Ironic Hipsters

And My Ever Rising Blood Pressure

Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."

- David Foster Wallace
"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

I work at a library, a customer service industry, in which I'm peppered with hundreds of questions, ranging from the mundane ("Where's the bathroom?") to the complex ("Do you have videos with public performance rights on peer pressure for at-risk minority children of alternative sexuality grades K to 12?") on a weekly basis. Because of the volume and diversity of the questions, which come from people representing a widely divergent range of education and socio-economic background, a librarian has to develop a frame of reference for the questions in order to comprehend what is being asked; often a question isn't even a question until you help the patron articulate just exactly what he or she wants. It's kind of like Jeopardy!; my ability to do my job - and help you, the public - depends on the ability to have queries put in the form of a question (hopefully one with an answerable frame of reference). In other words, I get best results, and waste the least time, when patrons tell me exactly what they want and don't beat around the bush. The Straight Talk Express, library reference style.

That's why I was so peeved on a recent Manic Monday when a young guy who looked like your basic twentysomething Indie Rocker approached me and said, "I'm looking for really pretentious art films."

I know all about art films, but there was a subjective value system buried in the question. I mean, one's man's sirloin is another man's Hamburger Helper as far as what's considered arty and what's considered crap. A naked picture of Jenna Jameson is considered porn while a museum painting of a naked Venus is considered art, in other words. And pretentious? Did he mean, bad films, boring films, laugh-out-loud exercises in artiness?

So I asked him, "You mean bad films?"

"No," Young Guy replied, "Why would you say that?"

"Because," I said, "You said pretentious, which is typically a negative term."

"No it's not," he scoffed.

"It's not?" I countered, suddenly lost. (I had a momentary chill, the kind you get when you think you've gotten something terribly wrong all your life, like when my grandmother corrected my pronunciation of the word poignant, which I had mispronounced as "poik-nant" for 28 years thanks to Curly Howard of the Three Stooges.) "You consider pretentious a positive, complimentary term?"

"Yeah," he said with confidence and without blinking twice.

I was amazed.

pretentious
Adjective
1. making (unjustified) claims to special merit or importance: many critics thought her work and ideas pretentious and empty
2. vulgarly showy; ostentatious: a family restaurant with no pretentious furnishing (www.thefreedictionary.com)

"So, if you were in a bar chatting up a girl and she said she found you pretentious, you would take it as a compliment?" I asked, incredulous.

"Yeah," he replied, "Of course."

"Oh, OK..."

In other words, he was playing a game of wordplay, of hipper-than-thou irony. Not a librarian's best friend. We're here to answer questions, not to fall captive to verbal B.S. That's the domain of politicians...and ironic hipsters. Shades of gray in a black-and-white world.

Luckily, my co-worker, who knew the guy slightly from his soccer league, intervened and, being a Twentysomething himself, understood the kid's wavelength enough to decode "pretentious art films". Apparently, the hipster kid wanted to put on a film series based around this narrowly-defined self-understood genre, and my co-worker pulled some titles for him.

This whole interaction made me think of that Onion article "Aging Gen-Xer Doesn't Find Bad Movies Funny Anymore."

Later, I thanked my co-worker and said, "Strange guy, huh?"

My co-worker replied, "Yeah, I didn't understand at first he was being ironic, but once I could understand that he really meant good films in his ironic way, I could help him."

Of course, the kid could have just asked for what he wanted directly.

But I guess that wouldn't have been cool. Some people talk to be overheard and not to be actually listened to.

I call them assholes. Which is a still negative term in almost all circles (barring porn films). But direct and to the point.

Related Links:
Pretentious - For the Sake of It (Gentle Giant CD compilation, 1977)

See This Immediately: MAN ON WIRE

In 1974, crazy Frenchman Phillippe Petit walked a high wire strung between WTC 1 and WTC 2. He didn't just walk it. He went back and forth eight times, laid down on the wire, knelt, and spent a total of forty-five minutes in the clouds.

I must live under a rock, because before Man on Wire was released, I had never heard of this stunt. This seems impossible, but true. The New Yorker did an incredible job with their hommage to Petit on the issue the week of 9/11.



