HOW TO BE HIP

Photo by Alice Kotlyarenko on Unsplash

I should have been in New York last week discussing novel-writing but this and that prevented it. (No get-well cards, please.). Had I gone, I would have stayed in a hotel much like the one I stayed in last time. Indeed, I was looking forward to regaling you with descriptions of it. Instead, please accept my recollections of last time. They come free, but as always I hope to amuse a paid-subscription out of you.

You want to know what 'Hip' is?  I don't mean how to define hip, I mean how to be hip?  Then you've come to the right man.  After 5 nights in the hippest of hip hotels in New York's hip Lower East Side I'm well positioned to give you the latest lowdown on it.  Never mind why I was there.  That's stuff for another conversation.  Let's just allow that I was hanging out, doing my shit, being hip.

The first rule of hip is that you don't ring a hip Lower East Side hotel from London and ask if they have tea making facilities in the room.  Of course they don't have tea making facilities in the room; they don't have any facilities in the room.  Bar a bar, that is - in this instance one that's better stocked than Salvatore's.  You might not think you want a highball glass of Knob Creek bourbon when you wake up, but you do if you're hip.   Tea and coffee, if you must, you get in the breakfast room where servers (it's not hip to call them waiters) wear trainers and black track suits and look at you with deep suspicion when you ask to see a breakfast menu.  What is it you really want?  'English breakfast tea,' I say, enunciating my way out of any misunderstanding.  English breakfast tea, not to be confused with crack cocaine.  They are clean out of teapots so I get a cup with a bag of something brown floating in it.  I think about shoving it up my nose.  As for the bacon bagel I request, they can't do it.  'But you serve bagels,' I say.  My server nods.  'And you serve bacon,'  He nods again.  I make a question mark of my body.  The hip equivalent of light - let's call it darkness - breaks somewhere in his brain.  'I can give you a bagel and a side of bacon,' he finally says.  I settle for that.

From the corner of my eye I catch him watching me putting the bagel around the bacon.  He'll be telling the guys he hangs around with about this.  It could even catch on.  If you are in the Lower East Side in the next few months and find all the dudes putting bacon between two halves of a bagel, while keeping an eye open for the cops, you'll know how it originated.

Back in the room I resume my search for a cupboard or a drawer.  A wardrobe I have.  But a cupboard or a drawer have I none.  Such things are getting hard to find wherever you stay these days.  The hotels my father used to take me to when I was a small boy and he was driving a van from Manchester to London were marvellously furnished with cupboards and drawers.  I still recall one that had a chest of drawers with separate compartments for cuff links and collar studs.  Since then exiguousness has come to be the fashion in the matter of hotel storage.  But there's usually somewhere to cram in a sock and maybe a change of undergarment - even if it means removing the Gideon's Bible.  In hipsville, though, there's absolutely nothing - just the floor of the wardrobe where you'll never be able to find anything because of the exiguousness of the light.

The more hip the hotel, the less light you get.  Don't ask me to explain this.  It could be that it's not hip ever to see yourself.  It could be that you don't mind losing shit if you're hip because possessions don't matter.  It could be that the truly hip can see in the dark.

I'd ring reception to ask but the phone is more complex than a space ship and it isn't hip to put instructions in the room.  I'd try looking for an explanation on my laptop but that means lying on the floor, because there's no desk and no chair that allows me to make a lap to rest my laptop on.  If this sounds like a cheap hotel I'm describing, I have failed to do justice to its expensiveness.  This is art-world territory, where less is more.  If minimal is chic then hip is more minimal still.  To make this hotel the acme of exclusive hip all they need to do is move the bed out.

Out on the hip streets of Off Soho that get less hip the closer I get to On Soho I see an artisanal juice bar, coffee and cake shop that is advertising for 'talented baristas' and happens to have a free seat in the sun.  Somebody's Daughter, it's called.  I don't recognise the name of the father but the smell's good.  I ask the talented barista for a skinny cappuccino - having no fat in my milk accords well with having no light in my room - and a cinnamon pastry.  He isn't sure about the cinnamon pastry.  He'll have to go check.  Ten minutes later word is delivered that if they have a cinnamon pastry they can't find it.  ‘Try putting a light on in the kitchen,’ I suggest. The talented barista turns his back on me. Don’t I know that it’s hip for a cake-shop to have no cakes. Hipper still is the time it takes to get me my cappuccino.

There are eight, say ten customers sitting out in the sun, waiting for something.  There are ten, say twelves talented baristas visible in the kitchen.  I reckon my cappuccino should take no more than a further two minutes now they've established they've mislaid the cinnamon.  After fifteen I raise an arm.  A passing barista says he'll ask.  Another barista arrives - this must be about the sixth not to have served me with anything - and surveys me with laconic contempt.  'We are working on your coffee, sir,' he says.

'Working on it!  It's a cappuccino not the fucking Empire State Building.'

In fact I don't say that.  It's not hip.  Hip is consenting to getting nothing you want and looking happy about it.  I smile.

END