The Difference a Century Can Make

[rowens]

The Difference a Century Can Make
 
 
If Charles Baudelaire, if D. H. Lawrence,
if Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh,
especially if Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh
were alive today, they might be fat
like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson;
knocked up by the Men in White
while ignored by the Men in Black,
—denizens of a postbourgeois world
where everyone's an entrepreneur proletariat,
an educated or uneducated workingclass
businessman who made the grade.
Have you made the grade?
 
If John Dee and Victor Frankenstein were alive today,
they'd be the Steve Jobs and John McAfee of tomorrowland,
the land of the lost made brilliant again in all our lightweight
contraptions we carry around, remembering—foreseeing—
impromptu game-changing.
 
The hipsters are on gluten-free diets
and the trolls are mostly fat,
mostly . . .
If Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh
were alive today they might be fat
and no more hip than they ever were.

[Wjames]

I really like this. For some reason when I first read the title, I read "The Century a Difference Can Make", and I like that title more.

[rowens]

For the look and sound of it, or for what that title would imply?

[RiverNotch]

The Difference a Century Can Make
 
 
If Charles Baudelaire, if D. H. Lawrence,
if Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh,
especially if Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh
were alive today, they might be fat
like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson; 
knocked up by the Men in White
while ignored by the Men in Black,
—denizens of a postbourgeois world Feh, Americans.
where everyone's an entrepreneur proletariat,
an educated or uneducated workingclass
businessman who made the grade. Feh, Americans. Or rather, white, middle-class Americans. I don't think even regular European folks don't see this, with the refugee crisis and, at least in Britain, the well-ingrained class system.
Have you made the grade? Although the sentiment isn't wholly unsatisfying, especially since the tone of the piece is wry enough to seem like it's skewering the thought. And yeah, at least for white, middle-class Americans, everyone's just that.
Also, the em dash can be removed, and the semicolon could be changed to a comma, but those incongruities do read intentional, so whatever. 

If John Dee and Victor Frankenstein were alive today,
they'd be the Steve Jobs and John McAfee of tomorrowland,
the land of the lost made brilliant again in all our lightweight Prefer "the" over "our".
contraptions we carry around, remembering—foreseeing—
impromptu game-changing. This stanza feels somewhat disjoint, for one because John Dee is way older than anyone in here, for another because this feels like a glimmer of (satirical) technological optimism. Whereas the progress of the Men in White/Black are denigrated up top, while the nature of this more-bourgeois world is mischaracterized, here "brilliant", "remembering--foreseeing-- / impromptu game-changing." is too-clearly positive, and the veiled jab that is "today's marvels being diluted" feels much more correct, even if almost equally limited (almost equally, since even in this *third world country* the poor can have smartphones -- thus the advantage). And with the topic somewhat returning in the next stanza, the disjointedness feels kinda awkward -- maybe the real opinion of the speaker peeking out, before being drowned in his anti-hipster-hipsterness? Or maybe I'm reading it wrong....
 
The hipsters are on gluten-free diets Hey now, responsible hipsters only go on gluten-free diets when they have coeliac disease! Most of the folks who go gluten-free for fads are either brain-sick or, hehe, prole-poseurs. Everyone but the desperate loves bread too much!
and the trolls are mostly fat, But with Jobs and McAfee, I read "trolls" as internet trolls -- I'm not sure about Artaud or Baudelaire, they seem deliberate enough (whereas judging by how the public treated Lawrence, sure, and van Gogh I don't think would even touch a computer), but are Johnston or Erickson online controversials, too? Or perhaps you meant something else, but here I'd think it was more your fault than mine, the internet reference is too close to the trolls.
mostly . . .
If Antonin Artaud or Vincent van Gogh
were alive today they might be fat
and no more hip than they ever were.
Kinda lovely, kinda weird. As much as I in my lucid states would consider myself a hipster (or at least a condescending aesthetic, as plenty of hipsters don't give a shit about thought), I've been immersed enough in a *third world* country's socialist rhetoric to find this agreeable, especially since this doesn't read too much like a character fully alien to the writer. But as language divorced from meaning, certainly lovely, with the rough style being very appropriate.

