Gavin McInnes, Williamsburg resident, co-founded the ur-hipster mag Vice and now blogs at Street Carnage. A recently-anointed U.S. citizen by way of Canada, he personifies the lackadaisical "who cares" voting attitude that we attribute to young hepcats—although the non-ironic celebrations in Williamsburg last night proved that stereotype all wrong. McInnes, weighing in for all the cynics out there, was happy to let Pop + Politics know why he didn't take the trouble to vote. First reason: he's 38, and voted one time in his native Canada: "It was an empty vote. I wrote nothing in the ballot."And also?

Remember when tattoos were edgy? Probably not, unless you're old enough to remember when, say, Williamsburg was edgy, and in that case we're tired of hearing from you. The point is that the declining edginess of tattoos is a natural barometer for the declining edginess of our weak-ass American society in general. And by that measure, we are weaker than ever. Hello, user-friendly chains of soothing tattoo parlors in malls! Even though more than a third of youngsters now have tats, it's occurred to the marketing geniuses that the untapped, un-inked market is huge! Sure, teenagers all have Chinese characters spelling out "I AM GAY" (don't tell them!), but what about timid suburban middle-aged moms? Enter several new investor-owned chains of mall-based tattoo shops, where anyone will feel perfectly safe getting a star on their butt while their husband browses the Sports Authority:

One-man gentrification-play performer Danny Hoch, profiled in the Observer today, has lived in the neighborhood for twenty years. He's fascinated by the collision of the formerly downtrodden area's old and new residents. One such person: his neighbor, an "old school Puerto Rican cat," who watches the ATM machine on Grand Street and retrieves the receipts that hipsters leave behind, just to see how much money they have in their bank accounts.

We thought that Williamsburg, Brooklyn's hipster kickball season was over after attending its corrupt end-of-season prom, where alcohol was served and a girl-kickballer in a tutu hit on our boyfriend. But they're still going! And they're still fightin'. Last Sunday's game included an "all-out brawl," with punch-throwing and tossed bottles of Colt 45—a beverage that even some homeless people think is beneath them. We e-mailed some kickballers to get the lowdown. One reply: "Omfg, I am totally appalled and offended. How does something so pure as alcohol and jr. high sports turn into something so ugly?"What happened? Says another kickballer,

Things end. People move on. The Brooklyn hipster kickball league has entertained us with their exploits all summer—fights, getting arrested in Macy's, letters to dive bars demanding a laminated free drinking pass. Now the season is over. Last Friday, they gathered in Greenpoint one last time for the Kickball Prom. We were there to create the memories that would last us the rest of our lives.OK, so I didn't do any reporting—or embed with a team, as was offered—because my heels were too high and my feet hurt. (When Clay Felker said that women make the best reporters, he meant that they make the best reporters if they are wearing sensible shoes.) But the New York Press did!

Many a trend piece has begun in and around Williamsburg's hip, multi-culti McCarren Park: the Times has been loving to point out what it means for the Way We Live Now, as well as fetishized its summer of rock shows in an empty pool. (Kids with dreads and tattoos!) But nothing has expressed the leisure activities and lifestyle choices of the creative slacker underclass as well as the rag-tag group of young creatives, hipsters, and drunks that make up the Brooklyn Kickball League. We've entertained you with their exploits all summer. And now, as fall approaches, the season is almost over. Yet what would the end of yet another kickball season be without one last fight?From a secret kickballer:

Griff Jenkins is the new quirky young media figure to be celebrated. Everybody rally for him now! He's pretty young, he wears sort of hipster-ish black frame glasses, and he's not afraid to take on quirky assignments like reporting live wearing only a Speedo (LOL), or inciting riots. The only thing is he works for Fox News. But he's totally not that kind of Fox News guy! When all the famous TV personalities rushed down South to cover Hurrican Gustav, who was left to cover the anarchist protests at the Republican convention? Our friend Griff! And you can't say he didn't do it quirkily:

