The intertubes home of author Robert Lanham

This pretty much made my year. You can visit The Writer's Almanac website and listen to the podcast here, or I've archived the MP3 here for posterity. Just wow.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 08:48 PM | Permalink

Misty Harris included a quote from me in her latest trend piece on "place-dropping:

"The inevitable I-wanna-be-on-vacation factor makes the pretension harder to dismiss," says Robert Lanham, bestselling author of three books on cultural foibles.

Lanham suggests the key to a successful place-drop is knowledge of which travel war-stories will help and which will hinder -- something he carefully considered after stumbling upon a clothing-optional beach during a recent trip to Mexico.

"It's not going to win me any favours to place-drop that 'John Denver songs sure sound better when performed on a pan flute by leathery nudists in Tulum,' " says Lanham. "And yes, this happened.

Continue reading ""Place-dropping" The Scary Nudists I Encountered In Tulum" »

Posted by Robert Lanham at 08:25 PM | Permalink

I got a really nice mention in the Yale Daily News.

In closing his talk, Monks read a popular piece from McSweeney’s entitled “Internet Age Writing and Course Overview” by Robert Lanham. The piece is written as an English class syllabus but satirizes the new state of writing on the Internet, from blogs to Twitter and Facebook. The “course” covered everything from “Week 1: reading is stoopid” to “Week 5: I can haz writing skillz?” and demanded “ENG: 231WR — Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance” and “ENG: 232WR — Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll” as prerequisites, among others. Monks said the piece exemplified what McSweeney’s tried to publish: “pop-culture oriented conceptual humor.”

Posted by Robert Lanham at 04:40 PM | Permalink

Evidently, this story was syndicated all over the place:

Then, the air came out of the tires. Released in 2004, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou cost $60 million and took in $24 million. The more modestly budgeted Darjeeling Limited grossed $12 million in 2007, $5 million less than Rushmore. These were commercial failures, sure, but the critics were also starting to pile on. Phrases like "too precious," "cloying" and "detached" popped up more and more in Anderson's reviews.

In one case of hipster cannibalization, The Hipster Handbook author Robert Lanham, writing for the ubercool Viceland Web site, said of The Life Aquatic: "Wes Anderson doesn't make movies anymore. He creates overly precious paintings inhabited by emasculated man-children who knit sweater vests to the accompaniment of Belle & Sebastian while fantasizing that they're macho enough to skin a caribou with a pocketknife. The set pieces to The Life Aquatic are stunning, but watching this film is like visiting the Natural History Museum. It's a beautiful building, but most of its pleasures are filled with lifeless things."

Posted by Robert Lanham at 04:17 PM | Permalink

New York Magazine has a long-overdue cover story on the Brooklyn music scene and the thing is pretty epic. The article discusses the latest wave of a-list indie bands—Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Antlers, TV on the Radio—and canonizes the Dirty Projectors as "the most risk-taking" group of the crop:

Bitte Orca, it turns out, is Dirty Projectors' real New York album, an urbane and sophisticated outgrowth of the most fertile new-music environment the city has seen since the CBGB heyday of the seventies. It is no coincidence that it came out within months of beloved albums by two giants of the local scene—Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion and Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest. These three bands do not sound alike. Animal Collective layers lush, romantic harmonies on top of kooky, heavily sampled orchestrations, a sound that is equal parts madness and impeccable logic. Grizzly Bear has a much more down-to-earth, folky approach, reveling in the pure pleasure of melodies and the ways they can be turned inside out and upside down. But the three bands all embrace many of the same virtues: fearless sincerity, devotion to craft, agnosticism about digital technology (which is to say, they use it but don't fetishize it), profound musical curiosity, ingenuity at using the human voice as an instrument, and an uncanny ability to reproduce their complex material in live performance (in no small part because this is where the money is).

The author was kind enough to include a quote by yours truly:

Meanwhile, a more studious, art-focused scene was coalescing around a Williamsburg band called TV on the Radio, which released its label debut EP Young Liars in 2003. "They had art-punk, gospel, freak folk‚ everything interesting that was going on in Brooklyn," says Robert Lanham, the freewilliamsburg.com blogger, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1996. "TV on the Radio was just a completely different organism."

And later, they deem FREEwilliamsburg one of the "Five Voices That Matter in the Music Blogosphere." Yahoo!

