Herculodge

My Very Own Hipster Consultant

Living in Los Angeles, that cosmopolitan locale rich with the “creative class,” to borrow a term from author and self-described “thought-leader” Richard Florida,  I have access to of the most vital minds on the planet—“green” entrepreneurs, cutting-edge artists, noble misfits, and self-styled cognoscenti, and I am confident that I can find a guide who will mentor me as I undergo what will be nothing less than a dramatic transformation into a full-fledged authentic hipster.  The problem is that I do not live in the real Los Angeles. Rather, I live in an outlying suburb, Torrance, and my neighborhood is somewhat anti-hipster.  Its most popular restaurants are Chili’s, Coco’s, the Outback, Macaroni Grill, the Olive Garden and similar eatery chains whose main appeal is easing their patrons’ fears that the foods served might strain their closed-minded flavor palettes by virtue of being unfamiliar or outright unrecognizable. SUVs and monster trucks remain popular. Fashion-wise, Torrance residents shun the wardrobes worn by people in the real urban centers of Los Angeles—the West side, Santa Monica, Los Feliz, and Silver Lake, to name a few—and prefer more stodgy modes of sartorial wear, which has made some malcontented Torrance residents refer to their city as “Bakersfield by the Beach.” While I personally find their comparison a rather harsh one, I do agree with their general point that Torrance is somewhat hipster-challenged. 

Therefore, it is unlikely my consultant will come from Torrance. Most likely, I will have to emerge from my beloved cave and venture twenty or thirty miles to a bustling hipster center.  As I hate to drive more than five miles in one direction and in fact live five miles from the college I teach at, I am dreading the prospect of getting on a notorious Los Angeles freeway. But alas I must. For my nation is undergoing growing pains with its massive cultural shift, and so must I.

After mulling the possibilities, it occurs to me I have a potential hipster guru, Zevon, a former college composition student, whom I’ve kept in touch with over the last ten years, and he has compelling credentials. He eventually transferred to UC Santa Cruz, where he become the chief editor of the university’s magazine. After graduating, he worked in private industry, first for a fashion magazine and then as a copy editor for an international toy company in Malibu. Disenchanted with the monotonous circadian rhythms of the business world at the age of twenty-seven, he resigned from his lucrative position and is now in grad school. Zevon speaks fluent Spanish, German, and French, which gives him huge hipster status. He regularly reads the New York Times, Le Monde, and Spiegel. He is adept at cooking Lebanese, Persian, and Indian cuisine. Recently, he was featured in a food magazine for his award-winning recipe for babaganoush. While he owns an iPod, he prefers listening to vintage record albums on a turn table and he has proven to me that the sound is more “pure.” His girlfriend, Petra, is a sultry ingénue in an indie band called Liaison. In her second year of fashion design school, she supports herself by working at an upscale perfume boutique. She is, Zevon told me, a fashion insider, a member of the fashion cognoscenti, and as such she is willing to help me throw out my wardrobe and replace it with something fitting the cultural shift championed by our new svelte smartly-dressed, President. The prospect of getting rid of my elastic-waistband Dockers is a daunting one, but the Hipster Train is accelerating faster and faster and I don’t want to miss that train. 

I Am a Man in Desperate Need of a Hipster Makeover

As I write, our country is hemorrhaging at its economic seams, plundering into a downward spiral of frozen credit, bankrupt banks, and a crippled Wall Street resulting in what may eventually sink our country into The Great Depression, Part II. Clear-headed pundits from both sides of the political aisle are proclaiming that we can now kiss the Age of Excess goodbye. That great behemoth of American Excess, misnamed the Sport Utility Vehicle, appears to be sinking into the bottomless tar pit with Mastodon, Megatherium, and other oversized mammals from the Pleistocene epoch.

Gone is the credibility of a President who, languishing with 20% approval ratings, told us that in the face of the 9/11 attacks we could fine-hone our patriotism and demonstrate our sacrifice for country by doing something as banal, fatuous and infantile as going shopping. Going to the mall, purchasing a $1,000 titanium watch with encrusted diamonds surrounding a 55mm bezel and then celebrating our purchase by going to Starbucks and eating a turkey pesto Swiss sandwich, walnut brownie, and Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino was supposed to be the penultimate way of showing support for our troops.

Even the most incurable shopping addicts failed to see the logic of this presidential pronouncement and now chastened by an economic malaise, we know that shopping—in the name of patriotism or some other noble mission—is no longer viable.

Barbarian fantasies of excess are currently embodied by a perky Alaskan Governor and Vice Presidential candidate who, overcome by a proclivity to wink lasciviously at her supporters, hunts moose from a helicopter and seems hell-bent on preaching the American Myth of Innocence and Divine Entitlement. Heavy laden with jingoistic platitudes but bereft of detailed domestic and foreign policy knowledge, this ebullient pop icon of American Might and her Presidential running mate appear fated to join our beloved Mastodon and Megatherium.

My interest in juxtaposing our current economic crash with the downfall of the Age of American Excess is not to argue for one political philosophy over another as I am not a cheerleader for any political party. Rather, my interest is to talk about a catastrophic shift in American culture.  Our country has voted for a cosmopolitan, half-Kenyan, half Hawaiian intellectual orator who navigates fluently in international circles and looks good in expensive suits over a wizened, rhetorically-challenged Anglo war hero who makes public appearances in an ill-fitting sport coat and is prone to incontinent saber rattling, then indeed our country is undergoing one of the great cultural metamorphoses of its 230-year lifespan. 

What I am saying, ladies and gentleman, is that our country is moving toward Hipsterdome. Burned badly by our past excesses, we are at the dawn of shunning all-you-can-eat buffets, American Gladiator, American Idol and other inane spectacles. We are at the dawn of no longer being proud of our sub-literacy, our ugly arrogance, and our sense of narcissistic entitlement. We are, my friends, at the dawn of becoming a Nation of Hipsters.

And sad to say, I am ill prepared for this great cultural shift, for I am woefully guilty of many of the excesses this country has indulged in during the last several decades. Overweight by twenty pounds, beset by a ravenous appetite for food and “deals” on the Internet for just about any consumer good imaginable, addicted to all forms of television humbug and media gossip, I have become the very thing I have always railed against—the dumbed-down, brain-numbed, well-fed American.

If you don’t believe me, please allow me to give you a picture of myself: Last Sunday I was all alone in my house, for my wife went to celebrate her sister’s birthday in Los Alamitos,  a suburb in Orange County.  I had made it a point to stay home in order to watch the San Diego Chargers, my adopted team, play against the New England Patriots. It was around 5:00 P.M., when I found myself impatiently waiting for the game to begin by kicking velvet pillows through a makeshift goal post made out of two chairs that I had gathered from my wife’s scrapbook room. One of the pillows hit a lamp, a vintage Tiffany, that my wife Carrie had purchased at an antique store in Hermosa Beach. Shards of crystal lay everywhere. I stood in the living room, a beer commercial blaring from the television, and had a sort of revelation. Here I was, forty-six years old, and in the early evening,  I hadn’t been out of the house all day. I was wearing my prized San Diego boxer shorts and a T-shirt with fresh guacamole and salsa spillage all over it. The edges of my mouth were encrusted with Doritos.

