Turn Yourself Around, You're Not Invited

One of these things is not like the others. Can you guess which one?

What Was The Hipster? - Mark Greif

Watch Out Portland, Pittsburgh's Lookin' Hip - Bill Toland

Cities and Ambition - Paul Graham

Will The Last Hipster Please Turn Out The Lights? - Zev Borow

Look At This Fucking Hipster - Joe Mande

Recently a friend and I had a discussion on the second aticle in line and how in the hell trendy types like hipsters would end up in of all places, Pittsburgh. (That article is not the correct answer, by the way; it's the next one in line, by Paul Graham.) After all, it's a recovering mill town far from tradtional centers of 'cool'. But our odd article out may have a clue as to why hipsters live where they do (Williamsburg neighborhood of NYC, Silver Lake of LA, etc.)and help us answer the question - are hipsters really here?

Graham often reminds his readers of the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Theorizing that if genetics meant that a person of equal artistic ability to da Vinci grew up and painted in Milan, surely he would have produced something for future generations to take note of. And yet no such person exists. Florence was the city at the center of the art world in the 1500s, and any budding artist would have been a fool to go anywhere else to learn.

So the hypothesis is, as with Graham's voluminous insisghts into tech startups, that for a particular field or pursuit, there is a hub city, or ground zero. That means that people interested in said field would be best served to move there, to live where there is a core of people involved in said pursuit. Silicon Valley is a garden for internet startups for a number of factors better explained by Graham. After all, he created one himself.

As an aside, Paul Graham's essays make for some compelling and fascinating reading. I strongly recommend checking them out.

But hipsterism is a fashion, right? Can't that happen anywhere? True, and there are parts of any city that could seem to cater to any fashion you can think of. But there is something different about hipsterism that should be explained before we go any further. According to Mark Greif (number one on the list, and for good reason) the hipster was, at first, a neo-bohemian creature born of nineties rejection of consumerism, morphed from 1999 to 2003 into a whiteness-celebrating urban redneck (keywords: porn-stache, trucker hats, motorcycle jeans, 'wifebeater' undershirts) with a twee and precious reverse side, and then into a slightly childish and pastoralist 'green' phase (keywords; outdated technology, green, sustainable, organic, recycle) until about 2009. (And I'm not even going to get into facial hair.)

The material culture of hipsters is whatever is waiting to be made cool again, with them at the forefront. A key trend in hipsterism is the possession of, or pretension to have, a priori knowledge of what's the new thing, what to claim you were doing or liking before anyone else (or in some cases, how obscure it is). Subtle advertising and grassroots-level endorsements (and the fact that until hipsters decided they liked it the brewing company was in a death spiral) drew hipsters to PBR. Local music and vinyl collections - both are obscure and highly niche parts of the music business that have been close to the hipster's interst and aesthetic.

So what we have is a culture and mindset walking backwards into the future, while pretending to walk towards now out of it. Where the hell is someone like this going to live?

To answer that question, recall that the activation energy for hipsters was the reactions of the neo-bohemians to their customers (often new money types that didn't look it), and that the neo-bohemians were also artists in their spare time. So this activation energy consists of some kind of artistic/craft/design movement. But is everyone in such a movement always a producer? No. There has to be a consumer for such an idiom and aesthetic to take off. And the consumers of the hipster period did something unusual. They asserted that their consumption of the idiom gave them the same interesting and creative vibe that the original creators possessed. In this sense the average hipster resembles the 'moochers' of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, feeling that they are owed a part of this cool thing without contributing anything of value. Hipsters are largely hangers-on. (So for every year that hipsterism persists, we get hangers-on to hanger-on-ism, as it were. Not to mention that hipsters are certainly overwhelmingly leftist, a la the aforementioned moochers.)

So we've got an interest (however self-absorbed) in an offbeat, often underground creative scene that likes the material culture of the past, but not so much its politics. Well, Williamsburg was a fairly natural deposit of old-city aesthetic until they moved in and isn't far from the arty East Village, not to mention the NYC obsession with art-as-brand (art-as-stuff is a Paris thing nowadays); similar for Silver Lake, but substitute Cali progressive attitudes, a preference for better living, and good weather for any single neighborhood. Webcomic author Jeph Jacques once remarked that the crowd at his local bowling alley was '50% Massachusetts hipster, 50% Massachusetts redneck'. (Given the white hipster, I wonder if a Venn diagram would have been more appropriate.) Massachusetts progressivism isn't so different from California's; and to boot, a nigh-upon foreclosed manufacturing culture that had disappeared or given up was an acceptable background.

Two possibilities emerge. The message these cities and neighborhoods seem to send to hipsters is to look like you're not trying (whether you are or not). Or, hipsters are the people with a natural predilection to invert the larger message of their environment. NYC still respects big money, so the hipsters subvert it by acting and dressing in the inverse fashion from their perception of it.

And what about Pittsburgh? Is the Steel City 'cool/not cool/wait, what?' enough to support the hipster? Well, yes. Yes it does. I should know, as I could easily be described as a hipster. Bloomfield is rumored to be a big hipster enclave in the city, even though (because?) it's Pittsburgh's 'Little Italy'; and Shadyside, though expensive, has the organic old neighborhood feel. (Also an American Apparel. Thanks a lot, Dov Charney.) The South Side hosts hipster tastes to a lesser extent, but the rent is somewhat cheaper than other parts of the city. A lot of bros from Duke and Pitt hang out down there, but there are the few hipster-friendly hangouts. I actually frequent Dee's Cafe, and last time I was there I was thanked by a fairly obvious hipster for playing 'Float On' by Modest Mouse, while listening to two other hipsters discuss whether Jack's was still a good South Side bar, which happens to be my other favorite place to drink down there. (Dee's wins these days for a better jukebox and always having an open seat at the bar.)