"When Exit Here organized the funeral last year of Poppy Chancellor... who died at 36, guests shared photos of the 'leaving party,' as the service was called, on social media."

"Inside the West London crematory were big, beautiful banners emblazoned with slogans like 'Embrace joy today' and 'I want to see you dance again.' In one video, guests were doing the limbo to the silky vocals and pulse of Beyoncé’s hit song 'Heated.'"

From "They’re Putting Some Fun in Funerals/Modern, even hip, mortuaries around the world are hoping to answer one question: How do we commemorate death in 2024?" (NYT).

Is this hip? Big, beautiful banners with slogans like "Embrace joy today"? Seems too close to the "Live/Laugh/Love" approach to home decor — the antithesis of hipness, no?

But I'm not the arbiter of hipness, so I'll just say....

Inside the West London crematory... Beyoncé’s hit song "Heated"....

Crematory... Heated.... intentional?

"Unlike the common arabica and robusta varieties [of coffee], liberica can survive in hotter and drier climes, but for many years was shunned for its allegedly unpleasant flavour."

Writes Elisabeth Perlman in "I’ve tested liberica, the ‘disgusting’ coffee coming to a café near you" (London Times).

Now, as the planet warms, it is making a comeback. Nigel Motley, 31, is the owner of one of the first UK coffee shops offering the "hipster" bean.

Hipster bean?! 

Hipster Trumpism.

I was never a big "Trump guy" but the way the media is treating him like he's some kind of criminal makes me want to go out and vote for the guy again.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) August 23, 2022

ADDED: The post title is based on the old concept "hipster racism." Remember "hipster racism"?

Carmen Van Kerckhove coined the term hipster racism in the article "The 10 Biggest Race and Pop Culture Trends of 2006", citing "Kill Whitey" Parties and "Blackface Jesus" as examples. "Kill Whitey" parties, as described by The Washington Post, were parties held for hipsters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by Jeremy Parker, a disc jockey who goes by the name The Pumpsta, in an attempt to "kill the whiteness inside". These were parties in which white hipsters mocked the black hip-hop industry, and essentially a part of African-American culture, for the sake of irony. Van Kerckhove also regarded the use of blackface by white people and the normalization and acceptance of such use from other individuals as hipster racism....

There was also "hipster sexism," circa 2012: 

"It has often been suggested that as [Bob] Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak..."

"... from [Bob] Neuwirth. 'The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,' Bob Spitz wrote in 'Dylan: A Biography' (1989). 'So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.' Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame. 'Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,' he wrote, 'a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.' Mr. Dylan, in his book 'Chronicles: Volume One' (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth: 'Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.'"

From "Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82/He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin" (NYT). 

Neuwirth, we're told, taught Janis Joplin the Kris Kristofferson song "Me & Bobby McGee," and he co-wrote "Mercedes Benz" with her. 

ADDED: Spitz's use of the words "hipster shuck and jive" undercuts the argument that Neuwirth created this style of personal presentation. This obituary shows the New York Times carrying on the long tradition of making black people invisible.

From the Wikipedia article "Shuckin' and jivin'":

Shuckin' and jivin' (or shucking and jiving) is African-American slang for joking and acting evasively in the presence of an authoritative figure. It usually involves clever lies and impromptu storytelling, to one-up an opponent or avoid punishment.... 

According to the linguist Barbara Ann Kipfer, the origins of the phrase may be traced to when "black slaves sang and shouted gleefully during corn-shucking season, and this behavior, along with lying and teasing, became a part of the protective and evasive behavior normally adopted toward white people."... 

In 2008, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo said of the Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama, who was running against Hillary Clinton, the candidate Cuomo supported: "You can't shuck and jive at a press conference." Cuomo received criticism from some for his use of the phrase. Roland Martin of CNN said that "'Shucking and jiving' have long been words used as a negative assessment of African Americans, along the lines of a 'foot-shufflin' Negro.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Hipster (1940s subculture)": 

In 1938, the word hepster was used by bandleader Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which defines hep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive"... 

In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk".... Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class European American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely African-American jazz musicians they followed....

In The Jazz Scene (1959), the British historian and social theorist Eric Hobsbawm... described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders"....

The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. In 1957, the American writer and adventurer Jack Kerouac described hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality." Toward the beginning of his poem Howl, the Jewish-American Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essay The White Negro, the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by the atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".

Front-paged at the NYT: How to eat lunch at your "luxurious" company.

In case this has never occurred to you, snack items can be lunch.

Inside, the article is "How to Make Meals From Office Snacks/At start-ups and luxurious companies, the free lunch is for the taking, if you’re bold enough." I look forward to more NYT articles about things that are "free... for the taking, if you’re bold enough."

