Vancouver, BC + Ironic Metrosexuals

After this morning's rather rantish political posting (at least, rantish for me), I decided that I'd better lighten things up a bit with a description of what I did over the holiday weekend.

I spent Thanksgiving with my mom in Vancouver, BC. (People in Seattle always add the moniker "BC" after "Vancouver" so as not to suggest that they are talking about Vancouver, WA - although, why anyone would spend a significant time discussing Vancouver, WA, I have no idea.) Picture me eating noodles at Hon's Wun Tun House on Thanksgiving eve - a nice change of pace from the whole turkey/stuffing/mashed potatoes thing. Normally, I wouldn't eat in such a super-touristy restaurant but we were a) hungry, b) cold, and c) every place else we went was packed. So, Hon's it was, and it was good. (Side note: I just noticed that Hon's has apparently trademarked the word "Potsticker," at least, if their Web site is any indication. Can they actually do this?)

My mom and I successfully turned "International Buy Nothing Day" into "International Buy Everything Because the US Dollar Still Goes Further in Canada and They Have Way Better Clothing Than in Seattle Day(s)." Of course, I'm rather conflicted about the whole consumerism thing, but I still had a great time walking around with her, and marveling at the wonders of an actual metropolitan area that boasts skyscrapers, which seem to be in short supply here. The only down side of being in Vancouver (and there are very, very few bad things I can say about the city) is that they seem to have even more Starbucks than we do. On Robson Street there are actually two Starbucks kitty-corner (or cater-corner or catty-corner or catacorner) from one another - apparently so that all of the tourists don't have to cross the street to get their caffeine fix. (Oh, and unlike my venture to Toronto last month, I didn't run into any Tim Hortons.)

After spending a significant amount of time and $$ shopping, I caught a television show on one of the local stations with Chris Staples, a principal at Rethink Advertising. Staples was talking about the whole metrosexual phenomenon - or "movement" as he called it. He juxtaposed metrosexuals with "real guys" and said that the metrosexual has been relatively ignored by television advertisers. Instead, Staples suggested, they are catered to in magazines like Wallpaper and Surface.

I've been noticing that there's been a trend recently to conflate hipsters and metrosexuals. For example, witness Pitchfork Media's review of the Kill Bill soundtrack:

The life of a hipster is arduous and complex, teeming with expensive haircuts, the obligation to buy the CDs the webzines have arbitrarily deemed cool, and those frilled skirts that you have to keep tugging at in the frigid lines to get into Chelsea's Bungalow 8. I mean, goddamn, it's like thirty degrees out there. The Hipster Handbook helped a little, but not enough. The questions linger. Is it cooler to be metrosexual, or to pretend to be metrosexual while actually being homosexual? Is it cooler to be an actual hipster, an ironic hipster, or the oft-imitated "fool on the hill" hipster?

Regardless of the author's complete disregard for the fact that The Hipster Handbook is, in and of itself, an ironic discussion of the hipster "lifestyle," I think there's something interesting going on here. Is the metrosexual just a more affluent, materialistic, and stylish version of the hipster? Does the metrosexual fall underneath the vast "hipster" umbrella? Can you be an ironic metrosexual - that is, you act like a "real guy" (e.g., you read, shudder, Maxim and/or FHM and actually enjoy the most recent Bud Light commercials) but you're really a metrosexual underneath it all?

These are the things I think about late at night.