-3oo Reviews

When I was coming up we only called it “gentrification” and even then it was code. What it stood for was first described in economic terms: growing property values, higher rents, rising food costs, and increases in local tax revenues. Then in terms of safety: drops in crime rates, arrests, and even reports of suspicious activity. It was an easy sell, except for one afterthought which lingered behind the celebration of all these “wonderful improvements”: race.

Let’s make this clear: the debate over the definition of a hipster, and all related subthemes, is a white one. Arguments whether a particular set of signs or modes of consumption signify “hipster” all elide that they are operating in a white lexicon, even when affixed to subjects of other races. The debate is an intra-racial diversion providing cover for the denial of persistent inequities along racial divides, particularly in northern cities of the USA which pride themselves on false impressions of being post-race.

Plenty of room remains for Marxist critiques of hipster consumption.

But the people pushed out by gentrification are blacks and latinos. They are pushed further into the urban periphery where they have reduced access to social services, to transportation, to centers of employment, and even to education. All this comes without the supposed benefits of a true suburban environment. And yet this isn’t about the helplessness of non-whites; it’s a testimony to the violence of economically-powered, racial leveraging, where in the name of access to boutique commerce, white folks pry out people of color.

Meanwhile simulacra appear as spectral projections of the evicted communities—a white-owned and operated taco stand, a white BBQ joint, white Fried Chicken spots. It would be ghoulish if people actually felt haunted, but instead they practice hipster semantics; the aesthetic dissection of a moustache hides the festering mouth of continued racial injustice.

-Jeremy Allan Hawkins

Original Post: A Reply to #55 – Hipster Invasion

There were things people forgot to tell me. The retired minister would openly critique my breasts as I brought him food. No girls wanted to serve him. (Only girls worked there.) A local realtor was fascinated by his shoe, which he often thought was his pet, and more fascinated by counting by tens very quickly. His father had been an auctioneer. One man would grab my arm and not let me go until I said, “You like your coffee black as Coley’s ass.” Coley had been his best friend during the war.

One summer I also worked an overlapping job, answering phones at an academic library. There, the ladies hung up posters reading You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. Really? I thought, and went off to my other job at the nursing home, where a 98 year-old woman was convinced we had locked her passport in the refrigerator.

Working those two jobs made me wonder, on a daily basis, what kind of crazy I was and what kind of crazy I would grow up to be. Was I crazy like the ladies at the library, the ones who hung up posters with frazzled-looking cats and gave me recipes for “beefy mac” even after I said I was a vegetarian? Or was I crazy like the resident who showed up for dinner with no pants? And would it be better, in the last days of my life, to know I was in a nursing home or to be like the resident who was always proclaiming what a lovely Irish castle she lived in? I arrive at work early one day and sit in the dining room, imagining turrets above me and a moat around me. It is a lovely castle.

-Erin Lyndal Martin

Original post: #101 – Clara Verner Retirement Community

Despite what some may tell you, a hipster invasion is generally a wonderful thing. When the hipsters arrive, property values skyrocket, charcuteries and cheese shops pop up and a tattoo-parlor scene develops. The bars in the neighborhood start selling an incredible selection of boutique local beers and have burlesque shows on weekends. Cupcake stores become part of the landscape, local residents start riding their bikes, and, after a few years, the public transit to the neighborhood is more effective. Art springs up like weeds, and a farmer’s market arrives. The produce at the local grocery improves, as does the quality of restaurants.

So, what’s to complain about? Sure, there may be a lot of good-looking twenty-somethings who are a bit too full of themselves wandering about, but they’re also interestingly-dressed (which is great for people watching), they’re good at graphic design (all those cool posters advertising their bands), and quite capable of giving excellent advice with regard to cask-aged whiskey and Soviet-bloc samizdat literature. Moreover, if you befriend a few hipsters, they will adeptly order sushi for you and, after a few hours of sipping sake, they will lead you to an absinth-selling speakeasy that is only accessible through a phone booth with a false wall; it will be an adventure.

Indeed, the only people who have a complaint are long-term renters in the ‘hood who’re priced out. With them, I commiserate; gentrification hurts when you can’t afford it, especially when it appears without warning. But, for property owners and visitors from nearby neighborhoods: So what if the new neighbors aren’t dressing like schlubs, eating mediocre hamburgers and drinking boring ol’ Budweiser? Hipsters are too self-involved to care what you do, so why bother knocking what they do? Unless you want to sound obsolete and spiteful, which, well – it’s unbecoming.

