Word: hipster
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From its early days, hipness had its aboveground successes -- the movies of James Dean, the comedy routines of Mort Sahl or Mike Nichols and Elaine May. But it took the full emergence of the baby boomers in the '60s to make hipness a force in mass culture. The hipster's stylish alienation was irresistible to youth, for whom style is the best defense against anxiety and alienation is the natural state. For suburban teens in particular, hipness became what romance novels were for Madame Bovary: an antidote to the featureless local realities. In subdivisions where the lawn sprinklers went back...
...those who have discovered it, the new Late Night has found its place as a nightly cultural ritual. It has a personalized and cultivated classic sense fostered by Conan's own penchant for past-hipster 1950's graphics and classic Hollywood photo stills, and a first-rate jazz ensemble fading to commerical with bop-style selections. The peppering of slightly-off Lampoon humor and cutting-edge musical guests propels the show out of the starchy promotion-circuit interview format. After nearly nine months of gestating under constant media scrutiny of the now-hyper-commercialized late night niche, the energy...
Burroughs delivers cheerless homilies with his usual gimlet-eyed glee: "You ever see a dog roll in carrion? Well now, a city boy see that and he might get tempted to join the dog . . ." The old hipster even indulges in a bit of moralizing, making a somewhat heavy-handed connection between the magic bullets and the temptation of drugs...
...Parker. Together, and with the collaboration of a tight core of players like Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and a few others, Dizzy and Bird drove jazz back into itself, straight through its heart and out again, sounding brand-new. Parker -- the racked jazz saint and junkie genius -- fit the hipster stereotype more than his good-timing, glad-handing buddy. But in matters of chops and talent, Gillespie played a supporting role...
...unfilmable Naked Lunch." Even this movie's producer called William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel that, and he was right. A gallimaufry of hallucinations, literary gossip and medical info, Burroughs' confession of a hipster junkie is its own X-rated movie, so vivid is its evocation of a mind gone bad, a soul shriveled. "Gentle reader," he writes, "the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description." Which Burroughs of course describes, in language both raw and heroically ironic. The novel is a detective story in which the private eye is desperate to forget, not learn, life's mysteries; or maybe...