DEFINITION OF HIP
by Joe Praml

Hipster: You can't be hip unless you are knocked out by Mozart, and understand a Miles Davis solo, or Chet Baker as a singer and as a trumpet player.

Hipster, a rebel, will not be pinned down. True hipsters are never caricatures. "Cool": step back, away from the main stream (but, not without emotion—that’s affectation). True hipsters are existentialists.

…And The Horseman’s Name Was Death, my screenplay: Story of an artist, musician. Bert Riley is a father figure to other lost souls, artists; doesn't matter the kind of artists. Bert is hip. He turns his back on his violent past as a Green Beret, Special Forces, LAPD cop, homicide detective and chooses to be an artist/guitarist, honky tonk country music.

Horseman is written from a hipster POV. Horseman is hip in the sense of Voltaire, Dante and Boccaccio, Mozart, Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker, Don Siegel, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Steve McQueen in the movie Junior Bonner.

Voltaire is blowing riffs as hip as Charlie Parker. Dante and Boccaccio leaping through the centuries of hip.

Sophocles, Homer, Shakespeare. Homer was the "finger poppin' daddy" of his day.

Clint Eastwood is hip. He loves jazz; made a movie about Charlie Parker.

Elvis is hep, not hip. Except for one thing he did that was incredible...Heartbreak Hotel. That was hip.

Hippies stole the word from hipsters.

Being hip is a journey. Kidsplay ’47, my screenplay, is a story about an 11-year-old, Skippy Chandler, who is on his own journey to hip, to the secrets of Charlie Parker, Voltaire, Kerouac, Dante. Skippy and his friends argue about the Nazis and the Russians and the recently ended WWII while smoking filched cigarettes. He teaches his younger brother about life, death and the meaning of Dracula; about the difference between lying and seeing with the imagination. We share his coming to terms with the sometimes disastrous results of both. We see Skippy becoming existentially hip because he has a code of honor; he becomes disillusioned with the gangster code after seeing Richard Widmark push an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs in Kiss of Death. He comes to see the necessity of getting in one good punch in a fight even if the final result is a good thumping by his opponent.

How did Charlie Parker do what he did? Charlie Parker found, burrowed into the secrets, music that no one else bothered to look for. Don't know. Max Roach was part of it. He was there. Composers Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, they got the credit. Pops, King Oliver, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker were there. Bix Beiderbecke wasn't there; he didn't get the credit.

Difference between "hip" and "hep":

"Play Misty for Me” by Earl Garner (hip)
Johnny Mathis (hep)
Sugar Ray Robinson (hip)
Sugar Ray Leonard (hep)
Blues: Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker
Lightnin’ Hopkins and Leadbelly
Monet and Expressionism (hip); stepping away from the mainstream.