6 posts tagged New York

I was in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn yesterday.  I was wandering around, taking pictures, taking in the urban landscape.  For me it’s like coming up for air when you’ve been under water too long—filling my lungs tight with fresh air after coming up from the deep end.  Now, I came to what used to be a pretty calm part of town only to find that the hipster invasion was in full swing there.  And I mean full swing, brother!  It was a fucking horrible display of hipsters, yuppies, rejects from the mid-west, wearing bum-ass clothing, fucked up hair, facial hair creations that went out of style in the 70s and were never meant to come back in style.  They were sitting at their cute little tables along the sidewalk, sipping their coffee, eating their cookies, talking about their latest wild and crazy day at the used book store. 

I stopped for a moment, because I swore I was about to vomit.  And then I did, a little bit.  After I regained my composure, I raised my camera to take a picture of the street, and the old buildings in the horizon, trying to frame something solid without getting these fucking morons in the frame.  But it was pointless.  They were everywhere.  Everywhere!  Like roaches that come out in the night.  Only these roaches come out during the day.  Like a cinematic moment that plays out in slow motion, I slowly lowered my camera from my face, exposing my naked eyes to the urban-horrific before me.  Looking at the wall-to-wall outrage that spanned the once-soulful, the once-gritty, the once-beautiful heart of the city.  ”They’re everywhere!” I thought to myself.  ”There’s no shot to take.  They’re covering up the landscape.  There’s no urban flavor to capture here….anymore”  

It occurred to me that what I was looking at was a small, visual representation of life in New York City.  There is no shot to take.  Because they’ve stolen everything.  There’s no room for the local flavor.   There’s no space for the urban warriors that gave the city its soul.  There’s only room for the hipsters, the yuppies, and their 2-dimensional lifestyle of ridiculousness.  

I had to go somewhere else…to find something to shoot.  But I realized it’s getting harder and harder to shoot the real New York City, because you can’t capture what’s no longer there.  You can’t frame a memory.   You can’t immortalize a vanishing legacy.  Not when the hipster invasion has killed it all.  Sure enough, I did get a few solid pictures.  But they were real hard to find!  New York is not friendly to New Yorkers anymore.  The soul is drying up.  Thank you, hipsters.  Thank you, yuppies.  Your desire to be trendy has killed a legacy.  Enjoy your fucking coffee, assholes!

Closing thought: Give Brooklyn back to Brooklynites.  Keep Brooklyn real.  Keep it real in the Bronx.  Stay real in Queens.  Keep it old school real in Manhattan.  New York belongs to New Yorkers! 

I see and hear a lot online, and offline about the disease known as Gentrification.  Oddly enough most of what I hear comes from non-New Yorkers who have a very limited perspective on it.  Would you like to hear what a New Yorker thinks about it?  Read on my friend.

As a native New Yorker I’m one of the victims of gentrification.  I’m a victim!  Not a beneficiary.  The only beneficiaries of gentrification are the City of New York, and the people who are causing the problem:  Yuppies, hipsters, developers.

It offends me that people move here because it’s “trendy”.  It offends me that these people move here for the culture when what’s really happening is they’re effectively forcing the culture to move out.  And it offends the shit out of me that these people treat the local color like animals in a petting zoo; nice to look at, nice to interact with, but not all that important to the ecosystem.  They subsume the local culture and the local flavor, and turn it into something cold and soulless.  They regard their surroundings very much like a fashion hog regards their clothing—something nice to wear and enjoy and show off and exploit for their own selfish, vain benefit…

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