Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Hipsters’

It’s depressing what passes for news these days, especially in the LA Times. I’ll explain.

Like most major world-class cities, Los Angeles is a decent place to live–with its own unique set of urban irritations.

One of them here is the constant influx of transplants from the Midwest—or other remote regions of the country–that are here to “make it” in “the industry.” That shit gets old. And like with other cities, a majority of the well-known negative stereotypes about how LA people look and act, seem to originate from these characters, instead of actual LA natives. Certain districts of the city, like the hipster enclave known as Silverlake, are jam packed with them.

You can usually pick them out pretty easily, since they furiously reject their wholesome, Midwestern look and ways—which would actually be a refreshing addition to the city’s culture—in favor of walking around in the most over-the-top hipster regalia imaginable, acting the fool.

Probably-not-LA-natives in Los Angeles.

One such Midwestern LA transplant, a Straight-Up White Girl named Jacquelyn Carr, is the subject of a ridiculous Los Angeles Times story. Apparently, after driving around in her Volkswagen Jetta for a while, she was “forced” to ride the bus when her parents finally cut her lazy-ass off.

A year ago, Carr would not have been caught dead on a bus.

She pulled into town from Indiana University in 2006 and quickly got a job at a talent agency. She drove a 2005 Volkswagen Jetta with tinted windows and thought of one day becoming a publicist…

But her job working in Hollywood publicity went away. Then the lease on the Jetta was up. Her parents, who had been helping cover the $250 monthly payments, told her she would have to foot the bill on her own.

A bit of background on Los Angeles public transportation is in order, in case you’re not familiar.

LA isn’t like other cities. It’s not just a city, it’s a region. Areas that aren’t technically part of the city are de facto parts of the city. Take Beverly Hills. It’s surrounded on all sides by Los Angeles, but it’s its own city, with its own mayor. There are several areas like this. So, in other words: Los Angeles is huge, bigger than it is “on paper.”

Separately, there’s this myth that Los Angeles has a terrible public transportation system. That’s sort of true, sort of bullshit. On the one hand, it takes forever to take a bus somewhere. There’s a subway that only goes to very specific parts of the city, to the exclusion of most of the rest of it. On the other hand, ours is one of the most robust bus transit systems in the country. If you took it and put it nearly anywhere else, you’d cover every square inch of space. The problem is, in the simplest terms, that LA is really spread out and enormous. But, you can still get places. It takes a long time, mostly, because it’s a long distance away.

So, in a city where everyone has cars, taking public transportation is a mark of your social status, and also—most of the time—your race. The buses and subway is Los Angeles are packed. But they’re packed with minorities and poor people.

So that puts Jacki’s “attitude” toward riding the bus in a little better context.

“I felt like I was too good for the bus,” said Carr, recalling her virgin voyage last October with a mixture of embarrassment and marvel. “I think there’s a social understanding and a construction around that if you take the bus, you take it because you don’t have money. There’s a social standard. Obviously I had bought into that.”

So I guess, when you think about it, it is news that: a rich, White-Girl transplant from the Midwest “struggled” to bite the bullet—because she had no choice—and temporarily ride the bus from her apartment in Brentwood to her “industry” job in Beverly Hills. Bravo LA Times.

For a while now, I’ve suspected my neighborhood was developing a serious hipster problem. Admittedly, it’s pretty hard to live in any decent apartment-dense area in a major U.S. city without running into at least of few of these characters, with their manicured beards, year-round beanies, and two-sizes-too-small striped sweaters.

But, one day, I looked up and saw this.

There’s nothing like a pair of “old-school” high-top Nikes—except maybe a pair of girlish skinny jeans—to telegraph hipster. It’s probably no coincidence that right below this hipster territory mark is:

• a store that sells turn-tables and other equipment for “DJs” (a common hipster pastime);
• an ostensibly “dive” bar, frequented exclusively by mid-to-late 20s city transplants;
• an “ironic” t-shirt and skateboard store.

I guess this is—to the extent that these wimps are capable of it—a hostile hipster takeover.

Even though the “observational,” complaining blog entry is near the bottom of the list, the absolute lowest form of wit nowadays is the portmanteau.

The once-great art of combining two or more words to make a new, useful (and occasionally funny) one–that gave us such gems as brunch and smog–has been beaten to death by a generation of digital-age text-messaging pop-culture clones and online wannabe-comedians.

I can hardly go to my favorite overpriced hipster cafes and online destinations anymore without witnessing one person’s “clever” combination of someone else’s two words into a single Frankenphrase (portmanteau intended).

I think the most common manifestation of this is adding the prefix man- or bro- to an otherwise conventional word, presumably to add a clever masculine twist to a word with a feminine or neuter connotation.

Overused Man Suffix + Innovation = Mannovation

Overused Man Suffix + Menstruation = Manstration

Overused Bro Suffix + Romance = Bromance

Overused Bro Suffix + Brazilian Wax = Brozilian Wax

Needless to say, the permutations are endless. The other day, its clever name almost lured me into watching a TV show called Manswers.

Urban Dictionary, a once-hilarious collection of slang terms and street dialect has degenerated into a bloated collection of these things. Recent “words of the day” include:

Double freeture – when you sneak into a second movie at the multi-plex.

Yellular – the loud voice people tend to use on their mobile phones.

Carcolepsy – people’s tendency to fall asleep in the car.

Canniversary – the one-year mark of your involuntary unemployment.

So, next time you’re tempted to get a cheap laugh by astutely combining two words into one, remember: you’re probably a dumb-ass.