So, with my lifelong expertise in thrift shopping and the musical knowledge I had gained through the edgy tastes of my older sisters as my passport, I joined the ranks of the hipsters. I had bangs by 2002, when my aunt gave me several garbage bags full of her perfectly preserved early 1980s attire, and in 2003 I fell for a guy who wore black Wrangler jeans and who wrote his senior thesis in French about film semiotics. Riding a bike to impress a different boyfriend in 2005 connected with my desire to participate in the hipster subculture that throbbed through Portland. His favorite sweater, which I had created from a pink-haired friend's castoff dress, was bright red with a white angora lightning bolt. I spent my days at the fabric store where I worked doodling minidresses and planning sewing projects. I still have a good deal of the fabric I purchased with my discount during that year. But I realized that I didn't want to support myself through craft shows. I entered graduate school in 2007 largely because of a nagging sense that I was missing something by staying in Portland, with its amateur artwork on every café wall and hour-long brunch waits. And then, when I moved back to Southern California, the thing that had been missing, my teenage passion for social justice, took over my life. That's what I've been blogging about since 2008.
Make no mistake, though; I still look like a hipster. At least, I think I do. I've heard the term used to describe so many styles now that the only common thread is the contempt the speaker wishes to convey. You use the word to refer to someone you find vapid, superficial, annoying, try-hard. It's because of their hair, or the type of anachronistic shoe they're wearing, or their prattle about David Bowie being underrated. Ugh, hipsters! So easy to dismiss for their pretentious vanity. Just like environmentalists, really, with their endless nagging about recycling and their holier-than-thou attitudes. This really came together in my mind when I started hearing people dismiss bikes as a hipster statement. Like the only reason you would ride a bike is to try and look cool.
Well, that's me, that's how I started bike commuting. And then I kept bike commuting not because I thought I looked cool, but because I felt cool. That changed my life; it mattered less how I looked, and mattered more how I felt. What I did, my routine practices, could make me feel good, and because I have a big ol' social conscience, I started to feel less good when I realized how many ways I was contributing to nasty stuff. Riding a bike put me in touch with ecology, with fair trade, with social justice. I started thinking about where my trash went, how much water I was using to wash clothes, infrastructure, what connects me and the rest of the world. I started noticing the people who were riding bikes because they couldn't afford to drive, not cause they thought they looked cool.
A short while before I left Portland, I saw Gimme Shelter, the Maysles Brothers' documentary about the Rolling Stones circa Altamont. In footage of the festival, I watched a young man on acid contorting his face, trying to master the waves of sensation passing through his body. Emotions flashed across, happiness, confusion, pain, while his hands flexed and unflexed. In the crowd behind him there were many other versions of this kid. Even though I had pored over my mother's 1969 yearbook countless times, and found The Crying of Lot 49 transporting, it had never struck me before that these people were just like me and my friends. They didn't know that their youth would become a set piece for Forrest Gump's personal heartache and a bottomless source of inspiration for mass produced goods. They thought something big was around the corner. In the film they all sit there, looking as cool as they could, waiting for the magic to pour out from the epic performers taking the stage. When the hour struck, during "Under My Thumb," it was not what they expected: a man in a psychedelic suit waved a gun and a knife-wielding Hells Angel, part of the evening's security detail, took him down.
The crime for which people condemn hipsters is detachment, satisfaction with surfaces. But this is what they are themselves reproducing in belittling the efforts of people to make real connections between where things come from and where they go. This is my understanding of the artisanal movement, the DIY lifestyle, the attention to details that make hipsters visually identifiable. Why is it despicable to care about how one's choices affect the world? I think about the incredibly wealthy people who benefit from this underlying class backlash, where things like shopping at Walmart get defended because poor people don't have other options. If you criticize Walmart, you're criticizing the poor. Now that is some effed up BS right there, but that is the strange reality in which we live. Calling out exploitation, trying to refocus attention through more ethical choices, marks us for bullying. Shut up hipster! Who cares where that food came from. You should be glad you have food. They want us to be that crowd at Altamont, distracted by the drugs surging through our veins, passive, until someone loses control and brutality becomes justifiable. But I'm not one of those kids, because I time traveled to the future and I know where their passivity got them: back to the suburbs, chained to their cars, producing new generations of young people who they drive to the Apple store for more white boxes full of experience design.
I do hipster stuff like cutting up old sheets and sewing napkins for friends. It feels good to make things, and finding colorful stripes on a sheet at the Goodwill outlet is a pleasure unto itself. Is that somehow less socially acceptable than going to Target and buying new dishcloths with a recycling symbol printed on them, covered in chemicals and produced by people living under extremely different conditions than I am? Does it make me an awful hipster that I get satisfaction from making a statement with how I live?
A lot of movements are counting on social marketing, the idea that our lemmingness as humans, wanting to show others that we're down with whatever they're into by doing it too, will get us into better, more sustainable practices. The things we buy are supposed to make us good people, because we don't just buy stuff, we take pictures of it and use it to display our identities on Facebook. We might as well be using this tendency to make sustainability seem cool, right? Some of us think that's kind of silly, and actually want to re-make our consumer practices. But would you be able to pick us out of a hipster lineup?
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| Hipster in Bogotá, Colombia |
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| Hipster with the mayor and the founder of the ciclovía at the first CicLAvia |
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| Hipster at a café in London, where she'd just presented her research at a bike conference |
1. I'm a hipster.
2. The word "hipster" doesn't refer to anything solid but is lobbed at any youngish person who demonstrates that they care about something.
3. What appears to be detached hipster behavior could be a lot more grounded in ecological reality than driving an SUV around in the suburbs to buy endless packaged goods imported from overseas.
4. Hate the game, not the player.
