Extra, Extra
Extra, Extra
Extra, Extra
Extra, Extra
Early Addition
- Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: "loose horses" in Queens, a stabbing in Soho, and a fatal person struck by train at 86th on the 4/5/6.
- No surprise: the richer a neighborhood is, the more landmarks get designated within it.
- Here's a pretty video of a Williamsburg Brooklyn Sunrise, from Youtube.
- Joseph Guzman, the survivor of the Sean Bell shooting in Queens, was released from the hospital today, nearly two months after the attack.
- Birds beware: GammaBlog spotted some very unsafe looking avian tenements around the East Village.
- The bitter fight between the General Theological Seminary and its Chelsea neighbors continues to rage on: at issue is whether the school should be able to sell its air-rights to a condo developer, who would then put up a tall building in the neighborhood.
- Did the NYPD launch a fake website to gather information about graffiti artists?
- The Columbia Spectator is urging the NYPD not to crack down on fake IDs.
Light Criticism, from the Graffiti Research Lab and Anti-Advertising Agency.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
Dobkin : Lame Grafitti posts :: Jen Chung : Lame spelling errors
I'll take the spelling errors. Jake, give it a rest there is more to New York than that crap spread on walls. Here's an idea, write about that.
Enough with the graffiti reports! What else is happening in NYC that isn't illegal?
Graffitist.com?
stop: correction, don't you mean "isn't illegal and boring?"
Funny, I was going to make the joke abut graffitist as well... I keep telling myself not to worry about the excessiveness of graffiti posts, and just read past them. But they really do bother me. It is just not interesting. Start a 2nd blog already, or get involved with another graf oriented site.
graffiti-as-art is so 1997.
"graffiti-as-art is so 1997." Um... Errrrrr... dontcha mean 1981 [i.e. Keith Haring, Futura 2000, Kenny Scharf, SAMO/Jean-Michel Basquiat, René, Zephyr, Cavellini, Dondi, The Missing Foundation, etc.] ??
.... fatal person struck by train...
a corpse hit by a train?
maybe:
.... a person fatally struck by train...
works better.
Look, it's like this. Not all of us are 22. A lot of us lived through the Haring era (I used to see him decorating the 68th Street station all the time when I was in high school). And you know what? While some graffiti is pretty, most of it is self-indulgent crap. That even goes for most of the stuff painted and drawn in the 1970s; and even accounting for most of the art that was produced over the ages being crap, graffiti crap usually doesn't even look good and acts as as unexpected eyesore. I am angry that one of these so-called artists wheat-pasted stupid pictures on my local newsstand. I hope that anti-graffiti guy throws paint on them.
But do you know what really annoys me? This website is about one of the greatest cities in the world, where people come to learn about and appreciate all kinds of art. Yet there is no real coverage of museums, dance,or serious plays. Bands that play one tiny bar and which are made up of a bunch of jerks? Yes. Comedians who couldn't get on TV if they tried? Sure. Obscure 'art' happenings starring talentless hipsters? Line them up. But coverage of some really interesting galleries or any of the top art museums? No- you're too busy talking about idiotic graffiti artists like Banksy, who defiles neighborhoods and makes them ugly so that 20-somethings can coo over what they assume to be cleverness.
There are reasons for art shows, galleries, and museums- so that people who don't want to look at work they consider to be crap don't have to, and so people who think certain styles are art can do so without annoying others. When you start covering some real art (some real restaurants would be good too- the world is bigger than over-priced hamburgers at Shake Shack) the way that you so entertainingly cover interesting real-time happening, the city will rejoice. And please stop assuming that all of us just moved here 5 minutes ago. Many of us are proud 'b&t' types who were going to elementary school here when most of the present-day hipsters were back home in Wisconsin wearing diapers and drawing on walls with crayons.
methinks dobkin just got owned.
From the Columbia Spectator:
"While it is admirably that the council intends to increase surveillance in bars and nightclubs..."
Isn't Jen a Columbia grad? This explains a lot.
People, you can't freak out over one link among several.
Anthro is my hero.
Anthro......yeah, you da man.
"This website is about one of the greatest cities in the world, where people come to learn about and appreciate all kinds of art. Yet there is no real coverage of museums, dance, or serious plays."
True!
There's also almost no coverage of happenings in Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, upper Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn not populated by recent arrivals from Oklahoma who use the term 'bridge and tunnel' to show their disdain for the actual working people in this city who are usually people of color or white ethnics and very often native to the city.
One of the salient points made by Caro is that Moses, for all the good he did, destroyed working-class neighborhoods, leaving less space for blue-collar homes and businesses. This in part is why the city is in trouble now- there's not too many places for the truck drivers, school teachers and bagel makers to live and work.
If modern-day hipsters primarily engaged in the life of the city as did many so-called hipsters of the past (Greenwich Village, for example), I would welcome them. I would even be happy with those native-born people who cater to their interests. But coming here to open a skate shop detracts from the city. Those skate shops and boutiques with badly-stitched size 0 clothing that no one can wear to work and bars that are rowdy and keep people up at night while charging prices no workingman or woman can afford are popping up in places where there were once pharmacies, cheap coffee shops, real working-class bars (not fake dives), laundromats, bakeries and pet shops. They do not serve the longtime communities that surround them, and without support services, neighborhoods and cities die. They die in part because ordinary people of all ages have no place to gather and exchange information, meet each other, flirt, teach their children to have a sense of community. And the rents go up so that a domino effect occurs, where more and more businesses owned by people with an emotional investment in the community shut down.
