The Toronto neighbourhood I escaped to after my initial flight from suburbia has been overrun by hipsters. It’s possible I have officially reached my old fart years but the previous sentence isn’t a complaint, just an observation. It didn't cross my mind when we lived in The Annex 20+ years ago that we might have been the hipsters but in those days it was still very much a place where people from a wide demographic lived, with hints of basic adaptive reuse in place. The first rule of being a hipster has always been to deny completely and vehemently that your lifestyle is hip. Nowadays my old bank is a coffee shop with every single bean and coffee related gadget you can imagine for sale and the old walk in safe is now a popular meeting room. The Woolworths was a massive CD shop until recently but it’s now empty, it’s fate uncertain. There are TWO bicycle stores selling incredibly stylish bikes, thousand dollar clones of the type we used to punt around on snagged from the garbage or passed down because Uncle Charlie couldn’t ride it anymore. Some businesses have survived. I stopped into Paupers, my old local, and the same guy was working the afternoon shift at the bar as he did all those years ago. Honest Ed’s keeps on keeping on, mostly because it is a Toronto institution but I get the sense that the clock is ticking for the old barn. I love the fact that, structurally at least, the strip is mostly still there and hasn’t succumbed to the kind of condo nightmare prevalent in other parts of the city. But the hipsters have to live somewhere and if not in the suburbs, then where?
I recently finished “Whiter Shade of Pale” the sequel to the book based on the website “Stuff White People Like”. It is supposed to be written as a guide to others as to what North American white culture is all about and how to understand it. Sounds completely racist, I know, but it is very much a tongue and cheek analysis and any white person that might be remotely intrigued by this book will read it, see themselves in it and hopefully laugh their ass off. I also think that anyone who qualifies in multiple categories will find the book less funny, perhaps insulting. Here is the list: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/ - do with it what you will. I’ve got a feeling that any subsequent list is going to include an entry about The Occupation, depending on how it pans out. The comments on the SWPL pages are very revealing, here is an example from somebody called “Premiers” commenting on #62, Knowing What is Best for Poor People: “I don’t like how middle class people present themselves as progressive champions of the working class and down trodden while displaying absolute contempt for real working class people and the things they like. F**k inner-city hipsters and their public displays of humanitarianism. They only embrace the idea of it so they can put shit on those who don’t bang a drum about it like they do.” Ouch! Something on this parody website touched a nerve but Premiers brings up an excellent point. I have never been able to square how buying organic diapers in the hipster district helps Joe and Jane (or Harinder and Daljit) Average who have to shop at Wal Mart because the factory they worked at packed up and moved to Mexico, and the old building has subsequently been turned into condos that they could never, ever afford to live in so it’s a giant bag of Huggies Pull Ups at $15.97 vs the same price for a SINGLE ORGANIC ONE (google it, all true). Granted the organic one is reusable but I’m fairly sure there is a photo of me in a diaper somewhere, back when an organic diaper was also known as “a rag”.
I didn’t set out to rag on hipsters when I started this entry. I just think that if one can’t do a bit of a reality check and “see ourselves as others see us” as Burns put it (Robert, not Mr.), then we are in trouble. I’ll leave you with one more anecdote from my day trip. Islington Station on the TTC is a dump. I used to use it as a hub on my way to work and it is a bit of a hybrid inside/outside deal. In those days I smoked and you could smoke on the platform if it was outside without getting busted because most of the staff would stand there and smoke too. Gradually, that has been quashed and that isn’t entirely a bad thing. Yet some of the most notorious smokers that are left in the city fall into the hipster category, until they have kids, that is. So on this last trip I was waiting for a stinking, belching, ancient diesel that should have been long retired yet still passes for mass transit in this country. There were four people on the platform; a shift worker at one end, I was in the centre and a hip youngish father and child were at the other end with at least 5 meters between each of us. We’ve all just missed a bus so working guy lights up a cigarette. Oh, shit. Hip Dad starts yelling at him from the other end of the platform “you can’t do that here, there’s no smoking AT ALL, my daughter has asthma, that’s disgusting, etc” The smoker says nothing and slides around the corner out of sight and off the platform. Then Hip Dad starts hollering again “That’s no better, I CAN STILL SMELL IT, my daughter…” (ad nauseum). Remember now, they are 30 feet apart and you can’t even see this guy anymore. The bus arrives blasting out a nasty black cloud worse than any tractor I have driven and we all get on board. Hip Angry Dad makes a big demo of doing the death stare into the back of working guy’s head for the entire route. His little girl kept on sitting all hunched with her eyes downcast, wanting to be invisible. Yes little darling, your easily offended daddy is a wanker but when you grow up you’ll find an empty New Balance shoe box full of what we used to call “photos” under his Ikea bought single bed. In at least one of these “photographs”, your father will be sitting by a campfire smoking a Monte Cristo cigar whilst chug a luggin a Hobgoblin microbrew with abandon. And if he ever picks you up from Waldorf school with a black eye, you will never have to ask how he got it.
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