"It's stupid to be homophobic," mused a guy working in a downtown bar last night. "And it's really stupid to be homophobic if you're in the restaurant business. And it's really stupid to be homophobic if you're in the fashion business." The subject of his rant: Taavo Somer, the 35-year-old owner of faux-rustic LES hipster haven Freemans and faux-nautical bar The Rusty Knot and proprietor of his own fashion line of $88 t-shirts. Somer was anointed by New York magazine this year as "the next groovy thing," the embodiment of forward-thinking hipster cool. But this ex-employee was of the opinion that Taavo is an ass [UPDATE: Even more opinions now, below!]: According to this guy—who worked at one of Somers' places for an extended period of time—Somer is not just a homophobe; he is dumb. I believe the approximate descriptor was, "big, idiotic bigot." He described Somer as an "idiot savant," able to build successful restaurants while being, simultaneously, "one of the stupidest people I ever met." He also said just about everyone who's worked in Somers' establishments can't stand him. The conversations, he said, go like this: "Oh, you used to work at Freemans?" (*Shakes head in dismay*). Of course, Taavo can always escape to his upstate estate if things get too negative in the city. Just one ex-employee's opinion! Feel free to email us a rebuttal, Taavo. UPDATE: We've received two additional notes about Taavo. The first comes from restaurateur Ken Friedman, Taavo's business partner:

It's about time that the paper of record started covering the happenings in McCarren park, the ragged dirt patch that is home to the Brooklyn Hipster Kickball League, that den of sociological intrigue so ably chronicled by our own Sheila McClear. What with the legal drama and fundamental instances of human love associated with the hipster kickballers, it's no stretch to say that they are the demographic group most worthy of media coverage in NYC or anywhere else. But in an article today that is lightly reported to a comical degree, the Times attempts to deny the BHKL-ers their rightful place at the top of our minds!: As you would expect, the reporter starts off the article by telling you that she has been in Williamsburg for a decade-way before all these gentrifiers got here. But in her discussion of McCarren Park and the accompanying photo slide show, the kickballers receive only a passing mention in a photo caption! Instead, the reporter's single source for the story of the park's rich variety is a 64-year-old Ecuadorean hot dog vendor. What does she know about Bloc Party? Sheesh. [NYT. Note to hipsters: the last McCarren Pool Party is today and I walked by earlier, and there is no way you're getting into that motherfucker. Seriously, take up basketball instead.]

Vice magazine is suspending its letters page for a month, in protest of the fact that they now just get stupid emails, whereas they used to get real letters with "gifts inside." The hipster mag's editors instruct readers to send in "actual, tangible letters" printed on real paper if they ever want to see their precious letters page again. To increase your chances of publication, be sure to include a bag of coke, a photo of a wasted Williamsburg girl who looks totally ready to screw a Vice editor , and a BMW marketing proposal. [NYO]

Last night, a mob of dangerously dancing hipsters armed with boom boxes and dressed as terrifying pandas marched from Union Square to Williamsburg, where the NYPD met them in force. Apparently, dancing and loud music on a hot August evening can lead to any end of mischief, so our boys and girls in blue twisted arms, threw people down, and destroyed at least one portable stereo.

Lots of fashion advertising is "artistic," in the sense of being executed by a highly-paid photographer who, at some point in their lives, produced actual art, and is able to form an advertisement into a reasonable simulacrum thereof. But at least if, say, Vincent Gallo is pimping Belvedere, you get some sense of parity between the "artist" and the product. Not so in the new Wrangler (say with Southern accent) campaign shot by naked hipster photographer Ryan McGinley, which is plagued by the fundamental disconnect of trying to sell workaday Wranglers (again, Southern: "Rayun-guhlurr") with what seem to be outtake photos from the world's shittiest cult family vacation:

