You're So....Hipster.

"What's a hipster?" Alvaro asks, sagging hotly on the couch in a newly opened cafe. It has a hand-knit quilt draped carelessly over the back and sides. The crazy colors of the thread make me dizzy. We're playing Jenga and glancing over a human interest article in the paper which has bought up the foreign term. A single from the Decemberists' new album rides the airwaves of a local indie radio station. I'm sipping down an iced carmel latte. I love this place.

Our Chilean generational equivalent has become quite hipster, though many of them don't even know what that word means. It's certainly hard to define. It has something to do with how you dress: skinny jeans, or eighties' leggings; second-

hand t-shirts, or flannel; vintage costume jewelry. It has something to do with attitude: chain-smoking your loose tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes; drinking your whiskey straight up; being a bit of a maton. A hipster yearns to be intellectual, or at least to spout enough witticisms that he can be considered intelligent by his hipster friends. He carries a tattered book rolled up in his back pocket, and protests on soap boxes on campus greens the evils and perils of the Kindle.

A hipster, like myself, looks up the definition of hipster o

n Urbandictionary.com. She thinks that saying hipsters "go to art house theaters and watch movies made on a 300 dollar budget and drink lots of coffee and smoke cigarettes. then they stare at paintings on walls for a while," is pretty damn funny. Same with "They listen to cool jazz while thinking of Jean Paul Sarte or Belmondo in Godard's film "Breathless."'

In most dictionaries, "hipster" is defined in Spanish as the Castillian "gafapatas." A note in a WordReference forum alludes to hipster's origins in the 1940's: "a typical hipster was a low-class citizen who had grown up in a ghetto or in the slums on the edges of a city. He dressed in a suit which was very elegant but at the same time vulgar" (translation mine).

This low-class link could be why a lot of people look down on the resurgence of Hipsters in America. My hipster friends self-depricate, each trying out-Hipster each other without being called out on being too Hipster.

But, all these partial definitions combined, anything that inspires this much curiosity and this much self-loathing has to have a lot more going on than ill-fitting skinny jeans and future lung cancer.

Erik sent me this article today which speaks of the Hipster like a diseased vestigial organ of rampant consumerism:

" 'What was the hipster?: A sociological investigation', un ensayo publicado por la revista 'n+1' y coordinado por Dayna Tortorici.Entre la sociología y el sarcasmo, la denuncia política y la mueca asqueada, sus autores acusan al 'hipster' de haber vampirizado la contracultura, hijos del postcapitalismo, pasotas, consumistas sin conciencia de serlo, dandis desprovistos del aterciopelado malditismo, adolescentes tardíos que compran ropa en mercadillos de segunda mano y H&M, por lo general blancos, de clase media o clase media alta, desocupados o atrapados en empleos que, rezan, serán temporales, dedicados al videoarte, la escritura de blogs alternativos y blablablá."

Guess I fit the bill. Middle class? Check. Blog writer? Check. White? Double check. Man, what a vapid hole of intellectual consumerism I must be.

But really, I don't think that's true. I'm not super consumerist. I don't write a blog to be trendy. And I think smoking is caveman-level stupid. However, like my vulgar suit-wearing, jazz-listening forties counterparts, I am pretty darn poor. My parents might be middle class, and I might in some ways still be a middle-class product, but I'm also facing potential explosive disaster of the neat little consumerist package I was raised on.

So, I counter the claim that Hipsters are vapid, intellectually hollow twenty-somethings stuck in a perpetual desire to remain adolescents and live off their parents' earnings with the following, much more likely, scenario:

I think the hipster of today comes from the obvious problems of our capitalism in the U.S., and our generation's attempt to transition from capitalism to scary recession. As children of "post-capitalism," as the article deems us, somehow we need to make "chic" our culture's fall at the hands of the greed of our parents' generation. We have no other choice but to accept the growing fear (and more than fear, actually) that the U.S. economy is crumbling, at least in some ways. On a grander scale, unless you're REALLY a money-grubbing caplitalist, you can't be blind to the flashing warning signs that we've used up our environment's resources.

So, I propose that what is currently popular, or "fashionable," in our generation comes from forced changes in lifestyle - we move back to the cities because we can't afford suburban McMansions. We buy stuff second hand because we don't have jobs and we don't have money. And we follow the "green" movement not out of trendiness but out of genuine care for the environment and the resources we've got left. To be a "trendy" hipster is to accept our generation's growing reality - that we can no longer bear the burden of a capitalist culture - and, spun the way the article chooses to spin it, this realization could be depressing.

But what I love about being a hipster is that the territory comes with some pride, or at least style: like an elderly woman who loses her beauty but still has dignity, being hipster is being dignified in our acceptance of pandemic consumerism's forceful aftershocks. Powerfully, we have chosen our fashion to reflect the hard lessons we have to learn from the way we've abused our resources. We've got to live moderately, and we've got to give up a whole lot. The hipster narration is that it's not only cool but couture to face downsizing with a smile - and a cigarette. And I see the fallacy in my argument, since it's true that I haven't yet had to really tighten my belt, and it's true that I still often live in excess. But at least I'm a hipster. I'm happy with whatever moderate amount that I have, and I'll be happy and I'll make good with whatever amount I get.

Right now, that amount involves the last sip of my latte.

Image uploaded from Toothpaste For Dinner comic strip.