How to Stock Your Home Office... supplies are free, if you're bold enough! 

For Shoppers at Department Stores: The clothes and makeup you need for your big date are free for the taking, if you're bold enough. 

For Diners at Middling Restaurants: Your home supply of sugar and ketchup is free, if you're bold enough.

Oh, now, I'm going too far! The NYT is talking about the conditions at "start-ups and luxurious companies." It's okay to take advantage of them, just like it's okay — even a great idea — to tax the rich to pay for things you want for the poor. Well, the workers at start-ups and luxurious companies aren't exactly poor, but they are young and hip and — I'm sure — socialist. So it's not petty theft or bad faith. It's cool, cool enough to be front-paged in the NYT.

Now, why do we need a 2,000-word article about how to grab office snacks for lunch. Is it about the moral question? The legal details? Is it about the office culture — what other employees and your superiors think of the worker who raids the shared snacks to assemble a meal? Is it about the nutritional details of a fruit and cheese (and whether Steve Jobs sort of died of being a fruitatarian)?

It's about the cuisine — the "scrappy new cuisine." And the makers of this new cuisine are stepping up to preen about it and the NYT is printing their names:

“I literally never go out and buy lunch,” said Rebecca Jennings, a culture reporter at Vox Media.... Her signature dish? The personal “work pizza,” which makes use of complimentary bread, sriracha and Babybel. Jennings bakes these ingredients in the toaster oven for about four and a half minutes, until the cheese begins to brown. After that, she adds a special touch. “We have this drawer that I don’t think a lot of the people at the office know about, with leftover Parmesan cheese packets from when big teams order pizza,” she said. “I’ll sprinkle that on top.”

They know now! And what do they think of you? The NYT doesn't seem to have asked anyone. They present Jennings's pridefulness as if everyone will admire her for her ingeniousness and her can-do spirit. There's no one to say she's using too much of the best items or that she's stinking up the place cooking cheeses that they'd only presume to eat cold.

No, it's on to the next person whose snacking gets called not only "lunch" but "cuisine." It's "Kira Fisher, who has worked for several social media companies, including Tumblr...." Wait. Are Vox and Tumblr "luxurious companies"? They're not "startups," are they? Aren't media companies struggling these days?

“One thing I really like to do is make a cheese plate,” [Fisher] said. “Getting all the fruit we have in the office and cutting it — cutting the apples, having grapes, finding whatever cheese they have — and making a little spread, a little office mezze platter.”

Having grapes?  Based on the photograph, I think they meant "halving grapes." And did she really cut  grapes apples with that little plastic knife? This lady is munching on fruit and cheese and taking enough to feel all right without more. But she's calling it "a little office mezze platter." So that makes it cuisine... or bullshit. Take your pick. And maybe it is what media companies deserve. Why is Kira Fisher working at Tumblr? She got her start at "the food blog Sad Desk Lunch, where she cataloged user-submitted photos of bleak workday meals."

Elsewhere online, lists of so-called “D.I.Y. office snacks” and “office snack hacks” recommend unofficial uses of office kitchen appliances, such as using a Keurig coffee maker to cook ramen. 

And the point there was humor. Office snack lunches are depressing. But the NYT is presenting this as a jaunty lifestyle.

According to Ms. Fisher, the great challenge of office cooking is overcoming the sweetness of snack food. She sometimes makes yogurt feel more lunch-like by adding a handful of crushed-up potato chips, or a salty “new wave snack” like Biena roasted chickpeas.

Is that an embedded ad for Biena? Here, buy some of that "new wave snack" through my Amazon portal. You can pay $1 an ounce for chickpeas — or let your "luxurious" company pay — and feel free to put them on yogurt (in your heroic struggle to overcome the sweetness).

A "sales manager" named Michael Sztanski is quoted enthusing about "a make-your-own-bowl-type thing":

“I’ll take the hard-boiled eggs and chop them up to make egg salad with mayo, pepper and salt. That’ll be one part of the bowl. Then I’ll crush up Doritos, or any chip — most recently, I’ve been using Sun Chips. I’ll crush them up as another part of the bowl. Then I get mozzarella balls, which I’ll throw in there as well. And a jerky stick.” 

I'm doing a make-your-own-blog-post-type thing, and yet I will pass on Sztanski's jerky stick.

