HIPSTERS, CELTS, AND OTHER MUSINGS

I have 46 posts in Drafts.  I have another 20 or so in my writing folder.

The longer and more complicated the post, the more likely it will set.  Since September there have been many multiple drafts on guns, rape, politicians talking about rape, racism, Israel, Mayans, racism again, guns again, etc.

A post on one of these topics becomes quickly very long, and often turns into multiple posts, and some I fear are almost book length. ( I never worry about running out of ideas or stories to write.)

So when something easy comes along, that I can cobble quickly from facebook posts into a draft-- usually at the end of an otherwise unsatisfying day in terms of writing accomplishments-- I leap on it to make myself feel like I did something objectively evident.

Also, the term "hipster" has fascinated since I began hearing it in L.A. at least five years ago, maybe seven (and if the term appeared earlier it didn't register or I didn't hear it used).

I recall an early encounter with the term on a facebook posting by a guy that I consider to be "hip" although I realise now is definitely NOT a hipster, based on current usage.

He worked as a waiter in an upscale but not high end (not for L.A.) restaurant, and he'd had a very tiresome encounter with a "moneyed hipster."

The comments on that facebook post did not lead me to identifying hipsters in my day to day life.  Although, this year I have come to conclude that I have indeed encountered many hipsters, most of them in their 20's, and most of them here in St. Louis. 

This was mainly due to this article:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/

And then this one:

Hipsters, irony, and lazy cultural critique - Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money

www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com

Really what I liked about the first post was just the description of hipsters. Like when the young people started saying EMO. I was like what the fuck is that? Some new Goth, I thought. I was shocked when I learned it meant Emotional. (I knew at that moment I was totally out of it in terms of the young people and their lingo.)

I have to admit that I was always looking for the modern day hipster to be a kind of beatnik, a bohemian.  Wearing a beret and snapping fingers and going to poetry readings. The pre-Hippie hipsters.

These kids with the truckers hats and facial hair and trombones didn't register as hipsters to me because I am not looking from the perspective of today's popular youth culture.

I certainly come in contact with the youth culture, but essentially I have become the older generation.  I am outside looking in, the same way the baby boomers were looking at us Gen X'ers.

I remember when I was a teenager and we all used to debate things like "mods" and "punks" and I was 2-Tone punk, and a "Rude Girl" and those things were SO important to me.   And those terms meant something completely different and had no cultural context for the ww2 and post-war boomer generations.

And none of the hipsters I knew were able to tell me that they, themselves, were hipsters because they either did not recognise themselves as such and/or recognised the term as a deragotory term and therefore did not embrace it.

My generation adopted "punk" because we embraced being "punks" to our Boomer parents the way the Teddys and rockbillys and rock n rollers embraced being "hoods" to their WW2 parents.

And the Gen X  Preppies embraced being preparatory school children to the punks and burnout.

But the hipsters don't embrace the term at all.

There is an eternally recurring question among newbies Celt-o-philes about whether the Celtic tribes would have pronounced "Celtic"  Keltic or Seltic? 

The question does not get asked once the student reaches a level of study where they learn that Keltoi was a Greek word for the tribes that shared similar cultures, languages, and religions, spread out over France, Spain, and parts of British Isles. 

Each tribe, or clan (and family or sept), would have called itself by its own name, and if there were a word to unite all the tribes as one people, it would likely not have been a Greek word.

But the Greek word is spelled and pronounced with a hard "k".  Moreover, in all Gaelic languages C is hard like a K.  And the Druids, mostly in Ireland granted, chose how their language would enter the written word, and how the words would be spelled.

(The Celtic tribes had no written language other than a highly magickal and priestly one, of which even Ogham was a late addition.  It was carved on sticks, and wood rots, of course. Few remnants survive. They were an oral -and I personally think  a telepathic- people, until the Latin Roman alphabet showed up. )

Anyhow, so that "hipster" term isn't really used among hipsters, as far as I can tell, and that is why no one could ever answer me! They didn't see themselves as such. Just as I was not "new wave", when I was a teenager.  I was a "punk" and a "2-tone Rude Girl."

I thought of this post in the drafts folder because I recently read this article on "hipster racism".   In every person there is the potential to be racist, and only when a person has really made a decision to become aware of it in themselves can they conquer it.  So this article deals with  "racism" true, but just how it gets translated through the "hipster" crowd. 

http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism 

Oh, and PS if you like this post for how my crazy mind works, you might like this one from my old blog as well: http://toodler.blogspot.com/2005/10/godzilla-friend-or-foe-hip-hop-photos.html