My emotionally-arrested state didn’t stop at being a Sunday couch potato. Consider the only movie I enjoyed during the last several years was the profane-laden Superbad, which focused on two lust-soaked adolescent boys suffering from the angst of growing up. Additionally, I had become an ugly consumer, specifically a malignant eBay shopper, buying things, not because I needed them, but to relish in the glory of outbidding my “competition.” For example, I had, perhaps in a desperate attempt to capture my lost youth, become a collector of vintage 1970s military style Panasonic radios. I was snatching up so many of these Panasonics during auctions, that I actually started receiving hostile e-mails, such as the following from one disgruntled eBay buyer:

Hey Moron! 

You are free to bid on whatever you like, but give the rest of us a chance on these radios on eBay! You want these so bad you just bid a super high price to be sure no one else gets the item except you! Fair? Maybe. SELFISH? YES!

 

 While I took umbrage at the hostile, resentful tone of his e-mail, I also considered that perhaps he was right. I was being selfish. Perhaps I was filled with the same domination fantasies as that Alaskan Governor who killed moose from a helicopter. And more generally, I had become  a poster boy for the emotionally-arrested man-child, the knuckle-dragging troglodyte, the infantile American filling the void of his pathetic existence with trinkets and baubles.

It’s time to relinquish my self-centered moronic ways. It’s time for me to transition along with our nation as it moves towards prudence, maturity, and cosmopolitanism. I need to become a smarter, leaner, more frugal version of my former self. I need to re-awaken my intellectual curiosity. I need to take on a host of things to keep up with our country’s cataclysmic shift. The problem is that I’ve been so fat and so dumb and so immature for so long, that I feel lost in my brain-dead abyss. Some kind of guide is needed, some kind of expert on everything I’ll need to know about becoming a hipster. Without a credible hipster guru, this nation will move toward Hipsterdome and I will be left behind.

The Essential Guide to Hipster Irony

 

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.”

 

 

It Is My Patriotic Duty to Lose Weight

Our new President is a lithe six feet, two inches tall and weighs a reed-like 195 pounds. His lean, fat-free body fits his message that if my fellow Americans and I are to extricate ourselves from our economic malaise, we will have to tighten our belts and start living within our means. Our good President has made it clear that our economic woes are a wake-up call to the fact that we have been on a collective binge for too long and an economy built on credit bills that we are in a constant struggle to pay down is doomed to perish.

Let there be no mistake about it, our spending binge has been accompanied by the growth of another binge and that is nothing less than the insatiable appetites of all of us, evidenced by the fact that our calorie consumption is going up and up and up. May I refer you to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization periodical studies of American calorie consumption, which show that between 1979 and 1981 Americans averaged 3,180 calories a day. Then between 1989 and 1991 the calories increased to 3,460. The most recent study covers 2000 and 2002 and the daily calorie intake of the average American is 3,790. I’m a bit alarmed to consider that 3,800 calories is about the amount I ingest on a daily basis, give or take a few. And this number explains why at 46 years of age my 230-pound bodyweight is 30 pounds heavier than I want it to be for appearance and health reasons. 

Let there be no mistake about it, a hipster cannot be a porker. For a hipster leanness is of paramount importance since a slender physique evinces someone in control. Look at our most recent Presidential debates between the young mellifluous hipster and the aging maladroit fuddy-duddy. The latter candidate lost points, and eventually the election, because his seething temper, evidenced by eye-rolling, excessive blinking, an hostile exhalations that whistled through his dentures, rendered him unsuitable for the Executive Office and lose he did. 

In contrast, our hipster President is a man of temperance and self-control and it is our duty to conform to our leader’s virtues. I therefore must embrace temperance, moderation, and self-control for my own life and there is no better way to begin than by curbing the excess manner in which I consume food.
Ladies and Gentleman, it is strange, but I have been blind to my woefully overweight state and did not become aware of it until our new hipster President was elected. The svelte silhouette of the magisterial Barack Obama highlighted my own bloated condition. This revelation occurred five days after Obama won the election. My wife and I celebrated the Dawn of a New Hipster Age the following Sunday by having a brunch in Hermosa Beach.  Uncomfortably full, I convinced my wife Carrie that we should take a stroll down Pier Avenue with the hope that each step might make my breaths less strained. Alas, it was almost impossible for me to walk. Overcome with joy at the knowledge that our new President was a well-spoken intellectual cosmopolitan, I had just ingested a 5,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar all washed down with several tall glasses of freshly-squeezed orange juice. As I strutted my 242 pounds outside the buffet room and past a clothing boutique window, I saw the reflection of a portly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This unsightly man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of an overfed American and was clearly anti-hipster.

I walked closer toward the bloated image and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but me. I was that dude, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned most of my life. 

This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” and I was fortunate to have experienced it. Most people are denied, or deny themselves, such moments of clarity. It is my belief that something like 95% of the human race walk around Planet Earth with their heads up their butts and this is how they die—never knowing what the hell is really going on. But on that clement November day in Hermosa Beach when I saw that the corpulent man in the window was in fact me, my head uncorked from my butt and I was able to see reality for what it really was. And this reality—me being a chubster—was contrary to the new America our lean, hip President was trying to create.
Losing weight—at least 30 pounds—was now a moral imperative. To do so was to show my fidelity and patriotism, not only to my country but to the new Hipster Zeitgeist.

The New Hipster Has a Title Becoming of His Exceptional Self

 

Whereas the original hipsters defined by Norman Mailer were rakish to the point of being devilish sociopaths, the new hipster was a different beast altogether. Zevon pointed me toward role models for today’s new and improved hipster, including of course our eloquent President, who of course is not only beloved; he is the embodiment of Benevolence and Wisdom. He is, rhetorically speaking, eloquent, rhapsodic, and mellifluous. He represents the new saintly incarnation of the hipster.

Of course, Zevon explained, it would be unrealistic of me to aspire to the grandeur of that Exceptional Human Being. However, the standards for being a hipster were rigorous and I would have to elevate myself if my hipster makeover was to be a successful one.

“The first thing you need,” Zevon explained to me over a lunch of fava bean agnolettie with curry emulsion, “is a title. The new hipster brands himself as a relevant, vital member of society. Do you have a title?”

“I’m a community college English instructor. Snazzy enough?”

“Frumpy.”

“But that’s what I am.”

Zevon shook his head. “That simply won’t do. You’ll need to change your title as soon as possible.”

He gave me a list to choose from. My job was to take a title that was close to my credentials and then work on adapting to the title so that it wasn’t an outright lie. The list was a rather daunting one.

 

Hipster Title #1: Futurist. According to Global Future Report, a futurist analyzes global trends and then explains how this trends will pan out over a period between 5-50 years. It’s important to note that a futurist does not predict the future, the way a prophet or seer might. He projects it. His uses science, not the supernatural. For example, some futurists, like Dan Koeppel, noted Popular Science journalist and author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, warns that forces are at work, such as fungal and bacterial infection, to make my most favorite fruit, the banana, an extinct commodity within the very near future.

