What even is a "hipster"?

Trends are dumb and boring people with social ambition are often suckers for expensive trends that make them feel cool or important or "creative" or whatever.  So, sure, I guess that's annoying. 

But, really, pop culture is just inane by definition and has always been thus.  So it's really not worth anyone's time to obsess too much over whatever specific inanity is currently in fashion. Or, at least, it's not really worth blaming fashion for the real life problems we associate with it.

The original definition of gentrification, as coined by Ruth Glass in the 1960s, was not about extravagant beards, coffee houses and fixies – it concerned housing opportunities, and the lack of them: an area is being gentrified when the housing options of the middle-classes expand and those of working-class communities diminish, leading them to be displaced elsewhere. There is a cultural dimension to the process too, but it’s an accompaniment to the main event.

Even if you hate hipsters, the problem with your city is not hipsterism. It's economic displacement. 

Capitalism can’t get enough of hipsters and creatives; not least because it needs them to sustain itself – a revealing press release I found issued by a “hipster property agent” earlier this year began: “Hipster boutiques and eateries are sliding further into the City [of London] … there’s a growing appetite for independent shops and cafes. This is driven in part by people’s obsessions with London’s creative scene and a growing apathy for identikit high streets and mainstream brands.”

Hipsters are the honeytrap, the property industry’s stimulus package; that doesn’t mean they get to eat all the honey. That sticky privilege belongs to landlords, to property developers, to local councillors moving seamlessly into well-paid jobs in “development consultancy” – in the end, not to young white men with beards, but middle-aged white men in suits.

Trendy yuppies are pretty terrible, but that's their business. If they weren't also being used as waypoints for real estate profiteers, they wouldn't really bother me at all.

The very quintessence of a hipster fight.

Okay nobody looks particularly good here.

To begin with, you shouldn't throw things at bartenders. Also, maybe don't fire your bartender for having things thrown at him. This town is going waay too far in the direction of that dreaded, "customer is always right" fallacy.

But really this is a story about hipsters arguing about hipster things at a hipster restaurant.

"There are a few things that we hold very dear. One of those is the city of New Orleans. Secondly, our guests," Lopez said. "We decided to terminate Max because of his actions and his mentality."

Messier and Lopez generally agree about the incident that ended the bartender's tenure at Square Root.

On Thursday (Sept. 18), Messier was working at Root Squared and telling two customers his opinion of New Orleans' culinary culture. Another customer took offense and threw a lemon at Messier.

"But what even is a hipster," you tiresomely ask?  It's someone who conspicuously consumes lifestyle trends in such a way that they become intensely personal identifiers which sometimes need defending via projectile fruit.

Ubers and brews

Maybe Joan Walsh is correct in thinking that these Republican operatives are stupid.  But one thing this should make clear is that conservatives see hipsters as their demo.

Here’s Feinberg’s whole “Free the Brews” pitch. You’ll see why they pay him the big bucks.

Young Americans are really interested in the craft brewing industry.  In fact, I’ve got a couple of friends who brew beer in their basement right now.  They’d rather leave their jobs, and become an entrepreneur, and start their own brewery.  It really actually is something that marks our generation.  It’s a cultural phenomenon.

We actually did an experiment where we use technology on Twitter.  We wanted to — overall we wanted to know what do young people care about?  How do they form their communities online?  And so we did a really intense analysis of their Twitter streams.  We found out that craft breweries and craft beer were actually the largest cultural segment in North Carolina.  So we set about to talk about craft breweries because it’s what they care about, so we care about it.

Just like a lot of other businesses, it’s one that’s marked by tons of government regulations, tons of cronyism where businesses are trying to keep the little guy down…So we did a Free the Brews campaign.  It featured young entrepreneurs that we’re really supporting and who were really trying to cut through the red tape and get started.  We got hundreds of people into that event.  In Asheville, North Carolina we have over 500 people that we were able to impact through our Free the Brews event.

…We’ve been able to get tons of these young Americans interested in the ideas of freedom, not because we came through with a really great way to talk about marginal tax rates, but because we were able to talk about freedom and regulation about something that they care about.

Nobody asked Feinberg to define “tons.” Feinberg’s career is a case study in the way wingnut welfare creates a culture of dependency, or alternatively, the debilitating effects of affirmative action for white people.

