Stumptown coffee roasters has roasted the greatest coffee blend in the universe. Its called Hairbender, and it made me contemplate quitting drinking coffee altogether, to protect my memory of perfection. Instead I bought half a pound and am gonna be chasing the dragon all week long.
Which brings me to a pseudo-buddhist “wantlessness” ideal that have been rattling around in my head for a little while. Does the cultivation of a hobby, a taste for a particular food or drink, or a certain form of entertainment turn you into a slave?
Consider the quintessential Williamsburg/Mission hipster. Not only does he judge himself and everyone else by what they like, but he has to actively pursue cutting edge culture in order to maintain his identity as unique/indie/contra/anti/apathetic to the point of trendiness. As the things you like become mainstream, should you celebrate the success of their authors or should you decry the emblandening of haute culture, the loss of the subtlety that only you and your elitist friends can appreciate, and the frustration of having to throw out anything that was featured in Juno?
Aristotle and So-Crates had this little tiff about whether or not anything was inherently “good”. I’d take it one step further- if you don’t like something for its inherent quality then what draws you to it? Sure, we’re all gonna look back on today’s trends and laugh about how dumb our hair looked without hairspray, highlights, feathered tips, and bangs, but no one claims that fashion is anything more than an innocuous combination of sex appeal and fads…
Except the hipster, of course. For him, fashion is political. It’s as if, deprived of membership in an ethnic minority, he must brand himself downtrodden, a sufferer of the indignity of being born to sell-out parents in a generation swollen with MTV watching morons. The girl jeans and self-consciously working-class shirts are a symbol of his pseudo-racial status not only as an outsider, but as an insider in the class of outsiders that pre-emptively hates you and judges you because, like, you were totally going to judge them and hate them for not eating meat or driving cars or listening to pop music. Isn’t that ironic? Maybe it’s intentionally ironic? Is it so intentionally ironic that its meta-ironic?
The saddest thing about the hipsters is that they are totally right. Mainstream culture sucks. Everything is stupid and violent and sanitized and product-placed and derivative and mass-produced. Except that some of it isn’t- there are still good movies and good bands and good food, and if you’re a yuppy bastard you’ll drink it in and ignore/revel in the fact that all of the above are far too expensive for normal people to enjoy. This dilemma is embodied by the Clover coffee machine. It costs $11,000 and there are 90 coffee shops in America that have one, and it is basically infinitely customizable. Supposedly it makes the best cup of coffee you could ever imagine, assuming the person running it knows what they’re doing. Micro-roasters and super-hip coffee joints have scrambled to get them but they’re in short supply because the company is so new. Enter Starbucks.
A couple weeks ago Starbucks bought the company that makes Clovers, and promptly stopped selling them. As in, “f*ck off, independent, quality-minded coffee people, cuz I’m the juggernaut, bitch!” Stumptown, makers of the aforementioned greatest coffee blend in the universe, promptly sold its Clovers so that it would never have to cut a check to Starbucks to get the machines serviced. Why?
Because the greatest irony of hipster culture is that its basically the same thing as being addicted to heroin. No matter how close you get to retrieving that sublime, truly high quality, nothing else matters because of how god-damn good this is bit of culture, you’ll never get there again. The very same spiteful, judgmental, hypercritical, self-consciously contrary mentality that got you so close comes back around and slaps your hand away from the holy grail at the last moment, because “shit, if other people like this, it must not be as cool as i thought it was.”
Oh well. I guess thats where the Buddhist maxim, “want nothing and nothing becomes satisfaction” comes into play. That’s all well and good, but how un-American! I’m far to patriotic to stop wanting stuff and consuming unnecessarily. And besides, if Buddha conquered his desires, how’d he get so fat?
