What Happened To Hipsters?

I drive to Portland. I grab a Vinegar IPA and some kimchi at a street food van in the rain. Down the block is a Brazilian place that does Tomahawk steaks fried in buttermilk, the locals love to share them as they walk down the waterfront. The city is busy, alive, and I’m ready to sample some of the local delicacies that run through Portland like the Willamette River.

Portland is a place of opposites. Up and down, black and white or loud and quiet could all be experienced on the streets the locals call “the ‘ort”, and you can’t help but feel that at any moment a good night can become a bad night. Or vice versa!

The city was perhaps most famous for its hipsters. The main subculture of the 21^st century, hipsters arrived on the scene in early 2011, opening up coffee shops and vinyl stores. They also had little moustaches and those hats that Bavarians have, and ride around on penny farthings. But what used to be widely ridiculed has now become mainstream, with many aspects of hipster lifestyle (buying products) being injected into every facet of modern-day culture. Once upon a time a hipster would be chased down the street in tight, black jeans with full cans of soda thrown at his head as crowds jeered at them. Nowadays the crowd also wore tight, black jeans and little green hats. We have become Hipster, gentrifier of worlds. But what is the new Hipster?

The answer, dear reader, is obvious. So obvious that I find it offensive to suggest that my readers would need it explaining to them. But for those who aren’t as adequately blessed as my average reader, let me explain.

Its woke.

Hipster transformed into two separate things; the aesthetics of the hipster, being absorbed and adored by many, and the hatred for the hipster, finding nowhere to go. It wasn't as if feminism or anti-racism was widespread amongst the 2010's subculture. But if everyone had become a hipster, then the aspect of enjoyment most people got from hipsters – making fun of them – needed to be directed somewhere. Simultaneous to the rise and digestion of hipster subculture was the increase of awareness in political and social philosophy, in part due to Gamergate. The scorn felt towards hipsters could be displaced onto people who were critical of computer games. These two ideas were like converging lines that intersected in 2016, when hipsterism was absorbed into the over-culture, simultaneously the hatred of these people was displaced into wokeism.

Due to this pattern, wokeism will ultimately be absorbed into everyday thought and speech, with a new idea ripening to become the idol of hatred. We know this as prior to hipsters were metrosexuals, with the idea that putting slime on your face and carrying a bag made you the antithesis of masculinity. Yet every day men look after their skin or carry things – the metrosexuals have been absorbed so thoroughly there is almost no trace of them left.

At a motel room and I can’t sleep. The conversation in the room next door is too loud. Turn on the pillow, yawn, the voices get louder. I close my mouth and they go quieter. Sit up in bed, opening and closing my mouth, as if I am opening and closing a door. I get up and walk around the room, finding out that the voices are coming from inside my mouth. Standing in the middle of the room, I open and closed my mouth, trying to work out what was happening to me by trying to make sense of the voices. But they are speaking in words I can’t understand or remember.

Helping Hands

I walked around North Hollywood looking for an assistant. I needed someone strong, agile, with street smarts and not afraid to do some dirty work on the side should I need it. A renegade if you will. I was going to post an ad on craigslist but thought that such a person would be readily available on the streets. I stepped over parts of a wig lying on the walk of fame, it was like a nylon jellyfish that had washed up onto a black shore. I kicked it around for a while as I watched the traffic go up and down, lit in dusk. Most of the people I'd seen so far were totally unsuitable, a little too raw for my needs. Schizophrenics, drug addicts, the sick. I threw nickels and dimes at them but no job offers, I needed to make sure I had a free range being. My eyes locked with another. He was the one. I extended a hand out and introduced myself.

