http://www.latfh.com/
Although more in a hurt your eyes and your brain sort of way.
Ah, you fucking hipster. How is it possible that I both love and hate you...
Showing posts with label yuppies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yuppies. Show all posts
05 May 2009
Even better than LOLCATS!!!!
OK, just kidding b/c nothing can ever top LOLCATS in that saccharin hurt your teeth way, but this comes pretty darn close:
http://www.latfh.com/
Although more in a hurt your eyes and your brain sort of way.
Ah, you fucking hipster. How is it possible that I both love and hate you...
http://www.latfh.com/
Although more in a hurt your eyes and your brain sort of way.
Ah, you fucking hipster. How is it possible that I both love and hate you...
06 February 2009
Oldies but goodies
I love stories and shows that can weave historical facts into an interesting plot.
Last year, I watched New Amsterdam because the central character was 400 years old. He came to North America with the first Dutch settlers and watched the small settlement grow into today's New York City. He would get these really cool flashbacks of historical New York. There was a particularly cool sequence where he took a picture of Times Square every year and lined the pictures up on a wall so he could see how Times Square had changed over time. I thought the concept was awesome, but the show got cancelled. Most shows I really like get cancelled. I think it's an indication of how out of touch I am. (Ahem, when will they make an Arrested Development movie?!?)
This year, I've been watching Life on Mars for similar reasons. The hero in Life on Mars is a present day policeman who gets hit by a car while pursuing a suspect and wakes up to find himself in 1973 (he's actually in a coma in 2009). The show works very hard to make sure all the props are consistent with the 1970s, and the show is often shot in industrial parts of Brooklyn where signs of progress are less apparent. It's pretty cool.
Finally, I thought I'd share The New York Public Library Digital Gallery -- it's cool because you can type in a street in Manhattan, and it'll show you all archived pictures of that particular street corner over time so you can see how it's changed.
Here's a picture of a street near my apartment that was taken in 1933.
Last year, I watched New Amsterdam because the central character was 400 years old. He came to North America with the first Dutch settlers and watched the small settlement grow into today's New York City. He would get these really cool flashbacks of historical New York. There was a particularly cool sequence where he took a picture of Times Square every year and lined the pictures up on a wall so he could see how Times Square had changed over time. I thought the concept was awesome, but the show got cancelled. Most shows I really like get cancelled. I think it's an indication of how out of touch I am. (Ahem, when will they make an Arrested Development movie?!?)
This year, I've been watching Life on Mars for similar reasons. The hero in Life on Mars is a present day policeman who gets hit by a car while pursuing a suspect and wakes up to find himself in 1973 (he's actually in a coma in 2009). The show works very hard to make sure all the props are consistent with the 1970s, and the show is often shot in industrial parts of Brooklyn where signs of progress are less apparent. It's pretty cool.
Finally, I thought I'd share The New York Public Library Digital Gallery -- it's cool because you can type in a street in Manhattan, and it'll show you all archived pictures of that particular street corner over time so you can see how it's changed.
Here's a picture of a street near my apartment that was taken in 1933.
Here's a picture of what it will look like this fall once construction is done on the glass building.
Check it at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchresult.cfm?num=72&word=13th=
06 October 2008
Hippie, Yippie, Yuppie, Hipster! Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!
With New York City caught in the vortex of one of the worst financial crisis in history, is the New York of old to be the New York of new?
Jay McInerney looks back at 20 plus years...
I first remember hearing the Y-word in ’83, when I was living in the East Village... I was enjoying a hung-over midday breakfast (we didn’t use the word brunch in the East Village; it was breakfast whenever you woke up)... An ostentatiously besplattered painter was sitting next to me at the counter, and I heard him mutter, “Fucking yuppies.” I looked up to see a young couple I myself would have characterized as “preppy” waiting to be seated. They looked as if they were visiting from the Upper East Side—all chinos and oxford cloth. We were all uniformly nonconformist in our black jeans and our black Ramones and Television T-shirts. As a Williams alum, I knew all about preppies even before they’d gone mainstream with the publication of The Official Preppy Handbook in 1980. My younger brother, a Deerfield senior, was a preppy. Many of my classmates were preppies. But this yuppie thing was new to me.
The term probably first appeared in print in 1983, when columnist Bob Greene wrote a piece about former Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, who was hosting “networking” events at Studio 54. Greene quoted a participant as saying that Rubin had gone from being the leader of the Yippies to the leader of the yuppies. The neologism stood for Young Urban Professionals and might have gone down in history as yups if not for the Rubin connection. The term yuppies suggested a certain evolutionary—or devolutionary—trajectory from the hippie and the Yippie. The story had everything—the double irony of the revolutionary trickster turned entrepreneurial capitalist cheerleader and the setting in the glam palace of mindless hedonism, as well as a zippy catchphrase that actually seemed to describe an instantly recognizable new minority. Once we had a name for them, we suddenly realized that they were everywhere, like the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—especially here in New York, the urbanest place of all. We might have even recognized them as us.
