[2nd Bn, 11th Mar]

Well, it’s official. I have now lived in Alabama for so long, that this article reads like a foreign language to me.

ROLL TIDE

[Jack Hydrazine]

I went with some friends this past Sunday to Portland, OR to something called an “ecstatic dance” but that my friends called the “hippie dance” even though my friends aren’t hippies (they just like to dance).

Definitely the hippie crowd was dancing at this event! You can find videos of it on GoogTube that gives you an idea what I witnessed but I won’t post any links here.

[Sherman Logan]

Actually, not a bad article.

I think the problem goes a lot farther back than the author does.

The intellectual leaders of our society have spent the last 200 years, and most especially the last 50 years, telling us there is nothing worth believing in.

Maybe they have just finally got their point across.

The author is quite correct, however, that this is a pose only for those who are insulated from reality. Very few people successfully maintain a pose of irony when stranded in the desert without water.

[detective]

“If irony is the ethos of our age — and it is — then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.”

The author is a 35 year old liberal, female, college professor. She reflects a subculture without purpose or values but with lots of leisure time. The things these self-indulgent elites do to amuse themselves she chooses to call irony. The ethos of these people is pursuing no other purpose other than self-absorption and defining themselves as “hipsters”.

[Gamecock]

The guy across the hall from me was once accused of being a hipster doofus.

[Behind the Blue Wall]

The author is basically describing the predominant style of the current generation of college-educated, urban twenty-somethings, which is to basically laugh at everything and believe in nothing. The only antidote is an intrusion of cold hard reality into their otherwise sheltered lives, which I fear is imminent given the results of the recent election.

[Buckeye McFrog]

A newspaper columnist here in Pittsburgh recently described one of our scruffy, dingy, slightly dodgy streetcar suburbs as “the place hipsters go to have kids”.

Just the very thought of that has been keeping me awake at night.

[Vision]

The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream. He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things.

Summed up, he's really, really insecure and in need of testosterone.

[equaviator]

Irony is overrated.

[marron]

Most people drop the “student of cool” routine when they are forced to confront real life, and become committed to the life they are living.

Another thing: having the courage to be who you are openly without apology, and believing what you believe openly and again without apology renders the whole studied ironic pose meaningless.

There is a place for irony of course, as one tool among many. If its your whole tool bag, though, you probably aren’t building anything.

[x]

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.

WTF? Seinfeld? Friends? Jon Stewart? Slackers? The '90s were ironic all over the place. 9/11 was supposed to be the end of all the Lettermanesque hipster ironizing.

But then, every past age is bound to look "simpler" and, I guess, less ironic, than the present -- especially to those who really don't remember those days very well.

[blueunicorn6]

Dear Christy; thank-you for sharing your thoughts with us. I haven’t been so underwhelmed since Geraldo Rivera found an empty bottle.

[a fool in paradise]

HIPPIES were hipsters too. They were the joiners, not the original freaks in the scene.

The saying is The Haight changed (the visitors took advantage of the free store) once the tide of hippies came to town.

[a fool in paradise]

"I WRITE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF IT.

[a fool in paradise]

Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself.

Stan Freberg was a master of the form in the 1950s and 1960s. This educrat needs to do more research.

Oh wait, to the writer he probably seems to be wearing his glasses "ironically".

[a fool in paradise]

Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety, finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades. Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.

Obviously forgot when the coming-of-age baby boomers ushered in the ME generation.

And just like the hipsters of today, they did piles of cocaine.

[a fool in paradise]

I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free.

Does not know of what she speaks.

[a fool in paradise]

The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority

It was a combat against the crap the music industry (hello Warner Bros.) was trying to shove down audiences throats. The last time so many small labels were actually able to get radio airplay and chart and concert hall success. Oh, and WB bought percentage stakes of many of these sorts of labels so as to own a piece of whatever took.

By the mid-1990s though, the indie labels were out in the mass marketplace, replaced by boy bands and girl pop stars (Nsync and Britney Spears et al).