What future trends did my powers of analysis afford me? I saw the demise of the movie theater, but I could not guarantee it. I saw famine and drought afflicting our poor planet. But truthfully I saw more of the same—idiots in high positions, incompetence ruling the day, lame, stupid ideas winning the hearts and souls of the masses, like nonfat potato chips and “diet” chocolate fudge cake. I am no futurist. For me, life is a repetitive, monotonous cycle. Humans do not learn from their mistakes. They repeat them over and over. This belief is echoed in a favorite passage of mine from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in which the narrator writes, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Zevon admonished me for being a sour pessimist. Hipsters are optimists, he explained. They believe in change. They have faith in man’s free will, his creativity, and his problem-solving, and his essential goodness. Hipsters champion goodness. They are the good guy. Therefore, I must be very, very bad.

 

Hipster Title #2: Pioneer of an Eco-Friendly Institute or Center. Hipsters are always founding noble establishments that consolidate the energies of other hipsters and create a synergistic effect. They may buy an island, like Johnny Depp or Marlon Brando, and convert it into an alternative energy eco-friendly hotel similar to The Brando in Tahiti. They might develop an animal sanctuary that runs on solar hydrogen and carbon free fuel. They might, like Ed Begley, become a guru of “Eco-Conscious Living” and sell a line of multi-purpose biodegradable cleanser called Begley’s Bestä.

Clearly, this title is for celebrities, people with deep pockets. I can recycle, I can compost, I can ride a bicycle to work, I can bring reusable canvas bags to the grocery store, I can turn off the lights in the house when I’m not using them, I can buy bleach-free toilet paper, but none of these qualify me as a “pioneer.” Or even a hipster, for that matter.

 

Hipster Title #3: Auteur. Most filmmakers are beholden to their producers and the studio, but the auteur, like Paul Thomas Anderson, stays true to his personal vision. In this digital age, any “smart thinking person” should be able to put together a documentary that chronicles his personal vision and says something poignant about the human condition or, even better, shows the triumph of a transformed life born from the muck of excruciating pain and suffering.  Or he may reveal a conspiracy in some earth-shattering exposé. Many short documentaries had become sensations on YouTube, launching the careers of their makers who would eventually become hipsters. But it seemed unlikely I could follow this path. I still didn’t know how to use my wife’s digital camera.

 

Hipster Title #4: Benevolent Novelist. One of our generations most celebrated hipsters, David Eggers, fits this title to a tee. Best-selling author, owner of his own publishing company that specializes in publishing alternative voices of other hipsters, and founder of 826 Valencia, a center for building the literacy of children ages six to eighteen, Eggers is the consummate New Saintly Hipster. Not surprisingly, his wife has one of the most mellifluous hipster names imaginable—Vendela Vida. Her name is not earthly enough for a regular human being. Rather, it seems designated for a Supernatural Earth Mother, or the title of some ancient Holy Book that chronicles how a group of suffering people found relief when, inexplicably, their barren land was showered with Manna from Heaven. It is no surprise that she and her husband enjoy a luminescent halo over their heads everywhere they go.

But I explained to Zevon there will be no halo for me. I am neither benevolent. Nor am I a novelist. So molding my life after David Eggers seemed rather unrealistic at this point. Frankly, I was growing more and ore hopeless and I read Zevon’s list with growing wariness.

 

Hipster Title #5: Fashionista. Being at the height of fashion was once grotesque, a sign of snobbery and affectation that the good, regular people wanted no part of. But then, Zevon explained to me, American popular culture was influenced by the likes of Stacy London and Clinton Kelly on What Not to Wear, a good-hearted makeover show in which the two fashion consultants gently but firmly steer their misguided guests in the right fashion direction. Helping people mired in their ugly clothing and their low self-esteem essentially makes being a Fashionista an act of magnanimous social activism rather than snobbish social elitism.

That’s all fine and good. But owing to my burly, peasant body structure, the best I can do in the fashion department is minimize my hulking presence with properly fitting shirts and pants. But I would never be mistaken for a fashion consultant. My inner thighs were still chafed by my failed experiment in which I wore $200 designer jeans in an ice cold bath. People would be better served looking at my wardrobe and making an attempt to not look like me. That is the only kind of “consult” I am worthy of.

 

Hipster Title #6: Globalist. Zevon made it clear from the beginning that a Globalist is one of those terms that is so nebulous that I might just get away with calling myself this.

“Surely, it means something,” I said.

“That’s actually under debate,” Zevon explained. “But it appears to involve the ability to synthesize international trends, economics, weather forecasting, anthropology, infrastructure, military power, and environment, and the spread of satellite television.”

“So basically I’ll have to go back to college and get five more degrees. Fifteen years later with an oxygen tank strapped to my back I can call myself a Globalist. No thank you.”

 

Hipster Title #7: Innovator. This term is distinct from “inventor,” which has the negative connotation of the lonely man in his garage putting together a radio kit together he bought at Radio Shack. The Innovator on the other hand is a pioneer of cutting-edge technology. Zevon provided the example of Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist from Stanford. He is currently working on developing luminescent grass, mine-detecting shrubs, and gourds that can be engineered so that they can grow into pieces of furniture and even huge structures that can be lived in as custom houses.

Who did Zevon think I was, Willy Wonka? Dr. Doolittle? Caractacus Potts, the inventor from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?  

 

Hipster Title #8: Spiritual Iconoclast. This title is embodied by none better than Deepak Chopra, a self-described spiritual leader who says in interviews that he doesn’t wear a watch, that he has no concept of time, that he does not age, that he does not know how old he is, that he does not get sick, and implies that human beings, with him as the exception, languish through Planet Earth with artificial thoughts that impede them from connecting with the Divine Within. In order to follow Chopra’s footsteps, I would have to have my own “Center” or “Institute” where I would give such iconoclastic instruction. I explained to Zevon that I love watches, I am obsessed with my age, even have nightmares about growing old, and that I get sick once or twice a year in spite of getting a flu shot. A spiritual iconoclast I am not.

 Hipster Title #9: Celebrity Blogger.  Making several posts throughout the day that brand me as a political gadfly, a fashion expert, or a futurist, I could get tens of thousands of hits a day and become a high-profile Blogger. I explained to Zevon that I have a blog and that I post my favorite indie bands, electronic products, watches, and social commentary and that after three years I average 500 hits a day. And for that I should feel fortunate. To prove my point, I then referred him to CYBERJOURNAL.NET, which provides the sobering news: There are over 100 million blogs. The blogosphere doubles every 6 and a half months. There are 175,000 new blogs created each day. There are 2 new blogs created every second. There are 1.6 million blog posts per day. There are 18.6 blog posts per second. Becoming a Blogger is not about “celebrity.” It’s about going out of your way to make yourself more obscure than you already are. 

Hipster Title #10: Philanthropist. I could increase my hipster cachet, Zevon explained, by starting a foundation dedicated to giving money and strategic aid in the areas of health, education, and the arts. But as I looked at the list of prominent philanthropists, I noticed they were CEOs and the like. I do give regularly to Rover Rescue, the dog adoption agency where I found my dog Gretchen and I do give a modest sum of money to my two local NPR radio stations. But these donations would hardly put me on the cover of Philanthropy News Digest, Bloomberg Wealth Manager, or Journal of Financial Planning. 

I explained to Zevon that I was doomed to be a schlub with all the hipster glory of a potato bug. I then got up from his kitchen and told him I was going back to my cave in Torrance where I belonged. 

