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We're all OK.

My all time favorite magazine--New York Magazine--featured an article that hit home with me and made me think imediately of this website.

Up With Grups

Also known as yupster (yuppie + hipster), yindie (yuppie + indie), and alterna-yuppie. Our preferred term, grup, is taken from an episode of Star Trek (keep reading) in which Captain Kirk et al. land on a planet of children who rule the world, with no adults in sight. The kids call Kirk and the crew “grups,” which they eventually figure out is a contraction of “grown-ups.” It turns out that all the grown-ups had died from a virus that greatly slows the aging process and kills anybody who grows up.

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?

This is an obituary for the generation gap

Please read this and laugh at how we finally have received validation...

article by Adam Sternberg

Here's more: Pay attention people!! We don't need to know what you would do with the poster before you for 5 seconds!

“All of the really good music right now has absolutely precise parallels to the best music of the eighties, from Franz Ferdinand to Interpol to Death Cab—anything you can name,” says Michael Hirschorn, the 42-year-old executive vice-president of original programming and production at VH1. “Plus, the 20-year-olds are all listening to the Cure and New Order anyway. It’s created a kind of mass confusion. I was at the Coachella festival last year, and the groups people were most stoked about were Gang of Four and New Order.” No wonder Grups like today’s indie music: It sounds exactly like the indie music of their youth. Which, as it happens, is what kids today like, too, which is why today’s new music all sounds like it’s twenty years old. And thus the culture grinds to a halt, in a screech of guitar feedback.

I love this guy:

“If really hard-pressed, I would admit that I actually own a Clash T-shirt that I got from that last Clash tour,” the musician told me. “But I don’t wear it! And I’m certainly not going to wear it under an Armani black blazer. I even remember meeting this guy who was around my age, who was wearing an expensive blazer, and on the lapel was a London Calling button. Who the fuck wears that? That’s what I wore when I was 18 in art school! And you’re the same age as me? And you’re wearing it again?” He pauses, then adds, “And you know what? Giving your kid a mohawk is fucked up, too.”

Or vice versa---I see hot 21 year olds literally ALL the time. *naughty*

I actually don't. I feel the parents are molding their kids into sub genres--not giving themn a chance to find out what they are into ever. I want my kids (yeah the ones I don't have, and prob, never will) to be as kid like as possible. That is beautiful.

You have to admit--we are indulging in a lifestyle not much different of the one we had as young adults. I think about this all the time (usually while feeling guilty) and realize that I still stay up too late, I still go out and tear it up, I have similar musical taste as an 18 year old girl from my work (she has excellent taste!) and I feel like a rebel around my family members....There is a lot of truth hiding behind every use of the dreaded "h" word.

Around 1996 I met my first child with a mohawk. The kid's mom was a crust punk with a drug problem. She put cigarette butts in the kid's ears to protect it from the loud music coming from the punk show we were at. Aww how sweet.... My mom cut my bangs as a kid, feathered my hair and gave me a bowl cut. It was not an expression of her taste in music or fashion, it was her way of keeping my hair from a) getting burrs stuck in it, b) from being in my eyes, and c) from having to brush it out all the time and making me cry. A mowhawk? It's saying "Look how hard core and terribly trendy I am--my kid has more New York Dolls t shirts and Stooges onesies than YOUR kid! Or YOU for that matter"

Also, about 7 years ago I had a kid come in to get a haircut. His mom said--"He has an idea and I said he could do it, so let him explain it to you and just go for it." Kid goes--"I want my hair like Two Face!!" I shaved one half of his head, and trimmed the other half like your average boy haircut. THAT was fucking hardcore. That kid was the happiest child I have ever seen.

I feel as though I've missed something.





Excuse me, I need to go play DDR and eat sugary cereal now.

I like this line

This, of course, is a seismic shift in intergenerational relationships. It means there is no fundamental generation gap anymore. This is unprecedented in human history. And it’s kind of weird.

It's totally true....We are going to be a crazy bunch of old people.

I love Joe Jackson!! LOVE that album...yes you are cooler than most