The Year I Started A Cult So in 1992 we worked on cars. A lot. And being kids, and working on cars, and spending a lot of time dealing with electrical gremlins and the Quest for Top Dead Center and determining whether it's the spark or the vapor that keeps an engine from running, you get superstitious. It didn't help that my mother's faith is basically superstitious animism; any important decisions get run through the I-ching. My father, for his part, is a devout atheist who has been known to cross his fingers when things matter. And in 1992, one of the super-seniors in town bought a GSXR-1000. He had owned it for a couple months before he - and his girl - decided to blitz down main hill road at 85 miles an hour. To no one's surprise, they took it wide. Right into a '76 VW Bus driven by an old English teacher of mine. Everybody survived, miraculously. Think the two of them went through the windshield of the bus, which prevented them from plummeting off the 300-foot cliff to their left. Not before denting in the gas tank of that gixxer six inches with their crotches, however. "Crushed pelvis" is, in my opinion, one of the most evocative phrases in medical literature. So in 1992 we worked on cars. And my buddy… he wanted the fuel filler off that gixxer so bad. So bad he could taste it. And the bike was sitting, wrecked, at Knecht… and it's not like it had any resale value… and it's not like anyone would want a fuel tank doing its best "crushed beer can" impression. So we stole it. Walked right up at midnight and put it in the back of the Subaru. It took maybe ten minutes with a couple pairs of Wiss before we had a jaggedy-ass fuel filler and a mangled, gnarled piece of Japanese steel that smelled of blood and Super Unleaded. So what do? "Sacrifice it to the Demon," I said. Do what now? It's not like I had a plan. It's not like it was premeditated. It's not like I even knew what that meant. But my buddy was so enthusiastic that I had to come up with a ritual on the spot. It was a good ritual. It had legs. We would solemnly drive down to the intersection of my street and Club road, where the path led up to the golf course. We would then walk sanctimoniously up the path for the quarter mile or so it took to get to the abandoned water tank. We would then climb up the ladder to the top of the tank, say a few words, and drop the Suzuki carcass in. BAM. Evidence of the crime disposed of, mechanical gremlins that curse all projects appeased, life would go on. And fuckin' A, it was fun. It was infectious. Whenever we needed a little luck, we'd "Sacrifice something to the Demon." No one ever asked who or what the Demon was, or why the Demon lived in an abandoned water tank, or what its peculiar taste for dead car parts was about. However, when you put on a new carburetor, the old carburetor (or whatever parts you could scavenge, presuming you needed the old one for a core charge) would go to The Demon. And over the course of a year or two, certain embellishments appeared: - The odometer must be reset before driving to the path - Music must not be played and words must not be said - Wild Turkey must be poured on the ground before approaching the Sanctum Sanctorum, i.e., the Golf Course - An incantation must be recited: "Oh great and mighty Demon we approach thee with no fear in our hearts and no hatred in our souls, we seek your benefaction in pursuit of mechanical excellence" - The path must not be deviated from and no words could be said until all participants reached the top of the water tank - Another incantation must be recited by the officiant - "Oh great and mighty Demon we request a boon from thee" - prior to the donor requesting specific or general benefits ("I humbly request, O Demon, that the rear main seal on the small block we just put in the Hote not leak"). - Wild Turkey must be poured upon the demon prior to the donation and after, and then everyone must drink (at which point, all solemnity was off - we were just a bunch of teenagers sneaking booze on top of an abandoned water tank a hundred yards off the golf course on a Wednesday) - Silence and solemnity must be observed back to the car It was only when I started thinking about what sacrifices I'd make to the Demon to make my own monster run that I realized I'd not only conjured a religion from whole cloth, I'd taken it from animism to Catholicism in the space of nine months. Gotta say, it gave me pause. Gotta say it also gave me some insight into human nature - I was an angry, angry, ANGRY atheist at the time, or so I thought. Yet I needed this ritual. My success depended on it. There was no "demon" before I invented it on a whim, yet I was completely spun up in a fantasy of my own making. "And Man created God in his own image." - Ivan Albright I wish I could say I laughed at myself, set my hobo horde of nuts and bolts aside and went on to lead a spiritually rich yet trapping-free life, but that would be a lie. I went and did my sacrifice. Alone. Just in case. I asked about a girl, too. * * * That was the last time I sacrificed anything to the Demon. Most of us, the core three or four, let it lie. We still drank bourbon, we still believed it unlucky to fix a car without the