Robert Lanham

The Website of Robert Lanham

Look At This Fucking Hipster Basher

By

I’ve got a new piece over at The Morning News. I’d sworn off writing about hipsters, but got sucked back in by all the rage they still evoke. Here’s a taste.

You get the sense that if Jimi Hendrix were to show up in Echo Park today, he’d be publicly mocked in a style section piece on blipsters for wearing a feathered fedora. Duchamp would have given up as soon as he appeared on dadaist-or-douchebag.com. And Warhol would be demonized as a hipster gentrifier for setting up his factory in a Brooklyn warehouse. Critics continue to complain that we live in an era where all art is derivative and devoid of substance. But if Hendrix, Duchamp, or Warhol were alive today, we’d be doing our damnedest to derail their self-expression, dismissing them as fucking hipsters.

You can read it all here.

A Quote in the Times’ Article on Trustafarians

By

I forgot to mention this when it came out June 8th. New York Times reporter Christine Haughney was kind enough to give me a mention.

Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses […]
In the boom years, Mr. Weinstein said, 40 percent of the mortgage applications he reviewed for buyers in Williamsburg included down-payment money, from $50,000 to $300,000, from parents. About 20 percent of the applications listed investments that gave the young buyers $3,000 to $10,000 of monthly income.
But in the past two months, Mr. Weinstein said, he has handled two to three deals a week in which the parents cut back their down-payment help […]
It can be hard to see the signs of financial troubles in Williamsburg because residents are so loath to show that they had money in the first place. Robert Lanham, author of “The Hipster Handbook,” said in an interview that many newer residents tried to blend in with the area’s gritty history and dressed “half the time like they’re homeless people.”
But parental help was obvious in the intersection of residents with low-paying jobs and $3,000-a-month apartments.
“You can put two and two together, that they have money coming in from somewhere else,” Mr. Lanham said.

Read it all here.
In other news, I hosted a party for the Northside Festival on June 12th. My amazing bloggers over at FREEwilliamsburg helped to make it an amazing night. Here’s what John Norris of MTV fame had to say about it:

No place I would rather be on Friday night of the Northside Fest than the venerable (Can we call it venerable yet? Why yes, I think we can) Death By Audio. Not because it was a chance to see bands that rarely play Brooklyn – as a matter of fact every few weeks it seems you can catch at least one of them around town. But because it was a showcase of some of the most exciting, modern left-field pop our fine locale has to offer… And people ask me ‘what’s so great about Brooklyn’? Um, this is.

the-northside-festival.jpg

Gawker Says I’m A Hipster Guru

By

custom_1241896141117_2214208983_1bac3484cb_o.jpg
[image via]
Not sure how I feel about that, but The Assimilated Negro asked me to comment on the hipster casting call that I posted about earlier this week. From Gawker

Let’s assume this thing isn’t a hoax or an art project by a recent Oberlin grad who thinks he’s bohemian because he found bedbugs in his beard.
Do you tap the family trust fund? Do you idolize Dan Deacon? Are you SO not worried about getting swine flu ’cause that shit only happens to poor people?
They’re not looking for hipsters. They’re looking for entitled idiots. And wait, before you say it, I’m well aware. The terms ‘hipster’ and ‘entitled idiot’ have been synonyms for close to a decade now. But come on, isn’t hipster rage about as tired as PBR and trucker caps? Of course there are plenty of ridiculous, pretentious idiots in Williamsburg-and New York as a whole for that matter. But would you rather be living in a stripmall in the exurbs of Richmond where alt culture consists of seeing The String Cheese Incident perform on Friday at that state-run amphitheater next to Applebees? (I’m from VA, so I can make fun). Personally, I’d rather be in a place like Williamsburg where people appreciate film, music, and fashion, even if I do have to put up with people named Unicornicopia and the neighborhood’s other goofy excesses.
I hope the hipsterhood reality series is for real. That way we can pin all our hipster rage on a handful of dipshits and begin recognizing the difference between artists, people who are cool, and entitled morons. We clearly need a few sacrificial lambs and anyone who would answer that casting call is a perfect fit.

Be sure to check out T.A.N.’s hilarious Hipster Sensibility Matrix too.