provinciality

Last night, I was up against the stage for Freshly Ground, staring right up at Zolani & co. The music was amazing, but the showmanship was something else. I had some lovely eye contact with the flute / saxophone / harmonica player, but was too damn shy to do anything about it after the show, even though this is a small town and the band was, as my friends and I were, hanging out at the hotel bar afterwards. (You know you're in Gabs when: a) everyone, including the band, is hanging out at the same bar; and b) the bar closes before the poor band members can even order a drink.) But what could I think to say besides, 'That was some amazing fluttertonguing you had going on tonight'? When I'm feeling shy, I only have two modes of interaction: bashful, and totally inappropriate.

I was also asked to write some haiku for a friend's birthday to supplement a collection of hipster haiku. I live in Gabs, people, which is a very strange place in which to meditate upon hipsters. But seeing Freshly Ground in Gabs at least bespeaks aspirations to a certain quality of urban, cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile-ish existence. In other words, provinciality is a shifter, folks. What counts as centre and periphery is always contextual.

I'm hardly immune to this; I spent most of the show meditating on moving to Cape Town. And this while I've been searching for a way to move away from Gabs to someplace less urban. Figuring out where to live for my research while trying to remain critical of representations of the centrality of the village to ethnographic research is a pain in the ass. All that to say that hipster as an aesthetic has its particularities from where I stand.

So, drawn from a combination of social commentary, self-reflexivity, and self-mockery, here are a few observations from the collection I sent out this morning.

Wi-fi internet:
I commute from coffee shops.
Isn't facebook work?

Rectangular frames,
stripy highlights in your hair;
I'm tired of this look.


Your vodka tonics
are where when you calculate
your carbon footprint?


If complaining were
a sport, you would now have won
the first gold medal.


It's great to hear you
and Bono will save the world.
Keep your day-job, eh?


What is a hipster?
Sarcasm feels like a hug,
snarky is like love.


Let's save the whales! But
don't forget the Africans;
they are both so cute.


Exploitation with
warm fuzzies: compassionate
capitalism.


Your politics are
fine, it's your attitude that
makes me want to hurl.