​Now that Occupy Wall Street no longer has a home, will it end up in Williamsburg? Well -- probably not. But tonight some people are meeting up at Union Pool (of course) to talk about a possible "Occupy Williamsburg" movement.

The Facebook event description begins: "Many of us in Williamsburg have been involved in and inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement. OWS is not about abstract politics. It's about unemployment, health care, dwindling social services, huge student debts, brutally expensive housing and bleak futures. In the most fundamental and personal ways, and in the places where we live them, OWS is a worldwide movement to reclaim our lives."

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courtesy of Sarah Baker

Lincoln Restler on the night of his election to the New York State Democratic Committee last year.

​Last year, Brooklyn politics-as-usual got a shakeup via the election of glasses-sporting 27-year-old Lincoln Restler to a State Committee seat as the District Leader for Williamsburg and the surrounding environs. Restler and the New Kings Democrats, a grassroots lefty organization in Brooklyn, took on crooked Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Vito Lopez and won, showing that with the right amount of effort and door-knocking, an upstart can get voted into local elected office.

The Voice wrote about NKD a bit last year during that election cycle. Recently we heard from Sarah Baker, a NKD organizer who's now involved in a new project down in D.C. with other young Brooklyn political minds. She and Carlos Odio, an Obama campaign veteran, are running the Candidate Project, whose goal is basically to replicate Lincoln Restler's success all over the country by recruiting progressives to run for local elected positions (the political establishment in Washington now being seen as something of a lost cause). Odio is the director of the project and Baker's title is digital director. Yesterday they launched the 2,012 for 2012 initiative, which will attempt to get 2,012 regular people elected to local offices in the 2012 cycle. Brooklyn hipster-pols are going national!

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You know it's over when you're an NPR article. Or a costume.

​Yesterday NPR posted an article called "The Hipsterification of America." We are momentarily lifting our ban on the word hipster to address it, because it is, indeed, something special, and should be publicly recognized. Never in the history of writing about hipsters have so many hipster terms, most particularly, the word hipster itself, been utilized! Herewith, all the words, in the order they appear, with repetitions included. Hipster, hipster, hipster. Hipster.

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​We know a deal when we see one. And tonight there is a super duper deal happening in Williamsburg! You can get a handmade tattoo for free with all the free beer you want at a bar called Lady Jay's starting at 10 p.m. (the event is sponsored by PBR, of course). The selections are "stick and poke" tattoos, which means that instead of using a machine, the people doing the tattooing will poke you repeatedly with a needle, prison tat-style; if you're looking for a guide on how to make these things yourself, Vice obviously had you covered like four years ago. All this, in an environment full of free alcohol. What could possibly go wrong?

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​We thought we put this one to bed a few months ago, but as it turns out, we're talking about the Ace Hotel again. Remember how hip it is? Or "not quote-unquote hip, per se"? It's hip again, or continues to be hip, or continues to be quote-unquote not not hip. This time, the angle is that the Ace lobby is a place where people work, which Chris Mohney at BlackBook covered definitively about a year and a half ago.

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Lower East Side from Django's Ghost on Vimeo

Look at that fucking hipster! Wait...where are we? When are we? As this clip of the East Village in the '60s -- posted on Neighborhoodr via Handsome as Fuck and supplemented with music from the Velvet Underground -- demonstrates, nerdy black glasses, smoking, ironic headbands, skinny jeans, and an overall certain retro-vintage style was popular a long time ago, before there were assholes like us to dub it "retro-vintage." More >>

We have oft wondered, where exactly did hipsters come from (and, more intriguing, how did "hipster," a word with 1940s jazz origins, become co-opted to indicate the generic bespectacled fedora-hat-wearing usually white people hogging the name in current society?). Thus, it is with some pleasure (minus the minor annoyance, like an inspect bite, gained from the fact that we are still talking about hipsters) that we viewed this video. Which was arguably created by hipsters. Still, it's amusing. We miss beatniks. But it's all just circle of life, right? Right. Hipsters are just...humans. [via Laughing Squid][@thisisjendoll]

via

​Miss Heather at NewYorkShitty spotted this poster seeking "Hipstras" in front of T & N Wine & Liquor in Greenpoint yesterday. It may mark a new high in obnoxious terminology. You see, MTV is looking for people, who, given the illustrations lining the borders of the flier, are pretty much "hipsters" in the traditional or stereotypical sense (trucker cap, Jagger haircut, old-school sneakers, ironic 'stache, black-framed glasses, PBR [yawn]), but for some reason MTV is calling them "hipstras" for a show titled I Just Want My Pants Back. MTV is calling them this to indicate that said hipsters/hipstras get paid! Hipstra = Hipster paid to work in reality TV as an extra = Pretty much right back where we started. Go forth and conquer, Hipstra Nation. We'll be sitting here thinking "Lenny Dykstra" for no reason at all. [NewYorkShitty]

Related: Please Welcome "Hampsters," the Hamptons Hipsters

via New Yorker

The Hipster Lit shelf at Bookhampton.

​Just when you thought the possibilities for talking about, classifying, and analyzing the ambiguous cultural movement known as "hipsterdom" were over, here comes a new one out of the Hamptons, of all places. This item in the New Yorker's Book Bench blog, about a "Hipster Lit" section in Hamptons bookstore chain Bookhampton, suggests the existence of a new strain of hipster: the "Hampster," or Hamptons hipster. Cue long sigh. Is this real, though? And what are they, these Hampsters? Kim Lombardini, the marketing manager of Bookhampton and co-curator of the Hipster Lit shelf, was able to shed some light. More >>

​Today on New Urban Network, Peter Feigenbaum writes of the various stages of the "colonization" of Williamsburg -- "just another chapter in the reconfiguration and rebirth of New York since the city's nadir in the mid-1970s." For history and urban planning nerds, this is some fascinating stuff. For people who hate Williamsburg or people who love Williamsburg, as well as people who love to hate Williamsburg, it is equally fascinating. Did you know, for instance, that Williamsburg is currently in the era of "Manhattanization," which started in 2007? This is when pre-recession real estate went nuts, and people who were older and/or richer than the typical prior resident started to build and/or buy those awful block-sized residential buildings on the waterfront.

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