-Alex Starace

Original Post: #55 – Of Moss & Hipsters

It happens everywhere: at convenience stores, the cinema, or in the queue outside of pubs. Sometimes, the exclamation is innocent, flung from the lips of the offender before she has a chance to cover her mouth, “You don’t look a day over fourteen!” More often than not, though, it comes in the form of a sneering remark, an unnecessary mention, from a person that has already been informed of my age.

The conversation goes like this:

“Now, how old are you?” asks the woman rebooking my missed connection, the man at the gym, the guy behind the counter preparing my garlic chips.

“Twenty-one,” I reply.

“Oh, okay.” Then comes the screwing up of the face, a curled-lip and raised-nose sneer. “Twenty-one, really?” I don’t believe you. “You look like you’re fourteen.”

“I hear it all the time,” I say. But really, I’m thinking that I find it terribly insulting, and I’m having a difficult time refraining from knocking that person in the teeth. I want to say that too, but I don’t. I take my garlic chips and go.

Because of its repeated mention, I’d like to know in what context ‘you-look-like-you’re-fourteen’ could possibly be a compliment. Oh yes, I’m happy to be reminded that I won’t be taken seriously in a job interview. Yes, I like to feel that any man who finds me attractive is probably a pedophile. Ha. Being an adult who looks like a child means having to prove my maturational level with each introduction. It gets exhausting.

The only consolation for this looking-young phenomenon is that I’ll appear twenty-five when I’m forty. That’s also the only thing people can console me with whenever I make this complaint.

Maybe I should take up hard drugs and smoking.

-Olivia Snider

They tell me it is shape that broken hearts and octopus traps have in common. They tell me that until 2005, when this syndrome was given a name, it did not exist. They describe my pain in the language of scientific process’ with scientific words to boot.

Tako-tsubo is the Japanese word for octopus traps. It is also the first given name for a broken heart:

In Takostubo Cardiomyopathy, the left ventricle of the heart takes the shape of an octopus trap. This ballooning shape is due to complete exhaustion of the heart muscle or, myocardial stunning in the mid-section and tip of the heart. It occurs in patients without significant blockage of the coronary arteries. If not recognized, it can lead to transient but severe (occasionally lethal) cardiogenic shock. The cardiac bio markers of heart damage (troponin, creatine kinase) are only slightly elevated confirming that there is not much heart muscle damage, but severe suffering, stunning inside.

I imagine interconnectedness of apparently disparate causation—the nature of a metaphor being stunned, but not stopped, and some kind of Takotsubo impermanence. A once metaphorical condition is born in the real—legitimizing my intermittent, crushing chest pains—somehow giving credence to my sister’s recent suicide. The suffering is real once it has a name. When you disbelieve loss, proceed to examine the condition of your heart—begin to perceive how the metaphor manifests.

Sitting in the hospital bed, in the wake of this language wash, I imagine the ballooning of my broken heart, how its first given name, Takotsubo, sounds like a whoosh of rising balloons on the wind, a gush of blood that this stunned organ continues to pump. I envision how our mother wrote Valerie a message on a white balloon and sent it skyward.

Still, I could not tell you anything about your own hearts—only question: How might some octopi escape their traps?

-Anastasia Hager

A post-menopausal teacher sits at the desk, more interested in her romance novel than the class. Boys sit on one side of the room, girls on the other. A self-imposed segregation, we steal glances across the room, still unsure how to cross that divide. We are supposed to learn typing from Mavis Beacon, but the teacher is riding out her lingering hot flashes with the half-dressed man on her book. We are left to play decade old games on decade old computers. This is how we become obsessed with the Oregon Trail. This is how we become obsessed with surviving.

Instead of exploring the internet or settling our fingers into the home keys, we hunt deer and repair wagon axles. Between the river crossings, food shortages, and disease, we watch ourselves die again and again. We surround ourselves with loved ones, name our wagon parties after crushes and friends to ease the journey. But no matter how many wagon wheels I carry or buffalo I shoot, my party dies. They drown, or starve, or succumb to cholera, and each time they perish, I bury them, wasting precious days by their 8-bit graves. I watch myself die alone, always alone. The computer buries me, fills the blanks on my tombstone.

Only a handful of us ever make it to Oregon, a mystical place synonymous with Valhalla. On these occasions, we allow ourselves to cross the classroom rift. We crowd around the screen, pressing into one another, to watch the survivors settle in a pixelated land of milk and honey. We stand there, letting our arms touch, until the teacher is startled by the silence and sends us back to our seats to replay the past on our computers. I don’t learn how to type correctly until high school.

