The Last Days of Chez Hipster

Kirsten Dunst, meet Oscar Moment

"Hipster"¹ has jumped the shark. 

This is not breaking news. I worked at an art school during the hipster grande époque of the mid-noughts and so immersed in their world it dulled my perspective and I'm a bit late to this observation.                                      

1. Blogger and celebrated hipster-hater Joe Mande offers this working definition: "College-educated babies...rich white trash — or people trying to stretch out adolescence as far as it’ll go." See also Paste Magazine's "Evolution of the Hipster>".

The evidence is everywhere but I didn't really catch on until sitting through Melancholia, the latest film by Swedish director Lars Von Trier. Well actually it was after watching the film and trying to sort through why I hated it so much. Von Trier is the international auteur du jour (At least he was until admitting Nazi sympathies during the latest Cannes Film Festival. Oops.) The best way I can describe it is Armageddon meets Rachel Getting Married meets Every-Bergman-Film-You-Couldn't-Sit-Through. If that sounds unwatchable, you have no idea. 

Melancholia is so devoid of even a shred of internal logic it makes the vastly superior The Tree of Life seem self-explanatory. Kirsten Dunst should be heavily fined and/or publicly shamed for her begging-for-an-Oscar performance as the kind of bourgeois who is both utterly self-absorbed and (of course) financially independent. This in turn gives Justine (Dunst's character) the widest possible berth to inconvenience and humiliate others. This includes her new husband by refusing him on their wedding night and minutes later engaging in random sex. With a stranger. Still in her wedding dress. On a golf course.

But wait. Justine is depressed, and a nihilist. And apparently because of this she knows things. And she's surrounded by decent but flawed people who are sort of freaking out that a planet twenty times the size of earth is hurtling toward them. It turns out Justine is the kind of savant who alone is able to embrace the coming extinction level event. Is it faith? Pluck? Courage? Please. This is the oracle from Justine: 

"I know things ... And when I say we're alone, we're alone. Life is only on Earth and not for long."

The moral and intellectual center in this tale is the one who hates life, herself and the world so much she's totally cool with the death of everyone and end of everything. And oh yeah, there's no God. Did not see that coming Lars!

Don't take my word for it. Go see it. Or you can click here and in a few seconds take in all you need.

Trying to understand the lavish praise this train wreck is getting I wandered over to a film message board to see if there weren't others equally dumbfounded. What I found was an endless, serpentine and oddly emotional argument over the question, "Is Melancholia a hipster movie?" My brain is already a bit spongy. It got a lot spongier trying to digest the emotional investment people had in warding off the term hipster from anything to do with their personal taste.

The line in the sand was basically this: Melancholia is a hipster movie vs. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is a hipster movie. The vitriol reminded me how Nick Hornby once described the anger in arguments over musical preferences,

"When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead."

"Hipster" took on the form of film-culture Kryptonite and there was a manic struggle as each side lobbed it between their trenches.

In a discussion brimming with absurdities, the clearest was there was no shared agreement what "hipster" meant. Not even close. And that didn't seem to matter. The word had become a white board on to which the most self-serving assumptions could be scrawled. How has a word so over-saturated kept its legs in popular usage? 

According to Foster Kamer of the Village Voice one reason is the "murky dark potion-making of SEO, or search engine optimization." News outlets figured out some time ago that if you created headlines with words people like to search for (as opposed to what may accurately describe the story) it helps drive visitors to their sites and helps business. "And," notes Kamer, "one of those magical words is 'hipsters.'"  So to keep web advertisers sated a perpetual energy machine is in place to make the word even more meaningless. (Of course the irony is that this potion-making may increase readers to this blog. I'm okay with that.)

Then a few weeks ago I saw a New York Times feature on a friend of mine, Vito Aiuto. Being one, I know lots of clergy. Most are good people but I can think of only a handful that I would really want to be my pastor. Vito is one of them. He is pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an area of New York City that is commonly considered the Jerusalem of hipsterdom. That perception lives on in spite of evidence to the contrary. The first odd thing about the Times piece is that it's in the "Fashion & Style" section. Huh? 

Then you realize from the second paragraph that at least part of the writer's intent is to reduce Vito and his parish to a sociological stereotype. See the skinny jeans, old sweaters and vinyl records. And they go to church! At least Vito is given the last word. On being seen as a hipster:

"It’s a way of looking at a person and not acknowledging their personhood. I’m trying to battle the trend of irony and sarcasm and not meaning what you’re really trying to say."

So this is what I'm really trying to say: Melancholia is pretentious nonsense. Hipster has passed its shelf life as a useful way of describing anyone or anything. Life is good. God is real. Grace and peace to you.

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Respect the Nonsense

When I say softly! Slowly!

