Noted

Spotted on the Bowery.

How hipsters can get paid for being hipsters

Spotted on First Avenue and East 13th Street. The Open Call is tomorrow from 2-4. (p.m.) And I have no idea what the overused term "Hipster" really means these days... and neither does the person who made these flyers.

The 'hipster trap' spotted in the East Village going viral, for some reason

By now you may have seen this photo of a cardboard trap by @WillHimself taken on Avenue A and Sixth Street during the weekend... "Just met this guy setting up 'hipster traps' in NYC, baited with PBR and American Spirits."

It was first posted on Reddit. Gawker linked to it. Time also linked to it. So far, the photos has been viewed more than 500,000 times.

Could this former East Village 'hipster' owe the IRS $172 million?

The Post today picks up on The Smoking Gun's scoop from yesterday...

Here's the Post:

Meet the scofflaw (above) who allegedly owes more than $172 million to the IRS — a broke, former Alphabet City hipster who has had to borrow money from relatives to make ends meet.

Garage-band guitarist Marcos Esparza Bofill quit his floundering job as a day trader in the city after less than a year — and left the tiny tenement apartment that he shared with roommates on East Sixth Street to move back to his native Barcelona, Spain, in hopes of having better luck with music career there, friends said.

"The first thing he said to me [yesterday after learning of the tax bill] was, 'What's the IRS?' " one pal told The Post. "He was shocked. He's trying to figure out what's going on.

"It's something that can easily be cleared up," the friend added. "It's crazy. He's a very chilled, relaxed guy. I think he's making music right now. He plays guitar and I think is doing some deejay stuff."

[Photo via The Smoking Gun]

10:11 a.m., Avenue A, Aug. 1

Noted

Brandweek: What's wrong with the influencer model?

Duncan Watts: The claim that influencer matter or are important or influencers drive brand awareness, when you scrutinize them carefully, they turn out to not really be very meaningful. Or to put it another way, everyone thinks they know what an influencer is and everyone thinks they know why they matter, but everybody thinks something different. Is an influencer the hipsters in the East Village or Oprah Winfrey? What makes Oprah influential is very different from what makes the hipster in the East Village influential. And so by failing to differentiate carefully between all these different types of influencers you really undermine the ability of the theory to say anything predictive.

Posts that I never got around to posting: That guy in the purple T-shirt

Ever since I saw these ads for Uniqlo on Suffolk and Houston I have nightmares that I'm forced to go out for speciality cocktails with that guy in the purple T-shirt and he takes me to a secret bar that's under another not-so-secret-anymore bar and no one drinks because they are too busy looking to see if Albert Hammond Jr. will show up, who eventually does and is actually really nice, which disappoints people who want to be ignored by a celebrity then we go to an after-hours party and I'm forced to select the music and everyone is watching me so I pick the Crystal Castles and get laughed at because they are so 2008.

When busloads of tourists take part in studies: The buzziest areas in NYC are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers

From the Times:

Apologies to residents of the Lower East Side; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and other hipster-centric neighborhoods. You are not as cool as you think, at least according to a new study that seeks to measure what it calls “the geography of buzz.”
The research, presented in late March at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, locates hot spots based on the frequency and draw of cultural happenings: film and television screenings, concerts, fashion shows, gallery and theater openings. The buzziest areas in New York, it finds, are around Lincoln and Rockefeller Centers, and down Broadway from Times Square into SoHo.

Noted

The Times features spiffy Crown Heights hotspot Franklin Park today. As the Times reports:

“I came because of the Skee-Ball,” said Ashley Bonnell, 28, on a recent Saturday night, as she sipped a gin gimlet alongside the white subway-style tiles of the smaller bar. “My friends have been calling me to join them in the East Village, but I told them I’m hanging out in my hood.”

From the next stool, her friend Joachim Boyle, 28, who was also drinking a gimlet, concurred. “You don’t know how excited I am to be out of the Village and live here.”

Mr. Boyle pondered whether old-timers would dismiss them as invading hipsters.

“I’m not a hipster,” Ms. Bonnell, a physical therapist, insisted.

“Yes, you are,” Mr. Boyle said, waving toward her long cardigan, red scarf and chunky boots. He tugged on his subtly sheened blue button-down. “So am I.”

Also, the Times offers a handy guide at the end that includes the address and this...:

DRESS CODE Facial hair, cabby hats, zippered sweaters and jeans for men. Oversize cardigans, leggings or skinny jeans, long scarves and flat boots for women.

Why you shouldn't be surprised if you run into Bill Murray at a bar or loft party or...

Page Six Magazine explains. Kind of.

An examination of hipsters

Meanwhile, in Australia, Lisa Pryor at The Sydney Morning Herald weighs in with a screed titled "How to be a bona fide hipster -- try to be different by being the same." Here are a few excerpts from the article:

Hipsters are hard to describe because they are so full of contradictions. But like a toupee or AIDS-related wasting, you know it when you see it. Hipsters hate fashion but take meticulous care achieving exactly the right degree of rumpledness. They value originality while looking the same as one another.

Thanks to these contradictions, hipsters find themselves always hurtling, psychically, towards a black hole of self-hatred, denial and irony, both intended and unintended. Ever seen someone walk into a cool bar and say "Oh my God. Look at all these try-hard wankers" not realising they look exactly the same? Classic hipster.

This week I am writing to you from the world headquarters of hipsterdom, the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Williamsburg. This slice of New York is the Haight-Ashbury of ironic self-loathing. In Verb Cafe on Bedford Avenue, a sign reads "Missing: brown felt fedora". Only four guys in the cafe are not wearing fedoras. Young men with messy hair, forearm tattoos and full beards abound. Around the corner at egg, an uncapitalised cafe, the beardage rate tops 50 per cent.

Whether they live in New York or Sydney, hipsters share many of the same qualities, particularly in the love-hate relationships they have to the hot topics of gentrification, fashion and queueing.

First, gentrification, a topic on which hipsters have passionate, confused views. They hate watching property prices rise in cool neighbourhoods partly because they do not want to see the earthy, quaint, ethnic working class displaced by white professionals with modular sofas who love painting their front doors red, but mostly because they realise they can no longer make a killing by buying cheap terraces and later flogging them off. And despite hating gentrification, they refuse to move anywhere that has not been gentrified.

Hair

Pipeline 29 checks in with this report on the new Freeman's Barber Shop in the West Village:

With its manly nautical theme, chalkboard, and vintage chairs, the men's hair salon is a favorite of the fashion set and any red-blooded male who wants a shave and a trim without a side of pretense. Now Westsiders won't have to travel to the Lower East Side to look sharp. On Tuesday, we got a first-hand look at the new FSC Barbershop on Horatio near 8th Avenue in the West Village. Like it's Freeman's Alley counterpart, the West Side shop oozes dude. This location, however, has a smoother, sleeker aesthetic to go with it's new, more upscale surroundings—white tile replaces beadboard, smoked-glass fixtures replace raw bulbs. Says co-owner Sam Buffa, "What we're hoping for in this location is to open up earlier in the morning 'cause all the guys in the East Village get up at like noon which is definitely different over here. There are a lot of families over here, a lot of businesses and a lot of kids. One of my favorite things that I saw when we opened up the other barbershop was when we had an eight year old and a 70 year old getting cuts right next to each other. This place isn't just for hipsters or anything like that. We'd like to think it's for everyone."

Well, if that's too downmarket for you, there's always the new salon in the Plaza. As Vanity Fair reported earlier this month:

Less than a week before the flagship Warren-Tricomi salon opened at the recently revamped Plaza Hotel, in Manhattan, hairstyling veterans Joel Warren and Edward Tricomi were sitting at a round table underneath the crystal chandlers in the hotel’s lobby. “We are in the lap of luxury here,” Warren said, the coloring yin to Tricomi’s cutting yang, “and we wanted to create a space that was geared towards our clients.”
Their loyal followers (jet-setters, boldface names, editors, you name it) tend to be a discerning bunch, so the hair pair wanted the salon environment to be—forgive the ladies-who-lunch parlance—beyond.
“We really wanted it to be the most luxurious experience possible,” Warren says.

Oh, and it's a 6,100-square-foot space with a VIP room with a special entrance.

I miss Mr. Yury, who used to cut my hair on 7th Street. One day he was just gone, though other barbers on his old shop.