Hipsters Lament.

I've been spending increasingly more time in Brooklyn these days. I realize the more time I spend there, the less likely I am to reach one of my top ten New York goals: to attend a party at The Dakota. Anyway, last weekend Shaun was in town for the Go! Team concert, which by the way was stellar. Before the show we met up with Aaron at Galapagos in Williamsburg for 'Opera and Beer'- 5 female opera singers performing with a keyboard in various operatic European languages. It was a perfect day of perfect activities for a dialectical sensibility. Galapagos is a gorgeous art space/bar-of course one of dozens in New York. True to the scale and form of Brooklyn, it occupies a rough industrial space, but possesses a glass like reflecting pool of water at the entrance which one has to pass over on a metal gangway upon entering. From inside the bar looking out, the water creates a stunning reflection of the concrete plant across the street.


(from Galapogos website)























(photo from Shaun Smakal)

Each time I'm in Williamsburg I can't help but muse over it's shocking similitude to Omaha; the scale, the industrial desolation that teems with artists, the thrift store meets Prada inspired fashion, the restaurants, the PBR on tap, and especially.....the hipsters. I've always perceived these similarities, but not until this recent rendezvous did I realize their depth. The breed of hipster that has colonized Williamsburg in the last 5 years have derived from the hellmouth of hipsterdom: Omaha's Saddle Creek Records. I witnessed the birth of this movement in the early/mid 90's when I would help my friend Jen sneak the would be Bright Eyes lead singer into our female only college accommodations. He was 13 and she swore to us this greasy haired, acne faced, pre-pubescent boy was going to be something big. Now consider the effect Saddle Creek has had on our nations music scene.

As Shaun and I wandered the streets of Williamsburg in between events, I realized another unforeseen outcome of that greasy haired 13-year old kid who feverishly recorded songs on 8-track in his laundry room during repeated month long snow blizzards in Omaha. It may be a stretch to suggest that Conor Oberst is responsible for the myriads of yuppie condo developments sprouting up all over Williamsburg, but it is an unavoidable, as well as intriguing connection. It is a connection that solidifies the fact that one's passions and hard work can contribute to an ideological trajectory opposed to the original intent. These are the guts of gentrification, and a very typical story in the development of American urbanity. Culture and urban form are intimate bedfellows.


























































Even more intriguing is the disparate connection between a group of musicians/artists who are the bastions of independence - they have self produced every album as a collective, have resisted multi-million dollar record deals with every imaginable record company, continue to reside in Omaha in their original neighborhoods and support the local arts scene - with that of the notion of developer driven condos. Condo living may infact be a contemporary typology representative of mass-mindedness.


Images are from various developer website. Yes, I'm getting sloppy with the pilfering.