Blipsters and bleensters

We went for a hike this weekend to celebrate Kikibomb's birthday. Afterwards, people started talking about the difference between hipsters and scenesters. Everyone seemed to agree that hipsters were people who liked cool things and scenesters were just into being cool.

I brought up the topic of "blipsters" -- aka black hipsters. Like the ones in the recent film Medicine for Melancholy, starring Wyatt Cenac of the Daily Show. It takes place right here in SF, with Cenac playing an angry young man on a fixie who follows a girl around for 24 hours after first sleeping with her.

(At one point, Cenac does a Bill Cosby impression, which he says all black men do. See the end of this clip). I really loved the Coz as a kid. The chicken heart. The sneaker that made change. His brother Donald. Hilarious. So now I've been torturing April with my own horrible impersonation.)

Anyway, the movie's quite nice, the kind of film with regular people doing regular things. It's got sweet characters, prettily shot, lackadaisically paced -- what Tarentino called "a hangout movie." My favorite bit involves iced tea and a taco truck.

But the funniest part is near the end, when the pair decide to go dancing. "Black people dancing or white people dancing?" Cenac asks. They choose white and they go to the Knock-Out. The funny thing is they go to Soul Night, which is a bunch of white Djs spinning (mostly) black music, so they dub in modern dancy indie-rock made by white people. Not that anyone anywhere would notice, but it is a funny switcheroo. There's a few seconds of it at the end of the trailer.

I think the film's on demand now too. Yes, that's how we watched it -- which means we're helping kill off the movie theaters too, which makes, yes, makes me sad. Or, rather, melancholic.