Petit didn't just walk between the Two Towers, either. Prior to that impossible feat he also walked the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the two turrets of Notre Dame. (Later conquests include the Eiffel Tower and the Louisiana Superdome). And, of course, he didn't do these things alone. He had a colorful crew of losers and friends to literally help him string the wires. The documentary is heist-tale of sorts: the crew had to find a way to get to the top of the World Trade Center without being arrested, manage to string the wire and get Petit across it all before being apprehended by the police. After several hilarious and nerve-wracking gyrations, they succeed.

The footage of Petit practicing his highwire and the photographs of him exercising his passion are perhaps the most impressive, breathtaking aspect of this documentary. But it is the focus on the relationships of these people, and how this singular event changed their lives forever that becomes the most heartbreaking, most meaningful reason to see this film. All involved parties are interviewed and their piecemeal accounts combine to form the narrative of the events leading up to the highwire walk on August 7th, 1974. But interspersed there is video footage from the seventies, mostly in Petit's backyard in France, where he practiced his walk. The same people telling us this incredible story are immediately transformed into their younger selves in what feels completely seamless: as if the moment of Petit's ascension aged them by thirty years.

In what seems to be a very French philosophy, Man on Wire seems to tell us to live our lives to the fullest, pursuing our passions and unabashedly worshiping our obsessions until they become a reality. But in what I believe to be perhaps the most poignant message of the film is the solitude and the resounding silence that occurs after said mission is won. Petit achieved an incredible and impossible personal goal that day. When one is confronted with the success of a lifelong dream, that changes everything, well, what then?



I find the parallels between Man on Wire and the demise of the Trade Towers eerily profound. (And yet 9/11, for understandable reasons, is never discussed). The Two Towers, for so many New Yorkers, and Americans represent those unattainable goals, those impossible passions and obsessions. And even if they are built, they can crumble around us. But, for those brief moments they survive, the journey is worth it. And then we must confront the ghostly reminder of our past, and its formidable mist that gathers at our feet.

When it Rains, Readers Pour

13th Annual Baltimore Book Festival
Friday September 26, 2008 - Sunday September 28, 2008
Mt Vernon Place, Baltimore - "The City That Reads"


Opening Ceremony, Baltimore Book Festival

What is it about the Baltimore Book Festival and torrential downpours? I went down on Sunday (the final - and only dry - day, after spending Saturday bailing out my flooded basement), of the 13th Annual Baltimore Book Festival and mused that question as I walked past the Walters Arts Gallery and saw one of the Walters museum guards outside on a smoke break.

"That's how you know it's the Book Fair," the guard said. "Every year they get the wettest weather - every year!"

Got that right, buddy. I think they even cancelled it one year due to a hurricane alert (2003?).

The sun finally came out Sunday, though festival goers wearing jeans like me still got soaked from the humidity. Anyway, before I even worked up a sweat, I ran into Baltimore Grassroots Media maven Mike Shea on his recumbent bike, down to film a Mark Twain impersonator for Baltimore City Public Access TV. Turns out he was interviewing Alan Reese, the guy I succeeded as Towerlight Features Editor at Towson State College in the '70s. Alan's always been involved with the local poetry and writing scene, and he looked pretty cool in his white suit. If he put on some pounds and grew a beard, he could pull double duty doing in-store appearances at KFC as Colonel Sanders with an outfit like that.


Reel Around the Fountain: Kids frolic in the Children's Book Tent

And Mike Shea? Well, the former Critical Mass-termind is never without his video camera, a spiffy Hi-Def Panasonic HDV30 that had me turning green with digital envy. I always considered Mike a social activist, but he decries the term. But I remember reading him getting busted for videotaping a Critical Mass rally back in 2004 ("Singled Out," City Paper, 5/12/2004). Must have been a hot-head cop (don't they have better things to do in Bodymore, Murderland?), because Mike's a pretty mellow fellow.


Cops put the brakes on biker Mike Shea

There must be something about Mikes clustering together, because next I ran into Mike Hughes, erstwhile MPT and Baltimore Mag Webmaster who also writes fiction on the side. In fact, his short story "The Blackwater Lights" - included in the Legends of the Mountain State anthology - was recently lauded by Huntingtonnews.net as "one of the best stories in a collection that has no bad ones" and compared to the great horror writing of H.P. Lovecraft! (To read his fiction or other observations, check out his great blog at michaelmhughes.com/wordpress). Mike's definitely a social activist of the Literati Set. Apparently he had a reading at the CityLit Stage earlier that day, and was now cooling his jets talking to the hip-savvy McSweeney Books dudes, who looked like they were in Weezer.

