A Gigantic Pile of Shit: Some Thoughts On Brooklyn
One sort of “thought meme” that is making a pretty heavy circulation in the media right now is the idea that Brooklyn has become a sort of global brand that is taking over the world. The idea is best summarized in a New Yorker article on Vice by Lizzie Widdicombe. The company seems like it’s run by a bunch of complete assclowns, but might be onto something in terms of both making money off media, and reporting news stories to young people:
“Vice has grown in lockstep with the spread of hipster culture: what was once a Brooklyn-based trend has become the lingua franca of ‘global youth,’ as Vice’s executives call it. Since Brooklyn is a brand, it is no longer necessary to live there. Smith [the founder of the magazine], for example, lives in Tribeca.”
I don’t really understand why Brooklyn being a brand would preclude one from living here — for instance, why wouldn’t Smith want to walk to work? I think Widdicombe is implying that “cool kids” used to be the ones who lived in Brooklyn, while finance stiffs and boring people lived in Manhattan. But now that Brooklyn is no longer cool — ie, it’s become an “everyman” sort of thing — people will no longer feel it necessary to live here to validate their images. Or something. BLAH.
I can’t speak to what people think of Brooklyn outside of Brooklyn itself, because I fucking live here. What I can say is that it’s sort of amazing how quickly it has become THE place to live rather than THE place to live if you have no money.
When I first moved to Brooklyn in 2005, I did so because I had quit my job — quit is a loose term, because really, it had been implied in no uncertain terms that I was not really liked or welcome at the gallery where I working — and was making my income filing medical student’s applications to a university in Israel. My best friend from childhood had moved into an apartment in Prospect Heights with an extremely handsome piano virtuoso with a degree from the conservatory at Oberlin who was working as a bike messenger — she was in medical school at SUNY Downstate —and they had an extra room available. The rent was $450.
At the time, my cool friends lived in the West Village and said things like, “I don’t go to Brooklyn.” Those that did took car services. The first time I had a dinner party in my new apartment, only two girls showed up, and when they arrived, they might as well have been pinching their noses. They were making faces like they had just stepped into a gigantic pile of shit.
Going out in Brooklyn was weird. There were only a few bars, and most of them were dives that had been around the neighborhood for years. There was one good restaurant, and it was an old-school prix fixe place where you could eat a three-course meal for $25. (It has since been pushed out of its location — today, it is an artisanal Australian open-faced sandwich joint, I fucking shit you not.) All of the liquor stores had bullet proof glass, and the best wine you could buy at them was Yellow Tail. The family living on the first floor of my building smoked crack and hung out on the stoop. On the weekends, I went out to brunch wearing pajama pants to an African place down the corner where owner frequently asked me if I’d like to work on the booze cruise he organized in which all of the girls had to wear thongs — and nothing else. My ass went over big in the neighborhood. There was no farm fresh. There were no artisanal cocktails. There were no bearded lumberjack-types — most of the people who lived in Prospect Heights were fucking dorks who worked either as teachers, or for non-profits. I liked being one of them.
Now, real estate in Brooklyn is, in many neighborhoods, more expensive than it is in Manhattan. I would never go out to breakfast in my neighborhood wearing pajama pants — but I would in $100 Lululemon workout leggings. Rich kids move to New York, and rather than looking for places in Tribeca or Soho, move to renovated warehouses on the East River in Williamsburg. It is so safe that I left my brand new hipster fucking $1,000 bike unlocked outside of my apartment for two days — I might have been a little drunk when I mistakenly locked it only to itself, not to the pole — and no one stole it. There are a million ways that the borough has changed, and I’m not going to enumerate any more of them here, because you can read all about it in the New York Times fucking Style section.
(I use this picture of my old roommate from Brown Smemily because she is pretty and cool and grew up on the Upper West Side — of course, now she lives in Brooklyn.)
All of this is not to say that I mind living here. I feel lucky that I’m in the middle of a creative capital, because it offers a plethora of opportunities. I’ve also traveled enough that I really, really appreciate living somewhere clean, where I can feel safe wearing a miniskirt and walking around as an unaccompanied woman. Such are privileges, I realize, that we New Yorkers really take for granted. The first time I wore a dress out to dinner in Mexico City, a Colombian woman pulled me aside, and hissed that I was putting my life in danger walking around with my knees uncovered.
What I don’t appreciate is that on a practical level, the Brooklyn aesthetic keeps on fucking me over. My writing is shitty today — I’m in a down cycle of creative inspiration — but hear me out, if I haven’t lost you already.
I don’t think Americans — or even Brooklynites — truly understand the way that the “Brooklyn aesthetic” has infiltrated American pop culture not only as a thing itself, but actually as a means of promoting an image of the entire country. The two best examples struck me while watching my television shows this past week.
First, the country music star Rayna James on Nashville— she’s played by the unmatchable Connie Britton, in case you don’t watch the show — comes to New York to play a big concert. In the limousine from the airport, she proclaims to her two young daughters something like “Get excited, I’m playing at the BARCLAYS CENTER!”
