Most Annoying Hipster Affectation

Jim Jersey Beat started a thread by this same name over at the PPMB, and soon had everyone and his irate mama chiming in to enumerate what they most disliked about those pesky hipsters.

If there's anyone more judgmental than hipsters, it's got to be the punks, but alas, the punks are not always as keenly attuned to the shifting vagaries of fashion as they might be, so a great deal of hot air was expended in denouncing things like trucker hats, white belts and "girl pants," all very 2-5 years ago, if not downright last century. But considerable vitriol was also unleashed toward "ironic" beards and mustaches, phony jihad scarves (well, apparently the scarves are the real deal; the people wearing them, not so much), not to mention "ascots and neckerchiefs" ("Who are we," demands one poster, "Fred from Scooby Doo?").

As someone who's done his fair share of fulminating, especially about the scruffy beards and clothes that have been giving me horrific flashbacks to the 70s, I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, in fact, to discover that most of these things no longer bothered me. I've made my peace with the hipsters, apparently, not that any of them ever showed any indication whatsoever of caring what I thought. But even the beards, which for a year or two had been my bête noire, have become so much white noise to me as I wend my way through the Williamsburg streets.

Well, perhaps not completely... Last night as I was coming home I walked past the Metropolitan, reputed to be our neighborhood gay bar, but which I had always suspected of being merely another hipster hangout for boys and girls of tenuous or conflicted sexuality. I was quite surprised to see a couple guys rather passionately making out just outside the front door. Surprised, I say, because it's the first overtly gay activity I've ever noticed emanating from the place; previously I'd only ever seen the usual hipster suspects standing around smoking cigarettes and looking angst-ridden.

As it happened, one of the making-out dudes was smooth-cheeked or at least closely shaven, and actually kind of cute, whereas his osculatory partner was a standard-issue beardo. And some of the old revulsion came rushing back: how, I heard myself demanding, could you rub your face up against that?

But I digress. For the most part I no longer find myself thinking badly of hipsters based on facial hair or clothes or even that jaundiced view of the non-hipster world they wear along with their carefully sculpted Weltschmerz and anomie. Live and let live, I say, and as long as I'm living here in the heart of postgraduate sleepaway camp, it's about all I can say, if I want to keep my sanity.

Then Jenna Alive weighed in with one hipster affectation I truly can not abide: smoking. True, not all hipsters smoke, but a wildly disproportionate number do, and when you consider that these are not exactly unsophisticated or ignorant people, but have come from mostly well-to-do families and colleges that the vast majority of Americans could neither afford nor be accepted to, you have to believe that the conspicuous - and highly mannered - consumption of tobacco is indeed a fashion statement. A particularly stupid one, granted, but fashion nonetheless.

Even then, I could stretch my tolerance to include 20-somethings frantically smoking because they're hoping for an early death (and need to cling to something) were it not for the fact that they're inflicting their stink on everyone else around them. Ah, but you've heard me railing in that vein before, so I'll stop right there and reveal that while thinking about smoking, it dawned me that the one thing that really annoys me about hipsters is when they deny being hipsters.

Which they pretty much all do. In fact, serious hipsters actually get outraged and indignant if you so much as hint at the H-word in their presence. "What's a hipster?" they'll snarl, "just some ridiculous stereotype that means nothing at all in the real world."

"So it's just a complete and utter coincidence that you wear the same clothes and have the same facial fair and see the same movies and read the same books as every other 20-something in the neighborhood?"

"People can have common values and ideas without being lumped into stupid media characterizations. Calling someone a hipster, well, that's abusive, it's practically like a form of racism."

I have actually had several conversations with self-denying hipsters than ran along almost exactly those lines, and none ended satisfactorily. After the first or second, I learned that there was no point in pursuing this line of questioning, so I'd just nod my head sagely and let them go on disclaiming their hipsterness. But quietly I'd think to myself, "Other subcultures don't seem to have such a problem saying who they are - punk, hippies, hiphoppers, even emo kids wear their status almost like a badge of honor - so what is the hipsters' problem?

You know what, though? I actually don't care anymore. Or maybe I do, but I'm sleepy and want to go to bed. Tomorrow perhaps I'll find a hipster on the street and ask him to explain this to me, but more likely I'll stay in and watch the Champions League final between Man United and Chelsea. Maybe I'll even start growing a scruffy beard and claim that it's not a beard at all, just the result of my being so preoccupied with vital artistic concerns that I forgot to shave. As Chris Grivet would say, "Ha. No."

