Hipster Mundi trivis 1 : Generation X
The
closest I’ve ever come to being a hipster was wearing turtlenecks of
unflinchingly darker colors 2 and
smoking Gauloises while contemplating my existence in terms of how a philological explication of the
cosmos was interpolated with the ontological narrative of mid-sized
academically-oriented sociologically-limited frequently-penurious quasi-urban
contexts as I spent my time engaging in spirited debates over chess choices
that might have averted tragedy had we seen the inevitable 38 moves back and
had the wherewithal to grab a functional time machine, casually slouch back a
few days weeks months years decades centuries (all equally valid options,
really, given the circumstances) and avoid the opening move that led inevitably
to our complete downfall in all matters recreational.
And possibly professional, and sexual, if the
opportunity arose. 3
Yes, that first paragraph above was all one exhaustingly long-winded sentence. And absolutely grammatically
correct just so we’re clear.
(Convoluted
digressive writing. That’s just how I
roll sometimes. Or far too often. Depends on your tolerance for thesis
statements masquerading as incoherent gibberish. 4 )
At the time, we
didn’t yet dabble extensively in hipsterism.
Especially not me. Quite
deliberately not me. Hell, just speaking
for myself (and, despite the premise of this little essay here, there’s no-one
else I can speak for), I’m not sure I’m capable of going with that particular
flow thanks to an upbringing that didn’t involve outsider art or a
non-scientific use of the word “experimental” to any significant degree.
We didn’t spend a
lot of time on hipster variants of steampunk 5
. Our dabbling in wooden versions of
things that should have been made with modern metallurgy or vulcanized rubber
or hard shatterproof plastics6 was
nascent at best.7 Man buns were virtually unknown outside of
samurai and maybe Coppola’s Dracula.8 Woman buns were still around on occasion,
but we pretended not to notice.
Terrible taste in clothing had been with us since the
beginning of our species, so that wasn’t really an indication of hipsterism
unless we went full Cro-Mag and claimed that we wore itchy bearhide pelts and
wolfhead caps with massive canines over our sloping forehead before it was
cool. Or claimed that wearing
still-bloody rabbit fur as sleeve-liners would one day actually be cool if we
were to just ignore the signs that nascent serial killer tendencies were becoming quickly non-nascent.
We listened to indie
rock, of course. Indeed, in many ways,
we founded modern indie rock as an entire genre rather than just a few acts
that nobody could really pigeonhole.
And, over and above that, we were early adopters of the generic hipster
formula that popular bands and musicians could be so uncool that they might
actually circle right back around to cool again, allowing us to listen to Metallica
and Springsteen and R.E.M and even Bruce Willis singing the blues9 without a trace of hypocrisy10.
Well, okay, with lots
of hypocrisy. It just didn’t get
addressed very often, so it was easy for us to overlook.
So we read broken
poetry about breaking things, and smoked copious amounts of weed but without
the hippie formula of trying to embrace the universe. We were barely motivated to embrace our
immediate surroundings, so engaging in such intimacies with a cold and uncaring
Lovecraftian cosmos seemed a little too presumptuous in light of our current
relationship with it.11
Mainly, we just wanted to get high. Nothing more meaningful than that. As far as we were concerned, the universe and
our immediate surroundings could both find their touchy-feely embracements
elsewhere and elsewhen.
The upshot is that we weren’t yet
hipsters, as such. But we were getting so close
that our noses twitched knowingly at the approaching smell of ironically
dispensed musk products and scented beard waxes.
Just to be entirely clear on
the matter -- our forbearance on the issue of becoming hipsters wasn’t the
product of a lack of trying. Well, no
more so than our general tendencies toward not trying, tendencies which,
admittedly, were considerable. Furthermore,
let me assure you that my/our (quasi-(neo-(ish))) hipsterism had very
well-defined limits. I would not, for
instance, attempt to remake my fridge into a baroque bronze idol shaped like
the Nautilus wrapped up in the grip of a giant cephalopod12.
In fairness to myself, and I'm quite devoted to being fair to myself so long as it works out to my advantage, it never actually occurred to me to specifically
reject that particular possibility. The
thought “If I had the chance to encase my food- and vodka-chillin’ machine in a bronze
shell shaped like a massive un calamar de dimensions colossales13 gripping a primitive and fictional 19th
century submarine, I wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity ” didn’t cross
my mind.
Not that I recall,
at least.14
In short, ours was a level of hipsterism too déclassé
to even be hipster déclassé.
As I said, though, we didn’t have ‘hipsterism’ back
then. Not really. Not as such.
Not in so many words, and definitely not in so many complete
carefully-articulated sentences designed to convey an idea. And absolutely not in any way that could be
considered widely-disseminated among the populace15. Very few people bothered to broach the
topic of hipsterism in conversation and/or Internet memes, so we had no way of
communicating with most people outside our immediate circle of friends anyway16.
(I can easily, if not overly-enthusiastically, remember a joyous world unfettered by the quasi-intellectual tyranny of Internet memes. I can also vividly recall that we spent our days looking silently around for some
way of expressing our thoughts and feelings with succinct visual
representations of overdone jokes. It
was a sad state of affairs, let me tell you17. How our ancestors survived such a dismal existence long enough to pave the way for posterity to make stupid, overdone images with derivative captions, I'll never be able to fathom. Imagine what Voltaire or Oscar Wilde or Frank the Gallic barbarian would have been able to do with a decent photo-editing program. The mind alternately boggles and weeps at the proposition.)
If one wanted to apply a label to us, the most obvious one would also likely be the most appropriate one.
We were basically
just slackers, both individually and in toto. It was in our nature.
