Brethren, rather than hang this on a text from scripture, I choose to hang this on the words to an old song, not as gospel, more as ambience –

“…And love, love is just a passing word
It’s the thought that you had in a taxi cab that got left on the curb
When he dropped you off and he stated firm
Oh, oh, oh
You’re a native New Yorker
You should know the score by now You’re a native New Yorker…” — Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell

This song was the tune du jour when Studio 54 was the club du jour. There are surely hipster clubs. There are plenty of velvet ropes left in the city, plenty of back rooms filled with ottomans lined up against banquettes in zebra print, with track lighting and artistically cut mirrors. However, before the clubbing hour – never a minute before 11 pm ever, if you’re really hip, and honestly, it would be much hipper to cruise by about 1 am – where are the hipsters hopping?

I found them at #1 Beard Street, in Brooklyn, all of them, around 4 pm. I passed leather-clad Japanese couples arm in arm, a girl with a saffron Obama T-shirt on with Sarah Palin glasses, a pony tail tortoise-shell-clipped to one side of her head, true religion jeans, and a macramé hip-hugging belt. I locked shopping cart wheels with a German runway model with waist-length red hair with her Catherine-Deneuve look-alike mother. I breezed past young men, with that over-gelled hair spiked up, that crazed look in their eyes from too much World of War Craft suddenly unplugged, eating cinnamon buns, making the Jonas Brothers look old and jaded. I brushed against a Rastafarian man with dreds bound up in hemp, I think, wearing a Movado watch, carrying a futon.

True, there was no velvet rope, no sushi bar with aquarium walls, no giant moon with a cocaine spoon hanging from the ceiling – yes, I DID see the original 54 when it was open and I was too young to have legally entered – but there were ottomans in neon colors, track lights galore, artistically cut mirrors enough to quench the thirst of the vainest among us, and one could buy hanging moon mobiles, spoons, but not the two combined. Besides, exclusivity is no longer hip – it’s obscurity, like a Red Hook warehouse is remotely located, that is the bar to the uninitiated.

I was in Ikea, and not the suburban one. Everything is pretty much the same as the Ikea in New Jersey or Long Island, only people wore more black, more Ugg, people were greener, were more blasé. It was the bootylicious Ikea, the street Ikea, the I-just-bought-a-loft-in-Bed-Stuy-and-am-painting-it-chartreuse Ikea. Even in Europe, Ikea is generally planted in the suburbs, but this one was planted in the just-out-of-reach-of-the-uninitiated gentrifying Red Hook, and everyone knows that the new Soho is now in Brooklyn – the debate is only about exactly where.

I bought some lamps for my desk and my bedroom, a set of casters to attach to the bottom of a cabinet, a curtain rod, and a few other accessories from renewable resources. Green, after all, is the new black. Black is still the new black, of course, but green – green is the new black, and mocha is the new green. Clear – in case you haven’t heard – is the new mocha. What the new clear is, I don’t know.

While I was trolling around with my yellow bag between products with names like Glimma and Trikka, they were piping in a sound track that was cooler than most of the lounges I frequented in recent years, much of it from my misspent youth, others of it sounding like the goth side of the Fuse network or MTV2. I paused to pick up a pink table lamp using low-wattage, energy-efficient bulbs only, and I heard a song that used to close out my nights at Le Privilege, the VIP lounge of the Palace night club where I used to dance mid-eighties, drinking flaming drinks from cups that looked, well, a lot like this lamp in my hand, I thought, and air kissing all kinds of girl models (French kissing a boy model or two). Now my club days have been turned into a retail experience – I am apparently one of the targets of this market, as I did buy some knick-knacks that I might have avoided at Costco with no sound track at all and no hip clientele of which to speak. They are doing pretty well, even as the stock market yo-yos.

