PBS on hipster hating

yes, it's gone that far: commentary on hipsters that tries to make some sense of the oh-so-popular hipster-hating bloodsport and that also gives us a lesson on Bourdieu and cultural capital. what was missing? no discussion of the mocking of hipsters for their skinny jeans and kufiyas, as i have posted on several times. but maybe that moment has passed?

How to Be a Christian Hipster (Hint: Kufiya Required)

Check out the easy-to-follow instructional video, which will have you looking like this:

Here's the vid, if you want to self-transform:

Palestinian Hipster (w/ kufiya, of course)

See previous post for a somewhat different use of the same image. This one, courtesy socialjusticejesus.tumblr.com.

Hipster Jesus

Robin just informed me about this website, Hipster or Jesus? It solicits your offerings. Its logo is this:

I'm no expert on hipsters, although I've devoted a fair amount of time to reading about them. I thought hipsters mostly made fun of longhairs. But I must admit, the layers of hipster irony are often so thick that I am unable to grasp the target of hipster humor. Or maybe this is making fun of hipsters. Who the frack knows?

Of course these images of Jesus (imagined and real) of course trade on the "old" Caucasian images of Jesus that someone like me was raised on, and that were much critiqued in the civil rights era and by the Black Power movement and so on. But hipster is largely a white phenom, so...

As of today, there are 7 pages of images of hipster/Jesus, and only this one is wearing a kufiya. (It's his headgear. The image is a little clearer if you consult the original.)

Hipsterism explained

In this mindblowing article about the US prison system, from n+1.

"In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, for example, steep drops in crime, combined with the virtual depopulation of entire city blocks, has underwritten a real estate boom. In neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, wealthy people with children have reaped the benefits of climbing land values from apartments they never would have bought had it not been for the removal of tens of thousands of locals from adjacent areas. Neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant show the population exchange in its purest form. As African American Brooklynites are exported upstate for involvement in petty drug crimes, twenty-somethings reared in prison towns migrate south and reoccupy the same areas vacated by prisoners. Often, of course, the new inhabitants proceed to consume and sell the very same drugs that got the previous tenants into trouble. Since they’re white, they do so with impunity."

Review of "What Was the Hipster?"

Ben Davis reviewed the interesting N+1 volume, What Was the Hipster?, for the Huffington Post back in April. I purchased the book and read it and have meant to post something about it, but...life intervened, as they say. And I didn't bring the book along with me to DC (where I'm living for the year), so I can't do it now. It will have to wait. In the meantime, check out Davis' review, critical, but fair. And he defends hipsters.

I found this bit quite interesting, especially in light of more recent events, to wit, Occupy Wall Street:

I graduated from college in 2001 with a degree in Humanities and Cultural Studies. With no idea what the hell to do with that, I went to work in a bookstore. All my co-workers had degrees in English or Philosophy, and we all had scorn for the dumb best-seller tastes of our customers -- in exact proportion to our keen awareness of the uselessness of our own cultivated tastes, the worth of which apparently topped out at $12.50 an hour. What do you do in that situation except be ironic? The U.S. economy in the last decade threw many more college grads into this same type of purgatory -- still relatively privileged, but going nowhere. My best guess is that it is this group, with its wounded pride and self-consciousness at its own superfluousness, that forms the basis for the Quentin Tarantino-esque aesthetic vogue for useless cultural trivia. (Tarantino, in fact, is himself a former video store drone.)

In the same period, the slowing of upward mobility has also meant that young people are living in more varied and precarious living situations for longer periods of time before settling down (or rather, before attaining "the means to compete and exploit the benefits of the metropolis on traditional grounds of income and class dominance," as Greif [the book's editor] prefers).

Here's a conjecture, which I think demands some on-site research: a lot of the so-called hipsters, formerly masters of irony and helplessness, have gotten involved in the Occupy movement. Above, Davis provides, I think, the experiential and economic grounds for why significant numbers of young(er) people have been so inspired and motivated and mobilized by this movement. Meanwhile, check out Davis' piece on Occupy and the Situationists.

One final note about the book, What Was the Hipster? It is a collection of articles and observations and therefore is not united by a single view. There is not a consistent mocking tone. I found it useful and interesting and a good read. But, as I said above, I didn't find time, yet, to do a thoughtful analysis.

Libyan Hipsters

Lots of irony in these findings. Very funny. This one, courtesy Sebastian Meyer.

This one, which features the characteristic 'hipster kufiya,' I got through a Facebook friend. The source, I never found. Don't you love the 'ironic' bazooka? Puts a whole new spin on 'irony.'

Hipsters

Among the many things I've learned while tracking kufiyas is that (a) kufiyas are stereotypically associated with hipsters and (b) kufiyas have emerged as a convenient stick to beat hipsters with.

Here's what I said about the hipster/kufiya connection in my most recent talk about kufiyas, which I gave at the University of Louisville last month:

Hipsters have also [in addition to celebrities] been a focus of criticism due to their fondness for kufiyas. For some reason, over the past few years the kufiya style has become synonymous with stereotypes of the hipster. The New Oxford American dictionary definition of the hipster--“a person who follows the latest trends in fashion”--captures the social type's ambiguous character: hipsters are up-to-date and cool, but at the same time they are followers, rather than the trendsetters. They try to live on the cutting edge, but constantly on the lookout for the latest thing, they will abandon an “old” trend for a new one at a moment's notice. Perhaps it is because hipsters, or as some have called them, the hipsterati, are so “trend” conscious that they can so readily serve as an example of the degraded status of the kufiya in the US. Standing as the quintessential example of the apparent emptiness of the search for coolness, the hipster is a convenient lightning rod, and so a popular and widespread spectator sport of mocking hipsters has developed.

