“I want to create films that encourage little kids to commit gang violence.”
-Oscar Garcia, August 7, 2008, said with palpable irony during his second acid trip this month, in my studio apartment in the Mission District, San Francisco, California, USA
I – circa 2006 – am wandering around Capitol Hill (Seattle’s equivalent of New York’s Williamsburg or San Francisco’s Mission District) wearing vintage Levis shorts, an American Apparel v-neck, and faux-leather ankle boots. My boyfriend at the time is wearing Cheap Monday skinny jeans and a sweatshirt with poodles on its front. We are smoking Parliaments and drinking forties of Pabst out of brown paper bags. It is probably a Monday or Tuesday, and it’s no later than three or four in the afternoon. We’re waiting on drugs. Once we get the drugs, we’ll get high and wait on the house party in the Central District that we’d never show up for before eleven. Maybe we stop by Everyday Music, where we listen to Bat for Lashes and Ratatat at the listening stations and don’t buy anything. Maybe we walk to the Frye Art Museum so we can say we looked at art. More than likely, we do a bit of shopping at Atlas and Red Light, our favorite vintage stores. My boyfriend probably buys a worn flannel, and I waste one to two hundred dollars on a 1950s housedress, some vintage pumps, a pair of oversized sunglasses, a few scarves, and a cigarette case. We definitely end up at Bauhaus Books and Coffee, where we get free lattes because we’re friends with the baristas. At Bauhaus, we bump into ten to twelve of our friends. Their days, thus far, have been almost identical to ours. Almost no one works. Those of us who do work slack off at American Apparels, coffee shops, record stores, or arts collectives. We listen to bands that you probably haven’t heard of yet. We might deny it, but we check viceland.com every morning for the Dos and Don’ts. We start shitty noise bands and do lines until our noses bleed and drink shitty beer in backyards and dive bars and studio apartments. I think, though I’d never admit it, that we’re all that’s left of the counter culture.
Here is how it happened. We were punks when we were younger. We listened to Black Flag and Bad Brains and tapered our own jeans and made zines and went vegan and hung out at the anarchist bookstore downtown. We got obsessed with Marxism and the Situationist International and composting. We applied to liberal arts and arts colleges and wrote our admissions essays about how passionate we were about community. We decided to major in art or non-profit leadership or film or political theory or writing. I was accepted to California College of the Arts, and I moved to San Francisco.
By this time, Urban Outfitters was selling tapered jeans and giving enormous percentages of their profits to the Republican Party and pro-life organizations. By this time, the whole American-Apparel-vintage-whatever-boots-concept hair thing was all over Nylon Magazine fashion spreads and popular among high school students who might have been punks or Marxists or hippies if they had been born a few years earlier. By this time, the word “hipster” had become an insult or, more accurately, a compliment that one must never accept.
“Me? A hipster? Fuck you.”
In high school, my friend Rose and I wrote a definition of the word “hipster” and submitted it to urbandictionary.com, an online database of slang words and their definitions. Today, three years later, our definition is the highest rated definition of the word on the site, out of many. Users of the website have described our definition as “fucking bang on” and “perfect.” It reads as follows:
HIPSTER, n.
Listens to bands that you have never heard of. Has hairstyle that can only be described as "complicated." (Most likely achieved by a minimum of one week not washing it.) Probably tattooed. Maybe gay. Definitely cooler than you. Reads Black Book, Nylon, and the Styles section of the New York Times. Drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon. Often. Complains. Always denies being a hipster. Hates the word. Probably living off parents money - and spends a great deal of it to look like they don't have any. Has friends and/or self cut hair. Dyes it frequently (black, white-blonde, etc. and until scalp bleeds). Has a closet full of clothing but usually wears same three things OVER AND OVER (most likely very tight black pants, scarf, and ironic tee-shirt). Chips off nail polish artfully after $50 manicure. Sleeps with everyone and talks about it at great volume in crowded coffee shops. Addicted to coffee, cigarettes (Parliaments, Kamel Reds, Lucky Strikes, etc.), and possibly cocaine. Claims to be in a band. Rehearsals consist of choosing outfits for next show and drinking PBR. Always on the list. Majors or majored in art, writing, or queer studies. Name-drops. May go by "Penny Lane," "Eleanor Rigby," etc. when drunk. On PBR. Which is usually.
Example: I am not a fucking hipster (sweeps bangs to side dramatically and takes a swig of PBR)!*
I will now admit something that one does not admit. This is uncouth, but it’s honest. When Rose and I wrote the above definition, we were essentially describing ourselves. We admitted to each other (after swearing never to discuss it publicly) that we knew that we were hipsters. And, even worse, that we wanted to be hipsters. There was an enormous difference between being a punk in Seattle in the early-to-mid 2000s and being a hipster in the same place during the same time period. Punks were no fun to have at parties. They – the real ones, anyway – cared too much. While everyone else just wanted to get drunk and get compliments on their outfits and insult people and hopefully fuck someone at the end of the night, the real punks wanted to talk about the war and sustainable living and taking real action. That, I think, is the primary difference between not only hipsters and punks, but between hipsters and all other past and present youth subcultures. Hipsters don’t care about anything. It is important, of course, to have some vague set of liberal beliefs. It’s fine, even preferred, to be a vegetarian or vegan. But one must, without exception, be generally apathetic. Still thinking about the innocent civilians being killed at this very moment in the Middle East? Have another PBR. Do a bump of blow. Pick up a copy of Vice Magazine at American Apparel and only read the music reviews and look at the fashion spreads. Get a new haircut. Cheat on your boyfriend and tell everyone about it. Throw a party. Take Polaroids of your friends while they’re blacked out. Talk about your band for an hour. Drop out of school. Start spray painting ironic phrases on walls instead of painting on canvas. Park your vintage road bike in front of the bar and try to forget that you spent the day pricing spandex leggings.