See, we might not yet have managed to get a good grip on self-conscious hipsterism, but we definitely had our fair share of slackers back
then. Indeed, it would be my contention that the modern usage of the word 'slacker' was
essentially popularized as a means of accurately describing the unearned soul-weariness our generation18.
The exact details of nomenclature and socio-political
analysis matter little. The important
thing is that we looked upon this blessed state of slackerish affairs and found
it good.
Well, we found it acceptable, anyway, in the sense that, having nothing
better to do that evening, we accepted it. We might not have taken to it with
the full vigor we had to offer, because slackers never do, but we did give it a
few kindly headnods and understanding shouldershrugs. In other words, we tolerated the world in
much the same way as a snowman tolerates a slightly bigger and better-made
snowman with authentic coal eyes. Mainly
because we had neither the energy nor the drive nor the magic top hat to form stronger opinions on
the matter, and our button eyes couldn’t really move around to examine the
other snowman anyway.
In our defense, we didn’t really have a particularly
precise definition of the word “good” except insofar as it meant we weren’t
particularly unhappy or anything. (We did have dictionaries, but mostly abridged ones.) Things
of beauty were still joys forever, and beauty was truth or truth was beauty or
toes were fingers or something. The
moral order of good versus not-good wasn’t entirely clear, but we were
reasonably satisfied with our paltry lots in life.
Genuine satisfaction is a lot easier to do than genuine
joy. This is axiomatic, and we leaned
like hell into the axiom.
We had the remnant children of the beat poets and white
jazz aficionados just behind us, nipping at our heels, but they were fading
with unjustified reluctance19. They had even-less justified high-falutination20 and they certainly couldn’t pass a day
without encountering plenty of them society sorts that you always hear about in
certain sections of the local paper that the advertisers are reluctant to
associate with21.
But not hipsterism as a recognized22 sociological perversion utterly devoid of such
basic human traits as shame and color-coordination23.
Oh, don’t mistake me. People wore Buddy Holly glasses, thick
horn-rimmed ones with little points at the upper terminal edges as well. Many worshipped Elvis Costello with a
devotion just south of perplexment, and most of them were convinced that the
aforementioned Mr. Costello was the only real Elvis24. We
had obscure LPs found in the dregs of the local record store25, discs and bands and musicians that had faded
into obscurity for extremely valid aesthetic and cacophonic reasons but
wouldn’t be left to rest in peace by people demanding that they receive respect
for unearthing such unknown treasures.
We had ironic sweater-vests and even more ironic Big Band swing
music. We had somewhat less ironic
grubby forays into actual swinging (both the sex and the playground kinds),
though a lot of that was a holdover from the ‘70s (and smelled that way to boot26.) We
had Nick Drake obsessions27, The
Smiths obsessions, recherché sexual
politics, casual profanity, vers
libre that we knew wasn’t some post-modern phenomenon, and many other
things that are escaping my memory, possibly because they weren’t really worth
remembering in the first place. But we
tried to pretend we came up with it, and a penchant for lots of deep analyses
of the socio-economic dynamics of hemp that ultimately turned out to be just a
desperate reason for arguing for the legalizing of weed.28 We saw, and occasionally palled around with29, 20-something ironic Elvis Costello imitators
wearing semi-ironic Radiohead gear or faux-ironic Tweety Bird t-shirts
and pins featuring dismally ironic quotes about ironic things with an attempt
at ironic detachment that most couldn’t quite pull off, ironically or
not. Amazingly, we even had vintage
clothing stores outside the major metropolises. At least I remember two or three such places. Whether those stores would still be open two
years later was quite a different issue.
We had and we had…and so on and so
forth. You know how it goes.
There was nothing particularly
unique, or even slightly original, about the things and themes in our possession. A few name changes, a couple twists and
tweaks, and this could have been written about any decade or any generation of
the last hundred-and-twenty years. With a lot more
twists and tweaks and the addition of a wooly mammoth or maybe some pre-dynastic Egyptian motifs, this could probably have been written about any decade or any generation of the last hundred-and twenty centuries.
The time cannot
kill a cliché, after all. It usually
doesn’t even bother trying. It just looks slightly embarrassed and coughs uncomfortably as it deliberately focuses its attention elsewhere or elsewhen.
We weren’t special. We were aware of this. We knew this.
Well, most of us knew
this. And, quite frankly, most of us
didn’t really care30.
Mostly we just labored under
not-quite-illusions not-quite-delusions of ‘current times.’ You know, like ‘today,’ and ‘yesterday,’ and
‘possibly last week.’ These were the
trends, in the theres and thens31.
The whys and whethers and whens never much concerned us, in the same basic way that the
crashing inevitabilities of ugly death (and its uglier sister, non-clinical PTSD) never much concerned us.
I mean, we didn’t want to die ugly or
anything. I feel I should emphasize that
point, just in case some of y’all get the urge to fulfill what y’all interpret
as our deepest desire. Most32 of us found ourselves rather unenthused about
such a prospect, rating it just below watching a group of 1980s vintage Honda
hatchbacks mudding around in our carefully landscaped backyards33.
Ugly dirty death34 was what happened to morose band members with
crippling heroin and pathos addictions.
Granted, some of us -- not me, just to be clear here -- suffered from those exact things, but our generation
wasn’t unique in that regard.
But since there’s really not much you can do about the
possibility of ugly death other than not taking candy and/or money from that
serial killer cruising the streets, you might as well just pass your time
drinking bitter coffee and playing some slightly-bitter chess, right?
Right.
