Hipster

c. 1954, Jack Kerouac, Untitled poem, in Book of Sketches, 1952-57, Penguin, 2006, p. 239, I, poor French Canadian Ti Jean become / a big sophisticated hipster esthete in / the homosexual arts […]

The other people in the urine-odored hall stood silently waiting for the hipster to disappear between the tables, to be dropped there by the stocky white detective.

Clare grapples with the idea that she, a well-dressed city hipster, will soon be in the boondocks raising a child with two men who are as much in love with each other as with her: "I'm not this unusual," she stammers. "It's just my hair."

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker seem like the kind of late-1960s hypercerebral born-cynical East Coast hipsters who are often found valorizing authenticity in aesthetic expression.

And his conclusion is that in a vast range of scenarios, the hipster population always undergoes a kind of phase transition in which members become synchronized with each other in opposing the mainstream. In other words, the hipster effect is the inevitable outcome of the behavior of large numbers of people.

Heading home from a party, two hipsters, completely stoned, pause to snuggle on a park bench. A fire engine roars by, bells clanging, sirens screaming. The boy flips. “Solid, doll,” he murmurs, “they’re playing our song!”

(from Kentucky backcountry moonshine)

But it was a white staff member of a reform school who gave Claude Brown the first notion he ever had that there might be something in the world besides dope and sex and hipstering.