I then go on to cite several examples, most of which I have blogged about previously.

I'm therefore very keen to get my hands on a new book (which I've just ordered), called What Was The Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation (n+1 Foundation, 2010). Today's New York Times has a great essay from Mark Greif, one of the contributors to the volume. Greif uses Bourdieu's book Distinctions to make sense of hipsters and the struggles over "taste." Here's the observation that, I think, really sums up hipsterdom, and helps make sense of all the mocking of hipster kufiya-wearing:

All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world. Yet the habits of hatred and accusation are endemic to hipsters because they feel the weakness of everyone’s position — including their own. Proving that someone is trying desperately to boost himself instantly undoes him as an opponent. He’s a fake, while you are a natural aristocrat of taste. That’s why “He’s not for real, he’s just a hipster” is a potent insult among all the people identifiable as hipsters themselves.

The spectator sport of hipster mocking, according to Greif, is just hipsters mocking other hipsters. His piece is accompanied by this graphic. The scarf is meant to evoke the kufiya, but given the absence of the kufiya pattern, it lacks authenticity. The kufiya pattern would give the stereotype a harder bite, I mean.

Greif has published a longer piece in New York Magazine (October 24) that is even more illuminating. I quote some of my favorite bits below (kufiyas of course make their appearance):

"The hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two...

The hipster...was a black subcultural figure of the late forties, best anatomized by Anatole Broyard in an essay for the Partisan Review called “A Portrait of the Hipster.” A decade later, the hipster had evolved into a white subcultural figure. This hipster—and the reference here is to Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” essay for Dissent in 1957—was explicitly defined by the desire of a white avant-garde to disaffiliate itself from whiteness, with its stain of Eisenhower, the bomb, and the corporation, and achieve the “cool” knowledge and exoticized energy, lust, and violence of black Americans...

The hipster, in both black and white incarnations, in his essence had been about superior knowledge—what Broyard called “a priorism.” He insisted that hipsterism was developed from a sense that minorities in America were subject to decisions made about their lives by conspiracies of power they could never possibly know. The hip reaction was to insist, purely symbolically, on forms of knowledge that they possessed before anyone else, indeed before the creation of positive knowledge—a priori. Broyard focused on the password language of hip slang.

The return of the term after 1999 reframed the knowledge question. Hipster, in its revival, referred to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else. The new young strangers acted, as people said then, “hipper than thou.” At first their look may also have overlapped enough with a short-lived moment of neo-Beat and fifties nostalgia (goatees, fedoras, Swingers-style duds) to help call up the term. But these hipsters were white, and singularly unmoved by race and racial integration.

Indeed, the White Hipster—the style that suddenly emerged in 1999—inverted Broyard’s model to particularly unpleasant effect. Let me recall a string of keywords: trucker hats; undershirts called “wifebeaters,” worn alone; the aesthetic of basement rec-room pornography, flash-lit Polaroids, and fake-wood paneling; Pabst Blue Ribbon; “porno” or “pedophile” mustaches; aviator glasses; Americana T-shirts from church socials and pig roasts; tube socks; the late albums of Johnny Cash; tattoos...

As the White Negro had once fetishized blackness, the White Hipster fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class “white trash"...

It would be too limited, however, to understand the contemporary hipster as simply someone concerned with a priori knowledge as a means of social dominance. In larger manifestations, in private as well as on the street, contemporary hipsterism has been defined by an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowingness and naïveté, guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption...

By 2003...an overwhelming feeling of an end to hipsterism permeated the subculture. It seems possible that the White Hipster was born in part as a reaction to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle—the emboldened anti-capitalism that was the signal youth rebellion of the century’s end. But 2003 spelled the beginning of the Iraq invasion, and a pivot in the national mood from post-9/11 mourning to patriotic aggression and violence. The wifebeater-wearer’s machismo no longer felt subversive...

Suddenly, the hipster transformed. Most succinctly—though this is too simple—it began to seem that a “green” hipster had succeeded the white...

In culture, the Hipster Primitive moment recovered the sound and symbols of pastoral innocence with an irony so fused into the artworks it was no longer visible...

Where the White Hipster was relentlessly male, crowding out women from public view (except as Polaroid muses or SuicideGirls), the Hipster Primitive feminized hipster markers; one spoke now of headdresses and Sally Jessy Raphael glasses, not just male facial hair. Women took up cowboy boots, then dark-green rubber Wellingtons, like country squiresses off to visit the stables. Men gave up the porno mustache for the hermit or lumberjack beard. Flannel returned, as did hunting jackets in red-and-black check. Scarves proliferated unnecessarily, conjuring a cold woodland night (if wool) or a desert encampment (if a kaffiyeh [emphasis added]). Then scarves were worn as bandannas, as when Mary-Kate Olsen sported one, like a cannibal Pocahontas, hungry enough to eat your arm...