Many listless Saturday afternoons found me taking a
break from coffee, at least for a few hours, and (joined by a friend or two
with similar notions about avoiding ugly death) spending some time on the patio
of some trite Americana-themed restaurant/bar or another. We’d play cards sometimes, chess more often,
and deconstruct the nature of play in the face of an eschatology where, in
final analysis, work and leisure pretty much accomplished the same pointless
ends. That is to say, no ends worth the wends we were wending. We’d smoke Marlboros and Gauloises
and Indian Spirits and thin cigars machine-rolled in a factory nowhere near Cuba,
in some random city like Hoboken or Upper Sandusky or Amarillo or Armadillo or Cigarillo or Limonjello. We’d drink expensive tequilas and
marginally-expensive whiskeys – for how else can one determine the worth of a
brand of booze except by the price point? – while talking flippantly of
cultural recidivisms and the proper hows to hump a cows35. And
we would relish being able to understand what that preceding phrase actually
meant while people around would occasionally glance at us with equal parts
curiosity, discomfort, heart-ache, and the apparent need to sneeze.
Our unspoken motto: You
know what? They deserve to be confused
and feel a little sexually ambivalent, bovinely-speaking, for eavesdropping on
our possibly suggestive and probably perverted conversations.
Let’s drive them nuts and then spray them with anise-flavored seltzer
water. And that’s why we’re talking just
a touch louder than necessary and making sure complete strangers hear and judge
our discussions within the ill-defined limitations of their understanding of ee cummings' interesting but overrated verse.
Granted, as mottoes went, it had a fairly narrow application to most aspects of our lives.36 If we squinted real hard37 and removed 97% of the motto’s words, we could possibly apply it to sex with British crumpets38. Or strumpets, depending on the depth of your knowledge of classic British vernacular slang. And anise, of course, despite how vile it tastes. And Ultimate Frisbee/Frisbee golf, if we weren’t overly concerned with making any sense whatsoever. So there was that, I guess39. But the more complicated and overly specific the motto, the easier it is not to be a hypocrite. So I feel this was an example of us choosing our motto wisely40.
Restraining it to the short and specific kept us sincere…ish. Kept us honest…ish. Kept us ish...ish.
Incidentally, the Gauloises -- Gauloise Blondes, to be specific -- looked exactly like they'd been soaked in a particularly pungent Gallic urine and tasted moderately terrible. Even worse than Camels, if you can believe that. I just want this particular assessment on the record. They looked appalling and tasted terrible and made me want to say unpleasant things about random strangers innocently walking nearby just to distract myself from the horror...the horror41.
Even now, several years later, I can still remember the
distinct sense that maybe smoking might be bad for us after all, based on the
entirely sensible proposition that if smoking tastes like this, it can’t possibly be good for either body or soul42. It
was akin to willingly poking your tongue with moderately sharp tetanus-inflicting pushpins for
four to six minutes. This was the sort of thing the Marquis de
Sade (Our Lord of Sadism, May He Never Return, The Sick Son-of-a-Bitch) would have written rapturously about as he pondered
fantasies of forcing five-gendered prostitutes to smoke an entire pack of
Gauloises while struggling against reticulated barbed wire ensnaring their
less-obvious sexual parts. If you
took a queasy French existentialist, paired him up with a French nouvelle vague fringe pornographer not
named de Sade, introduced this inchoate pairing to a French fringe pornographer
who is named de Sade (and vigorously so), offered the three of them some
suggestions of deconstructed Belgian sadism involving over-malted beer and
regularly invaded territory, and forced them to consult with a despondent
self-loathing bitterly divorced and even more bitterly re-married tobacco
farmer determined to inflict his inexplicable (and somewhat hypocritical)
hatred for smoking on the rest of the population, you’d end up with something
that tastes pretty much like Gauloises43.
Approximately, anyway.
The awful, awful taste was how we knew for certain that
they were cool. If they tasted good,
everyone would be smoking them44. I mean, popular kids and churchkids and drug
dealers and all those would be doing it and it would cease to be special and
then we’d have to switch to one of the extremely low-quality American
cigarettes available, ones that tasted as awful as certain imported cigarettes
designed to facilitate Eurotrash nihilism.
Also, because the Gauloises were heavily taxed in order
to protect the interests of homegrown tobacco consortiums qua
military-industrial pharmaceutical usury complexes, they were more expensive
than the usual cigarettes available in our time and place45; this price point just confirmed beyond the
shadow of a doubt how innately cool they were.
There’s probably a defined mathematical equation to find the correlation
between awful tastes, excessive prices, and undeniable coolness, but my last
calculus class was far too long ago for me to even consider trying to quantify
the relationships46.
Let’s just say that possibly ∑ and almost certainly ∞
would likely be involved at some point47.
I did ponder the proposition that all these factors
together simply meant that only terrible French cigarettes were bad for me and
the rest of them were perfectly fine.
Now, years and years later, I still haven’t given up completely on that
proposition. When one finds a pretty lie
that speaks to the pretty unconfirmed truths, one doesn’t let it go without a
fight and a heavy dose of truth serum.
Such truths as we once believed, part of us will always
believe.
We’re a stubborn species. Stubborn to our bone and marrow.
We are also a
wishy-washy species, so let your conscience and your bank account be your
guides. They’ll usually steer you wrong,
but don’t sweat it. Being wrong is what
makes us human.
In this context,
I’m very human indeed.
And, any defensive protestations
notwithstanding, so are you.
~=====FOOTNOTES=======~
1) I’ve done my due diligence by checking Google to see if someone could figure out what this means by looking it up. They can’t, and I’m not going to translate or explicate here.
Well,
“mundi” is obvious enough, but “trivis” is the hard part.
Yes, I know I’m being an ass. Kiss my….
2) From black to dark
green to the occasional crimson, I owned the full really restrained rainbow of
muted turtlenecks. I also owned a beige
one, just so I could look in the closet (or bedroom floor) and specifically reject
it as a sartorial choice. If I’m being
honest (and I sometimes am), I actually wore it in public on occasion, because there
are days you just need to shake things up and prove to people you can pull it
off, no matter how much of an abomination it might be.
