Brooklyn, baby

Friday night I sped out of Manhattan, into unexplored territory: Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I'd heard enough about the scene to expect a latte foam frenzy of hipster hipness, but all the chatter in the world couldn't have prepared me for what I was to find: Williamsburg is exactly like Eugene, Oregon, but with money.

It boasts the same mix of gender-bending grungy prep that makes you want to throw a Banana Republic skirt over a pair of ripped up no name jeans. Williamsburg also forced my hand up to my forehead to frantically try and reshape my Manhattan side sweep to the Brooklyn emo bang: straight down and hanging in your eyes just enough to make them constantly water. You suffer for the cause.

I went to a tiny bar overflowing like a cookie jar, spilling mixed nuts into the street. I danced/wedged my way to the back where, after 3 glasses of my signature elixer (vodka/tonic, extra lime) and enough pumk/emo/rock bopping to put BK to shame, I started to settle in. The funny thing about the boroughs is they each work so hard to define themselves as individuals no normal individual could ever really fit into just one of them. When I'm in Manhattan, I'm too poor. In Brooklyn I'm not quite smart enough (no I cannot discuss Nietzsche with you). In the Bronx I'm too white and Staten Island, well, like most New Yorkers, I have no reason to be there.

In NYC you find, due to these literal little islands, neighborhoods and even streets, you either struggle to fit in everywhere or decide to fit in nowhere and glean what you can while you're there.

I'm going to live it up.



.de

The Pod People

I bought an iPod right before moving to New York with the intention of using it the way you might turn a fan on to soothe a baby to sleep (ok...so I still sleep with a fan, but whatever). I considered it a valid expense because I needed something to help me transition from a pastoral aural landscape to grinding, squealing and whining. Well, transition it did, but the iPod also did something else that I couldn't put my finger on. It made the lights brighter, the cabs faster and the romance stronger. Finally, the other afternoon, my colleague called it: "When I have my headphones in, walking through New York City, it's like I'm the star of a movie".

The pod is not just a place to escape or dampen the bad noises; it's my own personal soundtrack.

Happy Halloweiner

Halloween, New York City, Greenwich Village. You'll have to see it to believe it. And you can see it. All of it. Any of it that you want, because Halloween is All Sluts Eve. Drag queens with no pants, straight women playing out the risque version of every fairytale, woodland or otherwise affiliated creature known to man (or she-man) come out of the brickwork and literally parade up Sixth Avenue.

I had to think though, while watching the exhibition, that it wasn't that far off from the everyday. It seems that each of us in NY, including me, is a bigger-than-life version of what we want to be or who we think we are. The village has its year-round parade of the out and proud, midtown has it's stilettos & Prada and the "starving artists" in Brooklyn want to starve just a little bit more than the artists in, say, Seattle. The 'greatest city on earth' seems to inspire us all to be greater or lesser, richer or poorer, straighter or gayer than the rest of the world. We all want to shroud ourselves in the label of what we want to be, regardless of where we came from or what's underneath. Each of us has something to prove, sometimes to our parents, our bosses, our siblings, but always, always to ourselves.

One of the float emcees last night, in sequins and headdress, screamed out "If you're not in costume, you don't belong in New York City!"

How true.


.de