The NYT does get to some other issues. There are a few words about nutrition. There's taxation: Employers have been deducting the cost of snacks, and it hasn't been taxed as income to the employees. Then there's the question whether you could "get fired for abusing workplace food privileges." A lawprof is quoting speculating that "maybe the employer is going to start saying that this is a crime, like embezzlement or theft." And Jennings is quoted feeling "embarrassment." But:

She probably should not be concerned. “Vox Media’s office cafes make for great spots to gather, have serendipitous run-ins and host creative brainstorms,” a spokeswoman for the company wrote in an email. “It’s no surprise our employees have grown as clever with the snacks as we are with our work.”

That's the right answer for PR and tax purposes. And I believe it, actually. The company is keeping you on campus and basically still working. I've worked in places that serve outright lunches, and it was obvious that the point was to keep you on site and in work mode.

Ah! Finally, we get to "the ethics of snacks." A philosophy professor is consulted:

“Are they an unpaid intern or an underpaid employee suffering from broader social injustices?” [Brookes Brown, an assistant professor of philosophy at Clemson University]. “Or are they the C.E.O. who wants to make a higher rung on the Forbes wealthiest people list?”

I'd like a little detail on the philosophy of that. What is the ethical principle that authorizes readjusting your pay? What's the point of talking to a philosophy professor if you're going to get an answer that sounds like the first thing an employee caught stealing would blurt out?!

There's a second philosophy professor:

“It definitely matters whether the snacks show up in an endless supply or whether there’s a limited amount put out each day,” said Karen Stohr, an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. “The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke put this in terms of an obligation to leave ‘enough, and as good’ for other people,” she said. “That seems to apply to employer-provided snacks.”

That's the Lockean proviso. Read about it here. Locke was talking about taking land from the natural world and making it private property, so I think you need to do some philosophizing to get from nature to an employer and from a human being working on land to an employee eating snacks, but — what the hell? — the article is getting long, we were just pausing to snack on philosophy, and it's time to get back to Kira Fisher. She says the snacks at Vox Media "are restocked daily."

“There’s always plenty left over, so I don’t feel bad at all,” she said. “But if you are the type to go in really early in the morning and take all of the most desired thing, like the cups of guacamole or the hard-boiled eggs, that’s extremely un-chill.”

And that's how it ends, with imagining somebody else who's doing the same thing but they're doing more, and when you think about them, they seem gross. They're un-chill. Hey, Kira, look at Michael, he's taking the hard-boiled eggs and chopping them up with mayonnaise to make egg salad as one part of a bowl and then crushing up Doritos. Should he be ashamed?

Not-Funnyites converge on a hipster homophobe.

Yesterday, responding to a NYT article about the supposed new trend of "gaysploitation," I offered the term "hipster homophobia" (like "hipster racism") to refer to some uses of homophobia that don't count as bad but work as casual and cool and perhaps even affectionate. I said:

But watch out, especially if you're the wrong kind of person. We've seen "hipster racism" (how'd that work out?), and I'm inclined to call this "hipster homophobia." Make sure you're wearing your "hipster" shield! But you can't make sure, because it's not hip to fret about security. And never forget: this is The Era of That's Not Funny. And the Not-Funnyites know how to strip you of your livelihood in just about exactly one day. To be hip, you must be loose and casual about your ironic interface with the world. If you're not already poor and beyond any interest in building a career, step away from the fun new game of "gaysploitation."

And now, today, I've stumbled into "Disney remixer Pogo can’t walk back his homophobic comments on YouTube." I had to get up to speed on what a "Disney remixer" is. It's not some job at Disney, the media giant, it's independent recording, using Disney audio, and producing results like this...



... which is truly fun and delightful and perfectly nice. That video, from 11 years ago, has over 20 million views, and AV Club had a piece, 5 years ago, "Pogo’s 'Alice' is the Internet’s nostalgia fixation at its most enchanting." Here's a Reddit discussion of it that includes a lot of reminds me of the time I took LSD.

Here's another example of Pogo's sweet video pleasantry:



It seems simultaneously edgy and cushiony soft. Mmm... just like I feel when I think I'm so hip and I can say... anything. And you'll get me. Because you know I'm cool, and you'd be stupid or stiff if you didn't understand the amorphous hipster place whence I originate.

But this is The Era of That's Not Funny. And the Not-Funnyites know how to strip you of your livelihood in just about exactly one day.

So, back to the piece in The Verge.

Earlier this week, a wildly homophobic video surfaced where [Nick] Bertke [AKA Pogo] states that he views “gays as an abomination” and cheers the 2016 massacre at the gay nightclub Pulse. Faced with immediate backlash, the musician is now trying to walk his statements back, claiming the internet “has taken the video very far out of context and proportion.”

