The sad, sad, miserable reality of what has come to replace H&H Bagels. [WSR]
In Williamsburg, brand-spanking newcomers complain about a pair of 50-year-old record stores: "owners of the shops...insisted they have done nothing wrong and that they never received complaints until a recent batch of new young people started arriving on the street. 'How would you feel if somebody came to your block and started telling you what to do?" [DNA]
Enjoy this 1969 film of Kenneth Koch teaching poetry to kids at PS61 in Alphabet City. [OMFS]
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| Night on Orchard |
Check out the latest Walker in the City. [WIC]
Enjoy the Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair this weekend. [FB]
1973 NYC on film. [Gothamist]
A new video game teaches girls how to become Upper East Side socialites: "prepare for a day out in the city or for a night out with your bffs looking chic and elegant like a true upper east side fashionista"! [DNA]
"Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea." [NYT]
"Hurricane Sandy ran roughly through cemeteries around New York City, but it devastated Green-Wood in Brooklyn." [NYT]
Checking in with Coney Island after Sandy. [ATZ]
And yet these are the same hipsters/gentrifiers fighting the law so that they can have their brunch in the sidewalks before noon on weekends and they can talk more than 42 decibels loud about their artisanal food, that guy they woke up with without remembering bringing them home, announcing to the hipsterworld that they have a urinary tract infection. So, lyk, yah! Fuckin' hipsters. Ironic isn't the word to describe them. More like idiotic and egotistical. Happy Friday.
ReplyDeleteyou got it. it's a culture war.
ReplyDeleteSecond that. So whiny. Oh no you have to share your block with two record stores! Woe is her.
ReplyDeleteDid she ever once walk in to the store and introduce herself as a fellow business owner and browse and buy some music and offer her hair services? And then mention that sometimes the music disturbs her clients? Perhaps a touch lower? Why did she have to go right to 311 and fines? What ever happened to community? Do people know how to live in a city anymore?
The issue with the record store and hair salon is overwrought. The record store can turn the music down a notch and the hair salon can give a little and accept the flavor of the neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteThe record store is 50 years old. I'm sure if you went back in time the existing residents complained about that newcomer.
I like this blog and read it regularly because I think documenting the systematic dismantling of the New York that was is important.
However, I think it's dangerous and wrong to demonize people who are different than the blogger and the readers of this blog. We all get annoyed by other people sometimes, but nobody owns this city or can stake a claim as to who belongs here. It's diversity means you have to put up with different people. Deal with it.
I have no idea who the person is, but I hardly think going after a hair stylist (who cares if she's a hipster from the Midwest) is dignified. At least it's not frozen yogurt, Verizon or Duane Reade.
Irony aside, the new replaces the old, sometimes simply by trampling it underfoot, or if Shakespearean, by killing the king and marrying the queen (that can be taken down many a weird, wonderful path to just about any storyline), and the micro is overshadowed by the Macro time and time again. Assimilation is sometimes apartheid, sometimes gender genocide, often just a blur. I'm so weary of infighting, back biting, and competitive drives, of factional disambiguation, of nation against nation, that it's all I can manage to stay within my skin. When you've lived long enough, felt deeply enough, and grown tired of the human condition, there's still something tender pulsing at the center point to hold to and cherish. Maybe that's just true enough to be enough.
ReplyDeleteI once overheard someone loudly and angrily complaining about the Orthodox cathedral in Greenpoint ringing its bells for Saturday Vespers. I can't fathom how people like this see the world around them. "Entitlement" doesn't go far enough.
ReplyDeleteAnon. 12:15, how would you like it if someone, a Puerto Rican for the sake of argument, moves to the Midwest, opens up a Latin record store and plays music in the store? I bet ya the hipster won't be complaining if that was a hipster record store and playing Black Keys. She needs to put up with diversity and deal with it and adopt to her neighborhood. Or is your coment ironic?
ReplyDeleteAs for the video game, maybe the Girls and Carrie Bradshaw wannabes can learn from this. This game will have more class and be more of a socialite, than Girls or SATC wannabes.
Fuckin' hipsters.
Hi Jeremiah,
ReplyDeleteyou've probably already seen this one, but I think it would be nice to share with your readers. It's Chantal Akerman's "News from home" (1977)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t28ZtSseJSQ
It's an amazing document of "vintage" New York, and a wonderful movie too.
