A Hipster Speaks Out

Now, I wouldn’t say that my body is fueled solely by American Spirits and Americanos from Broadway Café in Westport, but I wouldn’t deny the fact, either. Often times I find myself sitting on a bench outside of the café, conversing in depth with self-proclaimed “fellow literary critics” on Bukowski’s transcendent prose or Vonnegut’s misanthropic undertones in “Cat’s Cradle.” When I pull out my unpublished manuscript by J.D. Salinger, I really turn heads — it’s disgusting, these people’s obvious admiration and longing to be in my place. “He was a good family friend,” I tell them, rolling my eyes at their tongues lolling out of their mouths and their wagging tails sprouting out of the seat of their pants.

If, by mistake, a page of one of my wholesale Moleskine notebooks is exposed on my lap and is read by one of these dogs, I am bombarded with compliments. “How old are you?” they ask me. “When did you come up with the concept for a second-century slave overthrowing the bourgeois of that time to publish an incitement for worldwide revolution?”

I will say it now — I reject like the taste of meat in my mouth all claims that my prose is akin to Kerouac’s. It is, simply put, better.

Sitting on these benches, my lit cigarette looks like a quill in my right hand. Broadway frequenters have come to call me “The Bard,” shaming both me and themselves. The dogs ask me to “bum a cig,” as if one of my metaphorical quills will somehow help get their Beatnik-copped manuscripts published. Please. I can see right through their “worldly” facades, can see the Billboard-Top-100-listening skeletons inside of them, whose only aspiration is to be spit on by an inebriated Drake in a sold-out Sprint Center show downtown. I mean, Drake? Please.

Music is one of those things that I have come to think about less and less over time. I can’t risk revealing the artists I do listen to, as my writing their band names down for the public eye would squash any chance I might have of ever listening to them again. I can tell you that when Spike Jonze called me up to inform me that he was featuring Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” in the trailers for his film adaptation of “Where The Wild Things Are,” the Canadian buzzband became D2M (or, in layman’s terms, dead to me). I shortly thereafter took to tuning my car radio to white noise on an AM channel — I bet no one is listening to this, I thought. A Grammy last year? Dead. To. Me. I would’ve snapped my first-edition copy of “Funeral” in half again if I had the chance. I was a level above, am a level above, but you don’t hear me bragging about it.

No offense, but I don’t think there has been or ever will be a baby born with such pristine bone structure as my own. When I was laying in my redwood crib, not but two feet tall, my parents’ good friend Wes (or as most of you know him, Wes Anderson) saw my shining face smiling up at him and halted production on “The Royal Tenenbaums,” for, I kid you not, two weeks, trying to convince his team to wait 20 years until I was old enough to play Margot Tenenbaum. Even at the tender age of nine months, I knew how to turn down a bad offer — and did so, with what my parents documented on VHS as “Baby’s First Eye-Roll.”

Around the time of my 12th birthday, I found myself in an unassuming gas station in The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Wisconsin. As I leafed through the racks of ironic souvenirs in the back, a man that the world has come to know as “Bawn Eye-vuhr” (ahem, it’s Justin Vernon) strolled through the door, slouching and brooding in the manner that I’ve come to know so well in the past six years. We struck up a conversation, as I had recognized him as the face of Volcano Choir, a project he had posted on a Myspace music page, and he sullenly told me he was currently recording a new album out in the woods. Some of you may know this album as “For Emma, Forever Ago,” but you may not know the part I played in its production. I’ve tried to deny the claims of the media that I am Justin’s muse and the sole influence on “For Emma,” but lying to the general public has just become too tiring. Sadly, I haven’t spoken to Justin since his appearance at the God-Awful Grammys last year and I don’t plan on doing so any time soon.

Before that, when I was on my Buddhism kick in the fifth grade, I sold all of my worldly possessions and moved out of my parents’ home in Fairway, choosing to rent out a single-room loft in the Crossroads district when it was still in its prime. The only items in the flat were my original Salvador Dali pieces that I had collected as gifts from foreign museum curators, who thought that my own street art should be preserved and hung in their institutions and told me so. Often. “You’re the original Banksy,” they cooed in their respective tongues, hoping I would reveal the secrets of my urban art trade. As if.

After months spent traveling abroad, I would return to my loft for short periods of time to litter the floor and walls with these gifts and focus on my art. I slept on the finished hardwoods, ate organic berries from a neighbor’s unattended garden and had a single exposed light bulb hanging from my ceiling by which to scribe my eventually-Pulitzer-prize-winning works. I sold the place just last year, actually, when I read about the Zuccotti Park protests in my AdBusters subscription and set up a tent outside the Liberty Memorial. What can I say? Activism comes as naturally as breathing to someone like me. I wonder how my low-life classmates feel when they wake up in their Pottery Barn bed frames every morning and eat a meal prepared by their loving mother or father, I think every time I wake up in a damp sleeping bag. They must have nothing to live for.

You might’ve seen me in one of those YouTube (or BoobTube, as I have come to call it since its sell-out to Google in 2006) videos documenting PETA protestors who destroy furs at runway shows. When I was 14, I once threw a full liter of stage blood onto Jessica Stam’s fox-fur parka during New York Fashion Week. After the show was over and she had washed the congealed red starch out of her hair, she approached me to tell me that she admired my nerve and asked me out for drinks. I politely declined – “I don’t fraternize with murderers,” is what I said. You should’ve seen her face. Besides, fur is so 2004.