This cafe has changed its muserly, miserly, whispery music for Neil Young. He owns the business. His voice is quiet but sure and it penetrates. People gain confidence in such good musical hands, or seem to, and soon the hushed conversation level has risen like water roaring and the blond baby sitting on his mamma’s lap inside the window has piped up too, being part of things. “Ahb!” he says, dancing his feet: “Ah, ahb!”
The problem of hipsters. Nobody is one, yet everyone complains about them. It’s a bit like environmental damage: everybody thinks someone else needs to change.
I am listening to the couple at the next table lament how hip this neighbourhood has become. On this leafy street they can no longer find a seat, on a sunny Saturday, and it’s all because of hipsters. The woman has a chic-knotted green scarf and little red shoes. But that’s just the trouble: if I say, yeah, I wish I were cool enough to qualify as hip but sadly, I lack the raw materials… I come off sounding like I wanna be *too* cool ~ hip enough to not even care about not being hip.
Like my neighbours, I like a quiet street which is not too crowded with popularness. Yet I want the cafes to be good enough to draw such a crowd: Great coffee. Decent service. Music that doesn’t depress me. Essentially I am wishing failure & suffering on the businesses I claim to support: or partial success. “Emerging artist” status.
It’s like indie bands. One must discover a talent that is great enough to be worth a thorough listening; but not so great that it’s filling stadiums. Like infinite growth on a finite globe, this enterprise seems to me destined to failure. And failure is to hipsterism as stubble is to chic: a whiff of it, you’re a groovy artist. Too much and you’re under a bridge. Hipster or dumpster. It’s bloody brutal.
The other problem with hipness, or as I think of it, ‘atmosphere’, is it requires a willing peasantry. This groovy part of Berlin is enjoyable because of its mix of cultures and the picturesque and endearing ways that troubled souls, drug addicts and unorthodox people fill the streets with life. I don’t see any of these hipster-allergic folk wanting to move to the suburbs, or to genuine country communities where there may be very few artists. Other human beings serve as background scenery: a form of tourism. The scenery’s got to be grating enough to be ironic, to set the heroic Self free in bold, beautiful relief against its lesser-talented background. Like Park Slope.
First date in a cafe. “They always play such excellent jazz here,” he is saying. “Try the cakes, they’re always good.”
“Right,” the girl says lightly. He has over-ordered, wanting to induct her into his routines. “I think heaven must be an eternal breakfast,” he says. The girl is drinking coffee as though it were ice cream, with a spoon. Elbow on the table she slumps onto her hand. “May I?” She tears the best bit off his croissant, the fresh, unbroken, creamy end of the horn. I watch him watching it all the way into her mouth, his resentment almost audible.
Now the waitress brings his fruit salad, poignant with yoghurt. The yoghurt shimmers fat and glossy and unbroken. “Go ahead,” he says, “try.” She shakes her head. The third dish arrives, two soft-boiled eggs in a glass, with pretty salad arranged all around it in a tide. “I’ll just try a bit of your egg,” says the girl to her date, having presumably told him she is not hungry, that she never eats breakfast. “Or maybe I can just take half, some salad, a little of your bread?” She draws the saucer from underneath her coffee cup and holds it out.
“I usually don’t ruin it,” he says. “They always arrange it so nicely here. But – yes! Please! Of course you can! Please: help yourself.” They are neither of them native speakers but both speak in English. I think she is Spanish and I think he is German. His voice is soft and seducing but I think the relationship is off to a stony start. Now they are talking about her work. “It’s an animal. No, it’s a fung, a fungus, right?” “Ja,” she says, “a fungus.” “Have you ever given a name to a bacteria?” he asks her. “There must be some good bacteria out there.” Maybe tonight this girl will call one of her closest friends. “There must be some good men out there,” they will say. Maybe the man will ask himself how come a woman can be so resistant to being induced into the world he has already arranged so perfectly for her. It just has this one hole to be filled, a her-shaped vacancy. Why won’t she fill it? Don’t women want love?