I’ve been thinking a lot about scenesterism and hipsterism lately. Partially this is due to my entree into High Society at the X-Men 2 DVD release party at Jay-Z’s club last week. The whole affair was a little disappointing. The fellow who invited us was a delight, don’t get me wrong, and if I said it wasn’t a little interesting to have Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’s ass wiggling against mine at one point, I’d probably be lying. But mainly, I didn’t see the point of going to something like that unless you were a famous person. If you weren’t a famous person, you were just someone standing around looking at/for the famous people, and what kind of fun is that? You’re a hanger-on, a wannabe, a scenester. It’s boring and silly.
Also boring and silly are hipsters. This is a particularly tough pill to swallow for me, as a twentysomething media worker in NYC who likes weird music and films and reads comic books. But the fact of the matter is that now matter how weird or cool you dress, there are at least 200 other people in this city (I reiterate, at least) who dress in exactly the same way. Most of them spend their nights at deliberately trashy bars drinking deliberately bad beer trying to pick up any one of a cadre of identically-dressed girls or boys. They all read the same hipster publications, take the same out-of-focus photos of one another, do the same drugs, have a friend who takes her top off a lot, blah blah blah. God, it’s so tedious.
And what’s depressing about both these things is how magnetic they seem to be to the artist. Being seen at the right place, or with the right people, or wearing the right outfit–it’s just an incredibly tempting shortcut to Worthwhileville, particularly when compared to the struggle to create something of value, art-wise. It’s also a tremendously easy way to augment the creating you do perform in such a way as to make it seem a lot more impressive. I’m kind of horrified at how soul-destroying and peripheral this enterprise seems to be, since it’s so prevalent, and since there’s a real sense that you’re not living up to your potential if you’re not participating in it in some way.
I’ve long said I’m glad I live on Long Island instead of in NYC. I live there out of necessity due to my marriage to a wonderful woman who happens to teach there, but I’m happy this decision was made for me. If I weren’t married, I’d be living in some awful place on the Lower East Side or Williamsburg or Astoria, paying too much, doing bumps in the bathroom and acquiring sexually transmitted diseases, and God knows how much writing I’d actually be doing, and whether it’d be any good or just something dopey like every other artsy boy in the five boroughs. Which is not to say that what I’m doing now is works of brilliant genius, just that I’m reasonably sure it’s MY work, and not the product of some cookie-cutter scene I’ve found myself involved in.
(And let’s not forget how arbitrarily spacio-temporally biased “scenes” are, by the way. I spend the 1990s getting angry at writers telling me that my enjoyment of, say, Soundgarden was invalid because I didn’t have the good fortune to be born ten years earlier in Seattle.)
This is not to say that I think all aspects of scenesterism are invalid. Certainly if you can find a group of people with compatible artistic drives with whom to work or collaborate, even simply on a moral-support level, go for it. Hey, it worked for the Fort Thunder kids! And just because the comics-crit world is starstruck by them don’t mean they acted like the kind of scenester idiots people are usually starstruck by. Also, I do happen to think fashion and style are important, insofar as they are some sort of expression of your insides made manifest on your outsides. Courtney Taylor-Taylor from the Dandy Warhols put it to me in those kinds of terms, and suddenly I found myself thinking, “A-ha! I get it now!” In a way this only makes it more depressing when you walk around Avenue A and see 40,000 people who might as well be sharing your closet. But still, dressing up in a way that makes you feel vital and creative is a self-reinforcing thing, or at least it can be–like an athlete or a soldier putting on your uniform, you’re transforming yourself into the person you want to be. Just make sure that person’s you, and not Julian Casablancas.
The only important place is inside your head. That’s the only thing that defines you and your worthwhileness. When you’re an artist, the window to that is what you put on the page. To the extent that you can make your surroundings and your appearance and your circle of friends reflect this in some way, hey, great. But ultimately none of that matters in the slightest. The inside of your head can’t be reproduced, sold in thrift stores, and worn ironically. It’s yours!