

How Hipsters Ruined Paris - applecore
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/how-hipsters-ruined-paris.html

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keithpeter
What an odd article. I have some sympathy with what I take to be the basic
premise: modern life in Western countries is becoming homogenised and
gentrification is 'flattening' our cities.

But identifying the sex trade as an aspect of an area's authenticity is not
classy. I've lived on the border of a red light zone and it is not nice
(friends being curb crawled, hypodermics in the front garden, running the
gauntlet to get the milk &c). We can do without that one.

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downer97
What do you mean by "curb crawled"? Does that refer to being solicited, or
what?

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keithpeter
It is the UK term for soliciting from a car. Forgot about variations in
language.

Most police forces will now prosecute but they didn't until about 5 to 10
years ago.

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downer97
Ah ha, so it's a drive by! Makes sense why that would warrant a special term,
and why I haven't experienced it.

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grey-area
Pigalle has been a tourist trap for decades, as is the red light district he
describes. If you want to see a more interesting side of Paris, living in the
area which contains the 19C confection of montemartre and the moulin rouge,
famous for 19C artists, as he mentioned several times, is not the way to do
it. The Marais and almost everything south to the river from this area are
overrun with tourists or expats, particularly the weekend, and I'm really
surprised he's complaining about gentrification.

Try menilmontant, saint sulpice, canal st Martin, pantheon or many places
outside the central core for areas which are still more interesting or mixed -
there is plenty to Paris away from the sights, and to complain about the
gentrification of this area as too many people like him move in I find
genuinely baffling. If he wants something seedy and rundown for that extra
edge, there is plenty to choose from.

 _The sad truth of our contemporary moment seems to be only that you no longer
need to be anywhere in particular anymore._

I'd be really interested to know if he's left the safety of the bubble he's
complaining about in Brooklyn NY or Paris, because the areas he's chosen don't
sound like they would ever deliver the reality he craves, and both cities have
far more to offer than the hipster ennui he describes. It seems the first rule
of being a hipster is that you must complain about all the other hipsters.

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naterator
Yea, these people want some fantasy version of Paris (or wherever) that only
exists in the present day as an ideal. Back when those places were cool, they
weren't cool, they were most often grudgy shitholes, or just coming out of
being one. These are the people who wouldn't be able to stand living in the
Paris of the 30's or 50's, or the NYC of the 70's and 80's, where you actually
had constant background fear of crime; when you had to worry about starving.

Grudgy shitholes that might be legendary someday exist today, but these people
don't have the guts to go there. Go to Shanghai, go to Caracas, go to
Bangalore, got to Liberia. But that would be dangerous and, perhaps more
importantly, come with the risk that in the future those places won't be
legendary and they won't have any stories anyone will care about. So, they go
to Paris and complain that they can't have their fantasy cake and eat it, too.

Not that I would go to any places I listed, but I also won't complain. As my
father has put it, knowing that you're going to get mugged at least once or
twice a year on your way to work, sometimes at gun/knifepoint, is not awesome.
Bring on the yuppies and hipsters.

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dionidium
This article is further proof that the word "hipster" is just a stand-in that
means "whatever I don't like."

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MrOrelliOReilly
How? Sure, he uses 'hipster' as a synonym for gentrification but I think
that's reasonable. And I think he articulates rather well what he means by
gentrification - "urban spaces like style blogs or Pinterest boards
representing a single, self-satisfied and extremely sheltered expression of
middle- and upper-middle-class sensibility"

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ginko
I believe the term typically used in France and Europe in general would be
'bobo'(bohemian bourgeois).