Standing at about five foot one and weighing maybe one hundred and sixty pounds, Bill Williamson wasn't the most physically impressive person I'd met, but was pleasant to be around. He told me of his recent troubles, especially with drinking, though I dismissed these as his own particulars. He had hands like lump hammers, the knuckles criss-crossed with scars from street brawls. His head was slightly large and appeared to be of a decent weight, his forehead and jowls were especially prominent. He had a vertical scar just beneath his lip that went halfway around his head.
“I'm glad you're giving me a job. I gotta wife and kids to feed.”
“Don't mention it.”
“You want me to do anything for you?”
“Relax Bill. We'll get some food, clean you up, start tomorrow refreshed. How about it?”
“Sounds good to me.” he said, drinking the malt liquor I'd bought and lighting up a cigarette.

Later I cut his hair and gave him a shave, picking out some clothes on a catalogue online.
“We'll go to Rodeo Drive tomorrow, get you a suit, some shoes. You play squash?”
“Nope.”
“Any sports?”
“I used to play football back at school.”
“How about golf? Maybe we should get you some golf clothes. I saw this cute waist coat that I think you'd look good in, it'd be a shame for you not to wear it.”
“I ain't never played no golf before.”
“Relax, we aren't going to play. We'll go to the members lodge, shoot the shit with celebrities, do some shots. It'll be fun.”
“You're the boss.” said Bill. I nod.
“And your first duty to me can be to stand watch overnight, in case of trouble.”
“What you want me to do?”
“Sit at the end of my bed and keep watch.”
“Is someone out to get you?”
“Maybe. Maybe someone's out to get you? It's hard to say, but we'll see by morning.”
“Whatever you want.” he said. I nod and change into my pyjamas as he washes. I have a feeling that this assistant will be just what I need on the streets of L.A.

The next day Bill drives me towards Beverly Hills and we do a few hours of window shopping. I explain to him my philosophy on fashion. Work what you have. I demonstrate it by buying Bill a green blazer with flared sleeves in order to emphasize the size of his hands. I take them into mine and talk to him directly.
“Bill. I know you may not be used to this high standard of living. Fashion, art, fine dining, you know, but neither am I. But once you get a taste for the finer things in life, you can't help but expect a certain...je ne sais quoi. You feel me?”
“Yeah.” he says. I release his hands and turn back to the rail of clothes.
“What do you think of this?” I say, taking out a vintage eighties leather jacket. He shrugs. I spend seven hundred dollars on various outfits and we leave. I can't help but feel somewhat giddy, wanting to pirouette out of the store and sing. Once we're in the car I hum the The Rite Of Spring to myself, wondering what I would need assistance with.

A few hours later Bill and I are drinking white wine on a terrace overlooking the Pacific. It is quiet yet I feel as though both are content with that.
“What is it you're doing here anyway?”
“I am trying to find the edge. The edge of Los Angeles.”
“Hell, I can drive you out of the city tonight if that's all you want.”
“Can you?”
“Sure, we can take the interstate north, go through the mountains. I ain't been there for...say, coming on fifteen year.” he says. I shake my head.
“I'm from England, you know. And there's a funny thing about the coastline. You measure it in miles it's such a number. Let's say six hundred. But then you measure it in feet it's going to be....thousands of feet. You measure it in centimetres, it's going to be even higher.” I say.
“What now?”
“It's a paradox. The more fine the measurement, the higher it'll be. But the same applies to the city. Who's to say where Los Angeles ends exactly? Sure, it's on a map. But if I was to stand where the map said Los Angeles ended, would that necessarily mean that if I took a step forward I would no longer be in L.A?”
“Yeah.”
“No Bill. It's nebulous. It's a constantly shifting, the border between the city and the not city. Is a building or road what makes Los Angeles Los Angeles? Or do cars, trees, people, do they make up the city? If I was to get a microscope and examine a proton, am I looking at an individual proton or just a minutely small part of Los Angeles?” I said, gesturing in the air with my wine glass at the ocean view.
“I dunno man, I ain't never been to college.”
“Being academically inclined doesn't help answer these questions. Where is the edge? If the boundary of Los Angeles is so malleable, we could hypothesize that the length of the city limits is theoretically infinite. Which makes any part of Los Angeles a potential centre or edge. The only way we'll know is by investigating which areas are and aren't Los Angeles, and in through doing so I hope for a better understanding of not just this city, but all cities.”
“Well, that sounds good to me. So we could be at the edge right now?” says Bill, refilling his glass. I laugh heartily.
“This doesn't feel like the edge of civilization just yet. I'm sure we'll find it sooner or later though.” I said. We are quiet once again as I look out onto the constantly folding waves coming from the East.

