N
ew York City: the mouth that drank up the Old World’s brimming desires. Where numberless dreams have been answered and at once romantically lost when their dreamers fashion their realities. We’ll travel from west to east within the Village zone to find an exotic kind of social complexity baked in the urgency to create and forge new fantasies. There are many ways to go but only one right way, your way. So bring all your desires, all your fears, joys and discontents. Across these streets, where jazz nocturnally blazes trails both forgotten and ‘found’, across the bending lanes of Bob Dylan’s Jones Street and Carrie Bradshaw’s Perry Street stoop – paradoxes abound in one of the most tenacious of places. Head from the West Village to the East Village and the Lower East Side (LES), hopping the L Train or trekking the bridge into Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where hip culture is defined and works savagely towards urban transformations.
The hipster modality hasn’t changed much since vintage times. Contemporary hipsters are similar to the hippies of the Sexual Revolution because they still represent things made in small batches and intended for esoteric audiences. You might see them in gold leggings or red jeans, knotted wristbands, mirrored sunglasses and Shell Toe Adidas, wishing they were Hunter S. Thompson or some character in a Quentin Tarantino movie. You might catch them making gourmet pickles, drinking green juice until they splurge on beer and burgers, or playing pinball at their favorite dive. Broadly speaking, hipsters occupy today’s preferred stereotype: a digital-bohemian paradox of urban developments sourced in the stylistic intercourse of funk and hip-hop with video game culture and indie diagrammatics. Underneath it all, hipsterism completes the contentious desire to transgress status quo and become handmade.
The primordial question; what is “hipster”? Hipster-like substances forcefully go against the mainstream until they become mainstream and thereby find new expressions. Back in the 1940s, African-American communities used the term hip to describe youths who smoked ganja, occupied the jazz scenes, and loosened the knots around their waists. Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson, a white pianist from Harlem with all black bandmates, takes most of the credit for coining the word.
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itchy pigs Below: A fantastic art scene outside TBA electronica club in Williamsburg Opposite page from top: The Artists & Fleas market is a good place to find a funky gift for a friend back home. Buy straight from the artists; Pies n Thighs is a great stop for some comfort food cooked for gourmet city folk Opening spread: Grab a brew at the beer station off the dance floor at the Brooklyn Bowl
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