Like so: A few short decades ago, the area above Tribeca ("Hudson Square," said the realtor) was a fucking dump. Now, it's populated by De Niro and Jay-Z and, you know, a plethora of other rich and famous Manhattanites. The city wants to put a garage for garbage trucks on the far West side of the neighborhood. So a group of concerned average citizens including Roger Sterling from Mad Men and various artists—presumably drawn to the neighborhood for its wonderful halo of long-gone industrial grit—are fighting the plan. For the good of everyone.

"We're no Nimbys," said Jana Haimsohn, a performance artist and neighborhood advocate. "Always in our dealings we look at the needs of the broader community."

Did you know that Louisville, Kentucky, has its very own version of the Meatpacking District, called Butchertown? Same story: former butchering district close to downtown that's now "being spruced up with art galleries and fancy shops," according to the Wall Street Journal. Now the Butchertown Neighborhood Association is working to move the last slaughterhouse out of the neighborhood, "Butchertown," with its wonderful halo of long-gone industrial grit.

"It's been an ongoing nuisance for people in the area," says Jonathan Salomon, a 34-year-old Butchertown resident and attorney representing the group. "We don't want to see anybody, especially during these times, put out on the street. But...we have to look at what kind of economic growth is good for the neighborhood."

Look, we're not against these people having jobs. But let's be honest—this neighborhood is not the place for those kinds of people. We're not against the city parking its garbage trucks somewhere—but they don't really fit in with the character of this neighborhood.

This is for the good of everyone. Reversals of gentrification will not be tolerated.
[Pic via]

The novelist created the HBO series Bored to Death, starring Jonathan Schwartzman, but had nowhere to watch it the Sunday before last because he didn't own a TV. Insert your own "precious Brooklyn author eschews television" joke here if you like, but Ames insisted on Twitter he's "just very bad at shopping" and, in any case, had frantic fun watching his own show on other people's televisions for two weeks. Or at least that's how things seemed from his tweets.

And then HBO, where because they got tired, worried or charmed by Ames' Twitter begging, finally just bought him a set. Which, frankly is almost too perfect; we wouldn't put it past the network to set up the whole escapade as a publicity stunt targeted at the show's hipster target audience.

It's some comfort, then, that Ames has used Twitter as a cashless flea market before, offering free foreign editions of his books at a Carroll Gardens bar. That experiment didn't seem to go as well: One of us happened to drop by that night and Ames was there, but not one had yet come looking for his very pretty books. Apparently there are some giveaways even Twitter can't facilitate. Sorry, book lovers.

(Pic by mtkr on Flickr)

Just like all young princes must prove themselves in battle before they can assume the kingdom's crown, AG is continually being dumped in gritty urban precincts in which most manicured Ivy League NYT staffers would fear to tread. A "street" basketball arena unregulated by qualified referees! The Puerto Rican day parade, full of Puerto Ricans! And the midst of Manhattan's fruit stand wars—which probably also involves minorities! Now comes his most dangerous assignment of all: to travel into the part of Alphabet City where the projects are, and—using journalism—talk to the people there about how some dude is shooting BBs out of the window all the time, and whether they like that, or not.

"Everybody here is scared now," Primo Dlmn from Morocco said on Tuesday while selling Lemonhead candy and cigarettes at a bodega in the middle of the block. "I think he's crazy," said one customer standing outside who declined to give her name.

It's not just any reporter who will not just boldly venture inside that one annoying bodega that only sells Lemonheads and cigarettes, but will also—on the way out—talk to the lady outside.

We're just being jerks! A.G., we like the rugged cut of your jib. Let's go pimping some time. Email us.

"Welcome back from Burning Man," tweets Gregory McGarry. "You smell. Go get your car washed and reevaluate your life. We'll wait."

Or not! After all, burner, your friends have been bashing your festival for days:

• Violet Blue said sex was better in your absence, since the mating pool was free of "hippies and vaudeville hipster performers... ravers and... wealthy tech industry wonks."
  
• Environmentalists like SFGate's Cameron Scott are still complaining about the driving, generators, bottled water and, well, fire associated with the festival.
  
• Civil libertarians are incensed at the festival's policy of owning your pictures for third-party licensing purposes.

Plenty of participants sound stoked on Twitter, to be sure, even those coping with morning-after headaches like backlogged emails. And even those people are stoked they have a job to come back to, unlike some participants:

UPDATE: Original photo removed at photographer's request.