Granted,
my choice in turtleneck colors wasn’t exactly shaking up anything important
unless the world actually does revolve around me, in which case, I apologize
for the numerous tragedies, disasters, and, if I’m being really self-loathing,
episodes of “Two and a Half Men” caused by my callousness in wearing a beige
turtleneck in public.
3) Or kill your
grandfather. One of those, and which one
I’d recommend to any given person comes down to whether said person has brought
me ice cream and/or gratuitous in-person nudity at some point in the recent
past.
4) Also, I did all tis while somehow managing
stray strands of our facial hair en passant 4.1
And talking in the sort of long discursive sentences that take a whole
paragraph to finally reach the terminal punctuation and probably stopped making
sense approximately 20 words in, if not sooner, because Lord knows I can’t just
stop talking (well, writing) and wrap things up in a sensible manner because
that’s just not my style and certainly not in keeping with my
meticulously-devised self-perception, and it would be silly to pretend
otherwise in this old and weary and prevaricating world of ours.)
4.1) I describe it
thusly because that makes metaphorical sense, dammit. So stop asking ‘Wait, what’? And, no, I won’t be explaining the metaphor
for excellent reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the metaphor’s appropriateness and/or
validity, let alone its quasi-ontological sensibilities. We managed stray facial hairs en passant and that’s all there is to it.
5) What we did have, the proto-steampunk ideation, was frequently categorized as “industrial.” Though two are not strictly synonyms, the term “steampunk” was not yet in significantly wide pop-culture circulation at the time. I’d heard of it, so it wasn’t completely new or anything, but it wasn’t quite the cultural phenomena we know today, at least not to my admittedly-unreliable recollection. So people used “industrial” to label many things, in a few short years, people would have called “steampunk.” They also applied the same word to buildings on the wrong side of the tracks. Generally buildings devoted to industry, so calling them industrial wasn’t a hugely random thing.
6) Laptop computers and sexual pleasure
devices, for instance, because there are just some suggested and occasionally
suggestive places you don’t want to risk a splinter. Silicon microchips, for instance, and biological
vaginas.
Yes,
I went ahead and said it rather than leaving it suggestive or implicit. Sue me.
7) I admit many of us (not me) did sneer contemptuously at rhymed poetry, but that’s because we were talentless hacks who couldn’t master meter, rhyme, or, really, anything that didn’t sound like a boy band’s biggest hit.
Here’s
the rule: if you want to be considered a
truly creative artist, writer, poet, actor, mob accountant, etc, by breaking
the conventional rules, you need to prove that you can operate under those
rules first, to establish that you have an actual ability to do conventional
forms and are not just writing free verse because that’s the only type of
poetry you can do. Or, as I once told my
father, Picasso showed that he could paint realistically well before he started
getting more abstract and all cubic-like.
Even if you don’t like his Cubist works, for example, you can’t honestly
say that he couldn’t have just painted them in a traditional style because,
well, he showed that he was perfectly capable of doing that. In other words, his mature work was a product
of choice.
8) I don’t actually remember, and am not going
to rewatch solely to confirm or disprove my claim. I’m just going to assume Coppola got Gary
Oldman into a fake man bun and leave it at that. Knowing Gary Oldman (I don’t, just for the
record), he probably wore a man bun regardless of what Coppola intended.
9) Just to be clear, we didn’t listen
to Bruce Willis singing the blues, but, y’know, we could have if we were
brain-damaged and wanted to wallow in the experience of it.
10) The four major exceptions to this formula
were the Talking Heads, Huey Lewis and the News, Joan Jett & the
Blackhearts, and Dire Straits. The epic
story behind these exceptions cannot be adequately covered in mere words, but
if you ever manage to achieve the feat of being cool enough and hipsterish
enough, you will intuitively grok the entirety of this complex and magical
explanation.
If
you don’t, you aren’t cool or hipsterish enough. My friend, who’s a true Scotsman, agrees with
me wholeheartedly (and majorityliverly) on this point.
11) No, we weren’t that depressed or
angsty.
Well, okay, maybe a few of us were that angsty. We could hardly revel in our generation’s
music without putting in some work on our angst and alienation.
Okay,
maybe angst was a defining characteristic of our generation. We didn’t invent it but we sure as hell
turned it into an artform.
Okay,
in my generation’s defense, I wasn’t particularly angsty. I’m not sure how that particular observation
defends my generation, but it does defend me.
That’s important.
12) My spellcheck insists that cephalopods
don’t exist, which seems like a damned scurvy thing to say about a species
that’s just trying to live its best lives.
If it matters, I’m currently engaging in a protest against Microsoft and
their Microsoft Office suite due to their ridiculous insistence that I have to
buy the damned product all over again because I got a new computer to replace
an older, Microsoft-infected one.
Bitch-ass company with no scruples.
They couldn’t be behaving worse here if Steve Jobs himself came back
from the dead and took charge of them.
So
I’m using a freeware fork of a freeware word processor, LibreOffice, derived
from OpenOffice, and their spellcheck is being damned scurvy, possibly from an
actual acute lack of citrus.
I
should note that I’m not a programmer or computer scientist, so I can’t speak
with much authority on the role of citrus in computer technology. Apple, I understand, because I am aware of
society’s collective agreement to ignore the ridiculous limitations of
fanatically-proprietary programs in the name of pretending that something named
after the worst fruit flavor for candy is somehow cool. Alas, apples aren’t citrus fruits, so they
fall outside the scope of this increasingly-long and incoherent footnote.
