Four kush scores and seven Northsix shows ago our hipster fathers brought fourth on this sub-borough a new scene, conceived in exclusivity, and dedicated to the proposition that none of us need to freak out and move to Bushwick.
Now we are engaged in a great gentrification war, testing whether our subculture, or any subsets within our subculture, so smug and so ironic, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war: the McCarren Park Pool.
We have come to rest our fedoras on our tattooed chests and dedicate a rent controlled portion of that park, as a fair trade coffee shop for those who gave their artist’s lofts that that nation of twentysomethings might continue to snark. It is altogether as fitting as a pair of our jeans that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this former bandstand. Why? Because we’re fucking hipsters to the core, and we simply refuse to give a shit.
The brave hipsterati, bearded and bespectacled, who struggled on these streets before being priced out, have shrouded it in permanent air quotes, far above our poor power to tumbl or tweet.
The mainstream will little note, nor long remember our haircuts, but it can never forget that the bands were decent, the brunch tasty.
It is for us the blogging, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished video art, graphic design, and music which they who sublet here nearly got a book deal out of or play on NPR’s All Songs Considered.
It is rather for us here to reluctantly rise before noon to the great task remaining before us—that from this hipster diaspora we take increased smugness to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of smugness—that we here highly resolve that these vanquished hipsters should not have scuffed their Chucks in vain—that this neighborhood, under Vice, shall have a new birth of cool—and that the internet startups of the hipster, by the hipster, for the hipster, shall not perish from these condos.