Oct 21, 2009
POSTED BY DAVE REEVES
If you missed the last missive, here’s the nutshell: Manhattan has a drink, a chowder, a Frank Sinatra song and the opening of Saturday Night Live but Brooklyn has murderers who keep the cops focused on doing their job of murderer-catching and let me do my job of riding stolen bicycles into flaming trash cans with girls who look like Mick Jagger.
Revolutions are born in cities because it’s hard to be revolutionary when you’re thankful to make it home after too much beer and zeitgeist. The real freedom of Brooklyn was the freedom from the pig’s eye and his harsh blinking lights, crappy polyester uniform and horrible reform school shoes. Brooklyn cops didn’t pull over a responsible citizen asking “Where’s the fire”, “How did my sister end up in your car?” and “Why is she wearing only a tubetop?” because they didn’t have time and I didn’t need a car.
I turned into a man of many bicycles as rubber on the wheel is faster than rubber on the heel. Cycling in New York is more lethal than riding a motorcycle in Los Angeles. It’s roughly the same drunk/medicated population and chossy roads but New York has the added hazard of the Taliban cavalry driving yellow people squashers.
At the end of a Manhattan night I’d have to get on my bike, navigate traffic and cross the muggerland of the old Williamsburg bridge, drunk and hopelessly clipped into my pedals. It was dangerous but I was healthier than my Lower East Side peers who only had to stumble a couple of blocks home to nurse their habits into junkiedom.
In 1995, going back to Brooklyn meant you’d had been voted off the island. Bowery Boys and Loisidas loved to shame me about how they never been to Brooklyn and where was Brooklyn anyway?
Damn right I defended it. I’d been kicked out of college and run from the Bible Belt. Disney and Giullianification priced me out of Manhattan. I had to make a stand before I got pushed into the sea. Brooklyn was the Masada of me.
When I say “Brooklyn,” I mean before the raw food dipshits got there and it was all rice and beans or pierogis. Before the graffiti got all cute. Before the neighborhood was defined by the cookie cutter do’s and don’ts of Viacom.
I’m talking about Brooklyn when you could get a Heineken and bolsita right over the counter at Kokie’s. The kind of place you might shoot a king rat with a twenty guage shotgun in your apartment on Lorimer Street and your Chinese landlord never said a word because he was scared of getting deported. That place where Haitian families felt comfortable enough to burn a mattress and cook a goat on the sidewalk. A time so poorly lit that Monk could fall down the steps at Rug o Lad and then spit bloody teeth at the bartender so we could nab the Absinthe. The Brooklyn where you pour beer on the floor of the Greenpoint Tavern in order to twist with Horsey and Carlos on Christmas Eve.
That place is gone a long time now, banished to East New York or squelched behind facades of baby clothing shops. I’ve been going through the black box, trying to parse the day, the hour, the moment that Brooklyn turned into a mall. I remember a big bus pulled up. It said RISD on the side, which must be some kind of fashion academy because everybody that got off it had a bedhead and a pair of hundred dollar jeans slouched half off their ass.
They came in, ordered slices and checked their hair in the bulletproof plexiglas. There was a local kid named Mando in the pizza parlor, famous to us for a trick of breaking into David Henry Brown Jr’s apartment late at night to sell him drugs. Mando eyeballed the RISD kids, turned to me and my boy and shook his head solemnly.
“Remember? This neighborhood used to be hard.”
Mando was blaming the pioneer hipsters for how fashionistas thought it was safe to primp in Brooklyn. Mando intuited that the presence of these nabobs meant that the neighborhood had forgotten to keep up an illusion of danger. The ability for them to exist here indicated that the corruption was now systemic, as gentrification exponentializes so quickly. He was suggesting that it was our presence that brought this plague upon us.
Soon it became obvious that Mando was right. Every day overwhelming number of non-weirdos and normal job-having motherfuckers came in on the trains and paid exorbitant rents on time to live in our charming bohemian cesspool.
It’s the same every time: alpha hipsters and indie bands make coffeehouses which are patronized by fashionstas until the gays and college reality shows find out where they are and then suddenly all the buildings have doormen. The neighborhood keeps getting nicer until one day the local crackhead doesn’t come around to pimp Nazi uniforms, alligator heads or any other treasure reclaimed from the garbage. The Koolman is run off by hipster taco trucks. The cops write tickets for drinking beer on the street.
I wanted Mando to be wrong so badly that I went to the printer that day and had them make twenty t-shirts that read “Defend Brooklyn” with an AK-47 emblazoned on it. I didn’t try to sell them yet. Back then I didn’t want to be a t-shirt merchant. I just gave them out to like-minded people hoping to spark a war, like Red Dawn II if it was written by Genet featuring a cadre of wastrels vicious enough to break windows, burn down coffee klatches and scatter syringes around the neighborhood so we could still afford to live there.
