The desire to dress well and to dress respectably is something I picked up from my father. The freshly-pressed oxford blue shirts, the penny loafers, the bottles of cologne on the dresser, the ties I'd always hear people complimenting---he seemed to have it all, and wear it well.
My mother grew up with eight brothers and sisters in South Bend, Indiana. Being the second oldest, she saw new children appearing until 1960 and witnessed my grandparents' costs increase exponentially. So with the innate desire to not look like a schmuck from my dad and the thriftiness handed down from my mom, I always seemed to find a good look at a reasonable price.
In second grade a strange and terrible thing happened. One day, I woke up to a blurry world. My eyes, apparently weary of seven long years focusing on arduous math problems, leafing through picture books of talking animals, and memorizing oversized letters of the alphabet, staged an epic coup. This quandry left me with three choices: near blindness, contacts, or glasses.
My parents, embracing my mother's instinctive frugality, elected to enhance my vision using pieces of steel and prescription lenses that better resembled a side-view of the Brooklyn Bridge than something I should put on my face.
Now that I possess some refined hindsight and have spent a plentiful amount of time teaching middle school-aged children, I'm constantly reassured that being a kid is hard. The bullying from physically bigger classmates, the lack of social awareness and tact, the haircuts---the pressure to do all you can to be cool is immense. On more than one occasion, I witnessed students crying over receiving Bs on a test or paper, or shedding tears when simply asked how their day was going. I was no stranger to that tension, as my weakened eyesight promptly indicated my imperfections, and from that day as a seven year-old until my sophomore year of high school, I was in bespectacled purgatory.
So as a second grader newly outfitted with the ugliest glasses imaginable, the rest of my outward appearance in my formative years was judiciously selected. The temptation was always there, of course, to fall for whatever fads were popular at the time. I am happy to report though that I never had a goth phase, or was never hypnotically, magnetically attracted to JNCO jeans, or attempted to replicate Cobain's grunge chic. Conventions were never flouted and my parents were never embarrassed to bring me out in public.
I've lived in the suburbs of Boston for the last two years and a large portion of time and money was allotted for frequenting bars downtown and being irresponsible in the process. I've noticed that I find myself walking by the same people. The freshly shaven late-20s bachelor in business casual, the BC alumnae wearing top-siders and Ray Bans, toting the chic oversized purse, and the ubiquitous SuperFan, decked out in a minimum of 60 dollars worth of Red Sox apparel. But those people have become secondhand and uninteresting to me. I seldom encounter holy-shit moments here.
Sure, there is the occasional generic immigration protest or gay pride weekend, but those events typically bring out the more colorful individuals from the woodwork regardless of location.
San Francisco is a place where I find myself doing double-takes and, to the chagrin of my mother, openly staring at its inhabitants. Conventions in the city by the bay are boring, an afterthought. Here there is a no-holds-barred, I-will-pierce-and-wear-anything-and-everything attitude. In short, this is the people-watching nirvana.
In the cradle of the 60s countercultural experiment, all observations point to a reawakened group of hipsters and hippies alike. The Haight Street neighborhoods that were once the crash pads of America's forgotten children 50 years ago now houses (although sometimes not literally) their offspring. Whether they're decked out in tight pants purchased at a vintage thrift store or a torn camouflage jacket with suspiciously fashionable camping equipment, there is a message somewhere between the muddled lines.
* * *
I had my first interaction with the Nouveau Hipster of San Francisco when a group of us went to their designated drinking establishment, Madrone. Ostensibly marketed as an art bar, their manifesto clearly states that its purpose is to present performers or artists whose works primarily serves as a "counter-cultural and counter-hegemonic ideological intervention." I don't really know what that means, but I was promised there would be cheap beer and entertaining scenery. I threw on some bar-wear, hailed a cab, and walked in the door, a threshold where there would be no squareness or fascist Fox-News-intellectualism allowed. (Not that I possess either, of course.)
The genesis of the hipster surrounded the development of jazz culture in the 40s and was personified by a rejection of mainstream way of life, loosened sexual etiquette, experimentation with drugs, and occasionally hitchhiking. Their style of dress and parlance was designed to emulate the "cool" and "hip" jazz musicians, and more often than not consisted of restless middle-class white teenagers aching to gently rebel.
History has clearly proven to repeat itself, so there was a reemergence of the hipster in the 1990s and 2000s. Similar to their ancestors, the Nouveau Hipster looks with disdain upon the orthodoxy. But this time, he or she is wearing multicolored wayfarer sunglasses, a Wonder Bread trucker hat, or other clothing items purchased at the Salvation Army. Though I wasn't alive in the 40s, I'm assuming that the clothing has only become more form-fitting and trendier over the years for these defiant youth. The tighter the jeans and the more unique and witty the screen-printed shirt, the higher the hipster street cred, and sadly, the more cartoonish they are to their predecessors and alienated from the original principles.
