is there a hipster's guide to new york available?

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hipster code #90-390a

again, so do i. i'm such a civic busybody.

I blame Lukas's moustache for that one.

when i do know where something is, though, i will give the best directions that i can.

now that's just plain dumb, dude! C'mon, why do you think it's called "Wall Street?"!"!"!""!"#@:@^@$%@#$%?!#!?@#$?!@#$?!@#$?!@#$!@#????!??^&?&?&^?$?#??!?!?~

so they don't ask you for car rides either?

I said "YES" in this completely incredulous way. The boy apologized and then asked if they could walk to Greenpoint from there. I should have given them really bad directions.

"see that street up there, Metropolitan? Take a right and follow it all the way..."

At home he feels like a tourist
At home he feels like a tourist
He fills his head with culture
He gives himself an ulcer
He fills his head with culture
He gives himself an ulcer

Down on the disco floor
They make their profit
From the things they sell
To help you cob off
And the rubbers you hide
In your top left pocket

At home she’s looking for interest
At home she’s looking for interest
She said she was ambitious
So she accepts the process
She said she was ambitious
So she accepts the process

Down on the disco floor
They make their profit
From the things they sell
To help you cob off
And the rubbers you hide
In your top left pocket

Two steps forward
(six steps back)
(six steps back)
(six steps back)
(six steps back)
Small step for him
(big jump for me)
(big jump for me)
(big jump for me)
(big jump for me)

At home she feels like a tourist
At home she feels like a tourist
She fills her head with culture
She gives herself an ulcer
Why make yourself so anxious
You give yourself an ulcer

the publisher wanted me to turn it into a novel, but i decided not to do it.

Now there's a New York Times' guide to hipsterdom.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1913220,00.html

Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care.

Annoying, yes, but harmless, right? Not to hear their critics tell it. Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity. Critics have described the loosely defined group as smug, full of contradictions and, ultimately, the dead end of Western civilization.

Though the subculture is met with derision in wider society, hipsters have been able to eke out enclaves across the country, chief among them the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Williamsburg. But now even that is threatened. The hip have been hit with a double whammy of economic reality (more are struggling to pay rent as parental support dries up) and population changes (the carefully gentrified neighborhood is gradually being infiltrated by squatters inhabiting Williamsburg's stalled building projects). Hipsterdom's largest natural habitat, it seems, is under threat. (See pictures of Steve Jobs on the job.)

Though the irony-sporting, status quo–abhorring, plaid-clad denizens of Williamsburg are a distinctly modern species, the hipster as a genus has its roots in the 1930s and '40s. The name itself was coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene. The word's origins are disputed — some say it was a derivative of "hop," a slang term for opium, while others think it comes from the West African word hipi, meaning to open one's eyes. But gradually it morphed into a noun, and the "hipster" was born.

Hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed. But the subculture grew, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement: Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg were early hipsters, but it would be Norman Mailer who would try and give the movement definition. In an essay titled "The White Negro," Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death — annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity — and electing instead to "divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self." As the first hipster generation aged, it was replaced by the etymologically diminutive hippies, who appropriated their fears about the Cold War but embraced the community over the individual.

The word would fade for years until it was reborn in the early '90s, used again to describe a generation of middle-class youths interested in an alternative art and music scene. But instead of creating a culture of their own, hipsters proved content to borrow from trends long past. Take your grandmother's sweater and Bob Dylan's Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst and bam — hipster.

Such cultural mishmash is ripe for parodying. In 2003, author Robert Lanham wrote The Hipster Handbook, trying to codify the rules to hipsterdom, like "You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration" and "You have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your 'one Republican friend.' " There's also Hipster Bingo and, of course, Look at This F___ing Hipster (the link obviously contains strong language). Chronicling hipsterdom's extremes, the LATFH photo blog was a viral sensation, netting its founder, Joe Mande, a book deal in the process. (See the 25 best blogs of 2009.)

Some of this ridicule is a bit unfair. As stores like Urban Outfitters have mass-produced hipster chic, hipsterdom has become a part of mainstream culture, overshadowing its originators' still-strong alternative art and music scene. Those people, of course, no longer identify as hipsters, but they're not the problem. The hipsters who will be the dead end of Western Civilization are the ones who add nothing new or original and simply recycle and reduce old trends into a meaningless meme. It's for that reason that when Williamsburg's hipster playland is in crisis, there aren't many who are concerned.

time magazine btw, not nyt

Spent the last 4 days in Greenpoint. Who are these hip young things who DRIVE to brunch at Enid's?? Who DRIVES, and how do all the 20-somethings have big silver SUVs?? I guess the fixies only come out when the sun is shining and your skinny girlfriend (who's wearing a belted flannel shirt) isn't coming along.