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Are Brooklyn And Portland Actually The Same Place?

Earlier this week, we were strong-armed into watching Brokelandia—but not everyone was impressed with the Brooklyn-based response to Portlandia, the love letter to artisanal knit cap-wearing locavore hipsters. The Frisky was particularly riled up by it, and came up with the above Venn diagram to demonstrate just how dumb and surface-level the comparisons have gotten at this point. Either that, or they're making an even deeper point about the space-time continuum.

For you see, (Western) Brooklyn and Portland are an example of the relativity of the space-time continuum, where the same place can exist at two separate geographical points. As Wikipedia so helpfully explains:

When a space-like interval separates two events, not enough time passes between their occurrences for there to exist a causal relationship crossing the spatial distance between the two events at the speed of light or slower. Generally, the events are considered not to occur in each other's future or past. There exists a reference frame such that the two events are observed to occur at the same time, but there is no reference frame in which the two events can occur in the same spatial location.

Instead of rejecting that space-time break, we should embrace the fact that thriving indigenous Etsy-based cultures can exist at multiple places at once! This idea is one of the major pillars of globalization—who needs to go to Disney Land when they have Times Square? And we can't let a few Maggie Gyllenhaal's get in the way of that progress.

Of course, this is just our interpretation of the Brooklyn/Portland paradigm presented above. Maybe what we really need is a new TV show called "TVlandia" where hip 20-somethings discuss things they saw on TV programs and use TV as a jumping off point to discuss the world around them and extrapolate the relative merits of culture between things that are basically the same.

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Comments [rss]

  • Roccaseo

    ...and this isn't anything like the nyc marathon...

    http://vimeo.com/40044600

    ...right...

  • Roccaseo

    ...and this ain't the catskills...

    http://vimeo.com/32852978

  • Roccaseo

    ...but this doesn't look like Brook...

    http://vimeo.com/41011190

  • Roccaseo

    Brooklyn and Portland have more in common... A very-Brooklyn Portland mayor:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

    heavy Brooky accent and all...

  • nicholasian

    Isn't Bjork a more impressive/interesting resident than Maggie Gyllenhaal?

  • Hipster is a funny word. In my day we just said "narcissist," so there was no confusion about the meaning. Oh, and a bunch of white people talking about how Williamsburg is "Brooklyn" — are not only racially moronic, they are pretty much the problem. It's basically like "I drink in 'Brooklyn' on the weekend, but all the neighborhoods people actually live and work in don't exist... because I'm a white wannabe douchebag."

    Thanks for listening. Now go back to listening to your shitty music. Biggie is from Brooklyn. And he's got more life a decade after his death than all the name-dropping consumers of your little bourgie enclave put together.

  • CG

    Hip hop is for douchebags.

  • Pixelwhore

    This isn't Brooklyn, this isn't even NYC; man I hate venn diagrams

  • horsechoker

    Yo I really don't like hipsters. 

  • wow! stereotypes are awesome! 

  • Brian Mastro

    What about us normal Brooklynites. Born and raised nothing on that list describes me

  • pendejito

    Fuck Portland. Why is anyone even comparing it to Brooklyn?

    Just to get a rep....... 

  • discogarage

    They forgot to put that there are all different shades of non-white people in brooklyn as well as asians and a diverse sampling of whites (hasid's, russians, etc.) - Portland is pretty much all white people.

  • 69GeorgeWBush69

    New York City has jobs

  • Chick Blao

    You mean gentrified, northwest Brooklyn that has a ton of temporary residents.  Yes, I agree.  The ignorance of calling that small sect THE representation of "Brooklyn" is astounding!

  • bggb

    Yup.

  • But they think they are so edgy and influential. They invented bike lanes, they must represent all of Brooklyn 

  • CG

    I lived in Portland in the late 90's and Brooklyn for the past 5 years; there are some similarities, but I don't know how deep they really are; I definitely do not feel like I am still living in Portland! 

  • TeddyNYC

    Hipster men in Brooklyn - Ambiguously employed bearded men with pretentious music taste in a state of malaise. Anyone reading this fit that description?

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