(Pic: Burning Man 2009, by affinity1 on Flickr)

It's the perfect repellant for criminally-minded urban digerati, much like the classical music piped outside convenience stores to discourage teenaged loiterers. The Barcelona design firm Mitemite prices it around $85, according to the New York Times' gadget blog, which could buy you a year's worth of real newspapers to wrap your laptop in. But then you'd have to deal with ink, clutter, the pressure to read up on international affairs. Ick.

(Pic: Mitemite via Times)

A photographer named Zach Hyman likes to take nude photos of ladies in public, for art, and that's just what he did on the L train last month, causing a conniption amongst some of the more delicately constituted passengers, but this is what you come to New York for so just go back to Ohio why don't you? Also this is the L train. Take note.

"People see a naked woman and they smile," [Zach] said. "They see a penis and they freak out."

Lo, that we may live to see the day when New Yorkers are free to flash peen on the subway at any time without uptight losers "freaking out!"

This story brought to you, as always, by the NYP's Justin Rocket Silverman, vigilantly covering the vagina beat. With his hands, if necessary.

[Pic: Chair and the Maiden]

Old line, non-Twittering food vendors hate seeing these usurpers on their turf. Cue the death threats. The operator of the Twittering cart "Schnitzel and Things" told Midtown Lunch about a bad scene in Madison Square Park the other day: "We got harassed by 4 different dudes as soon as we showed up... I called the cops on them for harassment. Then they brought their own cop... Once they started to threaten our lives, we got a bit aggressive." Twitter gangs can't be far behind. What's the point of microblogging if you can't use it to call for backup?

(Schnitzel truck pic by @JoseSPiano)

Maybe it's all just performance art, the half-naked party appearances, brandishing that knife and going all Taxi Driver at a diner. But that doesn't really make it any less sad, the notion of a hipster millionaire fameball still clawing hungrily, strategically for attention. It would be more impressive if this were all some guerilla marketing campaign for a new class of hallucinogens. See excerpts from the latest installment above.

Chrissie's version: Her pug got sick on the subway, so she took it out of its bag, then a cop ran up and grabbed her and harassed her and arrested her and said anti-woman things!

The cop's version, courtesy of the New York Post, obv: Chrissie Brodigan is a crazy anti-Semite who went wild on the cop in question—NYPD's first Hasidic cop!

But a witness, Viane Delgado, said Brodigan was the one out of line. Delgado said Witriol "repeatedly" asked the woman to place the barking pug in a carrier she had. But instead, she allegedly insulted him with anti-Semitic slurs and tried to walk away.

"You f—-ing Jew, you're not even human," Delgado quoted Brodigan as saying.

She repeatedly said, "Jewish people think they own everything," a source said.

Ha, really? A little extreme, no? Chrissie denies saying this. Do people really say that, in Williamsburg? Pug owners? It seems doubtful. We're just reporting, here.

No word on whether the pug is still puking, but we will bring you word as soon as this important saga develops further, puke-wise or otherwise.
[NYP. Pic via Gothamist]

The 4-foot yellow rat snake, which we will call "Serpent Fang" startled some kids in the apartment. Where it was just kind of sitting there. NYPD responded with overwhelming force:

Police trapped it with a broom and a plastic bag, and it was taken to the Center for Animal Care and Control. Animal control spokesman Richard Gentles says the snake is non-venomous, and in good health.

The the New York Post and the Daily News and the AP and damn near every TV news operation in the city did stories about the trapping of this rat snake, a cold-blooded, flesh-hungry, dead-eyed breed described by experts as "Easy, an ideal beginner's snake. Hardy, tolerant of handling and tractable enough for children."

Just wait until someone spots a stray cat. Those things have claws!
[Pic via]

Lodwick has been as conflicted about his oversharing as any other internet fameball; he recently left the internet entirely, only to return. But his emotional volatility has seemed especially pronounced of late.

Earlier this year, Lodwick showed up half naked to a Web networking event and appeared in a variety of strange poses in pictures from the event. He later posted some sex pics, apparently of himself, to his blog.

Then in April he made an insane lipdub video in which he was swinging a knife and punching at the camera.

Now he's looking like a mohawked Robert DeNiro.

