While I can name several modern classical composers whom I interested in* I think your point still stands and most people wouldn't be able to name an active composer after Beethoven, maybe Brahms. I have brief memories of an interview with Milton Babbitt about how classical music was no doubt on the way out due to advent of popular music, and i think he was right, these days classical music is only relevant in most peoples lives when mentioning an anecdote about how making their newborn listen to Mozart might increase their IQ.
Whenever I would go to a chamber music event or an orchestral performance there will generally be two sets of people there - the old school bougie folk and a handful of conservatory students - the casual audience member is far and few between. Orchestras will have a better chance getting an audience by performing pops or some program full of video game music.
Still, going to the symphony hall, being part of that scene, this might retain it's importance for the upper class / professionals, and this alone could be enough to continue to support more than a handful of orchestras around the United States.
* And the only reason I can is because I studied composition and theory at University.
But there are. That is to say, if you mean exceptionally talented composers of classical music.
See Gyorgy Ligeti, Arvo Part, John Adams, George Crumb. Phillip Glass, and Nico Muhly. Everyone except Ligeti (RIP homie) is still living last time I checked.
It doesn't make it true either, and nothing that the original poster said suggested that it might be the case. Heck, we don't even know the gender of the original poster.
The term "hipster" has become more or less a catch-all for words such as
* pretentious
* egotistical
* artsy
* self-involved
* preachy
* irreverent
* trendy
and many many more. My favorite thing about the linguistic history of "hipster" is that it started out defined as "one who is hip", but has come to describe both the hip person and the hipness itself. Phrases like "hipster shoes" or "hipster band" come to mind.
> but has come to describe both the hip person and the hipness itself. Phrases like "hipster shoes" or "hipster band" come to mind.
(Note: Grammar quibbles ahead.)
I don't think your examples really support that. Saying "hipster shoes" doesn't require the shoes to be hip at all, it only means they are a kind that is popularly associated or made for hipsters. Naming something "Hipster X" is just an case of attributive nouns.
Similarly, consider a "Programmer Chair" being sold... Surely nobody is trying to say that the chair is able to code, or that the chair is itself a form of code, or anything like that, right?
Instead, "Programmer Chair" means a chair that is associated-with or belongs-to Programmers.
I think it's interesting that many popular nouns can modify other nouns in English, and that the order of the words matters, e.g. you would never say "shoes hipster"
From A Canticle for Leibowitz:
"In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended... house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection."
Even more subtly, there are things like adjective order that are also an important part of the english language that most native speakers just learn innately. Saying them out of order doesn't necessarily change the meaning of the phrase, but it sure sounds odd to a native speaker.
As an example, "a cute little paisley cat" would be considered the correct order, while "a paisley cute little cat" would not.
Although there are lots of examples where people switched the word order. It might not be historicaly accurate, but the example I remember being told is that an 'ear wig' was so named because it went from one's wig to one's ear.
I'm sure that Latin is also helped by the fact that word order makes very little difference, while we place a huge emphasis on it in English.
One thing I love about Latin is that you can have the adjective at the start of a sentence and the noun it modifies thirteen lines later (Caesar does this quite a bit), and the sentence is still perfectly readable. In English, not so much.
I would say a hipster is someone who thinks that everyone else has it all wrong and is missing the obvious right way to dress, think, live or do something. Which the hipster has all figured out.
The best thing about hipsters is they appear to not care about appearance (as only one example) but then almost always predictably dress a certain "hipster" way in order to conform to the way hipsters are supposed to look.
The most interesting definition I've seen is roughly: "one who fetishizes the authentic", but it seems the term has come to be a cheap way to heap scorn on certain categories of fashion.
The word is so overplayed and unuseful it ought to be retired (it's not hip any more).
Thanks. I'm well aware of what a hipster is and how the term is used in the context of modern slang, this doesn't really help answer my original question, however.
Fair enough. I think that's where we differ - I feel the word isn't quite as ill defined as you suggest, though it is commonly misused. A conversation for another time :)
You've just described the characteristics of a hipster - not a definition.
Not that it matters. Hipster is such a bullshit, reductive pejorative. I find the people that use it either:
a) Don't understand someone or something. Some guy genuinely into a genre of music you've not heard. Is it insecurity? Is it about looking dumb? I'm not sure. But rather than try and engage in an effort to gain knowledge about the genre, people just call it hipster and disengage.
b) Do understand. Someone's trying to do something that is fresh and original to them - but may be old hat to you. Let's say it's being into an alternative author or some kind of fair-trade delicacy. Rather than let this person have their authentic moment in the sun (regardless how unoriginal you know it is) - people label them as hipsters.
