So my sister and I now have a new category, one that is added to on a daily basis: “Too Portland for Portlandia.” But we realized that what we’re REALLY talking about is the ultimate list of hipster things/people/events/concepts. So it’s a larger list than just what we find in the Pacific NW.
And now, I must share. This is something I ACTUALLY, LITERALLY saw two weeks ago. I was at the Riverview Cemetery (the oldest cemetery in Portland, btw.) When you go into the main building, there’s a cheerful, bright office, with people drinking coffee, eating donuts, yelling things across the room at each other… and then…
About twenty yards away, there’s the indoor mausoleum.
So I started going through the three floors of it (doing research for a book… I don’t usually hang out there for fun… although it’s an interesting place, for sure.) On the bottom floor, I turned a dark corner. And there, RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME… was one of these.
In my 20’s, I used to go to a “Drum Gathering” at a local (hipster) bar. While I did enjoy all those percussion instruments playing in unison, 80% of the appeal was to witness the the “Hipsterness” (and the Hipster people) of it all. It was practically oozing out of the walls.
My most “hipster” moment is probably crocheting the occasional poncho for my daughter. I do have a friend though, who lives on a small farm in Vermont. Her husband teaches physics at the local high school, and she teaches Italian and contra-dancing. (She learned Italian while volunteering in the poorest slums of Rome for a year after college.) They have four children, and she raises her own chickens. And since it’s Vermont we’re talking about, I recently sent her a pattern for knitting them sweaters. The chickens that is. . . her husband countered with a link for buying chicken diapers - for urban farmers who keep laying hens in their living rooms.
They built a greenhouse onto the side of their house as much for the passive heat as for Winter vegetables.
I think that’s dapper. There is a guy who owns the coffee shop near my job who wears a fedora, has a handlebar mustache and smokes a pipe. Is that hipster?
There was a night where I went downstairs from my studio apartment above a bagel shop to buy a new record and got my shoes puked on by someone waiting to buy the new Soundgarden album.