Understand that I’m describing pre-9/11 thoughts and actions. Since then we’ve all made money, lost money and seen things that make the language and stance of “Defend Brooklyn” moot. Twilight Zone things like people that know they can’t fly jumping out of buildings and the BQE empty at rush hour.
NEXT: Just Wars Are Just Wars, Man.
Previously on Arthurmag.com:
IN A POST 9/11 WORLD I FIND THIS KIND OF ARROGANCE AND PRETENSION TERRIFYING
good. run for your life.
Yes, run – all the way to Territory Records & Barbecue!
In a post 9/11 world I find this kind of arrogance and pretension refreshing.
“The Gays” do not come after the “alpha hipsters,” they come BEFORE, during or ARE the”alpha hipsters.”
I also think it’s a bit creepy that you want people to live in blighted poverty so you can live in a picturesque fantasy. THAT is what makes “hipsters” irritating. New ones or old ones.
The problem with “hipsters,” in NY particularly, is that they move in and create an insular society, that uses the poverty around them as a backdrop to fuel their suburban refugee fantasies. They are just as guilty as the apparently rich, who wear different costumes, who move in to open boutiques and condos with doormen. These are all people who could care less about the actually poor people around them. I just wish more of these people, regardless of their outfits and bank accounts, actually cared more for people who aren’t as well off as they are.
hey gavin,
see the gay neighborhoods are usually like the west village and chelsea have traditionally been turned out by the art crowd before the double income no kids crew moves in.
here is an article in the washington post that might help you understand what i am saying and then we can get back to your more general kvetching about “Poor people” , which may be the most racist and overbearing part of your scree. What makes me not poor? My whiteness?
this kind of press from the washington post
“Overnight, another preserve of working-class American culture is rendered unaffordable to thousands of families — and to the hipsters themselves. Want to know the next move? Toll Brothers, the nation’s preeminent McMansion builder, has built a new luxe waterfront condo. Its ad features a preppy and distinctly unpierced blonde and the line: “Williamsburg, All Grown Up.”
Anthropologist Neil Smith of City University’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics has tracked gentrification with an obsession worthy of Ahab. He’s charted the transformation of blue-collar neighborhoods, from Shaw in the District and San Francisco’s Mission to the wharfs of London and the canal-lined streets of Amsterdam. This isn’t the old block-by-block stuff, the grinding rehab of old rowhouses by scruffy young gentry. He’s convinced he’s found a new beast.
“”We are witnessing the corporate and geographical restructuring of cities — the wealthy are suburbanizing the center and pushing the poor to the fringes, and it’s turbocharged,” Smith says. “Artists are disposable — developers just toss them out in hopes they’ll colonize the next ‘hot’ neighborhood.”
Firstly, I never said you were not poor, however, there is something very telling in the fact that you’re writing for a major alternative paper while mourning the passing of crime and filth. ACTUAL poor people (people born in poverty: black or white or anything else) would never argue to have needles thrown around their doorsteps so they can keep rich people out. It’s absurd.
dear gavin,
firstly is not a word. secondly the whole article is absurd, my style is absurd and it’s absurd that you don’t see that. So don’t get your panties in a bunch preaching that sixties hippie doggrel to me. This are new times, pal.
Times are changing. Instead of trying to keep neighborhoods poor for our inner film fantasies, we can buy Defend New Orleans products – made by “hipsters,” who use proceeds on inner city non-profit housing and art organizations!
P.S
Firstly IS a word.
dear gavin,
if you think that those Defend New Orleans assholes are more than the worst kind of fashion hipsters who have had to swaddle their plagiarism in charity then wait for the next Defense Industry Report.
I am NOT Gavin. I am from The Tremé and 9th Ward of New Orleans, plagued by the same problems as New York. And way MORE problems, actually.
See, my point is who the hell cares what people dress like, how much money they have or whatever – what counts is what you DO. The DNO crew actually gives a fuck about the hood – they actually DO defend New Orleans. Also, I very much like fashion – so I don’t see that as a criticism.
“Defend New Orleans” is a mantra that has been in use since the revolutionary war – people had signs on their windows when I was a child. It’s basically something you see ALL OVER THE SOUTH on front lawns, so I don’t know how they are any more of plagiarists than you.
[...] those who haven’t kept up with the Defense Industry Reports 1, 2 or 3 Dave Reeves is about to realize that printing the words “Defend Brooklyn” on a three [...]