e.g., from NY Mag:

“Let me recall a string of keywords: trucker hats; undershirts called “wifebeaters,” worn alone; the aesthetic of basement rec-room pornography, flash-lit Polaroids, and fake-wood paneling; Pabst Blue Ribbon; “porno” or “pedophile” mustaches; aviator glasses; Americana T-shirts from church socials and pig roasts; tube socks; the late albums of Johnny Cash; tattoos. Key institutions were the fashion magazine Vice, which moved to New York from Montreal in 1999 and drew on casual racism and porn to refresh traditional women’s-magazine features (“It Happened,” “Dos and Don’ts”) and overcome the stigma of boys looking at photos of clothes…”

and from you:

“I define the contemporary hipster as a type of person who is intensely focused on a process of self-making by means of strategic consumption. That is, the hipster constructs an identity by becoming something like a professional shopper, an “early adopter” of trends and fashions, as Greif rightly points out. What the hipster disavows is, quite specifically, an awareness of his class situation.”

Both of these perspectives do to the hipster exactly what the hipster is doing to himself, which is defining himself by externalities, by brands, and not something specific or unique to his own psychology. You could maintain the integrity of those paragraphs and merely change the proper nouns and you would be defining some other group, e.g. rap wannabes, or geeks, or whatever.

This shows that the hipster isn’t any different than any other self-branding type, only the store he shops in differs. But the mechanism is the same.

So to try and understand what the hipster “is” is an act of bad faith. It’s a self-defense. Defining him allows you/me/us the ability to pretend we are doing something different than he is. We get to pretend our identity is somehow more legitimate than his is.

That the hipster drinks PBR is absolutely no different than the yuppie buying a Subzero refrigerator, or someone’s need to have a MacBook Pro instead of a Windows 7. We convince ourselves that these consumptive experiences are important in their own right (“I need if for graphic design”) but they are always and everywhere ways of broadcasting an artificial identity we want others to accept.

There’s a word for that, but I can’t remember what it is.

Rather, I am interested in why we pay attention to political conflicts when people put on blue face paint, but ignore similar protests, conflicts, and situations when our pop cultural vanity isn’t part of the equation. By “we,” I don’t mean individuals, who naturally vary in levels of attention, but the system of the U.S. media and the myriad individual choices which lead editors, publishers, and producers to deem one sort of story newsworthy, while another doesn’t make the cut.

http://www.jpost.com/ArtsAndCulture/Entertainment/Article.aspx?id=168521

Casino 492c37a15c…

I see two major differences between what I am calling postirony (or post-postmodernism, as you call it) in film and in literature. One is the size of the market that consumes each; the other is the ease of consumption with each medium. Every Wes Anderson movie gets far more media coverage than even the highest selling McSweeney's Books book (with maybe the exception of those written by Dave Eggers), given the relative amount of attention our culture pays to literature. And then, it's far easier to watch a two-hour film than to read a densely-rendered three-four hundred page literary novel. With more attention from a general audience, with diverse tastes, comes more negative attention, I think.

I personally really enjoyed the Life Aquatic. It was my favorite of Anderson's films, which I know is an atypical critical judgment. But I have to admit that the Life Aquatic is pretty rarefied stuff, a kind of mainlined version of his aesthetic, and so not for everyone. With a McSweeney's book, the audience tends to be small and self-selecting, which leads more naturally to a higher proportion of positive reviews. This is just speculation on my part; I haven't done any sort of systematic reception history on these works in general.

Then again, there are plenty of negative reviews of literary postirony. Lee Siegel wrote a scathing review of Dave Eggers' "What is the What" in the New Republic. Melvin Jules Bukiet has written a fairly critical overview of the "Brooklyn" novel, which he says is characterized by "mawkish self-indulgence… a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia… magic realism… [and] a complacency of faith." James Wood, meanwhile, decries this style as a continuation of a Pynchonian "hysterical realism," a term he coined to describe the fiction of Zadie Smith. And so on.

I think general attacks of this sort are kind of silly. There are good and bad examples of this style, as with anything else, and good and bad individual works, often by the same author. So it's a mixed bag. I should say that my goal, at least in discussing these writers in my dissertation, isn't to pronounce critical judgments for their own sake but to position the aesthetic of these writers in terms of an evolving literary history and to describe their individual relationships to an ethos of irony, whose collective valuation I argue has been on the decline for a while.

All of which is hard enough to talk about in any sort of general way.