Critics will of course say this article came a tad late, but the real arguments will revolve around their Brooklyn Top 40 list. (I was happy to see it included zero Hold Steady songs—hipster frat rock). Still, it was nice to see New York paying respect to the amazing music scene that has emerged. As I told the reporter, it's the most exciting time to be making (and listening to) music in the city since the late Eighties.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 04:20 PM | Permalink

Now if I can just get in Shouts & Murmers...

Posted by Robert Lanham at 08:12 PM | Permalink

Just what the world needs: another snarky/tired/redundant article about Williamsburg and hipsters:

Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care.

Annoying, yes, but harmless, right? Not to hear their critics tell it. Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity. Critics have described the loosely defined group as smug, full of contradictions and, ultimately, the dead end of Western civilization.

Though the subculture is met with derision in wider society, hipsters have been able to eke out enclaves across the country, chief among them the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Williamsburg. But now even that is threatened. The hip have been hit with a double whammy of economic reality (more are struggling to pay rent as parental support dries up) and population changes (the carefully gentrified neighborhood is gradually being infiltrated by squatters inhabiting Williamsburg's stalled building projects). Hipsterdom's largest natural habitat, it seems, is under threat.

Such cultural mishmash is ripe for parodying. In 2003, author Robert Lanham wrote The Hipster Handbook, trying to codify the rules to hipsterdom, like "You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration" and "You have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your 'one Republican friend.' "

Posted by Robert Lanham at 04:43 PM | Permalink

Another hipster story, this time from the Globe.... and I thought I was done with this topic:

Hipster culture involves a certain degree of smugness, along with required material goods including a wardrobe of Kanye West sunglasses, American Apparel leggings, and fertility-challenging skinny jeans. So it’s with a particular amount of glee that the anti-hipster movement has blossomed. The idea of mocking hipsters started six years ago when Robert Lanham penned “The Hipster Handbook,’’ in which he offered insightful clues to help readers determine if they were hipsters, such as: “Your hair looks best unwashed, and you position your head on the pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks’’; “You have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your ‘one Republican friend’ ’’; and “You carry a shoulder strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-style glasses.’’

“I think if you asked me in 2003 if hipster subculture would still be around in 2009, I would have said no,’’ says Lanham from his home in New York, otherwise known as hipster ground zero. “But now I think the hipster is an enduring new archetype. Kind of like the hippie was. They go in and out of fashion, but I think we’re stuck with the hipster.’’ [...]

“Think of it as hipster fatigue,’’ Lanham says in a genial yet defeated tone. “A lot of people thought it would have its heyday and go away. But now it seems we’ll need to learn to live with the hipsters.’’

According to Michael Levenston of City Farmer, which styles itself as Canada's "office of urban agriculture," the canning comeback is tied to a do- it-yourself food movement that has seen vegetable gardens sprout up everywhere from "the White House to Buckingham Palace to the (Vancouver) mayor's front lawn.''

Among those growing their own greens is Robert Lanham, the bestselling author of three books on popular culture.

"I'm not sure if I'm saving any money - probably not - but the ritual itself seems cleansing and somehow more honest than obsessing over the latest foodie trends in Bon Appetit or Gourmet,'' says Lanham. "Now that the economy has gone kaput, stuffing your face with overpriced pork belly delicately prepared by a celebrity chef seems ridiculously ostentatious, even if you can afford it.''

Posted by Robert Lanham at 09:37 PM | Permalink

I forgot to mention this when it came out June 8th. New York Times reporter Christine Haughney was kind enough to give me a mention.

Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents -- also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians -- Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses [...]

In the boom years, Mr. Weinstein said, 40 percent of the mortgage applications he reviewed for buyers in Williamsburg included down-payment money, from $50,000 to $300,000, from parents. About 20 percent of the applications listed investments that gave the young buyers $3,000 to $10,000 of monthly income.

But in the past two months, Mr. Weinstein said, he has handled two to three deals a week in which the parents cut back their down-payment help [...]

It can be hard to see the signs of financial troubles in Williamsburg because residents are so loath to show that they had money in the first place. Robert Lanham, author of “The Hipster Handbook,” said in an interview that many newer residents tried to blend in with the area’s gritty history and dressed “half the time like they’re homeless people.”

But parental help was obvious in the intersection of residents with low-paying jobs and $3,000-a-month apartments.

“You can put two and two together, that they have money coming in from somewhere else,” Mr. Lanham said.

