Thursday, June 20, 2013

On Ted Endo's Hipsters

The funny thing is, I live in the epicenter of what people refer to as "hipsterdom," Williamsburg, the capital of all things Brooklyn, and I don't know any hipsters personally.  I see lots of people on the street who I think look like what Ted Endo is calling a hipster, but I've had enough embarrassing moments of realizing "realness" after even a shallow scratching that I know better than to judge that book by that cover.  In fact, one friend, the one who looks quintessentially hipster, the one even another passing hipster would unselfconsciously call out to his hipster friends, "hey guys look at that fucking hipster douchebag," is actually someone who completely embodies all the things hipsters are supposedly not. This hipster shit is as tired as it is old.  Kooks and vals and hipsters and hippies and longhairs and mods and punks and anything else you care to name.  There are real conversations to be had about the abuses of corporate power, government spying, greed, corruption and any number of life threatening environmental concerns that generate their own special totems of decline, but I'm of the view that a quasi-definition of a perceived generational culture isn't one of them.

Click the pic to read the original article.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

amen

nsabich said...

Even if there is some attitude, so-called hipsters are making some great cheese, chocolate, beer, kombucha, soy sauce, mayonnaise, toothpicks, axes and more! I'll eat their high-falutin creations any day regardless of melancholy!

EditorialBoard said...

There is an good little back and forth on Ty Breuer's posting of Ted Endo's article on facebook.

Abert Shelton, Nick McGregor and Tim Darwish all weighing in.

My follow-up comment is this:

The interesting thing is, Mr. Endo leaves on a super ecumenical note, basically shattering his definition of hipster by making it more universal. I understand the desire to come out on that end, to undercut his own mischief-making. Going down the road in the first place of putting that name to a generation's of feeling of guilt and distrust, well, I think that might be a slippery, gravity laden red herring. Hipster as totem of a psycho-social reality is interesting, but has to be fleshed out more forthrightly.

EditorialBoard said...

https://www.facebook.com/tyler.breuer/posts/10151431170701300?comment_id=26034304&notif_t=like

kelvin freely said...

Hey, what are you guys talking about?