car drawing blood at least once in the process, and the Kawasaki fuel filler never did make its way onto a car - too difficult. The ricer phenomenon ten years later proved we were on to something. I did have a friend, though. Not a close friend, but a friend. He liked tagging along. And one night he came to me because he needed a sacrifice, and he needed it bad. He'd brought along another friend that had never participated in our rituals. Could I officiate over one more? I demurred - I had shit to do and this was getting weird. They pressed, though. They needed some luck. So I split the difference - I explained the important parts of the ritual and that they could carry on without me. They did. For years. That particular spot of forest burned down in 2000. They condemned the water tank and tore it down.
You are close enough in your analysis but let me expand on why I find the term Hipster offensive and stupid, both generally and specifically. I know three households in my neighborhood that keep chickens. One house has both chickens and goats, they grow a wide variety of vegetables and fruits. The people who own the house are in their late thirties or early forties. They have something of a "hippie" aesthetic in their dress. I find them somewhat creepy, they aggressively accused me of calling the police about a possibly illegally parked RV outside their house, which I did not do. The RV in question was about a half block from my house, it wasn't in my way and it was a pretty cool looking older model vehicle that I thought was cool. One block from my house are a couple that I presume to be professionals by their dress and hours. They are in their late thirties, a tad overweight, keep several raised beds of vegetables and assorted herbs and greens. Nice folks, they talk to my kid about their chickens. I can't imagine anyone picking them out of a crowd as different from anyone else. The third house once again has a garden which I can't tell you much about as it's raised up and behind a fence. I don't know much about the people who live there except that at least one gentleman who lives there appears to be in skilled trades or construction. He has a workmanlike truck and his dress is that of a man who does some kind of physical labor. I'd say he is in his early thirties. They have a large sun with a painted face on the side of one of their sheds. I don't know what makes these people "hipsters" maybe someone else can tell me. I will dip my toe into what I think people who use the term "hipster" are really getting at here and expand it a bit more later. Keeping chickens is something not everyone chooses to do and it is in fact something which is somewhat novel to many people. It could be seen as a fad or a hip thing to do. A person who bandies about the term "hipster" sees people who choose to keep chickens as someone who chooses to do something they would never do for no other reason than to be different, cool, or try to be hip. Keeping chickens is different from what many people choose to do and different is not something that many people like. So maybe these chicken keepers in my neighborhood aren't "hipsters" because they have kept chickens for many years, they are doing it to provide food not because it's the "hip" thing to do. Maybe it's the people who keep chickens and give them up who are "hipsters." I have a friend who kept chickens. He is an overweight fortysomething math teacher at a community college. He is married has a teenage son, a pre-teen daughter, a toddler and as of last week a new daughter, his mother also lives with his family in an attached mother in law cottage. He has unruly hair and has been known to leave the house in sweatpants. He kept several chickens but when his son started crawling that he didn't want his son to crawl in chicken shit and didn't want to keep the chickens that weren't allowed to roam in an open space. He decided that keeping chickens was no longer for him and gave them away. Is my friend a "hipster?" To me he sounds like a person that formerly kept chickens and found that continuing to keep chickens was no longer for him. I don't personally think that he needs a special derogatory category that accentuates his difference, I think he is just a person who chose for a time to keep chickens. When I was a kid my father kept chickens. My dad wasn't particularly popular with his neighbors, he is a strange guy rubs many people the wrong way. He also kept bees and built me a stilt fort that stood fifteen feet off the ground these were both things that the neighbors tried to get the city to make his stop doing or tear down. The neighbors couldn't do anything about the bees or the stilt house, but the chickens were declared farm animals and my dad was forced to get rid of them. See my dad was different from the other neighbors, they couldn't relate to him, did their best to try to get him to live a life like their own. I don't think my dad, in his overalls with his checkbook tucked in one breast pocket and sunglasses in the other, mesh tank top clad, workboot shod, garden spade and pruners in the back pocket buzzcut sporting father was a "hipster", but he was different from most his neighbors, and they