The most advanced hipster youth even deprived their bikes of gears. The fixed-gear bike now ranks as the second-most-visible urban marker of hip, and not the least of its satisfactions is its simple mechanism...

Above all, the post-2004 hipster could be identified by one stylistic marker that transcended fashion to be something as fundamental as a cultural password: jeans that were tight to the calves and ankles. As much as I’ve investigated this, I can’t say I understand the origin of the skinny jean. ..

Through both phases of the contemporary hipster, and no matter where he identifies himself on the knowingness spectrum, there exists a common element essential to his identity, and that is his relationship to consumption. The hipster, in this framework, is continuous with a cultural type identified in the nineties by the social critic Thomas Frank, who traced it back to Madison Avenue’s absorption of a countercultural ethos in the late sixties. This type he called the “rebel consumer.”

The rebel consumer is the person who, adopting the rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture, convinces himself that buying the right mass products individualizes him as transgressive. Purchasing the products of authority is thus reimagined as a defiance of authority...The hipster is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of rapidly cycling consumer distinction.

This in-group competition, more than anything else, is why the term hipster is primarily a pejorative—an insult that belongs to the family of poseur, faker, phony, scenester, and hanger-on. The challenge does not clarify whether the challenger rejects values in common with the hipster—of style, savoir vivre, cool, etc. It just asserts that its target adopts them with the wrong motives. He does not earn them.

It has long been noticed that the majority of people who frequent any traditional bohemia are hangers-on. Somewhere, at the center, will be a very small number of hardworking writers, artists, or politicos, from whom the hangers-on draw their feelings of authenticity. Hipsterdom at its darkest, however, is something like bohemia without the revolutionary core...

One could say, exaggerating only slightly, that the hipster moment did not produce artists, but tattoo artists, who gained an entire generation’s arms, sternums, napes, ankles, and lower backs as their canvas. It did not produce photographers, but snapshot and party photographers: Last Night’s Party, Terry Richardson, the Cobra Snake. It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts. And hipsterism did not make an avant-garde; it made communities of early adopters...

The most confounding element of the hipster is that, because of the geography of the gentrified city and the demography of youth, this “rebel consumer” hipster culture shares space and frequently steals motifs from truly anti-authoritarian youth countercultures. Thus, baby-boomers and preteens tend to look at everyone between them and say: Isn’t this hipsterism just youth culture? To which folks age 19 to 29 protest, No, these people are worse. But there is something in this confusion that suggests a window into the hipster’s possible mortality.

True countercultures may wax and wane in numbers, but a level of youth hostility to the American official compromise has been continuous since World War II. Over the past decade, hipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities. One glimpses behind them the bike messengers, straight-edge skaters, Lesbian Avengers, freegans, enviro-anarchists, and interracial hip-hoppers who live as they please, with a spiritual middle finger always raised...

And hipster motifs and styles, when you dig into them, are often directly taken from these adjacent countercultures...[kufiyas from Palestine and anti-war activists?]

Can the hipster, by virtue of proximity if nothing else, be woken up? One can’t expect political efflorescence from an anti-political group. Yet the mainstreaming of hipsterism to the suburbs and the mall portends hipster self-disgust. (Why bother with a lifestyle that everyone now knows?) More important, it guarantees the pollination of a vast audience with seeds stolen from the counterculture. [so, is there something inherently hopeful about massive kufiya wearing?]...

Something was already occurring in the revivification that transpired in 2003. The White Hipster was truly grotesque, whereas within the Hipster Primitive there emerged a glimmer of an idea of refusal. In the U.K., American-patterned hipsters in Hackney and Shoreditch are said to be turning more toward an ethos of androgyny, drag, the queer. In recent hipster art, Animal Collective’s best-known lyric is this: “I don’t mean to seem like I / Care about material things, like our social stats / I just want four walls and / Adobe slats for my girls.” The band members masked their faces to avoid showing themselves to the culture of idolators. If a hundred thousand Americans discovered that they, too, hated the compromised culture, they might not look entirely unlike the Hipster Primitive. Just no longer hip."

Hipster Runoff & Kufiyas

My ongoing investigations (AKA hysterical obsessions) with kufiyas has led me to numerous critiques of kufiya style/fashion that essentially work through send-ups of the phenomenon of the hipster. I think that what I've ultimately determined is that (a) making fun of hipsters is like shooting fish in a barrel and (b) about 95% of the criticism of hipsterdom is dumber than the phenom under discussion.

I think it's taking a look at the blog Hipster Runoff that finally made me come to this conclusion. As I said, I've been looking at a lot of stuff of this ilk, and had concluded awhile back that poking fun at hipsters has become a very popular spectator sport--indulged in by legions of folks who are just too cool & clever for words.

It's Ben Sisario of the New York Times who hipped me to Hipster Runoff. In an article entitled "When Indie-Rock Genres Outnumber the Bands" (Jan. 2, 2010), Ben calls Hipster Runoff "a blog that ridicules bohemian culture with hilarious precision." Ben is usually an incisive cat, but I beg to differ on this particular claim.

Let's check out what Hipster Runoff has to say about the kufiya by running a search for keffiyeh (the conventional spelling) and Palestinian scarf. Here's what I found.