Seeking more aficionados of this new hipster, urban American Ikea market, I have some suggested product names and designs for the folks at Ikea –

• Bufda – a home gym that folds into the wall, making an inclining bookshelf unit.
• Mutha – a vibrating baby chair with black and red skull-and-crossbones in a mobile above it.
• Stuppa – An ice pack with a straw – fill it with the hair of the dog for the morning after.
• Sherpa – an environmentally sound, ergonomically designed GPS for pedestrians.
• Friki – a black twin Murphy bed with hand-cuff-suitable hooks.
• Prozaka – black-on-black double Venetian blinds.
• Ganja – a highly flammable organic furniture set, woven from fair trade grasses that are more than just decorative at a party.
• Chikka – a hot pink bed on a large lazy Susan in the shape of a pair of lips.
• Sukka-fri – a narrow quadraphonic speaker system with extra base and with spinning rims on the woofers.
• Hipsta – a combination lava lamp/blackberry/loofah sponge/chaise lounge made out of recycled tires and mulch.

In any case, it was nice to see my co-Brooklynites out en masse with Manhattanites willing to go through the Battery Tunnel to buy that which must be had this season among us. It is nice that exclusivity is out, democracy is in, and the New New York is the Old New York over the East River. Red Hook, in case you haven’t heard, is the new little black dress.

Brethren, sorry for the poor-quality cell phone photo of what was a kick-@## rock festival’s stage. I was there yesterday. I got sunburned, and my neck is a little sore from all the head-bopping I was doing.

Here’s the scripture upon which I am basing my homily this week — I consider it a promise to all believers who will pounce on it:

Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s. — Psalm 103:1-4

Saturday this past weekend, Coney Island was host to a day-long indie rock festival, the Siren Festival, and everyone from other parts of town who considers himself or herself hip, the same ones who go to hear bands in basements on the Lower East Side, seemed to be there.

Most of them were in their twenties, and those who were “older” were in their thirties, and I’m, well — ahem — perpetually thirty-nine at this point, but I was there, too. Does that make me hip? Let’s check:

TOP TEN REASONS I MIGHT BE REALLY HIP

1. Last year, a (Holy) hip-hop CD was released, The Cornerstone, and I was the only white person whose voice was on it — www.newlewmusic.com (Everyone there was half my age, too, it seemed like).
2. I have occasionally been asked for my autograph after readings by hip-looking people in their twenties. I also have gotten a couple of fan letters for my poetry from people who are serious hipsters.
3. There’s a guy in Brooklyn named Jackie, who is an older man of color who volunteers to talk to young black men in “at risk” programs to give them reasons and ways to avoid the mean streets. When Jackie wants to reach these young men across generational lines, he reads them several of my poems that show empowering images of black men. A lit journal that writes about literature of interest to African-Americans gave a positive review of my work.
4. I have watched a cocophonous orchestra in Manhattan — experimental modern music — blare dissonant horns as a woman with a British accent shouted words I wrote about freedom — that happened at Merkin Concert Hall in 2004.
5. I taught a college semester last year where I told my students (truthfully) that I was about their parents’ age, and they said they couldn’t believe me. When I asked why, they told me things like, “My mom doesn’t text her friends like you do.” “You just don’t look that age.” “You dress way cooler than they do.” “You know words they don’t.”
6. I am part of the Colbert Nation — actually, that might make me a total geek in some people’s eyes.
7. I often give readings on stages where legends of the rock world have stood before me.
8. I am so riding the crest of the wave of the return of big earrings.
9. I own clothes by certain hip labels, such as Baby Phat — remember, the Bible tells us that the liberal soul shall be made phat! (Proverbs 11:25, King James Version, Anne Babson spelling)
10. I bought fair trade products long before everyone else consciously started to do so in order to be “hip.”

Understand that there are plenty of things that might disqualify me from hipsterdom — my faith, for one. I don’t have any nose piercings, no tattoos, nor will I get any, when I wear t-shirts, which I rarely do, they may have ironic slogans on them, but they are never cynical, I never do any drugs, designer or other, and while I am always looking for friends, none of those friendships will ever include benefits.

Understand also that when I say “hip,” I really don’t mean Sex in the City chic. Carrie Bradshaw might slum at the events where hipsters go from time to time, but unless Samantha is there professionally to promote them, she wouldn’t be caught dead in the outfits hipsters wear. She would be bored by their artistic and intellectual pretensions. She would not find their antiestablishmentarianism even slightly compelling.

