie Couric beats you to the punch, you know your street cred’s dunzo.

“Like most autistic people ‘Carles’ looks ‘not at ease’ in society, uses ‘scare quotes’ and ‘vaguely rhetorical questions’ often and naturally, and almost always has a neutral facial expression, even while eating Big Macs. If an influence must be cited it would be MSG, which is inside almost every food product in America, and causes autism, according to some studies.”

- Tao Lin insists to NYU Local that he is not Carles, the man behind Hipster Runoff; he also manages to sneak two plugs for his upcoming novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel (which allegedly explains their entire history), into the interview. Our question for you: has anonymous blogging ever ended well? OK, maybe two questions. Does this controversy make you feel old and kind of out of too? We had to have our intern explain it.

If you read Hipster Runoff regularly, this will make perfect sense to you. If you don’t, we suggest setting aside an afternoon and familiarizing yourself with the satirical/all too real genius that is “Carles.”

Last night, we learned (through HRO’s Twitter, natch) that Hipster Runoff had been “hacked” by someone telling readers that they’re “idiot lemmings”:

“every one who has a blog is stupid. just a bunch of failed journalists trying to let their opinion be known. but charles is a psychopath. he doesn’t care about the goodness in anything. he is just tearing down everything and making excuses for everyone, developing a terrible, terrible world view for people to think is ‘cool.’ i don’t give a shit if you call it ART or if you call it social terrorism. it has to be stopped.”

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