A Most Revolting Character: The Original Hipster

 

Here I was trying to model my flabby middle-class suburban existence after the hipster and I didn’t even know what a hipster was. What a lost ignorant soul I was, floundering to become some image of cool when in fact the image was largely the product of my grossly misinformed imagination. This became evident when I opened the pages of Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself to the historical origins of the hipster. What I read was not pretty and was rather disgusting. The hipster was in fact an immoral charlatan, and a dangerous one at that. It was difficult to digest, but from reading Mailer’s description of the hipster, in his original form, I concluded the following:

 

The Hipster Is a Marginally Employed Criminal. Thinking himself above work due to his superior intellectual gifts and his refusal to compromise to the institution, the Man, or whatever, the original hipster was our first slacker, the sloth trapped in perpetual adolescence, the parasite who rationalized his laziness by painting himself as someone too good for work. The first hipster was an emotionally-arrested dolt who saw himself as better than the rest of us and who saw holding a job as something that was beneath his dignity.

This type of hipster became adept at hiding his laziness and apathy behind an elaborate screen of nihilistic aphorisms. He was fond of quoting Ecclesiastes which states that no matter how great our achievements we are all doomed to turn into dust. Since all aspirations are doomed to futility, the hipster was resigned to an inert life of low expectations. Or put a different way, there is the famous scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall where Alvy Singer’s mother complains to the family doctor that her son isn’t doing his homework. Alvy replies: “The universe is expanding. Everything will fall apart and that would be the end of everything. . . . What’s the point?”

What is annoying about the original hipster was his dependence on sour grapes to justify his lack of achievement.  For example in the 1960s, some hipsters indulged in countercultural sham during their nomadic, “soul-searching” adolescence when it was easy to reject middle-class values and home ownership because they had no resources. But as soon as they made it big in the stock market or enjoyed an inheritance, they forgot all about their hipster treatises, which they had once so fondly disseminated with blow horns and microphones. Well-fed property owners, they now barricade themselves in gated communities while they look at the riffraff from afar, usually with the use of their home security surveillance cameras, hoping the mob “out there” does not get too excited by the very hipsters doctrines of mayhem these recovering hipsters used to promote.

In other words, the original hipster was both a fraud and a malcontent who was either too lascivious, too slothful or too disenfranchised to commit himself to an ideal or a work ethic but who pretended to be superior to the rest of the world by expounding a philosophy that inverted his abysmal character flaws as virtues to others and himself.

This was the kind of person I truly despised. And here I was, earnestly trying to be a hipster, the very thing I’ve always hated. What other horrors awaited me regarding this charlatan? There were plenty more.

The Hipster as Nihilist. According to Mailer, the hipster saw death as inevitable. Either we would die from nuclear holocaust or die the slow death of conformity to society’s square ways. Therefore, the hipster concluded, there was nothing to do but tune out of society, reject common morality, and encourage one’s Inner Psychopath. I could never be like this, for as a child my father once told me: “Never flirt with a man’s wife or girlfriend, never insult a man’s family, and never use a man’s toothbrush without asking first.” My father drilled into me the idea that there is a strong dividing line between right and wrong. Even if I wanted to, I could never be a nihilist.

The Hipster as Moral Relativist. The hipster denied any absolute truth or reality because he believes that all our life experiences are doomed to a muddled ambiguity and are subject to infinite, arbitrary interpretations. His belief in the futility of pursuing absolute truth is the foundation of all his other beliefs. First, there is no right or wrong, no moral paradigm, no universal law to govern his behavior or to compel him to participate in the shared values of the community. Second, he believes, like Thomas Hobbes and Alexander Hamilton, that man must, in the absence of an innate conscience, contrive a variety of laws, a “social contract,” to keep the barbarians from taking over and that those who are in power can most effectively inculcate these laws into the masses by proclaiming these laws to be “natural” or “divine.” The hipster is resigned to the widespread belief of this “lie” since he deems the collective delusion of divine or universal law a prudent manner to keep the “savages” relatively tame. Of course, the hipster does not need these contrivances. He is in his mind elevated above the savages, yet ironically he gives his Inner Psychopath license to behave more savagely than the rest of us.

The Hipster as Misanthrope. The hipster is resigned to his belief that he cannot truly know another person or even himself. All his perceptions of men, women, gods, and demigods are “guesses.” His attempts to grasp a firm understanding of someone, no matter how painstaking, are doomed to fail since his “understanding” is influenced by mythology, self-interest, tribalistic prejudice, and unconscious fears and desires. His belief in the futility of knowing or understanding another person compels him to a life of solitude. Friendships are shunned for two reasons. Either people are not enlightened as he is and not worthy of his company or they are as misanthropic and depressed as he is and therefore they have nothing to talk about since their agreement regarding the emptiness of life also makes for feeble and redundant conversation. Perhaps a third reason he avoids his fellow hipsters is that their presence reminds him that he is not as unique as he would like to believe.

The Hipster Is a Wannabe Soul Brother. The original hipsters were Caucasians who would have traded in their left nut to be a Soul Brother. Posing as someone oppressed by a totalitarian system, the hipster identified with the oppressed black man and the black man’s courage and resourcefulness to cope with the Man. This position was the coolest of the cool and so the Caucasian hipster aspired to be a Soul Brother and found yet another way of being annoying, obnoxious, and fake, even as this self-described hipster claimed to long for authenticity.

The Hipster Is a Phony Existentialist. According to Mailer, the existentialist never conforms to society to the point that he is blind to his real desires and aspirations. But to live out one’s desires without a sense of purpose is to be a phony existentialist. With no moral vision other than the conviction of sating his lusts, the hipster is a phony existentialist whose desires are forever disconnected from a higher purpose.

The Hipster Is a Psychopath. Enjoying a “narcissistic detachment,” the hipster learns to make the gratification of his base desires and the living out of his “infantile fantasy” part of some sophisticated philosophical code. In other words, the hipster made himself into the premier bullshit artist.

The Hipster Is an Evangelist for Despair. The hipster believes there can be no real order, only an illusion of order. Chaos is the norm. The reasons for this are simple. One is that people of good will and high scruples tend to be incompetent and abysmal in their self-promotion so that they rarely enjoy positions of power that would spread their harmony and good will. The hipster agrees with Henry James who observed that “morons and madmen reign in high places.” Their reign results in chaos, incompetence, corruption, and a complete lack of accountability.

The hipster makes it clear that he is not shocked by the grotesqueries of the powerful; he has come to expect them and in fact almost relishes in their egregiousness, the worse the better, for the travesties of the powerful feed the hipster’s appetite for cynicism.

It should be noted that the hipster rejects the notion of self-improvement. He believes that we are forever stuck in whatever predicament we find ourselves in. This is because the overwhelming forces that stamp us as human beings—our genetic code and our environment—defy any notion of “free will” and personal transformation. Whether we are lazy, self-pitying, cowardly, melancholic, concupiscent, it does not matter. We are hard-wired a certain way so that our defective personalities do not respond to our most arduous attempts at change. As the Chinese put it, “Mei banfa”—nothing can be done.

Overcome by the giddiness that he has “discovered” that life has no meaning, the hipster feels the need to trumpet his message of despair to others. The reasons are several. The first is to assert his intellectual superiority over those who the hipster believes live in a childish illusion of absolute reality and moral order. The hipster is so proud of the enlightenment he has found that allows him to, like Nietzsche, live “beyond good and evil” that he wants to make sure others know of his grand accomplishment. With a hearty flair, he will therefore advertise to the world that he has read and reread Fredrick Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, On the Heights of Despair, and the Short History of Decay. Possession of this Holy Canon of Hipster Musings will make the hipster exuberant, a condition that is contrary to the depression he is supposed to feel from reading the masters of nihilism and existentialism.

