OPINION — Freelance Wasteland

Many of our regular readers enjoy our Bushwick Chic feature for the quite understandable reason that they work in fashion or related fields, or because they at any rate have an interest in aesthetics. Then, we have some great number of more irregular readers who really, really, enjoy our Bushwick Chic feature because they spend literally hours each week obsessing over "hipsters," a catch-all term that has come to refer to anyone who moves to Brooklyn from somewhere other than Puerto Rico or some awful Balkan country. Most such commenters come to BushwickBK by way of Die Hipster, the increasingly popular website with an editorial stance to the effect that hipsters should strongly consider dying. More specifically, it bills itself as "a place to laugh at transplanted, annoying, ironic, out of place, piece of shit, pseudo creative and intellectual hipsters." It’s also — and remember this, because it will come up again — a blog.

In contrast to our own site, which covers Bushwick as a whole, Die Hipster gives the entirety of its attention over to the influx of hipsters, whose collective crimes are said to include a tendency to "seek attention." In the course of seeking out hipsters to which to bring attention, the proprietor of Die Hipster asks that his readers give attention to the various forms of hipster behavior that upset him, as well as that they read his very prolific output of fan fiction detailing things he would do if he were the sort of person that he enjoys pretending to be while writing on his blog. The following, for instance, is an actual post from the other day, and almost identical to several others among the dozen or so blog entries that I’ve had the pleasure of reading:

Today, I saw a 95lb gender puzzle dressed like a lumberjack receiving a check from his vapid Daddy from Montana in front of his $3,000 a month loft. So I broke their legs, dipped their heads in a bucket of organic sustainable honey, locked them in Daddys Volvo with a hive of killer bees and pushed the car into the Gowanus Canal. End of Story.

End of story. Check… declined.

To be fair to the author, he does always seem to win these made-up fights — and there appear to have been nearly 50 of them so far, which is to say that we are dealing here with a very tough fellow with whom one would probably not want to mess less one get beaten up in some guy’s imagination and then have the whole thing described with some apparent effort by someone who doesn’t seem to know which words are supposed to be capitalized and why. To be even fairer to the author, it’s not his job to know the mechanics of written English or even whether or not someone might come along and make fun of him for writing little stories in which he is the hero. The sort of jobs that require a basic understanding of English and the ability to perceive irony are mostly taken — largely by "hipsters," of course.

Certainly there are some great number of douchebags, pseudo-intellectuals, and no-talent "artists" among the many over-educated young people who have moved to Bushwick over the past decade. Certainly there are a number of locals who are fine, capable people — but whatever that number is, it’s not so high that Bushwick natives are able to fill the various creative jobs that always need filling, which is why Bushwick, like all of New York, must continually import talent to fill them, even in such cases as nativity would provide a significant edge in the carrying out of such work.

I will tell you an anecdote. This one time, I met the author of Die Hipster on the street and I used my ninja combat skills to beat him up in some allegedly hilarious fashion and then I had sex with several beautiful girls and my muscles are really big. End of story! Just kidding. The actual anecdote is that my old roommate moved here two years ago and almost immediately got a job at The New York Post where he spent his days covering various things that go on in a city in which he had spent almost no time. Now, The New York Post would have preferred to hire someone from New York, and indeed interviewed a couple such applicants, but, as in many such cases, they took on one of the many unusually talented people who have been moving to New York since before it was New York, rather than one of the many people who live in New York because they happened to have been born here.

Of course, a number of locals or whoever these people are who leave angry and semi-literate comments at this site would very much like to have the sorts of media gigs that we arrivals come here to take; the fellow who runs Die Hipster would presumably like to make money from writing fan fiction about fights he’d enjoy winning or whatever else, and there’s plenty of money to be made writing the whatever else in question, if not necessarily in fan fiction. There are also, contrary to popular belief, many such gigs available in this city. They are almost always awarded to those of us who came to such places as Bushwick from elsewhere, as the alternative would be to depend on the talent pool found in such as places as Bushwick. For some reason, the city’s editors, producers, and the like are disinclined to do such a thing, although this will certainly change if more outlets end up needing people to honk at parked school buses, throw old televisions out of windows, play shitty Top 40 dance music from parked cars at 600 decibels, scream at bodega clerks, avoid branch libraries, give money to Pentecostal preachers, buy t-shirts that say "Hi Hater" on one side and "Bye Hater" on the other and then wear those t-shirts in public, await the Jewish Messiah, worship the Christian Messiah, and play the lottery.  

While we wait for the day to come when Bushwick natives are collectively capable of writing their very own restaurant reviews, we should all try to live together in harmony, as it’s going to be a long fucking wait.

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