The "long bits catching my fancy" edition. You better have your glasses handy.
Tuesday's Gothamist interview, author Kemp Powers on being a Brooklynite and a New Yorker:
You write in The Shooting that while you still love New York, you couldn't live here again. Do you consider yourself a New Yorker still, even though you're now settled in Los Angeles? Are there certain qualities that make someone "a New Yorker," or is it simply how one chooses to identify? Are New Yorkers more prideful of being New Yorkers than people in other cities are of their locations?I will always be a Brooklyn guy, no matter where I live. I'm a product of the New York public school system. Everything I do in life is done from a New Yorker's perspective. I consider myself a New Yorker who lives in Los Angeles, period. I still love the city dearly, it's just no longer what it once was. Some of the changes are really good, but some are pretty depressing. The smoking ban cracked me up. New York is Gotham, and they want to make it into Metropolis.
Brooklyn has become so transient. People move there right out of college, have fun for a few years doing the starving artist thing, then when they decide they want to have a family, pull up stakes and move out. Part of the reason I enjoy living in LA, a place I once despised, is because there are more native born New Yorkers here than any city I've been to outside of New York. I was at a parents’ event at my daughter's school last year, and I ran into point guard Mark Jackson. It turned out his kid also attended that school. It's also funny that I find myself in the unusual position of having to defend Los Angeles in conversations with my New York friends, most of whom aren't even from New York. I can usually end the conversation by reminding them of how much I used to have to defend New York to outsiders, back before people were taking family vacations there. Despite the allure of Hollywood, LA is also a working-class place, just like my Brooklyn.
Please understand that I see being from Brooklyn much different than being from New York. Brooklyn is unique, and being Brooklyn born and bred has unspoken connotations. I have a core group of friends from Brooklyn, and I routinely describe them as "my Brooklyn guys," no matter where they happen to be living. Being a Brooklyn guy means that, no matter how much or little education you have, you're going to approach situations a certain way. You lay out a problem for a Brooklyn guy, and he's going to approach it in a certain way. My mother always stressed proper diction, so I don't even have an accent, but as a friend of mine jokes, when I'm pissed off I go from zero to Brooklyn in about ten seconds.
I think there are plenty of qualities that make a person a New Yorker, but I'd have to say that the most important one is commitment. You don't have to be born in New York or live there to have a commitment to the city. And I mean a real fucking commitment, not some bullshit crush. Ask yourself this, if you weren't pursuing or living your dream as an artist, writer, musician, broker, or whatever; if you had two kids and had to take a job as a janitor for the next 20 years of your life; if the city had the highest crime rate and worst poverty in the entire country; would you still live in New York? If your answer is yes, then you're a New Yorker. Not because you think the place is cool, but because you consider the place your true home, regardless of how much of a success or failure your life is. What makes New Yorkers different is that commitment to the city. People from other places often grow up dreaming of leaving. Growing up in New York, the thought of leaving never really crosses your mind, no matter how poor you are. You leave if you have to, not because you want to. My brother in law got into lots of trouble with the law, but he still didn't want to leave New York . . . they deported his ass.
The comments for Hashim's post on "Music Critics vs. Normal People" were pretty interesting:
Hard is when your income is too much to qualify for the projects and too low to even be considered middle class. Hard living is when you have it hard, and you have 3 pair of pants that you try to switch up throughout the week and freak the coordination so peeps don't recognize that the pants you wear on Thursday, you wore on Tuesday, and the pants you wear on Friday, you wore on Monday, ya dig?Project dudes aren't hard, they just don't give a d*mn. That's EASY...that's not HARD, that's EASY. Project apartments are decked out materially...What? You didn't know? Well you better ask somebody that does know. It just so happens that money-management is where some people from the projects run into problems. That's why there are project generations where there are like 2 and 3 generations of families that have dwelled in the projects without exit or change, in their project of residence.
Sars on the drama of clothes shopping:
What a revelation the men's section always is, too, where sanity reigns and sizing is actually done according to measurements. There's no 6 or 8 or "regular" and "long," there's no plus-sizing, there's no mucking around with subjective ideas of petite and tall. Waist measurement, inseam measurement, thank you, goodbye. Can the women's side of the aisle please get on the rhyme-or-reason-in-sizing stick? Because "10" doesn't really tell me anything. It tells me, usually, that it won't either fit like a tube sock or fall straight off me, but that's about all it tells me. It doesn't tell me what body type the item is cut for, or on what body type it will look either cute or disastrous -- can you please get rid of numbered sizes and do something more along the lines of "32/30 with boy hips and a bit of a cheese-sandwich gut"?Posted by Candicissima at July 7, 2005 07:29 PM