Backintheday a cat named Robyn Hitchcock had an indie hit with a song called “Young People Scream”. The chorus “Old people, they make young people scream, old people they make young people want to lay down and die” was sort of an alternative battle cry for us snot nosed college radio kids. These days, I like to flip the words to “young people, they make old people scream,” especially when I see things like Alice Gregory’s recent piece in Elle entitled: ‘All Hail the New Hipster’.
Behold this passage:
A little over a year ago, I moved from downtown Manhattan to Brooklyn Heights, a leafy, cobblestoned neighborhood laden with pedigreed dogs and their well-heeled, mostly white-haired masters. That first day, when the movers had finally finished their hauling and gone on their way, I surveyed my new box-strewn studio, sighed with exhausted satisfaction, and went out for a walk. It was quiet. There were no recent NYU grads, no fixed-gear bikes, no “practice spaces.” Often referred to as “America’s first suburb,” the neighborhood has been gentrified for more than a century. Some of the country’s most famous writers have lived here—Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote—alongside bankers, lawyers, doctors. This is not the Brooklyn made internationally legible by pop culture. There’s nothing hip about it. Strolling the tree-lined street, I smiled at chic retirees in quilted jackets and elegant loafers. Like Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, first arriving at E. I. Lonoff’s Berkshire farmhouse, I looked around and thought, “This is how I will live.”
Though I’m younger than my zip code’s median age by approximately half a century, I’ve never felt so surrounded by neighbors whose personal style I’d like to crib.
It goes on and makes some points about some fashion stuff that, to be honest, I couldn’t process because I’d gone a little blind after the first 400 words.
So, hivemind, what do you think of the Elle article?
