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| ISBN-13: | 9781742694795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Hipster Mattic
By Matt Granfield
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2011 Matt GranfieldAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-479-5
CHAPTER 1
HIPTRODUCTION
Luckily I didn't own a bath. If I'd had a bath I would have been crying in it, and there were so many tears and so much snot the thing would have started overflowing and I would have floated out and broken a rib on the floor.
The shower had no plug, so I couldn't float out or do any wallowing of consequence, but it was still very snotty. At least the constant running water made it moderately hygienic. I didn't break a rib, but I did manage to pull a rib muscle while attempting to assume the foetal position in between two particularly violent moans.
There's a beautiful reprise in any major sobbing session when you take a deep sniff, run your index finger under your nose, pause for a second, frown emphatically and assure yourself the worst is over. It's a brief and snotty moment of solitude that arrives in the darkness like a lantern of hope and then exits swiftly and without favour, leaving you alone to whimper wildly in the shadows once more. I'd just reached that moment when her words echoed around me again.
'We're just two different people,' she'd said. This was over the phone — it had been a relatively short but tumultuous long distance relationship.
'Actually, it's not that we're different people, it's more that I'm a person and you're a child. You're fine when it's just us, but then you go out and end up skinny-dipping in some random water feature at four o'clock in the morning. I never know where you are. More to the point, you don't seem to know who you are. You don't know where you're going. You have no sense of commitment. I'm sorry. It's over.'
And that was that.
I thought we were going to live happily ever after and end up doing the sorts of things proper adult relationship people do, like choosing dinner sets, shades of Dulux and preparatory schools for our as-yet-unconceived children. She thought I belonged in preparatory school.
I went back to sobbing in the shower for a while. This helped somewhat. I could sob with way more gusto than any five-year-old. This gave me some comfort.
She did have one point. I didn't have a clue who I was. Nor any idea how to go about finding out. Nor any drive or purpose for doing so. Maybe I needed to go spend a year in an ashram or something. That worked for the Beatles. I didn't really like Indian food though. Lamb korma was OK, but lentils just weren't my thing. I could never be a vegetarian. I also didn't really enjoy sitting still for too long. I liked swivel chairs because if you got bored you could push away from your desk and spin around for a while. Ashram yoga probably wasn't the way for me to find enlightenment. A tub of chocolate YoGo yes; yoga, no.
I weighed up the other rational options before me. Running away to join the circus was out. I had no co-ordination, I wasn't good with small cats, let alone big cats, and I couldn't put up a tent. Joining the French Foreign Legion was also a no-go for the same reason: camping wasn't my thing. I didn't much like shouting either. Moving to Cambodia to set up an orphanage was something I'd considered, but my friend Holly had looked into it and said all the good orphans had already been taken by Hollywood movie stars. There were other types of international volunteering of course — there'd been a few earthquakes and floods happening about the place — but they were mostly in organised countries and things seemed to be pretty much under control already. I wasn't sure what skills I could offer anyway. I'd managed to put together a set of IKEA shelves once, but that was the upper limit to my re-construction and engineering experience. I was fairly certain no one at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant was sitting around going, 'Fuck, if only we had someone with an arts degree to come up with a social media strategy for this.'
Everyone else I knew seemed to have their shit sorted by now. My other 30-year-old friends all had careers and partners and puppies and paint rollers. I had a couch and a bookshelf and a guitar collection. I'd had dinner with my high-school girlfriend and her husband a few nights previously and they'd been making plans to buy their second investment property. My idea of investing for the future was keeping a tin of tuna in the cupboard in case I got sick one day and couldn't make it to the shops.
My ex-girlfriend was right. I was a child.
The only friend who had as little to show for his thirty years of existence as me was my best friend, Dave. He lived in Sydney so I didn't get to see him as much as I would have liked, but he was always good for a phone chat whenever I needed him.
'Dude,' he'd said when we'd been hanging out the weekend before. This was after quite a few pilseners. 'You know I'll always be there for you. I don't care if it's three o'clock in the morning and you're on the other side of the world, if you need me, just call. OK?' He'd just been through a break-up himself, so I'd been consoling him and we were talking about how we'd always be there for each other. I didn't have a watch on in the shower, but my guess was about two-thirty in the morning. It was time to test the friendship.
