THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT. Amanda's sick of anti-hipster backlash. I take her point. We greybeards flail and froth too much on the subject, and always have. There has been trend and anti-trend since the dawn of self-selecting communities, and kicks at anomic, gimme-capped urbanites (they still wear gimme caps, right?) are about as meaningful as a ringing denunciation of flappers, or that awful scene in Yankee Doodle Dandy where Cohan meets the bobby-soxers.

If there is any legitimate component to antihipsterism, it is the educational impulse of the wised-up geezer to tell a scruff the big mistake he's making. A choice of jeans or music, however, is seldom so crucial as to warrant comment. If I can point out aesthetic reasons why Band A is no good, I can argue with men and women of goodwill and any age who share my intrest in the true and the beautiful; if I posit that Band A is no good for generational reasons -- if I argue that Band A is the perfect avatar of the bought-out, gutless, anomie-ridden sub-generation that produced it -- then the fight is over whose demographic rulez. I'm old-fashioned enough to prefer the former kind. (Hey, that was a dig at you young punks! Ha ha! Go pay $150 for jeans, bitch!)

I'm not even sure how much bile I can work up over this:

One mile from the Las Vegas Strip, East Village is a 960,000 square foot, multi-level commercial development on 44 acres at the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Paradise Road. It is slated to open in early 2007. The emphasis of East Village is retail, restaurants and entertainment.

The urban lifestyle center will create Las Vegas's missing "meeting place" - America's fastest growing city has no urban "epicenter" and East Village presents a true streetscape of retail shops, a "market place", cafes, restaurants, offices, entertainment and nightlife in a village setting. Architecturally stimulated by Manhattan's eclectic East Village, this lifestyle center has the sense of local authenticity and a cosmopolitan energy. It will be shaped by world class tenants - a place for tourists and residents alike. The locally based developer is driven to create East Village as a legacy for the City.

Photos of the atrocity here. Normally this would be my cue to spray bullets, or at least spoor, in all directions, but I figure, the way things are going, they might as well build East Village Las Vegas in the actual East Village. What's the difference? The rent would probably be the same.

I still think the East Village of my own youth (high crime, low rent, big excitement) was a better Left Bank than the current, culturally-deficient mall version. But if a 90-year-old wheeled up to me and started talking about how it all started going downhill when the Irish and the Italians stopped throwing bricks at each other, I don't think I'd have much of an answer for him.

So, until my next mood swing (any second now...), I'll leave the fist-shaking you-ain't-no-punk-you-punk beat to actual cranks.