Since this is apparently my week to come out of the closet, I might as well admit my love of modern furniture. Through a connection at Herman Miller, I was able to procure a fabled Eames Lounge chair and ottoman for a third of the retail price. Along with my loving wife and darling child, every evening I come home to the warm, leather embrace of my iconic chair. Yes, it does happen to appear in the title sequence for that show where the four gays make over a straight loser with bad hair and a booger wall into a closeted homosexual with a clean apartment. Nonetheless, I still love the chair.

I don't love it enough to tattoo a picture of it across my forearm or anything even crazier than that, but I will put it on a t-shirt and force my child to wear it while getting photographed in front of a graffiti-covered wall. Again, instant hipster. And she totally gets into it.
After I did my last post about the Hipster Baby Shirt project, a lot of people asked if I would sell the shirts. At this point I'm still just using ink-jet iron-ons, and I wouldn't feel comfortable selling shirts unless they were actually silkscreened. Plus, what I'm doing with the project is putting things that I love on shirts in order to create some truly unique clothes for her, and that is something that everybody can do. It really is so easy just to take a picture with a digital camera (or "borrow" an image from the web) and then manipulate it with photoshop to look cool (use the "piant bucket" function to white out the background). Then all you do is print it on t-shirt transfer paper and your kid's got a shirt that no one else has. Someday I plan on commissioning some silkscreened shirts, and when I do I'll advertise them on the blog. But until then, I can't encourage you enough to go out and make some for yourselves. It's a lot of fun.

I love the San Francisco bus system, known as MUNI. When we no longer live here, I think I will miss MUNI more than anything else about the city. A lot of people complain about MUNI for breaking down all the time or being smelly, but I love it. MUNI really serves everyone from the homeless to the high-powered stock broker who doesn't see any sense paying $28 for a day's parking down in the financial district. If you have a MUNI pass, you don't need a car in this city. MUNI is to San Francisco what the subway is to Manhattan: essential for getting around on the cheap. And you know I'm cheap.

To me, there is no greater bus to exemplify all that is wonderful about MUNI than the 38 Geary. I've heard that it is the most heavily-used bus line on the planet. A bus comes every 5-7 minutes. It goes all the way from Land's End at the western tip of the city to the TransBay terminal at the heart of the financial district. So it goes through Russian and Chinese neighborhoods, the Fillmore, Japantown, the Tenderloin, and Union Square. Along the way it picks up some unusual characters. There's an Asian dude on it all the time who wears knit caps with holes that allow two very prominent antennae to pop out from the top of his head. They are technically his hair, but they look as stiff as pipe-cleaners. The day Alito was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, I heard the following very-typical MUNI conversation between two elderly black homeless ladies on the 38 Geary:

"I would want a range rover if I had a car."

"Girl, don't you know a land rover is much better than a range rover?"

"What'you talking about? Range rovers are better than land rovers."

I stop listening for a few moments, then I hear:

"Girl, you don't know what a filibuster is? That's when they just keep on talking and talking and talking so no one gets to vote."

I really wish I knew how they got from the Range Rover/Land Rover debate to a discussion of democratic cowardice on the Senate floor. But I'm sure it was very MUNI.

One of the greatest features of the 38 Geary is the bus itself. It is extra-long, and the middle of the bus bends like an accordion around corners. And you can stand in the bendy part! It's almost as cool as that place where you can stand in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico all that the same time. The front of the bus is on Market Street while the back is on O'Farrell. Pretty cool. Wood and I love to take Juniper on the 38 Geary, so I made her this t-shirt where a photo I took of the bus goes across the middle, but at the accordion part it bends on the body:
Just throw this shirt on with some orange baby legs and set her down in front of some orange-colored graffiti. That's a recipe for a color-coordinated hipster baby right there. I am trying to teach this kid the word "bus" so that whenever she sees one she yells "bus" the same time she yells "ball!" everytime she sees something round or yells, "da da!" everytime she sees her mother. She can say, "up," "ready," "ball," "bubble," "apple," but even though I have repeated the word bus in her ear a thousand times while strangers look at me like I'm nuts, she still won't say it. So I'm going to dress her in bus clothes until she gets it right.

