Hip hip foray! A closer look at hipster culture.

It's wonderful living in Vancouver because you get to travel back in time without going anywhere at all.  Everyone knows this city was built in the middle of a great big rainforest, but very few people understand that it's also built on a wrinkle in time.  

You don't believe me, do you? That's alright.  I'm all for the scientific method. Question everything. Ask for answers. Then  sit back and observe time rippling before your eyes. It's always the same: first the movement happens.  Then it's over.  Then the movie comes out, and then suddenly Vancouver is all over it. Remember the movie Premium Rush? The curtain closed on that one almost before it opened, and yet...

      

right here, right now, today there is a casting call out for Real Hipsters of Vancouver.                                                     

Georgia Straight

A conspiracy theorist might see it as a plot to employ the purposefully unemployed, but no.  Occam's Razor says what you see is what you get. Science likes to keep it simple stupid, or KISS, too.  No, there's no conspiracy here. Someone out there actually believes that this show is a good idea.  Isn't that cute?  

It will take a little bit of creative chutzpah and an ironic twist of fate, or two, to pull this off in the very same province whose government chose to spend taxpayers' dosh on adverts like this one, seen plastered all over public transit in 2012:

That's right.  They chose to target their transit-riding twenty-something electorate for ridicule, instead of doing a good turn and offering the film industry a few temporary tax concessions to stop the exodus of work to points East, despite a strong, grass-roots petition.  

 Isn't that ironic? 

Consider how well suited to the film industry gainfully unemployed hipsters can be...

The casting call is for hipsters who are following their dream instead of taking the predictable path, and it's even a paying gig, and so what do you know?  The hipsters are coming out in droves. It's nothing more than a casting call at this stage, but it's creating quite a buzz.  

Says Marsha Lederman of the Globe and Mail: 

“We’re looking for young people that have maybe chosen to follow a dream other than necessarily graduating from college and doing a 9-to-5 [job], people that are paving their own way, whether it be their art or music or anything that says a lot about our generation and how people are doing things like that independently and on their own,” says Irvin, who has acted since she was 10, with TV credits including Smallville, Vand Little Men.

Resurrected Bottecchia found on a downtown dumpster.

I found myself drifting off, staring at the wall, wondering what it is, exactly, which defines a hipster.  Relativity holds true in all things, and so the definition of a hipster depends largely upon who is defining it, right?  Irvin reluctantly admits that she is a hipster, and what do you know?  Her view of what defines a hipster stands in stark contrast to that of the Government of British Columbia.

All of which leads me to the obvious question:

Does anybody actually know what a hipster is?

Urban Dictionary says hipsterism is a state of mind,

and hipsters are typically in their twenties and thirties, though according to Irvin "the ageing hipster is an interesting  sub-category.'  The man argued that it must be so.  He figures hipsters have been around for at least ten years, and some people must have started out young and carried on...  

And then it dawned on me.

I thought of the man and his passion for re-building bicycles,

 all things retro

simpler things and simpler times, when people fixed things instead of tossing them out.

It was one of those moments. Ah Ha.
That's what happened to him.

 I mentioned something about living fossils, but he was non-plussed.  Of course.  That's the thing about hipsters.  They will never admit to being one.  They can't.

If you've put out a casting call for hipsters, this might pose an issue.

Technically, anyone who willingly puts themselves forth as a hipster is by definition NOT a hipster.  They are a scenester, which is not at all the same thing at all.  The Real Hipsters of Vancouver will never go out to a casting call.  The Real Hipsters don't see themselves as hipsters at all.

I was pondering this paradox as we rode home, when someone called out the man's name.  It was Rod Kirkham and friends, and again...
an Ah Ha moment.

Authenticity.

Rod and his enormous circle of friends were hipsters waaaaaay before such a thing existed.
They rode bikes before it was cool, not because they had to, but because they loved to. Still do. For them, it's not counter-culture, it's their culture, it's who they are, and because of them, we have progressive city planners embracing the development of a healthy transportation alternative.

It's not contrived reality tv, it's reality.  I'd like to nominate them all as the Real Hipsters of Vancouver..