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.

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