I got out of the shower and dried myself off. All the bits that would dry, anyway. (My eyes and nose were in a semi-permanent state of damp.)
Dave's phone rang for a while and then went to message bank. I left him a message consisting mostly of sniffing and then called again. It went to message bank so I left another message apologising for calling so late and called again. He didn't answer so I left a message apologising for leaving so many messages. I waited thirty seconds and dialled again.
'What?' He finally picked up. He didn't sound very happy to hear from me.
'Hey mate, did you get my message?'
'What message?'
'Oh, I just left you a message.'
'What did it say?'
'Oh, I was just apologising for calling so late and leaving so many messages.' I said.
'Awesome. That was very considerate of you. I appreciate that. Thank you.'
He hung up.
I called back.
'What?'
'Hey, I just got dumped.'
'Oh dude, I'm so sorry to hear that. Can we talk about this in the morning?'
'It is the morning.' I had a point.
'I was thinking more morning morning.'
'Man, I'm really upset.' I made my voice crack a little so he'd be more sympathetic. 'I've been thinking about killing myself, hey.'
'Oh, what? No, don't do that. Really?' He sounded concerned now.
'Well, no,' I said. 'No, not really. I was considering opening my emergency tin of tuna though.'
He groaned. 'You're a dick. Did this just happen?'
'No,' I said. 'She called me this afternoon.'
'I see,' Dave said. 'Why did you wait until two-thirty am to call me then?'
'Is it exactly two-thirty?' I asked.
'Well, it's ...' I could hear him shuffling around in bed to look at a clock. 'Two thirty-seven,' he said.
I'd always been good at picking the exact time. At least I had some skills. That's something I could do, I thought — go overseas to where people had suffered disasters and had no clocks and let people know what the time was. Obviously my judgement was a little off now, but there were extenuating circumstances. When I was back on my A-game my abilities would be in high demand. I made a mental note to look at time-telling opportunities with the Red Cross when I got off the phone to Dave.
'Well, what happened?' he asked.
I told him.
I could hear him nodding on the other end of the line and making the appropriate 'oh', 'ah' and 'bitch' noises.
'She's right though. I have no idea who I am. I need to know how to find out. You were seeing that therapist guy for a while. What do I do?'
'It's not as simple as that,' he said. 'You can't just figure it out in a second. Buddhist monks and religious leaders and yogis spend their lifetimes trying to find out.'
'Yeah, well I'm not doing yoga,' I said.
'Heaps of hot chicks do yoga,' Dave reminded me.
I hadn't thought about that. Maybe I could do some yoga.
'Anyway, there's no magic trick or anything. You need some time to do some soul searching.'
I didn't like that answer. I needed results. Now.
'Can't you just give me something? Some little bit of advice to set me on my way? I've been crying for hours; I need something to take my mind off everything,' I said.
'There is one thing you could try,' he said.
'Yes! Good, what? Tell me tell me ...'
'OK, so there's this little exercise my therapist got me to do when I first saw him. What you do is ...' he yawned.
'Dude, tell me!'
'Sorry,' he said. 'OK, so write down what you did last weekend.'
'Is that it?'
'Yes, well, not just the main things, write down everything. Who you hung out with, what you bought, what you saw, where you went. Everything. It'll be a little window into the kind of person you are and then you can use that information to work out what you're doing and what you should be doing. Do that and then call me back tomorrow at a normal hour and we can chat.'
I thanked him.
This sounded easy enough. Easier than yoga, anyway.
I dried myself off completely and went to find a pen and some paper. A girl I once dated had given me a Moleskine notebook which I'd never really used and it had an official, journal-like, existential quality about it. It would do nicely.
I thought about what I'd done the weekend before. There was certainly nothing of consequence. I hadn't saved anyone's life or anything. It was all just little mundane weekend things. Still, Dave seemed to think it would help. So I wrote out the list.
On the weekend I:
• Rode a friend's fixed-gear bicycle
~ in Surry Hills.
• Went to a gig
~ of a band I hadn't heard of, they were pretty good, SO trying to be Radiohead though.
• Attended a photography exhibition
~ and Tweeted about it a bit.
