ThoughtFiles

[flamingsword]

* Our culture resents and mocks hipsters for the same reason that I love them: they are the only large, culturally influential group that openly discriminates against the mainstream. Pop culture and its followers aren't used to being othered, and they really don't like the feeling. File under 'Taste Of One's Own Medicine'.

* When I was a teenager, I didn't have a sexuality of my own. I was attracted to people, but I didn't know why or what the factors of that attraction were. I was horny, but I didn't fantasize about normal things when masturbating - which I did infrequently. When I decided to learn about sex the way I learned about everything else, that there had to be books on the subject, I found that the only people speaking up were the BDSM and paraphilia communities. I owe my knowledge of sexuality and the emotional relating that underlies sexual relationships to books on S&M, clinical studies profiling D/S relationships, and slash fiction. File under 'Things I Owe To Kinksters'.

* Love is the reason we create things not because Love is itself creative, but because Love is a destroyer. It's so fun and addictive that we mostly don't mind the necessity, but love will destroy our conceptions of self, beauty, boundaries, value, meaning, risk - it can basically rewrite our context for everything and take apart any relationship, grabbing it by the metaphors and shaking. That's where the stereotypes come from of the loveless coward, the reckless heartthrob, all the rational people seduced by their emotions: all are reflections of this one truth. Dangerous Love breaks things and we are forced to pick up and rearrange the pieces in the aftermath. File under 'Structural Assay of MetaRelationships'.

Comments

[elucreh.livejournal.com]

Your brain is an awesome place.

(Fyi, when I finally run away to Texas to seduce you, I'm considering wearing a lowcut shirt with some sort of small furry animal peering out of the neckline. Winning strategy?)

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

A WINNER IS YOU!

I'm starting in on the backlog of my flist now. Sorry for the long posting hiatus. /o\

[elucreh.livejournal.com]

Are you just insanely busy?

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

I've been having a hundred pills worth of headaches, literally. It's hard to post lately because I just don't have the concentration, and when I do have it I try to get other stuff done that's a higher priority than blogging. :P

[gonner221.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the white skirt. :P

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

And the blackout contacts. :D

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

I was about to re-launch our disagreement about the definition of "hipster", but after rereading a few times, I realized this is the first place where your definition of hipsters actually matches mine. Hipsters (of any variety) are far from the first to discriminate against the mainstream, but they may be the first to do so by subverting POPULARITY ITSELF rather than simply rejecting THINGS THAT ARE POPULAR or renouncing the notion altogether. And I have always enjoyed the othering of normals...

I like what you say about people who speak up about sexuality. Before I started finding my own footing as a sexual explorer (which feels like only happened about five minutes ago), I owed my early horizon expansions to members of LGBT (and especially the LGBT activist) communities. One of those was poly, and another was kink. They taught me how to look at things that didn't feel wrong and develop a perspective where they weren't.

I drafted some thoughts on the love bit but fatigue dissembled the sense-making and I decided to frog a bed. Instead.

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

In my sleepy haze last night, I meant to add this:

Ooo, I feel like there's a deeper thought in here [my first rambly paragraph] about how critical many White listeners got about sampling in the first decades of hip-hop prominence ("That's not music," "They're just stealing someone else's work," etc.) because when White music was sampled, it was objectified, it was recontextualized, and it carried the implication (to those who can only think in hierarchies) that the mixer somehow believed the original ("normal"/mainstream) was less than superlative, or even perfect.

[gideon-s.livejournal.com]

That also is just the same juxtaposition of imagery, albeit using different technology, that surrealists used in the 1920s.

If you want to go further back, the use of variations by classical composers goes back to the 16th century.

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

Who else discriminates against the mainstream? Lots of movements have taken stances against specific things that the mainstream does, but that's not the same thing as saying that there should not be a collective identity. Most hipsters are not very articulate about their battle for de-coherence, but they are winning the war against celebrity.

For gods sake, THE ARCADE FIRE won a GRAMMY.

[gideon-s.livejournal.com]

However you want to define the term, hipsters are a product of an affluent society who would be unable to cobble together that mélange of identity *without* popular culture.

I would personally posit that that particular niche market is nothing more than the latest permutation of subculture where the "locus of identity" is external rather than internal (the focus on fashion, music, and other external accoutrements, as well as the use of pop culture iconography (albeit couched in so-called irony) is no different than say goth, skater, or nerd culture). As far as placing the populace at large (I have no other description of the "pop culture body politic" other than that) in the category of "other", that’s a time honored tradition of disaffected youth.

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

We can't not have a culture at all, we can't have no social contracts or lexicon of cultural context. But Hipsterism seems to me to be the sort of ironic movement that celebrates the unknowability of the self by constructing an identity out of bits and pieces. Because it's not about them, it's about the works themselves, about the music, the activism, and the fashion. They express their thoughts by having others say it for them. It's head-achingly meta and pretentious, but I love it that way.

[gideon-s.livejournal.com]

I would agree with most of what you're saying (though I strongly disagree with the activism part, since apolitical aloofness seems to be a running theme, unless there's a brief cause-du-jour akin to the "Free Tibet" movement in music of the mid to late 90s)if there were a larger base of memes or iconography that the subculture draws from.

As it exists now, if you start indexing by novelty or used some sort of symbolic Huffman coding (for example) the things that define "hipsterdom", there's an incredibly narrow focus.

[gideon-s.livejournal.com]

OK, maybe not "incredibly narrow", but just as narrow as any other subculture. Hot Topic is to goth as Urban Outfitters is to Hipsters, for example.