The Difficulty of Understanding Hipsters
"I moved to the United States five years ago, feeling very confident about my English vocabulary, only to find that my meager repertoire of cultural references made lively communication with other students difficult. The word that gave me the most trouble was "hipster"-my fellow freshman used it frequently, and my inability to understand it made me feel horribly foreign. I eventually asked a local outcast (the inevitable companion of the foreign student on first days of school everywhere) to explain the concept to me. He said that hipsters never admitted to being hipsters, but that they could easily be identified by their tight uniform and hatred of everything and everyone. I had just moved from Germany, and hipsters sounded an awful lot like fascists."
Careful Choire, zee Germans aren't all smiles und sunshine.
No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.
Say what you like about the tenets of hipster doofusry, Captain, at least it's an ethos.
You know who else had facial hair? That's right, HITLER! (which is also only a couple of letters away from hipster anyway).
Two peanuts ver valking down zee street. Von vas a salted.
Heh heh heh.
… peanut.
so, I feel stupid asking – but is that photo of Rimbaud?
Young Stalin
Jesus Christ. No wonder I'm drawn to the haunting symbolist poetry of forced collectivization.
Rimbaud is much cuter.
Many of them are also atheists, which, as the Pope will inform you, makes them Nazis.
Well. He would know.
"(I went to Bard")
Well, shit, son.
I don't know what makes me a worse person, thinking Stalin looks hot in that picture, or my secret crush on Ahmadinejad.
Just so long as you continue to hate Albanians, I still love you.
P.S. Wow, do you really hate Albanians, btw.
Stalin looks like Keanu Reeves' hotter great-great-grandfather.
I had the Keanu Reeves perception as well!
I think KR is too old now to do a bio film along the lines of "Young Winston".
def the no-longer-secret crush on the diminutive Iranian blowhard….since you asked.
I admitted my occasional-but-secret crush on Putin to my (Macedonian) flatmate once, and not only did he laugh at me for quarter of an hour straight, but a year later he still brings it up. Inappropriate crushes on awful world leaders is just my crush to bear, I suppose.
*Oh Jesus, lack of edit function making my Freudian slips indelible! Crushing on awful world leaders is my cross to bear, not my crush.
this dude totally rides a fixie: http://monkeysmashesheaven.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/stalin-2.jpg
How is it possible they don't have a German word for this?
"apathetic, sloppy fashionista" works pretty well, I think. In German that is no doubt a single word.
Personwhoseemslikeafascistbutisratheraniscuretewntysomethingswhowouldreallylikeanicedrinkperhapsafewticketstoalocalshowandneedstogetridofthatgoatee.
"I eventually asked a local outcast (the inevitable companion of the foreign student on first days of school everywhere) to explain the concept to me."
The first week of the school year was always my favorite. Early September in Annapolis, still humid at night, the morning sun would crawl up from under the Chesapeake Bay and bend confidently around circular streets, old brick and even older willow oaks. It was an exciting time, bringing with it the potential for reinvention, along with a new group of foreign students and intra-campus transfers from Santa Fe, people I could hang out with and show around campus. They didn't yet know me, the local outcast. Sure, the rush to disassociate would happen soon enough and then it would be right back to the fringe, just off to the side of everything, always adjacent to the party, privy only to partial conversations and recognizing most people by the shapes of their backs. But for one week in September, for one week, I was right there and part of it all.
Heh, I'm just kidding about all that. The point is that it's hard being a person in the world, and people handle it in different ways. Most choose a uniform and a recognized code and then strive to surround themselves with people who do their part to try and adhere to that code. For some that uniform and code consists of a pair of skinny jeans and a laundry list of mostly unwritten behavioral quirks, for others it's a navy suit and a business contract, and for still others it's something issued by a local, state or federal authority with rules and regulations printed out in handbooks, legal documents or tacked up on breakroom walls.
For the most part, these disparate uniforms and codes co-exist fairly easily despite vast differences in the minutia of moment-to-moment signification and expression. For the most part. And when we say that we have difficulty understanding each other? Well, if we were honest with ourselves, we might admit that there's really nothing difficult about understanding each other at all. In fact, we might just understand each other all too well.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Oh God, another SJC affiliated douche on here. Or, if you must (ugh) "Johnnie". Do I know you? Do you know me? Why pseudonymous? Actually, I don't really care now that I think about it.
Don't worry. I don't know you.
Well, if the (ironic, vintage) shoe fits…
"a local outcast (the inevitable companion of the foreign student on first days of school everywhere)"
Unless you are a hot Ukrainian, Japanese, Egyptian or what-have-you girl, in which case your inevitable companion would be a fellow foreign soul: me. Those were the days.
He so went to the same school as me. Fucking hipster…
A Hipster is a person, or a flock of people who are doing what you or I did, 5-10 years ago; only with more money, or credit cards.
How many of us have lately realized that we were totally cool about ten years ago, without even knowing it? Now we're just old.
I knew I was cool in middle school too.
Does anyone remember Eurotrash? They were all over NYC in the late 90s-early 2000s, oozing snobbery in their too-tight clothes and too-much-money-havingness. All that happened is that some of our kids got infected.
Hipsters don't exist. They are a myth like bigfoot or razor blades in your apples. The term hipster is a pejorative that means basically "self-absorbed asshole." The fact that no one will describe themselves as a hipster is a bit of a give-away that really there is no new subculture of disaffected artist types.