Month: November 2005

Oh my god, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. Via Gawker comes this revolting article about how gosh-darn warm, friendly, and civilized Brooklyn is. The whole essay is unctuous enough, but it really goes for the gold with this money (literally) quote at the end:

“You know in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, when, at the end, the hobbits have been up in this fantastic place, and they’ve been hanging out with Gandalf and Liv Tyler and all of these people, right?” said Edward Wilson, 36, a banker at Goldman Sachs who moved with his wife, Hesu (Suzy) Coue, 39, from the West Village to a brownstone in Park Slope. “And then suddenly they’re back in the Shire, and they’re all kind of in the pub. And when we were watching the film, and it’s all over, we just looked at each other and both said, ‘Brooklyn.'”

Now I love, love, love Brooklyn, and I only hold a little bit of a grudge that I can’t really afford to live in the prettier neighborhoods of it, but I can still only handle so much rhapsodizing about its innocent pleasures. Brooklyn’s charm isn’t really it’s casual attitudes toward its celebrities (which is bull) or its suburban feel (which is also bull). It’s always been hard for me to pinpoint exactly what I love about Brooklyn so much, but it sure ain’t nuthin’ that feels validated just because Heath Ledger lives in an expensive pad there.

Update!: And this ludicrously late-to-the party puff piece from the Washington Post also made my eyes roll back far enough to read the inside of my head. Gosh! Who knew Williamsburg was so trendy! (Remember thos sarcasm marks I mentioned yesterday. I needed one right there.) The most delicious part about the WP story is the subtext anyone around here understands: it’s an article promoting the neighborhood in a way that will only encourage further invasion by people no one in Williamsburg would actually want there. Well, the real estate developers want them, but that’s about it. And everyone else basically wants their money, but not the people actually spending it. That my friends, is the snotty hypocrisy about gentrification that makes me so giggly when I hear people talking — still — about how much Williamsburg has changed since they first got there [insert absurdly small number] years ago.

And even though my current neighborhood is in the crosshairs, I figure I’ve still got a couple of years of affordable space there before I get squeezed out again.

I was a teenage groupie. Which isn’t so unusual, really. Music is one of the easiest ways to forge, or at least latch onto, an identity when you’re young. (Or even when you’re not so young). It’s a way to connect to a ready-made tribe. Being a groupie gives you a sense of belonging, and a sense that if you just try a little harder, or make a better impression, you can become part of that group you’re so obsessed with.

By my junior year of college, I had already done New Wave and Industrial. I was maturing out of my ska phase and developing an appreciation for a wider array of microscopic subgenres, but for a while there wasn’t much that hit the spot. I wasn’t angry enough to be all that punk, and the exploding grunge scene just didn’t do it for me. I wasn’t clubbing enough to care about dance music yet, and I was still too self-conscious to accept how much I really liked ’70s music. I was yearning for something to grab me.

One night my best friend Dave and I went to a show at the student union. It was a decidedly unhip venue for a city with a music scene like Boston’s, but it was cheap and we were poor. The band hit the stage, and I saw an 8-piece sideshow of fun. The singer/trumpet player wore Muppet-fur pants. The keyboard player wore a stuffed bear’s head for a hat. The horn section was awesome, and everyone in the band was a natural showman. They were silly, they had the funk, and I was dancing my ass off within seconds.

“These are my people,” I thought.

Continue reading “Mix It Up and Do the Do”

It’s finally time to put up curtains in the windows of my new pad. Up until now, I’ve been enjoying the luxury of facing a row of empty buildings across the street, so there was no worry about peeping neighbors. Which is great, because I haven’t felt like attaching curtain rods to the masonry in the front of my place.

Once again, though, my penchant for low-ish rents in uncool neighborhoods has found me at the crest of yet another wave of hipster migration. (I haven’t dubbed my building “the Cracker Factory” for nothing, you know.) Last week I saw them loading some sheet rock into one of the empty buildings across the street. Last night, I saw all the lights on in there, and the front door standing open. That, my friends, is what an open house looks like.

So Special Agent Josh and I ran over to inspect what they’ve built, and check out whether or not the new tenants would be able to see into my apartment. Sure enough, the factory has been carved into a bunch of modestly sized lofts, with one floor ready to go in a couple of weeks, and two more floors ready in the next couple of months. A decent conversion job, in case you’re interested, and the rents aren’t all that bad. Of course, the street-facing units all have an outstanding view of my desk at the moment, in case you own binoculars and want to see what’s on my screen. The angle would make it hard for my eventual new neighbors (who seemed to be racing to submit their applications last night, even for the units that haven’t been built yet) to see anything else in my place, but this new development would only make me feel weird about people watching over my shoulder when I work.

But the other bloggers are already starting to follow me to the neighborhood, so I figure that if people are coming to the area, I may as well at least try to give any interested friends and readers a heads-up on any opportunities to stalk me.