#1. The title of this post:

NYTimes writes article about Christian counseling 4 female porn addicts, includes photo of hipster porn addict

Regarding the photo, it says: "It also really helped that they had a photo of an entry-level alt girl as the physical representation of female porn addiction. Do u think she uses her keffiyeh as a cum rag?"

Error! This is not a kufiya. Hardly even a faux one. And...not funny.


On to #2.

Title: Japanese figure skater wears keffiyeh at Olympics.


Here are excerpts from the post:

Popular Japanese Figure Skater Daisuke Takahashi had a keffiyeh integrated into his cute little costume for his Olympic Contest. We cannot confirm if he is ‘alt’ or if this was actually an anti-Israeli message, showing support for the 1972 massacre of members of the Israeli Summer Olympic Team at the Munich Olympics. Based on his Japanese heritage, we find it safe to assume that he was

Do u think this was a real ‘hipster scarf’ or a politically motivated message? Is he ‘just a harmless queen on ice’?

We can only assume that his Palestinian scarf gave him the warrior power that won him the bronze medal.

Ding! Again, this scarf is so far from being a kufiya it's ridiculous. And is it really "funny" to link the supposed kufiya to anti-Israeli messages and the hostage taking and murder of Israeli athletes by Black September in 1972?

Are we laughing yet??

#3. Alt Jews launch 'Star of David' keffiyehs, 'piss off' Arabs/Palestinians

This post is actually somewhat reasonable, it contains nothing blatantly stupid. No comment from me. But it is in no way hilariously precise in its ridicule.

#4. Is the 'tube scarf' 20k10's first relevant alternative trend?

The post makes fun, in a light-hearted way, of the (apparent) emergence of the alt tube scarf. The subjects wearing tube scarves look so hideous that you can't imagine that this is even a trend.

Along the way, the author makes some comments about the kufiya. First:

I will never forget the altstreamification of the keffiyeh/Palestinian scarf. Feel like I watched this trend evolve, much like a proud father watches his son grow into an NFL player.
I'm afraid I'm not hip enough to comprehend the ironic twists involved in this statement.

But I think I grasp the next one, which ridicules the would-be, neophyte, "entry level" hipster who cluelessly wears the kufiya.

Always start to ‘giggle’/’scoff’ whenever I see some1 of any age wearing a keffiyeh, the ’scarlet letter’ of an entryleveler.

The image below follows the statement. Of course, the author doesn't really 'miss' the kufiya. This is some kind of hipster irony from someone who is way cooler than any hipster.
#5. Feeling sad that altbros got violent at the G20 Summit protests

Here the author pokes ironic fun at the April 2009 protests at the G20 Summit in London. You learn nothing here about the politics of the protesters, only about the 'amusing' confusion of the author.

As for the kufiya, the author has this to say, below this photo:


Sad that the altBro in a Keffiyeh/neon palestinian scarf gave alternative people a bad name. Think these scarves might be dead. Not sure if I want 2 wear mine, or else riot police will break into my apartment and execute my family. Not sure why the bro is throwing a sweet ass flat screen through a window. Seems like a good screen to chill and watch DVDs on. Think this protest was in France, so not sure why he is wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Must be ‘alt’ to wear American caps in France.

Is it supposed to be 'cute' that the author thinks the protests were in France, when they were in London?

The layers of ironic humor are almost too many for me to make sense of. (a) The 'bro' gave 'alt' a bad name by wearing a kufiya? Because it's Palestinian? Because it's neon? Because it's out of style? (b) The scarf is 'dead' (stylistically-speaking) anyway? (c) The author is afraid to wear his scarf because the cops might see him as a political radical. But he wouldn't wear one anyway, because he thinks it's dead.

Too much for me...

#6. This post makes fun of the trompe l'oeil kufiya t-shirt. (I blogged about this twice, here and here.)


It says, with the blindingly clever insight so characteristic of Hipster Runoff: This shirt is crafty enough to feature a Keffiyeh AKA a Palestinian scarf AKA that A-rab Scarf that hipsters wear AKA an ‘I hate Israelis’ scarf.

Yeah, that's it, a kufiya 'means' 'I hate Israelis.'

#7. Here's one where the author uses his "Palestinian scarf" for something 'functional': to cover up the smell of a port-a-potty at an outdoor concert. Given that all the authors of Hipster Runoff appear to be snarky twenty-something white males, I suppose that some kufiya-related potty humor was inevitable.


#8. A post from Feb. 27, 2009: Are Palestinian Scarves Still Authentically Alt?

The answer appears to be 'no,' in part because they are advertised--in numerous guises, including the Kanye West Houndstooth style--on Amazon.com and: 'I think in recent months, it has become ‘cool’ to support Israel and altJews.'

I have no idea where this notion comes from.

#9. The Search for the Most Authentic Alternative Scarf. (January '09)

General making fun of scarves, including wearing them when it's 85+ outside.

Notable for this remark:
h8 u Palestinian scarves. trying 2 forget abt 2k8, yall.

Incisive critique of hipsterdom: anything worn last year is worthy of h8.

#10. Altbro or altbag.

A contest to decide what is the true nature of this gentleman:


Please justify your answer in order to be mailed your $5 Chili’s gift card. For example: “He is an altBro because he has a gymbag full of miscellaneous alternative g00dies and his palestinian scarf. And also his sunglassies.” or “He is an altBag because of his progressive bowlcut + postAltBro humble loafers.”
The knowledgeable reader, of course, is supposed to recognize that the guy is ridiculous and looks like a douchebag. I guess.