Circling
back to two paragraphs ago, I’m just making an educated guess based on my
understanding of the role of citrus in the issue of being a scurvy person or whatchamacallit. Also, while I’m thinking about it, I just
want to make clear that Apple is overpriced, overrated, and almost certainly
the hardware/OS choice of the next wannabe Evil Overlord.
Don’t
say I didn’t warn you. Just...don’t.
Edit: Having switched back the MSWord, shelled
crustaceans now exist again. Huzzah.
13) That is to say, a real big giant squid
thingie. Jules Verne, and the French in
general, have a sense of the overly-wordy melodramatic. Seeing as I’m overly wordy, though only melodramatic
in the sense that I just assume that the universe is a vast uncaring place
designed to drive the puny minds of mortal man over the brink into madness, I
can’t criticize too much when they can’t just say giant squid and leave
it at that.
Also,
just to be clear here, yes, I’ve read a lot of Lovecraft and cosmic
horror. That has no relevance to the
real point of this endnote.
Okay,
stop looking at me like that. There’s no relevance and I am quite correct on
the matter.
I’ve
also read 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea many times. It’s not a perfect bit of writing – Verne was
the very definition of over-explaining and over-expositing, with lots of dry
discussions of science tucked away in there – but I still love it all the same.
14) But I can assure
you I would have rejected this option had it arisen somehow. Because of my lack of readily-available
bronze and my much-greater lack of readily available talent, however, I would
have failed spectacularly so at this art project that kindergarteners everywhere
would have rolled their eyes and called my art a fucking disaster. 14.1
14.1) More to the point, I likely would have
violated or outright assaulted a half-dozen municipal codes, twice that number
of federal laws, and approximately
thrice that number of basic philosophies about
the function of art.
But,
dammit, it would have been my choice, not the FBI’s, no matter how severe the
charges I faced in a federal court.
15) Those were the
heady and unthinkable days of the early internet. You were far more likely to find a clip
art-festooned Geocities page maintained by a proud and chubby father of four
raving about his family trip to the Maroon Stick Bobblehead Museum than a site
with proto-hipsters behaving proto-hipsterish.
Both are appalling, but only one is appalling with a modicum of
comfortable sincerity.
16) We also didn’t have memes, as such. The word, if it was known at all, was known
primarily to atheists and biologists an.
It occurred to nobody at the time that it could be used to describe a
picture of someone making an “Oh Fuck” face while simultaneously dealing with
either a ballyhoo bandstream bash or a raging warthog chasing after them.
Yes,
it was a deeply unenlightened age.
Nevertheless, we can but weep for the lost innocence of the first time
we saw a cat picture with a quip.
Which
was actually years in the past. We did
have motivational posters, after all. A
kitty dangling from a branch by its forepaws, with the words “Hang in There!”on
the wall of a government employee’s cubicle was the defining image of our
era. That is, when we saw that poster,
we knew we were now trapped in the gears and wheels of government bureaucracy
and that our misery and frustration at the hands of the bureaucrat owner of
said cat poster was sealed.
Some
government employees can be incredibly sadistic, putting up the poster just to
warn us after we were already in the cubicle and had no meaningful way to
escape.
17) Life was hard and brutal world back then. None of us knew that we were supposed to live and love in addition to laughing, for instance. The first time I saw a “Live Laugh Love” meme on-line, I suddenly realized that I had wasted my life. And would continue to waste my life, because it’s such a cheesy fucking meme.
18) They even made a movie about the topic, though
it came out in 2002, not the 1990s, and I never actually watched it, so all I
know is that it sounds like something Kevin Smith or Richard Linklater would
make but apparently didn’t.
I’m
not entire sure why I even brought it up.
Not everything has a reason, and that’s perfectly okay. Most things – maybe 99.74% of things – don’t actually need any reasons because,
well, they’re entirely too pointless to rate an explanation.
19) Still very much with us, sadly, were the
really appalling performance artists exercising their questionable artistry
with an unquestionable need for questionable acclaim from unquestionably
foolish would-be gatekeepers of the haute monde. That made sense, really, because some of us
also had completely unjustified barbaric snootiness toward a world that didn’t
give a damn what we thought in the first place.
Subconsciously, they – I refuse to say ‘we’ for several very good and
utterly compelling reasons, none of which I’m going to share with you, so stop
being nosy – felt that society could not survive without their ability to treat
it as dismissively as they treated their own occasionally-serious jaunts into
genuine emotion, so they had the snootiness like Thumper on Bambi, if “Bambi”
was the name of a prostitute and Thumper was her completely apt nickname for
one of her regulars.
20) Usually this footnote would say “Not a
word, and I am aware.” Instead of that
rote answer, I’m going to zag and say “Definitely a word and that’s all I gots
to say about that. Suck it up and accept
it’s a word simply because I say so.”
Also,
is there such a term as “low-falutin’?”
If not, the arbiters, inventors, and chroniclers of the English language
really missed the boat. I’m looking at you,
Mr. Shakespeare. And you, Mr.
Johnson.
And you, Miss Damsel. Not because you deserve any blame here, but because I like looking at you. You’re a lovely person.
21) And, obviously, the Beats and the hep cats and the jazz!motherfuckers! were already a part of our cultural history. The Beats were the foetal hipsters yearning to be free. Metaphorically, we should have been the newborn hipsters, wailing and knowing damned well what we wanted out of life, i.e. boobs and nutrition. But somewhere along the way, we became the false pregnancy that didn’t actually happen and the real hipsters came hard on our heels and were born and holy fuck did this metaphor grow completely nonsensical.
22) The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders aka the DSM, still doesn’t recognize hipsterism as a
legitimate mental disorder. How many
more cross-woven beards must grow before they accept responsibility and fix
this? Sometimes, the greatest heroes
aren’t the ones who avert tragedy but the ones who step and and say, “This is
fucking stupid enough to be a mental illness.”
