“ . . . he advertises the refusal (or has ended up standing in for the people who do; more on that in a minute). It’s that his life — with its cool T-shirts, cool jobs, cool kids, cool art, hip music — is a walking implication to the rest of us that while we’re living our lives of complication, compromise, limitiations and sacrifice, there are these golden people out there who aren’t constrained by convention or expectation like we are. They don’t have to give things up, and they don’t ever have to come to terms with the distance between their actual lives and the fantasy lives they once projected for themselves in the future.”
-Daniel Oppenheimer on Neil Pollack, “grups,” et al
I’ve been igonoring, or perhaps, avoiding these Pollack/Grup posts by Dan and Hayley – or at least their implications for me – because they were all about being a hip Daddy. Until now, I’ve refused to be anyone’s daddy, hip or square, (Well, I’ve been called “Daddy” lately, but by a consenting adult, not by actual offspring.) and now I’m getting toward fish-or-be-bait years of my potential daddydom and supposedly well past when it’s respectable to even try to stay vaguely cool. And, while I don’t have the money to spend $600 bucks on anything, be it a Baby Bjorn or a pair of pre-ripped/-stained/ /-patched/-faded jeans (and sure, I am somewhat revulsed by and resentful of those who buy their hipitude instead of what I would call earning it by actual engagement with youth/pop/art culture) I freely admit that I’m a version of that aging, trying-to-stay-hip, rock’n’roll/artsy/boho dood, stretching those golden years way past their stretchmarked limits.
I get whatever cool I gots by really listening to music, looking at art, being part of a community of artists and writers and musicians. I value this knowledge, I value knowing good art and knowing it before everyone and their sister does. I value my beat-up leather jacket that I bought on St. Mark’s place in 1982 the way architects value their Boxters. Does this make me a snob, a poseur, an overaged goofball, for clinging to my youth, for keeping up with, say, the latest Shins record (which, by the way, sounds to me like a Beach Boys record, and thus, not likeable so much) instead of working diligently toward retirement and a few days more vacation each year?
But now I find myself, after a lifetime in San Francisco and before that New York City, (which, by dint of simple geography, grant residents an element of cool that is theirs to enjoy, squander, exploit, or forfeit) living in a working-to-middle-class former factory town in western Mass, teaching freshman English at the local university, writing this and that, opening a bar, getting ready to buy a house settle down maybe even with a li’l chitlin of my own. But “settle down,” dammit, can’t mean settle for button-down dreariness. And frankly, the comfort of a high-paying dreary career is no longer an option anyway, but even if it were, I’d say no, no, a thousand times no!
I’d say that the people who are most bitter about grups are the people who thought they were (but really weren’t, he said, cattily) kind of artsy and au courant in college and then went (as they’d always secretly planned, after slumming with the artistes) to business/law/med school immediately thereafter, then on to fat paychecks, and now don’t know Hoobastank from Hootie, or rather they know all too well who Hootie is/are, and hide those cassettes behind the Magnetic Fields “69 Love Songs” box set that they read about in the New Yorker but they really don’t listen to because they really don’t get it, they find it, well, kinda faggy. In short, they’re bitter because they now have the money but still aren’t cool: money (sorry, the Donald) doesn’t buy cool, and in fact, often enough, it buys you a one way ticket out of cooltown. I find myself recalling my best friend Tom’s 16-year-old punkrock pride at nailing Joe Strummer on the forehead with a quarter when he and cohorts were sitting in the balcony, whipping coins at the Clash for selling out with “London Calling.”
Well, drab well-to-do guys and gals, you took the money, and you’re enjoying the money, and you can’t have everything, so why not let those who forwent the cash for the culture have their little ghettoed status symbols, is all I’m saying (which, again, isn’t a Baby Bjorn or a Mini or a Iphone or whatever Apple’s phone’s gonna be called), so perhaps I’m off topic somewhat, I admit). I’ve spent my lifetime trying to deny that I am (or forgive myself for being) a hipster or an art world poseur or any of several wannabes/dilletantes that I often see myself as, but if you just tweak those words a little, hipster to “person with an urban, vintage/modern style,” poseur to “patron” or even “fan,” wannabe/dilletante to, er, “patron” (but with no money to actually patronize) then I’m really not so bad. The people who are bad are the ones who buy brand new, pre-ripped and pre-booty-faded Jeans for $400 bucks (instead of scouring Salvation Army or actually wearing new jeans in, because, wait, let me look, at my Blackberry, yes, who on earth has the time for that?) and get all their music and art from the Times, the NYer and Terry Gross.
I’m standing up for the aging hipster, darn it, the older artsy guy and gal who didn’t take the straight and corporate narrow but didn’t become an art star either. Neal Pollack and others want to go legit at least somewhat as parents but keep keep their (Williamsburg) street-cred, and I say, Haters, let ‘em be! Me, I’ve got my “art” and my art school at 42 (okay, creative writing school). My ex-wife has a house in San Francisco and a husband and two kids – I’ve got my apartment in Turners Falls, MA, my trips down to the city for my artist and filmmaker friends’ debuts, I’ve got my dog and my cat and my sweetie who may yet make a literal daddy of me yet. No 401k, no annuity, no real security to make my mom sleep better at night. So why not just let us aging hipsters hang on for as long as we can – we won’t be retiring to Hilton Head, okay?
But:
We all have envy and bitterness. When I look at friends and friends of friends who really do have it all – collaborate with Spike Jonze and Sophia Coppola or Steven Soderberg or Sol LeWitt or Jon Stewart or . . . ., play poker for hundreds of thousands of dollars a hand, have a gorgeous house in the Hollywood Hills with a ’72 911 in the garage, toured with Yo La Tengo, got a six-figure contract for their first novel, get famous by writing a satirical faux encylopaeaeaedia and being a resident expert on the Daily Show AND get to play a PC in really funny Mac commercials for – what, John, I’m guessing a solid five five figures a pop? – sure, I can get a little resentful too, but then I try my best to let it go. I’m not sure exactly whom I’m directing this at, and I can just as easily cringe at groovy mommies and daddies cruising the aisles of American Apparel (slumming, of course) in Carroll Gardens, but today, somehow, my last-gasp of alterna-youth has got the best of me, and I’m lashing out at the Man who wants to take it from me.
***
Dear readers, I’m off to London for a week, from whence I will report, as someone who hasn’t left the U.S. shores for fifteen-plus years, on the state of the international male (and on being a 42-year-old man who’s letting his mom spring for a spring break). Toodles.
