Supporting The Arts: A Fine Hipster Tradition

Art galleries are a little-known staple of hipster culture.  Not the art galleries around Union Square that have old people in dark blazers greeting you at the door before you come in to look at crappy amorphous sculptures and Bob Ross paintings.  I’m pretty sure those don’t appeal to anyone.  I mean the smaller, privately-owned galleries littering the city in the Mission, TL, and downtown areas like White Walls/Shooting Gallery, Fecal Face.Gallery, Park Life, and the recently lost Receiver Gallery.  The main allure is the opening parties every month or two, defined mostly by free entry, free beer (or at least a lenient BYOB policy), and being surrounded by other sexy young hipsters.  It’s the greatest thing to happen to America in a long time, and if that’s not reason enough to go, then you can just march right up to your room, mister.

Last Friday was the opening of Syzygy at The Lab on 16th & Capp, nestled cozily in the armpit of the Mission district.  Syzygy is “a kind of unity achieved through coordination or alignment of two or more things without the loss of identity” (http://www.thelab.org/events/395-syzygy.html).  There were ten artists featured, each utilizing different mediums, and each elaborating on the theme of syzygy.  

All of the pieces had something unique going, including a few video and projection installations, some ridiculously intricate collages, and an asteroid of penises.  What’s that?  Oh yeah, just an asteroid of penises...  You’re intrigued?  Fuck, I wish I’d remembered to take a picture or something... oh, wait, here you go.

Ha, yeah, that was something.  Can’t you just, like, totally imagine the artist who made it, like, changing into a fairy princess costume and, like, dancing around it with a magic wand, totally blessing all of the penises?  ... No?  Are you sure?  Yeah, well...

That.  Just.  Happened.

Anyway, the artist who seemed to get the most attention was a local and possibly Irish man, Flynn O’Brien, whose project, ‘Walk It Out’, had a constant swarm of people standing a polite distance away from the pictures, not realizing that no one could see, thus perpetuating awkwardness for those who might want to take pictures.  Lucky for you, he has a website, http://flynnpobrien.blogspot.com, and I took this:

Each picture is a set of photos taken every 20 seconds or so in the course of a walk, then overlapped as lighter exposures and separated into individual frames to indicate a distinct time frame.  Each collection of images represents the entirety of the walk, each set in a distinct location.  The effect is a strangely familiar, somewhat psychedelic representation of a an almost-recognizable environment, like a park in San Francisco, a cemetery in Colma, or a city street in Almeria.

I sat down with Flynn to interview him after the show.  I even thought up some really fascinating questions I was looking forward to discussing.  We had a great interview at the bar/restaurant Range on 20th and Mission, and though I couldn’t hear everything he was saying, I was confident that the mic on his shirt was picking up every word.

The next morning, I went to transcribe the interview, and realized how very wrong I was.  I listened for a few minutes to the murmurs and mumbles that I had recorded instead, and assessed that I was recording from the built-in mic which was in my lap, thus recording the ambient noise you hear in a restaurant, and whatever noises a lap makes.

Here's a photo of Flynn creeping about the gallery.  I was actually taking a picture of that rat tail, and this photo happened to be way better than the picture I took of Flynn later than night after the interview, as it happened to be in front of a different art gallery five blocks away... I know how confusing that would've been for you.

Anyway, I know there’s an astounding number of people who read this, and last week when I promised you an interview, I wasn’t lying.  I got the interview, but then God intervened, and forced technology to fail me.  That said, I sat down for an interview with Myself to figure out what went wrong.

Me:  So, what happened to the recording of the interview?

Myself:  The voice recorder was recording from the built-in microphone instead of the one clipped to Flynn’s shirt, so I couldn’t hear anything.

Me:  Wow, that’s rough... did you test it out before you left?

Myself:  ... No, but it worked fine last week.

Me:  Are you sure it was plugged in all the way?

Myself:  Yeah, I’m not that stupid.

Me:  ... Did you check?

Myself:  I don’t want to do this right now.

Me:  Okay.

From what I could derive, it kind of just sounds like I didn’t even have the mic plugged in all the way, and I’m just in denial about it because it’s such a stupid mistake.  I guess we’ll find out next week.