The Hipster Scoffs at Marriage and Monogamy. Further isolating the hipster is his pessimistic attitude toward marriage. Since the hipster believes we are hopelessly blind to one another, he looks upon marriage as a complete sham.  As he sees it, living with a spouse for fifty years, contrary to Hollywood’s glorious narratives, does not lead to a  continuously evolving intimacy that finds its happy conclusion with physical and spiritual oneness. The best case scenario for the hipster is to simply acclimate to his spouse’s annoying habits, her quirks, her chafing remonstrations, and her unpredictable mood shifts. But getting used to her presence is hardly “knowing” her or enjoying a sense of nuptial unity. The marital arrangement simply means the hipster must increase his tolerance for friction and irritation in what for him is not so much a marriage but an interminable prison sentence. Needless to say, the hipster’s low expectations of marriage do not provide enough motivation for him to seek matrimony. Rejecting the sacred bond of marriage, the hipster seeks orgiastic pleasures of hedonism and deems married people as joyless squares. The closest mouthpiece for this position of living the life of an incontinent, pot-smoking satyr today is comedian Bill Maher who flaunts his hedonistic lifestyle on stage while poking fun at the sexually starved married masses.

For all his pessimism about love, romance, and marriage, why does the hipster tend to be so giddy? For one he feels that having no laws, natural or otherwise, gives him license to get in touch with his inner tomcat. Since he believes we are biologically hard-wired in a way that contradicts society’s notions of morality, he feels no need to prick his conscience with such dreadful and unnatural burdens as generosity for the less fortunate or fidelity to his mate.  Determined to repel the inevitable criticism he will surely suffer for conforming to the excesses of a hedonistic satyr, the hipster will be prepared to retort any admonishments. To defend his incontinent carousing, he will be well versed in the huge body of anthropological and bio-psychological work that proves conclusively that primates, including man, are incapable of monogamy. He will love to cite studies that show that over 95% of married men cheat on their wives and that in fact the number is probably higher, something like 99.99%, since men tend to lie on the various questionnaires that ask about their faithfulness. He will also love to throw in the “fact” that all married Parisian men have mistresses. He will point to other cultures as well where having a mistress or a concubine is a common fact of life and he will take great delight in showing that the more metropolitan, educated and productive classes embrace the illicit pleasures of the demimonde while it is the backward peasant classes who cling to primitive, oppressive notions of marital fidelity.

In a patronizing fashion, hipster will concede that fidelity is a “good idea” for the mentally-challenged masses who need a crude moral structure in order to keep society relatively intact. As long as the bovine hordes stay married and make their mortgage and car payments, the economy and the metropolis should enjoy a modicum of stability. However, the nihilistic gasbag, fancying himself too smart to be duped by artificial moral laws, sees his debauched existence as proof that he is a member of an elite club of hipster intellectuals who are unshackled by backward society’s “neurosis” and “hysteria” that that have afflicted the Herd.

So this was the original hipster: A pseudo-intellectual, nihilistic selfish, lazy, back-stabbing carousing psychopath. If this is what a hipster was, then screw it, my hipster quest was over. But Zevon made it clear, the hipster had evolved into something sweet, and true and noble. The hipster had become something worthy of my devotion and fortitude. A new hipster had come onto the scene. But I, like many others, did not know who this hipster was because I was not yet hip. My education was incomplete. 

 

The Great Cultural Divide: Hipster Mini Cooper Drivers VS. Anti-Hipster SUV Drivers

 

As I studied my new hipster role, I recognized that I was joining an elite, passionate class of educated people for whom cultural dividing lines were common place. The more a hipster defined who he was philosophically, politically, culturally, and aesthetically, the more he sharply defined, not only himself, but his counter opposites. No where was this more clear than in the American preference for the automobile.

This became apparent when my hipster consultant Zevon encouraged me to get a Mini Cooper. He explained that cities with high hipster populations had a high concentration of Mini Coopers and that the quickest way to lose hipster credibility was to drive an SUV. I now recognized that America’s great cultural divide was perhaps no better defined than by these two different types of personal transportation. The Mini Cooper and the SUV were a shorthand to a long list of personal hipster or anti-hipster personality traits. As Zevon explained to me, the SUV driver and the Mini Cooper driver were complete opposites:

The Anti-Hipster SUV Driver:

1. He is a conspicuous and gluttonous consumer who lacks the introspection to see that his possessions are a form of compensation for the many inferiority complexes that roil beneath his fragile psyche. It is self-evident to everyone in the world that his behemoth of an SUV massages his insecure ego, but this fact for him remains an impenetrable mystery as unrecognizable as a film by Jean-Luc Godard. 
2. His SUV is an extension of his loud, obnoxious personality and suggests a penchant for eating while driving with his mouth open and discarding bright fast-food packaging from his rolled-down window all over our country’s interstate highways.
3. His is fond of the knowledge that in the event of a car crash—which is highly likely since he tends to multi-task rather dangerously while “driving”—that he is at an advantage since the superior height of his SUV is in position to decapitate the poor sedan driver he crashes into.
4. He is exceedingly lazy and believes, erroneously, that his SUV’s rear video display, GPS, anti-lock-brakes, and other safety features will compensate for his inept driving skills.
5. He is fond of wearing a safari vest, a titanium military watch and other “outdoor” gear to make him look ready for an “adventure” though his biggest trek is taking his SUV to the dog groomer to pick up his coiffed and perfumed Shih-Tzu. 
6. He is fond of multi-tasking in his SUV, which has become, de facto, his “office away from the home.” As such, his SUV is equipped with Bluetooth headphones, DVD player, a laptop, a fax machine, a copier, a printer, a microwave, and other gadgets that make him feel like he can always enjoy the comforts of home. Of course, his multi-tasking diminishes his already crappy driving skills and makes him more of a danger to others than ever. 

7. He is happily oblivious of the fact that his ugly SUV blocks the sight of the driver behind him, emits ten times more pollutants than ordinary cars, and gulps three times the gas. He happily accepts these “small disadvantages” so that he can live a life of vain self-absorption and proclaim that driving an SUV is the expression of patriotism as he screams “USA is number one!.”
8. He is happily ignorant of the fact that his addiction to gas likens him to a crack-cocaine addict whose dependence on SUVs and other forms of mindless energy waste reinforce our government’s dependence on foreign oil,  which comes from countries who long for our destruction.
9. The SUV driver is ignorant of the fact that market researchers in charge of boosting SUV sales have studied the psyche of the SUV driver and that his psychological profile is not a pretty one: He is vain, desires to dominate and bully others, and was teased by all his classmates during elementary and high school. He secretly desires to have a road confrontation with one of his former classmates and let them know that he hasn’t forgotten.
10.  The SUV drivers is unaware that his appetites for large gas-hogging vehicles carry over into the realm of his eating, so that he is often triple-chinned and overcome by breathlessness after “climbing” into his SUV.