In the video, which was filmed in 2016, Bertke addresses why he chose the username “Fagottron” for his YouTube channel. “I’ve always had a very thorough dislike of homosexuals,” he says. “I’ve never liked a grown man acting like a 12-year-old girl. I’ve always found that to be quite disgusting.” The video has since been taken down, though mirrors of it remain on YouTube. He adds that his “subtle” username is a way for him to “express to the world that I view gays as an abomination.”

Here's that video. I've watched it. You watch it and catch whatever nuance you can:



It's "hipster homophobia," isn't it? To my ear, he's a confident guy who thinks he's cool and can tweak and trigger uptight dumb people. Here he is, after he's come under the attack of the Not-Funnyites and after it's not funny for him anymore because he must find a way to repent or die:



At one point, he mentions Andy Kaufman. Fortunately, for Andy Kaufman, he's already dead or he would be murdered.

Returning to gay stereotypes in a new spirit of fun.

That's a thing now, according to "Gaysploitation Upends the Stereotypes That Make Us Wince" (NYT), which shows us 5 stereotypes that (apparently) it's okay to have fun with (if you do it the right way*): The Nance, The Gal Pal, The Rebel, The Men in Wigs, The Neo-Revolutionary. Those are all stereotypes from the movies, and the new "gaysploitation" is (supposedly) a movie genre. The details of the stereotypes are lifted — openly — from the great documentary, "The Celluloid Closet."

________________________

* But watch out, especially if you're the wrong kind of person. We've seen "hipster racism" (how'd that work out?), and I'm inclined to call this "hipster homophobia." Make sure you're wearing your "hipster" shield! But you can't make sure, because it's not hip to fret about security. And never forget: this is The Era of That's Not Funny. And the Not-Funnyites know how to strip you of your livelihood in just about exactly one day. To be hip, you must be loose and casual about your ironic interface with the world. If you're not already poor and beyond any interest in building a career, step away from the fun new game of "gaysploitation."

"Given the torrent of revelations of abuse against women in the #MeToo era, the [term 'wife-beater,' for the sleeveless undershirt] suddenly seemed grossly inappropriate."

That line was a forehead-slapper for me. It's by Moises Velasquez-Manoff in "Are We Really Still Calling This Shirt a ‘Wife Beater’?" (NYT).

The word that got me was "suddenly." Is Velasquez-Manoff telling us that he just noticed the transgressive violent edge to "wife-beater"? It's right out there. If you think it's okay that you didn't mind until #MeToo woke you up, then why should we condemn the men who are at the receiving end of #MeToo accusations? Without #MeToo to enlighten them, they didn't realize how bad their behavior was. Why not indulgently advise Harvey Weinstein, et al., to go and sin no more?

I've never not noticed that "wife-beater" is a terrible joke of a name for a shirt. And that's what it is, a joke:

“People aren’t calling it a wife beater because they believe that beating your wife is O.K.,” Adam Klein, an assistant professor of communication studies at Pace University, told me. But the willingness to casually evoke violence against women implies a strange double standard. “We accept misogyny as cool,” he said, even as we know that racism is unacceptable.

The question is whether you think it's a good joke. You know what it is. You hear the words, but did you/do you think it's cool? And "'We accept misogyny as cool,' he said, even as we know that racism is unacceptable" is a nonsequitur: Those who know racism is unacceptable may still use "hipster racism" — expressions that are racist but are thought not to  convey actual racism because they come from someone who is understood not to be racist. It is accepted as cool (by some!). And it's the same way with misogyny. Even among those who know it's unacceptable, it can feel cool. It's a joke. It's hipster sexism.

I think it's a bad joke, though I can picture myself in a situation, with an intimate friend, where I might let loose and say, "I see you're wearing your wife-beater." But as a casual, general term, it sounds like you don't care about domestic violence or you think you have hipster privilege... and that's not a good look.

Taking the Russian troll test: "I first had to write something about, 'What do you think about vegetarians?' or something like that."

"Then it was, 'What do you think of Hillary Clinton? What chances does she have to win in the U.S. election?' You had to write at great length about this. … The main thing was showing that you are able to show that you can represent yourself as an American. … I failed the test because you had to know English perfectly."

Said Marat Mindiyarov, interviewed by the Washington Post in "A former Russian troll speaks: 'It was like being in Orwell’s world.'"

The quote is confusing with that headline. Mindiyarov was not a troll who trolled Americans. He wanted to be one of those trolls. He "would see them on smoking breaks. … They were totally modern-looking young people, like hipsters, wearing fashionable clothes with stylish haircuts and modern devices. They were so modern that you wouldn’t think they could do something like this."