Hair salon? It says in the article that this lady is a freelance hair stylist; nothing about a hair salon on the block. Though I don't know the location, and wouldn't be surprised if some high-falutin' barbers had invaded there as well.
ReplyDeleteAnd I diagree that the issue is overwrought, and who's demonizing anyone except this self-entitled, whiny brat? Ultimately, it's a straw-man argument that we have to "deal with it" when it comes to "diversity." Whose diversity? Suburban transplants? You have to have a culture to spread it. Why is it that so much of Brooklyn is being wiped clean and replaced with the hipster/yuppie monoculture? Just because it's happening doesn't mean it's right.
Victoria makes the excellent point and I'll extrapolate that, typical of many people who do not grow up here and come from their plastic suburbia or wherever, their immediate reaction is to run to the authorities (their surrogate "mommies") rather than approach these business owners as human beings and fellow members of their community. That was the NY way. That's why these millenials flocking here think Bloomberg's three-way shotgun marriage--nanny state, police state, new guilded age--is just peachy keen.
Many hipsters have zero respect for the cultures they "discover" when they blew into town. In the article, record store owner Millan nailed it on the head when he compared them to Columbus. For them, Puerto Ricans, among other longtime NY'ers, are alien, scary, "ghetto," so why would they care if they are setting into motion the wheels that will grind down their music, traditions, community, and turn Bushwick into a giant Bedford Avenue within about a half a decade?
what was she thinking when she signed the lease? that is the big question?? ask her. now since she is there, it is not possible to work w/both speakers turned up loud. they should try to work out certain hours to have music on, & how loud it is. btw, these cultures are NOT white educated european. they dont have the same standards or ideas. loud music is what they do, especially if they are selling it. im sure they would still sell records if it was lower. if i was the hair stylist, i would try to move & not renew the lease. my sympathies are w/her. maybe this is a lesson, check out the area before moving in.
ReplyDelete"but nobody owns this city or can stake a claim as to who belongs here. It's diversity means you have to put up with different people. Deal with it.
ReplyDelete@anon. 12:15 I think you're doing some projection via proxy from that hair salon owner here. Perhaps that's what you need to tell her. It's the hipsters and gentrifiers who aren't putting up with different people. If that were Indie Rock playing, I'm sure she'll have no complaints. Perhaps she'd asked it to turn it up.Instead of diversity, they are white homogenizing the city. Deal with that!
What a strange reaction to the story of a retail outlet (ie music store) blaring noise (ie amplified music) all day long.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, most readers of this blog seem to pine for extraordinary due process when it comes to altering any piece of the city that is more than 30 years old.
On the other, they seem to openly mock the results of democratic due process: in this case, the decades-long fight for noise regulations (noise, of course, being disturbing to most people, including long-time new yorkers believe it or not...).
One suspects the people defending the noise would not find it so charmingly vernacular were it happening outside their apartment (more power to you if you can put up with it), just as one can imagine that parents on this block trying to do homework with their kids while this noise is blasting might find it,um, distracting. The article suggests as much, noting that it had long been a source of complaints, but nevermind - its Cultural!
This apologia for law breaking reflects a broader exceptionalism of a certain privileged class that seems to lionize grafitti, curb-side drug dealing, hell, even muggings, as some later-day mark of civilization - all perfectly chic as long as there's a place retreat upstate or in the Hamptons...
I do not like noise either and understand that it is irritating. I would not want to live too close to a noisy place. However, I think people must perform their due diligence when apartment hunting- Like not living next to a bar or school, frat house or record store that does not try to hide the fact that they play loud music
ReplyDeleteIt's like the story a few months back about the condo that was built next to the chicken warehouse- all the yuppies tried to shut it down- But I think you shouldn't move somewhere and then try to change everything- do your homework and check out where you will be living.
And to that last guy- no one is glamorizing drug dealers and muggings- That is a weak argument that if you don't like Bloomberg's NY of the gentrified yuppies then you love crime. Dig a little deeper and you'll see the difference or do you not remember that NYC once had a heart and soul? Once had unique stores, not strip malls. Had apartments for all levels, not just for the rich and connected. So sad that you can't think that far back or you can't see what is gone and what it is being replaced with. Or worse, you like this homogenized, Anytown USA.