Hipsters usually only feel a tenuous loyalty to each other. They usually don't care if old Mrs. Morgenstern no longer has a safe place to sit at night, or if Mr. Rajneesh can afford a laundromat that will give him and his family a reason to stay in an area and become Americanized. They don't realize that while Mrs. Morgenstern and Mr. Rajneesh don't paste up 'ironic' posters or wear t-shirts with trendy designs on them, they make a neighborhood safe by being what Jane Jacobs called 'the eyes on the street'. Mrs. Morgenstern might be 92 and completely unsexy, but she's the one who calls the cops when the guy up the street beats his wife. Mr. Rajneesh might not know any hot clubs, but his laundromat makes it possible for the local people who work at the area hospital to have clean clothes so that they can hold their jobs and afford their apartments. He's also the one who knows who the drug dealers are, is open at times when a lot of hipsters are asleep, and his children, by learning that everyone should have a part in making a vital neighborhood, will learn the real values of America.
I think this is a great blog in many ways, and I know the writers have their own interests and also cannot be everywhere at once. But everyone in this city didn't go to Columbia, and most of them don't read the New York Sun. Most people live in unfashionable places where, mirabile dictu, there are museums, dance companies, restaurants, parks, outdoor entertainments, and so on. Even more strangely, many of the people who go out in this city are over the age of 30 and could care less about the t-shirt and PBR crowd, even if they were once among them. And- I know this is truly bizarre, so bear with me- there are even people under the age of 30 who listen to music other than the latest rock band enjoying its 2 seconds of fame and look at art that's not in MOMA or scrawled on a wall that will now have to be painted over by some poor immigrant super who isn't cool enough to thought of as human by the artist who did it (or that person might not have made work for innocent people).Gothamist does cover some of these events- but not enough of them. Might I suggest that they ask readers if they would be willing to write reports on the parts of the city that get ignored?
Wow, you Gothamist commenters are softer than babyshit.
anthro,
what you want covered is done by the NYT (which by the way is a totally smug, arrogant and boorish paper). stick to that.
for the rest of youse re. the abundance of graffiti stories on gothamist, just look at how amny comments they get. that means advertising bucks for gothamist!!
bwahaahaaaaha! you critics are just supporting the whole thing.
full disclosure, i LOVES graffiti and believe it makes for a more interesting, informative and entertaining city than all the f*cking talentless ads everywhere, etc.
Actually, that's not quite true. The Times (which I also find insufferable) doesn't really cover plays and performances done by artists who are neither famous nor hipsters. Nor does the Times talk about restaurants in human terms- real people don't eat food made from gelatinized foam. They eat at coffeeshops and mom and pop places. That's why I miss seeing posts from the Hungry Cabbie in this space. It's why I'll read anything written anywhere by Sam Sifton.
When was the last time you saw theatre in the Bronx mentioned in any of the larger papers or on this blog? I'm happy that The Moses exhibit and things at the Queens Museum have been mentioned, but there's more out there. And when was the last time you saw a discussion of something at, let's say, the Met or the Frick or the Cooper-Hewitt and wasn't written by someone with his or her head up their butt?
Writing about classical music and old and new jazz by young and up-and-coming artists, older movies (notice I didn't say 'film'- I find that a bit pretentious) that are being re-released, and local arts companies in the outer boroughs doesn't have to be staid or arrogant. Everything out there is new to someone. Educating the public in an entertaining and open way and helping them understand why many of us still enjoy these things is not priggish.
I remember quite a few years back attending a performance of Lysistrata in Washington Square Park that was done by a guerilla theatre company. The language had been slightly updated but not much, and the cast was young and exuberant. But after a while I found myself watching the audience instead of the cast. What I saw was that ordinary people walking by- people who you usually don't find at gallery openings or drinking Chablis and reading the Times while waiting to score tickets for Shakespeare in the Park- were stopping, in some cases with their kids, and joining the audience. And they were laughing and talking back to the actors, and all of a sudden it felt like I was sitting in Elizabethan England watching a comedy at the Globe. The same thing happened a few years later when I saw an open-air performance of Macbeth in the same place.
It is arrogant of the Times to assume only the wealthy and highly educated can enjoy culture. But it's also arrogant to assume that only hipsters have the 'right' to deface walls, or to appreciate a night out. It's arrogant to assume that hipster bars are the only places worth visiting, and hipster neighborhoods are the only ones with interesting people in them.
The Internet has a sense of immediacy that magazines do not. It also has the power to reach people who might not ordinarily be reached with ideas and events they might not otherwise explore. Lots of us here may have gone to fancy schools, but we shouldn't assume that only our college newspapers have any interest to anyone. It's arrogant to presume that only a few city blocks are of interest to everyone here, or to not explore the ramifications of gentrification on longstanding residents whose neighborhoods are being blighted by hipsters who inadvertently drive out vital businesses while smirking at those residents and talking about them like they are outsiders. Isn't that what you dislike about the Times? That its writers ignore the interests of the people who really live and work here full time?
Hipsters stay for a while, pretend to be musicians or artists, and move on to the suburbs with a tall tale of their bohemian adventures. Good for them. Some of us are here for the long haul, though, and as I said, we make up the majority population of this town. Williamsburg and the like are barely discernible pimples on the ass of this city as far as most residents are concerned, even if they area gaudy and well-decorated ones. Ditto NYU and Columbia grads who think that the world is only made up of people like them.
"what you want covered is done by the NYT (which by the way is a totally smug, arrogant and boorish paper). stick to that."
I see, so in order to get coverage of non-superficial art you've got to read the "smug, arrogant and boorish paper." Nice dichotomy you've got going there.
Face it, gothamist is stuck in a rut on certain things. The music and visual arts coverage is one-dimensional (= indie rock & public art/graffiti). There *are* other smart young people out there who are into other things. (In my field, music, there are plenty of young people into electronic music, new improv, and contemporary classical, for example.) Why not bring some on board?
Don't like the website? Don't read it.