New Experience: Hipster Bars

Your local Renaissance Wannabe is probably already a connoisseur of your local pubs and can accurately name not only which beers are on tap at each bar but also which kinds of whiskey and rum are house favorites for drinks that are supposedly in "Jack and Coke" (Jim and RC?). But even the greatest of connoisseurs don't always know the intricate details of their speciality - for example, when's the last time a wine taster discussed the delicate bouquet of Carlo Rossi? Never, that's when.

So it is with this bar connoisseur. Sure, I know a lot about the bars in town but not those things known as "hipster bars." For the blissfully naive, you might want to know what a hipster is. Well, I've prepared a crash course in hipster-dom below. Warning: this image may not be appropriate for with those with heart conditions:



Additional Warning: Eyes have been shielded to protect the confused.

It's not that I've purposefully avoided this particular segment of the bar scene (ok, that's not true). I avoid it like the plague. Why? Hipsters are possibly the most singularly annoying thing since the Macarena (and at least that was catchy). With their Che T-shirts, thick glasses and overly dramatic sense of everything, hipsters will lecture you on the merits of whatever emo thing they're into and then discuss why they hate mainstream culture (and you specifically) right after. Impromptu crying or slam poetry might also occur.

Well, a very non-hipster friend asked me to come with him a few weeks ago to a bar I've never heard of. While skeptical, I acquiesced ... that was a mistake.

My first clue was the fact that there were lofts advertised as lofts and not condos. Uh oh. I was behind enemy lines, and while we were walking to this place from our cars, I knew that I had gone too far to run screaming back to my car.

Then I saw the first hipster, and they're like cockroaches: if you see one, there's probably thousands more. This one was wearing black waiter pants, carrying some little paperback book and listening to his iPod. To set the scene, I'm almost positive that the little book was Noam Chomsky and the current track was something by Modest Mouse (which, admittedly, I also enjoy).

Then another appeared, and another right after that. Pretty soon I was out of the car and shuffling through a sea of cigarette smoke, weird blue back lighting, dirty pool tables, statues of the Virgin Mary, mohawks, some girl crying her eyes out and a bar literally the size of a ping pong table. Awesome.

My buddy got a 40 of High Life, and I got nothing (no cash and that's all they take). He offered, but I figured drinking would either cause me to say "the truth" or encourage me to drink until entire the experience was pleasurable.

We talked inside for maybe 45 minutes until I was ready to make a B line for the door. By this point, the place was the packed with hipsters or seem to produce in a sort of depressingly asexual manner. To more accurately lay the scene:

- At one pool table there were two hipsters girls and one abnormally normal looking girl. Both of the hipsters had hair that was dyed jet black and wore clog-like shoes and black fishnets (nobody's complaining about the fishnets though). The normal looking girl was wearing jeans (which any hipster can tell you are simple oppression).
- At the bar, there was what might loosely be called a hipster couple (I know that androgyny is popular but this was ridiculous). They were close enough that I could eavesdrop, and they were having a really passive conversation about Sartre.
- While I eavesdropped, another group had bought a bottle of wine and was passing it around. Uh huh...

At this point, I found a quick excuse to leave, and he followed.

"This was fun," he said.

"Uh huh," I replied as I flung everything except my keys into the passenger's seat and slammed on the accelerator to get out of there.

Moral of the story: change can be exciting but have an idea of what you're walking into.