Lodwick, who invests in tech startups, says he "makes projects" for a living. Here's to hoping his strange antics just part of yet another "project" by the attention seeker, rather than a genuine indication of his state of mind.

Hipsters. They're everywhere. You've seen them on skateboards, in the mall and at the club. You've seen them shrugging dismissively in Oakland, Calif., Willamsburg, Brooklyn and Austin, Tx. And, suddenly, in Barack Obama's Washington, too.

Do you get a good sense of how this article is going to go, now?

Hector is black. And these days, if you spend enough time in Union Square in New York City, Gallery Place in Washington or even Brick Lane in London, you know that there are thousands more kids just like him-black, white and brown. What gives?

Is there a real question here? Have we actually established a premise? No? Okay I didn't think so either. Just checking.

So just what is a black hipster-a "blipster" or "alt-black"? Like many recent cultural trends, this one straddles race, politics, fashion and art. For the purposes of discussion, we'll stick with men (though I have seen some Flock of Seagulls-looking black females out and about of late).

Could this article be categorized as "performance art?" In this blipster-ridden world, why not? Let's fast forward to the PROVOCATIVE part:

But, as with any budding social scene, it can be hard to tell who's in and who's out.
Asher Roth, a white rapper who favors a preppy look, became a YouTube sensation with his hit "I Love College." Does he count?

Black Hipsters: Explained. SAY NO MORE.
[The Root. Pic via]

From Smith-9th Street to Broadway-Lafayette, I roamed the car, peeking invasively at the front covers and front pages of dour men and women as they wearily went to work.

Mass transit provides captive audiences for people who sell words. Let's see what New York's teeming hordes of commuters are killing time with:

Paid Papers
Total: 9
One man sitting was working his way through Sunday's New York Times (he totally looked like a weekender and was reading that unreadable article about "games artists play"). Four others read today's Times. Only one man—suited and well-suited for his paper—was reading the WSJ. He got up for an older lady. There were two Post readers, though one of these people put their newspaper in her handbag after a brief glance. There was also, in the corner, a Daily News reader. Conclusion: WSJ readers are gallant. Times is still the paper of record.

Unpaid Papers
Total: 4
Four people read AMNY. It's free.
Conclusion: People like free things.

Books
Total: 6
One woman was reading Comfort Me Apples by Ruth Reichl. One man was reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. A guy in a suit and with a shoulder bag was immersed in Public Information Technology and E-Governance by G. David Garson. A man by the doors was ostentatiously reading City of Thieves by David Benioff. A girl seated was a few pages from the end of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. An indie looking girl was just beginning Flying Changes by Sarah Gruen.
Conclusion: Most people read for pleasure. At least one respondent was likely reading for professional reasons.

Magazines
Total: 6
Five well groomed men and women were reading the New Yorker. Though three entered at the same stop at through the same door, they soon dispersed, like magnets of the same charge, to be equidistant and as far apart as possible. One woman read Print magazine.
Conclusion: New Yorker readers are well-kept but self-loathing. Print magazine has at least one reader.

Other
Total: 2
One long haired techie type was reading the B+H catalogue. A Hispanic lady was reading a pamphlet of Psalms that was tucked inside her day planner.
Conclusion: Jesus and Jews selling audio equipment can be sustaining forces in this long and thankless sludge through life.

Gadgets
Total: 9
The big winner here is iPhones, with 7 people peering into the little tiny private screen, either typing (mostly overground) or generally peering (what's inside of there, little angel gadget?). There was a guy i a yarmulke typing on his blackberry and a teenager with tight curls and gold hoop earings listening to music and playing a game on her Sidekick.
Conclusion: Even though reading on an iPhone is uncomfortable, people still do it. In the chart above, Excel's wonky math concluded that nine gadget readers is a bigger share than nine paid newspaper readers. We agree!

In that a new sense of community has sprung up from the faintly green ashes of the economy's grand collapse, that people are starting to look at the slate as clean rather than completely wiped out. Who better to turn this erratic, schizophrenic eye on the city it both loves and loathes than New York magazine, which runs a big old honking cover story about New York City Without Money this week. Because that magazine never really traffics in actual New Yorkers who don't have any money, and never did, they mean like, should you switch condos?

Heh, kidding. Sort of. They don't only talk about real estate and baby bjorns. They also crow about how people are volunteering again!