I give Bill the rest of the night off to go and see his family whilst I go for my evening perambulations. My phone rang. Again, it was the distant sounds of animals breathing and the low talking. I sat on a bench and listened for a few minutes, wondering if it was even English, before the line went dead again. The Los Angeles night was drawing in, all lit bright orange all around me. I watch a coyote slink from out behind a diner and run across the road clutching something in it's mouth. In a trash can I find a shoebox full of love letters and take them up to my room to read whilst I sit in bed. Once I have finished I throw them around the room, ripping some in half, eating a few others. I had a busy week ahead of me.

Legalisation

In front of us were row after row of cannabis plant lit by yellow lights, casting harsh shadows onto the concrete floor. We are underground. Alvin Theodore turns to me and wipes at his brown moustache.
"What do you think?" he says, voice wavering in excitement. I turn back to the 'sea of green' and breathe in.
"Smells like...food."
"That's the trichomes." he utters before leading me through a gap in the field. Alvin Theodore is a business man, I could tell by his cheap suit and the way the skin sat on his face, like an ultra-real mask, all deep-pored and hairy up the nose. He looked like a wax work animated wet. We enter another room, this one contains seedlings on three rows of shelves. Botanists walk through the columns, administering a liquid vitamin solution into the growth matter.
"When they bred dogs for a certain kind of temperament, they noticed some physical features were shared with behaviour, like if a dog was good with people it might have had floppy ears. Or a curled tail. That kind of thing. With these plants we aren't really looking for a psychological behaviour but physical traits. But what if the exterior form is intrinsically linked in some way to the interior?"
"So what you're saying is that plants have a personality, like big leaves means...this plant is good to be around? Like...this plant is fucking sound."
"More or less. It took them about fifty years to breed a little terrier from a true dog, call it forty generations huh? Think how many generations you can have with plants. They reach reproductive maturity much earlier and can have potentially hundreds of children. Not only that, we can clone them. I think this is why we've seen such a significant increase in THC levels over the last fifty years or so. If you look at the buds we have now compared to your grandpa's weed, ours looks a lot more...Lovecraftian." he says, climbing a staircase. We're in his office, decorated in formica and residue. He makes a pot of coffee.
"Tell me about your cannabinols. Would you say what you have been growing was 'kush'? Or more similar to the variety of super skunk flooding the country from Amsterdam." I enquire nonchalantly, accepting the cup from Alvin.
"I'm running a business model that fits the high class stoner, providing the highest quality product on the market. I have a degree in Evolution from Oxford, I've travelled to the states to see how they do it. Recreational cannabis is going to be a huge cash crop, bigger than...wheat."
"Wheat?"
"Celiac's on the increase. Why not replace wheat with weed?" he said. I nodded encouragingly. I always enjoyed meeting a person willing to maximise their concept to it's fullest potential. It wasn't just a product with a single purpose, it was a multi-faceted money spinner that could enter various revenue streams. Food, clothes, medicine, building material, the potential was endless.
"It comes down to the waste product. Think about wood pulp, animal fats, plastic chips. We recycle all of these in pretty much everything, but we're going to have such an excess in marijuana related waste matter we can have weed in everything."