===

There are a few more references to "Palestinian scarves" but they don't really bear discussing.

I'm worn out from trying to make sense of all the layers of irony and 'subtle' humor. No doubt I am showing my age. But I think I can conclude that kufiyas/Palestinian scarves remain a useful and productive stick with which to beat up hipsters. After reading through so much of this, my sympathies now lie much more with the hipsters (who, of course, everyone denies being) than with the lame ass critics.

Dissin' skinny jean (and pashmina scarves, i.e., kufiyas)

The world's gone mad, the world's gone drag. Boys in their little sister's jeans like DAMN!!!

"Skinny Jeans (The World's Gone Mad)" is a kind of old-skool attack--or maybe better put, a satire representing a particular vision of old skool--on the new male style trends associated with the "jerk" scene, and in particular, the skinny jeans. (Thanks to Wayne Marshall to telling me about this vid.)

The Protracktorz and The Incomparable Shakespeare deploy a number of rhetorical strategies to put down the skinny jeans. They associate it with drag (i.e., homosexuality), with effeminity (sister's jeans), and with other purportedly unmanly fashions: to wit, pashmina scarves (which are really kufiyas) and plaid shirts.

Pashmina scarves, plaid shirts, oh no.

The skinny jeans and associated styles are also associated here with "boys" as opposed to men, with styles worn in 5th grade, with accessories like the man purse, with posing.

The "news broadcast" that interrupts the vid presents a number of femme-sounding synonyms for tight jeans: slimmies, thigh riders, hip handlers, bootie huggers, denim with spandex or mandex, soccer pants, butt wranglers.

Added to this is that the male models are made to look decidedly "unmanly" in the "American Idle" spoof that is the vid.

This model has nerdy glasses, is "too" light in skin color, and sports the offending pashmina/kufiya and the plaid shirt. Which of course don't match. Not to mention the skinny jeans.

This male model is at least a bit darker in skin tone, but he wears a pink shirt, with the image of girl on it, and that of course immediately makes him suspect. As does that strangely colored hat. The nerdy glasses don't help either. The cute shop assistant is impressed by neither of these dudes.

When you see the vid, you also notice that an important part of the objection to these styles (skinny jeans and pashminas/kufiyas and [maybe?] plaid shirts) is that they are also associated with white hipsters. What could be more hipster than skinny jeans and kufiyas?!

Wearers of skinny jeans, in sum, are damned for being girly, adolescent, associated with whiteness.

As opposed to the real, authentic black men who are mocking and protesting against the tight jeans. The homophobia here is scarcely veiled.

What this is all about is a cultural phenomenon associated with a dance music known as jerk, that hails from LA, that is very much a teen phenomenon, and that is very much about the skinny jeans. The band most famously associated with jerk, the New Boyz, have released an album called Skinny Jeans and a Mic. Check out the vid for their song, "You're A Jerk."

The video gives you a good sense of how fun and energetic the jerk scene is. How it resembles original hip-hop, in that it is not merely about rapping, but also about a style of dancing and a sense of fashion and a location in the street. Guy Trebay's lively and compelling account of jerk is here.

Stephanie Diania, New York Times

And notice that no one in the vid looks anything like the male models who are spoofed in the Protracktorz video. The "jerk" kids look like hip-hoppers, but with tight jeans. There are no "pashminas" or plaid shirts in sight.

I was recently in Philadelphia, and I did see a lot of twenty or thirty-something African-Americans wearing kufiyas. They weren't teenagers from the jerk scene. But neither were they slavishly imitating white hipsters, although there were certain stylistic commonalities. Kufiyas have been around in the black communities since the '70s, and are not signs of unthinking adoption of "white" style.

New Boyz defend the skinny jeans style here. They argue that it's not novel, that it's a style that was big in the West Coast and East in the 80s. "A lot of the people who are hatin' on you are people who are scared of change."

The Protracktorz are just jealous old guys, worried that something new is up that they don't get, something that it is going to pass them by. They don't understand jerk at all. Or kufiyas either.

And...

On skinny jeans as a global phenomenon, please listen to Wayne Marshall's recent lecture at MIT, "Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops."

And for Wayne's exhaustive(ing) archive of items on skinny jeans, go here. (How does he do it? Is he super-human?)

UPDATE: April 6, 2010. Please see comment one. I completely missed the point that this vid is a spoof of narrowminded and conformist views within hip-hop towards new phenomena. Damn. I apologize to The Incomparable Shakespeare. Now I love the vid even more.

misc. #2010.z

Hipsters. Orientalism. Qaddafi. Yusuf Islam. Rififi. Taqwacore. The Japanese Red Army. Any interest? Read on...

Random stuff I've been gathering for awhile. I meant to do longer posts on some of this material, but the time has passed for that. Time to get all this off my desktop. Here goes.

1. Bashing the hipsters. According to Ben Sisario, this is the place. Hipster Runoff. Only two kufiya posts, here, and here, that don't really add much to kufiya snarkiness. But if you are in search of snide, irreverent and often witty hipster satire, it's all here.

