The Hipster Handbook - Robert Lanham
I am not a Hipster, although I could qualify as "punk rock" since I don't really care what other people think of me. On the other hand, it seems that married, Christian, conservative folks are about as fin as you can get, according to this book. The Handbook outlines your various types of Hipster (Bipsters, WASHes, UTFs, and others), gives you some explanations of vocabulary ("deck" means "cool"), and sheds some light on the lifestyles and habits of fashionable tassels and cronkites.
The book is in the "humor" section, and certainly a lot of it is written tongue-in-cheek. But is the whole thing a farce? That's what's hard to tell. I imagine it's quite possible that the authors created the entire vocabulary, put it in this book, in the hopes that people who want to be hip will start using these words. Then again, people who are truly hip don't really need a book to tell them how to act, do they?
At any rate, if you want to know what books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, and brands to buy (hint: Corporations are bad), then pick up this book. If you want to appear really deck, I suppose you can stick it in your back pocket.
Fed to jhliu's brain | March 28, 2003
