In this week's SFR, music writer Alex De Vore provided our readers with a
to determine whether you are a hipster, a normal human being, or some kind of weirdo that we can't identify. Coincidentally, this week at SFR we received a copy of the
book, and it does nothing but confirm everything we believed about hipsters, and verify everything we published in this week's paper.
The LATFH website was only established in April 2009, and author
proclaims that it was pretty much started as a joke for him and a few of his friends. But within days he was receiving images from all over the country of people in ironic sweatshirts and clunky outdated eyeglasses, riding fixed-gear bikes and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, growing wispy facial hair and getting chest tattoos of things like deer or guns. Thus, LATFH was born.
Now that LATFH is a book, it can inform even more people of precisely what a hipster is and what a hipster does. "How do you figure?" you might ask. "A virtual website can surely reach more people than an old-fashioned paper website." Mayhaps it will reach more people, but this book is truly educational.
It is divided into sections titled "What is a hipster?", "What makes a hipster a hipster?" (which has subsections like "Tight Pants," "Dumb haircuts" and "Yasser Arafat Scarves"), "Types of Hipsters" (like Androgynous Hipsters, Musical Hipsters and Let's Dress Up Like Indians Hipsters—there are a shocking number of the latter), "Is This A Hipster?", "They're Just Like Us!", "Celebrity Hipsters," "Hipsters Through the Ages", "Look At This Fucking Love Connection" (a regular feature on the website where hipster photos are paired up with each other due to a common bond, like, shiny gold pants or unicorn costumes), and "Beeeeeaaaaaaans" (a chapter dedicated to a single chubby hipster, code name Beans, who has made a name for himself in LATFH, and who has become somewhat of a viral phenomenon).
As is made clear by Mande in the book's introduction, the LATFH phenomenon is not hate mongering—much like me proclaiming that I do not like sun-dried tomatoes is not hate mongering. I just don't like sun-dried tomatoes and I can't imagine why anyone would like that salty, tough, nasty shit that tastes like cigarettes and these gross red berries I had in my back yard as a kid. But if you like sun-dried tomatoes, go ahead and eat them, I'm not gonna stop you. Same with hipsters. They look stupid and they're often obnoxious, but if people like looking stupid and being obnoxious, go right on ahead. It's a free country!
While we do have our fair share of hipsters, it could be much worse. Nonetheless, here are some examples of hipsters that can be spotted in Santa Fe:
- A girl in a high-waisted skirt and dingy T-shirt dancing to D Numbers at Corazón. I'm sorry, but you can't be sexy in a high-waised skirt.
- Kids hanging out on the Plaza with thick black glasses, skinny pants and really dumb-looking neon-accented hi-top shoes.
- Arguably homosexual Asian dude with James Dean-like white T-shirt, black jeans and those weird boots like the Beatles used to wear in the early days, sitting on a porch railing in the Barrio, drinking PBR and bitching about things that it takes money to do.
- Girl who doesn't need glasses wearing glasses—and not just any glasses, but really ugly thrift store glasses—at Tune-Up Café, talking about Foucault. Oh, and she's probably wearing all
clothes too (aka the kinds of clothes you wear when you have lots of money but want to make it look like you scrounged your threads from the floor of a thrift store).
Most interestingly, SFR itself has smatterings of hipsterness here and there. LATFH points out that residents of hipster enclave Williamsburg, Brooklyn
really sucks at sending back census forms
, possibly because filling out the census is not hip. Now, if you'll do us a favor and remember back a few weeks to when copyeditor Rani Molla posted about her
, it was a little hip of her to so flippantly fill it out. But you know what? Rani eventually sent that damn census back, so that means she's not a hipster.
Another hipster in SFR's offices is editorial intern
. Arp, a photography student at the College of Santa Fe who is set to graduate in May, of course does not believe he is a hipster—but, as De Vore pointed out in his hipster quiz, protesting your hipster status is the first indication that you are indeed a hipster. Methinks the intern doth protest too much. He's got the moustache, the skinny jeans, and the giant eyeglasses. But you know what? Arp borrowed the LATFH book and thought it was hilarious. He thus negates his hipsterness, or at least balances it out, by laughing at (his fellow?) hipsters.
I'd like to close with pretty much the best hipster joke ever from our editor Julia Goldberg.
Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A:
It's a really obscure number, you've probably never heard of it.
