Friday, December 5, 2008

"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization"

Thank you adbusters, for fueling my disdain for the vacuous and self-obsessed era of hipster, the only people who've managed to make me feel bad about myself while actually just being ignorant assholes.

While I openly admit to ascribing to some of its definitions, (I ride a bike instead of driving, and it is fixed-gear) I attribute the similarities to a generational trend (I live in a city, I don't drive in Australia, it's ethically sound) rather than some embrace of apathy. Apathetic I am not; I am not afraid of describing and defending what I find interesting or what might move me to feel something, and I'm certainly politically and socially aware and active.

But maybe that's because I'm not a teenager, and I don't think that having an informed opinion makes me vulnerable. Also: I'm a feminist. Most of the hipster girls I meet are too concerned with looking like an American Apparel ad and being perved on by Dov's disciples to care much for the fight for equality.

All this brings me, however, to the fact that I've just justified how I am not a hipster. And as my friend Tim once observed, "only hipsters talk about hipsters."

UPDATE: There's an interesting response here, from a former Vice writer.
I think my biggest thing with hipsters is not so much their conformity (the Vice guy is right, that's just the case with the majority of the population) but their apathy. The hipsters I know are not the ones the Vice guy is talking about; Melbourne hipsters are small-town kids who think they're hot shit, don't know anything about the world and don't care to. They are politically and socially retarded and they're proud of it, and it is precisely that ignorance mixed with arrogance which drives me to hate people--anyone.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

That's More Like It.


From the NYTimes: "An eight-ton, 72-foot Norway spruce lit up with sparkling holiday colors as thousands of onlookers packed into the streets surrounding the center's plaza, with its famed skating rink and gilded statue depicting Prometheus bringing fire to mankind."