Time to answer some of your questions. What I have done is read everything I got from you, and then swiftly erase it so as to make only the most striking and fundamental questions rise to the top of my memory. As you might guess, many of these questions revolve around a central theme: How do I define myself? It's a fair question to ask, after all, here I am bagging on hipsters, a 'naysayer', but where the hell do I get off, right?

Simply put: Every situation I have encountered with hipsters, every conversation I have ever entered, has been a complete disappointment, a repulsive disgrace. Why you ask? Because hipsters don't know how to speak, they only know how to mimic. Every syllable is as hollow as a chocolate bunny, and what's more, instead of keeping their miserable mouths shut until they DO have something to say, they twist and tangle genuine expression into an embarrassingly ill-concocted 'ironic' sludge. I suppose I first noticed this trend five or six years ago when upon striking up a little chit-chat with a roundly tattooed and chain-walleted fellow at a coffeeshop (Eugene), every communication hinged upon some matter of taste: This band, that 'film,' what type of beer I drank ('dude, you should really try Black Label') and on and on and on and on and on he dragged me around this barometric tether of trivia. I shook my head, and finally (against my good instincts) I agreed to attend a gathering of his friends. It would be nice to say: 'Little did I know ...' but of course Eugene made it abundantly clear that I was (by this lucky fluke) about to enter at the very top of the hipster food chain, on the very cutting edge of cool, on the precipice of pragmatism: I was invited to his Guided By Voices listening party. This was an affair I shall never forget: the Pollard story, the Pollard pose, the Pollard shirt, the Pollard drink, the Pollard sing-along, the endless stream of homoerotic jokes (rendered all the more pathetic by the near absence of women). There was one other woman there: 'Ophelia,' a tweedy, frumpy, spectacled, couch-bound little wench who thumbed ferociously through a copy of Art Forum the whole time. An affair to remember, indeed. One especially contemptuous pug of a man who smelled of moth balls and wore a tucked-in western-cut polyester button-down (yee-haw) and a pair of thick, black-framed specs set himself to the task of 'documenting this party,' with his Polaroid (how very quaint) and as I left he endowed me with a pile of shots (most taken at reverse arm's length with his throbbing little face squashed against another stoically posed hipster) and said in shocking earnestness, hushed whisper: "hang on to these Aimee, someday they'll be worth something."

These are, of course, the self-styled artists of our time. And I left that party with the one giant question about hipsters, one that I still have not been able to answer, the one that drives me to cringe at their very presence: How in God's name could a group of people so fanatically guided with being critically tasteful, possess such a profound retardation of taste? When it comes down to things as basic as conversational skills and genuine interaction these people rely on quoting Sixteen Candles and Evil Dead II. So you ask: How do I identify myself? I believe we define ourselves primarily in opposition to others, and since I don't readily identify myself positively with any group, my only instinct is to ally myself in the way that comes naturally: I am an Anti-Hipster. I don't know any other way to put it. This is to say that I struggle to find a mode of expression that does not rely on bending the mental refuse of popular culture (song lyrics, movie lines, advertising jingles) into some kind of ironic code that can only be interpreted by those who 'speak the language,' because I find those who speak the language absurd, and I find the language itself absurd.

And like the hipster lingua franca, the hipster environ (think Disney's Mainstreet U.S.A) is replicated in the Mission Districts and Williamsburgs of America, its residents (think giant plush Mickeys and Minnies, and Plutos and Snow Whites) staggering along the vapid streets around bartime chanting Ted Nugent songs and dangling copies of Paper and Shout and the Village Voice and the Weekly from their little purses Sunday afternoon, cackling their way to mimosa brunches to argue the finer points of the post-punk scene. I have slowly grown to despise them.