Access Ain't Rebellion

Sandy Miguel sent me a Q&A on Hipsterdom for an article she's writing. I answered it. I was told it's okay to put it in my blog.


1. What do you think of the growing hipster subculture in the country? How does society benefit from it?

There's always some sort of hipster culture growing wherever, it's only now that they're specifically called "hipsters," more out of specific trends in fashion and music that are now widely accessible to people who don't have to have the required appetite for these things. By "required appetite" I mean, I remember being called a "hipster" in the pejorative sense way back in 2001 mainly because of my then growing fascination for Adrian Tomine and Lomo cameras and my extreme adoration for Belle & Sebastian, which were back then relatively fringe and of course very expensive items - I remember buying all the B&S albums (the first three, at least) in Music One Megamall for 900 pesos each. I even made zines back then, quite regularly. I made my own pins and buttons, taped poetry on my shirts, wrote essays for a webzine, wore Adidas jackets and trainers from various ukay-ukay, Napsterred mp3s based off of recommends from Pitchfork, laughed at the Onion. Ten years back, I probably would have been called "gay." That's as hip as one can be in the Philippines circa 2001 when you're not from Ateneo. That was the price of admission into Hipsterdom.

Nowadays, you don't even have to be as snooty as I am/was to be a hipster, you just need a few shirts from SM, download a few gigs of whatever's playing on the local college radio thing into your iPod, attend a few concerts and read Kiko Machine, torrent Community and 30 Rock and keep a Tumblr blog and a Flickr page in tandem with your Facebook thing you ironically keep and you're all set to be hip. I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that Hipsterdom's turned into just another cool thing to do instead of remaining as what it was, a sort of passive rebellion of intellect and taste, a legit response to the oppressive media-sponsored boneheaded kewlness of what was being passed off as rock/punk during those days, as exemplified by what was then the new Incubus album.

I'm trying my best not to sound like an old man, here, but really, back then, you actually had to be smart and well-read and a bit culturally discerning to be a hipster. I suppose now at least more people are better dressed? Listen to better music? Watch better movies? Read better books? Of course, it's not the hipsters' fault individually as one can only be as what the society dictates one to be, and this society has turned relatively dumber as it turned towards being more mainstream, as what happens to any fringe thing moving to the center.

But one can only really judge these things on whatever culture they're producing, only I've yet to see anything of worth produced by Contemporary Hipsterdom. All the cultural landmarks of such a society - magazines, books, movies, songs - are all still produced by people from Old Hipsterdom. Like I said, at least more people are better dressed and more or less listening to better music. Did the New Hipsters get Noynoy elected? Are they changing the local literary landscape with their hip Twitter ruminations on death, decay, renewal? Any more prominent effects New Hipsterdom would have on society at large, we'll have to give a couple more years to happen. I’m very very very sure it’ll happen, only it’s not happening today.



2. As a writer, how do you benefit from this subculture? (Can we call it that?)

I can’t say I benefit from this culture specifically, truth be told, in the sense that they’re giving me money or media mileage of any sort. Despite the fact that one can suitably argue that most of the things I do, most of the things I used to do, they’re all hipster things, but they’re not solely hipster things, or rather not solely for that slice of society alone, or rather they probably don’t/haven’t even read any of my things, as I don’t really see these things as particularly appealing to them like, say, Gelo Suarez’s Dissonant Umbrellas, or McSweeney’s books (even Nick Hornby’s utterly dreck essays collections), seemingly in the larger part attracting more or less the crowd that wants to be seen with something hip. I don’t really see that happening with any of my things, not in the same way as some bands seem to be, as some gatherings are packaged as.



3. Why are you self-publishing your book/s? What are the works of self-publishing here in the country? How do you manage to do that when you don't have a job most of the time?

I’m self-publishing them mainly because I enjoy the freedom to design the books from the ground up. Bits about the writing and the editing, they’re all secondary concerns to me, things that take care of themselves, being largely self-governing processes, albeit that said, writing and editing are all still part of the design of the whole thing, as I’m talking about design as a holistic thing rather than just the superficial packaging and layout thing.

What I’m really interested in in self-publishing is the author as designer, and the book as object – not even art, just the book as an object – with every little thing in it put in there to propel a certain point-of-view, a certain experience, a certain aesthetic. In my experience working with self-publishers, every single thing is calibrated, even the slightest shift of colour in the cover art, they’re all meant to convey some authorial thing, more so than with mainstream publishers – from big time pop books people to university presses – the attention in book design is more for the market, to sell the book, less for the book itself. Not to mention the often tragic wholesale laziness to just design mainstream books for readability, often choosing Times New Roman as type for the interior pages just because it’s the default setting in Adobe In Design. Because self-publishers tend to be people who’ve already accepted that what they do don’t really sell that well, or won’t have the appropriate market reach, they won’t even bother to consider packaging their things for market appeal, or at the very least, they’re not that concerned with the cover maybe being less-standoffish than it could be.

A bulk of self-published books in the country is poetry books and, until recently, genre books, poetry books being the ass-end of sellability, the genre books being the ass-end of literariness. The majority of poetry books come from High Chair, them also being one of the first serious self-publishers in the country. Being mainly alone and penniless, I do PDFs and hypertexts that you can download or read online for free, and they’re mainly vaguely literary things like poetry and prose, with occasional forays into actual hardcopy publishing. A few new serious online publishers have also made their presences felt online, namely Rocket Kapre and Estranghero Press and also Charles Tan’s annual SpecFic compilations, focused on producing genre PDF books or online zines. There’re also Kestrel’s annual SpecFic anthologies and Kenneth Yu’s almost regular Philippine Genre Stories, which they do as real physical books. All these self-published books online are relatively for free, or in Rocket Kapre’s case, sold for cheap, while High Chair and Kestrel and Kenneth Yu, they sell their books somewhere between 100 pesos to 300 pesos, reasonably cheaper than most books of the same genre and/or quality of production. There’re also the tons of zines and komix produced and sold and read annually through the two or three regular komikons, selling their books somewhere between 5 to 200 pesos. In the zines and komix and High Chair’s cases, their books are reasonably cheaper because they don’t sell them through bookstores, so there’s no need to pad the pricetag. In PGS and Kestrel’s books, they either sacrifice the production quality (not a very big issue, if at all, as they still look very very good) or sacrifice the financial payback, which is more or less the case for all self-publishers.

And I know I’m not only (cheesily) speaking for myself when I say that self-publishers survive because self-publishers have an intense inherent love for what they’re doing, an inherent love – or in more sedate terms, appreciation – for books that they’re willing to shell out valuable time and money to do something that isn’t really paying for itself, and often they’re doing this for free, meaning they don’t get paid to do designs or edit galleys or any of those things, they do this because they love/appreciate these things, despite exactly us not having steady jobs, despite all the (mainly financial) hassle that comes with doing these things.



4. What are the chances of independent publishing/clothing/music outfits of surviving in the country? A brand manager I've talked to said that indie brands should go mainstream at some point to achieve some level of financial success. What are your thoughts on that?

Financial success, surely, of course, one needs to go mainstream for something like that, and in things like clothing and music, it’s certainly a necessity, although less so for music, but yes, certainly, only it’s one measure of success, but certainly not the only measure, most definitely not the only measure of survival, even financial survival, especially when one considers the Internet just making basically everything available to everyone to the point of excess, already having ways to address the machinations an enterprising young writer/designer/musician needs to produce and peddle her wares, normally both in one place, like Cafepress and Threadless, all these pop on-demand mechanically-reproduced-art services. Granted, these things are still largely US-based so still relatively out-of-reach for most, but I’m betting in two years’ time these things will be as easy and as common as Amazon is to us today. So yeah, you can go mainstream, that’s always valid, but you don’t have to go that far, especially when it means you’ll be sacrificing whatever artistic vision you’d been cradling since the outset of your art thing. Co-optation isn’t that big of a monster anymore.