I'm going to conclude that hipsters are a largely mythical being existing only to be the subject of other people's ire.

I'd invite you to come with me to Wicker Park and see them in their natural habitat, but I haven't been over there in a while and they may have moved on to other Pabst Blue Ribbon watering holes.

"Hip" to me has a positive connotation, while "hipster" does not.

Wikipedia has two Hipster pages. One is "1940s Subculture" one is "Contemporary Subculture".

one is "Contemporary Subculture".

How is the contemporary version differentiated from sheer dickishness?

It's a special kind of dickishness.

I'm going to conclude that hipsters are a largely mythical being existing only to be the subject of other people's ire.

I'd invite you to come with me to Wicker Park and see them in their natural habitat, but I haven't been over there in a while and they may have moved on to other Pabst Blue Ribbon watering holes.

He doesn't need to go that far - we've got 'em all over this city. Valencia is a hotbed, in particular.

Heh. This is pretty cute:

In a Huffington Post article entitled "Who's a Hipster?", Julia Plevin argues that the "definition of 'hipster' remains opaque to anyone outside this self-proclaiming, highly-selective circle". She claims that the "whole point of hipsters is that they avoid labels and being labeled. However, they all dress the same and act the same and conform in their non-conformity" to an "iconic carefully created sloppy vintage look".

Elise Thompson, an editor for the LA blog LAist argues that "people who came of age in the 70s and 80s punk rock movement seem to universally hate 'hipsters'", which she defines as people wearing "expensive 'alternative' fashion[s]", going to the "latest, coolest, hippest bar...[and] listen[ing] to the latest, coolest, hippest band." Thompson argues that hipsters "...don’t seem to subscribe to any particular philosophy... [or] ...particular genre of music." Instead, she argues that they are "soldiers of fortune of style" who take up whatever is popular and in style, "appropriat[ing] the style[s]" of past countercultural movements such as punk, while "discard[ing] everything that the style stood for."[16]

I don't know. The co-option of cool as a marketable commodity is a pretty old gripe. Not that I don't think it happens, as obviously it does. It might be that it's reached a sort of peak of Uncooling All The Previous Cool things by marketing and clueless adoption.

Then again, every cohort that turns thirty and settles into their career/life/family declares that irony is dead when they really just mean they need to wear sensible shoes or their backs hurt.

This is a pretty deft analysis:

Rob Horning developed a critique of hipsterism in his April 2009 article "The Death of the Hipster" in PopMatters, exploring several possible definitions for the hipster. He muses that the hipster might be the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics," or might be "...a kind of permanent cultural middleman in hypermediated late capitalism, selling out alternative sources of social power developed by outsider groups, just as the original 'white negros' evinced by Norman Mailer did to the original, pre-pejorative 'hipsters'—blacks...." Horning also proposed that the role of hipsters may be to "... appropriat[e] the new cultural capital forms, delivering them to mainstream media in a commercial form and stripping their inventors... of the power and the glory...".[15] Horning argues that the "...problem with hipsters" is the "way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how 'cool' it is perceived to be," as "...just another signifier of personal identity."

Particularly this bit...

Furthermore, he argues that the "hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene" or the way that they transform the situation into a "self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit."

This complaint is basically small subcultures bitching about Poseurs and Wannabes writ large.

Can there be a cute way to expose ass crack?

Jeans makers apparently think so! @@

I woke up early and decided not to go back to sleep. This may have been a mistake.