Right now, in New York, volunteerism is booming. Compared with the first quarter of last year, Citymeals-on-Wheels, which delivers food to the elderly, has seen a 32 percent increase in its volunteers; God's Love We Deliver, which distributes meals to those suffering from hunger or illness, has seen a 20 percent increase. New York Cares, which places people in charities around the city, trained twice as many people in February and March of 2009 as it did those same months the year before.

A new sense of community and work-together-itiveness is blooming all along these cracked sidewalks. So forget the doom and gloom and violence that some had heralded. We've already moved past Hoovervilles and hobo shankings. We're at the New Deal! The cradle is rocking! Hell, even that old, creeping-in doom and gloom is maybe kind of appealing, in a friendly, throwbacky way, isn't it? James Wolcott certainly seems to think so. He writes in his paean to New York's Drop Dead Era:

The municipal-finance crisis of New York in the 70s resulted in meat-cleaver budget cuts and payroll cutbacks and infrastructural rot-a near-death experience that produced an exodus to the suburbs and beyond, a loss of almost 10 percent of the population over the course of the decade. It was hell on the tax base but, for those who migrated to New York and secured a foxhole while the city bled out, terminal conditions weren't all bad. There were upsides to a downward spiral. Having fewer people clogging the scenery aired out the city nicely, opening corner pockets of private and public space where all sorts of termite creativity could take place, and did. It was a more egalitarian city than it subsequently became with the rise of the super-rich, the crime and crumminess more evenly dispersed. Real estate was affordable, even for artistes and aspiring deadbeats.

For our part, we're still stuck on the real estate, giddily rubbing our hands together because we think that maybe, just maybe, we can now afford to move back to Manhattan, leaving Brooklyn and its babies and long subway waits to the birds. Oh, and we held the door open for someone the other day. So.

The fired Vimeo founder's latest posting to his video-sharing site is, frankly, frightening. It's also his first in three months.

The comeback, a lipdub of Little Boots' "Meddle," seems innocent enough if you don't watch it closely and completely. "Yay!" wrote one commenter. "You're back"

But about halfway into the video, Lodwick inexplicably swings a knife, which he keeps somewhere off camera. It's only later that Lodwick starts making angry punching motions and using psycho eyes to underline the lyric "you don't know what she hides."

This outburst comes from an on-again-off-again blogger as famous for his emotional volatility as for his prolific oversharing. Lately, his behavior has turned disconcertingly bizarre.

Last summer Lodwick produced a creepy psychedelic video, looking high and nearly catatonic. In January, he turned up at a Web industry networking event shirtless, sweating and flailing his arms. March's internet sex picture seemed an almost pedestrian way of acting out in comparison.

But now there's the knife video. The blade comes out quickly in the excerpt above. A frenetic, apparently naked Lodwick ducks in and out of an enveloping darkness. He's a tortured internet pioneer looking like he's ventured all the way into a new jungle, straight to the heart of dot-com celebrity darkness. He's Colonel Kurtz, and he's seen horrors.

Or maybe Colonel Kurtz was nuts to begin with and just found a way to make us all watch. We probably won't know whether there's anything to learn from the manifest pain of the world's most tortured millionaire until it's too late.

Leduff, last seen poking around a dead body encased in ice in an abandoned Detroit warehouse, has now profiled a Detroit retiree, Glemie Dean "Coon Man" Beasley, who hunts raccoons and eats them or sells them. This just barely meets Charlie Leduff's minimum standards of manly quirk.

Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots.

"Today people got no skill and things is getting worse," he laments. "What people gonna do? They gonna eat each other up is what they gonna do."

Leduff then killed, cooked, and ate Beasley for his upcoming book, Going 'Against the Grain': Charlie Leduff Goes Totally Carnivorous as He Cannibalizes Various Quirky Men in America's Backwaters.

[Detroit News. Jossip points out that Leduff already wrote this coon-eating story once before, for the NYT. BONUS: Read through and find the sentence where Leduff explains what raccoon tastes like "to the uneducated pallet."]

Where their souls maybe used to be.

It's so inspiring, this outpouring of situational ethics and socially-condoned redemption on the front page of the New York Times!

Suddenly the feelings of poors are important.

"It's disrespectful to the people who don't have much to flaunt your wealth," said Monica Dioda Hagedorn, 40, a lawyer in Atlanta who is married to an heir of the Scotts Miracle-Gro fortune. "I have plenty of dresses to last me 10 years."

