Where was I? Ah, yes, logos: yes, being hip takes time and hipness is a performance. My question would be: what activity isn’t a performance? Why do we call teaching or acting or ballet a performance but not mopping the office floor or serving food or picking grapes as much a performance? We need to sharpen our tools, Greg, even if it means making others think about their allegiances or making a hammer sing.

What is the consequence as claiming the hipster’s art is “everywhere”? When I read poets like Reines, I’m seeing so many more corners, so much more seclusion, a bending of everywhere being harnessed by a dampened American cultural vision. Perhaps there is a sense of “cool” that exists beyond our national ephemera, but I don’t think that universality, that cultural cooperation, is operating within the poets above. At the same time, however, how old are these poets? Attending a Flying Lotus show last night I realized the sake of “cool” electronic music is changing so rapidly that one must sacrifice their own passions for music to seek out the current hipness, the current trends. Are the poets hip right now actually hip from yesterday?

I’m curious, also, because of your Tzara references, if you found any insights into the “performances” of the hipster poet. When living in Philadelphia a couple years ago, the coolest poetry readings also had the most disappointing “readings,” same going for New York. I would say that trimmed, cream-soaked fat of identity exists here in the lives of Seattle poets as well, but I’m blind to my own city.