Deep Thoughts about Cat Pictures

Deep Thoughts about Cat Pictures.

Harry Potter and the Cognitive Dissonance

Harry Potter and the Cognitive Dissonance.

In Defense of Hipsters

This afternoon I was sitting in Star Lounge, a relatively new coffee shop a block from my house. As I was sitting there, reading the Onion AV Club on my MacBook and listening to the New Pornographers, I had the sudden realization that I am probably a hipster. Just being in Star Lounge should have been enough for that, given that if Pitchfork were to become a coffee shop, it would look a hell of a lot like Star Lounge. There are still-packaged X-Men action figures tacked to the wall for Christ’s sake.

Still, I’d never really considered myself a hipster. After all, I wear my jeans loose, I don’t own a single pair of converse sneakers, and all of my t-shirts are utterly sincere. To me, the hipster has always been marked less by musical or artistic tastes than by simple clothing choices. Lots of people like the Arcade Fire, but many of them don’t shop at thrift stores or wear messenger bags with seat belts for straps.

Yet it’s probably time I faced the facts: I’m a damned hipster, or at least a related species. I don’t really say this to brag, because “hipster,” at least lately, is almost solely used as an insult, usually followed by the equally endearing term “douchebag” or “douchenozzle,” or my personal favorite, “douchezepplin.”

The stereotypical hipster is a cynical, effete, urban-dwelling snob, a sort of modern day fop who sneers at the bumpkin tastes of his suburban and rural counterparts, and holds nothing but disdain for anything mainstream, sentimental, or not drenched in irony. The hipster wears t-shirts with wolves on them, the kind you buy at truck stops, because they’re funny. He drinks PBR. You see, the hipster co-opts the signifiers of mainstream and lower class America as a sign of his own superiority and coolness; he also flaunts his education by using phrases like “co-opts the signifiers” and semi-colons. The hipster has a liberal arts degree, lives in Brooklyn, Chicago’s Wicker Park, or anywhere in Austin or San Fransisco. The hipster thinks he’s so much cooler than you because he thinks any album after “Pablo Honey” is so overrated and his favorite band is even more obscure than your favorite band. Also, his favorite band is fronted by a one-legged Nigerian refuge who plays Queen covers on an electric shamisen. A two story suburban house with a white picket fence is his fever-inducing American Nightmare.

There is a certain truth to these stereotypes. Okay, there’s a bathtub full of truth to these stereotypes, but to me they seem like strawmen. I’ve never actually met any of these sneering hipsters, despite living amongst them like Jane Goodall with the chimps. Sure, hipsters tend to think the things they like are better than the things they don’t like, but who doesn’t? And like any subculture, they tend to see the “mainstream” as fundamentally out of touch with them. The same could easily be said of our rural Red State brethren, who listen to Toby Keith and see the suburban and urban mainstream as disdainful of their proudly uneducated, religious, provincial subculture (see, isn’t stereotyping fun?)

Most of the hipsters I know are very sincere in their tastes. They like what they like and like discussing those things with other people who like what they like.  What’s more, hipsters hardly reject the mainstream, they usually embrace it. Like I said, Star Lounge has fucking X-Men figures on the wall. Hipsters love their well-done Hollywood blockbusters as much as the next person, they just demand a certain level of craft and (yes!) sincerity in their escapism. Basically, to use an obvious example, original Star Wars = good, new Star Wars = bad. Despite their cynical reputation, hipsters do not like cynical pandering. Hence, I think, the dislike among many of them for “Juno,” with its too-clever dialogue and obvious attempts to be quirky and cool in a very hipster way (orange tic-tacs! Burger phones! George-Michael from “Arrested Development”!)

I’d go as far as to say there’s a certain generosity in the hipster subculture. The Onion AV Club, a hipster institution on par with Pitchfork and Sonic Youth concerts, has multiple features celebrating or at least revisiting some of the most notorious failures in movie history. There’s a certain love of camp involved here, an embrace of the overtop, the batshit crazy, and the bizarre. Part of this may be a certain counterculture or contrarian trend, but it so informs the general taste of hipsters that I think it’s a legitimate part of their culture. Pulp Fiction, perhaps the ultimate hipster movie with its arthouse update of grindhouse conventions, embodies that “substance through style” approach to art and entertainment that hipsters love, where the flashy, innovative surface creates or contains a greater depth of meaning. Even if a work misses it gets points for trying. The more over-the-top and ridiculous the better. Substance and style are great and all, but the hipster will settle for either. Preferably style.

In other words, the hipster doesn’t necessarily demand artistic perfection and will lovingly embrace a work despite, or even because of, its myriad flaws. The hipster has a great respect for the simple art of getting off your ass and trying to achieve something cool or new or interesting whether you succeed or not.

Granted, there is a certain disquieting nostalgia inherent in hipster culture, an all-too eager and forgiving embrace of anything reminiscent of or associated with the hipster’s childhood (in the 80’s or 90’s) and all the kitsch that goes with it. It’s the double-edged sword, because that same sensibility also gives us the giddy hipster embrace of the cream of mainstream entertainment and the refreshing insistence that art is at its best and most effective when it’s pop art that draws from the high and the low and blurs them until you forget which is which (not that this is especially new. After all, William Faulkner, high priest of American modernism, wrote plenty of pulpy detective stories and screenplays).

The hipster is also one of the primary champions of the newest art form: the comic. While the view of comics, cartoons, and graphic novels as a legitimate art form has been around as long as the word balloon, it seems to have only recently become a more widely accepted (and I’d argue inevitable) proposition that the comic will become as respected an art form as the novel or film. For all the mainstream media’s talk of video games as the next great art form, I believe the comic is slowly and (amazingly) somewhat secretly laying claim to that title. Like both of those art forms experienced when they first started out (in the 17th and early 20th centuries, respectively), the comic is still seen by many as purely entertainment, but thanks to Watchmen, Maus, and all the other obvious examples, that’s changing. And the hipster is out front, holding aloft the banner.

So, I may be a hipster. If so… cool.

To all things, a beginning…

So, I’ve started a new blog. I hadn’t touched my old one, Land of the Rising Gilkeson, since recapping my trip back to Japan in August. I felt like those posts had essentially brought an end to its “story arc” (my time in Japan) and it was time to move on to greener pastures fertilized with newer mental manure. This blog will thus be less of a review of my life and the insanity of Japan (though given that I still work for the Japanese government, that sort of thing is inevitable) and more a series of short essays, snide remarks, and ill-informed rants on whatever the hell I feel like writing about. It should be noted that I will write this blog almost primarily to amuse myself, so you’ve been warned. Read at your own risk…

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