Word: jazz
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...attention that two friends pay to one another. The idea is to follow your friend's hand carefully as you approach it, making sure that you meet in the same way—shake, snap, slap, or pound. I learned from B that hand manners are like jazz. They are not about exclusion—they are about sympathetic improvisation...
...Guild to agitate for Party causes. He also worked on some B movies. On Winter Carnival (1939), a fictionalizing of the annual Dartmouth frolic, his co writer was F. Scott Fitzgerald, cadging for jobs in California after the drying up of his first act as the chronicler of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald would die in 1940, leaving his Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon famously unfinished. Schulberg took the inside-movies notion, ran with it and produced What Makes Sammy...
...Though the irony-sporting, status quo-abhorring, plaid-clad denizens of Williamsburg are a distinctly modern species, the hipster as a genus has its roots in the 1930s and '40s. The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene. The word's origins are disputed - some say it was a derivative of "hop," a slang term for opium, while others think it comes from the West African word hipi, meaning to open one's eyes. But gradually it morphed into a noun, and the "hipster" was born...
...Hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed. But the subculture grew, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement: Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg were early hipsters, but it would be Norman Mailer who would try and give the movement definition. In an essay titled "The White Negro," Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death - annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity - and electing instead to "divorce oneself from society, to exist without...
Afterward, lots of supernice Christian people complimented my Christian-bashing jokes, including Tony Guerrero, Saddleback's director of creative arts, who also throws a jazz and Shakespeare festival at the church. I asked him what exactly the point of all this was, and he said, "If you look back in history, most of the arts were done for the church. All the music of Bach and Mozart was written for the church. We'd like it to be a hub for the arts again." Even back in the Renaissance, for every Michelangelo, there were probably five guys on a stage...