He didn't get the job because he he didn't "know English perfectly," though if you read the other article WaPo published about Mindiyarov — "The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with an American accent" — he didn't pass the test because "it wasn’t clear if his shortcoming was imperfect English or failing to bash Clinton."

WaPo makes 2 articles out of this one guy who didn't even get the job, and on the face of the clear text of 2 articles published on the same day, it contradicts itself. Fail!

Anyway, the Orwellian environment Mindiyarov encountered was as a troll writing in Russian on Russian news articles to fool Russians. He — this propagandist whose job was lying — tells the Washington Post that he quit that job — "for moral reasons. I was ashamed to work there."

And we're supposed to believe him.... why? Is he trolling the Washington Post and its readers now? They're so damned gullible! Me, I question everybody. The sad troll who longs to be a young, modern-looking hipster. (He's 43.) The Washington Post, cranking out articles about the "sophistication and ambition" of the Russian troll operation.

The Russian trolls who supposedly could imitate Americans couldn't even really do it. Look at this one:



That's just a mess! Americans don't say "a Satan." Satan is one specific character. And "her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is" should be "her crimes and lies have proved just how evil she is." And it doesn't make sense to have Satan say "If I win, Clinton wins." It should be "If Clinton wins, I win." I think! It's stupidly confusing. And that graphic! Jesus looks like Derek Zoolander. I guess somebody decided he needed to look white, but I've never seen an "American" Jesus that white (or with that much contrast between skin and hair color). Also Jesus looks tentative and Satan looks like a superhero or wrestler. And "Press 'Like' to Help Jesus Win" seems satirical.

I think there are plenty of Americans using social media taking shots at our candidates and they're doing it on their own or for pay and with much more skill and in greater numbers. These people dilute the Russians, and it's just a lot of free speech about politics. If anything, the Russians help us all become more skeptical, because they get little things wrong and you become uneasy and therefore more aware that we're swimming in propaganda.

And I suspect the Washington Post loathes social media — whether it's full of trolls or sincere Americans (and sincere foreigners!) having our say. It competes with the Washington Post's business model. I presume the Washington Post would prefer to be your go-to source for information and opinion and to be venerated as an oracle of truth. All of social media interferes with the interests of the Washington Post. And it serves WaPo's interests to scare us all about Russian trolls in social media.

And this is where, I think, the Russian trolls have some chance of success — as a tool of mainstream media in a plot against free speech in social media.

"Some problems weren’t [Megyn Kelly's] fault..."

"... such as when a cameraman walked on-screen while Kelly was interviewing soccer player Carli Lloyd. The cameraman then could be audibly heard muttering an expletive, which wasn’t bleeped since the show is aired live. Other problems, though, fell entirely on Kelly’s shoulders. For instance, two days after a gunman killed 58 people and injured hundreds more in the Las Vegas mass shooting, she interrupted Tom Brokaw as the former 'NBC Nightly News' anchor spoke out against the NRA. Kelly spoke over Brokaw, saying 'Yep. Yep, got it. Gotta leave it at that, Tom. . . . We’re up against a hard break.'... Kelly is now reportedly having trouble booking celebrity guests, unlike the other blocs of 'Today,' according to Variety. 'I’m not booking anyone on her show,' one publicist, who requested not to be named, told the trade publication. 'I literally haven’t pitched anyone even from right out the gate. The buzz that is out there is so bad.'... [O]n many days, Kelly doesn’t have celebrities on her show at all, which is unusual for the 'Today' franchise. Instead, she often relies on lifestyle stories and pretaped features. One recent nearly five-and-a-half-minute segment, for example, followed Kelly and her real-life family as they went camping."

From "Megyn Kelly tries dancing for ratings as her ‘Today’ show continues to falter" in WaPo.

I posted the dreadful dancing clip yesterday, here.

If you want to see that expletive-muttering cameraman, here:

Megyn Kelly's camera man stepped into the frame and then said "shit." pic.twitter.com/zh5vaFPQGl

— Kate Aurthur (@KateAurthur) September 28, 2017

What a dismal slide for Kelly! Remember how high she was riding when she moderated that GOP debate? That was more than 2 years ago. She made a big leap that night, confronting Trump, and there was so much liberal hope for her when Trump went menstrual on her.

But Trump went on to win, and what use is she now? No use to celebrities, and now she can't get celebrities on her show, and what's a daytime talk show without celebrities? I don't watch daytime talk shows (or, really, night time talk shows). Because I can't stand the canned PR appearances celebrities do on TV these days. It used to be that celebrities might go on TV and be weird. I don't know — Marlon Brando, Bette Davis — I mean back in the day when we loved weirdness, real weirdness, not canned weirdness like Megyn Kelly pretending to find the beat to some overproduced pop music irresistible and just had to get up and dance....

