On Pabst and Prada

My roommate and I left for work at the same time today, and since he takes the bus and I drive right past his office on the way to mine, I offered him a ride. On the way, we discussed a certain section of road (First Avenue, from just north of the Hennepin Avenue bridge to Washington Avenue) where we tend to see more attractive women than elsewhere on the commute. I, in my class and subtlety, had taken to referring to it as ‘Hot Chick Alley’.

My roommate guessed, correctly, I think, that Hot Chick Alley is where it is because a growth of expensive condo buildings had sprung up there recently. He remarked that the area, known when we first moved to the city as an off-beat but hip working class neighborhood full of Polish and German themed dive bars, had changed into a mirror image of Uptown, an area of Minneapolis full of expensive restaurants, boutique shops and, more recently, condominiums.

I feel a little bit sorry for the blue collar folks in Nordeast who were once able to bowl at Elsie’s in peace. It happens all over the city; where there once were smoky taverns with deer antler chandeliers, now there are tapas bars that offer Thursday Flamenco classes. French bakeries moved next to ‘drinking clubs’ that served canned beer.

I found it hard to believe that condo-dwelling yuppies would be infringing on the space of the working class families, the punks and the freaks alike. There are bunches of neighborhoods in Minneapolis with local dive bars; why these places and why now? It hit me like a ton of bricks:

Hipsters!

Those chambray and women’s jeans wearing nerds, with their ironic life view, were unaware of the real irony. They are nothing but condo-seeds. Wherever they go, the trendy is replaced by the faux-trendy, the authentic with the gauche. These indy-rock-listening eaters of worlds are like worms in reverse, consuming the soil of good culture and shitting ... well, shit.


But worm poop really isn’t shit, it’s dirt. Or fertilizer.

Fuck.

I know what you’re thinking. How can you blame the hipsters? It’s not like they ask lawyers and accountants whose cool faded with their acid wash jeans (which I can only assume are actually popular again, on account of how ironic it is to wear stuff so ugly) to follow them from neighborhood to neighborhood

I can blame them mostly because they are prettier than me and more likely to have a trust fund. I have no scruples that way. I can also blame them because of their irony. Hipsters don’t seem to do anything they actually like and that includes living somewhere. When hipsters claim that something is cool, they mean it in the same way you used to mean it when you rolled your eyes and said ‘yeah, Mom, real cool’. So when they move somewhere, they aren’t simply saying ‘this place is ironically cool in such a fashion that mainstream people should move here to imitate us’, they are also saying ‘these people are so tragically unhip it’s okay to shit on them’.

But never fear! I have the solution. All we need to do is convince hipsters that condos and fusion restaurants are ironically cool. The hipster-followers will go into a frenzy knocking down condos to put up more condos; the eclectic neighborhood will no longer get besieged by people looking to cash in on their lifestyle, and the construction / demolition business will get just the boost it needs to fight the housing slump.