–My subway obsession continues… though I don’t believe that any of those stations could possibly be real. (DB)

–Steven Holl’s Nanjing Museum of Art and Architecture (top) is nearly finished. I’ve been meaning to check out his Linked Hybrid (bottom) in Beijing, but haven’t had the chance…

–I just discovered Sleevage, a blog that explores album artwork new and old. (The Animal Collective and Jay-Z entries are quite interesting and relevant as year-end list time is upon us.)

–PSFK has brought an interesting phenomenon to my attention: adman George Parker cites Starbucks’ unbranding experiment in his post on a resurgent (No Logo-esque) brand backlash (astute readers will note that I just read Naomi Klein’s manifesto). I followed the link to Bryant Simon’s essay on Reuters.com, which provides a nice rundown of Starbucks’ attempt to appropriate the local, indie coffeeshop aesthetic—i.e., the rejection of its corporate encroachment and supersaturation tactics. Very interesting.

In fact, the New York Times (Why don’t I just marry them?) has also picked up on this local and handmade trend, perhaps best known in its Slow Food manifestation, with some timely gift advice: local and handmade are so hot right now. Not that Etsy really needs the boost, considering its massive growth in the past couple years—which, in turn, has metastasized into a parody (2.0) spinoff site, Regretsy.

Beijing has plenty of Starbucks, but the trend here is decidedly global, factory-made and, um, dependent. Just as the subway has grown by leaps and bounds since my last visit five years ago, that timeframe has also seen the arrival of the sandwich chain Subway, just around the corner from the McDonald’s and two KFC’s on my block—one of which appears to be a Combination Pizza Hut & KFC. Jamaica Ave don’t got shit on Chengfu Road.

–Speaking of AnCo and brand backlash, Carles of the infamous Hipster Runoff ran off. Crazy shit. I wrote a brief essay on HRO for the Joneses blog earlier this year and it seems to be a rather appropriate (if not altogether prescient) obituary, if I do say so myself.

So the Village Voice recently interviewed mystery blogger Carles, the man behind the contrarian ‘altblog’ Hipster Runoff, a veritable mash-up of contemporary indie subculture and the cynical dissection of it. The result occasionally flirts with brilliance, or at least knows what brilliance is, but more often comes off as a headache-inducing exercise in irony in the Age of Web 2.0. (Caveat emptor: this is not an endorsement unless you have a fetish for the the prefix “alt-”.)

Hipster Runoff’s tone is equally self-promoting and self-deprecating (not to mention self-referential) but always knowingly so, something like the editors of Vice Magazine playing the rest of Williamsburg in an epic game of Scrabble… within a single ego. Despite his penchant for appropriating post-LOLCATS bombast (srsly) and subverting neologisms—bro, ghey, blog house etc.—I wouldn’t be surprised if Carles was a bright kid in a second-rate city who happens to have a little extra time on his hands.

At its core, Hipster Runoff is a product of postmodernity, a blog about blog culture that asks to be blogged about (literally). But if the suggestion of recursiveness—infinite levels of analysis and endless layers of subtext—is symptomatic of modern man’s futile search for meaning, Hipster Runoff is an intentional parody of itself, disguising the abyss with a hot pink header, uncomfortably large helvetica typeface, and ubiquitous American Apparel (Am Appy for short) ads. Apparently, overdosing on irony is the opiate for the alt-masses.

Of course, it’s always difficult to critique a subsumptive zeitgeist when you’re living it, something like (if you’ll excuse the rather grotesque metaphor) pinning the tail on a donkey that has swallowed you whole. Or, alternately (pun intended), the unsettling feeling that you’ve created a monster but must keep feeding it if only to prevent it from eating you. Hence the conception that hipsterdom is parasitic on the detritus of previous creative movements, which has evolved into an ungodly Katamari-like entity of pure snark.

Perhaps this is why I find Hipster Runoff so irritating: the fact that he has seen into the soul of the beast has spawned a critique that is not prescriptive or even palliative but, on the contrary, amplifies its bite and rate of consumption.

At the end of the day, I prefer the comfort of Brooklyn Vegan’s no-frills news, pics and commentary. But Carles must be doing something right—he got me to blog about his blog.