"Hipster" as pejorative.

In the Western imagination, the valiance of symbolically charged figures like Homer’s Ulysses or the Knights of the Round Table remained unquestioned since their conception.

If the soldier has largely been replaced by the video game character and the drone, if the mothers have proven that they can raise the children alone, if the corporations are less able or willing to guarantee the possibility of upward mobility and some level of respect that comes with title, if someone else can bring home the bacon, what is left for young men?

All this, and they still are not allowed to cry.

If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same

She's certainly more dedicated than your average concern troll

finally someone who Gets how hard it is to be a young white guy

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A-t5J9SCQAEGidf.png:large

Looks like Sufjan in the middle there.

I guess this fits in here...I wrote an article for VICE having a pop at Alt-lit...shit's blowing up:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/alt-lit-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-literature

thoughts on alt-lit?

ha funny to have an article posted to this thread by the author

a guy on my fb writes alt lit and he's super self-depricating about it, always posts things like "wrote this poem going to kill myself now kthxbye." any time i've read his stuff it's been pretty terrible but idk seems like there's a pretty limited audience for this?

personally, i prefer the kenneth goldsmith/uncreative writing school of internet-informed poetry. it "speaks to me", as it were, because i'm a programmer and many of the methods used reflect the creative methods i use in programming. i dabbled in some of it after learning about OULIPO in an intro college course and was kinda stoked to find out years later that there were actually people doing this with much better results.

alt-lit on the other hand doesnt really do it for me, but i can definitely see why it appeals to the younger internet crowd. i think a better way to describe it would be tumblr poetry because its aesthetics are essentially that of tumblr posts and memes.

funny side note: i created a "fake" tumblr just to follow some blogs and i posted a "poem" which was just text jacked from a linux help file and it got liked by the one and only steve roggenbuck and he started following me lol!

can't believe we're approaching 10 years of this magnificent, timeless thread.

i'm sure there's a great overlap, but are what these people doing really hipstery? it seems like it's missing a "colonizing and appropriating the other" element to be a hipster thing, unless all these guys writing it are actually 50 year old hedge fund managers.

so there's now a facebook group dedicated to me: http://www.facebook.com/ThankYouJoshBaines

that article makes it sound like image macros really annoy you
like alt lit is this flimsy thing you can take or leave, "really" but image macros ~shudder~, ~cringe~

i joined the facebook group ironically

this is one of my favorite ilx threads

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bsND7aibvOQ#!

that was very well done and not funny at all

seemed like an awful lot of effort to do... whatever it's doing.

http://hipsteripsum.me/

miss u burt_stanton

that was very well done and not funny at all

― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Sunday, February 10, 2013 9:54 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nailed it

almost nailed it: it's also too long

http://raniakhalek.com/2013/02/17/the-best-take-down-of-hipster-racism-you-will-ever-see/

knowing my luck this was the video posted last week upthread that's currently down.

have we figured out who "hipsters" are yet

they apparently like Tribe Called Quest

Have an acquaintance who during one 10-minute walk from off license to my flat simultaneously

- offhand dismissed several bands/artists/music things I was trying to spread enthusiasm for, in each case because they could name someone or something that had 'done it before'
- slagged off 'hipsters' using (as everyone seems who uses the term seems to) an entirely unique and personalised definition of the word
– slagged off a 'fashionable' person they knew somehow for wearing a certain combination of clothes (which had become fashionable) without knowing its original connotation

which cluster of things seems like it might be vaguely relevant to this thread.

Anyway, as far as cardamon can see from his little pod, it looks like some people are just good at being 'cool' - that is, good looking, but in some sort of distinctive way, but without going so far off the radar they look 'weird'.

Then other people overanalyse these people, and ascribe motives to them, together with neuroses about being cutting edge and a pedantry that they don't have. It is exceptionally rare that I meet someone 'cool' in the above sense who displays any sort of 'I knew about this when it first came out' attitude. In fact it would be really weird if those two things coexisted in the same person because they seem like anathema

ON the other hand it is not at all rare for me to meet people who like to talk about how terrible 'hipsters' are and go into depth trying to define them

the person you were talking to sounds like an elitist hipster

i think i just want to avoid judgmental people in my life, no matter if they're being judgmental about hipsters, or gays, or ethnic minorities or w/e. anyone who feels the need to complain without reason or vilify or antagonize... fuck 'em.

i generally find exclusionary scenes pretty depressing but also i like to assume the best in people until they prove otherwise. except for neo-nazis! fool me once, etc

that last video has me confused & ashamed. but probably not in the intended way.

I thought I was in the clear because I don't actually have black friends (via rejecting human companionship entirely), but now I'm worried that my haircut & smell might be bothering some of my community college classmates, in which case I apologize

it is kind of frightening to be a member of the 'hipster' caste (I'm not actually technically a hipster, but I look similar enough that only another hipster would know this) and realize that there are people for whom my mere appearance reflexively provokes hatred

as for 'treating animals better than humans' or w/e—yeah that's definitely some shit I've observed people doing, I can see how it's kinda problematic but I just tend to assume that those folks are autistic

... fuck, this is one of those things that's gonna keep bothering me until I blog a thinkpiece about it, isn't it?

I treat animals better than humans. Because they are better than humans, most of the time.

you shouldn't bug out about possibly being a hipster because "hipster" is essentially just code for "this kind of person whom I find really annoying" sometimes mixed in with vaguely defined ideas of privilege & cultural tourism

i think i just want to avoid judgmental people in my life, no matter if they're being judgmental about hipsters, or gays, or ethnic minorities or w/e. anyone who feels the need to complain without reason or vilify or antagonize... fuck 'em.

― i guess i'd just rather listen to canned heat? (ian), Wednesday, February 20, 2013 9:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno people who rant about how they hate hipsters can be boorish and annoying, but i really can't equate that with if they ranted about how they hate gay people or people of a certain race

Hipsters are a tricky class, like "intellectuals" it's almost always used to describe others and there's a connotation of phoniness i.e. a hipster thinks he's cool and has good taste (but you think he's a poseur). Likewise, intellectual is often code for calling someone a pseudointellectual. A hipster is pseudohip.

Hope you're all enjoying my amazon kindle prose.

Hipsters returning clothes to Urban Outfitters in droves

is the actual headline of that article

It's kind of a shame. If we could only get a lot people to wear the batshit crazy clothes highlighted in this thread, the world would be a much more entertaining place.

otm

Real hipsters are okay. However, these wannabe hipster fuckwits on Twitter who listen to Arctic Monkeys and You Me At Six and think they're anti-mainstream annoy me.

:)

nice first post SNB

Or what about these morons who think they're mods because they've been listening to Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, The Stone Roses and Jake Bugg for about six months? Really gets my goat.

otm

Really gets my goat.

c'mon nobody uses this kind of phrase unless theyre a sock. try harder