You have to have at least a nodding acquaintance with Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes. And that's only the core curriculum, so to speak. If you decide to major in hipness, then you're expected to go absolutely all the way. The hip film jock, for instance, should not only have favorite early '70s Hong Kong sex comedies and German Alpine films but also be prepared to argue the merits of Japanese versus Belgian raw video stock. It just never ends, and I think that the sheer magnitude of it makes people cold and grumpy.
Compassion is called for.
It's mostly the arty, white-urban hip that I want to say goodbye to. Not a thing. More of them, please. We won't sing folk songs around a campfire, except as a retro gag. Hip, whose guiding idea is ostensibly to liberate us from our conformist childhoods, is now the very model of conformism.