This is a Public Service
Announcement from The Bartender Knows (Cue Walter Winchell style typewriter key clicks and Morse Code beeps).
After countless overheard
conversations at the bar, hundreds of shit-talking neighborhood dwellers, a
multitude of articles, essays, and journalistic endeavors by all kinds of major
news sources have attempted to answer, describe, and assimilate this immortal
and endlessly fascinating question:
What the fuck is a hipster—and am I one?
If so, what can be done about such a
diagnosis? Are there levels of hipsterism? Is it something treatable? Or is it an
honor to be one of this clan, brandishing a badge of a select group, an allegiance
to a movement that has no true definition, no ground level identity.
As a grown man living in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn for some years, I believe I have some kind of authority
as to what a ‘hipster’ really is, since I live at Havemeyer and North 6th,
dead center in a neighborhood that invented the phenomenon.
I know Echo Park and Seattle, and
even Portland (nope…sorry kids) claim to have invented this.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn is the grand
ole Aunt that created the monster that all second–tier cities merely emulate
and receive our less than fortunate ex-patriots who escape New York’s grueling
pace, high rents, and extraordinarily competitive culture.
A place to open their Milk Bar in
peace.
Let’s just start with the basics,
shall we?
“Do you wear pants small enough to fit
your 12 year old sister?” (quote by S. Chang, local bartender).
“Are you so socially awkward that
when someone smiles and says hello you freeze, eyes glazed, like a doe walking
into the middle of a freeway?”
“Do you look like you need to eat a
burger or risk exhaustion?” (again stolen from S. Chang, local bartender).
“Do you have a trust fund and buy
already torn jeans?”
“Are you so removed from human
emotion that when someone confesses true emotive experiences you lack the
empathy to identify with their suffering?” (this recently happened to me.
Seriously. Weird, and slightly scary).
Now, these are merely cheap attacks
on tropes any episode of “Girls” has locked on with deadly accuracy.
Let The Bartender Knows make a
statement for the court.
I fucking love Williamsburg.
I do.
I used to visit this place over a decade
ago crashing at my sister’s place on Eckford and Nassau. Walking up the then
mostly shuddered Bedford Avenue at 2 am, I remember certain wild evenings,
jumping into strange cars, and odd demonic characters of varying ethnicity
leaning in to put coke under my nose on little silver spoons.
This week, The Bartender Knows
cordially presents a special two-part segment, dutifully titled: “Are you
A Hipster?”
This is Part 1.
Strange luck this week. I’ve been
looking through my previously erased files I lost when my bastard computer died
in Paris (read here).
There were several stories I forgot
I even wrote. Most writers have stored hundreds of forgotten pages somewhere now
lost. Discovering them is like bumping into an old friend on the train.
In honor of this double feature
celebration of the hood, I’ll enclose a small little love-letter excerpt I
wrote in 2004 on a little jaunt into fair Williamsburg:
I wrote this at 27. Now I’m 35. Oh
my.
Bar’s open!
-
It is my birthday. April 1st 2004.
In ten years I’ll be 37.
This worries me.
I hope I will still have many
erections. There are only a few things men must worry about. Erections are, to
me, I think the most important. Well, okay, maybe not erections but the use of
the erection. At some point—somewhere.
This was the motif last night.
Thinking that perhaps there are only a limited number of erections one may have
and setting off to implement the erection with a willing participant. I was in
New York, a city known for the usage of erections. More importantly I was in
Williamsburg, which holds the highest percentage of hard-ons the world has ever
seen.
Imagine Bedford Ave the shaft aimed
at the bulbous wet peninsula of Manhattan. I was staying in the balls, locally
known as Greenpoint. No passerby cannot smell the trace of Vodka seeping from
the lips of the babushka’s and the old men that shuffle, staring off to the
dirty cement remembering, I have no doubt, their lost erections.
I leave the balls and move up the
shaft right into the heart of this hipster heaven. Immediately, passing the
bars and shops and records stores, I soon realize that I do not have the
pressed down flap of hair greasily laid upon my forehead. My clothes are not
tight-fitting, I do not have slim hips. The arty girls walk easily next to
their tall lanky men, cute thrift store hats pulled deep over their
foreheads-unbearably cute.
The arty kids are also hot for
copulation. But this copulation has nothing to do with insertion, more
IMMERSION. The tale of the tape for up and coming artist havens goes like this.
Take a ghetto, a scary place, crack
infested, rats living as some peoples roommates. Then take that poor
son-of-a-bitch writer/painter/musician who, because of the poverty punishment
set upon them by our artless culture, are forced to live in such means to still
have the mind and money to create their dying forms. Now the rats crawl in—those
that dress the part and wear condescension like a badge on their face and the
money-makers smell shit under their pig noses. The landowner too sees the shot—and
raises the rent.
Now some ‘hip’ bars are brought up,
the place gets a buzz, the real artists are forced to move to whatever rat-trap
is on the horizon, and the rest is festering history. Humanity is yet again
destroyed, kill or be killed.
Money wins.
Artists are holding their bleeding
asses across town.
I hear Park Slope is getting
sodomized as we speak.
-
Yep. I think I was reading a lot of Henry Miller at the time. The story goes on for
another six pages. Wow. Wow. 2004.
I’ll spare you the rest.
But for the weekend, we’ll mull over
all the different types of folks who found themselves here.
And anyone who doesn’t live here,
let this be a travelogue of some odd land, often emulated and mocked, but
always drinking more than any of you.
Stay tuned for “Are You A Hipster?
(Part 2)” this week.
I raise my glass:
“To the working class!"
OUR FAIR HAMLET. SOME PEOPLE SAY IT'S THE CENTER OF THE HIP WORLD. I HONESTLY DON'T FEEL THAT COOL.
THIS JPEG ACTUALLY WAS TITLED: "HIPSTER FUCK".
WHY THE HATE?
AND IT'S WAY BETTER THAN HANGING WITH THESE DUDES!