When will our anti-hipster Heracles finally come to beat down anything wearing a trilby?
23) It’s not that we were better people than
generations plagued by large numbers of hipsters in their ranks.
Well, maybe we were a little better. But it’s not like we did much of anything else to deserve being praised. We just didn’t really have a name for the systemic problem of trying desperately to be cool. “Trying too hard” really doesn’t qualify – it’s a descriptive phrase, and applies across any and all generations.
24) They
never said so as such, but the general vibe one got from them was that Mr.
Presley’s parents might have been prescient with regards to the power of the
name Elvis when they named him, and good for them, but that didn’t mean their
kid was anything other than a flawed attempt to steal RealElvis’ inevitable
glory by preceding RealElvis’ career by a couple decades.
Seriously, they didn’t say it out loud, but their withering (well, just annoying, actually, but they felt their gazes were withering and it was no use arguing with them) glares spoke volumes. Or at least paragraphs
25) And
the record stores themselves were already a crusty bit of nostalgia and
proto-hipstertude. Cassettes were very
much on their way out, and CDs were the hot new item. But the record stores endured, even as some
do nowadays. In some circles. if your
choice in party/gathering music in a physical medium wasn’t as big around as
//Dolly’s left boob//, you could be guaranteed a few slightly disparaging
sniffs on the outer rim of rude. Just
far enough that you couldn’t prove the rudeness one way or the other.
Just
to be clear, this wasn’t in any way universal.
But the affinity for, and vociferous arguments over, vinyl could last
for a considerable amount of passive-aggressive time even amongst people who
didn’t go all in with regards to records and the stores that sold them. Even nice, friendly people (I’m looking at
you, Carlton S.) could get caught up in the fervor and go scorched earth.
It’s
entirely possible – I see this now – that I needed to trim a few people in my
social circles, because sniffing, snorting, or spasming over the (perfectly
acceptable, let me emphasize) medium someone chooses when playing music doesn’t
really reflect well on you and your outlook on the world. You’d probably look down your nose at a
person’s choice in the breakfast cereal wars involving Lucky Charms vs Captain
Crunch vs Cinnamon Life vs Cocoa/Fruity Pebbles vs Honeycomb vs Froot Loops vs
Frosted Flakes vs Frosted Rice Krispies vs Captain Crunch with Crunch Berries
vs...ah, let’s just say a dozen or so others despite there literally being no wrong choice in this debate. They all have
their merits.
Where
was I? Oh, right. Sometimes you gotta
cast off a friend to prevent you from writing about them years later and
suddenly realizing you probably should have cast them off.
I
like the monster cereals, incidentally.
Not easy to find, but Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Franken Berry. They – that is, Wikipedia – say there were
two others at one time, Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy, but those were
before my time. Or, according to the
aforementioned Wikipedia article, they were around but, according to me, I
don’t recall them at all.
26) The 1970s were far too close in our rear-view mirror to withstand much post-70s irony and retro affectation. That didn’t stop some people from trying, though. Ironic disco fans had already begun popping up in the early ‘90s. For some reason, a few of the ones I knew made disco part of a de facto battle for the soul with New Wave. This made no sense, musically or culturally, but damned if they didn’t try their best, bless their weird little hearts.
But we clung to the smells, let me tell you. Incense and pot and patchouli and whatever the hell it is that gives beanbags their smell, these were all frequent in places where the chipper ‘80s had come quick and left even quicker. To call it a remnant of grunge wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it would miss the point. We didn’t even care much about grunge by then. Indie rock, sure, and fatal belle dame sans merci lead singers and the occasional shoegazer throwback, but we really didn’t have much of a musical ethos by then.
27) And
Nick Cave, for that matter. But Drake
won out because he had the advantage being dead before his time. Nick Cave suffered from, well, not being dead
before his time.
Sometimes
it’s the little things that can affect a person’s career.
I should note that Nick Cave wasn’t some major MTV-rotation name (as far as I know, because I didn’t watch MTV) at the time, so he had what we might call hipster cred. He also wasn’t completely unknown, so that eroded his hipster cred. The world fills even the wisest of us with bewilderment at all the butterfly effects out there.
28) Mind you, I’m all for legalizing weed. It’s ridiculous that booze is legal and weed isn’t. It’s even more ridiculous that being a Trump Republican is legal and weed isn’t. At least the mind-altering effects of weed are generally harmless and wear off after a decent interval. You can’t say the same for Trumpism.
29) I’m
not saying I was part the group that palled around with such people, and I’m
not saying I wasn’t. I’m just saying
that a mental catalogue of the people I hung out with back then contains a
distressingly large number of squarehead Costello imitators.
Also,
every time I happen to see this footnote, I immediately think it’s a predicate
form of “pall”. It’s very confusing.
And also, my spellcheck dislikes ‘catalogue’, but that is a perfectly acceptable spelling, so my on-going war with spellchecks in general has reached a new plateau.
30) It’s
no coincidence that “Fight Club” came out in the late ‘90s. The problem was, it crudely articulated some
of the zeitgeist of our generation but cared way too fucking much to actually
put its finger on the pulse.
And the solutions it offered were ridiculous to
the point of parody.
31) I’m not entirely clear when “retro” became a thing to the extent that overeager journalists num-nummed on the issue. Consignment shops and vintage clothing stores were certainly a thing at the time, and I would guess approximately 112% of my friends and casual acquaintances had offered said stores their patronage at one point or another, but they weren’t particularly endemic. Certainly not to the extent they are now, and even less so in them sorts of places I had been living, ranging from major but not huge metropolitan areas south of the Mason-Dixon line, to medium-sized college towns even further south of the Mason Dixon line, to New York.
