Hipsters are everywhere. At the coffee shop, wearing large headphones and reading Martin Amis. At a dive bar, drinking ironically, cradling their cans of Pabst.
In New York, working as interns at Matador Records. And most of all, at concerts, nodding their heads approvingly at Swearing at Motorists or Check Engine or Les Savy Fav, or whoever happens to be onstage that night.
So what are hipsters, exactly? Well, Miles Davis was a hipster. Jack Kerouac was the hipster. Burt Reynolds was not a hipster, and neither was Waldo from \Where's Waldo?"" although he dresses like one, which makes him a popular hipster Halloween costume.
More specifically, according to Robert Lanham's new book, ""The Hipster Handbook,"" hipsters possess ""tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool.""
The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2 percent body fat.""
Obviously, Lanham knows hipsters. He's friends with hipsters. He's probably remarkably close to being a hipster himself.
And thus, he felt qualified to write this book. Ostensibly a style guide for this subset of society, ""The Hipster Handbook"" seeks to define all that is cool, or in supposed hipster terms, ""deck.""
Dressing like Bjorn Borg is deck, baby back ribs are deck, the Liars are deck, bikes with baskets are deck. Mustaches can be deck, but only if worn for a little while- then they become ""fin"". And so the book goes, providing an amusing character study while mocking the characters that are studied.
The book takes pains to be accurate and frequently hits right on, such as when describing the celebrities hipsters have crushes on-among others, Jon Stewart, Jason Lee, PJ Harvey and Sarah Silverman-but has a greater goal in mind than listing what is deck and fin.
By setting out to define all that is deck, Lanham is making fun of the categorical narrow-mindedness of hipsters and pointing out the arbitrariness of their labels. But most of all, he just thinks hipsters and the things they do are funny, and he's right.
Those who will appreciate ""The Hipster Handbook"" the most are those that appreciate the satire-if you don't know any hipsters, the poking at them loses all meaning.
Also missed would be Lanham's impressive accuracy: he's obviously been to a few Yo La Tengo shows and taken notes. Hipsters, the book's supposed target audience, will probably not enjoy this one too much, though, and would better spend their money on a Communique EP or an issue of Wallpaper magazine.
