Would be the best fight ever. Flappers would win hands down, because you have to be danged athletic to dance the Charleston till the wee hours. These guys will kick you. But that's not what this post is about.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do nihilistic hedonism (OK maybe there is a wrong way and a slightly less wrong way?). Hipsters are slugs with no style and delusions about their "philosophy" whereas flappers had no pretensions, and tons of style, which is pretty much the only way to get away with hedonistic nihilism. Or nihilistic hedonism. Huh. I wonder which subculture typifies which....
Anyway, I'm only bringing up flappers because I think they were the bee's knees, as was just about everything in the 1920s. Especially the slang.
Mostly I want to talk about hipsters. I have been pondering them lately, since I see them around a lot where I live. I have come to the conclusion that they are basically nihilists, and actually quite aggressive ones. How can people who spend so much time preening (they look that way on purpose, believe it or not) and having wanton sex (the "straightedge" ones bug me - their little vows of abstinence never seem to cover sexual abstinence, but their taboos somehow make up for it?) be nihilists? A-hah! They have calculated their appearance to show others just how much pain there is in living (or HMPTIIL, for short). If only they had that much style! See, I think emo kids evolve into hipsters when they reach level 20. Initially their nihilism is turned inward, but once they evolve, they can learn a TM called "blight soul", which they accomplish by displaying skinny jeans, v-neck t-shirts, and giant glasses. This is a stripe of "diabolism of fashion", also seen in the Red Hat Society, where people deliberately pick out clothing that looks bad, to show how much they just don't give a damn.
At least they also take a few hits of HMPTIIL. See their choice of beer. The bathtub gin the flappers were swilling probably tasted better, and if hipsters went blind, they wouldn't have to look at each other.... Also if you're going to sport face furniture like that, you'd better get yourself a set of tweeds!
Next post, I'll be nice.
Hipsters aren't worthy of the comparison to Legato, though. I think their fashion choices are worse than nihilism: a deliberate act of perversion, not unlike a skinwalker's incest or fratricide.
ReplyDeleteAre they not, to quote Chesterton about the Aztecs, "...yearning to carve at last...a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror"? Only, rather than "in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the forests", they're doing it with their clothes.
You see the same thing in their "irony": that is not the posture of a healthy mind. Especially since so much of it is coupled with an attack on innocence. Remember, the Apaches say you can tell someone is a witch, and targeting you, because he seems to be making jokes but he actually wants to hurt you.
Hipsters aren't nihilists, they're diabolists. Their clothing, and the other trappings of their lifestyle, are, like the wolfskin of a skinwalker, quite literally "yee naldlooshi": "by means of it, he becomes a beast".