THE JO-TEL … where long-form blogging comes to die

I thought the final nail in the hipster-as-cultural-movement coffin was the massive country-wide high school social power shift away from preps and jocks and toward hipsters and skaters. Like, every girl under the age of 18 that lives in the greater LA area — regardless of race, creed, or socioeconomic position — looks like Tegan and Sarah. Haircuts! Edgy! It’s frightening and depressing.

But really that wasn’t it. Fake eyeglasses is it. (And the two nails are related in part, as the younger the movement adherent the more eager to prove their bona fides by adopting the latest style cues.)

Now, I’ll be the first Jim Rome fan to admit that his style of dismissive mockery is limited in usefulness and impact, in that it mostly consists of repeating the thing to be mocked with increasing levels of disgusted inflection — but it does have its place, like now:

“Fake eyeglasses? Pff! Come on. Fake EYEglasses?!?! Lame. Really, come on people. FAKE EYEGLASSES?!?!? Alvin, what do you think of that? What? People who don’t actually need glasses wearing glasses with non-prescription lenses as an accessory? Pff! Come on. Get real!”

I mean, okay. My eyes are horrible. I’ve worn glasses since I was 6 and despite their considerable gauge, I was able to largely escape mockery in my youth somehow. But my anger at this trend isn’t rooted in, like, personal offense. It’s just stupid as fuck.

I guess that hipsters got together and decided that between shoes, hats, scarves, leggings, arm warmers, fingerless gloves, headbands, wristbands, bangles, necklaces, dangly earrings, handbags, cardigans, hoodies, sunglasses, tattoos and ethnically ambiguous significant others, there just wasn’t any opportunity to EXPRESS ONE’S INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH ACCESSORIES!

I guess they just had to adopt the trappings of the visually impaired to round everything out. What’s next? Fake hearing aids? Prosthetic limbs? Trying to get your Lhasa Apso designated a guide dog? In a year is DUMBO going to be overrun with hipsters in electric wheelchairs, drooling onto their sticker-covered voice keyboards?

Full disclosure: Like any hipster worth his salt, I deny that I am a hipster and scoff at other hipsters for being totes fake and lame durrhhh. But ALSO, like any hipster worth his salt, I like to get together with my hipster friends and laugh at other youth demographics, like the Hollywood-type douchebags dipped head to toe in Ed Hardy. Ah ha! How hilarious! I mean, look at those gelled-up guidos. How much better — as a group — are we than them? I know, right?!?! SO much!

But the fake eyeglasses thing, I just can’t countenance. It’s too self-conscious. Too transparent (no pun intended!). It causes self-respecting hipsters like myself to come face to face with the fact that my group of friends is not exempt from the sorts of crippling self-esteem deficits and cries for acceptance that would cause someone to go to Ed Hardy and blow $85 on a t-shirt.

I used to have a rule about upside-down and backwards visors. It was a simple rule, and effective in social interactions. “If any person in your crew wears an upside-down and backwards visor, your whole crew is automatically uncool.” It invalidated your entire crew by proxy. This rule was never, to my knowledge, broken.

In the years since I formulated that rule, I have substituted other items for the visor, most notably the “t-shirt that features any combination of the following: a skull, angel wings, a bleeding heart, general paint splatters.” But now I must lay down the law and say that fake eyeglasses are the new upside-down and backwards visors.

As a hipster, I have had to swallow my tongue while friends danced drunk on the fashion precipice, experimenting with things like suit vests over t-shirts and slitty Kanye shades. But if I find out that any of my friends have been wearing fake eyeglasses, it’s over between us.

Love,
PETE