 

The Hipster Mini Cooper Driver

 

1. He is proud of his sleek, diminutive car and the conspicuous way its tiny dimensions alert others to the fact that the Mini Cooper driver is making an anti-SUV statement.
2. He is fond of eating sushi and sipping Perrier while driving past SUV drivers who are snorting down triple-decker cheese burgers and super-sized milk shakes. 
3. 
He is fond of doing yoga and other exercises that maintain his lithe physique while driving past SUV drivers whose bloated stature needs a behemoth vehicle to accommodate their ever-expanding corpulence. 

4. He is prone to going to foreign and independent films while his SUV-driving brethren frequent “blockbusters” that feature muscle-bound action heroes, scar-faced, eye-patched villains, and gratuitous explosions. 

5. He is fond of his car’s horn sound, which mimicking the loveable cartoon Roadrunner, suggests a sly cleverness, but is never rude. The Mini Cooper driver also takes note of the way his cheerful sounding horn contrasts with the typical SUV horn, which, sounding like the bellicose cursing from a luxury cruise ship, scares the living shit out of nearby drivers. 

6. He is tolerant of aggressive drivers who cut him off and instead of succumbing to road rage and instead of playing “gotcha” and trying to get back at those who disrespect him on the road he focuses on the Miles Davis or other iconographic jazz playlist that is playing from his iPod.  

7. He is proud of the way he dresses himself like a hipster in order to maximize the “Mini driving experience.” He wears the latest “understated, tasteful, all-cotton gear,” which contrasts sharply with the clothes SUV drivers wear—nylon sweat suits, loud prints, and other sartorial grotesqueries. 

8. He is proud of the way he keeps his Mini bare and clean as he finds clutter adversarial to his “Mini Cooper lifestyle.”  At most, one might find a worn copy of Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, most likely in the original French, lying in the back. In contrast, his SUV-driving brethren keep their vehicles littered with fast-food rubbish, strewn clothes, loose Amy Grant CDs, and other paraphernalia which reflect the chaos and disorder of their lives. 
9. He is someone who exclusively uses an Apple computer. SUV drivers in contrast use PCs. 
Since computer hackers program viruses for PCs, and not Apples, we can safely assume that it is the world’s SUV drivers who irresponsibly open e-mail attachments that result in infecting millions of computers throughout the world with worms and viruses.
10.  He is someone who travels throughout the world, making sure to avoid the tourist spots. His Mini Cooper may even have decals with various international flags. SUV drivers in contrast rarely travel at all and when they do they make sure to go to all the tacky tourist attractions.

 

As I studied this supposed dichotomy between the Mini Cooper and SUV driver my heart sank and Zevon asked me what’s wrong.

“Here I am, learning what it means to be a hipster,” I said. “And all I’m learning about is stereotypes. This is not what I want to be.”

“Stereotypes are an important part of being a hipster,” Zevon said. “They are a good starting point, but being a hipster requires a whole lot more.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“You have a lot to learn, my friend.”

The Hipster’s Perennial Conflict, Part I: Narcissism Vs. Social Conscience

 

As was prescribed by my hipster consultant Zevon, I lay in a bathtub of freezing water for two hours wearing a brand new pair of $200 “Ralf Dry Selvage” Nudie jeans. This baptism was essential, Zevon said, to show that I was serious about making sure my Nudie jeans contoured my thighs and buttocks optimally. Lying in the cold bath and listening to NPR reports about the persecution of educated women in Tehran and starving children in the Sudan, my conscience painfully pricked me because all this time I was spending “personalizing” my Nudie jeans, I was questioning Zevon’s expertise: He prescribed the cold bath method, but I had read on a Nudie message board that an overnight soak in hot water was actually better.

As I contemplated the hipster subculture sitting in front of their Apple computers and scouring the Nudie jeans message boards, I recognized a painful hipster paradox: To be cool requires vanity, self-absorption, and a ferocious attention to fashion detail on one hand. On the other hand, the hipster must show a superior social conscience by leaving a small carbon footprint, by patronizing local organic produce sellers, by boycotting companies on the hipster hit list and by making an annual pilgrimage to an impoverished locale where he and other hearty souls build houses for the homeless. The gulf between customizing a pair of $200 jeans and writing a $500 check to my local animal rescue was a huge one and I felt that the attempt to reconcile these opposite hipster impulses to be a feeble one. From the freezing tub, I called Zevon and described to him my dilemma.

“There is no dilemma or conflict between style and social conscience,” Zevon explained to me over his iPhone. “They exist in a happy marriage. And if you doubt me, may I refer you to hipster extraordinaire, Bernard-Henri Levi.” This French spokesman, activist, humanitarian, contrarian, and best-selling author was the consummate hipster. Well dressed, articulate, mediatique,  he had through his writings and speeches exposed the evils of the world while his sartorial insouciance was an implicit admonishment of the barbarian hordes.

“Don’t you see?” Zevon continued. “Bernard-Henri Levi and our new President both have a lot in common. Exquisite in fashion and using their social conscience to call upon our higher angels.”

I told Zevon I had to get off the phone. My thighs were beginning to chafe and the cold bath seemed to have given me a case of the sniffles or something worse. All this time in an ice cold bathtub had rendered my “higher angels” comatose inside some deep freeze. I needed to thaw. 

The Hipster Eating Code

My trusty hipster guide Zevon made me home-made falafels slathered with babaganoush and Umeboshi paste, and presented me with his artisan cheese platter featuring Zamorano, Epoisse, Fontina val d’Aosta, Adriatic figs, and guava chutney while explaining that while he appreciated my desire to lose weight I would have to do so by adhering to the Hipster Eating Code of which there are twelve principles.

 

Principle #1: Hipsters Don’t Go on Diets. Zevon made it clear that I could not under any circumstances go on a diet, for dieting is anti-hipster and, owing to the Herd who take marching orders from Low-Carb Fascist Dr. Atkins, Beverly Hills Diet maven Judy Mazel and other dietary charlatans,  going on a diet is downright gauche.

There is another important reason hipsters do not go on diets and that is that diets promote self-denial and going on a self-punishing diet is a sign of capitulating to the media’s tyrannical notions of what constitutes a pleasing body image. Zevon made it clear that dieting is anti-hipster because hipsters are what Zevon calls “educated hedonists,” meaning they indulge their voluptuary and sensualist appetites with temperance. A hedonist eats expensive high-grade dark chocolate, for example, but savors it meticulously, caressing each subtle flavor more like a professional food critic than someone in desperate need of a chocolate fix. In other words, eating rich, indulgent foods is a hipster imperative, but equally important is the attitude the hipster adopts while eating. “Eating,” according to Zevon, “is an exotic adventure. It is never the base act of feeding at the trough like an animal.” I then explained that eating like an animal, hoarding food, and being driven by a voracious, unforgiving appetite pretty much defined my entire existence upon which Zevon shook his head and said I had much to learn. 

 

Principle #2: Hipsters Don’t Get Bloated. The trick to being a hipster is to be slender and to eat lavishly but in small quantities. This principle is both embraced by the French and the Japanese who wisely adhere to the saying, “Hara hachi bu,” which means eat until you’re 80% full.  The Anti-Bloat Principle, not surprisingly, prohibits a hipster from eating at all-you-can buffets or any eatery where large portions are emphasized over quality.