I left the meeting feeling puzzled. Was drugs okay now? I visited a juice bar to find out. Hundreds of these have popped up over the country, not selling alcohol but various juices that simply tasted nice. I ordered a virgin cranberry mojito and sat outside, digging the vibelicious music pouring out of the woofers, waiting to talk to someone. It didn't take long for a woman to ask me for a light. I passed her a box of matches I'd kept for such an occasion and watched her quietly, trying to smell her from across the table. I introduced myself and asked why she was smoking cannabis.
"It feels good, you know? I like it. Do you smoke?" she says, offering me the glass pipe stuffed with a well cornered bowl of Norwegian Haze. I breathe in the thick smoke and shut my eyes. I quoted Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."
We then get into a conversation about the fancy drinks that they had at the bar before I moved onto a more complex conversation.
"Why do you take drugs? Do you have no control over your life?"
"What do you mean?"
"Does your need to escape reality have anything to do with problems you experienced as a child?"
"Well, not really. I mean, I had a good childhood."
"I suppose you're imaginative?"
"Yes."
"Imagination is a defence mechanism for those that struggle with their own ego."
"That's ridiculous." she says, laughing.
"Let me tell you about a man who imagined the whole world was an orange. He tried to peel the whole world until they trapped him in a dungeon. Now was that because he was on drugs or was it all in his imagination?"
"I'm going inside." she says, leaving me alone. I think about the man who had tried to peel the world. What would happen if he had been successful? I look up and down the street, thankful for small favours. I think back on my experiences so far, still undecided if smoking weed was a morally safe decision. I needed to try for myself by visiting the Institute of Scientific Research in Durham.

I am strapped onto a bed, scientists move around me, though I'm unable to see them properly as a bright light shines overhead. There's so many electrodes attached to my scalp it looks like an orange plastic ponytail, my thoughts being played back to me as a wavering sine tone. A doctor administers 100 milligrams of pure cannabis via eye drops.
"Blink please." he says. I can feel the liquid drip down my temples.
"How long will it take for the weed to activate in my system?"
"Approximately four minutes." he says. I can feel hands touching at my arm and the sting of a needle.
"What are you doing?"
"Administering a saline drip in case you lose consciousness. Try to relax." says the doctor. I wait, watching the light. After a few minutes I mention I don't feel anything, so more eye drops are administered to me. There is somebody talking in the background, I think I recognise the voice.
"Who else is in the room?" I ask. There isn't a response for a while and I can't move my head.
"Myself and the nurse." says the doctor eventually.
"I think I am beginning to feel the...eye drops having an effect."
"How do you feel? Speak clearly into the microphone." he says, I can feel the foam top brushing against my lips.
"I am beginning to feel like Bob Marley." I say.
"Do you have the munchies?" he asks.
"Yes...yes, I think I can feel an increase in appetite. And a dry mouth, is that normal?" I ask. The doctor laughs.
"Just try to relax, we are moving onto the next stage of the procedure." he says.
"Okay." I say. The bed begins to tilt so I can see the whole room. In front of me are about fifty snakes inside a glass box.
"What are they there for?" I ask.
"This is an experiment." says the doctor, walking forward and smashing the box with a baseball bat before running out of the room.

Classical Music In Public

Women wearing yellow sit beneath the trees, they call out.
"Let me see your heart, show me your heart."
I take off my jacket and unbutton my shirt.
"Let us see it. We need to taste it. We see it."
"It is burning."
I pull at my sternum with my fingers, pulling apart the skin and bubbles of yellow fat.
"Show me your heart."
I unclick the ribs and part the lungs.
"I can see it. Your heart. Your heart."
"It is burning."
I reveal my heart, like the blooded head of an unborn, it moves inside of me, pumping the blood into my brain that is telling it to beat.
"Oh, your heart. Magnified in a lens made from the air, refracted in my mind. It is your heart and I can see it, burning. A burning heart pumping molten blood."
I reach inside my chest and pull out my heart slowly, being careful not to tear it from my body. I am holding it in my hands and I part the ventricles like the petals of a flower.
"This is my heart."
"Show me your heart."
A woman walks over to me and begins to caress is gently with her hands. It flutters like a bird. She bends down and begins to kiss it, licking at the thing which beats. She whispers something to it before handing it me back. I begin to sing in operatic fashion:
"I am but a man, holding out his heart. A clock that ticks. This is my heart.
See my heart.
It is burning."
A host of flies begin to swarm around the greying thing and I bow one knee, offering it up. She accepts and takes a bite.

