craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

first line of defense

It struck me that there was (once, maybe no longer as you say) a common enemy for Brooklyn-boosters, which is to say that Manhattan snooters. But who's the common enemy for Hackneyites? No-one, as far as I can see.

As I think about this, I don't really object to it - people feeling good about where they live, it's not a bad thing. Over-enthusiasm sometimes gets a bit irksome but it's pretty harmless (with the usual caveats about the upsides and downsides of gentrification).

over-enthusiasm sometimes gets a bit irksome but it's pretty harmless

maybe? i don't want to overstate it but there's a strange isolationist undercurrent here, i don't think there's gonna be any tarriffs on out-of-borough foodstuffs but you know what i mean

Don't perceive that to much in the London version of this - don't see Hackneyites turning their nose up at the Kernel beer we sell them because it comes from two boroughs away in SE1 (SE16 now but whatevs). There is the impulse to "buy local" I guess but I think most Londoners who get into that don't tend to be very borough-focussed (and the restaurants I know which have taken that line tend to talk about"within the M25" or whatever.

does the salsa taste any different now that it's packaged in jars? does larger-scale production effect the absolute quality of the product? i don't know -- i'm guessing not! or is it just less desirable now that it's available beyond brooklyn? does its wider availability just no longer flatter brooklyn's own self-conscious ~uniqueness~?

people get pleasure from exclusivity

ppl get pleasure from all sorts of things. ask katie roiphie!

Putting food in jars that don't need refridgeration means the product has to be boiled, right? I'm sure that does affect the flavor. Versus always-chiiled fresh salsa.

yeah i'm just wondering out loud, how much is exclusivity based on limited quantity, and how much is based on selective distribution

I would think that "local" in the UK means "anywhere in the UK." I mean it's only 4 hours' drive across for chrissake.

quantity & distribution are both part of the equation. you don't make a very large batch of expensive high quality salsa because there are only so many people who will be willing to meet your price point. marketing to those ppl who can afford to buy your product, is the surest way to make a buck & not risk losing unsold fresh salsa. or something.

this is MAYBE a related discussion or a different thread, but i have been noticing a few boutique publishing houses (centipede press, really) that will manufacture 100-500 gorgeous 'japanese cloth bound' books etc and sell them for anywhere from $45-295 list. the exclusivity comes from the limited run, which in turn comes from the limited demand and difficulty in distribution of such a niche product.

i love boiled salsa.

http://www.centipedepress.com/sf/shadow.html

like, are you kidding me? this book which you can go buy in barnes & noble if you want as part of an anthology, is being published in a tiny run for a small number of ppl and someone is making a profit. n

i imagine this is JUST LIKE SALSA wherein you make enough to sell to the portion of the population who will both WANT your product and be able to AFFORD it.

volume three still avaialble new for $225!
http://www.centipedepress.com/sf/sword.html

part of why ppl like these products is because they are marketed as (and in reality are) objects of a very high quality. people who buy them buy them the same way people buy art prints.

so maybe it's not like salsa, i don't know. but like salsa, there is a much cheaper option.

people w/ too much money need something to do w/ it, designer salsa, books, clothes, cars are all part of the same story

"i lived in hollister, california and i wouldn't buy 'hollister' crap if my life depended on it."

my refusal to wear "brooklyn industries" branding has to do with the company's relationship to the gentrification of certain brooklyn neighborhoods at the time i lived in park slope. gentrification isn't a bad thing, necessarily. it can bring money and jobs to an area that wouldn't otherwise have much of either. that's all to the good. but gentrification also displaces local culture, and that has its downsides.

brooklyn industries, to me, represented a strange attempt to sell an ersatz version of brooklyn's famous local pride to newcomers (like me) lured by gentrified neighborhoods and still relatively cheap housing. its appeal seemed based on the idea that the "authenticity value" of neighborhood pride was a fungible commodity that could be appropriated and used to add sparkle to whatever. i was bothered by that. i was willing to be an agent of gentrification, but that didn't mean i wanted my clothing & accessories to advertise gentrification.

as the company's grown, it's relationship to brooklyn itself has changed. to buy and wear and brooklyn industries bag in kansas somewhere has no real relationship to the gentrification of this or that neighborhood. but i'm still tied to the time and place in which i first encountered the brand.