And all those sumptuous rich-people bacchanals feel like maybe wrong, somehow?

"It's kind of like we all went overboard," said... Sacha Taylor, a fixture on the charity circuit in this gala-happy city... "And we're trying to get back to where we should have been."

Even workaday spendthrifts give quotes like "it's kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can't buy" now that they have far less money with which to buy things.

Because as heavily dependent as Gotham is on the smoldering financial services industry, it's actually worse in many smaller cities and towns, probably due to all those boomtime real estate brokers, mortgage-banking call centers and other subsidiary industries. Florida, an "urban theorist," writes that the "New York area" gets 8 percent of its jobs from finance, close to the national average of 5.5 percent and compared with"28 percent... in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois; 18 percent in Des Moines; 13 percent in Hartford; 10 percent in both Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Charlotte, North Carolina. "

Even more important: New York (and cities like Chicago) have dense professional networks, which take a long time to build.

For Florida, this explains why the world has had but three financial centers since the 17th century (Amsterdam, London, New York). Such networks also figure heavily in the city's dominance of other industries: "New York is more of a mecca for fashion designers, musicians, film directors, artists, and-yes-psychiatrists than for financial professionals," Florida writes.

Florida should be treated with some skepticism. It's early in the meltdown, and the author seems eager to comport the crash to his own longstanding arguments about the inevitable dominance of "Creative Class" cities. For example, he ignores impact of the financial services crash on industries supported by its wealth, those fashion designers and artists he's so fond of.

But the Times' article on the "bourgeois bohemia" of Eagle Rock, Los Angeles reinforces his idea that intra-city networks are hard to build.

One of the flood of recent newcomers to the town, a screenwriter, once dreamed of "a miniature Whole Foods," "a gastropub" and a "retro" diner lining the streets. But now amid the economic crash, "the shops at risk are the ones playing the Decemberists in a continuous loop," the Times writes, before quoting urbanist Joel Kotkin:

"The ecosystems of these neighborhoods are very fragile... Over-stimulation, and, in a recession, under-stimulation, and you have dangers."

In other words, Manhattan landlords can quickly cut their rents to attract new residents and industries in hard times. Places like Eagle Rock,which started cheap, face a much longer slog to build up dense communities of smart, like-minded people.

(Image via)

Some examples:

Bill Maher: Execute them!

The HBO talk-show host said he would like to see two bankers executed: Former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, for earning $500 million in compensation before the company folded, and Bernie Madoff, for scamming rich people like Fuld. China does this sort of thing, you see, and it would serve as a warning to others. Maher's "Death to Moochy" segment might habe been half in jest, but Maher left no doubt he was at least partly serious.

London's 'Summer of Rage'

In London, financial services once accounted for close to 40 percent of economic output but is now in tattetrs. Fierce economic demonstrations have racked nearby Iceland, and around 1 million recently turned out to protest in France. Meanwhile, the G20 will soon come to town for an economic summit. So it's no wonder police are gearing up for the sort of rioting Britain hasn't seen in more than two decades. Who knows, maybe Gotham will follow suit.

Bankers more despised, less cool than Congress, somehow

Rep. Barney Frank: "People really hate you, and they're starting to hate us because we're hanging out with you... [you] need to avoid being stupid." When a Congressman is calling you uncool, unpopular and stupid, something has gone horribly wrong. It takes a lot to make people hate some particular group more than Congress. This is a clear a sign as any that the masses are gathering their pitchforks.

Bankers did more than their fair share to get us into this mess. They turned a blind eye to lying mortgage brokers. They kept doubling down on leverage bets they knew (or should have known) would eventually turn sour. They got personally rich through their ineptitude. And some of them have the revolting audacity to demand the government reinstate that wealth while the poor rot.

But the bankers did not act alone. Journalists celebrated them. Politicians pandered to them. And a good many people who knew, or should have known, what they were getting into borrowed from them.

Despicable bankers should not be strung up, nor should we burn out cities down trying to do so. But they shouldn't get off lightly.

Those bankers managing taxpayer money — most of them — deserve government salaries. Excess compensation should aggressively be grabbed back through every available legal channel.

And the financial leaders responsible for the meltdown should be forced to actually learn their trade, starting at the call centers that deal with their customers and continuing through a variety of clerical and middle-management positions at low-salary state banks. (If you've got a better idea, we trust you'll leave it in the comments.)