hipsteroid rage

The problem of hipsters. Nobody is one, yet everyone complains about them. It’s a bit like environmental damage: everybody thinks someone else needs to change.

I am listening to the couple at the next table lament how hip this neighbourhood has become. On this leafy street they can no longer find a seat, on a sunny Saturday, and it’s all because of hipsters. The woman has a chic-knotted green scarf and little red shoes. But that’s just the trouble: if I say, yeah, I wish I were cool enough to qualify as hip but sadly, I lack the raw materials… I come off sounding like I wanna be *too* cool ~ hip enough to not even care about not being hip.

Like my neighbours, I like a quiet street which is not too crowded with popularness. Yet I want the cafes to be good enough to draw such a crowd: Great coffee. Decent service. Music that doesn’t depress me. Essentially I am wishing failure & suffering on the businesses I claim to support: or partial success. “Emerging artist” status.

It’s like indie bands. One must discover a talent that is great enough to be worth a thorough listening; but not so great that it’s filling stadiums. Like infinite growth on a finite globe, this enterprise seems to me destined to failure. And failure is to hipsterism as stubble is to chic: a whiff of it, you’re a groovy artist. Too much and you’re under a bridge. Hipster or dumpster. It’s bloody brutal.

The other problem with hipness, or as I think of it, ‘atmosphere’, is it requires a willing peasantry. This groovy part of Berlin is enjoyable because of its mix of cultures and the picturesque and endearing ways that troubled souls, drug addicts and unorthodox people fill the streets with life. I don’t see any of these hipster-allergic folk wanting to move to the suburbs, or to genuine country communities where there may be very few artists. Other human beings serve as background scenery: a form of tourism. The scenery’s got to be grating enough to be ironic, to set the heroic Self free in bold, beautiful relief against its lesser-talented background. Like Park Slope.