His craft beer remarks let Rachel Campos-Duffy segue into the way her Latino-outreach organization, LIBRE, has worked with GenOpp on the issue of “freeing” food trucks, too. The main area of overlap seemed to be that GenOpp’s targets tend to eat the food – millennials love “having a truck pull up and bring delicious food directly to you,” Feinberg explained — while LIBRE’s targets tend to make the food. But both groups will benefit if Big Government doesn’t overregulate the growing food truck industry, Campos-Duffy argued. (It’s a variation on the right’s embrace of Uber, Airbnb and Burning Man.) She explained that LIBRE is working in Florida with “the fast food truck communities” to fight “big government, and cronyism, and over-regulation [of] the little guy.”

Again, Walsh is making fun of these guys.  But here's what they're on to. The most celebrated social and business trends today are products of exploitation and  regulatory arbitrage. The media habitually mistakes consumerism for "cool." And the vanishing concept of full time employment with benefits  is often papered over as the blooming of "entrepreneurship." 

In other words, a hardline conservative economic agenda is currently enjoying a society wide marketing boom.  Of course, Republican strategists are going to take advantage of that. 

Conspicuous consumers of trendy luxuries

There. You can stop asking, "What even is a hipster?" in that fake know-nothing voice the guys asking this question all the time like to adopt.   The core of it is the mass marketing of a stratified society where the ostensible "counterculture" look actually signifies high status.

The urgent need of our age is not individual self-actualization or even a really innovative artisanal cocktail; it is to hold on to that middle-class society the counterculture thought was so soulless and unfulfilling. All the signifiers have changed. Today corporate managers routinely declare themselves to be disruptive and revolutionary fellows, while average, uncool workers fight desperately to hang on to their pensions and healthcare benefits. The symbolic poles of our world have been completely reversed, and it is time we recognized it: flat-accented Wisconsinites and dowdy suburban moms and mulleted union guys, all of them watching their world fall apart, often show a kind of bravery these days that is far more transgressive than anything you will see at Fashion Week this year. Or ever.

This is not, in fact, a new phenomenon.  Tom Frank (quoted above) has been writing about this sort of thing for some time. 

It's strange to me that every 20 years or so the latest incarnation of yuppie fadism is treated as a mysterious new thing.

"Xenophopic" hipster haters

Sound familiar? It's a common accusation aimed at New Orleanians less than enthusiastic about the sale of their city out from under them.   Here's an article about San Francisco. 

Carl Nolte, the old native son who writes a column for the (dying) San Francisco Chronicle, said this month of the future inhabitants of 22,000 high-priced apartments under construction, "These new apartment dwellers will all be new San Franciscans, with different values. In a couple of years we'll think of the progressive politicians, circa 2012, as quaint antiques, like the old waterfront Commies your grandfather used to worry about. This is already a high-tech city, an expensive city, a city where middle-class families can't afford to live. It is a city where the African American population has dropped precipitously, where the Latino Mission District is gentrifying more every day. You think it's expensive here now? Just you wait. These are the good old days, but it won't last. We are at a tipping point."

Mr. Nolte, you can tell, doesn't particularly like this. A guy named Ilan Greenberg at The New Republic popped up to tell us that we must like it—or face his ridicule. He writes, "Ironically, the anti-gentrifiers themselves undermine San Francisco's liberal ethos. Opposed to newcomers? Wary of people whose values you don't understand? Critical of young people for not living up to an older generation's ideals? It all sounds very reactionary and close-minded." The problem is that we understand Silicon Valley's values all too well, and a lot of us don't like them.

Adding newcomers might not be so bad if it didn't mean subtracting a lot of those of us who are already here. By us I mean everyone who doesn't work for a gigantic technology corporation or one of the smaller companies hoping to become a global monolith. Greenberg (who is, incidentally, writing for a publication quietly bought up by a Facebook billionaire) sneers at us for defending middle-class people, but "middle class" is just a word for those of us who get paid decently for our work. People at various income levels in a diversity of fields here in San Francisco are being replaced by those who work in one field and get paid extremely well. Small, alternative, and nonprofit institutions are also struggling and going down. It's like watching a meadow being plowed under for, say, Monsanto genetically modified soybeans.

Read the whole thing.