In other news, I hosted a party for the Northside Festival on June 12th. My amazing bloggers over at FREEwilliamsburg helped to make it an amazing night. Here's what John Norris of MTV fame had to say about it:

No place I would rather be on Friday night of the Northside Fest than the venerable (Can we call it venerable yet? Why yes, I think we can) Death By Audio. Not because it was a chance to see bands that rarely play Brooklyn - as a matter of fact every few weeks it seems you can catch at least one of them around town. But because it was a showcase of some of the most exciting, modern left-field pop our fine locale has to offer... And people ask me ‘what’s so great about Brooklyn’? Um, this is.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 02:58 AM | Permalink

[image via]

Not sure how I feel about that, but The Assimilated Negro asked me to comment on the hipster casting call that I posted about earlier this week. From Gawker

Let's assume this thing isn't a hoax or an art project by a recent Oberlin grad who thinks he's bohemian because he found bedbugs in his beard.

Do you tap the family trust fund? Do you idolize Dan Deacon? Are you SO not worried about getting swine flu 'cause that shit only happens to poor people?

They're not looking for hipsters. They're looking for entitled idiots. And wait, before you say it, I'm well aware. The terms ‘hipster' and ‘entitled idiot' have been synonyms for close to a decade now. But come on, isn't hipster rage about as tired as PBR and trucker caps? Of course there are plenty of ridiculous, pretentious idiots in Williamsburg-and New York as a whole for that matter. But would you rather be living in a stripmall in the exurbs of Richmond where alt culture consists of seeing The String Cheese Incident perform on Friday at that state-run amphitheater next to Applebees? (I'm from VA, so I can make fun). Personally, I'd rather be in a place like Williamsburg where people appreciate film, music, and fashion, even if I do have to put up with people named Unicornicopia and the neighborhood's other goofy excesses.

I hope the hipsterhood reality series is for real. That way we can pin all our hipster rage on a handful of dipshits and begin recognizing the difference between artists, people who are cool, and entitled morons. We clearly need a few sacrificial lambs and anyone who would answer that casting call is a perfect fit.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 11:10 PM | Permalink

Evidently, there's a Cherohonkee fashion spread in Italian Vogue this month. WTF? More here.

And even more exciting, Nicole Richie’s “House Of Harlow” jewelry line is deemed 'Cherohonkee Chic.' Hilarious. Images after the jump.

Continue reading "Cherohonkees Blowing Up In Italian Vogue" »

Posted by Robert Lanham at 05:29 PM | Permalink

This month's Bon Appetit has a story on the Williamsburg food scene. They give my blog a nice little mention:

That sense of personal and like-minded connection is one of the things that first attracted Williamsburgers like Robert Lanham, the founding editor of the comprehensive and indispensable Free Williamsburg blog. "You'd walk down the street and recognize people," remembers Lanham, who is also, tellingly, the author of The Hipster Handbook. He admits that much has changed in the 12 years that he's lived in the neighborhood (among other things, he can no longer afford to live as close to the center of things as he once did) but "you still feel like you're part of a real community," he says.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 04:13 PM | Permalink

From the Canadian wire (Canwest News Service):

Business suits are the new shorthand for sexy, according to a survey released Thursday indicating Canadian men and women alike fantasize more about white-collar workers than such perennial objects of desire as firefighters, rock stars and models.

"Given the global financial crisis, suits and business attire are the new hot uniforms, since they remind us of what really turns us on: employment," says Robert Lanham, a humorist who has written three books on North American idiosyncrasies.

"When fantasy becomes dull, we begin to long for the real thing. So it makes perfect sense that the corporate uniforms we wear and see every day would become the new fetish."

Posted by Robert Lanham at 03:37 PM | Permalink

Jay McInerney has a great article in the current New York. It gives a quick shout-out to The Hipster Handbook

Hipsters believed they were the ultimate anti-yuppies. Unlike their forebears, they wanted to be known not by their job or ambition but by their self-conscious disregard for either. If anything, the cult of connoisseurship was even more exaggerated in this subgroup. Their code, enshrined in Robert Lanham’s hyperironic 2003 Hipster Handbook, was inherently elitist, defining itself in opposition to the mainstream. Hipster consumerism championed the notions of alternative and independent, rejecting the yuppie embrace of certain consumer brands in favor of their own. So it was vintage T-shirts rather than Turnbull & Asser dress shirts with spread collars, Pabst Blue Ribbon over Chardonnay. But ultimately, whether you love Starbucks or loathe it, a world in which we are defined by our choice of blue jeans and coffee beans owes more to Alex Keaton than to Abbie Hoffman.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 07:28 PM | Permalink

