Authenticities

1. Chinawood:  A five-hour drive southwest of Shanghai, in the hills near a manufacturing hub, something like a mirage appears among the smokestacks: a full-scale replica of Beijing's Forbidden City.

2. Hyper, local parenting:

While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl.

The only people who know are Storm’s brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, a close family friend and the two midwives who helped deliver the baby in a birthing pool at their Toronto home on New Year’s Day.

3. Accidental Chinese Hipsters

4. Why the "Adele is Authentic" debate is stupid:

I post this in a way as a warning; we're probably going to see stories setting Adele up as the Next Great Hope For Realness percolate on this side of the pond soon, since some critics over here never saw an authenticity fight they couldn't avoid.

5. Electricity is inauthentic in baseball

La Vie 'ipster

French newspaper Courrier Internationale has put together a photo essay on la phénomène hipster in Williamsburg. I tell you, some things are just made for a foreign language. The blurbs on each photo are priceless.

Authenticity Smokes

Authenticity is like charisma -- if you have to say that you have it, then odds are you don't. And so I can't imagine that Brooklyn's hipster vanguard is going to fall for a target-marketing campaign from Camel cigarettes:

The marketing campaign promises its customers will earn “serious street cred” for trying the Williamsburg brand, and noted that Camel met with some “modern-day pioneers” with “lighthearted angst and rebellion” in the neighborhood to try the brand out. Company spokesman David Howard said the marketing campaign was movitated by one thing: Helping hipsters to understand that Camel fits their way of life.

Except there's one old-timer in the nabe who hopes Camel succeeds:

"I hope all these kids buy them, smoke them, and get cancer," Joe Valle, 52, tells the Post of Camel's new Williamsburg-hipster-branded cigarettes. "They ruined this neighborhood, so I hope the cigarettes ruin them." 

(via the handcaper)

Holy Hipsters, Brooklyn: Doubling down on the authenticity hoax

The NY Post has a remarkably un-snarky piece about the growth in attendance at a Hispanic Lutheran church in Williamsburg. The upsurge is the result of Jesus-loving hipsters as "Worshippers with full-sleeve tattoos, skinny jeans, stocking caps and square glasses pack the pews of Resurrection Presbyterian Church on South Fifth Street."

This doesn't really surprise me. In fact, it strikes me as the next logical step in the evolution of hipsterdom. After all, for all the talk about hipster "irony", what has always characterized the movement is the search for the authentic, and as the competitiveness in authenticity-seeking has steadily ratcheted up, it was inevitable that hipsters would eventually see it for what it has always been: a form of thinly-disguised status-seeking. 

And once you've come to that realization, there are really only two ways you can go: Either you accept that the search for the authentic is and always has been a hoax, or you double down on the only form of authenticity-seeking that avoids the hamster-wheel of conspicuous authenticity. That's why -- as I argued earlier -- the current craze for "cool Christianity" completely misses the point. Churches shouldn't be selling cool, they should be selling they one product  that isn't cool. Brett McCracken put it best when he wrote:

"As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don't want cool as much as we want real."

Found: Chinese Hipsters

Back in April, David Goodman of Slate got the internet buzzing with his question, "why are there no hipsters in China?" His argument, in a nutshell, was that China was simply too poor for anyone to be ironic about aping the habits of the lower classes. I critiqued the argument in a blog post at the time, but a friend sends me a photo he just took in Beijing that settles the argument once and for all:

Authenticity Watch: Hipster Moonshine

At what point are hipsters going to concede that their politics are indistinguishable from those of the Michigan Militia? Running moonshine, as we all know from movies like "Thunder Road" and songs like "Copperhead Road," is a serious business. Or at least it was until the Brooklyn hipsters ginned onto it. Now it's "cool", according to the BBC: 

Today's moonshiners are a diverse bunch. They include home distillers, high-end "mixologists", small businesses making cheap liquor to sell locally and bigger operations which sell across state lines.

One anonymous Brooklyn resident says she makes moonshine in her tub, according to an old family recipe. While most of her colleagues at the museum know about her hobby, she says ""You've got to be careful about who you tell. I wouldn't go blabbing about it to someone I'd just met." 

Like, for instance, a BBC reporter?

At any rate, first they're refusing to fill out the census, now they're runnin' Gowanus Lightning across state lines. Forget "artisanal is the new organic," it's more like Williamsburg is the new Lynchburg. 

(via Gawker, duh)

Are there any hipsters in China?

Are there any hipsters in China? That’s the question David Goodman confronts in a recent article for Slate. To frame the debate, he looks at the fashion for fixed-gear bikes, and wonders why come, in a country where everyone bicycles, there is virtually no fixie movement.

The question is, I think, at least semi-facetious, but it is a good way of getting at the real issue, which is whether there is any kitsch in China, and if so, of what sort. The conclusion is that while there is kitsch of a sort (Mao kitsch, in particular), there is no ironic playing with the signs and symbols of poverty, which is so central to the hipster worldview. Goodman has this great quotation from a sociology prof who says, "There is a saying in Chinese: 'Laugh at the poor, not the prostitutes,'".

By this, I gather he means that in China, the shame is in being poor, not in how you make your money. In such a culture, there is no room for nostalgie de la boue, there’s only the absolute shame of the dirt on your pants. You simply can’t “play” with being poor, because no one will get it.

Is this an accurate take on Chinese culture? I have no idea. One possibility is that China is still at an earlier stage of economic development, where conspicuous consumption has not yet become conspicuous authenticity. Once China gets rich enough, and bikes get scarce enough, the kids will get with the insta-irony/nostalgia/hipster/kitsch program.

Another possibility is that there is no romantic strain in Chinese culture that could underwrite a counter-progress movement, even an ironic one. In which case, China’swill always be a far more straightforwardly materialistic society than ours here in the West, since they don’t share any of the shame about consumption and brands that motivates so much hipster irony.  Again, I don’t know enough about Chinese culture to know. Anyone have any thoughts? Send me an email.

Meanwhile, this story might serve as a counterexample to the entire thesis.