5 awareness that the essential values through which one…lock cat
2. Washington Post with “Three Books on Hipsters.”
Their affinity for tight jeans, shaggy hair and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is easily mocked, but the principal criticism is that they’re frauds.
11. Rose Metal Press is having a fund drive! For 5 years RMP has been putting heart-imploding hybrid/slash/flash into your taped coins/eyes/tattoo tails/synapses. You get stuff, too. Give.
14. Cult Pulp Fiction at Sabotage Times. Or:
Pretty soon, my feverish teenage brain was boiling over with descriptions of high-class orgies, anal penetration and amyl-nitrate-fuelled orgasms.
236. Did someone on this fucking site already link to this long un-cut interview of DFW from 1998? I don’t know. I don’t. If so, some HTML god will most likely remove it and you won’t even see these words. Fuck.
9. Did you hear Steve Martin was so blar they had to offer a refund? Why was he boring? He talked about art. Martin says:
“So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience’s emails. Artists beware.”
Get off my lawn! Yeh but Steve, you’re trying to sell a book. You are Steve Martin. You manipulated, man. But I like it. This goes under one of my favorite genres of public readings: You expected this, I’m going to give you that. Recently, I went to see a semi-famous memoir writer and she ignored all that and read a dry history of religion. you could hear the air crackle as expectations tumbled into walls. Hissing. Andy Kaufman reading Great Gatsby. Ever been to one of those readings? Like WTF? They glow.
On hipsters, hoodrats, and fitting in
If it’s one thing hipsters hate, it’s being called a hipster. A couple weeks ago, I met this very nice hipster guy who told me a great story about how he was accused of being a hipster, and he was totally pissed, told the guy who called him a hipster that not all white guys who have tattoos are hipsters, which is true. However, a white guy with tattoos who wears vintage clothes who is vegan who rides a fixie, well, nope, the shoe doesn’t fit.
But the truth of it is that I’m guilty of calling people hipsters out of jealousy. I mean, I don’t have the style to be a hipster, nor do I have the money or general sensibility. My taste in music is about five years late, and that’s a generous estimation. I mean, I rarely intend to say the word in a derogatory way. It’s a compliment undercut with jealousy, which makes it sound like an insult, sure, but I’m not fooled.
Yesterday, Reynard started a conversation about the word hoodrat, which is funny in its own way, because the stated definition of hoodrat seemed to imply that a hoodrat is just a hipster of another color, maybe a specific geographic location based on socioeconomics.
376 Comments
September 3rd, 2010 / 1:26 pm
September 3rd, 2010 / 1:26 pm
Hipster Autophobia
Hipster Tilley by Johnny Zito
I’m tired of hipsters saying they hate hipsters. Every time I read some rant on how hipsters suck I realize I’m reading it in a journal or website written by and for hipsters. Self-hating narcissistic hipsters somehow think they are immune to the vague and broad fallacies of hipsterdom. What deepens this ingrown pathology and paranoia is that self-denying hipsters often subconsciously enjoy being called hipsters, because in some weird way it’s a compliment. This is not a defense of hipsterdom, but an afriendly suggestion that maybe we’re all in the same goddamn pond.
Hipsterdom’s got something do to with an impenetrable irony which results in shallowness, affectedness, smugness, etc. — but aren’t those just judgment calls, like things people have been calling other people forever? Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh’s been calling out people like that for ages. Hipsterdom may be a new word, but pettiness is timeless.
Blake Butler—
Very excellent post over at Johannes’s Exoskeleton about ‘experimentalism’ and the &Now Conference ‘Hipsters, Kitsch and the Specter of Mass Culture’: “Complexity is the new Negative Capability.”
2