A key to being a Nouveau Hipster seems to be judgement of all things conventional. Say you shopped at the Gap or happened to find blue khakis on sale for $15 at the Ralph Lauren outlet (guilty), then it's assumed you frequent Nantucket, the Hamptons, or some other fancy place for affluent white people---vilifying you a douchebag. Pertaining to music, if you ever happened to enjoy or even think of enjoying a song by Coldplay or John Mayer, or any other band that produces quality and mainstream albums, then you didn't know shit about music.
Anything outside the indie spectrum is seen as threatening to the fiber of a hipster's being. As I waded in a sweaty sea of tight-pants wearing, caucasian 20-somethings with pierced lips dancing frenetically to electronic music at Madrone that night, I suddenly felt like the Gap jeans-wearing fuddy-duddy who has a soft spot for "The Scientist" and Mayer's live album.
I removed myself from the "dance" floor, where I was continually bumped into by the wayward limbs of strangers and made my way to the bar, my gaze pulled upward to the Burberry AK-47 mounted on the wall atop the bustling bartenders.
I didn't fit in here, and saw no viable solution to this predicament until we left. So being the good sport I am, I decided to smile and nod my head to the beat as I consumed numerous $3 cans of cold Pabst Blue Ribbon, which were delicious.
* * *
I briefly remarked on the street people in my first poorly structured San Francisco story, so I'll make another more earnest attempt.
Each day in the Haight is like a zebra, you'll never see two alike. I encountered the most interesting people and though my life has currently taken the direction of a moderately paid teacher, I was reminded that that was probably better than daily consumption of acid.
It's hard to label the street people as homeless. The homeless are people that get laid off from their jobs and find residence inside a bottle of whisky, or if their apartment burns down, they are forced to forage for food and survive without stable shelter. Quite frankly, they seem blissfully---or not so happily--- unaware of what's going on around them; their day begins and ends with the search for the physiological.
I don't typically give to beggars on the street, mainly because I don't know what the money will be used for, and because I'm struggling to find steady employment myself. I lost all sympathy for the street people of San Francisco after the light bulb clicked atop my head.
These people aren't homeless.
They're camping.
Camping, for everyone except children who are inescapably subjugated by their parent's decision-making, is a voluntary activity. One decides, much like Thoreau, to move into the woods for a short or long duration and participate in the austere life. Cooking over tiny stoves, urinating in the forest, getting bitten by various flying insects, sleeping on the ground, and having your very existence threatened by furry predators are just some of the highlights of getting closer to nature. I haven't been camping in the wilderness since I was a child, mainly because now I'm bigger than both of my parents and camping involves creating fire, zero wireless internet, and lacks proper hygienic practices for long periods of time. At this stage in life, I much prefer a very sandy beach and very cold beer.
The last time I visited San Francisco, I made the mistake of venturing by myself into the 1,017 acre Golden Gate Park to find a museum recommended to me by a friend. Needless to say, I did not find the museum. I was, however, accosted by suspicious characters to purchase their marijuana, yelled at by random drunk people, and had my iPod freeze soon after I entered.
There were people everywhere.
People asleep on the ground, people playing music on a bench, people playing frisbee, and people drinking from brown-bagged bottles who would soon be asleep on the ground. This is where a lot of the squatters called home. When they weren't asking tourists for money in the adjacent Haight, they found a patch of grass to pool their day's salary, discussing entrepreneurship and surely pontificating on the stock market or failed policies of past presidents.
Or they would smoke some Mary Jane and take a nap.
Sure, most of them were probably only here to renounce middle class security and piss off their parents in Marin County, but any time I walked by street dwellers, I kept wanting to know the intimate details. How did they get to where they are today? Why did they want to challenge social norms by living with no fixed abode? What was it about deodorant they hated so much?
Once I got over the panhandling and meaningless lyrics they sang on out of tune guitars, I saw it for what it was: a pretense, a facade, make-believe.
They're just following the footsteps in the sand.
Joan Didion, in her essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" put forth the notion that the original movement in Haight-Ashbury was perpetuated by immature, undeveloped teenagers who were largely ignorant of the society they rebelled against. That these were "children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values." Those 15, 16, and 17 year-olds of the counterculture era are now in their 50s and 60s and work as teachers or state representatives or own sandwich shops.
They eventually grew up.
The trip ended.
These kids that inhabit those streets now and annoy me and countless others with outstretched hands, shitty guitar music, and cute, curiously well-fed dogs are imitations. They are the failed replicas of their parents who at one time also tried to escape reality, but ended up driving a 2001 Camry, using a Blackberry, and enjoying complimentary HBO with their cable plan.
It's fascinating because although the hipsters and the street people would never openly co-habitate, they still coexist, and they are both striving to skew the lines of social and cultural benchmarks. Yes, they contrast drastically in their ensembles and hygienic preferences, but the message they send is the same: We're different, damn it.
In a very strange way, I envy these people who outstretched their middle finger to The Establishment, who possessed the chutzpah to dress in unbelievably tight jeans on a daily basis and pierce various body parts, or who knowingly decide to smell like campfire.
But then again, I am conscious of my own priorities and I recognize the track that I have to make in the sand.
And whatever my agenda in life entails, it most certainly involves deodorant.
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