Speaking of which... NEXT WEEK:  Have you heard of those giant concrete slides on Seward Street?  Me neither.  I’ll go and tell you whether or not they’re fun.

Updates!

A couple brief thoughts for you to chew on:

<> Last week I said there would be interviews.  I lied.  The couple times that I went into The Mission to do them, I got too drunk and didn't feel like fucking around with my voice recorder.  It's okay - I would've just made up quotes if I didn't hear what I wanted anyway.

<> There's a new posting called 'So Lame' that you should read.  Keep in mind that a few of the paragraphs are in invisible ink (fun, right?).  Just high-light the empty black space between where the Gavin McInnes quote should be and the picture of teenagers in a white room, and like magic, it will appear.

<> Next week there will be interviews.  I promise.  Because I love you.

So Lame...

The hipster fashion is an amalgamation of all styles, which isn’t a bad thing.  Rather than conforming to one specific style, it has integrated aspects of multiple cultures and fashions to, in a sense, form its own identity.  In a way, creating something entirely new, and in quite another way, something found to be so dismissible and unequivocally uncool, that it’s almost a joke.  In either case, it creates a lot of hatred towards hipsters, specifically in New York and L.A., where hipsterdom is taken to the next level of absurdity via people with far too much creative energy and vanity and an unlimited allowance from their parents.  That, or they’re regular ass adults who have regular ass jobs by day, then put on their hipster costume and stalk the night like Batman.  Just look at these fucking hipsters...

Apparently hipsters in New York are people just like your dad.  They have an office job, love ‘the sports section’, and it kind of seems like they love the family dog more than you or your mom sometimes.  The main difference is that when they come home from the office, they slip into skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors and go out to dive bars to live out the street trash lifestyle.  Hipsterdom is now considered a fashion statement, as wealthy people spend money on vintage cat shirts and slip-ons in an effort to resemble the effortlessly creative poor kid instead of using said wealth to buy the elite brands (bebe, juicy, Versace, Louis-vitton) as they used to.  It’s no longer cool to be wealthy and show it off.  It’s way cool to be poor though.  Maybe the whole ‘irony’ thing comes into play when you spend $100 on a haircut your 8-year old niece could’ve given you in exchange for a chocolate chip cookie (it’s her favorite). 

Rich kids who aren’t too busy being rich will, in some way, do the whole rebellion thing.  Remember that street punk kid that went to your high school, who everyone was like “I heard he lives in a box and his parents beat the shit out of him everyday”?  That kid got picked up in his Mom’s Jaguar after school and driven back to his mansion, which is really awesome, but kind of ironic given what was initially implied by the punk movement.  He really did get beat by his dad everyday though. 

A differentiation needs to be made between the good-hearted party pal hipster and the vain, egocentric d-bag dressed as one because it makes them feel even cooler than when they were a vain, egocentric d-bag dressed like an asshole.  If you haven’t been recognizing the difference, then shame on you and your heartless ways.  The only book that should be judged by its cover is Goosebumps; they told you almost exactly what you’d be reading about, and some of them were super scary.

What’s with people getting butthurt over the fact that hipsters integrate aspects of all styles?  You tell me what’s wrong with a pirate-chic grunge punk beat cowboy, and I’ll tell you to shut the fuck up.  It’s called cyclicality.  Everyone was way over the whole plaid flannel thing around 1997, but that shit only took about a decade to come roaring back.  That, and paint-splashed acid wash denim.  Really though, how cool is that?  It’s fucking boring to put on the same old shit every day.  Get crazy with it, and next time you go out to your favorite bar, be like “I haven’t worn my snake skin jacket/moon shoes/Def Leppard shirt in forever!”  You’ll be the hottest shit at the club.  I promise.

Young narcissistic douches everywhere are ruining the whole hipster thing for just about everyone and their mom (who read about hipsters in Yahoo! News and thinks that “it sounds silly”).  I don’t think I’ve used the word ‘snarky’ before in my life, maybe it’s just because it sounds funnier when your 4^th grade teacher says it, or because it kind of epitomizes the whole problem with the hipster movement.  That, and it’s probably ruined by the idea that some people actually consider it a movement.

