Hipster Kids In Oakland

Saw this joint in the eastbayexpress today about the Artmurmer First Friday jump off. Basically it's this shit where all the galleries around downtown Oakland, specifically the lower bottom, open up at night and a shitload of white people invade the area. I've never been to it but in Phoenix they had the same shit I use to go with a bunch of graff kids who had shit on display. We would mob downtown with 18 packs of busch, hang around looking at art, drinking and talking shit to indie rock kids. Downtown Phoenix is different than Oakland. No one lives in downtown phx so there wasn't really any gentrefication to be had. It was mostly a bunch of dirt lots and shit. What's going on in Oakland is probably best sumed up by this quote from some patrons of a black gay bar that is right next to one of the art galleries.

...he can't help but be irritated by the Reef's unwritten agreement with the police."No more than five people outside," Ward says. "No drinking. Yet there are about six hundred white kids blocking the street, drinking from open containers, and no one cares."

"Duh. If there was six hundred black people drinking in the street, there'd be fucking barricades!" concurs Marcel Diallo, a black artist and longtime resident of West Oakland. "Let's talk about something that everyone doesn't already know."

I'm all for promoting the arts and creating a scene but the problem is the exclusion of the existing community. One of my favorite parts of the article is when they quote Marcel Diallo he was on a panel for Oakland Artists in San Francisco and just yelled at the art kids.

"You kids come into the Lower Bottoms, my neighborhood, and at night I got five hundred people from God knows where wandering around, drinking from keg cups, making a mess," Diallo told them. "We're at odds, and we don't even know each other."

The former spoken-word poet continued: "That's great. You're fearless. We bump our cars buh-boom-boom, while you come down here and play your music rrr-rrr-rrr. You like the funkiness. But tell me, can I go ghost-ride the whip in Piedmont?"

And lastly: "Hipsters are one of the worst aspects of gentrification," he said. "You are the arrow tip of all this culture. And it's the arrow tip that pierces you first and hurts the most. The punk rockers, the hipsters, and developers are all the same thing.

HA! fucking yeah! Go read that shit because it's good for you.