did their best to make him conform or be ostracized. So maybe my friend or my dad isn't a "hipster." Maybe a "hipster" is a person who has chickens and gives them to a shelter or lets them starve to death when they realize that keeping chickens isn't for them. It's a pretty narrow definition but if you are comfortable with it I guess that is on you. I work at a bar that is known as a "hipster" bar. People from out of town actually go there to see real "hipster" culture (I shit you not, hipster tourism is real). Let me give you a good idea of what 80-90% of the people who are regulars are like. We have salespeople, nurses, lots of skilled trade and construction workers, tech workers, accountants, cooks, bartenders, musicians, waiters, social workers, teachers, lobbyist, graphic designers, artist, city workers, landlords, call center workers, secretaries, retired people, Vietnam vets and clerks. Racially we have African Americans, West Africans, North Africans, Whites, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, South Americans, Irish Americans, a pair of Germans, Koreans, and Vietnamese Americans. We significant number of our clientele is gay and lesbian. While the average customer is a middle aged straight white person, the average probably holds it's own at about 50% and it's a pretty diverse crowd. I'd say that most regulars have no more than one or two degrees of separation, with most regulars knowing the name of and ready to sit down and have a chat with any other customer who comes in at their normal day or time, regardless or profession, race, sexual preference or social class. Yet still people from out of town come to gawk at the bartender who has a beard that is grown down below his collarbone and ask if we are going to play Def Leppard, because evidently that is what "hipsters" listen to. Having enough space to park 25-30 bicycles and having all that space filled makes us a "hipster" bar, because what kind of people choose to ride bikes when they could drive cars. Because we don't serve redbull, or any energy drinks, we are an elitist hipster bar. Because we don't serve long islands, we are an elitist hipster bar. Because we don't serve drop shots ect... We have a fierce pour at a good price, we don't serve many sugary kiddie drinks, mostly because we don't want to fill the place with young folks slamming sugar shots and crashing thier cars on the way home. It's basically a non homogeneous space where people freely mix and if you aren't ready to talk to sharply dressed gay or an old grizzled Vietnam vet then it's going to seem a bit different, and different has to be clearly delineated with derogatory language like "hipster" instead of "people who aren't all like me". A local magazine posted a map that scraped yelp for all reviews that had the word "hipster" in it and made a handy map so that people could avoid having to rub shoulders with "hipsters" a while back. People loved it. One poster said something along the lines of "This is great, now we only need one that shows where all the blacks and hispanics are." It was a joke and it wasn't. The poster was obviously remarking that the map was a load of bigoted bullshit but the rest of the commenters didn't seem to think that it was a very witty comment. Their response was "Hey, this is just in fun, it's a joke and if you can't take you just don't understand and don't have a sense of humor." Let me tell you a joke I heard the other day, we'll see how this sits with you. How do you hide something from a Nigger? Put it in a book! I didn't laugh, in fact I pretty much did the opposite vocally. "It's just a joke, lighten up," I was told. I didn't lighten up. If any read here doesn't like that joke and bandies about the term "hipster" then they ought to examine what they are thinking. I'm sure many people think that I'm making an unfair analogy and that I ought to lighten up. An analogy that I always liked was that of the American love of lawns to our conformist society. The perfect American lawn is uniformly green with every blade of grass cut to a perfectly uniform height. Every splotch of lawn that isn't uniformly green and perfectly uniform in height and similarities is a blemish. "hipster" is just the word for those who are different, who don't conform to a neat little box, have an odd hobby, wear a loud shit, like a different kind of music, or keep chickens. "Hipsters" are those who are brave enough or oblivious enough to do what they want instead of doing what everyone else does. "Hipsters" are in fact just people like everyone else, just like blacks are just people with different coloured skin and italians are people who were born in a different place. There is no sense in setting them aside with derogatory language, in fact it makes everyone poorer to set people aside just because they are different. pseydtonne, as far as flouting whatever guidelines for polite decorum which you have set for yourself, I have to say that I set my own guidelines. I reserve a somewhat different set of guidelines when I protest what I think is ignorant and bigoted content. Truth be told my comments were made in hopes of igniting some attention toward the the phenomenon of "hipster" callouts, which didn't really catch on like I hoped. They were purposefully aimed at inciting some discussion of the issue but that didn't seem to take off like I hoped. It looks like you weren't around last time I took on a bit of what I perceived and still believe was racism on Hubski. It was quite a kerfuffle and was I believe a good deal more important than this "hipster" bit I've tried to explore here. There are no rules to Hubski as far as conduct goes, it is a free speech zone and anyone is more than welcome to take umbrage and counter my speech with more delightful free speech. I'm sure that my post could use an edit for brevity and content but I'd rather get it up here now rather than wait a few days when I am free of obligations. Time is pressing, I must wake and feed my daughter before I head to my "hipsterly" duties of getting people drunk.
Rem Koolhaas had a great graph during the recent economic crash where he showed how creativity in architects increased in inverse proportion to the decline of the building industry. His argument is that architects are continually generating ideas regardless of whether or not they can make them, which in turn gives us a surplus of thought that could generate a future full in ingenuity. And the guy talking on stage here is right. Architecture isn't about building, it is about a way a thinking. A friend of mine abides by that rule. I have a different thought about what architecture is and all I can come up with is that it has to do with the practice of connecting something to something else. Preston Scott Cohen says that "architecture is a coincidence". Chew on that. Typical North American building code has in place a division B part 9, designed specifically for small buildings. Small schools, churches, even tiny hotels, and homes are subject under this category. The idea behind this is that there are, and should be, a different set of standards to build these small typologies of necessity. The most paramount being that one does not need to be an architect to get a permit to build them. In some places still, one can go in with a series of hand drawn plans and be able to build. All that would be required is that you've demonstrated a proficient understanding of best building practices within that particular region - information that can easily be gleaned from a few google searches, a bit of reading, and an appreciation to detail. To zoom out for a second, I've always really liked the idea of this because it reminds me of a right to pursue happiness of sorts. The idea that any one can get a bit of land and build a life - literally - without needing specialization is a great thought. Building your own home is something you will always be able to do. Architecture is already democratized. 80% of the buildings around the world are still made from loam. Earth being the most readily available material, and quite literally the byproduct of excavation, it's quite easy to come by, let alone free. Add a bit of fire (free again) and bam - brick. With that in mind, building with plywood and a computer seems a bit of a non starter to me for most places. Plywood can only get wet 7 or 8 times before it's no good, so like he says, just add windows and some cladding. And metal flashing, and building paper, and footings, and hinged doors and and and. Try adding cladding with a mallet made of plywood. What he is essentially proposing here is something akin to a poorly considered first year design project. It isn't nearly as affective as this concrete tent. Waterproof, fireproof, and durable as all get out. Concrete as a matter of fact works pretty well in poor countries with little resource. Those favella towers? Concrete bones with a bit of re-bar, clay infill and a corrugated metal roof. No fifty year warranty needed. Oh, you didn't finish building before the rainy season? No problem. Concrete hardens underwater. Come back next summer and keep going. Above all of this though, is how troubling I find it when a person says that they're giving design to the people and leaving it up to them even though what they've presented is an already intentioned and considered object. The fact that this thing has a gable roof is problematic as it is essentially a symbol of western colonization. There are examples of this all over the world. One that comes to mind is the First Nations people in western Canada. Forced to live in Queen Anne style homes designed by the British, their way of life was completely upended and thus began a string of social woes within the family and community fabric - all bubbling out of the spaces that defined them. Turns out, our buildings rely on us living in them a certain way. And really, just imagine seeing one of these sitting on an almost impossible to develop slope in Rio nestled between two 6 story masonry structures. Does that feel right to anybody? Exporting such a singular icon is not democratization, but homogenization that disregards cultural identity and creeps slow death. Architecture is most alive where regional materials and local social practices are represented in real space and created solely by the people who use them - not flat-packed in plywood and stored on a microchip.