Well, New York might be an exception. I don’t recall it very well on account of being young, stupid, and fairly inebriated for most of my time there.
32) Perhaps not all, but I can attest only to the friends I had.
33) At least that’s how I rated the idea,
though perhaps not in those words and perhaps not in any way, shape, or form,
but that’s retconning for you. And I’m
mostly certain that my friends would have agreed with me had I taken the time
to posit such a ranking, assuming I’d even come up with such a ranking.
I will say that rated it above listening to a Yanni concert during live organ donations involving liver removal by a cheeky British guy. So extrapolate the rest of the list as you feel best.
34) As I said, I can only speak about the ones I knew. A few of them seemed to want to die, in a very roundabout way. but, as far as I could tell, none of them wanted to do so in a way that could be construed as ‘ugly’ or ‘dirty’. At best, some probably hoped for something tacky, or (dead fingers crossed) ) inappropriately prurient. That’s something, I suppose
35) There are no typos in this particular phrase. If you need further information, the Internet isn’t probably the best place to start looking. You can try the library, of course, but the search function isn’t nearly as sophisticated.
36) Indeed, in the 20 years since, I’ve only
had to apply that motto to my life maybe thirty-five, forty times, and it
actually had relevance to the situation exactly once, and that was only because
I was mysteriously in possession of a bottle of anise-flavored seltzer water
after a will night with a group of Greek expatriates trying to do as many
unspeakable things as possible before being deported on moral grounds.
Things happened. That’s all I have to say about the topic.
37) Since the hardsquint strategy could be, and usually was, used to apply most anything we felt like to anything related to sex, that’s not really a revelation.
38) Do I need to point out that, for clever young people like us, pretty much anything could be applied to sex if we really wanted it to be? I don’t? Cool. Carry on.
39) And now that I’ve spoken it, it’s no
longer unspoken, so it seems we’ll have to find a new motto to keep firmly
silent about.
Yes,
I know the Fight Club motto. Please stop
suggesting it. You’re not being clever
or original or even tolerably acceptable in mixed company. Thank you.
Don’t mistake me here. I actually like the movie, though I don’t care for all the people who took away the exact wrong lesson from it and decided Tyler and his philosophy were cool upon cool. They were character and narrative devices, not a screed to enlighten, exemplify, and transform the modern age. Get past that 16 year old angry-at-society-but-not-so-angry-I-won’t-gladly-accept-my-parents’-offer-to-help-me-get-a-car-so-I-can-drive-around-and-park-at-school, and learn to enjoy the movie for what it is, a well-made and well-acted piece of cinema. Again, thank you.
40) To be clear, not only was this motto
completely unspoken, I have serious doubts about whether the other people I
talked with even thought of this motto, let alone specifically embraced it. For the most part, and as far as I could
tell, their actual mottos were along the lines of “Ah, another line of whiskey
shots can’t hurt. I mean, 3:47 in the
afternoon is practically nighttime, so might as well get drunk a bit early and
keep moving from there.”
My
mid-afternoon drinking chess buddies were a sensible lot, you see. They didn’t overthink things. I had so very
much to learn from them, and far too little time in this life to do so.
41) I love the movie, as disturbing as it may be. Though lots of people disagree, I actually prefer Redux because it re-inserts several scenes that were just grimly suffocating. I don’t watch it very often because I like my soul intact, but that’s just a sign of it accomplishing what it was meant to accomplish.
But I read Conrad’s book long before I saw the movie, so whenever I think of that quote, it’s always from the book.
42) Marlboros were my
control group, Camels were evidence that there was something that tasted even
worse than Gauloises, which banged up but didn’t destroy my original
hypothesis. Imagine, if you will,
somebody choosing to irrigate a tobacco plantation with only camel piss. Now imagine if that actually worked instead
of killing off all that precious, precious tobacco. Maybe because there was a genie involved or
something. I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here. Use your own imagination, dammit.
Now
imagine the growers aging their tobacco in large vats of camel piss for three
years, with the occasional spraying of camel sweat as an insecticide or
something.. Now imagine also that,
unaware of its agricultural providence, you bought a pack of Camels Wides
(assuming those still exist – I’m not sure of that point, but it’s your
imagination, so you can easily imagine they still exist, mmkay?)
Have
you got the image fixed in your head?
Okay, now imagine if you happen to be smoking one of those Camels at the
precise moment you’re reading this.
Yeah,
now you understand how I feel about Camels.
So
imagine going to get a nice strong-tasting drink to wash out your mouth, since
you threw up a little inside it, and resume your reading.
I’ll
wait.
(This
sequence of events is even more appalling than the one I will shortly be using
to explain the Gauloises simply because Camels hurt me younger and more
viciously than Gauloises. Also because
the description of the process for Gauloises was written in French and my
French translation skills are questionable at best ever since I stopped
changing any word I didn’t recognize into very recognizable English cuss words.
My
translation of the works of Rousseau got some rather nasty reviews and
horrendous sales precisely for this reason.
Apparently people feel strongly about not claiming ol’ J-J wrote
extensively about willow-bark ice cream and the virtues of wrangle-sex after
eating it. Supercilious bastards.)
In
any event, back to Camels so I can hammer the point home: now imagine yourself stuck in a deserted
Nevada desert mining town for months, the nearest scratch and evidence of
civilization three hundred miles and a hundred and fifty years away. You have no phone, no vehicle, and no
cigarettes. You’ve run out of the
emergency rations you brought, and that drinkingwell you discovered is almost
empty and you’re almost relieved at that second one because the water it
provided always tasted a little funkier than you liked.
As you stand by the
crumbling dusty road leading through the heart of town, baking like a
pumpernickel under the 107 degree temperatures, you see a vehicle approaching
in the distance. A good one, durable and
likely outfitted with all modern conveniences.
