anybody who gets irradiated with the bile and emotional garbage that flows so freely from this large, comely mouth knows that i have a big shitty ax that needs lots of grinding wrt the teleo-orthography of hipsteriana, the genre boundaries, demographics, etc. i think it’s a pocket obsession of quite a few people, particularly in their chosen subfield of interest. i find mapping whatever it is that we mean when say “gentrification” vis a vis rental real estate to be a particular nugget among dudes and ladies that i know, be it in brooklyn or the west side of chicago.
part of the reason it’s hard to grapple with the phenomenon is that it’s disparate, misshapen, unshapen, etc. at some points of comparison it’s hard to tell the difference between lifestyle contrarianism, nerd culture, garden-variety liberalism. i have a hard time grappling anyway; i think some people might not really worry about this– it’s certainly only a question for the very self-conscious, or for sociologists (same thing?), to marinate on. anyway, this blog entry (which i think is written by moderately well-known belletrist dude Luc Sante) has some true knowledge jubies in it, and i recommend for everybody to read that ish.
from http://ekotodi.blogspot.com/:
It took me until today to understand what the word “hipster” has come to mean. When I heard people complaining about neighborhoods infested with hipsters, bars ruined by hipsters, I didn’t really give it much thought beyond remembering Yogi Berra’s lament: “The place is too crowded–nobody goes there anymore.” The red herring was the word “hipster,” which to my mind couldn’t possibly be synonymous with “yuppie” or any of the other terms for people who have more money than you do but no souls, and who spend their free time subjecting all you hold dear to unfriendly takeover.
[...]
So it’s especially disheartening that their name has been reassigned, and not to any foolish but vigorous crop of tyros, but to parasites. Eric Fredericksen defines the hipster as “a consumer of (sub)culture, a person who substitutes taste for creative drive.” That sort has probably been around forever, but didn’t really become an identifiable genus until maybe the 1980s, when the vastly increased size of the market made it possible to pursue consumerism as a full-time activity. Hunting esoteric cultural kicks turned into connoisseurship; possession of items distinguished chiefly by their obscurity at once inflated the desirability of those items to others and became tantamount to having produced those items oneself. Now hipsters have gone way beyond Scandinavian psychedelia and Japanese bondage photography. They collect neighborhoods. Soon those will run out, too. You are advised to protect your neck.
so yeah, now i have a starting point for one of the purge initiatives after i (ok, we) successfully start kulturkampf in the US/Canada trade zone. it’s worth ruminating, in a loose and sloppy, first-draft way (is there another way i do things) about why it is that contrarian-connisseurship is something that i want to worry about? obviously there have been and always will be dudes with insane/ironic/highly speciated and specialized taste, now that like, the enlightenment happen and the leisured classes have infected the middle class with the disease of culture. the internet, which is basically still-photography television with 1 billion million channels, including the option to make your own channel, has let people who previously might not have been able to access microculture in on it.
some of this shit is fueled by some kind of interpersonal psychic lust, when you see someone, befriend someone, notice someone cooler than you in the specific way you want to be. this happens to everyone, at some point in my life: circa the mid 90s a good friend’s older brother was the guy I adored. he spoke in cipher, smoked weed, listened to faith no more, idolized eric turner of the cleveland browns, practiced a specific kind of messthetics that i could emulate. this all makes sense to me. one thing i don’t understand right now is the widespread emulation of a weird hybrid of grunge culture, mod-ish hipster style (more in the vein of the late 70s/early 80s mod revival than true mod-dom), urban african-american street culture among the 20-30 yr old demographic, but that’s a tongue for me to crank back into my mouth and worry about later.
there’s no way for me to continue on this tangent at the moment without pointlessly blathering about how i don’t like living in the future or whatever. what do you call a death wish when it’s other people you want to die? evil? i have to power down for a while or i might overheat. anyway, the news value of all this is, i fell in love with a brief blog discursive commentary about identifying and fearing hipsters.
i call this piece “will smith angry”
that cat weights (sic) a lot. his name is hewitt and for scale i am 6ish feet tall and weigh well over 200 lbz putting him at circa 5 feet 1 and 180 lbsz.
secular non-holiday greetings. i just woke up from a longterm nap with a burning need to write down some notes about the forthcoming jonathan frakes Speculative Celebrity Fiction which as always is thinly veiled pete beatty nonspec’lative noncelebrity nonfiction. word to voyages of self-discovery that can happen in mom’s condo’s downstairs toilet while peeing in the dark with your glasses off. here is an ASCII art preview of my cover design, which will look something like this:
J (face) (face) (face)
(face) C (face) (face)
(face) (face) S (face)
(face) (face) (face) F
or this:
J (face) (face) (face)
C (face) (face) (face)
S (face) (face) (face)
F (face) (face) (face)
both schemes incorporate a lot of white space above the word-talking-orthographic shiz. i was thinking either a baskin robbins color scheme or a basic like pantone rainbow set. the faces are going to mutate. and it might be strategically advantageous to break the 4×4 square. the idea is that the first picture to the right of the initial letter will be a monochrome like graffiti stencil of dudes (the only dudes that i suspect will be involved are frakes, brad pitt, and the internet) that, as you move from left to right, loses integrity and at the end you have a skull. or a gorilla mask. somebody had too much juice and cookies before bed time
#as a favor to me can everyone please read the wikipedia entry about barry horowitz
this is the chicago city flag that used to be flying over ribs und bibs before it (the flag) was promoted by my mans. i felt bad about causing its theft for a while but now i’m ready to sleep under it. fun fact: it has visible meat-vapor stains.
