Stuff That Makes You Want To Relocate To Duluth Includes . . .

. . . the word “bicoastal”:

Eve Levine, a 34-year-old real estate broker, recalls fondly the five years when she was, as she calls it, “low-cost bicoastal.” Her primary residence was in Brooklyn — first Williamsburg, then Bushwick and now Greenpoint — but she also had an apartment in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, Calif., that she visited for long stretches.

The apartment, actually a warehouse, was really big and inexpensive, she said. Friends paid the rent, but Ms. Levine said she could come back whenever she wanted, because they were friends.

In the fall of 2005, she severed ties to her West Coast warehouse.

“If you are trying to build something, whether a career or a bank account, you need to make a choice,” she said.

These days, she is a host of a gathering in Williamsburg called Home Buying for Hipsters, at which she explains the idea of Tenancy in Common, a form of ownership that enables people to combine their resources to buy a house jointly instead of just renting together. It is popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, she said, and she hopes to bring it to Brooklyn, where there is a similar pool of young people who have a history of sharing apartments through their 20’s.

. . .

Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

. . .

If there is an aesthetic credo to Brooklyn and the Bay Area, it is Do It Yourself, which connotes more than using an Allen wrench from Ikea. D.I.Y. can mean everything from wearing locally designed T-shirts to attending concerts staged in someone’s warehouse apartment, to riding a bike to work.

Several businesses that have opened in both Brooklyn and the Bay Area exemplify the aesthetic. One of them, Rare Device, a home furnishings and fashion store in Park Slope, sells felted throw pillows and “wildcrafted soap.”

Those Who Remember The Past Are Doomed To Reheat It

And to think that I just dropped off a bunch of horrible stuff at the Goodwill. “Faster nostalgia” is the first sign of a sick culture:

In tribute to the year 1992, an elevated D.J. segued through records by erstwhile hip-hop artists like K-Solo and Apache and into dance music by Color Me Badd and Bobby Brown, while members of the crowd swarmed the bar and contorted in dated dance steps. Some participants took the theme particularly seriously, wearing vintage Polo sweaters, retro Air Jordan sneakers and chunky gold door knocker earrings.

A celebration of the urban culture of the early 1990s, the monthly party is known simply as 1992. Bouncing around downtown Manhattan clubs since August 2006, it has attracted celebrity guests like Jay-Z, the producer Jermaine Dupri and the music mogul Andre Harrell. Europeans, hankering for a slice of retrograde Americana, have taken the party to Paris and Amsterdam.

“If you don’t know the past, you’ll just follow the trends that are going on now,” said Stephen Barr, 26, of West Hempstead, N.Y., a designer of T-shirts that coordinate with Nike SB skateboarding sneakers. Tall, burly and bearded, he wore a vintage Polo ski jacket with a “1992” patch on the breast pocket. A party regular, he said, “It’s more about camaraderie than meeting girls and all that stuff.”

While the shimmering synthesizers, leg warmers and asymmetrical New Wave haircuts of the 1980s have been alternatively ridiculed, revered and replicated, the early 1990s have remained an untapped source of retro lodestone.

. . .

Just as Mick Jagger’s skin-tight pants were resurrected as skinny jeans, fashions of the early 1990s find new life at the 1992 party. Revelers in their late 20s and early 30s in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren Polo mix with recent Fashion Institute of Technology grads in neon-colored jeans.

Retro-oriented scenes often wink at the cartoonish aspects of the era they celebrate, but there is little irony here. “The early ’90 was the last good style moment in the past 10, 15 years,” said James Filsaime, a 20-year-old from Brooklyn who wore a pink, orange and green Sergio Tacchini windbreaker and turquoise jeans he admitted were “actually from 1991.”

Start Packing

The “-packing” suffix trend is something that must be quickly and quietly eliminated:

Though other areas of the city offer one or a few of these services, Union Square is becoming a one-stop destination for those who consider themselves health-conscious, eco-friendly and deserving of the kind of spiritual and bodily nurturing that in the past was mainly the province of spa vacations. If the meatpacking district is where you go to party, Union Square is where you detoxify.

“We call it the wheatpacking district,” said Lisa Blau, who with Amanda Freeman founded VitalJuiceDaily.com, an e-mail newsletter devoted to healthy living that they publish from an office in the neighborhood.

What’s next? Downtown Brooklyn as the Courtpacking District? The neighborhoods served by the 6 line now comprise the Seatpacking District? Will the area the Brooklyn Gun Court is targeting become known as the Heatpacking District? Can 8th Street keep up its reputation as the city’s Feetpacking District?

Just Keep Them Away From Bad Influences Like Mary-Kate And They’ll Adjust Fine

What first appeared to downtown observers to be an influx of chunky Midwesterners on some sort of semester-abroad program turns out to be employees of the new Googleplex:

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.

. . .

Food is a major perk at the Manhattan Googleplex. Every Tuesday afternoon, tea with crumpets and scones is served. In the cafeteria a dry-erase board lists local purveyors of the ingredients in the meals like a sign at the Union Square Greenmarket. (Dry-erase boards are big in Google culture; ideas flow quickly).

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. “Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here,” said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily. “I definitely gained that when I started working here, but I think I shed some of it,” Mr. Tipon said. “I try to be disciplined but it’s really hard.”

Maybe Congestion Pricing Will Help

The psychological principle of hating in others what you most see in yourself, writ Sunday Styles:

For status-conscious New Yorkers, Saturday has become synonymous with hordes of pleasure dilettantes wearing gelled hairstyles and quaffing Red Bull, creating hourlong lines at clubs that city dwellers may line up for on Thursday or even Monday, but will not get within five stretch-Hummer lengths from on Saturday. Instead, Netflix and Vietnamese takeout sounds good, or maybe that new Bond movie. It’s a night that people accustomed to quoting Andy Warhol or Diddy may summarize by invoking another New York luminary: Yogi Berra, who said, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

. . .

Of course, the Saturday-shy New Yorkers who do go out on the town that night often do so with reservation — and reservations.

Last Saturday, four Manhattanites in their early 30s were huddling over a low table downstairs at Buddakan, the cavernous pan-Asian restaurant in the meatpacking district. “During the weekends, you get a lot of clutter, if you will,” said Brian Kirimdar, 30, an investment banker. He and his wife, Ashley, tend to hide out in restaurants on Saturdays, avoiding all but a few of the Chelsea clubs. “You don’t find too many bridge-and-tunnel people at Cielo or Marquee,” he said. “You really have to pick and choose.”

Indeed, it is no accident that clubs like Marquee, its upstairs V.I.P. room packed with models even on Saturdays, and Stereo, known for its Nikes-only sneaker policy, are more outsider proof.

“No cologne, earrings or hair gel,” said Michael Satsky, an owner of Stereo, standing outside the velvet rope of his club on West 29th Street around 1 a.m., explaining his weekend door policy.