"Nature is great and all but I like seeing what Mankind made and then destroyed. Or seeing examples of Mankind being ironic, irreverent, or incompetent."

"It gives us insight as to who we are and what we were in the past," said the Hipstercrite when her mother took her to the Grand Canyon. I ran across this piece as I was writing yesterday's post about post-tourism. Hipstercrite uses the term post-modern tourism.

Her travel recommendations make the idea pretty clear: Salton Sea ("It’s full of dead fish and Botulism and empty trailers and salt-encrusted lawn chairs. It’s reeks of death and the humidity is oppressing. IT’S HEAVEN."); Dollywood ("Because it’s a theme park in the middle of Deliverance-land created by a country singer with Double D breasts."); Marfa, Texas (" Long after minimal artist Donald Judd left, his big city grime stayed spluged over the sleepy town. New Yorkers/Angelenos/Austinites have been flocking to Marfa to add their own seed ever since."); all of New Mexico ("[I]t’s vast. And it’s desolate."); Picher, Oklahoma ("Picher was once the home of lead and zinc mining and over 1640 people. Now it’s the home to gigantic holes to the center of the Earth and 20 people.").

I feel some affinity to this kind of thinking — especially when it comes to photography. Remember when we pulled over in Orderville, Utah to photograph the "Food & Drug" sign?

ADDED: Here's another example of my interest in depressing signage, from last February:

"I learned about post-tourism, which is just research jargon for traveling hipsters: believing there’s no authenticity left in the world, they enjoy tourist attractions ironically."

From "Thomas Cook and the Stack Pirates/Boredom and an enterprising Brit gave birth to the modern tourism industry, and we’re still trying to make sense of it all" by Mary Mann (via Metafilter). I'd never seen the term "post-tourism" before, and there's lots more in the article than that idea, including the process of doing research in a library...

Modern tourism started in England, which makes sense — a colonizing country is probably a restless country — but by the mid twentieth century people from all over the world were touring. Tourism became a thing; you could tell because people had started studying it. The stacks are full of their books: The Ethics of Sightseeing, The Language of Tour­ism, The Tourist Gaze, and so on for longer than you’d care to read. Before venturing into the stacks I’d never read a book on tourism, but I knew the industry from working in it, first as a guide and then as a copywriter....

The long chatty article ends with another reference to "post-tourism":

It would be easy to admit defeat, to become the “post­-tourists” researchers write about, committed to the idea that there’s no such thing as authentic experience so we might as well laugh at it all. That seems like the most boring fate of all....

The parishioners who came to my dad [a pastor] for ad­vice all asked versions of the same question: How can I be free? Free from grief, from anxiety, from anger. Free from the purposelessness of boredom, the result of a dull job or a stale marriage or the tedium of too many identical days in a small town. But, depressed, my dad wasn’t free either; so there they sat, week after week, year after year, prisoners theorizing about their chains. Travel, at least in the books I read, offered to press pause on those questions in order to ask a single question that, if it could be an­swered, would make it one hundred times easier to figure everything else out: Free for what?

Notice that this idea is that ordinary life is a problem and travel helps by removing you from ordinary life, perhaps to give you a new perspective on ordinary life. But if ordinary life is not, for you, a problem — not everyone is depressed — then perhaps you do need to confront the problem of authenticity, because ordinary life is (probably) authentic, and perhaps the answer is post-tourism. 

Here's another article on the subject: "Authentic outsiders? Welcome to the age of the ‘post-tourist.'"

“Post-tourism” is an ambiguous term, certainly, but it invariably suggests something of a departure from everyday “boring” tourism. The rise of the post tourist – as an offshoot of the dreaded hipster and their avoidance of tourist hotspots and maps – is symptomatic of this “tourism-as-performance” phenomenon....

Post tourism abides by narratives of self-righteous struggle, “tourist-shaming” those who continue to visit predictable tourist spots such as the Berlin Wall or the Eiffel Tower. Hence, post tourism is partly defined by an underlying sense of posturing where travelling is concerned.... Any traveller or tourist in another country inevitably remains an outsider.

"Imagine all the tatted, gauged, man-bunned and pussy-hatted young progs who tuned in hoping to see someone like Kamala Harris give the Dem response. Instead they got Gramps at Cracker Barrel."

Said exiledonmainstreet in the comments to "Will you still love Trump tomorrow?"

Today's the day I can read The Washington Post without hitting the paywall.

