imphilly

this marks the beginning of a project that i am working on. my goal is to travel throughout history, embodied as the aflac duck, asking the appropriate(d) question, "are you my mother?"

tune in for the answer

this morning i awoke to find this in my inbox.  i'm not sure what makes me happier: if it is the fact that in three days i will actually be reunited with my dudeitchka; or if it is that this certain dudeitchka has found a way here to reach deep down into my chest and heart and tug beautifully at the appropriate strings.  well at this point it's certainly the former but the latter is not entirely unrelated.

thank you dudeitchka.     

although they didn't enjoy it as much as i did, nate, john, ian, and alex all rallied together (and were great sports about it) in order to spend time with me on my birthday (and it was seriously appreciated!!!).  we went to moca for an exhibit titled, "index: conceptualism in california".  it was truly a wonderful exhibit with some really interesting pieces.  ian and i spent way to long trying to figure out the "meaning" behind a piece that we finally concluded was purely working to destroy notions of truth/meaning in art (it did so in a wonderfully intricate way that enticed us to string certain equations together in a way that just didn't "fit").  we then climbed down into three large holes that exposed the actual concrete foundation of the building.  we saw an interesting film narrative which was constructed using nothing but magnetic letters to spell out words.  one word at a time for an entire story (realistically only a long paragraph but still a pretty interesting play on time and narrative).  all in all i had a great day thanks to my friends and moca.           

as i sat there, i wondered what -- if anything -- about my new life in los angeles could be considered suitable for my imphilly blog? i debated hanging up this site and trying to rework a new more "site/city" specific blog, yet was hesitant because of my strong affinity for my imphillyness. i was truly caught in an existechnial whirlwind!

so what's a man-boy to do?

it's not that i thought my recent move to la should erase my phillyness but rather i was questioning whether the content on imphilly ought necessarily be philly based. that is, i think, the nature of the project/blog changes drastically depending my location.

and after sitting and trying to fully comprehend what exactly it means to have a new home, i began to question my prior understanding of the relationship between one's home and one's identity. an email from brad the other day reading, "u r so la! how did that happen so fast?" seemed wildly appropriate.

brad's statement made me, for the first time, think that i might actually be "la" (or rather could be "la"). and this labeling process first by the other and then appropriated by the self is precisely what interests me. thus, i decided that "imphilly: project nv - as in noun or verb - myself" had as much to do with la as with philly. first of all, anyone who reads my blog as of right now is located in and around the philadelphia region. my new location (as well as the readers "new" location in relationship to my new location) creates an interesting and dynamic relationship between these two cities. one that is solely indebted to the author reader connection.

thus, i will not retire imphilly and i will continue (as much as possible) to post in ways that highlight this "new" relationship and work to explore all aspects of this bicoastal interconnectedness that is us.

as i sat in borders yesterday reading adbusters, i came across an article titled "hipster: the dead end of western civilization" by douglas haddow. while reading, i could not help but feel as though haddow, in his genuine attempt to refute everything hipster, accidentally re/de-subjugates an identity category (in a very loose sense) which he knows very little about. he then takes this fabricated category and projects onto it a disdain for western culture in general. typical adbuster stuff. before i go any further i might mention that haddow and i probably share very different views on many things and to criticize his ideas is not my goal (i do agree that there are some serious issues with mass consumerism) but rather to discuss how his article is flawed to the very non-existent teleological core. i must also state here that if his article was an attempt to affirm hipsterdom through the use of irony and hyperbole, metaphor and metonymy then, well, he wins. his postmodern wit was such that it eluded me completely. and if this was the case then i stand here mostly naked, wearing nothing but my american apparel briefs, and i salute him all ironic and smug.