2. Popular Orientalism. Last February the New York Times published an article, in the Antiques section, about Goldsheider ceramics, very popular among the US middle class. Especially popular were the Art Deco figures of the 20s and 30s, including those featuring "harem dancers." What caught my eye was the photo of a figurine called "Aida," which the online version did not reproduce. Now I've found an image (at left). The one I saw on ebay was selling for $4000. An earlier post on the popularity of harem and belly-dance dress among the US bohemian bourgeoisie is here.

3. Gaza and pop culture. Last January, Yusuf Islam (ex-Cat Stevens) released "The Day the World Gets Round." Proceeds from the sale of the single go to UNRWA and Save the Children, for their work with children in Gaza. It's a cover a George Harrison song, and recorded with bassist Klaus Voorman, who used to play with the Beatles. I'm not a big Islam/Stevens fan, but I like this one.



4. Qaddafi, the Opera. Almost too odd to be true. News from September 2006, but still worth recording. Put on by the English National Opera in London, and called "Gaddafi: A Living Myth," it was ostensibly meant to attract younger audiences. To that end, Asian Dub Foundation was commissioned to dub the score. If we can credit The Guardian, it didn't work too well. I'm a huge fan of Asian Dub Foundation, but I can't figure out why they were involved in this project. But you can watch a clip about it here.

5. Rififi: a footnote. I had heard of this film but never seen it until last night. The name intrigued me, however, because it seemed to be some kind of riff on the Moroccan Rif. Of course this is the film that blacklisted US director Jules Dassin famously shot in Paris, was a huge hit in 1954, and reestablished his reputation (and income).

It is based on a novel by Auguste le Breton called Du Rififi Chez les Hommes, which was given to Dassin to film. He hated the novel but took the job because he needed it. In particular, he hated it because of its racism. The bad guys were all North African, and Dassin said, when interviewed later, "The truth is the book shocked me: it was all about Arab bad behavior, including necrophilia." So Dassin made the bad guys French, and focused the film in particular on the robbery caper.

The title of the film only comes up in the theme song, "Rififi," sung in the cabaret by Viviane (played by Magali Noël), but even then, you can't really make sense of what it means other than that it seems to be gangster argot. (Watch the sequence here.)

Dassin explained the meaning in a 2000 interview: "The title comes from the North African tribe, the Rifs, who were in constant conflict...So it's all about melees and conflicts and fighting, out of which the novelist Auguste Le Breton made the word 'rififi.'"

There's a history of US citizens being sympathetic to Riffians, going back to Abdelkrim's celebrated revolt against the Spanish colonialists in Morocco (1920-1926). But that's another tale.

6. The Kominas/Taqwacore. Since they toured, they've been getting lots of media attention. The Taqwacore movie (see below) has helped garner media attention too. Here's a nice AP report. My favorite line is this: "Usami said a reporter once questioned him on how he felt about some Muslims being terrorists. He responded by asking her how she, as a white person, felt about the African slave trade."

Here's another from Sapna. "[T]he band is not supportive of 1947, the partition of Pakistan. It is always much more important to be desi than Pakistani, Bengali, Indian. Having a south Asian identity is much more important than being from a region."

The film, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, will be screening at this year's Sundance Film Festival! Check out the film website.

Other good reports have been done, I've been trying to keep track, but right now, I can't locate the archive...Later, inshallah.

7. Japanese Red Army & PFLP on film. The invaluable magazine of Middle East art and culture, Bidoun, has partnered with the avante-garde art website Ubuweb to put up some fascinating sound and film documents. I've only just begun to explore.

Check out this one: Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War), 1971.

In 1971, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, both having ties to the Japanese Red Army, stopped in Palestine on their way home from the Cannes festival. There they caught up with notorious JRA ex-pats Fusako Shigenobu and Mieko Toyama in training camps to create a newsreel-style agit-prop film based off of the "landscape theory" (fûkeiron) that Adachi and Wakamatsu had developed. The theory, most evident at work in A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), aimed to move the emphasis of film from situations to landscapes as expression of political and economical power relations.

In 1974 Adachi left Japan and committed himself to the Palestinian Revolution and linked up with the Japan Red Army. His activities thereafter were not revealed until he was arrested and imprisoned in 1997 in Lebanon. In 2001 Adachi was extradited to Japan, and after two years of imprisonment, he was released and subsequently published Cinema/Revolution [Eiga/Kakumei], an auto-biographical account of his life.

Yes, really, "newsreel-style agit-prop." Fascinating. (The photo is from the film, of one of the four jets the PFLP hijacked in September 1970.) Of course, if you are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, like I am, the connections that groups like the PFLP made with the Japanese Red Army as well as Germany's Red Army Faction are, to say the least, the source of embarrassment. (I'll have more to say about the RAF in future.)

There is also a short Agnès Varda film here, Plaisir d'amour en Iran, which I hope to look at soon.

And speaking of popular Orientalism--or maybe, rather, avant-garde Orientalism--there are also some Jack Smith films on Ubuweb, including Flaming Creatures, Normal Love and Scotch Tape. Normal Love is quite as amazing as Flaming Creatures, and I hope to have something to say about it in future.