TLDR: Calling things hipster is a demonstration of the holier-than-thou attitude it seeks to mock.
"We do know what hipster means—or at least we should. The term has always possessed adequately lucid definitions; they just happen to be multiple. If we refuse to enunciate them, it may be because everyone affiliated with the term has a stake in keeping it murky. Hipster accusation has been, for a decade, the outflanking maneuver par excellence for competitors within a common field of cool."
It's aimed at the sort of person that thinks hipste.rs is a super clever domain name (and who is uninterested in the difficulties of communicating that in word of mouth or old media channels like radio/tv).
Or for people who find it convenient to type/write an 8 character email address in non-word-of-mouth communication, which is the majority of email address communication anyway. I own the domain hip.st for this purpose.
Actually, hipster has been with us for longer, so one would expect it to be even more tired than yuppie, since hipster has been well used since the 50's, while yuppie only recently joined us in the 80's. However, it turns out that hipster is actually being used more often, while yuppie is trending down, which by definition means that hipster is most definitely not more tired than yuppie. [1]
I don't find hipster to be tired at all. It communicates to me a certain type of person in a very clear manner.
I never really got this line of thought. While creating life in a laboratory and creating life through sexually reproduction between a man and woman (or however it is other organisms manage it) have the same end result, I think it's fairly reasonable to recognize that they are two very distinctly different things.
I think you're very sadly mistaken - white people can be victims of racism, too, you dig? I grew up and went through a school system where white people were by far the minority, and yes, I had to deal with racism.
edit: Downvotes? Yikes. Like most people, I'd prefer some constructive replies instead of silent detractors, but it is what it is.
I'm just curious - do you mind elaborating on your thought that Microsoft has been stale and dormant? This just seems so far from reality, so I'm wondering what about them gives you that impression.
The client side tools have been in purgatory for years, as things were in stasis when MS screwed up the XP to Longhorn or whatever they were calling the next generation client then.
The server side is a totally different story. Windows Server, system center, sql, etc have been going gangbusters for years.
Agreed. On the client side, a lot of effort was put into WinJS and the whole ModernUI experience.
Speaking as an ex-Microsoftie, my guess is that you'll see some of the innovation behind ModernUI apps back-propagated to thick client desktop stuff in the next major release of Windows.
As seen from outside, Microsoft seems to move very slowly. If you look it up close, you may be aware of smaller changes than those that don't pay attention and give them more importance than those on the outside, as those changes affect your work, but don't affect anyone else's.
Microsoft has been moving, but there is so much more movement outside the Microsoft ecosystem that it's easy to miss when Microsoft makes changes to its technology, even those that shake their entire ecosystem. Microsoft is just one more ecosystem among many and a very insular one.
No Microsoft launch since .NET has had any significant impact on my daily life and it would be perfectly rational to completely ignore them.
> No Microsoft launch since .NET has had any significant impact on my daily life and it would be perfectly rational to completely ignore them.
By this I can say that Apple is stale and dormant. No launch since the iPhone has any impact on my daily life, and even that is simply because it's influence on Android.
Good point. I am now curious as to how the FOSS ecosystem looks when seen from within a Microsoft-heavy environment. Does it look "slow"? Can it be safely ignored?
I see a steady flow of news of new Ubuntu releases, new PostgreSQL functionality, and miscellaneous HPC/Big Data technologies, but that's because I pay attention to that. I wonder if it would be different if I spent my day writing code in Windows, for a Microsoft stack.
I've served in an operations capacity for exclusively *-nix, mixed-stack and primarily MS environments, and I will say that from my perspective the OSS community has more news, but I find that there's less that I actually care about.
I've actually been finding MS products more easy to work with lately, while Ubuntu has been getting more frustrating. Some of that is due to familiarity, but there's also a lot of decisions I've not agreed with. In general, I like that I can write something that works for a few years in Windows - I don't have to worry if the latest package updates are going to break everything. I've lost weeks fixing dependency bugs, and I don't seem to have the same issues on Windows.
It's not different. Half of Microsoft developments these days are them implementing some open source tech (like not-Windows in Azure, Node becoming close to first-class on IIS..)
Certainly there is more than a small difference between it being rational for you to ignore a company and to call the company itself dormant and stale.
Whenever I would go to a chamber music event or an orchestral performance there will generally be two sets of people there - the old school bougie folk and a handful of conservatory students - the casual audience member is far and few between. Orchestras will have a better chance getting an audience by performing pops or some program full of video game music.
Still, going to the symphony hall, being part of that scene, this might retain it's importance for the upper class / professionals, and this alone could be enough to continue to support more than a handful of orchestras around the United States.
* And the only reason I can is because I studied composition and theory at University.