back to business. this article severely begs the question (logically speaking). by presenting what he himself has gathered to be necessarily hipster-esk, haddow works to build a surface caricature of the hipster which is necessarily all consuming, all partying, all superficial, and down right damned to hell. he says,
An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization- a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” - a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.
here he takes his (formalist?) portrait of the hipster and ties it to the mainstream. it is not clear to me if he is criticizing society for creating the hipster or criticizing the hipster for embracing society (or both?). my initial reaction is to go with the ladder. either way, his connection rests solely on his notion of the superficial which he half-assedly assigns to both; a connection which itself requires a process of oversimplification more accurately mirroring the death of society than any brand of jeans ever could.

i will pause here to state that i personally agree with his assessment of the superficial and how it negatively infiltrates mainstream consumerism, which includes the youth. what i disagree with however is the idea that it is hipsters who are quintessentially trapped in this rat race to destruction. call me an optimist but this is just statistically improbable.
seriously, about half of my friends and i regularly frequent what haddow would probably term hipster hotspots and i can honestly say that this group of friends represents the antitheses of artificiality (i.e josh’s fixed gear bike has everything to do with his diy ethics, and brad’s affinity for pabst has direct ties to “blue velvet” and bob and babara’s thursday night philly specials (no longer ), oh and my v-necks are represented by michael jordan not dov charney (but how would haddow ever know this?)

my point is this, sure our youth runs the risk of succumbing to all that is superficial with our society, but then again what era’s youth was ever exempt from this. And yes the stakes may be raised in the postmodern simulation (oh yes I did), but meaninglessness has always been a threat. what the hipsters might actually be doing is thumbing their pierced noses at this meaninglessness (a priori), not because they don’t give a fuck, but rather because to give a fuck (a priori) is fucking meaningless.

In the article he describes a certain level of discomfort that a group of girls express when he asks them if they are hipsters:
“I’m not comfortable with that term,” she replies.
Her friend adds, with just a flick(e)r of menace in her eyes, “Yeah, I don’t know, you shouldn’t use that word, it’s just…”
“Offensive?”
“No… it’s just, well… if you don’t know why then you just shouldn’t even use it.”

here is an interesting altercation that can be read several different ways. haddow reads it as the girls being an exclusive group wishing to belittle anyone outside the “know”. this implies that there is something to know and that this object of knowledge is both unprecedented and isolating (not to mention implicitly supportive of mass consumerism). although this may be the case, it requires that the hipster intends to buy into either the hipster culture or the consumerism culture (tacitly?). that is by not being able to describe it but still acknowledging its presence, one is agreeing to be a hipster.

the problem then rests between the intention to buy into a culture rather than a product. Perhaps this is precisely haddow’s mistake. he assigns intention only to the signs that the hipsters appropriate, applying only superficial significance to them, and never to the actual act of appropriation which might mean something entirely different. in doing so he automatically abandons any level of social or political or ethical or aesthetic significance that might exist implicitly in these acts for the hip factor …

i fear that the only way the hipsters can win this game that haddow has built is by admitting (verbally?) that s/he is trying to be a hipster. That is to re-appropriate his or her own appropriations? meta-appropriations? now things are just getting silly! but in doing so then haddow would be forced to admit that perhaps the hipster is a self aware being partially separate (or at least trying to be) from societal structures. you can see the trouble now that the aware hipster faces. s/he is forced with the double-bind obligation of justifying his or her existence (on whose terms is still a HUGE question) which is necessarily unjustifiable in-and-of-itself.

perhaps a link between hipsterdom and “queer” (the appropriated term not the pop culture meaning “gay”) culture is appropriate and should be expanded on. perhaps in a few weeks when i am living in silverlake attending calarts and sweating through my skinny ass jeans i will sit down and attempt to justify hipsters in a way that assigns way more intentionality to the youth (as a whole) than is really necessary (or historically accurate). perhaps i will wax intellectual with my hipster friends back home over a pabst and iphone tweets. perhaps i will even decide it necessary to create low-fi art projects using outdated materials combined with new technologies. who knows maybe someday i’ll even blog it.

Almost exactly two years ago one of my best friends decided to bleach his hair a few days before packing up and heading off to grad school. Well, after seeing how well he did I thought I'd follow suit. Distinction here I come; of has been written in my cards!