If you run across bloggers blog'itching about hipsters overrunning their 'hood, it's likely they themselves are hipsters, sensing their erstwhile exclusive entitlement to hipster-dom coming to an end.
(I know you are, but what am I?)
You can bet your sweet caffè latte this guy ain' a hipster.
Born and raised in
Prenzlauer Berg, nowadays he spends his spare time spying on-, and ratting out night-shops that open on Sundays. (He also happens to be annoyed at cyclists on the sidewalk and, if this photo is any indication, doesn't care much for the bicycle lanes either.)
He's right about one thing: Around the clock service brings broken bottles and downright un-neighborly noise, and those few more hours in the week for tourists to decide, "This must be the place!" And then, of course, as he points out, when those high enough on the food chain (property owners, for instance) know that this fresh "economic growth" means they can probably get more out of what they got than they'll lose for doing it, they will demand more for it.
But I'm not sure demand-side ecologics requires tourists-who-won't-leave to finance it. Nor is the Sunday-supply - forbidden by local statute, which is the prole
* part of his argument to help justify his motoring block by block, night-shop to night-shop, snapping photos to prove that nobody follows the fucking rules around here - the reason that rowdies are ruining our
pristine palatial place.
Be the newbies
bankrolled, baby! or subsidized students, be the newbies by way o' Bavaria or Brooklyn, be the newbies yuppie emigres, there's always gonna be newbies. Even the kids born of the born-and-bred Berliners are newbies, with their new haircuts and gizmos and
you know how they be doin'...
I could reckon, but can't say for sure, that the wannabe Pope o' Prenzlberg just loathes newbie-dooby nature and longs for the way things used to be. Godknows I share his annoyance at those who'd run you down on the sidewalk while you're already trying to squeeze past tables of iChatting brunchers.
But there is no "way things used to be"; things are to each what they are, and were to each what they were. If you don't believe me, then "you shoulda been here ten years ago" (a statement as applicable then as it is now).
As to the blog'itchers about hipsters: they're just pissed that the price has gone up. There's always somebody who can still afford it. Bastards!
* I hasten to add that a self-proclaimed outsider prole might feel more solidarity with the self-employed rinky-dink-repreneur than he does the Kaiser.
That's it for your (late) Sunday Paper.
And, yeah, of course that death-toll is counting. When I first saw it, it was at 29, by the time I screen-grabbed it 33, now 38.
