Zevon could tell I was
discouraged at the progress I was making toward my Hipster Quest to the point
of being bereft. I had no hipster title, no hipster place in the world of
cutting edge professions, and no “slim fit” in hipster jeans. The fact of the matter
was I lived in a cave in the suburbs. I was middle-aged, my life narrative was
already clearly defined. My life’s sense of finality was heavy and
unforgiving. To underscore this
latter point, I explained to Zevon that my two-year-old 2007 Nissan Maxima only
had 26K miles on the odometer and that I only drove 5,000 miles a year.
Probably, I wouldn’t buy another car for ten years or so, which would put me in
my mid to late fifties at my next car purchase. And that car would be my last.
The next car I bought would be the car I drove into the grave.
“What’s your point?” Zevon
asked me.
“Don’t you see?” I said.
“My Maxima is the only buffer between me and the Death Car. My life is over.”
“Hipster’s don’t fret
about aging,” Zevon said. “They keep their brains alive through wit, wisdom,
and the most important mental elixir of all—irony.”
“Have I not impressed you
with my keen sense of irony over the years?”
Zevon scrutinized me
through his oversized dark-rimmed glasses. “Frankly, you could use a heavy dose
of irony. I think a healthy injection of irony would make you more buoyant,
psychologically and spiritually, and definitely make you more hipster.”
Zevon then want on to
explain that if the world could be divided into two perennially-conflicting
tribes, it would not be theists vs. atheists; it would not be conservatives vs.
liberals; it would not be home-owners vs. renters; no, the world could be
divided between Irony Lovers and Irony Haters and hipsters of course belonged
to the former camp.
“Is not my love of irony
evident?” I said. “Am I not clearly an Irony Lover and therefore safely nestled
within the Hipster Camp?”
Zevon shook his head and
looking at me with a doubtful expression said I was in dire need of a crash
course in the finer points of irony. “We will make you an Irony Lover yet,”
Zevon said.
“But I already am.”
“You will be. But before
this can happen, you have to stop insisting that you love irony so much and
listen to me.”
Admonished, I remained
quiet and did my best to absorb Zevon’s lesson. My mentor then went on to say
that there were certain ironies that even a sheltered suburbanite like myself
knew. There was of course sarcastic irony, saying one thing but meaning
another, and plot irony in which there is always a reversal of expectations.
But these ironies were too remedial for us to be concerned with. As Zevon said:
“Everyone’s junior high school teacher tells him about this irony and then uses
the example of the driver who never uses a seatbelt for several years without
incident and then the day he feels compelled to wear his seatbelt is the day he
gets into a car crash.”
This type of irony was a
cliché and thus was anti-hipster. Zevon had to elevate my understanding of this
essential hipster knowledge. “Once you truly understand irony, you will savor
it the way a sommelier drinks fine wines.” He then laid out the Essential
Hipster Ironies:
#1: Serendipitous Irony. Zevon recalled a high school party at Joe Lasconi’s
house in which he got in a shoving match with Eric Silva over the use of the
bathroom. Silva shoved Zevon toward the toilet. Falling backward, Zevon
extended his hand and broke his fall as his hand fell into the toilet bowl.
Having your hand in a toilet bowl is a disconcerting thought, Zevon explained,
but to my mentor’s surprise his fingers tickled something cold and solid at the
bottom of the bowl. He perceived the item to be a large coin. He grasped the
coin, erected himself, and held into the air a shiny silver dollar as beads of
cold toilet water rolled down his hairy forearm.
Hipsters did not get
depressed, as I often did, Zevon observed, because their sense of irony
consoles them with the fact that good fortune is often born from the most
woeful circumstances.
“I’d like to think that if
my hand fell into a toilet bowl, it wouldn’t be worth my while unless I landed
at least a hundred dollars.”
Zevon rolled his eyes,
then said, “Your greed has blinded you from my major point. We hipsters have a
saying. A crisis is an opportunity. You would be well served to let that soak in
for a while.”
#2: Pathological Irony. Zevon explained when it comes to human nature, the hipster is
essentially a “compassionate pessimist” who has a keen sense of irony when it
comes to human folly and self-destructiveness. One form of pathological irony
was our tendency to overreact to a problem so that the cure was worse than the
affliction. “A man has a wart on his big toe and he cuts off his foot,” Zevon
said.
“Man, that’s stupid,” I
said. “He should have just cut off his big toe.”
Zevon sighed. “This is no
time for jokes,” he said. “Do you want to learn about irony or don’t you?”
“Must I pursue it so
seriously? Should I not learn this lesson with a certain ironic detachment?”
“Except that you confuse
ironic detachment with being fatuous and flippant. That’s a problem of yours
that you need to work on.”
“So a hipster can’t be
glib or flippant?”
Zevon shook his head. “Of
course not. Glibness is for superficial fops.”
“And a hipster is never a
fop.”
Zevon nodded. Then he
said, “Another kind of pathological irony is the man whose life is relatively
perfect—perfect job, perfect health, perfect relationship. The problem is that
he thrives on a challenge and without any hurdles to jump over he becomes
bored, so he creates problems out of nothing. He starts a fight with his
girlfriend or his wife or he starts an unnecessary conflict at work. The point
is all of his problems are self-induced.”