A Plague Of Musos

It's old news now, because my life is so disorganized and chaotic that I can never manage to blog about things when they're going on, but last week was CMJ week in New York City, CMJ standing for, oh, I don't know, College Music Journalism or something like that? It's an annual dealie where thousands of writers, PR flacks, label honchos, scam artists and quite a few musicians convene in lower Manhattan for purposes of getting off their faces and running deals past, through and around each other.

I never participated in it during my years in the "industry" (perhaps you can infer why from the comments above, and it was a source of some chagrin when my successors at Lookout Records started laying out the big bucks not only to attend, but to put on major showcases. To be fair, though, many of the kids growing up in New York during that time (late 90s/early 00s) have very fond memories of those CMJ shows, and frankly, if I hadn't been such a grumpy puss, I probably could have come along and enjoyed them,too.

But as it was, I never attended a CMJ event until this year, and then only because various friends of mine were in attendance, in certain cases friends that I wouldn't be likely to see again until, well, at least next year. Foremost among them was Mr. Grant Lawrence, former (and perhaps future; there's increasing talk of a reunion) frontman for Vancouver's mighty Smugglers and present CBC radio personality. Grant was in outstanding form as he regaled anyone within earshot with amazing tales of people, places and the music business, all of which had at least some elements of truth to them, but which were equally well seasoned with a rather substantial dollop of fanciful invention. As they should be, Grant being a firm adherent to the "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" school of thought.

Celebrity has clearly been doing Grant some good. Once the oldest-looking 25 year old in Western Canada or at least from Vancouver to the Sunshine Coast, Grant has somehow magically been transformed into one of the youngest looking 30-whatever-he-is-nows you're likely to meet. How exactly this has been accomplished remains a mystery to me, though I hope it doesn't involve the CBC's rather generous surgical benefits program.

Anyway, it was great to see Grant once more and be inspired by close communion with someone who lives so close to the beating, throbbing heart of rock and roll. I also found time to call in at the Weston acoustic show, where three members (sans drummer) dragged bales of hay, cowboy hats, chimes and a rain stick up onto the Mercury Lounge stage for an hour and a half of campfire-style singalongs and coruscating comedy, much of it courtesy of Dave Weston and the inadvertent humor of a rather intoxicated (or just plain loony) female audience member.

This was on Day 1 of CMJ; two days later I met up with Grant again at the Mint Records showcase, and by then I was all CMJ'd out. Anyway, if you noticed an unusual increase in the number of dark-clad hipsters and their limo-driven paymasters on the streets of New York City last week, now you know what was up. And you can safely forget all about it, until next year at the very least

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Beardo Nation

I don't have any right to complain, I suppose, having chosen to live in this neighborhood, but there are times, most frequently in a packed car on the L train, when I question my own judgment in having voluntarily subjected myself to being surrounded by people with some of the worst dress and grooming sense in history (well, at least since the 1970s, which is far as I care to go back, lest I have to start ruminating on the horrors of paisley bellbottoms and other atrocities of the 60s).

I mean, Williamsburg, capital of post-collegiate America that it is, should be awash in beautiful young men and women, or at least one would think, but instead it provides a daily assault on the senses by hordes of what would appear to be derelicts, at least in embryo if not of the fully sprung variety.

But before I go any further, I should clarify: when I say "people," I actually mean the men, because most local women manage to look at least interesting, and sometimes downright fabulous. And for the most part, they tend to wash both their clothes and hair on a regular basis. The men, not so much. Not hardly at all, in fact.

I know I'm in danger of sounding like one of those fuddy-duddies who used to fulminate about "dirty hippies" or like Ronald Reagan, who once said of the 60s counterculture: "They dress like Tarzan, look like Jane, and smell like Cheetah." But at least I'm not going on about how, "You can't even tell the boys from the girls."

Quite the contrary. If only there were a bit more androgyny, if only a few of these potentially good-looking young men's idea of "masculinity" didn't entail making themselves look as grotty and unkempt as possible, with the ideal image apparently being a 70 year old Bukowski at the tail end of a three week Night Train and crystal meth binge.

Mostly, of course, it's the beards. Why? We didn't endure the travails of all these centuries of civilization building and razor inventing to come to this feral pass. Or did we? Is there where it ends, with a whole tribe of what are presumably among America's best and brightest (certainly if the amounts forked out on college tuition by their doting parents are any indicator) deliberately uglifying themselves as a statement against... what? The commodification of contemporary culture? The fact that they're only 25 years old and already getting too paunchy and disheveled to look good in their super-skinny American Apparel shirts?

Of course the women are not without blame in this matter: as long as they're willing to tolerate or even embrace guys who sport the beardo/bum look, there will be ever-growing legions of new young men who say to themselves, "Shave? Why bother?" I'll admit I'm a bit squeamish, but every time I see an even moderately good-looking girl sucking face with some human Brillo pad, I'm simultaneously astounded and appalled.

