The last New Yorker

I have decided. Being a native Manhattanite is like being a Hamptons fucking townie. There is no fucking prestige in being a Native New Yorker. I throw in the towel and admit that I am just good for nothing except being the last living person from the Jewish underclass. It is extinct. They should just give me a room in the New York Tenement Museum and let me live there like a living diorama and have little kids come on class trips to see me. "Look! Is that the Jewish person who grew up in a $400/month 4th-floor walkup on a street riddled with dogshit and concrete indent graf, where drug dealers loitered, which is now considered the Upper East Side?" "Yes...she's the very last one of her kind. She grew up drinking schav and electrocuting herself and now she's a fucking loser in a city overrun by Midwesterners who eat $10 chocolate from Mast Bros and dipshit lemming cocksucker Yuppies."

I have recently been reading diehipster.com and I enjoy it very much. However, despite being a native New Yorker who grew up in miserable poverty, I also 1) have one of the obnoxious (?) names the blogger regular uses in his fictional rants 2) went to art school (BFA) 3) used to play drums in Williamsburg experimental bands 4) used to pay $80 for a mullet haircut at a Japanese salon in SoHo 5) used to make craft-based art on the train 6) have, in the past, barista'ed so much I can do it in my fucking sleep.

But I'm a native fucking New Yorker who grew up in poverty and I am a different kind of person. While I was playing music in the experimental bands, I was always the only native New Yorker and the only one who would admit to liking Justin Timberlake or Jack Johnson.

In the name of scrupulous honesty, the way the writer of diehipster so violently talks about murdering hipsters and celebrates his working classness makes me actually think about the Midwestern and California transplants I know and kind of sympathize with them even though I do have my issues with their suffocating ubiquity. I have to say, I kind of have a very minor dark objectifying fetish for hipster guys from Wisconsin. Just Wisconsin, nowhere else. No guys are more twee and stylized and secretly misogynistic than guys from Wisconsin. I can really understand where all these kids are coming from. They're coming from strip mall places, places they think of as being hopelessly without culture. It's sad that American culture has become so hopelessly leached of its regional culture. So these kids want to create something that they never had, they're rebelling against what they grew up around. They grew up getting bullied by meatheads.

But I know native New Yorker kids from Bay Ridge, a whole gang of them. And they all went to art school and are creative. They also don't like the meatheads they grew up around, the homophobic and stupid idiots who are just like they were in the 70s in Saturday Night Fever, but with spikier hair. Yes, Brooklyn people are picturesque. It would be a shame if that culture was displaced by rooftop gardening cock-knockers. But how wonderful is that culture really? Sorry to say it.

I also grew up getting teased. By Black and Hispanic kids and by privileged White kids. The only group of people I fit in with was immigrant kids.

Yet the other thing I want to admit is that I resent immigrants in the same way diehipster resents transplant hipsters. I feel frustrated when I see signs in windows or job posting on Craigslist demanding that the job applicant be able to speak Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, or Russian for a retail job. In my opinion, that is wrong. Both hipsters AND diehipsters will hate me for saying that. In Sweden or the Netherlands if you don't speak the language, you don't get the job. You also have to have working papers for any job at all. In New York, foreign workers are working off the books on every tier of the economy. I know a Japanese hairstylist who works at a major agency who gets paid off the books. At least hipsters have to pay taxes. It bothers me when a Russian woman waddles in front of me on line at the grocery store, cutting in front of me (you would think she would know how to wait in a line, being from a former Communist country) and whips out her EBT card.

One diehipster fan wrote that he is a physically-built, blue-collar, former member of the military and harasses his now-hipster ex. Well, isn't that nice. The writer of diehipster also uses the term "feminising." Well, another thing I hate about New York City is the constant street harassment. Nobody wants to hear this either, but I get most of my street harassment from blue-collar men. Blue-collar men of all races, mostly Black and Latino, but some blue-collar White guys. Truckers, construction workers, delivery men, mechanics, the type of upstanding "unfeminized" wonderful authentic New Yorkers. Now, don't get me wrong. I think many hipster men are misogynistic too. But they don't harass women on the street in the same way. If they do, they are not real hipsters. It's like Russian men--they're often misogynistic, but they don't act it out in such a barbaric way. I have been harassed and assaulted in public spaces by blue-collar men since I was eight years old. And working with blue-collar women makes me want to rip my hair out. They are often stupid, with totally backward ideas about life and reality just like their male counterparts. Is that racist or classist? I don't think so but you can think what you want.