Everyone loves to hate on hipsters and their neighborhood of Williamsburg, but the just-announced "Mr. and Ms. Williamsburg Pageant" sounds like it's going to be a little slice of awesome. Why? The sheer honesty of pageantry! Everyone parades down Bedford Avenue in their outfits, silently judging each other anyway—doing it with rules and a prize is so much better. (It's actually a relief to accept that yes, people are superficially judging you—nothing personal!) The contest is allegedly part of Misha Calvert's (pictured) community service—she was arrested for stealing some 40-ouncers and thought "why not put together something about a subject a lot of us are most passionate about: ourselves". Read on for the details—obviously we need to sponsor a contestant.Apparently there's a talent show and interview portion, as well as looks and clothes. There'll be some questions to judge "how Williamsburg" you are. It'll be held September 5th at Supreme Trading, and we'll definitely be reporting live. Also, I used to study fashion and costume design, so if we find a Gawker-approved contestant I can totally help with your outfits. We need to get beyond American Apparel for this one. I think a prarie/rustic look might be more appropriate for these times. Who's in? [Free Williamsburg]

Sofia Coppola slouches in a red damask banquette so battered and torn it's practically held together by duct tape. She twists the end of her "Go Metric" t-shirt around her forefinger, staring blankly into the middle distance. Finally, as the flash of yet another polaroid camera goes off and Yo La Tengo's "Deeper Into Movies" comes on the iPod at the long abandoned DJ station, she looks pleadingly into my face and she says, "I never wanted this to happen." Hey, so did you read the one in Adbusters about how hipsters spell the end of Western civilization? Scummy pints of cloudy beer, V-necks, kaffiyehs, and fixed-gear bicycles (no cheese doodle baskets at Bushwick Country Club?), all lamented in earnest New Journalese and questionable pronoun-antecedent agreement. And in what was once an eminently read hipster lifestyle handbook. TNR apologized for the war; this was inevitable, too.

Bushwick, Brooklyn was once a minority neighborhood. Really! Recently, a bunch of hipsters have moved in there. But here's a secret: Bushwick is still a minority neighborhood. It even has ten separate housing projects, which are not full of whites! But Brooklyn's minorities are boring, because they're hardly on the cutting edge of art, culture, or cheap imported beer. So when Paper Magazine set out this month to answer the head-scratchingly inane question "Can the hipster ghettos of Brooklyn really replace Manhattan?", they took the logical step of including only the relevant people in the neighborhood: tattooed nilla hipsters. Check out these scans of the magazine's photo shoot and play "Guess the area's demographics":

Writes a tipster about the hipster neighborhood's messageboard, today's thread starts out with "whining about being poor, then it turns into outing your 'best friend's' abortion on the Internet." [Williamsboard]

They're building tons of new condos and high-rise apartments in and around Williamsburg, the hipster neighborhood that has been mostly gentrified but still has some rough edges. Like last night: a "machete-wielding mob," as the the Daily News called it, stabbed two teens on S. 3rd St. in what's thought to be a gang-related beef. An hour and a half before that, a man was shot near Roebling and S. 9th St. [via Curbed]

The hip hop magazine XXL has a serious problem: It was founded back in the days when hip hop people actually wore XXL clothes. Now, everybody wears tight pants, and young'uns don't even understand what "XXL" means. So Byron "Bol" Crawford, a blogger for the magazine's website-whom I secretly love (NO HOMO, Bol) because he is perhaps the most offensive asshole on earth-is trying to revive the relevance of XXL's name by encouraging hip hop to "reclaim its manliness." By, uh, smashing all "teh gheyness."

A cartoon starring an East Village DJ in shutter shades, on a space ship. About time. [Current]

VICE Magazine, the magazine whose readers are too cool to read it, had a party last night! It was a free concert sponsored by their friends at Nokia NSeries! But VICE didn't want its enthusiastic fans to get too worked up about the possibility of having fun, so they sent out an email in advance warning everyone who had RSVP'd that "many, many, many folks on the list will NOT be getting in. Including you, maybe." It concluded, "Please do not reply to this email, no one will read it." Refreshing honesty, or an outrageous insult? The attendees weren't too happy about it, judging by the flood of angry comments that came into the Brooklyn Vegan blog today. The commenters' conclusions: VICE sucks, you suck if you went to the show, and furthermore, they went to the show, and it sucked: