New York Magazine has a long-overdue cover story on the Brooklyn music scene and the thing is pretty epic. The article discusses the latest wave of a-list indie bands—Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Antlers, TV on the Radio—and canonizes the Dirty Projectors as “the most risk-taking” group of the crop:

Bitte Orca, it turns out, is Dirty Projectors’ real New York album, an urbane and sophisticated outgrowth of the most fertile new-music environment the city has seen since the CBGB heyday of the seventies. It is no coincidence that it came out within months of beloved albums by two giants of the local scene—Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. These three bands do not sound alike. Animal Collective layers lush, romantic harmonies on top of kooky, heavily sampled orchestrations, a sound that is equal parts madness and impeccable logic. Grizzly Bear has a much more down-to-earth, folky approach, reveling in the pure pleasure of melodies and the ways they can be turned inside out and upside down. But the three bands all embrace many of the same virtues: fearless sincerity, devotion to craft, agnosticism about digital technology (which is to say, they use it but don’t fetishize it), profound musical curiosity, ingenuity at using the human voice as an instrument, and an uncanny ability to reproduce their complex material in live performance (in no small part because this is where the money is).

The author was kind enough to include a quote by yours truly:

Meanwhile, a more studious, art-focused scene was coalescing around a Williamsburg band called TV on the Radio, which released its label debut EP Young Liars in 2003. “They had art-punk, gospel, freak folk‚ everything interesting that was going on in Brooklyn,” says Robert Lanham, the freewilliamsburg.com blogger, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1996. “TV on the Radio was just a completely different organism.”

And later, they deem FREEwilliamsburg one of the “Five Voices That Matter in the Music Blogosphere.” Yahoo!

Critics will of course say this article came a tad late, but the real arguments will revolve around their Brooklyn Top 40 list. (I was happy to see it included zero Hold Steady songs—hipster frat rock). Still, it was nice to see New York paying respect to the amazing music scene that has emerged. As I told the reporter, it’s the most exciting time to be making (and listening to) music in the city since the late Eighties.

Now if I can just get in Shouts & Murmers…

Just what the world needs: another snarky/tired/redundant article about Williamsburg and hipsters:

Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They’re the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you’ve never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don’t care.
Annoying, yes, but harmless, right? Not to hear their critics tell it. Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity. Critics have described the loosely defined group as smug, full of contradictions and, ultimately, the dead end of Western civilization.
Though the subculture is met with derision in wider society, hipsters have been able to eke out enclaves across the country, chief among them the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Williamsburg. But now even that is threatened. The hip have been hit with a double whammy of economic reality (more are struggling to pay rent as parental support dries up) and population changes (the carefully gentrified neighborhood is gradually being infiltrated by squatters inhabiting Williamsburg’s stalled building projects). Hipsterdom’s largest natural habitat, it seems, is under threat.

At least they gave me a small mention:

Such cultural mishmash is ripe for parodying. In 2003, author Robert Lanham wrote The Hipster Handbook, trying to codify the rules to hipsterdom, like “You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn’t won a game since the Reagan administration” and “You have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your ‘one Republican friend.’ “

Another hipster story, this time from the Globe…. and I thought I was done with this topic:

Hipster culture involves a certain degree of smugness, along with required material goods including a wardrobe of Kanye West sunglasses, American Apparel leggings, and fertility-challenging skinny jeans. So it’s with a particular amount of glee that the anti-hipster movement has blossomed. The idea of mocking hipsters started six years ago when Robert Lanham penned “The Hipster Handbook,’’ in which he offered insightful clues to help readers determine if they were hipsters, such as: “Your hair looks best unwashed, and you position your head on the pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks’’; “You have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your ‘one Republican friend’ ’’; and “You carry a shoulder strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-style glasses.’’
“I think if you asked me in 2003 if hipster subculture would still be around in 2009, I would have said no,’’ says Lanham from his home in New York, otherwise known as hipster ground zero. “But now I think the hipster is an enduring new archetype. Kind of like the hippie was. They go in and out of fashion, but I think we’re stuck with the hipster.’’ […]
“Think of it as hipster fatigue,’’ Lanham says in a genial yet defeated tone. “A lot of people thought it would have its heyday and go away. But now it seems we’ll need to learn to live with the hipsters.’’

Misty Harris has a great story on slow food over at Camwest:

According to Michael Levenston of City Farmer, which styles itself as Canada’s “office of urban agriculture,” the canning comeback is tied to a do- it-yourself food movement that has seen vegetable gardens sprout up everywhere from “the White House to Buckingham Palace to the (Vancouver) mayor’s front lawn.”
Among those growing their own greens is Robert Lanham, the bestselling author of three books on popular culture.
“I’m not sure if I’m saving any money – probably not – but the ritual itself seems cleansing and somehow more honest than obsessing over the latest foodie trends in Bon Appetit or Gourmet,” says Lanham. “Now that the economy has gone kaput, stuffing your face with overpriced pork belly delicately prepared by a celebrity chef seems ridiculously ostentatious, even if you can afford it.”

Heirloom tomatoes from my garden

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.