• Bought a necklace with a large retro camera on it made from beads as a present for my friend who is a twenty-year-old photographer.
• Drank pear cider
~ on a grassy knoll
~ with a bunch of friends who worked at national indie radio station
~ while reading a classic hardback novel
~ and had to explain thick-rimmed underpowered Wayfarer spectacles did in fact have prescription in them.
• Played Scrabble on my phone with Dave, even though he was sitting opposite me
~ in a vegan café
~ in Surry Hills
~ and moaned about our jobs in advertising
~ while convincing girlfriend (bitch)
~ to work on her personal brand
~ then came home and blogged about it.
And that was it really.
I called Dave back.
'Dude, I said call me back at a reasonable hour,' he said.
'It is a reasonable hour,' I said. 'You're the one being unreasonable.'
He sighed. 'What did you come up with?'
'Well,' I said. 'I forgot to tell you, but after we hung out at that café last weekend I bumped into this homeless guy and he said he'd read my fortune if I gave him a dollar. So he looked at my palm and said I was destined to save people's lives and at that point I heard a woman scream from a third-floor balcony window and there were flames coming out behind her, so I scaled the outside of the building and carried her down to safety and she thanked me for saving her and I realised that I really want to be a fireman, and that I've always wanted to be a fireman, but that father would never let me be a fireman because he wanted me to go to university and get an arts degree because his parents could never afford to send him to university to get an arts degree, but I realised I never wanted to have an arts degree, so I'm going to go to fireman school and become a fireman.'
Dave sounded sceptical, but impressed. 'Hey man, that's really cool.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'I might have made a bit of that up. The fireman part. And the homeless man part. I did see someone in a window though.'
'Right,' said Dave. 'You do like to climb things so I wasn't quite sure.'
He was right. I did like to climb things. I tried to climb a fridge once. There was another skill for the international disaster relief effort. Fridge-climbing.
'So, what did you really do last weekend? Read me the list.'
I read him the list. He liked the bit about playing Scrabble on the phone while he was sitting opposite me. And the personal branding bit. And the thick-rimmed, underpowered spectacles bit.
'So,' I said. 'What do you think? Do you know who I am? Anything in there for you?'
He had a think about this for a while.
'Actually,' he said after some time. 'Yes. Yes I do.'
There was more silence while he considered his opinion. It sounded like he'd stumbled onto something and wanted to turn it over in his mind a while before he let me in on it.
'Well?' I said.
'Well,' Dave said. He was hushed. 'You're a bit of a fucking hipster, aren't you?'
There was silence for about twenty seconds while we both thought about this.
'I am not a fucking hipster!' I said, indignant.
'You're a massive fucking hipster,' Dave said. 'In fact, you're probably the biggest fucking hipster I know.'
'I'm not!'
'You're as hipster as it gets,' he said.
'No, I'm not,' I said.
'Yes, you are,' he said.
I said 'not' again. He said 'are' again. This went on for some time.
'I don't even own an Apple computer!' I protested. 'I don't drink coffee and I hadn't even been on a fixed-gear bicycle until last weekend when you lent me yours!'
Dave pointed out the fact that I wore thick-rimmed Ray Ban Wayfarer-style designer reading glasses, Converse sneakers, a bicycle courier-style bag, which usually had a copy of a classic American novel in it, that I worked in advertising as a day job, and that I spent an inordinate amount of time Tweeting about photography exhibitions.
'In other words,' he said, 'hipster. And there are thousands, perhaps millions of cool young things like you out there all over the world, sitting in cafés, drinking fair trade coffee, reading literature, writing what they hope will one day be literature, taking photos of people in floral dresses, starting ambient electro bands no one has heard of, wearing thick-framed glasses, going to music festivals and pretending to be, generally speaking, hip.'
'I'm not a hipster,' I said.
He thought about this.
'Actually, you know what? You're right. You're not a hipster. You're actually not cool enough to be a proper hipster.'
'Hey,' I said. 'I'm cool. My mum says I'm cool.'
'No, you're not,' Dave said. 'And even if you were cool, you're too half-hearted to be a hipster. You don't have the commitment. Your girlfriend was right. You're not a hipster, you're a halfster.'
He had a point.
