Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
How long can a culture built on insincerity last?
Instead of going forward 200 years, go back 200 years
We come from the future where artisan coffee roasting is taught in grade school.
Dear DJ,
I’m an admirer of many aspects of Hipster Culture — craft, style, literacy, simplicity, girls in pleasant dresses, for instance. But I worry that it’s a culture doomed to failure, because it’s built on irony. You mentioned David Foster Wallace in a recent answer. He opined that irony is a toxic force in society. I’m inclined to agree. Irony — in the sense of ironic mustache/T-shirt/bow tie — is the opposite of sincerity. How long can a culture based on insincerity last? Or maybe I am making the mistake of thinking hipsters want their culture to last. Is the whole point of being a hipster a nihilist rejection of the idea of building lasting culture?
— T. Bombadil, Bonita
I think it helps to put your broad contention into more concrete terms. Imagine the world in about 200 years, when we all live in a cool Matrix-y dreamscape where Mark Zuckerberg’s zombie ghost sustains itself on humanity’s collected lifeforce, and China finds a cheap way to manufacture “food,” so we basically eat nothing but synthetic burgers.
In that glorious world, will we look back on the quirky, tongue-in-cheek song stylings of Vampire Weekend with the reverence today’s musicologists reserve for Beethoven?
Will college freshmen learn about locavorism (as the logical heir to existential metaphysics, natch) in their Intro to Philosophy seminars?
Will future historians speak of the little black dress, the bikini, and the hipster asymmetric hairdo/floppy hat combo as equal players in the story of emancipatory women’s fashion?
My best and only answer to that is, “How should I know?”
One of many funny quirks about that which “endures” is just how random fate can be. Instead of going forward 200 years, go back 200 years and take a look at what passed for pop culture in the early 1800s. Titanic literary figures from that time include Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats... but you know who was poet laureate of England, i.e. the Michael Jackson of his era? Some irrelevant dude named Robert Southey.
Never heard of him? Neither had I till I looked him up.
So, if you’ll pardon my rhetorical time-traveling, I think it’s easy to see that the relative lastingness of any culture, its proponents, or its artifacts is subject to a great deal of historical caprice.
Now, bringing that back around to the thrust of your inquiry, I’d say that there’s no difference between a culture built to last and one designed to thumb its nose at the very sincere idea of enduring. Plenty of insincere cultures have endured. Look no further than the continued existence of punk rock — a culture hell bent on self-destruction since its inception — for proof of that. On the flip side, some erstwhile bastions of earnest sincerity mean almost nothing today. When was the last time you heard anyone beating the war drum of, say, the Temperance movement? Swearing you’ll never touch whiskey again after a hard night at the karaoke bar definitely doesn’t count, so don’t even try.
In the end, being cool isn’t so much a nihilistic rejection of any attempt at building culture as it is a fatalistic acceptance that there isn’t a whole lot of control over whether or not one’s culture will endure. Better to think of creating a culture that seems to matter right now.
Here's something you might be interested in.
How long can a culture built on insincerity last?
Instead of going forward 200 years, go back 200 years
How long can a culture built on insincerity last?
Instead of going forward 200 years, go back 200 years
We come from the future where artisan coffee roasting is taught in grade school.
Dear DJ,
I’m an admirer of many aspects of Hipster Culture — craft, style, literacy, simplicity, girls in pleasant dresses, for instance. But I worry that it’s a culture doomed to failure, because it’s built on irony. You mentioned David Foster Wallace in a recent answer. He opined that irony is a toxic force in society. I’m inclined to agree. Irony — in the sense of ironic mustache/T-shirt/bow tie — is the opposite of sincerity. How long can a culture based on insincerity last? Or maybe I am making the mistake of thinking hipsters want their culture to last. Is the whole point of being a hipster a nihilist rejection of the idea of building lasting culture?
— T. Bombadil, Bonita
I think it helps to put your broad contention into more concrete terms. Imagine the world in about 200 years, when we all live in a cool Matrix-y dreamscape where Mark Zuckerberg’s zombie ghost sustains itself on humanity’s collected lifeforce, and China finds a cheap way to manufacture “food,” so we basically eat nothing but synthetic burgers.
In that glorious world, will we look back on the quirky, tongue-in-cheek song stylings of Vampire Weekend with the reverence today’s musicologists reserve for Beethoven?
Will college freshmen learn about locavorism (as the logical heir to existential metaphysics, natch) in their Intro to Philosophy seminars?
Will future historians speak of the little black dress, the bikini, and the hipster asymmetric hairdo/floppy hat combo as equal players in the story of emancipatory women’s fashion?
My best and only answer to that is, “How should I know?”
One of many funny quirks about that which “endures” is just how random fate can be. Instead of going forward 200 years, go back 200 years and take a look at what passed for pop culture in the early 1800s. Titanic literary figures from that time include Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats... but you know who was poet laureate of England, i.e. the Michael Jackson of his era? Some irrelevant dude named Robert Southey.
Never heard of him? Neither had I till I looked him up.
So, if you’ll pardon my rhetorical time-traveling, I think it’s easy to see that the relative lastingness of any culture, its proponents, or its artifacts is subject to a great deal of historical caprice.
Now, bringing that back around to the thrust of your inquiry, I’d say that there’s no difference between a culture built to last and one designed to thumb its nose at the very sincere idea of enduring. Plenty of insincere cultures have endured. Look no further than the continued existence of punk rock — a culture hell bent on self-destruction since its inception — for proof of that. On the flip side, some erstwhile bastions of earnest sincerity mean almost nothing today. When was the last time you heard anyone beating the war drum of, say, the Temperance movement? Swearing you’ll never touch whiskey again after a hard night at the karaoke bar definitely doesn’t count, so don’t even try.
In the end, being cool isn’t so much a nihilistic rejection of any attempt at building culture as it is a fatalistic acceptance that there isn’t a whole lot of control over whether or not one’s culture will endure. Better to think of creating a culture that seems to matter right now.
Comments