Shit my Jackie says or Let This Be the Final "Hipster" Post

Apology in advance: I meant to post this yesterday afternoon but it ended up taking longer to write than I anticipated. This is why I jump from Twitter tea leaf reading into a longer bloviation on gentrification. Again, sorry about that.  Since I began this post, a Gambit article as well as this NOLA Def follow-up have updated the story.


 
From the City Council meeting today yesterday where they are were discussing the new food truck regulations.

Clarkson: "My favorite thing at Mardi Gras is trucks with hot dogs and candy apples."
— The_GambitLIVE (@The_GambitLIVE) March 12, 2013

Head: "Those are carnies. They're not from New Orleans" and have nothing to do with this ordinance.
— The_GambitLIVE (@The_GambitLIVE) March 12, 2013

But Jackie's funnel cake and corn dog dispensaries aren't the only food services in operation along parade routes. There are also actual food trucks lurking about.  They just aren't the nouveau gourmet kale and quinoa cake pop vendors the council has in mind while considering these regulations.  Instead they tend to offer a less sophisticated, but certainly more "traditional  New Orleans" brand of street food.



I bought a pork chop sandwich from these people.  It was one fried pork chop served on a plain hamburger bun, dressed with nothing. Pretty satisfying if you've been at the parade "drinking to forget" anyway.



If I'm reading Gambit's tweets correctly, Stacy Head seems pretty exasperated with the process right now. But then again, when is she not?

Not that the discussion isn't silly. Council appears to be trying to figure out the appropriate distance food trucks must stay from "brick and mortar" restaurants while also staying within reasonable proximity to those restaurants' restrooms. Last week during BP trial testimony, geologist Andrew Hurst described the importance of finding what he calls the "Golden Zone" with regard to deepwater drilling.

Hurst described what he called the Golden Zone, a layer of rock formations deep beneath the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico containing more than 90 percent of its oil reserves, where temperatures range from 140 degrees to 248 degrees Fahrenheit. But the farther down one drills, into the warmer temperatures, the rock containing oil becomes more fragile, especially in the Mississippi Canyon, he said. The result is that there is a very narrow margin in the area where the Macondo well was drilled between the pressure needed to move drilling mud down the well to keep the drill bit moving through rock and too much pressure that would result in the mud fracturing the surrounding rock and disappearing, allowing oil and gas to move up the well toward the surface, he testified.

 Fashioning these ordinances seems to require a similar degree of finesse.

 Next they will take up the issue of misleading or unnecessary quotation marks.



Meanwhile the.. um... course to digest this week with regard to all of this has been an article from this month's Antigravity by Jules Bentley.  The piece has gotten a lot of attention; some good, some bad. It's valuable, though, because it addresses aspects of the national food truck "movement" that aren't often discussed locally when this issue comes up. It turns out that, in some ways, food trucks have become something of right wing cause.

On the subject of justice, let’s get to know perhaps the biggest power behind New Orleans food truck advocacy, and one of the most frequent partners of the New Orleans Food Truck Coalition: the so-called Institute for Justice.

The Institute for Justice was begun with seed money from the infamous Koch brothers, who continue to fund it, along with the Walton siblings who control Wal-Mart. It’s a coalition of lawyers and PR professionals providing free legal advice and representation for conservative legal causes all over the country, “both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion.” Once best-known for their attacks on affirmative action (which they call “reverse discrimination”), the Institute has more recently become prominent as high-profile litigators in favor of “school choice,” aka vouchers and charter schools. They’ve got multiple tentacles wrapped around Louisiana: the Institute’s founder became president of the “national school choice leader” Alliance for School Choice, which a few months ago filed suit “to intervene in the recent lawsuits challenging the newly-expanded statewide Louisiana school voucher program.”  Yes, how dare anyone challenge Bobby Jindal’s giveaway of taxpayer education funds to fringe religious freaks!

The Institute for Justice is very hot to strike down our laws governing food trucks. To that end, the Institute came to New Orleans in July 2012 to hold “Let the Food Trucks Roll,” a food truck advocacy “symposium and rally” in conjunction with (among others) the New Orleans Food Truck Coalition, Neighborland and the Southern Food and Beverage Museum.

Bentley goes on to describe the way fast food companies like Taco Bell, Chick-Fil-A, etc. have, perhaps inevitably, gotten into the truck game and so have become a force behind deregulation movements in some cities.