An obvious part of my vocation is speaking in front of groups. I even get invited to the occasional speaking engagement outside of my normal Sunday gig. A few weeks back I was at one of those events and when I began to speak I realized my voice was nearly gone. I immediately knew the reason. On the way to the venue, alone in my car, I sang along to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" at the top of my lungs.


I mentioned that to the group and the reaction was...mixed. I was gobsmacked. I mean, who wouldn't sing this at the top of their lungs? Turns out a lot of people wouldn't. But I'm still baffled. It's arguably the greatest pop song ever.¹
                                                                      

1. I'm talking "pop song" here. Second and third? "Billie Jean" and "Raspberry Beret". And I'm not even a real fan of Elton John, Michael Jackson or Prince. That's how good these songs are.

                                
Now the interactive part. Click play:

Yep. You've heard it. Recorded in 1971 the song didn't even crack the U.S. Top 40 when it was released as a single. But it aged well and got extra traction in 2000 when it featured in a key scene in Cameron Crowe's film Almost Famous. And the reason it's awesome is not brute subjective. A classically trained musician goes into (at least to me) fascinating detail here why the song is pretty close to perfect. I've listened to this song a thousand times but when the pedal steel kicks in near the end of the first verse I'm hooked. Again. 


Near the end of the second verse a choir floats in. Chills. When we finally get to the chorus (at an astonishing 2:30 into the song) I'm completely at the song's mercy. And singing really, really loud.


I find myself singing in the car a lot lately. Not sure what to make of that. Other than "Tiny Dancer", I have a few other alone-in-the-car favorites and they flex genre. There was never a more bloated and pretentious band than Styx but "Come Sail Away" is choice for a car-window-rattling scream out. That in spite of stunningly nitwit lyrics that sound like they were written in a sixth grader's composition book. What, they're not angels? "We climbed aboard their starship and headed for the (falsetto) skyyyyyyyyy!".²
                                                                       

2. I once saw Styx, Journey and REO Speedwagon on the same bill. It was Death by Power Ballad. Styx didn't even play "Come Sail Away" but they did play "Babe". Journey? This was before "Don't Stop Believing" found new life as a semi-ironic musical staple. Yes. There was a time.

  
The only man possibly cooler than Frank Sinatra was Bobby Darin and "Beyond the Sea" kills it from behind the steering wheel. Big Band syncopation, lush strings, irresistible beat. I highly recommend it. Same with "Sweet Caroline", a Neil Diamond standard. It's impossible not to "sing" the brass parts in the chorus. I think I'm getting pretty good at it.


Charles Lamb was a British writer and contemporary of Jane Austen in the Georgian era. He suffered from intense bouts of mental illness and found refuge in a group of London friends and fellow writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. He wrote, 

'Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.

Foolish and inveterately adolescent behavior is rightly scorned. But I think Lamb is correct to see some nonsense as respectable and maybe even (as he likely found) therapeutic. 


That's what I'm going with. This is certainly nonsense, but I like the visceral rush, I spare others and I'm fairly confident I have a lot of company.


Respect that.

"Tiny Dancer" in Almost Famous

"Come Sail Away" - Styx

"Beyond the Sea" - Bobby Darin

"Sweet Caroline" - Neil Diamond

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Brain Stewing

This is my brain. Sort of.

Stephen Greenspan is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and writes an excellent blog called Incompetence - gullibility and foolishness. He recently wrote how panic can lead to, well, less than stellar judgement.


So maybe it wasn't such a good idea to blog just a few hours after discovering I had something in my brain that's not exactly supposed to be there (see last post, Rocks in My Head). As you may have picked up there was a lot of fear, loathing and unvarnished coping mechanisms at work.


With time and a second (and third) opinion it's time to give the rock-in-my-head  apologue a saner and informed narrative. In the vernacular of the peasantry it seems that from birth my brain included a very small cluster of veins that are "spongy". Now "spongy" and "brain" are not two words you want to go out of your way to connect but apparently it's not all that unusual. What is normal is that the brain will calcify around that kind of spongy cluster.


My neurologist friend's description of it being a "big old rock" is subject to the perennial standard of relativity. Think Einstein and sitting near a pretty girl vs. sitting on a hot stove. People look at the same thing differently. Turns out the calcification is about 2 millimeters. So clearly my not completely serious attempt at picturing it was way off scale.  


Dawn and I have lost dear friends from malignant brain issues which adds a new level of perspective and, for me, another measure of embarrassment. I'm 53 and enjoy, on balance, excellent health. There's a reason the ER attending physician was so relieved to give me the news. Ditto for my neurologist friend and his text-jokes about the rock-in-my-head. In the grand scheme of things I should be grateful for the way my body is finding its way into late middle-age in spite of my fondness for nasty hamburgers, cheesesteaks, barbecue and a childhood of watching too many of episodes of Gilligan's Island.


On to living life, and things more important on this blog.


And for the record, "Don't Bug the Mosquitoes" is the Citizen Kane of Gilligan's Island episodes.

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