-Rebecca King 

#1: Music drifts from the clubhouse, pings carry from the driving range. Ahead, a strange landscape: wilderness that is not wilderness; everything leafy and beautifully green, everything manicured, cut, chopped.

#2: This is not quite a park, not quite a garden. It is not quite a place to be discovered, not quite natural or unnatural, not quite the new world or the old.

#3: On some courses, houses lurch along the edge. They gather like ghosts in the shadows of the out-of-bounds. On the best ones, golfers find themselves alone with nothing but trees and water. A course in the desert is an impossible oasis: grass grows from sand, clouds of green float above jagged ground.

#4: Men are allowed to find beauty in this; they are allowed to comment on that beauty.

#5: A doe glides across the fairway followed by three fawns. Golfers stop to watch. It is not the animal they revere but the course itself.

#6: The golf course is a calming place, a promise. It is a place of silence, a reminder of what is possible, a beautiful dream.

#7: It is a series of borders and edges where the length of the grass increases in penumbras. There is the green, the fringe, the fairway. The rough, the deep rough, the out-of-bounds. Maintaining this takes time. It takes a hundred different kinds of craftsmanship.

#8: Other games might recall nature, but none purport to surround a player in it. None try to impress by what can be chopped, what can be shaped, what can be controlled.

#9: Halfway through the round, golfers return to the clubhouse. They use toilets, they purchase beer in aluminum cans. They will go back out, but in a moment. When their cans are finally empty, they will toss them into the woods.

-Lucas Southworth

Original Post: #104 – Watching Golf on TV

At around 53 minutes past the hour, a hair-dyed ex-basketball star slowly lumbers his way to the ring. Like all of the ring’s former heroes, he gets cheered for a minute before the crowd realizes exactly what they are cheering. After all, this man does what bad guys do: attack their heroes in order to draw attention. The world of professional wrestling has always been about comparing staged antics to legitimate chaos. And the crowd remembers that the aged man in the ring, Kevin Nash, destroyed hardened competitor, CM Punk, unprovoked at an earlier show.

Nash is the type of guy that would sit at a bar and tell tales of the cultural abomination of 1996, a time when his New World Order managed to make rebellion as mainstream as the NFL, when Green Day’s “Longview” took the punk concept of anarchist rebellion and made it into a “song about jerking off,” and when we eventually came to care too much about oral sex (thanks, Bill Clinton).

And yet Kevin Nash embodies a past where America didn’t understand itself, even if he lives in a present with precious self-awareness. When Nash wears a plaid shirt, the fan is a half a step ahead of him in the sheepish silliness of that attire choice.  Nash’s present rival, CM Punk, may as well be Win Butler while Nash himself is Chris Cornell. Nash and Cornell have a similar love of long hair, weird chin whiskers, and being out of touch. They both feel as corporate as can be now, especially when Cornell is working on piss-poor records with Timbaland and Nash is using his cache as a “legend” to return to the wrestling world time and time again. Then again, it’s hard not to feel corporate when you never were actually rebellious.

—Trey Irby

In “Serial Seduction: Living in Other Worlds,” Ron Simon claims, “more than any other art form, the soap opera creates an alternative world, where the characters and their environment seem to exist in a parallel dimension.” Thirty-four years ago, when I first started watching my soap, I skipped French club and yearbook meetings on the days I knew my favorite characters, Rick Webber and Monica Quartermaine, would get airtime. Blonde like Monica, though encumbered by braces, hopelessly unfashionable gold aviator glasses, and middle school pudge, I modeled my posture and elocution after Monica, played by Leslie Charleson.

From “General Hospital,” I learned a number of things about adult life: what rape was. What a disco was. That rape could take place in a disco. That rape could have a soundtrack.* I learned that a rapist could be repentant – so much so, that his victim could marry him in a storybook wedding. Years later, in college, when a guy visiting from Yale tried to date rape me after I’d downed a good deal of rum and Coke, I heard the Herb Alpert song in my head as I fought him off. I learned from “GH” what an extramarital affair was, what a child out of wedlock was, what a cuckold was, what a deposition was. I learned what it meant to be “estranged” from one’s spouse.

These days I watch “GH” with elegiac anticipation, as if waiting for a loved one long ill to expire. The other two ABC soaps were canceled this year and replaced by “lifestyle” shows; the writing is on the wall. Charleson, now in her sixties, still makes the occasional appearance, though she’s had plastic surgery that, heartbreakingly, prevents her formerly expressive face from being able to register her emotions.

-Wendy Rawlings

*Herb Alpert’s “Rise.” The exposure the song gained from “GH” helped it shoot to #1 on the Billboard Top 100.