This is all worth knowing about. But it doesn't necessarily follow that the worst-case scenario Bentley implies, "the deregulated corporate future: hundreds of chain-restaurant junk food trucks peddling toxic, mass-advertised garbage wherever a crowd gathers," is what's on the horizon locally.

It's difficult to picture such vendors having much success at any of our spring festivals where the local food is the major draw. One imagines they might prefer the highly touristed parts of the French Quarter. But before that can happen, they'd have to displace our native "toxic garbage" peddling Lucky Dog monopoly from that territory.  

So while it's helpful to know that the fast food industry and its lobbyists are looking to horn in on a popular food trend,  we don't need to assume that some of their favored reforms are in every case a bad idea. A better conclusion to draw from this is that it's often important to separate specific policy questions from the idealogues who might happen to argue on the correct side of them for whatever reason.  Sometimes Rand Paul gets up and says he doesn't like drones.  He might have stupid reasons for doing that but it doesn't make him entirely wrong.

Don't get me wrong, though. I enjoyed reading this article.  Jules is a talented writer who, counter to the current effete trend, is unafraid to reach into a deep rich bag of snark and let fly with a torrent of high quality hipster-bashing.  For example,

“Real” food trucks—the kind of food trucks that the NOFTC cares about and fights for—are like gastronomic EMS for hipster fuckheads: little mobile factories reproducing a genericized leisure-class remix of world cuisine, the kombucha-infused Sriracha empanadas that capitalism has trained moneyed, socially aspirant young Americans to demand.

These food trucks provide a way for high-tech newcomers to avoid having to deal with or even speak to New Orleanians; they’re another layer of twee West Coast culture superimposed atop what’s left of our city, to make it more comfortable for well-off “young creatives.” Just as lower-middle-class tourist visitors to New Orleans line up around Canal Street for the reassuring familiarity of IHOP or McDonalds, our city’s status-conscious upper-class arrivistes can now line up for reassuringly artisanal quinoa claptrap served by reassuringly privileged people with reassuringly kewl tattoos.

For the record, I'd like to point out that as a mildly pro-food truck person who has sampled several of the more popular outfits around town, I've yet to find one that sells any actual quinoa.  But I get it. It's hard to resist throwing it in there when writing these little jokes. I did it myself nearer the top of this post. I'm not sorry. There is a cathartic value in this and I'd like to encourage more of it.

Unfortunately we've reached a point where it also undermines communication due to the reactionary identity politics of the image conscious young urbanite. I think they've developed some sort of anti-defamation society.  It's become nearly impossible to criticize any aspect our superficial commercialized fashion-conscious culture without being branded a "xenophobe."

Personally I think the kids doth protest too much, although often times I can't really blame them.  During my own run through the 18-35 demo, I read enough inane crap that was supposed to describe my tastes and tendencies that I hope never to put anyone else in a similar box.  The caveat, though, is if you're going to complain about being stereotyped in with the contemporary trend, you should be expected to think independently of it. Or at least not buy into the marketing ploys drawn from it. 

The phenomenon by which popular means of expression are co-opted by commercial or superficial interests is timeless anyway.   Lately, though, we've come to see "branding" and personal expression as essentially the same activity. Hence the almost cultish shushing of anything deemed overly critical or hot tempered.  I don't know exactly when it became so incredibly gauche to make any sort of argument that strays too far outside of, "Yay for these guys for doing a thing!" but I find it sort of oppressive... or at least limiting.  Like the whole world took a big Xanax.

Bentley sees something like this at work with regard to the food truck movement.

Beyond using the trappings and signifiers of subculture—e.g. graffiti as décor—hipster capitalism also brands itself as underdog or revolutionary, employing the language and techniques of social justice movements. New Orleans food truck advocates, like any hipster-capitalist undertaking, aggressively seek to enlist you in their urgent, righteous struggle. Arise, ye Facebookers, and sign this internet petition! For freedom! For liberty! For justice! For food trucks!

He's not wrong to point out the folly of fashionable faux-activism. But I think it's okay to do this without forcing ourselves to the conclusion that the thing the douchey kids are all Facebooking the power about isn't also a nice thing to have.

