Layabout boys of the kind Joan Fontaine was being ware of in Suspicion are all over the place now. This is a junk economy and it’s hard out here for a wimp.
No, but seriously: lots of intricately-talented boys-II-men are not being amazing people who run landscaping businesses. We dj languidly twice a week or make Beatles murals on the side or remain glamorously underpublished writers who share EBT with girls who consent to bed us. And all of them, the girls, have jobs.
A notorious scene-party planner in a fair city south of here got on Facebook once and spoke to this point with much more than a modicum of lols. It was her opinion that modern boys are just lazy, like Guy Pierce in Mildred Pierce I guess. But she thought it was funny! While all the broke-ass dudes she knows are off drinking Tecate and throwing the empty cans into the kitchen while Toro y Moi plays, she is busy baking them pies or drafting emails to talk them into building her a new photo booth.
I don’t know which is the sharper detail, that there are currently more women than men in law school and medical school or that so many of them are chill with male partners who don’t really ‘do’ anything.
The eternal joke about hipsters everyone pretends to get is that none of them actually call themselves that. Nick Valensi of the Strokes, who were a band in New York in the pre-buzz era, called himself a cheesy hipster in Spin once; it was like pulling a fire alarm. Everyone huddled on the curb in bathrobes, wondering what it meant.
I used to think I was the only guilty man in Shawshank, that everything I did probably screamed hipster and that was okay. About a million years ago I was gearing up to go to this thing and I remember sort of idly saying how everyone there would be more hipster than me and the person I was about to go with sneered “that’s not possible”. I’m sure the look on my face was like 502: bad gateway. But not because I objected; because she thought it was a relevant criticism.
It’s more discrete now than a storm of trucker hats in 2003; still, people actually think you’re homogenizing them by saying “you look rather homeless.” When Olivia Wilde gets mistaken for street people, it’s probably time to stop denying you’re a thrift-store junkie. And I wouldn’t say Olivia Wilde’s a hipster but I bet she’ll pocket-tweet about Twin Sister any second now.
Apparently it’s not enough to just have a certain aesthetic and little money. I don’t always eat organic, I find Mission life appalling, and I definitely don’t like Bon Iver. Annette Bening’s bit in The Kids Are All Right about hating heirloom tomatoes and hemp-milk: I wanted to give that its own room in the museum of me.
You find yourself befuddled by a middle-class morality, Ricky Roma says in GGR, get shut of it. Nevermind that he was selling something, this is a nexus of sorts to all the overeducated underemployed hipster males in MMAs all over the country; we never appropriated working-class details in a cloud of ironic sweat. We go to dive bars and donut shops and wear well-worn Pendletons* because grizzled clock-punching lunch-bucket working stiffs are people we actually envy every bit as much as we envy relevant artists.
Going to some site, performing manual labor and shooting pool afterward seems like surviving trench warfare to us. People with regular job-type jobs, from Chilean miners to Somali pirates, are real-ass heroes with credentials to burn and we don’t even like Bruce Springsteen.
What Do People Do All Day? is not just a really awesome Richard Scarry book. Living in a post-jobs apocalypse is surreal but in this really parallel way: people who are used to not working find people with mainstream experience afield in their dayless drift and are benumbed by the new equality. Meanwhile the people with mainstream experience who got laid off by George Clooney, Mitt Romney, or some rounded-off decimal point in-between are going to the store in the middle of the day, in the most non-heroic of guises. And we need them on that wall.
My favorite season of The Wire will always be Two, the one with the docks—a bunch of ramshackle mokes at street level, in their hats and vests, going to the same bar every night to drink beer with a domesticated duck. That’s the only season where I liked the marks better than the cops. It made me want to be fifty and in a union. (You could also say that about every James Gray movie, actually.)
My dad is a systems analyst for the state of California. I don’t know what that means but sometimes I imagine him at his desk and there is no The Soul Is Not A Smithy horror to it. I wonder what it’s like and why getting and keeping a job you can’t really describe but is actually out there, holding up the grid, is so beyond so many of us.
*I do not wear these.
