Gawker: grups

Is 'Home Buying For Hipsters' Actually Just For Tools?

rebecca — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:50:00 EDT

Like "cool," "hipster" is a multivalent word with no set definition but many different meanings. But from a real estate developers' perspective, if you live in Brooklyn, have read a Jonathan Lethem book or have gone to Studio B, you qualify. Sorry! Even so, no real hipster admits to being one. That's worse than saying you want to be cool. Which makes Home Buying For Hipsters — a monthly real estate advising meet-up with ties to the Corcoran Group — so perplexing. What tool would show up to their event tonight, which is aimed at a demographic no one would acknowledge being a part of?

The "hipsters" who go to Home Buying For Hipsters are probably not hipsters at all, even if Fortress of Solitude totally spoke to them. It may be a Tuesday night, but it's New York in spring. The rooftop garden of the Met is open! Jenna Bush is giving a reading! American Idol is on! Who wants to spend their time hearing about mortgage rates?

Most likely, these "hipsters" aren't actually buying a home themselves. Their parents are. And with bankers uninterested in the skyscrapers on the Williamsburg waterfront and now too broke to afford them anyway, you have to credit the Corcoran Group for going after America's home-owners a second time through their kids. It's like renewing your vows, but with property taxes.

Tonight's Home Buying For Hipsters is being held at Union Pool. Though Union Pool is in Williamsburg (cool) and in a former pool supply store (cred), it is still not hip. It's mostly frequented by people already in the home buying stage, 30-somethings. (Also cougars.)

Home Buying For Hipsters: really Home Buying For Adults. Adults who are still trying to be cool.

(Although— buying a home in this economy may be genuinely edgy. So maybe some real hipsters should try it!)

Aging Gracefully a Foreign Concept for Hipsters, Beastie Boys

Doree Shafrir — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 15:30:12 EST

A tipster sent in the following sighting: "MCA of the Beastie Boys was skateboarding along Carmine Street last night (seen at intersection of Bedford)." We realize that MCA has long been a skateboarder and snowboarder, but we also know that MCA is 42 years old, and somehow this sighting made us think of all those grups we know who are, like, 45 and wear hoodies and Pumas and talk about how amazing that Cold War Kids show at Union Hall was.

Oh, whatever, it's fine. Really. It's probably better than a sighting of MCA wearing Dockers and rocking out at the James Taylor concert. Right?

Staple of Gruppie Kid Diets Now in Jeopardy

Doree Shafrir — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:55:28 EST

From Salon comes this very alarming piece of news about Annie's Mac and Cheese, the grup parents' comfortable alternative to the radioactive-looking Kraft version:

Annie's stinks. Ever caught a surprise whiff as you guide stove-top traffic at dinnertime? (Right rear pot cleared for takeoff. Climb to avoid hot and high left front.) The stuff is rank; think sweaty T-shirt marinated in a gym bag for a week. Yet kids, whose palates are usually so delicate, lap it up. Which leads one to wonder, what's in those little hare-festooned envelopes anyway? Heroin? As a matter of fact, it's pretty much the same thing that's in the famous blue box: pasta, cheese, milk, salt. Granted, Annie's has only nine ingredients while Kraft has 20, most of which, nasty as they sound, replace nutrients removed in processing or are naturally occurring and have a long history as additives. Just two Kraft ingredients raise the mercury on the toxic-meter: yellow dyes No. 5 and No. 6, which impart the infamous fluorescent hue.

But from a nutritional perspective, that's the only time Annie's lands a punch. The rest of the match is a draw.

We can almost see the crazed look in Park Slope parents' eyes as they rush to clear the now-cursed boxes from their pantry shelves. Personally, we're sticking with the Kraft version; we find its soupy-sticky qualities appealing. Also, the color kind of looks like the sesame chicken from the cheap Chinese place next door.

The Bunny vs. the Blue Box [Salon]

Neal Pollack: Spokesman of His Grup-eration

Doree Shafrir — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:40:35 EST

In this Gothamist interview with the perpetually self-consumed writer, we learn much we never knew, but probably could've guessed, about Neal Pollack: "I modeled myself back then on Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties, but I wasn't a Republican. I was academically nerdy. In terms of the kind of person I was, I got beat up a lot. It's not like I didn't have any friends, I just had a big mouth and the jocks didn't take kindly to me." Yeah, that sounds about right. What disturbs us more is the news that his upcoming book Alternadad—about the (gag us) foibles of being a "hipster dad"—has been optioned and he's turning it into a movie. We knew the grups were taking over, but now it's apparent that this is a trend that simply will not die. A generation of self-consumed male hipsters have suddenly discovered parenthood, and we'll be forced to listen to them for years on end. Really, it's enough to make you want to just crawl into a little ball and never read New York magazine again.

Neal Pollack, Writer [Gothamist]

'New York,' the 'Times,' 'TNR,' Brooklyn, and Grups: Toward a Unified Theory

Jesse — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 14:41:08 EDT

Profound — and, granted, profoundly inconsequential — sociomediacultural thought of the day:

If we accept The New Republic's recent assertion that Sunday Styles is about fancy people and ThuStyles is about those peoples' fancy things (which we don't necessarily, but let's run with it), and if we accept New York's recent assertion that there's a new cohort of 20- and 30-somethings, largely centered in bobo Brooklyn nabes, who are chronologically grown up but refuse to behave like grown-ups (the "grups," that is), and we if accept New York's assertion this week that there is a distinct design aesthetic centered in Brooklyn, which the magazine proceeds to document the concrete manifestations of, then it would stand to reason that said aesthetic is the grup aestethic, and that, under the TNR schema, the April 3 New York mag (coverline: "Forever Young") is therefore the Sunday Styles of the grups while this week's New York mag (coverline: "Brooklyn Style") is grupdom's Thursday Styles.

We'll now return you to your regularly scheduled celebrity stalking and gay jokes.

Brooklyn Style [NYM]
Up With Grups [NYM]
The Grey Lady Wears Prada [TNR]