You see, quintessential New York hipsters don’t wear designer labels. I have occasionally joked that I have the K-Mart Jacqueline Smith Collection version of Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe, but that’s not really true. Even if I had billions of dollars, I would never buy from the more fashionable couturiers because of their lack of fair trade practices (see my hipster top ten list). I am more chic than the twenty-something tribe that haunts the corner of Stanton and Rivington on the Lower East Side or any corner these days in Williamsburg, but I’m enough like them that I find myself bumping into them again and again.

Most people my age that I know don’t go to indie rock festivals any more — and I promise, I’ll talk about this one part of the scene, I swear — they go to the occasional movie, go to work, go home, feed kids, water plants, once in a while have brunch — their only potential crossing coordinates with hipsters — and attend establishment cultural events. I asked a few of them to go to the Siren festival with me, but they said no. Only my friend Doris, who is twenty-four, said yes, even though she has a kid she could go home and feed. She left the baby with relatives.

Now the festival itself was wonderful. I particularly LOVED this band I had never heard before, and so did Spin.com — they are called Ra Ra Riot, and they are a marriage between the sound of The Clash and The Kronos Quartet. They call their music “chamber pop.” They are a bunch of fresh-faced kids from Syracuse New York — okay, fresh-faced with really, really intense “I’m making awesome music” grimaces. It’s very original stuff.

Ra Ra Riot (totally go to www.rarariot.com because they rock) was on the main stage, set up by the historic roller coaster the Cyclone, so while they were riffing, the only screams were not from fans but from people sliding down wooden tracks very, very fast. The hipsters looked, well, bored.

At the top of the page is the one lame photo I was able to take. The hipsters are bored. So I borrowed another photo from Ra Ra Riot’s promotional material which is more fun to look at:

As a part-time, non-card-carrying hipster, I had forgotten, as my friend Andrea reminded me today, that one of the cardinal rules for being hip is that you’re not supposed to appear to interested in anything, even stuff you spent a lot of time and energy to go see.

Me, though, I was bopping my head and dancing around. If I like something, I just like it. I’m not going to pretend to be ironically detached from it. That’s just lame, that’s missing the point. Honestly, the young, bored people around me were wasting their time, in my opinion, if they weren’t going to even bother to enjoy what they took the F Train all the way to the end of the line to come see.

This brings me to the passage that I quoted — let me focus on that rather mysterious part about our youth being renewed “like the eagle’s.”

Cosmetics promise us this, but surely not in quite the way God meant it. I don’t think here that God is talking about literal age. I think he’s talking about an outlook that brings joy and a freshness of being, physically, perhaps, but because one’s mouth is involved, and good things in it, I have to assume he means something spiritual and intellectual.

One of the things that I find frustrating about talking to people my own age these days is that many of them have stopped entertaining new ideas. It seems with each passing year there is less and less originality among my chronological peers. I did not go to the siren Festival to be “hip,” in fact. I went because I wanted to see it for my own enjoyment. I do a lot of things — like when I learned about “bars” and “hooks” in rap, and the difference between gangsta rap and more mainstream rap from a hip-hop producer’s standpoint, that was just for my own edification and enjoyment.

My peers used to be curious about new things. What happened? I admit wholeheartedly that someone with a child has a lot less time to focus on cultural phenomena. I understand that. But still, wouldn’t being around that child engender greater curiosity by constant contact with someone who can’t seem to stop asking “why?”

And as for those youngster hipsters — isn’t youth supposed to include the ability to just let loose and enjoy without fetters? If being hip means being detached, I’d rather be a geek.

Perhaps being renewed in one’s youth like the eagle’s in Christ is like being held aloft in a state of perpetual vivacity, to be like the Nobel Prize winner whom I met who decided in his late nineties to learn the minutia of artificial intelligence design at the software engineer level, just because it’s cool, or to be like a woman I met years ago in a night club who was in her seventies and in the VIP lounge past the velvet rope, clubbing with her granddaughter because she wanted to see it all. I guess I’m on my way to being like that.

I exhort you, in the name of Jesus, bless the LORD, forget not all His benefits, and remember that if your mouth is filled with His good things, your youth can be renewed. Never stop asking impertinent questions. Never stop trying new things. His mercies are new every morning. Amen.