Just six illustrations seem kinda a gyp.

i think a good example of the right way (responsible way? fiscally sensible way?) to go about making a boutique product is something like a group of Jack Vance fans did with the Vance Integral Edition, a subscription series to a very limited run of the complete work of Jack Vance, with introductory material, high-quality leather bindings, signed, the whole nine yards. very expensive, costly thing to make, but by doing it together and for each other it became possible & eventually was done to completion in iirc 44 volumes at about $5,000 total for a set.

i don't know where i'm going with this really. just been thinking about boutique printing presses lately, encountering them in amazon searches & google seaches and stuff.

gonna go buy a $12 jar of salsa now and take it home in my $50 reusable grocery bag brb

boutique printing presses are prob gonna be bigger things in the future when books are sorta more comparable to vinyl records

i think what ties brooklynites together, btw, is not a sense of pride or antagonism towards manhattanites, but just people in general trying to ~get shit done~ be it get to work on the train, buy groceries, walk the dog, whatever, people are just about doing what they're doing no judgments, and there seems to be a certain level of mutual respect for people in the community who would otherwise have nothing in common with each other. some sense of 'all in this together.'

what we talk about when we talk about brooklyn

i don't think it's exclusive to brooklyn really, it's probably what ties ppl together where there are residential neighborhoods where people are (relatively) densely packed and walking all over each other every day

gotta get of the internet jesus.

there aren't that many neighborhoods that fit that description in america

but it is true in other countries

brooklyn industries, to me, represented a strange attempt to sell an ersatz version of brooklyn's famous local pride to newcomers (like me) lured by gentrified neighborhoods and still relatively cheap housing.

I kind of get resenting this sort of branding/marketing. As ridiculous as it may be, I feel like there are newcomers to my general area who are selling basically a newcomer take on their local/city experience to each other. I mean, if they make something that appeals to me I'm probably not going to be a snob about it and I want to encourage pretty much all local businesses, but I get the feeling that some of these things are just not for me.

This will undoubtedly change, though, since in areas where there weren't any businesses, a place that's been around a mere 10 years is pretty entrenched, or the things that I thought of as "entrenched" were pretty new only a few years before I really started going there.

Having to "defend" gentrifying Brooklyn against Manhattan "snootiness" has become kind of the ultimate ruling class agony.

Brooklyn-branded apparel on gentrifiers has always annoyed me on a number of levels, one being that, yeah, you're talking about a very small sliver of a very large city in its own right, another being that it at least used to seem like appropriating a word associated with street smarts and toughness for people who had neither. And also I guess it felt like this inexplicable need to completely redefine the entire borough as the essence of yuppie cool. Also most of those t-shirts look like tourist shirts no matter how hard they try not to.

i think what ties brooklynites together, btw, is not a sense of pride or antagonism towards manhattanites, but just people in general trying to ~get shit done~ be it get to work on the train, buy groceries, walk the dog, whatever, people are just about doing what they're doing no judgments, and there seems to be a certain level of mutual respect for people in the community who would otherwise have nothing in common with each other. some sense of 'all in this together.'

― one dis leads to another (ian), Tuesday, April 17, 2012 1:33 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do not buy this at all fwiw

Imo it's there if you feel it? Then you put it there by your own actions and relations with people.

I imagine it being read by spike lee over a video montage of people walking around downtown brooklyn

or maybe read by someone else and it can be a nets commercial

there are lots of densely packed neighborhoods in the u.s. there are also lots of low-density neighborhoods in the u.s. there's lots of everything in the u.s.!

this land has lots of mountains/this land has lots of mud...

I don't feel very tied together with much of brooklyn/other brooklynites. and I have no antagonism towards manhattan. it's just a place where I work but could never dream of living.
maybe that would be different if I moved here ten years ago or something.

Hurting 2 OTM

ie. I have never felt a whiff of "stance" about living in brooklyn. it's just where I can conceivably afford to be without alienating friends.

http://static8.businessinsider.com/image/4e847563ecad04980200001c/how-to-make-it-in-america.jpg

Although to be fair, I now work in a midtown east office where I'm the only Brooklyn resident and it seems like a bit of a novelty/curiosity to some people, especially the senior partners. The people who make more money live in Manhattan or Westchester or something, and the people who make less live in Jersey or Queens, but no one but me is in Brooklyn.

Like I wouldn't say I have to "defend" it, but there are older people who are surprised I live there with a baby, surprised my commute is not that bad, etc.

Anyway at least with people 50 and under I think the Times has pretty much killed any need to "defend" Brooklyn. Williamsburg's waterfront is already full of finance industry bros, and pretty much everyone I meet has at least been to the Brooklyn Brewery or Brooklyn Flea or has some restaurant that they make the trip over the bridge for.

or the people 50 and over who live in brookyln

A former ilxor who worked for a literary agency had a boss who came from so much money that she had never lived outside Manhattan in her life and never took the subway, and she was shocked/horrified that her employee(s) would live in Williamsburg and didn't know what train went there. This was...maybe 6 years ago?

826,551 people 45 or older live in brooklyn according to some math I just did

I've been to industry dinners with vendor salesmen who offered to pay for our cabs home assuming we all lived in Manhattan, too. That was funny.

funny thing is people who live in manhattan and are in my income bracket are pretty much guaranteed to be 50+ exclusively.
lotta old people in my office with rent controlled places in amazing neighborhoods who think I should move there to be by nice restaurants.

I just feel bad for the 'I've never left manhattan' ppl, it's like living in belgium but never having seen holland

Is Brooklyn itself artisanal