To be quite honest, I just don't like mean, stupid, abusive people who don't care about how their actions affect people. I don't like the strident white and Asian yuppies who have invaded Yorkville/the Upper East Side, I don't like 99.99% of the mixed lot of Manhattanites I grew up with, I don't like little old Asian women who dive under me to get the seat I am about to sit in on the train, I don't like Black women from the hood who call my friend a "dirty white bitch" for bringing her small leashed dog on the train to get to her vet visit at the ASPCA, I don't like juvenile barbaric street harassing blue-collar guys, I don't like perverted leering businessmen, I don't like white guys who date Asian girls, and many a time, I feel loathing for the hipster massive and any transplant who thinks being a New Yorker means eating brunch.

ummm...

i found fa gelée royale body wash for under $5 at one of the many 99 cent stores in greenpoint with a large selection of products for the neighborhood's dominant polish community. it is amazing. smells so great. love the bottle. love the color.

oh yes...cues and clues

i was at a gallery opening and a girl said something and within two seconds i knew she was a native new yorker (a native manhattanite).

i think she said, 'yo, bust me down...'

today or yesterday i asked someone, 'did the young lady find her diamond?' (someone who works in my building lost a diamond, fell right out of the setting)

the young lady. now how you gonna be 28 and normal and refer to someone as 'the young lady.'

just comes right out, like 'my friend.'

i also did it without a linguistic clue recently. i just saw it, smelled it, and called it.

us young native manhattanites are so weird! nice to have a context, though.

insight

THERE IS ALWAYS A SOLUTION* TO A PROBLEM WHEN YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE IN INTEGRITY

*PEACEFUL AND LOGICAL, ETHICAL

THANK YOU, DR ZIZMOR!!!

general mills...

i had a sudden thought today at work, "i would like to eat at the olive garden!"

it was a funny kind of thought. because i am a native new yorker and i have never been to an olive garden. there are a couple in new york city and they are the province of an exotic other. so i looked at their menu, and some things look okay, but if i were to get salad with my entree and a baked potato and what have you, it costs as much as dinner at a good, real new york restaurant, with a interior-designed interior, a graphic-designed menu, a chef. i mean, the olive garden has all these things but let's be real.

the olive garden, according to wikipedia, is owned by general mills. according, also, to wikipedia, most americans buy something created by general mills whenever they go to the grocery store.

since i try to shop the perimeter of the grocery store, buying fresh vegetables, plain unadulterated dairy, meat, soy products, and whole grains and wholegrain cereals, i figured, "ha! not me. i mean i ate ninja turtles cereal when i was a kid, but those days are over."*

WELL, I WAS WRONG!

one of the best things i buy in a can is made by general mills! they have several lines of organic food products. including muir glen and their bomb-ass fire roasted tomatoes. you can make chili with it. you can cook up kale and fresh garlic with it. you can throw eggplant in it. it has no additives and it has a subtle yet potent smoky flavor, and a deceptive from-scratch freshness.

ah, well! like the idea of the olive garden, i don't mind partaking in general mills. it has that air of middle-america kink to it; for when you are a native new yorker, especially a native manhattanite, middle america is as exotic--more exotic, much more exotic--than the amazon.

by the way, eating healthy has NOTHING to do with being a native new yorker or a native manhattanite. one of my best friends i grew up with probably has a special general mills blood type from eating so much general mills. and you will find many people who live in new york who are not from new york who are in williamsburg making artisanal pickles, they are NOT from new york. they are very weird. i feel like the tragic mulatto - i don't get the middle americans who come to new york as tourists, and i don't get their kids who come here to be artisanal. i mean they are very interesting and all.

great article about an article about this phenomenon, good synopsis. lol-worthy. ach!

by the way i ate a lot of THESE as a kid:



thank you, crotchrot, for posting. :-D

* actually, TMNT cereal was made by ralston-purina but i just felt like mentioning.

uuu

romanian indie brand chou chou. these shoes are 190 lei ($63.54303 U.S. dollars). beautiful and reasonably priced too.