I think I’ll remember this summer as the one where I was constantly in and out of a knarly cold, and up and down from New York. I’ve actually come to like New York. I used to feel lost and overwhelmed every time I went, but now it’s growing on me. I like walking down the avenues and randomly running into people I haven’t seen in five years. I like that there is a seemingly endless supply of quirky coffee places and fragrant flower shops. I like the way the subway weaves under the city like a maze. When I come back home and get on the one in DC, it feels like the kiddy ride at an amusement park.
I do like New York now– most of the time, at least. But sometimes truly unpleasant things happen there. Like, for instance, last Monday. My friend and I were walking down a little street that is nestled between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. We were strolling along, and the conversation was going in as many different directions as the avenues. We were swapping stories about our favorite bookstores, when from across the street we spotted what appeared to be a charming one. Its dark wooden sign read USED AND ANTIQUE BOOKS in red block letters. The window of the front was completely covered with tall and narrow stand-up book shelves that displayed some copies of aged classics. Each book got its own shelf, and proudly faced the street with its cover. There was a lovely, well-loved copy of To Kill a Mocking Bird. I eyed a particularly sinister edition of The Scarlet Letter with a red and black cover. I love the old Washington stand-bys of Politics and Prose and Kramer Books, but I took a second to relish what promised to be an undiscovered, exciting independent bookshop. This would never happen to me in DC!
For a moment my heart sank when the door was locked. But then we noticed—this place even had a buzzer! How charming. For a moment I imagined who would come to the door. Would it be some elderly woman with a blue shawl, who had inherited this shop from her mother, who had inherited it from her father before that? Perhaps the owner would be some handsome professorly-type gentleman with a tweed coat, a loose tie and a shaggy brown haircut that fell around his ears. Of course he would have a doorbell; he doesn’t like too many customers. He needs some quiet, after all, just a few quiet moments to work on his own book.
Then the door swung open. To my dismay, what tumbled out of it was not a charming professorly type, or a grandmother who would serve me tea while I browsed her collection. It was, unfortunately, a textbook variety hipster. She wore plaid. She wore tights under her shorts. She had brown, shaggy hair that fell around her shoulders, but her bangs cut across her forehead like the blade of a butcher knife. A grandmother could have worn her large, thick, round glasses, but somehow I doubted they were actually prescription.
She quickly inhaled to speak: “um, guys, this isn’t actually a bookstore.”
I think I must have given her a quizzical look. “What?”
“And it’s not, um, open right now.”
“Oh. Well, when is it open?”
“At eleven. But you need a reservation to get in.”
My friend and I stared at her. Her eyes were cold, empty, yet piercing. For a moment, I was hypnotized by her aura of distinct aloofness. We were fools. How could we be naive enough to believe that a places with a facade that read BOOKS on the outside and displayed books in the window actually sold books?
Then we turned around, walked a few steps, burst out laughing, and didn’t stop doing so for a block and a half. My friend likes to poke fun at me for “gazing” because of my minor in anthropology. “Go gaze at that girl” he told me. “And don’t feel guilty about it for a second.”
Where did hipsters come from? Why are they here? Who do they think they are? I wonder what that place is like at eleven, though somehow I think that if I called to make a reservation, I probably wouldn’t get in. Perhaps we do need a team of ethnographers to descend into their dens and come back with some answers. Urban Outfitters carries a number of hipster how-to guides that teach people who to spot a hipster, classify one, or be one yourself. But has there been any scholarly work on this topic? Seriously. What cultural forces collided to produce this young woman and her phony front of great books?