The Barclays Center, for those of you somehow not familiar with it, is the new stadium in my old neighborhood, Prospect Heights, which is partially owned by the now insufferable Jay-Z. It is an eyesore that I would happily see bombed off the face of the earth, albeit as long as no people were inside — and its also the venue poised to replace Madison Square Garden as the place to see spectacles in New York City. Even though its only been open for a year, it has asserted itself quickly — the only other location depicted in the Nashville episode was Times Square, a decision that pitted the Barclays, in Brooklyn, as an equally iconic — and perhaps centrally located — landmark in New York City.
The second example was on “The Americans.” Even though the show takes place in Washington DC in the 1980s, it’s shot almost entirely in Brooklyn. In this past week’s episode, the cast spent a lot of time having secret meetings about killing KGB Agents in Prospect Park, which again, is located adjacent to my old neighborhood. The significance is pretty loaded — whoever scouted locations thought that Brooklyn was a suitable location to transmit the feel of “suburban life in the 1980s.” Granted, they might be getting major tax breaks for filming here. But still, the decision means that Brooklyn has become a uniformly blank canvas upon which the media transmits fantasies of what America was like back in the day. People in future generations will watch the show, and think, “this is what the capital of the United States looked like in the 20th century” — people in THIS generation will think that.
I find it to be really insipid, not because I don’t like Brooklyn being appropriated in such a manner, but rather because, before our car went missing a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even recognized that “The Americans” was filmed in Brooklyn. The place where I live, quite literally, is unrecognizable to me.
I wrote about this in a previous post, but Caleb and I returned from San Francisco a few weeks ago to find that our car was gone, without a trace, from the parking spot where we had left it for a mere four days. It was parked in a completely legal spot. After searching the neighborhood for a day with the police, we resigned ourselves to what we assumed was the truth — that the car had been stolen.
A week later, the police called to say that they had found our car. It had been moved to a “no standing” zone right near the Battery Tunnel by the location scouts for “The Americans,” which I now realize is routinely filmed in Red Hook. The alarm had gone off until the battery died — the horn doesn’t work, so only the lights flashed — and it had a big fat ticket pasted on the window. Caleb, infuriated, asked the cops why no one had even so much left a note to let us know that the car had been moved — or even, why they hadn’t been required to file a report. The cops said that the filming crew had probably put up fliers that they were filming in advance of the shoot — we had just missed the warning. Because we were gone. For four days.
In other words, the city had allowed a film crew to fuck with our personal property. We couldn’t call anyone to complain, because no one could be held accountable — it was totally legal, and there was no paper trail. Fucking Bloomberg, am I wrong?
I was pretty incensed — especially because Caleb and I need to waste even more time challenging the ticket in court — but I kind of let it go. I couldn’t imagine that it would happen again, at least not soon. How often could we find ourselves the victims of a film shoot?
(This shot was taken the day after Sandy.)
Then, on Thursday, I went to go pick up my bike in Dumbo — the neighborhood in Brooklyn underneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges that you no doubt would recognize from literally every romantic comedy produced in the past five years — where it had been chained to a street sign for a few hours while I was in Manhattan running an errand. When I got there, it was missing. My heart sunk — the bike is my main means of transportation, and a source of pure joy for me.
Fortunately, someone had left a note near the spot saying they had found it, and brought it to a nearby bike store — the bike store was fortunately still open, and a very kind woman said that she had agreed to hold it because she could tell that it had been made with love. She was right, because the bike was a present from Caleb for my birthday.
When I asked why the bike, which still had the lock attached to it, had been moved, the woman explained that a film was shooting in the location where I had left it. In a matter of a few hours, with no warning, the crew had cut it from the post, and left it standing, un-guarded, against a wall. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” I think I screamed. It was that that I began to realize how fucking ridiculous it is that if you live in Brooklyn in the modern day, even if you are an upstanding citizen, even if you have done absolutely nothing illegal, your personal property will be sacrificed just to keep America’s image factory producing. I am no longer living in a neighborhood; I’m now living on a fucking gigantic movie set.
Not to say all of this will drive me out of here — and neither will the fact that living here is no longer technically cool. What will probably send people like me — creative types who barely make a living following their “passions” — out of the borough is the rising cost of living.
A few weeks ago, Caleb and I checked the listing on his old apartment in Williamsburg, and found that in the course of a year, the rent had risen by more than $1,000. The guy who lived below us in our current apartment in Carroll Gardens, a wonderful man named Ed, just moved out because the landlord had risen his rent, without warning, $400, and plans on renting out the apartment for even more. This on top of the astronomical rents the landlords were already charging. It won’t take long for me to be priced out of here and into the Bronx, which no doubt, is the next frontier. For me, it will be a homecoming, because I was born there.
Let’s just hope that before I go I won’t lose my shit and go on a homicidal rage against the location coordinators on one of these film shoots. Here’s how I imagine them — short, fat, balding and lazy. Here’s how I imagine myself — grabbing their balls in my hands as I break their nose with my elbow. I got the inspiration for that fantasy from a recent episode of “The Americans.”
