Rating: NNNNN
My vagina has been called many things, but “ironic,” as far as I can recall, hasn’t been one of them. Yet according to Robert Lanham, the sly Brooklyn cat behind new oh-so-amusant cool guide The Hipster Handbook, “Brazilian bikini waxes that leave a finger-length vertical stripe in front can be the perfect decision for hipsters who want to add a little irony.”Well, phew. I knew my crotch was lacking something, and now I know what it is. I must have a hip vagina! I must live in an Urban Outfitters wasteland. I must get on MTV! Which is why I dig further into Lanham’s manual of style, trying to discover what else makes up the ultimate Hipster Girl and Boy (who, by the way, does not have an ironic penis.)
Hipster Girl is not a vegetable, animal or mineral. In fact, she’s barely a person, but more like the wet-dream creation of a marketing focus group. Elusive yet ubiquitous, she sashays through dirty late-night parties busting her dilettantish chops all over the asses of shivering, skinny artists while spilling her martinis on Web designers, then stumbles into a cab to go home to her studio, all the while fingering a tattered copy of Camus’s The Outsider in her Salvation Army bag. (Hmm. Artists: check martinis: check Web designers: check. Lacking Camus.)
But am I cool enough to get what Lanham means? First of all, you gotta talk the talk, which is why he starts off with a glossary of necessary terms. Because really what I ultimately need to know is if I’m deck or fin. “Deck: To be deck is to be cutting-edge. Sentence: That tassel we met at the gallery opening sure looked deck in her cowboy boots. Fin: the opposite of deck, similar to outdated terms like lame.”
Apparently, these terms have something to do with surfboards, which I’ve never seen, so I’ll have to take Lanham’s word for it that everything that was cool is now deck. Hipsters, says Lanham, “believe that irony has more resonance than reason. Hipsters also enjoy declaring random things like vodka martinis or exercise passé.” He also helpfully provides breakdowns of various painfully recognizable types of hipsters, including the UTF (unemployed trust funder), the Clubber (“attaching “DJ’ to your name is very 90s”) and The Loner. (“Question: Are you a hipster? Answer: I have a large collection of obscure Belgian techno master mixes on limited-edition vinyl.”)
While most of Lanham’s calls are spot-on, he misses the turquoise Vespa on a few. Cosmopolitans? Puh-leeze. College and Clinton gets a thumbs-up as a hip area which everyone knows the Utne Reader rated as one of the hippest corners, like, five years ago. Darlin’… keep up!