Festival Experience 2013

I was standing in a muddy field, tweeting, dressed from head to toe in leather. It's festival season in England and I have used this opportunity to meet the manager of Daughter, the indie-folk band from London. I had been listening to them before they were famous, but Daughter had played Glastonbury and were selling a personal record number of albums across the country, getting serious air time on all the big radio stations and podcast d'loads. Their manager, Ryan Riley approached me carefully. He looked like a bird or reptile, all dead in the eyes and thin in the face. I introduced myself and he lead me towards the stage that the trio were playing on.
"I'm the one with all the ideas you see. I came up with the name of the band even." he said.
"Really?"
"Yeah, I also did the cover art for their first album, but they ended up going with that photograph of them trees. Still, if you're interested I printed off a few copies with the original artwork on."
"So how did you meet the band?"
"Well I met them at a pub. They all played or sang so I said, you guys should be in a band. I had to help them a fair bit as they didn't know what to do at first, but I reckon they're getting better now."
"Yeah. They're really stupid."
"That's good right?" said Ryan. I nod and remove the leather cap from off my hair. We're backstage, fat men roll cigarettes in the dark. I trip over a crate of bottled water as we make our way to the green room.
"Hold on, can you take my picture? It's that one." he says, pointing at a button. I take his picture next to the door, it has a sheet of paper that says 'Daughter' stuck to it. We wait in the green room as the last few notes are played onstage and Elena Tondra thanks the audience. A few minutes later they appear, slightly ruffled after playing for the last eighty minutes. I introduce myself and rest my bag on the table, snapping it open and taking out a machine.
"What's that for?" says Igor Haefeli, the guitarist. I attach the lump of metal to the side of my head and begin to plug it into the power supply resting at the bottom of my bag.
"I'm experimenting with some new recording equipment." I say before turning the machine on. Magnets descend over my face and begin to hum. I have to grab onto the table quite tightly as the machine begins to vibrate my whole body as if I'm having a fit, though this is part of the process. The hum rises to a high tone before clicking off, the sounds of the fans and inner mechanisms running themselves still once more. The pieces of metal are drawn back into the machine and I set it down back onto the table. The four people sat around now look exactly like me. I have printed my face onto their heads.
"What just happened?" says Ryan Riley. It is odd to see myself speaking with someone else's voice, wearing somebody else's clothes. They look at one another and begin to shout, although they are confused which one is me. I run out of the room and out behind the stage, chased by my facial clones.

The Ministry Of Beige

Recently I attended the Leeds University degree show, the culmination of three years of study from art students from around the globe that had gathered in one building, as it makes it easier to teach. I usually made a point of visiting the various degree shows up and down the country in order to spot the next hot talent I can ear-mark for future reference, able to say in future conversations that I saw their early work and perhaps make a snide comment about it. As I walked those sanctimonious galleries that smelled slightly of emulsion and cheap wine, I examined that year's students suggestions as to what the best piece of work they had ever made was to be. There were abstract paintings, stuffed animals, a couple of rocks, photographs of topless women, bits of string, some sort of rusted bicycle, coloured tape, triangles and a few videos of students staring at the camera whilst things happened to them. Work like this happened up and down the country, though one of the slight differences was that every single piece here had a little red sticker on it, marking it as sold. I grabbed a student by the arm and demanded to know what was going on.
"Someone bought everything. I made a hundred quid on my crypto-vintage screen prints based on the works of Miguel de Cervantes recontextualised as a parody of social media." they uttered. I pushed them to one side as I made my way to the refreshments table, thinking that something was amiss. It was rare for anybody to sell work at these things, let alone for every single student to make a sale. I needed to track down this art enthusiast, although first I needed to make sure I capitalised on the refreshments.