 

Principle #3: Thanksgiving Must Be Anti-Bloat and Anti-Traditional. For hipsters, Thanksgiving is a necessary evil—an obsolete tradition rooted in revisionist history and one that asks us to indulge in backward eating habits. Piling an incoherent amalgam of food slop on a plate and eating until one is debilitated is definitely anti-hipster. But Thanksgiving is also a time for hipsters to gather and enjoy a sense of “shared experience,” a favorite term for hipsters. To make Thanksgiving cool, hipsters avoid turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and other ingredients that constitute the “eating clichés of the Herd” and demonstrate that one is shackled to close-minded provincialism. A more open-minded, cosmopolitan hipster Thanksgiving feast might feature home-made sushi, Okinawan purple sweet potatoes, miso collard greens and Ichigo Daifuku sweet cakes. Faring international food at one’s Thanksgiving table is conclusive evidence that one is enlightened enough to see the folly of the traditional Thanksgiving, but warm-hearted and magnanimous enough to seize any opportunity to embrace a time when family and friends bond and get together.

 

Principle #4: Hipsters Don’t Get Punk-Fed by the Man. Zevon made it clear: Hipsters are the most educated eaters on the planet. And their modern-day Food Sage is author Michael Pollan who proselytizes over and over in his books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that the human race should shun the processed foods made by the Evil Food Industrial Complex and eat only real food. By processed foods, Pollan is referring to the chemical-laden “foodstuffs” like Pringles, Doritos, Twinkies, frozen pizzas, all of which can be identified by ingredients with polysyllabic chemical names so long and confusing as to defy correct pronunciation even from the most erudite microbiologist. On the other hand, real foods aren’t meddled with. How much can you do to an orange, or an egg, or an almond, or piece of salmon? It is food in its unmolested form that constitutes the badge of being “real” and is therefore hipster. The highly processed foods, on the other hand, are made by the Evil Industrial Machine, AKA, the Man, and hipsters never, ever let the Man punk-feed them.

 

Principle #5: Hipsters Only Eat Foods That Are Part of a Grand Pastoral Narrative. As food writer extraordinaire Michael Pollan expounds in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there is a certain kind of shopper who frequents Whole Foods because many of the foods are attached to pamphlets or have some kind of literature that attests to the Edenic setting from which truffles, coffee beans, Mission figs, artisan yogurt, and “free-range” chickens are cultivated by benevolent, rosy-cheeked farmers and make it to the Whole Foods market without leaving too large of a carbon footprint. The hipster is eager to share the fact that his dark chocolate was founded by a visionary, socially responsible explorer who adopts orphans in remote regions of Latin America, pays them generous wages for their labors of picking cocoa beans and establishes scholarships for all of them so that eventually they become neurosurgeons, college professors, and activist lawyers, and Pulitzer-Prize winning authors.

 

Principle #6: Hipsters Only Eat While Conversing Or Reading. As a general rule, hipsters go against the grain of mainstream America. For example, Americans eat the largest food portions in the world and have made eating the equivalent of “feeding the beast.” By this I mean too many Americans eat with a shameless rapacity which renders their brains completely empty. The American penchant for consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated is astutely explained by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More, where he posits that the America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we’ve regressed into our troglodyte ancestors. To be sure, this troglodyte-style eating is an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Houston where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.

The feeding orgy I have just described is quintessentially anti-hipster. For a hipster, eating is a communal, almost sacred, act rich with ebullient repartee with like-minded hipsters. Hipsters like to talk about the foods they are eating with the same artistic rigor they might apply to an analysis of a Renoir painting. The point is that for hipsters the food is not of value by itself, but is only provides an opportunity for bonding and luxuriating in a bath of ideas. If no one is available for conversation, then a book is needed, featuring such standard hipster reading material as the notebooks of Albert Camus, the philosophical musings of E.M. Cioran, or the latest manifesto from Jeremy Rifkin.

 

Principle #7: Hipsters Know Their Sushi. Going into a sushi restaurant and being completely lost with the menu and not knowing the sushi protocols, such as the correct technique for using chopsticks, is definitely anti-hipster. Perhaps because sushi is so diminutive in its portion size and so artistically presented, it represents the antithesis of troglodyte eating and is therefore prized highly by American hipsters who navigate insouciantly in a sushi restaurant, fluently ordering agari (green tea) and hamachi (yellowtail tuna). However, Zevon warned me that bringing a sushi guide into the restaurant would result in the loss of “Hipster Points,” as would ordering the ever loathsome California rolls.

 

Principle #8: Hipsters Grind Their Own Coffee Beans and Use a French Press. Zevon made it clear that hipsters were at their fascist worst when it comes to coffee preparation. A list of infractions that can never be forgiven are using percolators, instant coffee, and sub-grade coffee beans. Equally egregious is tarting up one’s coffee with flavored creamers and artificial sweeteners. Not only must hipsters grind their own beans, they must use a burr grinder because the cheaper blade grinders make inconsistently sized crystals, which compromise flavor. Anyone who does not know the distinction between a blade and a burr grinder, Zevon emphasized, cannot be a hipster.

 

Principle #9: When It Comes to Setting the Table, Hipsters Favor Japanese or Swank. Hipsters sniff at conventional tableware and prefer Japanese earthen bowls or sushi sets or in the absence of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, they go swank, which means setting the table with retro tableware from the early 1960s, including magnetic orange juice glasses on checker or chess boards and billiard ball shot glasses. Zevon made it clear that going retro is not about nostalgia. It’s all about cultivating irony and showing off that one watches the consummate hipster television show, set in the early 1960s, Mad Men.

 

Principle #10: Making Gourmet Comfort Food Is Ironic and Therefore Cool. Sometimes patting themselves on the back for knowing the meaning of “oxymoron,” hipsters love to make comfort food—something from the archived recipe books of our frumpy mothers—and reinventing it as the contradictory “gourmet comfort food” by adding some fancy touches and thereby making the dish ironic. For example, macaroni and cheese might be made with brie, camembert, roasted garlic, truffles, and Mission figs. Or cornbread might be made with blue cornmeal, chipotles, sun-dried tomatoes, and Havarti cheese. Hipsters are fond of calling these comfort food variations “deconstructions” to show that all the time and money spent on grad school did not completely go to waste.

 

Principle #11: Hipsters Never, Ever Buy Store-Bought Salad Dressing. One of the hipster’s most rigid codes is the dictate that “thou shalt make thine own salad dressing from scratch.” The reason behind this fierce rule is considered by some to born of urban legend, but as someone who witnessed the circumstances that are responsible for this strict decree, I wish to explain, first-hand, why store-bought salad dressing is strictly forbidden. Back in 1984 when I was working my way through college by stocking wine and beer at a hipster liquor store in Berkeley, I witnessed an aspiring hipster suffer the humiliation of being admonished by one of my co-workers, Skyler Oliphant, for bringing a bottle of pre-made salad dressing to the cash register. Skyler was the classic hipster snob over-educated for his position as a wine clerk. He often discussed literature with the customers, explaining, for example, how reading Flaubert’s Madam Bovary in the original French better captures the nuances of provincial France. Or as he bagged the brie, smoked salmon, and Sauvignon Blanc, he often explicated the finer points of Don DeLillo’s White Noise while defending the novel’s lack of plot and narrative arc. He spoke three languages. He always lets the customers know through his conversations that he had a life outside his job that was far more meaningful and exciting than what he did for an actual living.  Skyler in fact was an expert in Japanese landscaping. He also built futons with his bare hands and sold hand-crafted Japanese mattresses and pillows, Sobagaras, that he stuffed with buckwheat hulls.

