Funny, huh? I stole it from pdgibson's flickr page. (Click to visit)
Last weekend I was trotting over to the LoDo Tattered Cover — which is a really neat place, btw, not only because the owner once stuck it to the man in a profound sort of way — and, cutting through Civic Center Park, I encountered a strange thing amid the usual fare of junkies and bums and delinquents and South American tourists: Hipsters! en masse! on fixed-gear bicycles!
Well, not all of them were on bikes, most were actually just sitting around the inaptly named Greek theater — beside their bikes — looking all aloof with their ironic mustaches and earnest hats, while a mounted half-dozen of them circled aimlessly, nudging a grapefruit-sized ball around, forlornly picking at the table scraps of what appeared to be a dwindling game of fixie polo.
Hipsters.
You no doubt can see me now jabbing my friend Scott and chuckling and debating internally whether to give a too-loud rendition of one of my favorite and oft-deployed jokes:
Q: Why don’t hipsters like karate?
A: They can’t get past the white belt!
Later on, we dropped by City O’ City for their intolerable-but-for-the-awesome-quality-and-prices happy hour, and the various stationary objects out front were unusually cluttered with many varieties of a certain style of field-modified bicycle (which is not atypical for City, but in this magnitude!), one of which sported a sticker promoting cyclejerks.com.
You may have thought to yourself, Sweet Lord, don’t tell me it’s a fucking hipster fixie blog. If you clicked the link, you know that it is. (And it’s not the only one.)
On it I found some info about the strange gathering I had just witnessed: It was, in fact, a bicycle soccer tournament, in which players manipulate the object ball with their bicycle tires (as opposed to polo, in which participants would presumably use large mallets, and hopefully ironically brain each other).
With the more gentrified quarters of my fair city now in the throes of full-blown fixiemania, it’s nice to get some insight into the tight-rolled-jeansed menace that insists on hindering traffic along the narrow, decidedly not bike-friendly lanes of 14th avenue. And so I took a look-see. One might profile this crowd thusly:
Likes: indie-rock, PBR, and veganism. Dislikes: sexuality-based discrimination. Severely dislikes: Hipster-mocking bicycle thieves.
If you go back a few weeks, to before the election, you will notice one thing fixie-riders really love is Obama. OBAMA! The Obama fixies and drawings of Obama riding them are very cute, and they combine nicely with the “Sarah Palin is a Cunt” T-shirt to demonstrate just how much political reflection one is capable of when dodging traffic in tight pants.
A word about the bicycle thief in question: Even though, if one may judge by the comments, I tend to share similar attitudinal characteristics with this guy, under no circumstances do I condone stealing track bikes, even if it’s only to sell them for scrap. (And, in fair disclosure, my girlfriend insists that I am a secret closet hipster who only makes fun of other hipsters because they’re such an easy target [as opposed to, say, Crips] and so anyway I am only baring my insecurities for all to see — I say, So what if I’ve seen the Fiery Furnaces, at least I didn’t shout “Freebird!”)
All this trash talk sounds very judgmental, I’m sure, and no doubt reflects very poorly on me. Well then, let me end this post with a conciliatory word: Like war criminals, hipsters will always be among us. And until they graduate art school or get promoted to assistant manager and can afford a stripped-down AMC Pacer (you know, cause it’s ironic), they will ride track bikes. In the meantime, let’s show our solidarity by adopting the phrase “fucking rad” and not running them over when they maddeningly choke busy thoroughfares.
1 Comment
December 3, 2008 at 6:13 pm
You seem to have done your research. Fucking rad.