craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

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

vs. mass produced manhattan

Yeah I'm definitely aware of those weird never-leave-Manhattanites, although I think they are a dying breed, and I think this has changed significantly even from six years ago.

Is Brooklyn itself artisanal

― raw feel vegan (silby), Tuesday, April 17, 2012 3:04 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's a local city

That literary agent woman was like 35yo! She was rich, though.

idk anything about that lifestyle, although I am trying to catch up with this tv documentary called "gossip girl"

yeah they are usually rich people born in NYC. Nowadays though I feel like even rich private schoolers of the Gossip Girl mold make jaunts into Brooklyn.

neighborhood pride was a fungible commodity

i am trying to parse fungible in this context and it's just not working, are you saying that staten island pride has the same commodity value as brooklyn pride because haha no

i mean that the branding of "brooklyn" treats that authenticity value of brooklyn's working-class, underdog pride as something something that anyone can buy into. this sort of branding reduces local identity to a meaningless set of tradeable logos that anyone can acquire or cast off as they see fit. it devalues neighborhood pride as an intrinsic quality tied to long-term relationships with place, culture and history.

there's nothing deeply wrong with any of that, commerce will have its way and newcomers are as entitled to pride-in-place as anyone, but it's not something i feel personally comfortable adopting.

i would never leave manhattan if i lived in manhattan.

but i'm a man of few needs.

scott i bet you would leave manhattan to go to metal shows in brooklyn.

you would probably leave manhattan to look for records too, who are you kidding??

but there are lots of records in manhattan! and if i lived there i could probably afford them all. would not go to metal shows in brooklyn.

if someone offered to drive me to brooklyn and take me somewhere fun i would go. probably.

like if we had some beers and I put you in a car with the promise or music or something and then you're all of the sudden wondering why we're on a bridge or in a tunnel

when i lived in philly i never went anywhere. had no desire to. i could go a calendar year easy living in center city never getting on a bus/train/cab/car and only going as far as i could walk. i could walk pretty far though.