Remember, a custom-designed (by me) hipster baby t-shirt is one of the prizes in the First Annual Sweet Juniper Weird Search Hit Contest, which ends Monday night. There are already some hilarious entries there, so check them out if you haven't already.

When this whole pregnancy thing struck I was probably what most would consider a raging hipster. I would always deny this, but Wood would say, "Honey, hipsters always deny that they're hipsters. The good ones do, anyways."

Part of my unwanted inclusion in hipster society comes from my undying love for thrift stores. I have been buying my entire wardrobe at the Salvation Army, Goodwill, NuWay, and the holy grail of all thrift stores, Value World on Michigan Avenue in Ypsilanti, for the last twelve years. While driving across the country by myself a few years ago, in every town I stopped, from Winnemucca, Nevada to Lincoln, Nebraska, I hit up every local Salvation Army. Thrift stores are one of the true blessings of living in the provinces; without competition from the entire population of Williamsburg or the Mission, scoring unbelievably cool vintage clothes for cheap is a piece of cake.

Before you scorn all this as hipster pretension, understand that it is actually something worse. At first it was not style, but the word "thrift" that attracted to me to this world. It was cheapness that led me down the golden road to Hipsterdom. See, when you only shop in thrift stores, you can't help but dress like a hipster. You sort of become one by default. And it didn't take a genius to see that the fashion assholes at Miu Miu and Agnes B and all the rest were just recycling old ideas from old clothes: old clothes I saw every week that had been donated by the widows of dead autoworkers to the local thrift store. I'd rather pay a dollar for a dead man's clothes than $400 for something sewn by an Indonesian street urchin any day. Wood and I have found old Audrey-Hepburn coats from the 50s for her that look like something I.N.C or Marc Jacobs would sell for $500. Cuter, probably, and only $5.99. Nothing stirs my soul as much as getting an amazing deal. I have dozens of vintage suits dating from the 30s to the 70s. I have tons of soft Levi's Big E redline single stitch jeans from the 50s and 60s. It would take me a month to wear each pair. I have enough snap-button shirts to clothe the entire audience at a 1999 Wilco show, I mean, I would never wear them, but I just can't pass up a beautiful old 1950s western shirt with roses embroidered under the shoulders for $1.99. I could go on and on. Let's just say this has created closet issues in our apartment and every season Wood forces a culling.

When you shop at thrift stores as much as I do, you also can't help but buy the truly great vintage ironic t-shirts, the kind they reproduce and sell en masse now at Urban Outfitters. I have hundreds of them, t-shirts from 1982 barbeques in Lubbock, Texas and a 1978 family reunions in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. My favorite is a simple black Hank Williams Jr. tour shirt from the 70s that just has his bearded mug etched on the front with the word "Bocephus" below it. Awesome. I've had it since 1993. What I always loved about these shirts is that they were pieces of history, and few, if anyone, still wore them. They weren't sewn in batches of 50,000 at the Old Navy factory outside Kuala Lamphur. They felt like they were nurtured through the years until they were ready to be handed over to me.

And then a few years ago people started calling any man that cares about his clothes a "metrosexual." God I wanted to rip out the fucking gums of anyone who so much as uttered that horrible world. The Gap started making faux-vintage tees and hipsters started stuffing Big Macs in their stubbly faces in commercials, so I stopped wearing my t-shirts. Once anything hits the mainstream I scorn it (I suppose the mark of a true hipster). So all of my ironic tees sit in a cardboard box in our garage. If anyone on Haight street knew about them, I swear I'd be fighting off hipster zombies warily stumbling up and down on our block, through the fog and the streetlights, looking for a chance to do the zombie swarm and break through the plywood I'd nail up to reinforce the windows and doors, wailing and moaning, We hear you have old Van Halen tour t-shirts from 1982. . . "Get back," I'd yell to my little family. "They've come for the LPs! And the t-shirts!" Good thing hipsters are so skinny: their zombies would be easy to defeat.

I figure someday I will make Juniper a quilt from these t-shirts, and tell her, "See, sweetie, these slightly ironic sayings on faded primary-colored fabric are proof that your dad was a hipster back at the turn of the century!"