And what do I get? There was that puerile column about the Ohio State attacker, already blogged here.

Now, I'm poking around some more, and here's "I love your family. But I dread your joyous holiday letters."

After I finish the letter, I put it down on the coffee table, stare into space, open a bottle of wine and drink the whole thing. The next morning, the letter still splayed on the table, I realize it’s not just the image of a happy, still-together family that had unmoored me. It’s also the power of the record-keeping and the memories that such records evoke. I was never good at keeping records....

And here's "Does this haircut make me look like a Nazi?"

"Hi, sir. Bye, sir. Your kind are not welcome here. Read the sign. Out!"

Says Hermie (Colin Quinn's character) on the "I Love You Baby" episode of "Girls" that aired on HBO this week. The sign — in Ray's Coffeehouse — says no "man buns." And Hermie is blatantly, vocally enforcing the shop's new "hipster hate" theme. Shoshanna (the Zosia Mamet character) has very enthusiastically devised this theme and put up the signage and gotten the NYT interested doing a style-section piece on the place: "They love the hipster-hate angle." Hermie's interpretation of the theme is overt refusal of service. Shoshanna reacts:

"Hermie, Hermie, we cannot actually turn people away. That's discrimination. We just have to, like, you know, glare at them and make them super-uncomfortable and bully them until they leave of their own volition."

Hermie reacts:

"From now on, anybody walks through that door with a bun on top of their head or tattoos that were not acquired on a naval adventure on the South Pacific, we treat 'em like a hippie at Disneyland in '68. This is a haven for normal people — working men and ladies... We're taking back the night. You're either with me or against me."

Shoshanna seems to have come up with the hipster-hate theme as a marketing gimmick to counter the competition from the extremely hip coffeeshop across the street (Helvetica). She's following the "lean in" advice Hermie found in that book by Sheryl Sandberg. Later, Hermie tells her he needs her to "lean out" a bit, because she's too intense. But he likes the money that's been coming in under the hipster-hate branding, which the NYT and some of the customers might think of as ironic, but Hermie is an older guy — the actor who plays him (who I remember from the old MTV quiz show "Remote Control") is 58. Hermie seems to be getting excited by the theme unironically.

The interplay between these 2 characters is wonderful. Is Hermie some kind of stand-in for Zosia Mamet's father David? In the final scene, closing the coffeehouse for the night, Hermie and Shoshanna dance to the evocative old voice of Frankie Valli singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." I had to puzzle over whether that counted as sexual harassment in the workplace, but I backed off — influence by retro-ishness and my idea that Hermie and Shosh were like David and Zosia — into the view that they were like a father and daughter at a wedding. Isn't "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" an iconic wedding song?

As for those hippies in Disneyland in '68... like many of the things we remember from the 60s, it happened in the early 70s:

August 06, 1970. A bizarre occurence takes place at Disneyland when 750 "Hippies" and "Radical Yippies" infiltrate the park, and take over the Wilderness Fort. They raise the Vietcong flag and pass reefers out to passersbys. Later, they march in a Main Street parade, and sing their own lyrics to "Zipadee Doo Dah" ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn is going to win..."). More conservative park guests try to drown them out by singing "America the Beautiful." Before the confrontation can heat up, a platoon of Anaheim Police officers in full riot gear pour into the park from backstage areas! A riot is adverted and Disneyland vice president of Operations Dick Nunis orders the park closed at 7:10 PM. For many years afterward Disneyland will selectively enforced a "dress code" at the park, occasionally refusing admission to "long-haired hippies."

Look at the ads in the NYT next to the story about the great hippie invasion:



What a fabulous moment in movies: You've got the iconic hippie movie, "Easy Rider," the iconic racial comedy "Watermelon Man," the iconic military movie "Patton," and — tucked in there cozily in the corner — "Rosemary's Baby" (7 years before Roman Polanski committed rape) and "Tales for Males" (2 decades before Hollywood began making its movies about gay men).

"Hipsters are an uptight bunch. They like dance music, but they lack the sense of abandon that made raving so much fun...."

"Organised and particular, hipsters know to detest big business. Instead, they fetishise the authenticity of an independent operator. Yet they expect a level of service that can only be delivered by a multinational corporation.... Perhaps the most depressing trend of all is the introduction of the ‘safe space’ policy.... Once, the rave was supposed to feel like a distinctly unsafe space, even if the danger was illusory.... Under the hipsters’ watch, dance music has become tedious and diluted... I’m out."

Says George Hull.

The official Hillary Clinton website does viral media with a collection of how-to tips on how to make DIY Hillary costumes for Halloween.