[rowens]

Drugs and technology are the same thing. Nature-buffs are mainlining the machine. And as long as hipsters are allowed to learn history, this doomed to repeat the past jazz is right down their alley. They're going to live through all the cultural eras and political upheavals only watering it down a little bit, less steam and more wires, less jive talk and more generic college kid 'definitelys' and 'absolutelys' and more properly pronounced 'ings' and that thing they do where they end each sentence with the emphasis on the last word like they're asking a question and that thing they do where they make the end of their sentences sound all gravily which is sexy and annoying at the same time. And this is happening all at once all times at once. People supporting and protesting the same things at the same time. Building, maintaining, tearing down and replacing at the same time.

[Bueller]

Drugs and technology are the same thing. Nature-buffs are mainlining the machine. And as long as hipsters are allowed to learn history, this doomed to repeat the past jazz is right down their alley. They're going to live through all the cultural eras and political upheavals only watering it down a little bit, less steam and more wires, less jive talk and more generic college kid 'definitelys' and 'absolutelys' and more properly pronounced 'ings' and that thing they do where they end each sentence with the emphasis on the last word like they're asking a question and that thing they do where they make the end of their sentences sound all gravily which is sexy and annoying at the same time. And this is happening all at once all times at once. People supporting and protesting the same things at the same time. Building, maintaining, tearing down and replacing at the same time.

This reply may or may not be better than anything I've ever written.

I hate hipsters. And hippies. I'm a big fan of hips though, especially when they look like they could bear my children.

[rowens]

You can't do anything at all without a hipster knowing everything there is to know about it. Even dumb stuff: I was at Dollar General getting ready to get a $2 twelve DVD boxset of Richard Pryor-The Sober Years, and I knocked this other DVD in the floor and picked it up. I don't even know what it was, but some hipster stood there telling me about the case it came in and the history of DVD cases and the booklets that come in some of them, and that got him onto video game instruction booklets and how according to the Super Mario Bros one all those bricks Mario and Luigi were smashing were transformed Mushroom Kingdom residents, and then he went on to something about the Rebel Alliance murdering the construction workers on the Death Star, and then he talked about politics in comic books and some show called Comic Book Men. Then he said he had to check his voicemail, and, get this, he went out to his car and pulled out a record player, because all his voicemail goes straight to vinyl record. But when I started to say something about poetry, he said he had to make a phone call. And he's still making it now.

[Lizzie]

I had that box set before it was cool.

[rowens]

It was either that or The Adventures of Brer Rabbit starring Nick Cannon and Wayne Brady or a CGI laden remake of the alien autopsy that aired on Fox back in the '90s.

[Wjames]

You can't do anything at all without a hipster knowing everything there is to know about it. Even dumb stuff: I was at Dollar General getting ready to get a $2 twelve DVD boxset of Richard Pryor-The Sober Years, and I knocked this other DVD in the floor and picked it up. I don't even know what it was, but some hipster stood there telling me about the case it came in and the history of DVD cases and the booklets that come in some of them, and that got him onto video game instruction booklets and how according to the Super Mario Bros one all those bricks Mario and Luigi were smashing were transformed Mushroom Kingdom residents, and then he went on to something about the Rebel Alliance murdering the construction workers on the Death Star, and then he talked about politics in comic books and some show called Comic Book Men. Then he said he had to check his voicemail, and, get this, he went out to his car and pulled out a record player, because all his voicemail goes straight to vinyl record. But when I started to say something about poetry, he said he had to make a phone call. And he's still making it now.

I love the Antiques Roadshow hipsters
that fawn over ten cent stamp collections
once owned by the penny-farthing bicycle inventor.

The heat in their eyes
reminds me of the first night
we made love.

[rowens]

The hipsters first came to town around 2010. At that time we still had bookstores, recordstores, video rental stores, art stores and a lot of unique locally owned little shops. But after the hipsters had been here a few months all of those places closed down and were replaced by car lots or simply nothing at all. So where do the hipsters go, and what do the hipsters do? I don't know. But they're there. I seem them. I hear them around the corner speaking in authentic northern accents as if they actually were from Brooklyn and the Bronx and Boston and Maine and Ohio and Chicago all at once. And they have all the things you look for in town and can't find. And they're into all the things you were made fun of and put on medication for being into in high school and all throughout your twenties. And if you approach them, and try to talk to them, and tell them that you too were into the original episodes of Wild and Crazy Kids with the original cast of Donny Jeffcoat, Omar Gooding and Annette Chavez who was then replaced by Jessica Gaynes around mid first season, they'll just nod and condescend and then disappear in a wisp. Leaving you nothing but memories and not even a Goodwill left to shop in.