Past countercultural groups had common concerns. The hippies united to protest an unjust war. The punks shared a frustration with the American government and do-it-yourself ethics. Hipsters view themselves as a new countercultural group, when in fact they regurgitate the past (it is 2006 and I am wearing a 1980s leotard and listening to 1960s-inspired psychedelic noise music). It is the summer of 2008, and I live in the Mission District in San Francisco. Hipsters wear feathers in their hair like the hippies and tapered jeans like the punks. But no one cares about anything. There is an unjust, pointless war raging in the Middle East, and no one can be bothered to protest. Who has the time? There’s a warehouse show in Potrero Hill tonight, and our days will be spent getting dressed and getting drugs. My roommate in making coffee in the Haight right now. My friends are checking their MySpaces and plucking their eyebrows and getting new tattoos.
This intense focus on appearance begs the following question: Is the whole hipster thing really a purely aesthetic phenomenon? Are hipsters an apathetic countercultural group, or the new bohemians? Almost anyone you chat up at a warehouse party in Capitol Hill or Williamsburg or the Mission District will likely define him or herself as an artist of some kind. For some, this is surely part of the image. There are those who carry cameras or sketchbooks like they are purses from the Mission’s Idol Vintage. My friends, who, generally, look like they jumped straight off the pages of the Vice Dos, are real artists. Oscar’s film premiered at the San Francisco International Short Film Festival two nights ago. I manage a literary and visual arts magazine, go to art school, and try to write every day. Lilly’s slam poetry team made it to finals last year. We care about something. Sure, some of our art is self-indulgent. Yes, I should be protesting the war and I do have some idea of what is happening in the Middle East and, no, I do not do anything about it. I do not write political essays. Rose does not make political art. Oscar’s film is about himself, in Paris and drunk off of three gigantic beers. The soundtrack is Crystal Castles.
Recent articles in alternative American magazines have described hipsterdom as, essentially, the death of the counterculture. Not only are our supposed expressions of individuality commodified (American Apparel tee, $24. New Ratatat album, $14.99. Gram of cocaine, $40.), but we are not expressing our individuality at all. There is a uniform, and it extends farther than what we wear. We listen to the same music; we hang out at the same coffee shops; we all read Vice. Granted, the hippies and punks had their own uniforms, but their purpose surpassed the simply aesthetic. We are united by our uniforms and labels (as adamantly as we may deny them), but for what purpose?
I often think of the hipster phenomenon in relation to Andy Warhol’s Factory and the Warhol-influenced club kid scene in the early nineties. Warhol was famous for no reason. He created (or had others create) art that wasn’t really art, but, rather, appropriations of pop culture icons. His real job was hanging out with the good-looking, fashionable, and hip. His real job was having his picture taken. This was art because it hadn’t been done before. It was art for the same reason that the Dadaists’ art was art. In New York, just when Warhol died, the club kids tried to capitalize on this same idea. Instead of doing anything, they would simply be. They were celebutantes, famous simply for being famous. They were the Factory gang, minus the production of any real art. Now, there is no more fabulousness. Hipsters are not flamboyant. They don’t dance. They sort of nod their heads and adjust their hair.
Oscar, the filmmaker, is, like me, obsessed with the Situationist International, an artistic and political movement led in mid-twentieth-century France by Guy Debord. The Situationists’ Marxist ethics led to a frustration with and hated of art on a gallery wall. They wanted to be living art. Take a walk around your city with no set destination. That is art. That is the only pure art, as all other art is commodified. Maybe hipsters, with their purely aesthetic dialogue and seeming apathy are creating art in its very purest form. You don’t need to see Rose’s paintings hung on a gallery wall. It doesn’t matter if you attend a screening of Oscar’s film. You don’t have to read my chapbook. We will tell you that we don’t care about these things, that we don’t care about anything. The three of us, walking down the street, drinking in the early afternoon, smoking cigarettes, wearing vintage clothing and telling you that we don’t care: this is our creation. This is what we want you to look at. Maybe we’re making a statement. Maybe our point is that it is too hard to care. Watching the news hurts. It makes me sick to my stomach when I do go to a protest and someone is crying, and I am crying, and I know that we are making no real change. It is easy to drink a can of Pabst. It is easy to walk to the salon and dye your hair white blonde and get a concept cut. It is easy to bob your head at a warehouse show.
Maybe we aren’t the death of the counterculture, or of culture