17 September 2010: "DISASTER VIDEO: Tornado tears up Brooklyn, 2 altbros ‘flip a shit’ in their sweet loft"

This post is about infralapsarianiam. Yes, Carles takes a quick swipe at the personification of Mother Nature, comparing the weather anomaly in a renowned district for contemporary aspirants to the Bohemian lifestyle to a "‘pussy tornado’" in order to stress the libidinal energies that underwrite structures of postadolescence. The metaphor reminds us of the casual misogyny that attends natural disasters, the free-floating implication that untamed female desire always threatens to erupt as a destructive wind sweeping away existing schemes of containment and control. But that is not his primary subject in this essay. The tornado also presents Carles with an occasion for a searing critique of the folly of trying to deliberately ape an approach to everyday life that is marked in the very minds of its admirers by its accidental, organic quality.

"Apparently a tornado ‘ripped thru Brooklyn’, trying to transcend ‘hipster bashing’, and instead do some ‘hipster twisting’/'hipster natural disastering’/'hipster rapturing,’" Carles reports, drawing an explicit connection between the inauthentic approach to the quotidian and the wrath of divinely controlled, untamed forces. The implication is that the soul is involved in such matters -- that hipsterdom is akin to a kind of Calvinist Elect, with God choosing from those among us who to bless with cool, and that the salvation of hipster status cannot be achieved through our own deeds alone. The difference between hip-elect and reprobate rests entirely with God's sovereign and seemingly arbitrary decision to show mercy to some but not all. The Synod of Dort in 1613 addressed this issue: "Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, [God] chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin."

To secularize and rearticulate this position in lay language: even those who want to become Brooklyn bohemians know that it isn't a matter of simple decision and determination but requires a confluence of contingencies, an alignment of the field of social relations, status signifiers, and hegemonic power structures such that countercultural practices can have an apparently authentic meaning rather than functioning merely as one more consumer niche, one more entertainment option.

This is why Carles so frequently couches his critique in tentative language, as questions or conditional statements, as noncommittal musings, as in the following passage:

Not really sure if they followed standard tornado protocol. I think ur apparently supposed ‘duck and cover.’ Or maybe go into a room without many windows, like a basement or a cellar. Maybe I should move to Brooklyn and build a ‘sweet underground loft/mixed use art space/organic food dumpster diving co-op’/d.i.y. venue.’

The careful wording is meant to evoke the radical uncertainty of the soul's fate in the immanent realm of fashion and status, the curious impotency we all must confront when reckoning with our inherited habitus and the differential gifts of charisma and sprezzatura, as described by Castiglione. Will it make a difference to do anything at all? Should we commit an effort of will to any particular measure contrived to enhance our cool quotient? "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" -- all Carles can say, Prufrock-like, is "Maybe."