Hipsters?
Wow, that is so ME except for the duct-tape wallet. Excuse me while I make a run to my garage.
VP - Workshop Dog
Ah I see, I was thinking that was Emo. Never been good at following what is trendy.
I said it.
I remember for a while I was called a hipster wannabe. Because I liked the style but just couldn't quite get into the circle of people that were the cool guys and girls.
I had a band that got big (locally) once and they had no choice but to start talking to me. It was odd because these people didn't care about me before and now all of a sudden they did. I didn't pay them any credence though because I remembered what it was like to be burned before.
My band broke up and they stopped acknowledging me. Figures.
There is a hipster bookstore where I get Chuck's books from. But the guy who owns it hates that it's become that. He said he opened up and started selling banned books and hard to find authors that he thinks are cool and all of a sudden every 120 pound guy in skinny jeans and black hair began patronizing his establishment.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he opened up his book store near The Hi Dive, which is the coolest bar in town. At least that's what all the weeklies and press tell me.
Is it possible to be considered hipster by proximity?
From Wiki:
The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene. Although the word's exact origins are disputed, some say it was a derivative of "hop," a slang term for opium, while others believe it comes from the West African word "hipi", meaning "to open one's eyes". Nevertheless, it gradually morphed over time into a noun, and "hipster" was born.
The first dictionary to list the word is the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," which was included with Harry Gibson's 1944 album, Boogie Woogie In Blue. The entry for "hipsters" defined it as "characters who like hot jazz." Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed.[4] The 1959 book Jazz Scene by Eric Hobsbawm (using the pen name Francis Newton) describes hipsters using their own language, "jive-talk or hipster-talk," he writes "is an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders." However the subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement. Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg were early hipsters who made up the majority of the Beat Generation. Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality." However, it was Norman Mailer who gave the movement definition. In an essay titled "The White Negro" Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death — annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity — and electing instead to "divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.
From HOWL Part I: 1953, Allen Ginsburg
I saw the best minds of my generation
starving,
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts,who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.
Hipsters aint nothing new. Just prettier now with all their piercings and tattoos and such.
You know in all the years I've been here I've never been sigged?
post an excerpt why don't you!
hang on, don't you have a howl excerpt tattooed on you, or is that someone else here?
fucking epic poem either way. i love Ginsberg.
hah, that IS an excerpt... and the entire thing just kept proving my point as I read it.
And yeah, I've got a HOWL tattoo.
You know in all the years I've been here I've never been sigged?
Yes, the hipster as a cultural type greatly predates the post emo style choices of today's unwashed 22-year-old. Amid the culturally bankrupt ennui of suburbia, rich and upper middle class kids are shucking off Gap purchases in favor of Salvation Army Store clothes; likewise, self-consciously striving for bedhead as a hairstyle. But it's a reinvention and not something new. In similar slick style, the second page of this thread is becoming a reincarnation of the first. Check out those first 50 posts, dunelord. It's hip to read.
VP - Workshop Dog
Hipsters may be poseurs who don't even know their cultural history, but real Hip is damn near eternal. Come take a walk with me there.
VP - Workshop Dog
Ha! That was awesome!
I liked the scene where the two guys were dancing. I kept watching it over and over.
Not because I thought one of them was hot though...
Far from it...
I uh...
I liked the dancing...
I didn't actually notice there was a first page... forum fail. Sorry VP.
You know in all the years I've been here I've never been sigged?
I did, and when someone brought up that emo wasn't the same thing as hipster I asked.
I said it.
Hey, no sweat, man. You were doing a balls-out terrific job of reprising the role I played on page 1.
VP - Workshop Dog
I did, and when someone brought up that emo wasn't the same thing as hipster I asked.
Ah, okay. I just figured you hadn't seen that page at all. I recalled someone bringing it up there and I believed the topic had already been treated with astounding thoroughness.
In the history of American alternative sub-cultures, emo was dead and overwith 15 minutes ago, but it only started 20 minutes ago. I was already old enough not to relate to it much when it happened. Hip and the "hipster" type, in contrast, have been around forever, coming along well before even punk rock. That's why it's so egregious to think of the hipster as something the emo kid has somehow morphed into... even if, in a very limited sense, that has become true.
The timeline of Hip aside, I think of emo as an inflection of neo-gothic High Romanticism. In the 80's, when I was coming of age, we had the goth as a cultural type. That happened long before emo. We've had sensitive people with pale skin and dark lipstick for a very long time. And even the goth sub-culture didn't start with fans of The Cure. It was a reinvention of Percy Shelley-style Romanticism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
It isn't a new idea that it's cool to be deep into your own emotional reality, even when that reality turns a bit morbid. To me, emo (short for "emotional") music and culture is what happened when skateboarder kids of the 90's got old enough for real heartbreak.
The latest reinvention of the Hipster is, to a very slim degree, what happens when post-emo kids simply need to make a different fashion statement. But it's also what happens when they grow skeptical or too jaded for Romanticism. The philosophical feel of Hip is far less weepy. Instead of Romanticism, it's more like an American Existentialism.
VP - Workshop Dog
Hipsters aren't that complicated, unfortunately.
Thanks for summing it up so well.
VP - Workshop Dog
I think the hipster is only used on the internet I'm 17 and in high school (So a pro on slang, just kidding, but really never heard it) It's only on this website or on ticketmaster where all the reviews say "Too many hipsters were at the concert."
Try reading just a little bit deeper into the first page of this thread. The term "hipster" has been around since at least the 1950s, and the concept of being "hip" is much, much older than that. The internet hasn't been around all that long. So, as one of your English teachers might tell you, it's important to support your opinions with facts. It's also important to read for context.
The resurgence of the hipster as a cultural type isn't something a few people on the internet just made up, it's something that we're noticing in the world around us and talking about. Just because the same talk and the same type of character isn't showing up at your high school is no real test. If your high school is anything like mine was, most cultural trends show up about ten years late. And again, we're talking about the return or reinvention of the hipster as a cultural type. This is not the coining of something new. It's at least as old as Kerouac and The Beats. Ever heard of them?
VP - Workshop Dog
We should start up a movement called "Hopsters."
We can all wear Kangol hats!
VP, your deconstruction of the hipster fad early in the thread was pure joy to read. It's posts like yours that make The Cult worth visiitng.
Self improvement comes from trimming away the shit, not building up on top of it.
We can all wear Kangol hats!
And wear old school fannypacks?
We can all wear Kangol hats!
I'll reserve a table for us at iHOP.
VP - Workshop Dog
Thank you.
VP - Workshop Dog
i saw fight club once when i was in my 20s. i felt too old for it at the time. i haven't seen it since either. i didn't know that it was an adaptation until after i read my first Chuck book, which was Haunted. after that i read everything i could get my hands on, fight club on that list.
Why should Hipster receives any credit. Why would any part of human beings receive credit for another's work. Weird though.
Under Plastered Sheet
Yeah that is weird. Its like stealing. I think maybe hipsters are thieves.
No, no, thieves are hipsters.
This is why we can't have nice things.
First and second images to come up: