Frequently Asked Questions:

Unedited responses to various (cited) interview questions.

I do think that there are several, possibly competing ideas of what a hipster is. The people I know who get called "hipster" are white, twenty or thirty something, urban, liberal, overeducated and underpaid, interested in alternative and independent media and art. They can come off as elitist. However, most people, when they talk about hipsters, mean those consciously cool kids that are so enamored of a perceived scene they play it to death. They're in it for the subculture cred and enjoy the monkishness of tight circles and an almost cryptic use of information. These are the ones people would like to see killed and the ones the reviewer was looking for.

In my mind, the only true "hipster" in the book is Doctor Jeep - the serial killer. He is the embodiment of everything surface and shallow, what people hate about hipster culture. He is elitist, obsessed with esoteric trivia to which he attaches all sorts of meaning, the end result of living only for a scene. (Charleston City Paper 6/08)

It’s tricky. I think really that there are almost two competing definitions. When I first started hearing the word used in the late '90s, it was really kind of these liberal, white, urban, overeducated, underpaid, intellectual -- maybe snobbish -- music or film kind of geeks. There was nothing negative attached to it; there was a crowd and they were hip. There was this pull from the Beats, and they gave it kind of the cache themselves. Nowadays, with this huge hipster backlash, certainly in New York, it refers to a much younger group, in their mid-twenties now, who are kind of consciously cool. I think the folks earlier were cool by default in some way, and now the ones that people hate the most are doing it for the look and the lifestyle and trying to form an identity around this elitist attitude that’s kind of surfacey. The book has gone through a number of different incarnations. I started about five years ago. I wanted to show the landscape of all of these various hipsters, the old-school ones, the new-school ones, the irritating ones, friends of mine that wouldn’t call themselves hipsters. (Westword 6/08)

The reaction I got that I was suprised by was how many people -- even those who’ve told me that they didn’t like the book at all -- they loved the fact that hipsters were getting killed. There were people who didn’t like the book, but loved the hipster-killing scenes. These guys are foaming at the mouth for hipsters, so any instance where they’re going to see one die, they’re really getting up and cheering. (Westword 6/08)

There's this incredible Belgian film called Man Bites Dog that really gets at what I was trying to accomplish. The film's premise is stellar - a documentary film crew follows around a serial killer as though his job was ordinary, dull even. The serial killer is really an engaging character; he's droll and witty and as we watch him we start to identify with him. But when the killer coldly butchers a family, the film very quickly turns very serious - the violence we were laughing at before becomes sickening. Our having laughed earlier makes us uncomfortable.

That's essentially the same thing I was trying for but in a more textual sense. The characters, not necessarily the reader, assume that killing someone will be easy. They assume that violence is simple and clean but clearly it's not. I overemphasized the brutality of the violence for that reason - it's meant as a splash of cold water. Sometimes it works, sometimes... (Charleston City Paper 6/08)

I think a lot of people miss the irony in the book. They overlook the satire. I shouldn't care but I do. For me the book is hilarious, it's so overblown and tongue-in-cheek. My intentions were entirely satirical.

However, I didn't want the satire to be one-sided. While it's "about" hipsters - or those I define as hipsters - the real focus of the book is about people who get caught up in the illusion of what subcultures can offer. I'm no exception. When I was in high school I traipsed from group to group - goths, punks, weirdos - looking for meaning and looking for an identity. It's a funny dichotomy: We're hive-minded but at the same time we're obsessed with coming across as unique. We emphasize individuality above all else but we all want to be individuals together. (Charleston City Paper 6/08)

6 SICK HIPSTERS

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