[lbo-talk] Politics of DIY

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sun Jan 23 13:20:42 PST 2011


At 03:22 PM 1/23/2011, SA wrote:
>Thanks for these links. I lived among the hipster from the beginning, and
>I find all these essays confusing, like they're making something simple
>seem complicated. To me, the hipster never seemed like a new phenomenon or
>specific to any particular era -- until people seized on the word and
>reified the concept. When the term became a nationwide household word and
>NPR and Salon started churning out endless pieces on "the hipster," I
>found it confusing. I felt like an editor being pitched an article on how,
>like, have you noticed people wear baseball caps or how popular bumper
>stickers are? I want to ask: what exactly is the news peg here?

I don't have a problem with hipsters. I like them. I do find it endlessly fascinating that there's a cult of authenticity amongst the whiners who hate them: there are real artists and musicians who ride scooters and fixies, wear skinny jeans, pin bunny tails to their backsides, skateboard, listen to good music, etc. and then there are hipsters. Being an outsider, I can't tell the difference and when I ask the person claiming to make a distinction all they can do is claim that, by a look at their clothing (or whatever) that one over there is a hipster, the one over here is authentic.

So, reading around on this latest hipster literature, I found Grief's stuff rather interesting. He argues that what is new is the cult of authenticity. The word hipster isn't thrown around simply to describe people who are alienating from consumer culture. It's thrown around to describe people who are merely posing as if they are. And at the same time, Grief also says that the distinction isn't entirely empty. Thus, there are artists, and then there are graphic artists. There are photographers, and then there are people who take photos at parties on their iPod, there are writers and then there are people who really dig fonts.

While I'm suspicious of this real v non real art stuff, the fact is I was first introduced to a distinction between real art v graphic design by our own Chuck Grimes who once snarled about how graphic artists weren't artists on the old Bad Subjects list. Being unschooled in Art, I hadn't a clue. Even so, I think Grief might be on to something. You write about former sub-cultures of resistance who did, indeed, create art, music, literature - no?

In that sense, playing with Grief's thesis here, the DIY movement is the latest hipster fad perhaps. I live with a DIYer myself, but he's fatally over 35 and, by definition, incapable of ever being a hipster. Plus, he doesn't think of it as a way to change the world. It's just something he likes to do, a habit irritating to me because I'm sick of the pack rat shit in my garage. Yes, I know you can rescue some magnet out of spent microwaves and construct a tig welder. Yes, i know we can replace the watch battery by ourselves, but can I fork over $5 for it to be fixed - now? and not when you finally get to it after the bizillion and one projects you have. I think we once spoke of wedding bands - though, truly, I could not care less at this point. But these have never materialized because, I shit you negatory, he wants to pan for the gold to make them himself. Of course, in my worst moments, I always wonder if all this projecting is just another way fo never getting much done! I will probably regret this but I ordered a gift of Make magazine. *sigh*

Obviously, I DIY myself - baking, cooking. Hey, I make my own glass cleaner. *smirk* I love to refinish furniture. If I had time, I'd build more of my own. Power tools rawk! Alas, I also like long-distance cycling and organizing work. Only so much time in a day.

the other interesting piece to the hipster puzzle was a discussion of the speed with which insider knowledge - the cachet that made one hip in the past (see Grief's discussion of the origins of the term;really good) - traverses, say, Wmsburg to other major cities, zipping through suburbs and rural areas, and then globally: A process made possible by the Internets(tm). Disconcerting to the arbiters of cool in Wmsburg who then must ratchet up the cool hunt in order to distinguish themselves from what has gone mainstream and, thus, no longer authentic.

So, as i said: discussions of hipsters aren't about the newness of the phenom of an alienated subculture emerging among youth. Discussions are about locating authentic protest subcultures vs. those that merely feed off them in order to grub together a style, made affordable by your trustfund. Which Mark Grief then dumps on its head to ask, and so how to these artists and critics of the poseurs end up secretly requiring the poseur hipsters both as foil for their own identities but also as consumers that make their alienated art, music, etc. possible.



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