The page is titled "Texts from Hillary and 4 other DIY Hillary Clinton costumes for Halloween/What’s in Hillary’s closet? A lifetime of looks," and there are 5 photos of Hillary from various stages of her life, each with a photo of a woman emulating her. We're given a list of items, for example, to be "Hipster Hillary," from 1969, you need a white blouse, glasses, striped pants, "leather shoes" (why stress "leather" rather than sandals?), and long, loose hair. The campaign promo is there: Hillary was "Wellesley College’s first-ever student commencement speaker."



I got there via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, that is, I caught the virus through someone who loathes Hillary and prompts readers to laugh contemptuously ("Not The Onion"). I was initially surprised that the campaign would portray Hillary as a subject for Halloween (traditionally the realm of monsters and the dead), but reading the page, I saw the value. The bio is there, the young women modeling the costumes all look like they're having fun with it. And the Hillary haters who propagate the link, layering on their contempt and astonishment, give it spin that is useful for those who'd love to scream with horror at that old reflexive misogyny, risen from the grave once again.

By the way, back in 1969, college kids didn't refer to each other as "hipsters." A "hipster" would have been a man from the past, more of a 1950s beatnik in some smoky urban jazz club. The word the Hillary campaign has apparently forgotten is: "hippie."

Hippie, oddly enough, has become a go-to Halloween costume in recent years, perhaps because it's easy to put together from crap you might have around the house, like the old-standbys of the 1950s and 60s: bum and gypsy.

Remember "hipster racism"?

"Hipster racism, is engaging in behaviors traditionally regarded as racist and defending them as being performed ironically or satirically." It was one of "The 10 biggest race and pop culture trends of 2006."

Yeah, well, if you remember it, you'd better forget it, because it's 2015, and it could ruin your whole life.

"Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers’ All-World quarterback with Berkeley pedigree and long established hipster’s snark, threw some shade on Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson..."

"... after Green Bay’s 27-17 victory on Sunday. In the post-game version of sub-tweeting. Rodgers commented that God 'was a Packers fan tonight,' as he seemed to visibly fight a grin. Rodgers’s comments, subtle as a blowtorch, are being read as a direct response to the garrulously religious Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson’s comments after last year’s truly 'miraculous' come-from-behind playoff win over the Pack when he said that a Higher Power made him throw four interceptions because, 'That’s God setting it up, to make it so dramatic, so rewarding, so special.'"

That's Dave Zirin in a piece at The Nation titled "Getting God Out of Football/Believers and non-believers alike should welcome Aaron Rodgers’s and Arian Foster’s dissent against the constant invocation of Christ in football."

I really don't care one way or the other whether football players attribute their fate to God. It's the kind of religion I put under the tag "lightweight religion." I'll join your effort to shush the God-talk from football players, Nation, if you first make it a thing to shame the casual "omigod"/"OMG" exclamations out of common speech. That's even more lightweight. Should we take offense or let it go?

I think The Nation just doesn't like football, and, sure enough, the truth comes out in the end, where we hear of the sport's "filthy underbelly" and "brain injuries" and "boozing and bacchanalia."

Bacchanalia. Who talks like that? People who build an argument on the idea that the person whose position they want to endorse has a "Berkeley pedigree." Rodgers didn't just go to Berkeley. He has a "pedigree." Yeesh. And as for "hipster’s snark" — the phrase that caused me to open up a "new post" window — when has Aaron Rodger's ever been considered a hipster? Hipster! Ridiculous.

And by the way, Rodgers actually was subtle:



Nothing blowtorch-y at all about that.

"Obama paid a surprise visit Tuesday to Snow City Cafe, a hopping brunch spot in downtown Anchorage with a bit of hipster flair."

"Dressed down in a casual coat and sunglasses, he strolled past throngs of cheering crowds into the cafe, where it took just a few seconds for the cinnamon rolls to catch his eye. 'How many of those do you guys have?' Obama asked a bemused barista. 'I'm going to take all of those.'"

I don't know. Seems like a metaphor or something. Should we say the President should be in Washington working or not acting like a hipster or not getting in the way of local hipsters who were counting on getting a cinnamon roll at their hopping brunch spot? I really don't know. I just like the elements of the story, as my tags reveal. Sorry if you don't like "cake."

By the way, "bemuse" means "To make utterly confused or muddled, as with intoxicating liquor; to put into a stupid stare, to stupefy" (OED). Yeah, no one gets that from "bemuse" anymore. Did you know that "amuse" originally meant "To muse intently, gaze in astonishment" or "To cause to ‘muse’ or stare; to confound, distract, bewilder, puzzle"?