From the beginning, there was a certain subject/object confusion associated with the yuppie concept, a certain “we have met the enemy and he is us” self-reflexivity to the phenomenon. Downtown mohawked squatters aside, it was sometimes hard to find a Manhattanite without some taint of the new lifestyle. Did gym membership qualify you as a yuppie? Snorting coke? Eating raw fish? When I heard a movie agent slinging the term at a group of bankers at the Odeon, I wondered about pots and kettles.
“Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors, and $450,000 condos in semi-slum buildings?” asked Time magazine in its January 9, 1984, issue. “Yuppies,” we were informed, “are dedicated to the twin goals of making piles of money and achieving perfection through physical fitness and therapy.” The Yuppie Handbook, which had just been published, defined its subject: “(hot new name for Young Urban Professional): A person of either sex who meets the following criteria: (1) resides in or near one of the major cities; (2) claims to be between the ages of 25 and 45; (3) lives on aspirations of glory, prestige, recognition, fame, social status, power, money, or any and all combinations of the above; (4) anyone who brunches on the weekends or works out after work.”
Apparently, the creatures anatomized in The Yuppie Handbook were just common enough to elicit recognition, but not so general as to provoke a shrug. The concepts of “brunching” and “working out” were apparently new and humorous. A few of their defining characteristics—dhurrie rugs, potted ferns, pickled parquet floors—sound suitably dated. But many more—European automobiles, gourmet kitchens, computer literacy, designer clothing, and sushi—fail 25 years later to convey the exoticism that the authors seem to have intended. Oh, those wacky yuppies, eating raw fish and going to the gym.
read more
Jay McInerney looks back at 20 plus years...
I first remember hearing the Y-word in ’83, when I was living in the East Village... I was enjoying a hung-over midday breakfast (we didn’t use the word brunch in the East Village; it was breakfast whenever you woke up)... An ostentatiously besplattered painter was sitting next to me at the counter, and I heard him mutter, “Fucking yuppies.” I looked up to see a young couple I myself would have characterized as “preppy” waiting to be seated. They looked as if they were visiting from the Upper East Side—all chinos and oxford cloth. We were all uniformly nonconformist in our black jeans and our black Ramones and Television T-shirts. As a Williams alum, I knew all about preppies even before they’d gone mainstream with the publication of The Official Preppy Handbook in 1980. My younger brother, a Deerfield senior, was a preppy. Many of my classmates were preppies. But this yuppie thing was new to me.
The term probably first appeared in print in 1983, when columnist Bob Greene wrote a piece about former Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, who was hosting “networking” events at Studio 54. Greene quoted a participant as saying that Rubin had gone from being the leader of the Yippies to the leader of the yuppies. The neologism stood for Young Urban Professionals and might have gone down in history as yups if not for the Rubin connection. The term yuppies suggested a certain evolutionary—or devolutionary—trajectory from the hippie and the Yippie. The story had everything—the double irony of the revolutionary trickster turned entrepreneurial capitalist cheerleader and the setting in the glam palace of mindless hedonism, as well as a zippy catchphrase that actually seemed to describe an instantly recognizable new minority. Once we had a name for them, we suddenly realized that they were everywhere, like the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—especially here in New York, the urbanest place of all. We might have even recognized them as us.
From the beginning, there was a certain subject/object confusion associated with the yuppie concept, a certain “we have met the enemy and he is us” self-reflexivity to the phenomenon. Downtown mohawked squatters aside, it was sometimes hard to find a Manhattanite without some taint of the new lifestyle. Did gym membership qualify you as a yuppie? Snorting coke? Eating raw fish? When I heard a movie agent slinging the term at a group of bankers at the Odeon, I wondered about pots and kettles.
“Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors, and $450,000 condos in semi-slum buildings?” asked Time magazine in its January 9, 1984, issue. “Yuppies,” we were informed, “are dedicated to the twin goals of making piles of money and achieving perfection through physical fitness and therapy.” The Yuppie Handbook, which had just been published, defined its subject: “(hot new name for Young Urban Professional): A person of either sex who meets the following criteria: (1) resides in or near one of the major cities; (2) claims to be between the ages of 25 and 45; (3) lives on aspirations of glory, prestige, recognition, fame, social status, power, money, or any and all combinations of the above; (4) anyone who brunches on the weekends or works out after work.”
Apparently, the creatures anatomized in The Yuppie Handbook were just common enough to elicit recognition, but not so general as to provoke a shrug. The concepts of “brunching” and “working out” were apparently new and humorous. A few of their defining characteristics—dhurrie rugs, potted ferns, pickled parquet floors—sound suitably dated. But many more—European automobiles, gourmet kitchens, computer literacy, designer clothing, and sushi—fail 25 years later to convey the exoticism that the authors seem to have intended. Oh, those wacky yuppies, eating raw fish and going to the gym.
read more
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