Hipsters

Someone once told me that when people reach a certain age they begin dressing in the manner they did at the happiest time in their life.

The same often goes for elderly people with severe dementia, who can keenly recall the minute details of life when they were happiest. My 80 year old grandmother did not recognise me at all in the last six months of her life, but she would talk about her sons as if they were still young teenagers. She was a homemaker and it was the most joyful time in her life

That’s what I think about when I watch the brilliant video above about hipsters, the future and social media.

Continue reading "Hipsters with hip replacements" »

If there’s one thing complete strangers on the Internet have taught me, it’s that it’s cool to hate on hipsters. At least that’s what some hipster on Twitter told me.

The problem is, they’re becoming increasingly hard to pick out. Your mother, best friend, or favourite pet could be a hipster and you wouldn’t even know it.

Through clever use of poor fashion choices and general laziness, they’ve reached such an advanced level of irony that they are, in fact, indistinguishable from the rest of us. The best course of action, in these dark and uncertain times, is to simply treat everyone with suspicion.

Continue reading "It slices, it dices, it makes coleslaw out of hipsters" »

A year ago, my wife and I underwent a hipster-to-bogan metamorphosis. Faced with the choice of (a) continuing to service a huge mortgage on a latte-belt two-bedder or (b) have a kid, the primal drive to propagate the species narrowly won out over the Sydneysider’s obsessive determination to hold on to primo real estate.

I was under the impression I was only inner-city wanker to have ever made the schlep of shame to the suburban fringe (I’m yet to meet another) but it appears not. Priced out of more fashionable suburbs, David Nichols, an urban planning academic, bought a house in the notoriously boganish Broadmeadows in 2004.

Of course, the danger of making this kind of move is you’ll go native and come to suspect the people you find yourself living among aren’t the uncivilised brutes of the popular imagination and that the community you left behind is not beyond criticism itself.

Continue reading "Boganville and Hipstertown aren’t so far apart" »