More attacks on hipster kufiyas

Maybe 'attacks' isn't the right word. Maybe 'snide satire.' However you want to characterize it, hipsters continue to be the object of ridicule and fun-poking. No one ever seems to get tired of it. I guess 'they' are an easy target, because, apparently, no one ever seems to want to claim to actually be a hipster. And the kufiya continues to be one of the stereotypical signs of the supposedly absurd, poseur hipster. A quintessential sign of "fakery," which for the critics, is what hipsterism is all about.

Here are a couple recent examples. Note--although the point is dead obvious--that the targets in both cases are women.

Thanks to Katie for this one. This is Ms. 2005, the fauxhemian, from Paste Magazine's feature on "The Evolution of the Hipster, 2000-09," in its November '09 issue. This is one of those "decade retrospectives" that we've seen and heard everywhere over the past few weeks. The caption reads:

2005: The Fauxhemian

She suffers for fashion, wearing a furry hat, boots and keffiyah even during the warmest months. Her new wrist tattoo is the Japanese symbol for beauty—or at least that’s what the guy at the tat shop told her.


Th next one, the "Apple Store Indie," is from yourscenesucks.com, authored by Rob Dobi, and it is rather more finger-pointing and mean-spirited in its take on the "scenesters," i.e., hipsters. The "Apple Store Indie" is a recent addition to yourscenesucks' rogue gallery of "ridiculous" hipsters..

The description of this scenester is also rather more elaborate. Notice, once again, the use of the term, fauxhemian. All emphases are mine.

Looking something like a mix of Pocahontas and a tornado at a thrift store, the Apple Store Indie is your typical #fauxhemian. Masking her love for Steve Jobs products with whatever your blind grandma wore 40 years ago, she blends in seamlessly with the rest of her contemporaries at All Points West Festival.

Tweeting endlessly about nothing other than questions to a fake Ezra Koenig account, her main source of news is whatever happens to be a trending topic on twitter. Her iphone isn’t just a means to tell people what type of sandwich she is eating, she also uses it to cover Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” using only app store instruments with her hipster friends.

Getting musical recommendations from last.fm or whatever Jenny Eliscu and Jake Fogelnest play on satellite radio, her entire “scene” seems to only exist in digital format. The only physical music she owns are vinyl hand me downs that serve as decorative filler for her Ikea Billy bookshelf. She rarely if ever supports her local indie music scene unless it is someone spinning records (see: itunes playlist) at a scenester bar.

Unable to make sales of her diy junk through her etsy store, she has set up shop at a number of craft fairs across the tri state area. Unfortunately everyone else was selling the same trite octopus necklaces, owl earrings and onesies she slapped together. Upset with the lack of enthusiasm towards her creations, she will later blog about it to an audience of spambots.

Wow, not really funny, eh? I learned about this in a recent issue of Spin. For the life of me I can't understand why Spin was promoting yourscenesucks.com, but I'm glad they did, for the sake of my kufiyaspotting.

Mother Jones blames hipsters for decline of Palestine kufiya industry. Plus, Colin Farrell & Isabel Marant

The Mother Jones blog published an article about kufiyas this week, by Sonja Sharp, and entitled "Your Intifada: Now Made in China!" For the most part, Sharp goes over material that hawgblawg has covered obsessively over the last year or so. (My first post on the demise of Palestinian-manufactured kufiyas is here.) But here is the key argument:

...why is the the last keffiyeh factory in Palestine about to go out of business?

That's because the one you're wearing (and, increasingly, the ones Palestinians are wearing) are now made in China.

Here's how it happened: Back in '87, during the first intifada, intifadniks couldn't get enough of Palestinian-made $25 scarves. Looser export restrictions meant that Israelis could rep them too, and slowly but surely the scarf and its emblematic pattern began appearing in the West. By the time the second intifada happened in 2000, hardcore activists and the super cool already had them. Then the keffiyeh trend reached its tipping point, and hipsters' insatiable lust for the scarf lured Chinese manufactures into the gig. Fast forward a decade, and Chinese keffiyehs are the norm.

Ironically, global support for Palestinian-statehood-as-fashion-accessory has put yet another nail in the coffin of the Occupied Territories' beleaguered economy. What's next?

So, hipsters are to blame for the decline of Palestinian industry? Ah, they are so easy to blame, aren't they?

But as more responsible reporting suggests, it probably makes more sense to blame the "peace process," which caused the West Bank to open up to "free trade" but created no viable national authority that could impose imports. But maybe criticizing the "peace process" would be too radical a step for Sharp.

One thing that Sharp could have done is to promote the purchase of Palestinian kufiyas by providing a link to the The Kufiyeh Project. (Note to The Kufiyeh Project: get the Hirbawi factory to make green kufiyas, so that we can show our solidarity with both Palestine and Iran. If you need a green kufiya, try the Arab American National Museum.)

And a footnote to earlier kufiyaspotting posts. Here's another photo I found of Colin Farrell (man, he has been photographed a lot in kufiya!--see here and here.)


And here's a photo of a kufiya from designer Isabel Marant, from her Fall/Winter 2008 Runway Show (courtesy Mick Margo, writing in the Fashion Journal):

Look at the Fucking (Kufiya Wearing) Hipster

The kufiya is by now so stereotypically associated with hipsterdom (and its follies) that you would expect that this new website, "Look at this fucking hipster," devoted to making fun of hipsters, would feature some kufiyas. And of course it does (thanks, Susana). And it's being constantly updated (you can send in your own photos, if you've got it in for hipsters), so if you like this sort of thing, you can check back.