"How can you do that?" I always want to ask. "I mean, even with your eyes closed, it still feels (and probably tastes and smells) like you're kissing the ass end of a wombat, doesn't it?" Admittedly, I have met one girl who forthrightly claims that she's sexually attracted to beardos, up to and including Abe Lincoln, but she's clearly in a small minority. What of the others? Are they that hard up? So lacking in self-esteem that they can't even say to a potential suitor, "Yeah, like I really want to make out with Charles Manson. Go home and shave before you even THINK about trying to talk to me, loser." In my experience, women have never had a problem with speaking that forthrightly in the past; what could have changed?

But I guess I'd be overlooking the regrettable fact that people still met and spawned all through the 1970s, the last time dirty, smelly beards were in fashion, and that in fact many of today's most visually offensive hipsters may even have been the offspring of some of those squalid couplings. So perhaps it's an ancestral memory thing, though thinking further, I realize that most of Williamsburg's most bearded denizens these days are more likely to have been born in the 80s, when people were clean-shaven, watched John Hughes movies, and committed few fashion crimes more egregious than big hair and Kajagoogoo.

So I think we really could expect better, but unfortunately probably won't get it. In the meantime, I will have to console myself by meditating on the misery endured by those who insist on sporting face muffs and dressing in head to toe dirty black during these 95-degree days with humidity to match. Hopefully this will have a seriously deleterious effect on your sperm count and you at least won't reproduce.

Giving Directions To Hipsters

Counting last summer and the (not quite) two months since I returned in March, I've spent less than five months in Williamsburg. And to be fair, the Williamsburg where I live is not the first place many people think of when they hear the name, that distinction being reserved for the Hipster Strip and its immediate surrounds along Bedford Avenue. But apparently I already have the look of an old-timer, because the newly arrived seem to make a beeline for me to ask for directions.

And there are a lot of new arrivals these days, about three quarters of them appearing to have graduated college in the past couple weeks. Sporting nascent beards (you can tell because they haven't had a chance to get grubby from the city air) and ironic hats, they wander through the convoluted streets trying desperately not to let on that they have no idea where they're going or what they expect to find when they get there.

It's taken me a while to get used to the street plan, which was apparently laid out before rulers or t-squares were invented, or else by someone who was drunk, but after semi-mastering the tangled mass of spaghetti that passes for the map of London, Brooklyn was never going to be too much of a challenge. Still, when an earnest young man with a burgeoning but very clean red beard interrupted my reverie to ask directions to Lorimer and Norman, I had to look up at the overhead street sign to verify that we were indeed standing on Lorimer Street.

Lorimer runs near my house as well, but it's a very different Lorimer from the one that skirts the northeast edge of McCarren Park, and anyway, all the streets go rather askew at the point where Williamsburg meets Greenpoint. It's as if the two communities designed themselves to produce maximum confusion and difficulty for anyone straying across the admittedly nebulous border, calling to mind the way that early railroad lines used different gauges of track to make it difficult for the competition to encroach on their territory.

Actually, I wasn't in a reverie as much as I was pondering the conversation I'd just had with a guy who, unlike most of those around me, had lived his entire life in the neighborhood. I'd been wondering what the locals thought of the influx of middle and upper middle class young people that has so radically transformed this area in the past decade or two, and he'd been happy to share his views on the subject.

"These new people," he'd sputtered, "Hey, I got nothing against them, and they done some good stuff for the neighborhood. I go out of my way to be polite to them, but man, they got some attitudes. Like, I'm holding the door open, you know, just to be a nice guy, and they just go walking through, no thanks, nothing, not even noticing me, like I'm the fucking doorman or something. So I decided, fuck 'em, I'm not going to let myself get all burned up about it, I'm just going to let the door slam in their faces and let them deal with it."

I also learned, by his correcting me several times, that he resolutely refused to refer to the area bordering the Hipster Strip as Williamsburg, that to him it always had been and always would be known as "the North Side." Trying to soften his mood about the newcomers (myself included), I said, "Hey, they may have no manners, but at least they're driving up your property values. At the rate things are going, you'll be able to retire a rich man."

"Yeah, you got a point there," he said, "if I owned my house, that is. I rent." Oops. "Hey, it's all right," he assured me, "I'm making plenty of money off the new folks. I'm an exterminator, see, and these people see so much as a cockroach, let alone a rat, and they're screaming for me." To illustrate his point, he showed me a picture of a bedbug that he keeps stored on his cell phone. "This little guy here is gonna put my kids through college."