'OK then,' I said. 'Maybe you're right. Maybe I should quit being a hipster altogether and go start some new sub-culture. Is that what you're saying? Do my own thing. Be myself. Yeah?'
Dave considered about this for a while.
'No,' he said. 'No, you can't quit being a hipster now. You've got to where you are because you like books and you're reasonably fashionable and you do all that stuff anyway. Quitting being a hipster isn't the answer. Quitting now would be like getting to Everest base camp and saying, "OK, that's high enough, I might turn around." If you really want to find yourself you need to get to the top of Everest. You need to stop doing things half-arsedly and become the ultimate expression of who you are. You need to become the ultimate hipster.'
I thought about this for a moment. It actually made sense.
'I'm right, aren't I?' Dave asked.
I nodded.
'Are you nodding?' he asked.
'I'm nodding,' I said. 'So what does the ultimate hipster look like? What do I do?'
'Well you could get a fixie for a start,' he said. 'You liked riding mine: remember how fast it was?'
I liked that idea.
'What about an ironic tattoo?' he said.
I'd always wanted a tattoo.
'Hey,' I said. 'I could make pieces of jewellery out of old board-game tokens and sell them at a market stall, along with some organic vegetables.'
'Now you're talking,' Dave said.
'Get a free heirloom tomato with every Monopoly dog ring.'
He liked that a lot.
'I could do heroin or something in the name of art.'
Dave thought it might be best if I didn't take heroin or something in the name of art. I promised him I wouldn't.
We discussed the possibility of doing some street art instead. I told him about an idea I had of writing inspirational messages onto the walls of a train station using nothing but soap. Technically it wasn't graffiti because it was actually cleaning dirt off, so you couldn't get in trouble with the police. You could do the same sort of thing with sand on a beach if you wanted to — stay up until four in the morning and use food dye to write messages that everyone would see and then the ocean would just wash them away.
He asked me what sort of messages I would write and I said I wasn't sure yet but that they would probably involve some sort of stencil or something. Like Banksy.
'It sounds cool,' Dave said. 'But it's all a bit too much effort. Hipsters don't have that much motivation. Banksy isn't a hipster, he's an artist. There's a massive difference. Hipsters need to be artistic in some way, but they can't be too motivated.'
He was right.
'If you want to put effort into something, grow a beard,' he said. 'And then take your beard and hang out in trendy cafés and write poetry. That'll kill three birds with one stone.'
'But I've got a beard,' I said. I was quite proud of my neatly trimmed man- stubble. It was the most masculine thing about me.
'Mate, you haven't got a beard, you've got a five o'clock shadow. If you're going to be the ultimate hipster you need to look like you've just robbed the Glenrowan Hotel.'
'Is that what the ultimate hipster would do?' I asked.
'Yes. I think so. Yes,' Dave said. 'That's what the ultimate hipster would do. Now. Go and get some sleep. That's another hipster thing. Hipsters love sleep. Sleep is cool.'
I thanked him and hung up. I felt good. And I'd stopped crying.
CHAPTER 2HIPSTERATURE
The term 'hipster' was coined by a New York musician in the 1940s. The Second World War was raging, jazz had only recently been invented and a new language called 'jive talk' was evolving in the underground piano bars of Harlem. If someone talked the lingo, they were referred to as being 'hep to the jive'. Around this time a young pianist decided he needed a stage name, so he changed the spelling of 'hep' to 'hip' and called himself Harry 'The Hipster' Gibson. The moniker caught on and hipster became proverbial for young, in-the-know scenesters who were at the pointy end of popular culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hipster Mattic by Matt Granfield. Copyright © 2011 Matt Granfield. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 Hiptroduction,2 Hipsterature,
3 Look like you're homeless,
4 Hipknit,
5 Hipsternomics — the market stall part I,
6 Hipster shopping,
7 Hipsternomics — the market stall part II,
8 The ultimate hipster tattoo,
9 What is hipster music?,
10 The ultimate hipster band,
11 Hipsterecording,
12 Trixie the fixie,
13 The national bike courier bike polo championships,
14 The hipsternet,
15 Vegetarianism,
16 I drink so much coffee I get high,
17 I dial 000 because someone is being murdered in my backyard,
18 Hipsterdrunk,
19 Hip and run,
Acknowledgements,