Seeing as cars haven’t been invented yet because you’re a hundred and
fifty years away from the nearest scratch and evidence of civilization, you’re
contemplating the possibility that the heat has made you delusional, but, you
know, whatever.
So you just stand
there. When the driver sees you, the
vehicle slows down and comes to a stop next to you. She is a gorgeous woman with a wonderful
smile (because this is my hypothetical, she’s a gorgeous woman with a wonderful
smile, but I have no issue with you imagining a gorgeous man or an unattractive
woman or the Piggly-Wiggly mascot or whatever floats your boat). She looks concernedly at you and observes
that you seem to be on the precipice of a total breakdown. She blinks, glances around, and asks if
there’s something, anything, she can do to help.
“A cigarette?” you ask, hopeful. “Do you have one I can bum off you? Anything that involves nicotine-infused dried
plant leaves inside rolled paper for the purposes of igniting one end and
subsequently inhaling the resultant smoke in the other?”
She nods, climbs out of
the car, opens her purse, and pulls out a pack of…Camel Lights,.
“Camel okay?” she asks. “Camel
Light, specifically?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely okay,”
you reply without hesitation because this is neither the time nor the place to
hesitate on such matters. And it’s even
true. Not because Camel Lights are inherently
okay, but because the world changes and man must needs adapt. I mean, it’s a hundred and fifty years ago,
so you might have just invented the tmetic ‘fucking.’ Without access to any means of researching
the topic, it’s possible.
You’re on a roll here. Lean
into it, my friend.
Anyway, she hands over a
Camel Light (the cigarette, of course, not a less-fattening version of a
miniature dromedary, in case I didn’t make that clear earlier.) You place the filter end between your
lips. She lights it for you since you
have no means to start a fire and don’t want to anyway, in these
conditions. You inhale. It tastes like camel piss. Vile, disgusting, strangely taintedly oasis-like. (Or something. I have no idea what the adjective form of
oasis is. Oasian taste? Oasitic taste? Itbelikeanoasiskindofplace
taste?) Dismissing the pointless
attempts at proper grammar and lexiconography (also of dubious validity as a
word) your mind insists on trying, you sigh.
She leans in for a kiss, her hands sliding down your body, her beautiful
face just inches from yours. She is an
absolute vision of perfection, and she’s clearly so attracted to you that she
can hardly contain herself, sliding her hands down to your hips, breathing
huskily, her dark skin gleaming with the sheerest sheen of perspiration, her
perfect violet eyes staring deep into your own less-Harlequin Romance
eyes. The Camel held firmly between your
lips holds steady as you shake your head and mumble, between those clinched
lips,
“Good God, woman, let me enjoy
my first cigarette in months.”
The end. Everybody wins. Even her.
Especially her, because she came within millimeters of kissing you but
tragedy was averted.
Look, it’s nothing
personal. You just aren’t the sort of
person who should be kissed. Ever.
Please resume your reading above now, and remember, I take donations for telling people the way it is, even if it is a lie or it really hurts their feelings. I charged double for both at the same time.
43) Indeed,
it’s been proven under laboratory conditions by a good friend of mine. She started the experiment out of friendship
but finished it out of a smoldering desire to punish me for getting her
involved this entire sordid affair in the first place. The French have much to answer for, including
certain variants of post-modernism, and, of course, Proust, but the effect they
had on my friendship with this sweet young lady tops the list of atrocities by
a country mile.
Not a country kilometer and
change. Stop inflicting the metric
system on us, you Froggy pollywog sons of bitches. Just stop.
44) I
sometimes think the joy certain people – yours truly, for example – take in
black coffee has a certain inherent perversity.
Objectively, black coffee is bitter and sharp and, by any reasonable
standard, not exactly tasty. But people
– still yours truly, for example – can drink it all day long and enjoy the hell
out of it.
You
know, I was going to make some deep philosophical point here, but I suddenly
realized that I don’t actually have a deep philosophical point to make. Really, some of us are just perverse and
that’s all there is to it in final analysis.
What more needs to be said?
Some day, I will delve into the demand for a large percentage of alcoholic beverages. Yes, Jagermeister, I’m coming for you first, and I will not treat you nearly as gently as I just treated coffee. You are the Hitler of flavored alcohols. Oh yeah, I definitely went there. Just accept that it is true. You are the weird-mustached genocidal scatological dictator of flavored booze.
45) Close to the order of twice the price of a pack of Marlboros, if I recall correctly, at least in mid-sized academically-oriented sociologically-limited frequently-penurious quasi-urban context where I lived at the time.
46) In case you’re wondering, this is not a joke. I actually took calculus. No, I didn’t learn anything worth learning. Yes, I have forgotten every last tiny bit of it. No, I’m still not joking. Yes, I sometimes screw up basic arithmetic. No, I don’t consider basic arithmetic to be vital to my survival. Yes, I am very, very wrong on that point. No, I will not budge even so. And, yes, I’m almost certainly lying on that point for humorous effect. So take this implicit life advice with a dollop of kosher salt. And, no, I have no idea if kosher salt comes in ‘dollops’.
47) Then
go get some top-shelf Irish whiskey and pretend you taste something supernal in
it, like the experts and booze snobs do, despite it objectively tasting
terrible because it’s mostly the flavor of gopher wood fermented in a vat of
shoe polish.
Just
to be clear, the Irish are an amazing people, and they make damned good
beer. I just never got exactly why they
– or anyone – actually likes the Irish variants of whiskey.
But I’ll drink enough Irish
beer to keep going in the competition for drunkest person at the brothel even
when I’m up against people slamming hard liquor like Irish whisky.
