- I'm reading "Hip: The History" by John Leland. It is witty, funny and only occasionally wanders into super-heavy theory land.
I theoretically sympathize with a lot of what hipsters stand for. They're into mixing things up, rebellion, individuality, and they're usually basically liberals. The problem is that standing for something is very uncool. And verbalizing a logical belief system--that shows that you are not authentic, not hip.
I blame the Beats. They're pretty easy to blame if you live in San Francisco. They managed to create a dead end street right here that a whole generation of lemmings ran right down. But the created a set of problems for young liberals. Like, what about women? Should women be consigned to being grumpy house fraus? And what about politics? They never really left their Benzedrine haze long enough to figure that one out.
To be fair, it was never about the future. And the modern day hipsters are the same way. They carve out a small corner of the world, put their blinders on, and enjoy themselves.
2 comments:
your tone is entirely UN-sympathetic to the hard work of being a hipster! It is hard feigning the (bizarrely imputed) authenticity of being poor while rockin' a pair of $120 Diesel jeans, and keeping up on the new and cool that is just old and widespread enough to be intelligible as new and cool to a rarified group of opinion leaders. God forbid that you might be original and thus oddly unintelligible but brilliant (look up the poetry of one of the good beats, D.A. Levy--didn't go anywhere, died lonely, actually wrote good stuff).
I digress, I jest, in fact I am being entirely ironic. But you knew that.
Cool is just a device for telling yourself a story about who you are--we all do it. You, for instance, tell yourself the story that you are smart. Fortunately for you, it is a pretty accurate story--and you enjoy the fruits of labor in the fields of the mind. So let the hipsters have *their* fun.
http://www.doodie.com/elmo_sesame_street.php
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