Skyler was fond of admonishing customers if they shopped for products in the store that reflected mediocrity, convenience over quality, or the greatest plague of the upper class—philistinism. Skyler was eager to save people from these plagues, so that whenever customer sets pink Chablis, onion-flavored processed cheese and frozen microwave lasagna on the counter, Skyler sighed, rolled his eyes and proclaimed that he adamantly refused to sell these products. “Those are for the troglodytes,” he would say, “the out-of-towners who came out of their caves for a quick bite.”

On one notorious afternoon, a young couple—soon to be married—entered the store and said they were in a rush to go to a dinner party of which they were responsible for bringing a salad. The man, dressed in a preppy light blue sweater with the shirt collars folded over the sweater as was in vogue during that time, brought a bottle of poppy seed dressing to the counter, at which point Skyler nearly had a fit. “Why are you buying this overpriced salad dressing when you could make it yourself?” Skyler asked him holding the bottle and scouring the ingredients. “Not to mention that this stuff is crap.”

“Just sell it to me. We’ve got to be at a dinner party.”

“Nonsense.  Bringing store-bought dressing is an insult to your hosts. It won’t take more than a few minutes to whip up a good dressing.” Ignoring the man’s repeated concerns that he was rushed for time, Skyler recited a list of ingredients for a home-made dressing—mustard, cider vinegar, olive oil, onions, sugar, and poppy seeds. While the man became annoyed that Skyler was making him and his fiancé late, the woman was thankful and said it would be okay to be a few minutes late if it meant bringing a high-quality dressing to the dinner party. The man and woman bickered back and forth and as the man gesticulated while holding the salad dressing bottle, he inadvertently whacked the bottle into a sharp corner of the candy bar rack, causing shards of glass and dressing to splatter all over his fiancé’s body and face. He then stormed out of the store while Skyler applied first-aid to the attractive young woman.

To make a long story short, the couple’s wedding was called off and Skyler soon after starting dating the woman, whom he eventually married.

Word quickly spread throughout Berkeley and San Francisco as to the cause of this couple’s breakup and ever since that fateful day buying store-bought dressing has become emblematic of being backward, provincial, and downright anti-hipster.

 

Principle #12: Hipsters Are Eating Contrarians. Zevon made it clear that hipsters are too diverse a group to all be vegetarians or vegans. He explained that vegetarianism is just one way to be a food contrarian, going against the cultural mainstream. “It doesn’t matter what contrarian eating position the hipster takes, Zevon said. “Whether it’s gluten-free, anti-diary, pro-dairy, detox, all-raw, anti-oxidant, pro-soy, anti-soy, the point is that hipsters have to be prepared to argue their eating position to the death. In other words, it’s not the diet that matters so much as the level of expertise. Hipsters research their diet with the rigor of a specialist and use their contrarian eating habit as a springboard for showing off their fluent knowledge of chemistry, anthropology, history, and bio-medicine. Zevon admitted that it’s common for hipsters to go from one food fad to the next, which is lame, but at least they arm themselves with a profound knowledge of their subject so that they can vigorously rationalize their position.

 

Over the ensuing month, I did my best to adhere to the Hipster Eating Code, reading Nietzsche and Pascal as I ate my morning oatmeal and exploring new ways to add golden beets to my radicchio salads. But while obeying Zevon’s dictate to never count my calories, I gained five pounds. It turns out that my genetic DNA and metabolic rate are definitely anti-hipster.

So as our new President adroitly heads the Executive Office looking svelte and presidential, I must resign myself to looking less like Barack Obama and more like Larry Csonka.

 

 

It Is My Patriotic Duty to Lose Weight

 

Our new President (soon to be) is a lithe six feet, two inches tall and weights a reed-like 195 pounds. His lean, fat-free body fits his message that if my fellow Americans and I are to extricate ourselves from our economic malaise, we will have to tighten our belts and start living within our means. Our good President has made it clear that our economic woes are a wake-up call to the fact that we have been on a collective binge for too long and an economy built on credit bills that we are in a constant struggle to pay down is doomed to perish.

Let there be no mistake about it, our spending binge has been accompanied by the growth of another binge and that is nothing less than the insatiable appetites of all of us, evidenced by the fact that our calorie consumption is going up and up and up. May I refer you to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization periodical studies of American calorie consumption, which show that between 1979 and 1981 Americans averaged 3,180 calories a day. Then between 1989 and 1991 the calories increased to 3,460. The most recent study covers 2000 and 2002 and the daily calorie intake of the average American is 3,790. I’m a bit alarmed to consider that 3,800 calories is about the amount I ingest on a daily basis, give or take a few. And this number explains why at 46 years of age my 230-pound bodyweight is 30 pounds heavier than I want it to be for appearance and health reasons.

Let there be no mistake about it, a hipster cannot be a porker. For a hipster leanness is of paramount importance since a slender physique evinces someone in control. Look at our most recent Presidential debates between the young mellifluous hipster and the aging maladroit fuddy-duddy. The latter candidate lost points, and eventually the election, because his seething temper, evidenced by eye-rolling, excessive blinking, an hostile exhalations that whistled through his dentures, rendered him unsuitable for the Executive Office and lose he did.

In contrast, our hipster President is a man of temperance and self-control and it is our duty to conform to our leader’s virtues. I therefore must embrace temperance, moderation, and self-control for my own life and there is no better way to begin than by curbing the excess manner in which I consume food.

Ladies and Gentleman, it is strange, but I have been blind to my woefully overweight state and did not become aware of it until our new hipster President was elected (I am of course projecting a bit into the future). The svelte silhouette of the magisterial Barack Obama highlighted my own bloated condition. This revelation occurred five days after Obama won the election. My wife and I celebrated the Dawn of a New Hipster Age the following Sunday by having a brunch in Hermosa Beach.  Uncomfortably full, I convinced my wife Carrie that we should take a stroll down Pier Avenue with the hope that each step might make my breaths less strained. Alas, it was almost impossible for me to walk. Overcome with joy at the knowledge that our new President was a well-spoken intellectual cosmopolitan, I had just ingested a 5,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar all washed down with several tall glasses of freshly-squeezed orange juice. As I strutted my 259-pounds outside the buffet room and past a clothing boutique window, I saw the reflection of a portly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This unsightly man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of an overfed American and was clearly anti-hipster.

I walked closer toward the bloated image and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but me. I was that dude, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned most of my life.

This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” and I was fortunate to have experienced it. Most people are denied, or deny themselves, such moments of clarity. It is my belief that something like 95% of the human race walk around Planet Earth with their heads up their butts and this is how they die—never knowing what the hell is really going on. But on that clement November day in Hermosa Beach when I saw that the corpulent man in the window was in fact me, my head uncorked from my butt and I was able to see reality for what it really was. And this reality—me being a chubster—was contrary to the new America our lean, hip President was trying to create.

Losing weight—at least 30 pounds—was now a moral imperative. To do so was to show my fidelity and patriotism, not only to my country but to the new Hipster Zeitgeist.