But, okay, in the interest of more effective engagement I'm forswearing  future use of the word "hipster." (Except maybe on Twitter where loaded imprecise terms are actually preferred.) It starts too much of a side conversation and distracts from the more important points of one's argument.  The worthy takeaways from Bentley are that New Orleans is faced with a very real gentrification problem, and that's a difficult problem to tackle because it comes with a host of attractive incidentals that lend it the guise of progress. But by describing this problem, he opens himself up to too many distracting ad-hominem accusations of "xenophobia" and the like.

A good companion article to this was published a few weeks ago by Richard Campanella.
Campanella does his share of smirking at the dumb trendiness of his Bywater neighborhood. But his focus is describing the material implications of this aesthetic.

After the area attains full-blown “revived” status, the final cohort arrives: bona fide gentry, including lawyers, doctors, moneyed retirees, and alpha-professionals from places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Real estate agents and developers are involved at every phase transition, sometimes leading, sometimes following, always profiting.

Native tenants fare the worst in the process, often finding themselves unable to afford the rising rent and facing eviction. Those who own, however, might experience a windfall, their abodes now worth ten to fifty times more than their grandparents paid.

Too often our conversations about "what kind of city we'd like to build" ignore the central question whether or not we can afford to live there.  The ideal city harbors a wide diversity of opportunities for work, leisure, and entertainment.  But, more importantly, it offers an affordable quality of life.  If New Orleans were actually "booming" in the way its spokesmodels and political leaders claim, we would be witness to a far more chaotic arrangement of opportunity and development. Instead we're dealing with a predictable pattern of economic stratification tailored to an increasingly exclusive monoculture that is slickly sold as a "renaissance."

Still, I say it's a mistake to blame the "hipsters" and their goofy accoutrements. In truth, food trucks are actually a pretty nice amenity. They may inadvertently signify the presence of a sinister trend but they do not cause it. I suppose one could say the same for much of what gets classified as "hipsterdom" in general.  But I'm fine with whatever crap game of dress up the kids want to play so long as my rent doesn't go too damn high in the process. 

Better to spend time and energy following the policymakers whose decisions directly affect our quality of life.  People like Jackie Clarkson, for example, who helpfully reminded us yesterday which world she comes from.

Before Clarkson left the meeting, she pounced on Billow as discussion went to the 100 feet proximity requirement that would prohibit trucks from serving within 100 feet of a restaurant:
"It's likely unconstitutional to have a proximity requirement," Billow said.

"You have to prove that to me," Clarkson replied. "You're talking about land owners, private property rights, you're talking about tax payers on property. I come from that world. That would have to be proven in court for me. You don't want to go there with me on that. Don't argue that with me."

If looser restrictions on food trucks make the people in Jackie Clarkson's world uncomfortable, they can't be all that bad, right?

Community or commodity?

Increasingly our "public spaces" become geared toward the facilitating the latter.

Are parkettes sensible for a state highway such as St. Claude Avenue? Regarding pre-existing community support, one local architectural historian, commenting anonymously so as not to complicate workplace relationships, observed: “It’s interesting that Candy Chang has produced multiple venues for people to voice their wants and needs for their neighborhoods and yet chooses to ignore what she herself has manufactured. Neighborland and the ‘I Wish This Was’ installations have been described as tools to be used ‘so the future of our communities better reflects our desires today.’ But is there any desire for parkettes in our neighborhoods? A search of Neighborland came up with zero matches for parkettes. If the website is the supposed voice of the people, then haven’t we already spoken?”

Other critics have questioned whether parkettes are truly public or will long remain so. They are intended to be maintained by municipal park services, in partnership with departments of streets and public works. But as already overstretched budgets shrink further, cities have tended to hand them over to private businesses, such as restaurants and cafes that want outdoor seating. Thus does commerce colonize what was intended to be public space, a recurrent theme reflected in many of Civic Center’s ventures.

Because one artist/activist/whatever has a specific desire to see St. Claude to look more like San Francisco, we're setting ourselves up for a new round of Mr. Peanut Parks.  Except these will be right out in everybody's way.

Update: Uh oh looks like The Lens made the story go poof for some reason. Can't wait to see what that's about.

Upperdate: It's back up now with a retraction/correction appended.  Looks like the author was confused about which people or entities were doing what.  But, in my reading of all this, the core point about the parkettes still stands.  Public grant funds amenities of questionable aesthetic value which are likely to be used more or less as private property over the long term. Seems like a bad idea no matter who is responsible.