new kind of friskies. something about this unsettled me (hint: it is “the touch of garden greens” not least because the touch of garden greens doesn’t merit a proprietary shape of kibble to signify that that specific kibble is like, the roughage. me and the cat have not discussed this at length yet but i expect to take care of that sometime tonight.
a new look for count chocula. normally i’m really a stick in the mud about cereal packaging but this is swell. something about “let the product sell itself.” somebody over at general mills realized what they’re selling is really the count himself, and not the cereal. bravo to all.
wiry cat using two things for things, in this case both a blanket and a pillow (you might argue she is also using a bed for a bed). anyway i admit i manipulated this photo and tucked her into the blankie, civil-war-photographer moving corpses style, but i don’t feel like that voids the journalistic capital we are handling here right now.
n/c. this was on a paper honor box on clark street.
youth without youth: startling, good. also the achingly beautiful white lady in youth without youth supplanted starbuck from battlestar galactica in my hyperthalamatic Speculative Romance Brain Pavilion or whatever which i kind of think was a good and due change, because starbuck gives me the H-Js. something about cranio-facial similarities to a baseball player. no need to go into further detail.
also i don’t know if i ever mentioned this to anyone but Caribou/Andorra is the only good record that came out this year.
this is a dude with a giant snake, wearing a shaquille o’neal jersey. captured in crown heightz brooklyn. racism spans the globe.
from recent fun times at the hospital, one of the last things i saw before going upstairs. going out on top, is what they call that.
things that i had at work, on my desk, one day. there are A LOT of pictures of frogs in that book, sorted and kind of licensed or at least wrangled with by… me.
a thing i made. this omelette has okra in it. i was probably hung over.
file under “bags that tell you what is in them”
Jeff Samardjiza jersey t-shirt. i’d like to point out that dude likes samardjiza enough to floss his jerzee tee before he ever plays for the cubs. why not just spring for the replica jersey? or hang yourself in the garage? mmh?
top nine at nine for 12/17/07
1. stratomatic 2005 baltimore orioles: i think it’s possible to assemble a 1-9 batting order of nothing but mitchell report-ites.
1a. stratomatic baseball, writ large
2. saigon/”come on baby” ft jay-z
3. stroopwaffel
4. PMA.
5. Invisible Man. i probably should have read this already but i haven’t had as much processor time to dedicate to the african-american experience as i needed recently outside of little wayne and jamal lewis.
6. knowing what happens in season 5 of the wire and not saying anything about it. yeah yeah yeah yeah.
7. battlestar relaxica. shit is good. and by good i mean, totally fungible drama located in space. basically i have a crush on all the
people on the show. incl edward james olmos. esp edward james olmos. excl … whatever
12. suede
so since i stopped drinking, like i said, i’ve locked myself out of my house twice. driven by my recent struggles, today i bought a thing to connect my keys to my pants on a semi-permanent basis. downtown print it. but the like, bathos of this shit is: as a result of certain expediencies/liberties regarding my keychain organization, i am formally taking the bottle opener off said keychain. it’s like that one miller lite commercial wherein the dude realizes he no longer needs a talking keychain bottle opener that says “beer me beer me beer me” over and over again. except instead of a fake-upgrade to a watery, domestic, i stopped drinking at the gentle, flintyeyed advice of science medicine doctors. this will be our year, took a long time to-hoo co-home.
Just so everybody knows, there is a new link on the sidebar, not that i prune that ish with any regularity. but it feels right to let you know that you can get to hockeygoalies.org from my extremely non-read and non-cited internet stump. if i get rocked this shit is for my kids, &c.
-finis-
postscript: so, if there is a thing wherein the concept of “bear” is an identifiable, marketable-to subgenre of human sexuality, is there another, shadowy-reflection of a thing wherein there are heterosexual bears? is that a thing? i was thinking about it. my other big idea for this week was to sell t-shirts from the fictional Hudson University.
things being presently marinated upon:
Teach for America (is that a thing? i will be posting about my newfound and fearfully powerful Positive Mental Attitude and the importance of giving back to the community)
Law & Order SVU (has attained a crazy socioromantic harmonic frequency wherein it is in certain unspeakable ways more satisfying than some episodes of high church Orbachian L&O. just throwing that out there for consideration.)
i locked myself out of the house for the second time in two weeks today. i blame the cat for this somehow. now i’m at the GD library waiting to be rescued from myself. coincidence: i am reading The Jungle (am priming myself for There Will Be Blood by getting up on my Upton Sinclair) and the scene i was on when i locked myself out is the scene (well one of the scenes) wherein Jurgis is homeless on teh freezing streets of Chicago trying to get his shit right. It’s like my life is a slant rhyme. except i was only outside for abotu 10 minutes total and i treated myself to mexican food and a coffee and feel pretty good. actually i’m a bit too warm and might take my coat off in a minute. whatever.