Several refreshments later I was none the wiser. In fact I hadn't moved from the table. But as is the case at these events, sooner or later everyone needs a drink. I noticed him by the stream of whispers he left in his wake. Dressed in a sharp suit and pointy shoes, the figure of Miles Burgeaumont blends in like a black moth against the night sky. Though there is something different about him compared to a moth. He has genuine joy in his eyes. I go forward to apprehend him, to ask him if he is the enthusiast that has bought all the work, though I am intercepted by a proud parent who asks the questions for me.
"You bought my daughter's work!" cried the father.
"Indeed I did! I was surprised at the...suggestions it made. I needed to have it." said Mr. Burgeaumont.
"I'm glad. The thing is, it wasn't for sale. You see, she used several pieces of my late mother's jewellery in her collage and I'd like them back."
"But I paid a fair price. Don't worry, they will be looked after, even displayed in a gallery. In London."
"Oh London! You should have said!" squawked the father. They made idle chit-chat whilst I began to make some notes and did a few drawings. London. The land of the blind. And the one eyed man could be king. But why? Surely the one eyed man would never be able to prove that he could see. I then noticed that the work was being taken off the walls and taken outside.

Everyone was at the front of the university, looking at Mr. Burgeaumont standing by the pile of artwork. He began to speak.
"Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for attending the Leeds Art School Degree Show. As you may or may not know, my name is Miles Burgeaumont. I am an art collector and have bought every single piece of work at this event. You may wonder why I have bought all of this work, and I am telling you now that I wish to display it in London at my very own gallery." said Mr. Burgeaumont. Some people began to cheer.
"Before doing so it needs a slight modification. You see, I represent the Ministry of Beige. The ministry represents everything mediocre, bland, sexless, boring. We have identified that certain works of art do not meet a standard of quality that will in anyway increase the culture of society. They are required to be unmade. To be beigeified." said Burgeaumont. Men emerge from the back of a van and begin to pour gallons of beige paint over the work. The thick gloss falls thickly across paintings and sculptures, erasing all detail. Some students laugh, some are shocked, some rush forward to try and rescue their work, though members from the ministry block any attempts to save the work from being covered in litre upon litre of beige.
"I have bought the work. It is mine to do with as I please." said Burgeaumont.
"But your idea itself is bland and boring. Anti-art is nothing new and has been done better a hundred of times before! Some of the work you're destroying is itself anti-art!" shouted a tutor, making their way forward. A bucket of beige paint is thrown over them.
"This isn't an artistic statement. I am just pouring beige paint over your work." said Burgeaumont. He continued to answer questions and protests as more and more beige paint was poured, it began to ooze out onto the street, onto the pavement, it was splashed up the trees and smeared along the walls. I am unsure as to what happened next as I went inside to make use of the refreshment table, but by the time I left the university there wasn't anybody around, though beige paint covered every surface like a wet snow. I walked over to the pile of art work that was the nucleus for this rearrangement in colour and knelt down, picking out a painting at random and wiping away some of the beige with my sleeve. It was a portrait of David Cameron with a Hitler moustache. I dropped it back into the pile with disgust and began to walk along the empty roads of Leeds, everything was beige. Everything.

The Second Large Glass

The supermodel was dressed in a turquoise dress and matching six inch heels whilst the various photographers milled around, shouting encouragement and redirecting lights in order to best illuminate the beautiful woman. She was stood next to a eight foot high pane of glass and gently rested her body against it, where her skin met the surface it all became the same featureless, flat colour.
"Tilt!" screamed the director. Pulleys were jigged about and the top of the glass began to descend, creating an angle growing less and less steep as the seconds ticked by.
"Hoist!" he yelled. The pane of glass began to slowly ascend. The scene was set. Silence had fallen over the crew as they watched the supermodel slowly begin to slide off the glass. Cameras tracked the viscosity of her skin as a strange squeaking sound filled the room. Just as her hips reached the bottom of the glass, she flopped down, landing slightly unsteadily on her feet.
"Great job! Can we go again at a thirty seven degree angle?" said the director. She nodded, going to one side to have her make-up reapplied as a window cleaner descended from above to clean the glass.