Props to Douglas Haddow for writing the cover story for Issue #79 of Adbusters: “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”.  Not because it was a good article (in fact, it’s the cynically-written piece of garbage that almost single-handedly inspired me to create this site), but because he quotes Vice Magazine’s co-founder, Gavin McInnes, calling him “one of hipsterdom’s primary architects”, as saying that:

“I’ve always found that word ["hipster"] is used with such disdain, like it's always used by chubby bloggers who aren't getting laid anymore and are bored, and they're just so mad at these young kids for going out and getting wasted and having fun and being fashionable," he says. "I'm dubious of these hypotheses because they always smell of an agenda."

                

           Doug was busy as fuck meditating on how smug and hipsterly Gavin was about the whole thing, and apparently didn’t realize that the quote was describing people exactly like him.  You could call it the only counter-point he provides in the whole article if it wasn’t so blatantly unintentional… poor baby.  Making fun of people who make fun of other people can still make you an asshole if you ‘take it to that level’.  Seriously, read the article (https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html).  He sounds like an eloquent high school school student with a grudge against the cool kids for not inviting him to their birthday parties (he heard they played ‘Seven Minutes in Heaven’ at Suzy Henderson’s sweet 16… shucks!).

I’ve lived in SF for two years now, and in all my nights of going out to dive bars, and being surrounded by people who, by all means, would be considered hipsters by stereotypical convention, they are delightfully friendly gems of human beings who like to party and have fun.  I’m almost certain that all this hipster hate is being blown over from New York and LA via dust clouds and air molecules.  I’ve only met a handful of hipsters who fit the ‘2 kewl 4 skool’ bill, and (surprise, surprise) they were all hanging out together.  Way to ruin it for everyone, dicks.  Them, and the people who stand on the escalator on the side where people are walking, because they don’t know about the whole ‘escalator etiquette of standing to the side’ thing.  And they don’t know that you’re late for work.  Or they do, and they’re just being a dick.  

Welcome to my daymare...

Hey, fella.  Why the long face?  Did someone steal your fixed-gear bike?  Did you spill PBR on your skinny jeans?  Then you and your roommate mixed up your non-prescription eyeglasses with her real glasses, and now you can’t see so good at that dive bar in the Mission?  Yeah, I’ve been there.

Seriously, I have.  My fixed gear bike got stolen in Oakland (go figure), I ruined my favorite skinny jeans, and I don’t wear glasses, so that last one was made up.  Really though, if you haven’t made the connection, hipsters take a boatload of shit every day for representing a style that’s accused of trying so hard to be cool that it mangles the idea of ‘cool’ itself into some twisted mash-up of pretentiousness and street cred.  The word itself, ‘hipster’, is so wrought by negative connotations that the people who supposedly represent it will deny the title adamantly.

Read the first 20 definitions for ‘hipster’ in the urban dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hipster) and you’ll get an idea of how most people perceive hipsters (if you’re too drunk on PBR to read it, about 9/10 of the definitions are negative).

Balls to that, I said.  If I have to be the first person to admit it, I will.  I’m a hipster.  What exactly that entails, I’m not sure.  In fact, one of the first articles you’re going to see on here is an exploration of that concept.  Hipster Trash SF is going to serve as my beacon of holy light in a scene so wrought with self-loathing and contradictions that it’s on the verge of collapsing like a Jenga tower at any given moment.  Remember Jenga?

Check back every week for really uncool updates about really cool things that are associated with a scene so enigmatically prevalent it might not even exist: local artists and musicians, dive bars, gallery openings, “special” events, regular ass events, and all shades of alternative amusement and collective intelligence you can wrap your sausage fingers around.

NEXT WEEK: ‘So Lame’ – I’ll be venturing out into the Mission and the Tenderloin, conducting interviews in a vain attempt to discover what it means to be part of the scene, if it exists, and whether or not anyone will admit to being a hipster, or for that matter, punch me in the face and break my voice recorder because they think I’m accusing them of being one… seriously…