The UCLA Student Union’s panel on hipsters last night was “kind of a shitstorm,” according to moderator Christian Lorentzen, a contributor to n+1‘s book What Was the Hipster? We caught up with Lorentzen and assistant editor Christopher Glazek, who participated as a panelist, over the phone from LAX, where they were waiting to catch their flight back to New York.
Lorentzen was unwilling to comment much more on the panel except to say that VICE founder Gavin McInnes was a predictably unruly panelist—”the guy’s charisma is irrepressible,” said Lorentzen—while well-known photographer Mark “Cobra Snake” Hunter was a sweetly idealistic one. According to the LA Times, McInnes showed up shirtless and delivered long rants that left the rest of the panel “stunned.” “We couldn’t keep him in check,” Lorentzen said. But he added, “Tao Lin quietly dominated the panel.”
Glazek, who received a long letter from a UCLA law student last night seeking to apologize for McIness and his teenaged fans, said he experienced the panel as both boring and chaotic. “The problems with the panel weren’t unusual—it’s just probably a mistake to assume hipsters are authorities on hipsters, or are going to comment interestingly on the circumstances of their own personhood.”
