From LA-based Kitsune Noir:

I have never been to Brooklyn, but in my mind it possesses an almost mythic status and encapsulates everything that is holistically artistic, effortlessly cool and divergent from the mainstream. In his short film/documentary ‚”Breukelen”, ‚”Afropean” filmmaker Ofa brings to life the Brooklyn of my imagination.

BREUKELEN from ofa on Vimeo.

One important question, though… Where are all the hipsters?

Over on the anarchist forums, anonymous commenters are furiously debating the actions of the Williamsburg Bubble Tea Ninjas. One writes:

Looks like it [ed: Williamsburg] needed a little broken glass around the place, too clean and liberal smugville, the broken glass glitters beautifully at night in the headlights, or at sunrise as the slanting rays of the sun remind us that nothing is permanent.

Many over there do however believe it was a terrible move by the anarchist ninjas, as they’re making real anarchists look like stupid, violent, nihilistic and irrational ninja anarchists. Which they totally aren’t! One writes, you ninjas shouldn’t be attacking quaint little boutiques, storefronts, and normal people cars, but the system.

Attack the rich, attack banks, attack the RULING CLASS not yuppies or hipsters. it might not be as easy, because they usually don’t just park their cars on the street, and they usually have security guard stations and don’t run boutiques but multinational corporations.

Quite the debate going on over there, where everyone is “anon” and forever temporarily unidentified in that damn system of Google Cache. Fight the power, anarchists, friends of the hipsters.

Hipsters got a Tip of Stephen Colbert’s hat last night, “because as a demographic they are consistently not filling out Obama’s census.” Yep, he heard about it on NPR. As you know by now, it’s not neccessarily the Hipsters fault. Still, well played by Sir Colbert, who noted the low return rates are part of a grand hipster scheme to get less representation, and therefore less neighborhood resources, which in turn will lead to a neighborhood in disrepair, lower rent, and a return to the gritty neighborhood of the 90′s.
But yes, good old Nate Stark, he of Academy Records on North 6th and source in NPR’s article saw his $5 quote replayed on Colbert, saying, “I guess it’s laziness and like, what’s the point? When it comes down to it, nobody wants to fill out like another form that’s just like getting sent to your house that really relatively has nothing to do with your life. I mean people would do if they got like five bucks.”

Hey NPR, next time you run a piece entitled ‚”New York’s Hipsters Too Cool for the Census,” you should maybe do more than talk to three people in a record store?
Sure, as Brian pointed out last week, Williamsburg’s response rates are super low. But check out the actual data available on the Census 2010 Map. The Census return rates for the ‚”hip” parts of Williamsburg are about on par with those for the rest of the city. It’s the Hassidic areas that have a super low rate of return (see screenshot above). Which the NPR story mentioned, kind of, at the end of the piece, after focusing on those crazy kids with their “wacky bikes” and “ironic mustaches.”
So yeah, some of us are lazy assholes who haven’t mailed their forms in yet (like, ok, I *might* have just mailed mine in this morning). But come on ‚Äì we’re no more lazy than the rest of this city.
UPDATE: Aaron Short, over at A Short Story blog, points out that one reason the Hassidic return rate might be so low is because the forms were mailed out during… Passover.
So what we’re saying is that it’s nobody’s fault, really.

Congratulations, Williamsburg! You are in dead last in census return rates with an impressive 31.3%. Your neighbors to the north in Queens are the highest, with 62.9% returned. Nihilists!
For a little non-context, this rate of 31.3% is equal to the amount of U.S. troops killed from accidents or illness in Iraq (May 2004), White male students likely to have carried a weapon in school in the US, and Hispanics in the state of California in 2001.
Bloomberg said, ‚”For each person who is not counted in the census, the city loses about $3,000 in federal aid every year.” So put it this way. We’re not getting any new parks, waterfront concerts, McCarren Park updates, trees, bike lanes, bike racks, or anything else the city pays for with federal money until you send in your census.*
*I have no idea how federal monies are used and am not even close to an expert on the subject.
Full list of return rates here.

The host of the hipster speed dating event, The Internet Killed Your Social Skills, is either hilariously self-aware or just plain mocking us.
After defending the event in a comment as “a fun night,” she wrote, “you only need to know 2 indie bands really well, one dead novelist, and you actually have the length of a song to talk to each person. about 3 minutes, not 30 seconds.”
Easy! Anyways, the next event is Thursday, May 6th at Macri Park should you be interested in mingling, and hey guess what, we’re looking for a single hipster correspondent! Anyone want to attend and let us know how it goes? Write me.
pic via their fb group

I can’t imagine what self-respecting single resident of the neighborhood could have sullied on down to Macri Park on Thursday for what must rank as a new low for hipster-themed bar nights: Hipster Speed Dating!
How does this work? We imagine you’ve got thirty seconds to express how much you don’t give a f’k and name 3 indie bands in the process aaaaand go, make babies.
Did anyone attend?!

photo by Todd-Shaffer c/o Brooklyn365

Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan asks, “What will we call Hipsters?” The field has been narrowed to Doucheoisie, Fauxhemians, Pabstsmears, Probos & Trendsluts. Go, vote & help reset the course of history for the sake of the American media 4eva.

Following last week’s window smashings at American Apparel, they sent out a statement to help clear things up. Here’s what they had to say…

We’ve gotten a few inquires about an incident at our Williamsburg store last week, and because online speculation can so often go awry, we thought we’d try set the record straight with the facts we have available. About 20 small windows were broken by a group of people on Thursday around midnight. The piece of metal used to smash them was left behind, a few mannequins were scuffed, and nothing was stolen. The police apprehended and arrested two people later that night, a man and a woman, and we’ll likely proceed by attempting to be reimbursed for the destroyed property.
As far as anything goes regarding a black-clad hipster uprising or mobs of angry retail protesters terrorizing Brooklyn, there hasn’t been anything to confirm this apart from a few blog comments. Most retailers have a brush with vandalism at some point, which although unfortunate, is just a reality of being in business. As it stands, this appears to be one of those instances.

But! Gothamist has a theory. “Could black-clad hipsters be confused with black-clad communists? Bring those perps into the ‘interrogation room,’ Dov Charney, because the photos from that recent American Apparel protest show the angry rioters also wearing… all black.”
Related: did we never find their blog weaponry? If they said they have blogs, then they must be out there. C’mon people, find the retail terrorists/vandals’ blog!

[pic c/o Jennifer May for The New York Times]
A group of people with Abercrombie & Fitch bags and big aspirations gathered in the yard adjacent to Roberta’s Pizza in November to learn how to kill them some rabbits.
It went well, it sounds like! For a $100 fee, they learned the method of choice, which “was to place the rabbit on its belly on straw-covered asphalt, press a broomstick across the back of its neck and swiftly yank up the rear legs.” Snap, it probably went.
Now a days, people are eating those rabbits at places like Buttermilk Channel, even though a table of horrified guests walked out after discovering the cute little furballs on the menu. This caused the restaurant to promptly remove the rabbits from the menu, despite the other options like lamb legs, pig ribs, and an iced, baked, or pan-roasted sex-changing animal that is simply a collection of gills, gonads, tubules, tissue, cilia, mucus, mantle, a heart, two kidneys, blood, a mouth, and poop.
But no matter, the restaurant’s owner, Doug Crowell, is pretty sure he’s found the solution: “It seems to me that the more you can make rabbit not look like rabbit, the easier it is to sell people on it.”
So where do you stand on the divisive rabbit issue? Should we nom them?