Next I ran into a former Pratt Library co-worker, Donna Woods, who was manning the BookMooch booth. BookMooch (www.bookmooch.com) - whose motto is "Give books away. Get books you want" - is an international community for exchanging used books that operates under the premise that's it's better to give AND to receive. Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you've read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish. I liked their banner (shown below); the Moochie critters are kind of creepy, like something out of a John Wayne Gacy-style clown painting.



And speaking of giving and receiving, when I wandered up to the Radical Books tent, I met the nice folks hawking $pread, the New York-based mag dedicated to worldwide sex industry workers (call girls, escorts, strippers, prostitutes, porn stars, et. al.). Naturally the sexual nature of the mag's headlines and photos attracted a number of horndogs, including some off-duty cop whose flair for the obvious ("I've found that a number of the prostitutes I've arrested had drug problems" - Really! Ya think?) astounded me. But they soon wandered away when they realized the mag wasn't at all prurient, and featured articles about sexual abuse, sex workers unions, hookers that murder their pimps, and such. Far from Red Hot, the mag's focus is more Red Emma's, with an appeal of "Sex Workers of the World Unite!"

I bought the issue with Tracy Quan on the cover, recalling that she wrote the text for a cool photo book I had seen at Daedalus Books & Music called Orientalia: Sex In Asia (2003). Quan, a former sex worker, has branched out into fiction, penning Diary of A Manhattan Call Girl: A Nancy Chan Novel (Three Rivers Press, 2003); though fictional, Quan's book (which originally ran as a column in Salon.com) is based on her real-life Sex and the City experiences. The same issue also had an article about menstruation fetish videos (we live in troubled times!!!) and an interesting interview with Caveh Zahedi about his autobiographical film I Am a Sex Addict, in which Rebecca Lord (one of my favorite adult film actresses) plays the director's wife.

Seeing $pread made me think of Teresa Dulce (pictured right), the Portland-based artist/activist who started stripping to pay off student loans and eventually founded Danzine - an Oregon sex workers organization and zine (1995-2005) - and later curated Portland's Sex by Sex Worker Film Festival (1998-2000)...I remember videotaping her in 1997 for an Atomic TV segment that never aired (trust me, there were a lot of them!), back when she did an in-store appearance at Baltimore's old Atomic Books (then on Charles and Chase streets). As former Atomic Books/TV impresario Scott Huffines recalled, that's when the bookstore used to have a display of James "Shocked & Amazed!" Taylor's sideshow oddities in the store, and Teresa did a "How To Put A Condom On" safe-sex demonstration in which she slipped the "love glove" over one of the horns on a three-horned goat head!

Later I spotted Joe Giordano, creator of the snazzy/snarky online mag GUTTER, wearing one of those Sinatra hipster hats that they sell at Target now (though Joe insists he got his fedora/trilby in New Orleans), the fashion craze that's replaced ironic trucker hats on the Ottobar and Joe Squared circuit...Just kidding Joe! Joe's a good guy and an ace photographer whose getting plenty of work and (well-deserved) kudos of late. I like it when he stops by the library, because he always finds the good books and CDs there before me - it's hard to keep up with his cool finds!

On the way out I had to stop at the American Visionary Arts Museum's booth, which is my perennial favorite. There I was dismayed to see that the already marked-down copy of Andy Warhol's Screen Tests I picked up at Daedalus Books & Music was even more marked down at AVAM! Oh well, live and learn. (By the way, reading about the screen tests is much better than actually viewing them, according to Video Americain's Scott Wallace Brown, who has a number of them in his collection; basically, the screen tests provide a Who's Who record of every notable '60s personality that stopped by The Factory)...Anyway, I told the AVAMsters that they have the best gift shop (officially known as Sideshow) in town and that I regularly recommend them to any out-of-towners who stop in the library and ask what landmarks they should see in Baltimore. By way of thanks, they gave me a Pirate book bag. You just can't beat that: trendy - and functional!