Okay, I learned the craziest thing yesterday, which you may not find at all interesting unless you live in New York or Stockholm. If you don’t, just read anyway. You might be amused or horrified.
There’s a little restaurant here in Williamsburg that I really love called Diner. It used to be a run-down, abandoned old truck-stop diner underneath the Williamsburg Bridge that a couple of guys fixed up a bit — just a bit — and reopened as a fancy little restaurant with rough charm, good prices, a swanky menu, and the best burgers on Earth. It being Williamsburg, the crowd there is fantastically, otherworldly beautiful. I feel like I should carry headshots with me when I go there. It’s basically the concentrated essense of the Williamsburg hipster phenomenon. And not necessarily in a bad way.
Well, it seems that some Swedish businessmen got it stuck in their heads that they wanted a little restaurant just as fabulous to open in Stockholm, so they gave the guys who run Diner a chunk of change to basically recreate the formula overseas. Which means they had to find a building, fuck it up, and then renovate it to make it look like it was restored. But the kicker is — trust me, this is the good part — they were so anxious to get the atmosphere just right, that these Swedes flew over a dozen Williamsburg hipsters to Stockholm for a long weekend to do nothing but sit around in the faux-Diner Diner for lunch and dinner and drinks. Ringers. Brooklyn hipster ringers trying to con the swedes. It’s brilliant. And I bet they still sit around in their chunky black glasses and 70s softball shirts complaining about all the people who moved to Williamsburg after they did. God, I want to be there with them.
to make this a tad funnier i should mention some of the things i have learned of swedish ‘hipster culture’ as an exchange art student from chicago.
swedish hipsters are really just mtv-ified clones of the members of the hives and other such bands. bland, bland, bland. so imagine a bunch of gentrification grumblers(who, of course, ironicaly are responsible themselves for the gentrification) anyway – imagine them mingling with people who look and act exactly the same, and appear like the just stepped out of an H&M catalog..
oh yeah.. they LOVE to tuck their pants into their socks..
strange.