on hipness

[gusl]

The Wikipedia article on Bohemianism describes exactly what I want in a neighborhood. (I like the links section). Sadly, they all tend to get gentrified and lose their creative edge.

The article on the book "The Rebel Sell", by Joseph Heath, reminds me of the stuff I've read on OvercomingBias and LessWrong, in the sense of being cynical (in this case, debunking hippie political BS) and the game-theoretic story of "why we need rules". It also reminded me of George Carlin's rant about baby boomers.

Comments

[tedesson.livejournal.com]

Have you seen
http://nymag.com/realestate/neighborhoods/2010/65374/
?

And also _The cult of statistical significance_ by Ziliak and McCloskey?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen the NYmag article. Strangely, they rank Williamsburg as 12th for creativity.

My only nonzero factors are: affordability (0.5), transit (0.5), safety (0.3), creative (1.0), green space (0.5), bars&nightlife (0.5)

This is the ranking I got:

1. East Village
2. Lower East Side
3. DUMBO/Downtown Brooklyn
4. Park Slope
5. West Village/Meatpacking
6. Carroll Gardens/Gowanus
7. Tribeca
8. Greenwich Village
9. Soho
10. Brooklyn Heights
11. Cobble Hill/Boerum Hill
12. Chelsea
13. Prospect Heights
14. Williamsburg
15. Red Hook
16. Midtown West
17. Greenpoint
18. Upper West Side
19. Battery Park City/Financial District
20. Nolita/Little Italy
21. Murray Hill
22. Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill
23. Inwood
24. Flatiron/Gramercy
25. Long Island City
26. Upper East Side
27. Midtown East
28. Astoria
29. Central Harlem
30. Washington Heights
31. Manhattanville/Morningside Heights
32. Sunnyside
33. Roosevelt Island
34. Bushwick
35. Woodside
36. Bay Ridge
37. Brighton Beach
38. Riverdale
39. Chinatown
40. Jackson Heights
41. East Harlem
42. Corona Park
43. Sunset Park
44. St. George
45. Bedford Park
46. Sheepshead Bay
47. Belmont
48. West Brighton
49. Bed Stuy
50. Flushing
51. Crown Heights
52. City Island/Country Club/Pelham Bay
53. Melrose/Mott Haven/Port Morris
54. New Dorp
55. Ditmas Park/Kensington
56. Todt Hill
57. Parkchester
58. Belle Harbor
59. Co-op City
60. Westerleigh

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I have not read "The cult of statistical significance". Why do you ask?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I like this:

Clash of the Bearded Ones: Hipsters, Hasids, and the Williamsburg street.

highlights

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

<< Finally, the opponents are at the door. The Hasids are a group of three led by 59-year-old Isaac Abraham, an erstwhile candidate for the City Council and a self-appointed spokesman for the Satmars. The trio is bearded, too, of course, but differently so: These are authority beards. Heritage beards. Abraham finds his seat on the cramped stage and requests a glass of water, cracking, “Make sure it’s not spiked.” He’s attuned to the absurdity of the premise: Three Hasids and 120 cyclists walk into a bar. >>

<< Loop introduces herself as the author of the topless-ride initiative, “which God stopped with a blizzard,” she adds. “Damn him!”. Awkward giggles ricochet around the room. Abraham’s face turns to stone.
This is not going to be an easy evening.>>

<< Morning to night, boys and girls whipped by Hasid minivans on their fixed-gears, hoods and hems flapping, thoughtful produce rattling in the baskets. It’s not that people didn’t bike down Bedford before, but the lane threw them into relief, marked them as a category. >>

<< The Satmars were incensed. Hasids are prohibited from looking at improperly dressed members of the opposite sex, and some complained that the women cycling through their neighborhood were an affront. “It’s a major issue, women passing through here in that dress code,” Simon Weiser, a Hasidic member of Community Board 1, told the Post. >>

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

<< Right now, on a slow Thursday afternoon, the talk of the deli is Rachel, an 18-year-old Hasidic girl who “went off”—the local term for breaking with tradition. >>

<< Baruch Herzfeld, 38, is a classic macher and motormouth with a foot in both the Hasid and hipster worlds. He is an Orthodox Jew with close ties to the Satmars who also calls the Satmar leaders “Talibanowitz” and says things like “There is no community more homoerotic than the Hasidim, they’re so fucking gay.” Within minutes of our acquaintance, he offers me a hookup with a lapsed-Hasid girl and invites me to the Dominican Republic to report on a business dispute of his currently making its way through the rabbinical court. >>

<< The bike-lane scandal has made Herzfeld a kind of unlikely spokesman for both communities. He represents, in fact, a burgeoning hybrid constituency—Hasidic hipsters. They are the ones you see banging their heads at the Reverend (Reverend!) Vince Anderson’s gospel-rock shows at Union Pool. They are the breed that gave us Curly Oxide (a Hasidic punk musician whose life may become a Sacha Baron Cohen movie), the Hasidic rapper Matisyahu, and writer Paula (actually Penina) Roth. In Herzfeld’s view, there’s less contradiction here than one may think. “Once a Hasid shaves his curls, he’s a hipster,” >>

<< For South Williamsburg’s Hasids, Traif Bike Gesheft functions as a semi-secret window onto the larger world and a clubhouse of mild transgressions. Herzfeld rents bikes to Hasids at no cost, just to get them to venture beyond the neighborhood. (Among Satmars, bicycles are not specifically disallowed but are considered taboo nonetheless.) Inside the shop, otherwise righteous men let down their guard. Tongues loosen. “The men, they don’t know how to have a conversation with a woman,” Herzfeld explains, talking a mile a minute. “Whenever they come to the bike shop, the first thing they ask me to find them a prostitute. >>

<< If there is one reason the Hasid-hipster standoff runs deeper than the usual street-level urban tension, it is that both sides have a lot more to lose from parting. One needs living space, and the other needs to lease it. ... The Hasids and hipsters are shackled to each other in a co-dependent real-estate loop. >>

<< The Saturday the building’s 66 units went on the market, remembers one young female apartment hunter, “was kind of a madhouse.” Corcoran brokers were shuffling frowzled hipster couples and postgrad roommate groups through the property, jabbering about the perks and the fixtures. All around this axis of crazed activity, the neighborhood was dead deserted, with shutters drawn and streets empty: Shabbos. >>

<< Back at the panel meeting at Pete’s Candy Store, the Satmars-versus-cyclists debate rages on. The discussion is devolving into chaos. Isaac Abraham offers odd, ad hoc claims that bicycles are dangerous in general, none of which has anything to do with the topic at hand, but each of which manages to infuriate the bike activists a little more.
...
Only a naïf would have expected a resolution of any sort tonight. But the common blindness to facts and reason is beginning to look like, well, a plague.

After about an hour of this, I step outside, where the two Hasids from Abraham’s entourage are exchanging bemused quips. Near them, a bicycle is chained to a tree with a large NO BIKES sign. Two gunless NYPD officers, both Hispanic, hang around in yellow windbreakers that say COMMUNITY AFFAIRS.

“Are you here in case a fight breaks out?” I ask.
“Yeah, just in case,” answers one with a wide grin.
“No problems so far?”
“These people are not going to do anything. But damn, they can talk.” >>

[rdore.livejournal.com]

Of course, everyone thinks it's not them who's diluting the neighborhood's creative edge.