Tune in tonight.... I'll be discussing the Jesusyness of Sarah Palin and the Mavrickiness of McCain on BlogTalkRadio. Using Google maps, I've seen Capitol Hill from my home, so I'm an expert on all things political. From Rumproast:

Check out the premiere of our BlogTalkRadio show Radio Rumproast Monday September 15th from 11PM-12:30AM ET. Our guest will be Robert Lanham, author of the The Hipster Handbook, Food Court Druids..., and The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right. We'll talk about his books, evangelicalism in politics, the general election and ferrets. We'll also feature a roundtable of bloggers, including Rumproast's poputonian, discussing the past week's events and, of course, we'll be taking your calls. Radio Rumproast: We like it well-done.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 09:08 PM | Permalink

Misty Harris quoted me a couple of times in her latest article for Canwest News Service (Canada's AP):

Guitar solos have vanished from the concert scene at the same time millions of gamers are pretending to be a Guitar Hero.

Gym memberships are down while stores can't keep the home exercise game Wii Fit in stock.

Precious hours of real life are being sacrificed to the online universe Second Life, and high-powered marketing campaigns this fall are planned to sell still more virtual fantasy trussed up as reality.

Forget concern over counterfeit goods such as watches and handbags. Increasingly, it's organic human experience that's being knocked off.

"People are just too overwhelmed by all the technologies that exist to be active participants in real life," says Robert Lanham, who has written three books on the idiosyncrasies of contemporary human behaviour.

"When you're microblogging on Tumblr and juggling Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace accounts, who's got time for yoga classes or guitar lessons? Perfecting your Stratocaster licks playing Rock Band is simply less time-consuming than trying to become the next Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen." [....]

But however convenient or ego-stoking these hi-tech encounters, cultural commentator Lanham says they'll never be as fulfilling or as sexy as the real thing. "Saying, 'Dude, my virtual band totally rocks ... we're playing a gig in my living room tonight' is never going to have the same allure as securing a real gig in an actual rock band," says Lanham. "And it's unlikely the words 'he's such a romantic text-messager, his SMS skills made my knees buckle' have ever been uttered, or sent via SMS for that matter."

Posted by Robert Lanham at 12:36 AM | Permalink

Evidently, I'm one of the most influential and "visible" New Yorkers on the interweb. Of course, the people who generated the list live in Vancouver. Hilarious. See the full list at NowPublic.com

“Visibility and connectedness define today’s elite,” said Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic. “Today, there are innumerable new ways for one’s voice to be heard. The goal of the MostPublic Index is to measure who is currently most effective in broadcasting their own personal brand online, as well as identify emerging players.”

Posted by Robert Lanham at 05:23 PM | Permalink

From The Boston Herald

Three agonizing minutes. That’s how long I stood at a Dunkin’ Donuts cash register the other night waiting for an employee to make eye contact with me. This is not an exaggeration. I timed Tim with my cell-phone clock, absolutely fascinated that he was counting money inches away from my face, but did not acknowledge my presence.

Heck, he was busy. I was tempted to walk out muffinless, but Tim’s name tag kept me intrigued. It read: “Shift Leader.”

The Era of Customer Service died long before I was snubbed at the doughnut counter, but this guy kicked up the apathy factor to a new level. He even seemed annoyed when another employee broke the silence and hooked me up with my late-night snack.

Tim totally fits the self-absorbed stereotype of “Generation Y,” since renamed “The Millennials,” those early 20-somethings who think the workplace is an extension of college - where you can show up late with uncombed hair and ragged sweatpants without anyone raising an eyebrow. Their motto: “Don’t bug me - it’s not my job!”

Continue reading "Quoted in Boston Herald: "Surviving 'Millennial' office invasion?"" »

Posted by Robert Lanham at 02:31 AM | Permalink

It's another article about blogs being turned into books. Of course, FREEwilliamsburg wasn't a blog when I secured my book deal but I'm happy to get another shout out. The print edition included a very earnest looking picture of me. You can read the article here. And here's a jpg: View image

Posted by Robert Lanham at 01:44 AM | Permalink

From the article "Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal"

But there are successes. On the nonhumor front, the best seller “Julie and Julia,” about a woman who cooked one Julia Child recipe a day, started as a blog, and “The Hipster Handbook,” spawned from freewilliamsburg.com in 2003, has sold 39,000, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Incidentally, The Hipster Handbook has sold many more copies than reported by BookScan which often doesn't account for sales at independent and college book stores, the places where the satirical book has sold very well.

Posted by Robert Lanham at 05:32 PM | Permalink