Word: hipster
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...granted to the hipster to grow old gracefully," Mailer wrote in his middle 30s, and there certainly did not, at the time, appear to be a silver-haired patriarch in the author's future. Mailer is now a proud, picture-packing papa, ready to draw his wallet at the least provocation. The walls of the Brooklyn apartment are covered with photographs of the eight Mailer children; mixed in is an old-fashioned studio shot of little Norman, a well-scrubbed tot with jug ears and a mischievous smile. Mailer's and Norris' son, John Buffalo, 5, lives...
Throughout his intense immersion in the time of his times, Norman Mailer has repeated his conviction that making history is preferable to reading it. In his influential essay "The White Negro" (1957), Mailer turned the emerging social type known as the hipster into a daring pioneer adrift in "the perpetual climax of the present," freed of all moral guides and codes of conduct except the thrumming of his own nervous system. The author specifically disavowed any precedents for this existential frame of mind: "If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic...
Flash and the Five sport a wardrobe that goes for a lot of "gusto," money, in straight talk, so their audience would be hard pressed for direct imitation. Like rapper talk, which pulls in language from such diverse sources as '40s hipster, '60s hippie and even cockney rhyming slang (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn's crime-haunted Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, is "Do or Die"), rapper flash is eclectic. The jeans, the leathers, the heavy personalized belt buckles, even the jewelry, are modifications of street-gang uniforms. A lot of the aggressive energy that once went into street fighting...
...subject matter provides a considerable sociological analysis. His insightful 1957 essay "The White Negro" is a prophetic vision of the hip consciousness that would develop in the next decade. Mailer said that the specter of the atom bomb and the fear of our collective death produced "the American hipster" who was predominantly religious and dealt with the fears "by seeking out the rebellious imperatives of the self." This piece also marked the beginning of Mailer's preoccupation with the New Left, which not only influenced radicals like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin but also involved him personally in politics...
...shared assumptions of the Woodstock generation, he insists, "rock isn't the best possible tool for insulting your parents or establishing the fact that you are a free person. Kids are too cool for that now." Certainly the music is cool, not in Wexler's hipster sense, but in mean degrees. A go-for-broke performer-someone who, like Springsteen or Pete Townshend, has the temerity to believe that rock not only matters, but matters deeply-is working out of a hot center that no longer exists. Such an attitude even a decade ago would have been...