And my meth habit hasn’t ruined my teeth because I choose intravenous methods.

The last couple of years, I’ve come out as an aging artiste and been embraced by a whole cadre of SF young people who seem to fit the profile of “hipster”. Yes, they wear thrift store clothes, goofy glasses, aggressively unattractive hair styles (which they carefully maintain)and pride themselves on being outrageously judgmental college drop outs. They live on Facebook and You Tube, have video cameras and I-Phones permanently cemented to their fingers except when sitting in over-priced cafes drinking designer coffee and fingering their laptops like a lovers private parts. They are incredibly masterful at multitasking 100 different meaningless projects. They make art. They appreciate art. They love artists. I adore them. Finally I fit in. You know, it seems to me they love each other – a lot – without all of the hippie posturing with the flowers and stuff.

The hipsters have made a hipness for the “terminally unhip”, like me. Long may we wave.

I am 23. Hipster, for me, has always been a bad thing. Was Cobain, at one time, considered a hipster? I’m very surprised. I never would have put the grunge scene and the hipster scene together.

I just graduated college in the hipster haven of Boulder, CO.

A hipster, there, is a kid who shops at American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. They spend 80 bucks on a T-shirt that they may as well have gotten at the thrift store. There is a lot of unnecessary head gear (see the hipster head band), and a lot of new items made to look old. Hipsters strive to be smart and arty. They come off a little holier than thou, a little precious. Hipsters aren’t the worst thing ever, though. I mean, the things they are trying to be are good enough. Smarty and arty…nothing wrong with that. I want to be those things, too.

I guess people hate on hipsters because they are considered posers. Also, hipsters have a general confidence and coolness many of us can’t pull off, and they do it all with their silly outfits and headgear.

“Notice how much more modest we are than anyone else: We even put ‘modest’ in quotes.”

The problem is that believing it exempts you from the self-examination that would lead you out of the self-obsession you’ve mistaken for modesty and toward actual modesty.

One problem is that people seem to be conflating two types: yuppies and beats. They seem to be claiming the hipster is a kind of media-absorbing beat who has sold out in just-visible ways because commodification is inevitable even if you’re a Marxist, let alone, a conservative libertarian. The idea is that no idea, no matter how good or specific, will escape the marketing pyre, so enjoy that anonymous moment just before it happens. It never seems to occur to people that do so means surrendering their lives to *reacting* to marketing instead of finding value beyond marketing. Shostakovich “sold out,” in the sense of acquiescing to the Russian government, yet from the POV of content, his later symphonies and string quartets are better than those of many minor composers who didn’t. I’m using an example that’s as remote as possible to hipster-labeled culture to make a point.

You’re either using the term pejoratively or you’re not. Kerouac and Mailer (however smirkingly) were not. Christian Lorentzen is — and with unusually good turns of phrase.

One thing I’ll add to a thread of lists carefully constructed to show that posters could be called hipsters if they wanted but are too cool for that:

One of the prevailing annoyances I find in Williamsburg is not ironic detachment but sentimentality. No disrespect, but whether he realizes it or not, Elliot’s channeling the quality I detest most in that culture, whatever epithet might apply: The need to dismiss people with “not-so-passive-aggressive snarkiness” and then emote about things that touch them or make them cry but probably don’t deserve to.

It isn’t that emotions are bad. It’s that real emotion is not mindless sentimentality, which is as far from passion as reflexive post-Simpsons irony is from thoughtful irony. Real emotion makes people photograph badly and scalds their lives to the point that posing becomes a distraction.