Fatherhood has left me dressing like a bible salesman. But it has also given me the opportunity to project my tastes and aesthetic onto my child. My first stop on this journey was discovering daddytypes while doing a google search for an Eames rocker bases I could attach to our shell chair. Then, for nine months, Greg led me through the world of design-oriented parents who were, like me, sickened by the ugly baby shit you find at any big box baby store. Greg fed and nourished my inner hipster. But I could never bring myself to pay the extravagant prices many of the smaller design-oriented companies were charging. The gifts from family and friends and baby showers started rolling in, onesies with the words "I'm adorable," printed on the front with giraffes and ducks and such. I found myself looking at that onesie in particular and thinking, "I wish that said, 'I'm FUCKING adorable." Alas, all of the baby onesies and t-shirts with sarcastic sayings or rock bands on them that Greg pointed me to were like $25. In the end cheapness ruled out over hip at our house. Besides, why would I want my kid to wear a "Sex Pistols" onesie when I don't even like the Sex Pistols, and besides, a few hundred other little hipster babies will have that shirt?

Then, at our San Francisco baby shower, one of the attendees brought iron-on transfers with pens and markers to decorate them, which we then put on the onesies. What a great idea, I thought. It formed the perfect trifecta of hip, thrift, and uniqueness. I went out and bought dozens of sheets of iron-on transfers, a bunch of wholesale baby t-shirts and onesies on eBay, and several months before Juniper was born I had sixty or so unique onesies and t-shirts designed and read to go. And now my little girl is probably the only baby in the world with a Steve Buscemi onesie, and it only cost about $1.50. While Wood retired early with her pregnancy sleep each night, I toiled away on google image search and photoshop manipulating the corporate symbol of San Francisco public transportation ("MUNI") to say "MUNI BABY" with the same kick-ass font that looks like the windy path down Lombard Street. I manipulated the corporate symbol for the BART subway to say "BART BABY" and put a picture of an old 80s BART train above it. I put Mr. Edwards and Nelly Olson from Little House on the Prairie on onesies. I indulged every esoteric interest I had and made my daughter a billboard for them. Charlie Chaplin onesies. Alexander Calder's designs on onesies. Harry Houdini onesies for when she saw fit to escape her swaddle; "Jaws" from James Bond onesies for teething. I saw all those horrible children's t-shirts that said, "WILD CHILD!" on the front and I made the French version, with a picture of Victor from Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage and that title in a scroll above his head.

Making custom tees for babies is extremely easy to do: (1) buy a package of ink-jet iron-on t-shirt transfers (you can put 10-15 images on one sheet of ink-jet transfer paper!); (2) use google image search or a scanner to come up with the images you want to put on the shirts; (3) edit the images in photo software--- at the very least you need to "flip" or "mirror" the image so the proper side faces up when you iron it on (4) use a hand iron for 30 seconds to complete your masterpiece.

It was so much fun for me in those months before Juniper was born, and I felt like it gave me a little bit of control over something when everything else felt like it was spiraling out of control. My baby didn't have to become a little Carter's clone. We could still be different from the hoi polloi. We could prove that having a baby didn't mean we had lost our sense of style.

She is now just outgrowing the last of the onesies I made for her, and Wood secretly stashes them away when they no longer fit, probably so I don't go out and make a bunch more. Strangely, now that she's here I no longer really feel the need to complete her 9 month wardrobe with a new set of custom onesies and t-shirts. Maybe this whole "design-oriented" baby scene has started to wear on me. These are the new hipsterati in my life, the parents with Bugaboos in the DWR showroom on Fillmore Street eyeing the stokkes and complaining that the new line is nothing spectacular, even though none of our babies give a fuck what they sit in or shit in so long as they are loved and held close and kept warm when it is cold. I do still find myself perusing thrift stores for French baby clothes and I found the cutest little street urchin outfit on eBay (from the 1890s!) and Junebug is going to make one hell of a soot-faced little newsgirl this Halloween. It is, in some ways, still more fun to have a hipster baby than to be a hipster yourself.

But just this morning I pulled out the "I'm adorable" onesie and pulled it over the kid's shoulders and snapped the crotch before I realized which one it was. "You are adorable," I said while I kissed her belly, and she laughed. "You are fucking adorable." Then I went to my closet and put on my business casual attire for another day of selling bibles.