The creator of Cat and Girl, a very good comic, lives at my subway stop, it seems. It also seems she was grumpy and did a study justifying her hatred of hipsters.

Thing is, it doesn't really hold up under her standards of purity and it's pretty standard issue hipster self-hatred--I mean, what, should the white kids be unemployed and live in New Jersey instead? She says there are "residential areas and communities that exist totally independent of anything around them save the subway line," but this is really only true at Morgan and maybe Montrose. Everywhere else along the L (like where friend George lives) the "hipsters" are often side-by-side with the "noble brown folk." And "the closest decent supermarket is 2 stops away"? Well, sorry miss priss, but if you want to walk, there's one four blocks away on the other side of Bushwick. Sheesh. I mean, the Morgan Ave stop is only a three-minute walk away from huge housing projects. Allison does a good job of representing the abivalence of being a hipster in C&G, but not so much here.

Her methodology, too, is questionable--the count of how many hipsters get off the train will vary wildly depending on where you're sitting on the train--but perhaps she accounted for this. Still, I think the whole point of this fairly obvious phenomenon is that paying $500 a month in rent and $80 a month on unlimited metrocards to get to the places where you run your errands is a lot cheaper than paying $1000 a month to live in a place where "a decent supermarket" is right downstairs.

I guess I'm a wee bit stung by the bit about "9 to 5ers imagining themselves as noise band bohemians" (naw, I imagine myself as a yuppie, but my salary won't sustain it--where are my coke and hookers?) but, well, you know. I suppose I myself take a weird pride in counting how many white people are still on the train when I get off, and it's usually very few. Oh well, I'm a horrible person.
posted by Mike B. at 1:11 PM 0 comments