“All of them? Like in one
hundred percent?”
“More like ninety percent.
Must you interpret everything I say so literally?”
He seemed annoyed by my
small, anti-hipster mind and I decided to encourage him to continue to the next
type of pathological irony, which is Jungian irony. Zevon explained that the
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose works are well known by hipsters, had
conceived the idea of the Shadow, a person’s alter ego or opposite self, which
was a reaction to an extreme type of behavior. “A man becomes a prude,” Zevon
said, “and then he inexplicably develops a compulsion to walk around his house
naked with his windows open. Or a woman admonishes others for their unhealthy
eating habits and then develops a compulsion for secretly bingeing on gallons
of ice cream.”
“So,” I said, “the man who
dedicates his life to becoming a hipster at the same time develops a compulsion
for shamrock green sweaters with cat designs and listens to Anita Bryant music
without trying to be campy or ironic.”
“Exactly,” Zevon said.
“I think it’s been
happening to me,” I said. “Ever since I embarked on this Hipster Quest I’ve
developed this urge to go to Las Vegas and see Captain & Tennille.”
“You’re being flippant
again. It’s the pose of the guy who thinks he’s hipster but he’s really
not.”
I didn’t understand why we
had to pursue the subject of irony in such an earnest, unironic manner, but I
held my tongue lest I suffer more scolding from my hipster mentor.
Zevon had one more irony
lesson to give me under the pathological category and this one he called
narcissistic irony. As he
explained: “The poor lost soul who tries to find himself, either through some
misguided form of psychoanalysis, therapy, Buddhism, or some other Self Quest
finds himself actually getting further and further from his real self. In other
words, his naval-gazing becomes the source of his very demise.”
“It reminds me of
interview I heard on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air
with Werner Herzog who said he distrusted therapy immensely and compared it to
going into the funny house hall of mirrors in which one gets lost in several
distorted images of oneself.”
Zevon nodded approvingly,
then said, “Quoting a Terry Gross interview is very hipster.”
#3: Deceptive Irony. The hipster is keenly aware that nothing is what it seems. For
example, if sees people who think they are rising in life, soaring in success
and stature, he understands that they are unaware that they are actually
falling because they cannot see that they are blinded by vanity and a sense of
invincibility that their success creates. “Success is a drug or a Trickster,”
Zevon explained to me. “And the
inverse is true as well. Failure, which makes us think we are falling, is
actually the time in our life we are rising. The humility and modest means and
temperance we are forced to muster during our lean years hone our best
character traits so that often failure accompanies the best time of our lives.
Therefore, the wise hipster is always a bit unsettled by success and finds
himself looking over his shoulder, wondering how his balloon will be soon
punctured.”
“So the hipster is
paranoid,” I said, “and can never enjoy his success.”
Zevon shook his head.
“That’s not what I said. The hipster never takes him or his success seriously.
Thus the hipster is never pompous. The pompous man is a square.”
“But,” I said, “being so
anti-pompous is a form of pomposity.” I referred him to the hipster’s required
television viewing, The Daily Show with
Jon Stewart and explained that I had seen too many hipsters so
self-congratulatory in their ability to understand the show’s often ironic
attack of pretension, pomposity, and fakery, that these hipster viewers had
become, ironically, somewhat pompous and pretentious in their own right.”
Zevon beamed a smile of
approval, then said: “That brings us to our next and final form of irony.”
#4: Hipster Irony. A hipster can be so emphatically, conspicuously hipster that he
becomes a predictable caricature or stereotype so that he becomes, unwittingly,
anti-hipster. Having all the
hipster trappings of kitsch and swank and fashion rebellion, as laid out in Robert
Lanham’s The Hipster Handbook, transforms the aspiring hipster
into a cliché, which is definitely anti-hipster.
“So the irony is that a
hipster can be too hipster.”
“Wrong again. The irony is
that the aspiring hipster who plugs into some preconceived notion of hipster is
a walking affectation and a fake.”
“But there are notions,
codes, and rules of hipsterdome. That’s why you’re helping me.”
“There are good notions
and there are bad, or rather, misguided ones.”
“But those who take it
upon themselves to claim—rather arrogantly I might add—that they have the right
definition of being a hipster and that those whose hipster lives don’t agree
with theirs are somehow misguided is
rather pompous and therefore anti-hipster.”
“That’s the smartest thing
you’ve said all day. Very ironic and very hipster.”
i hate hipsters, they're worse than nazis
Posted by: neil | August 06, 2009 at 09:15 AM
The self-consciously affected, cooler-than-thou hipster is very annoying.
I would distinguish such a poser from an educated cosmopolitan who pursues things out of genuine intellectual curiosity without any pretension.
Posted by: Jeffrey McMahon | August 06, 2009 at 09:23 AM
"Hipster" hasn't been a "hip" word since 1960. If you'll remember, it morphed into the despised word "hippie" in the Sixties. Any 21st-Century useage is severely anachronistic.
Posted by: Ed | August 06, 2009 at 10:00 AM
I feel like most people define a hipster just because of the clothes they wear and not because they're ironic. There are certain aspects to someone that makes them a hipster, but I think most people don't really know what 'hipster' really defines and therefore are opposed to people they think are 'hipsters'.
Posted by: CJ | August 09, 2011 at 05:14 PM