Meanwhile, a 'fucking hipster', photo posted March 31.


The snarky caption reads: “Hmm…well, the orange matches my helmet strap and the avocado goes perfect with my Yasir Arafat scarf. All I need now is something to go with my fucking disgusting sneakers, and I should be all set with groceries.”

Yasir Arafat scarf? In turqouise? That's a new one!

And this one, from April 19.



The caption reads, “Thank you, but we prefer to be called Hipspanics.” (Uh, no comment on that 'pun.')

More kufiya hipster fashion, that Verena Von Pfetten loves to hate

My friend Theresa told me about this recent (Sept. 26) Huffington Post column by Verena Von Pfetten, entitled "7 Hipster Fashions We Love to Hate." It's fall, she says, and time to say goodbye to old trends and embrace the new ones. But--the hipsters need extra encouragement in this regard because, she says,

...no one group of people have ever so succumbed, so embraced, so clutched on to trends for dear life with cold, pale, smoke-yellowed fingers as that so-called creative counter-culture: The Hipster.

"From what I can tell," Von Pfetten continues,

the hipster depends, nay, thrives on irony, but the problem is that in doing so, they've a) diluted and deserted any formal definition that irony may or may not have once had and b) they've only served to create a fashion version of The Blob in which once they adopt a "trend" -- usually historical and always ironically, of course -- it feeds on itself, and it grows and grows until frat guys are wearing it and the cast of "The Hills" are designing it, and then someday Rachel Ray will star in a Dunkin Donuts commercial while wrapped in it. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Interesting, isn't it, that it's the hipster kufiya that's the iconic villain of this piece, the viral hipster fashion accessory? And that it's dead when frat boys and Rachael wear it--the archetypes of un-coolness?

And then there's Von Pfetten's point c):

...though they initially drench themselves in these sartorial affectations in a (soon-to-be proven misguided) attempt to show how very unconcerned they are with what exactly it is they wear and though it would seem that their entire image hinged upon the sheer disinterest they have in other people's opinions and the exquisitely cultivated and the desperately disdainful, "What, this? I picked it up off the floor and pulled this out of the garbage and stole this from my myopic maternal grandmother!," the very act itself is contradictory. In attempting to embrace something so patently unflattering so as to prove how patently unimportant such flattery is, they are -- in fact -- acknowledging their concern, and therefore, their endorsement.

And then:

To put it simply: these trends, these [seven] accoutrements, these god-awful outfits are fugly. And yet, they are everywhere. And somehow they just never seem to go away.

And then there's the slideshow, with a slide of Rachael Ray in kufiya, and the comment: If Rachel [Rachael] Ray is wearing something in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial, it's most definitely no longer cool. It's done. It's dead. Get over it. And a slide of Kirsten Dunst in brown-and-black "global chic scarf," with the comment: And while I'm a personal fan of Kirsten Dunst, this wasn't cool then, and it sure as heck isn't now.

Will Von Pfetten help kill this trend off? Will it revert back to the politicos?

I don't know. Fayetteville, Arkansas is certainly no bellwether of fashion. But now that the weather has cooled off, you do see the odd kufiya around. I have at least three students who wear them, who are both rather fashionable, and pro-Palestinian.

The saga continues...

back on the kufiyaspotting tip: "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization"

Yes, clearly I've not been blogging much lately. I have to attribute it to what seem like the very high demands of teaching this semester. But I've been collecting kufiya info, and it's time to start reporting. So here is the first of several posts which I hope to spit out over the next couple days.

One of my undergraduate students turned me on to this article yesterday,"Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization," by Douglas Haddow, from the latest issue (79) of Adbusters.

Here's the last paragraph of the article, which sums up the thesis and conveys the mood of the piece:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

The article contains a couple of kufiya (keffiyeh) references--kufiyas, according to Haddow, are one of the key distinguishing signifiers of today's hipsters, as well as being symptomatic of the emptiness and meaninglessness that typifies the hipster subculture.

Here's how Haddow describes hipsters:

Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.

The kufiya: the quintessential sign of the vacant character of contemporary youth culture!

The kufiya comes up again, at the end of Haddow's article, in his description of a bunch of urban hipsters making their way home at dawn, after the after-parties:

The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.

Hmmm...you'd look like revolutionaries whay exactly? Because of the kufiya and the rocks? Like this kind of revolutionary? (A young Palestinian confronting the army of occupation.) Who would hipsters be throwing rocks at? Who would be driving the tank? Or would you just be throwing rocks at your "yuppie futures"? Maybe it would be better to forget imagining that one could look like a revolutionary, and join demonstrations against the $700 billion dollar bail-out or send money to the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

I'm not sure that the kufiya hipster signifies the end of Western civ either. Hipsters or bohos or whatever you want to call them were wearing kufiyas for style reasons back in the early to mid-eighties. And hip youth culture as now being about "consuming cool rather that creating it" (Haddow)--this isn't particularly new either. It's all well and good to critique hipsters wearing uniforms, not knowing the provenance or politics of their kufiya gear, and fooling themselves about the subversiveness of their style and attitude. But it's not the end of the world.

(Excellent hipster kufiya photos are to be viewed at Hipster Intifada.)