Zombie Cuddle: The Zombiecuddle Guide to a Vacation →
2. Set email auto-reply to “Fuck outta here, indefinitely” or similar.
A friend of mine works at an elementary school in California; this was the background of a computer she got working today for the first time in months. Youth is so precious.
“Always use the same sad Morrissey photo” is a strange editorial house rule, but I’m into it.
I wrote about The Source Family and the wild music they made for Noisey. This was fun to watch & think about.
In the first high school English course I ever took, my teacher downgraded an essay I wrote about Lord of the Flies because I’d ventured an explanation alternate to the one she’d provided in class. “There’s one answer,” she said when I complained, “and you didn’t write about it.” I thought that was garbage, and was happier a few years later when a more advanced teacher told us that we could read anything we wanted into a piece of work, as long as it was supported by the text. If the evidence was there, then you could claim whatever. The Cherry Tree is about socialism! Hamlet is about incest! etc.
Easy enough when we’re talking about a single piece of literature. But in today’s world of online think piecing, the same methodology has extended past the work and into the ephemeral. We’re reading Tweets, interviews, GIFs, SNL appearances, collaborations, non-collaborations, and so much more as part of the work. Fair, and that’s maybe how things are, but I see that increasingly parceled with armchair psychology that claims, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is what person X is claiming or intending when the answer is still that there is no real answer. We’re still providing our individual readings, only there’s infinitely more material to consider—which should make everyone more doubtful of congealed narrative as it is, but instead, de facto endorsement of incomplete/flawed analyses is whipped up even quicker whenever they pass the smell test for plausible credibility. An echo chamber of people saying “THIS” instead of going back and forth—or, when they do, quickly devolving into shouting over privilege or ignorance or whatever.
I’m generalizing a lot and I’m not referring to any one specific thing, but the race to be right seems stupider/more misguided than ever now that the parameters are much more expansive; at some point, you can’t claim to be so sure without lying a little to both yourself and the audience.
J.J. Abrams, blah blah blah, but gimme a whole movie made of this and I’ll never Tumble again.
“What the hell is water?” Chris Pine wonders as he swims on by, his big dumb handsome blubberfish of a face gaping and contracting every time he’s forced to emote in the new Star Trek. When Chris Pine cries, he looks like someone having an allergic reaction; when Chris Pine yells, he looks like someone trying to convince you they are a real goddamn actor by acting the shit out of whatever monologue you’re uncomfortably watching. It’s just painful to watch him go head-to-head with Benedict Cumberbatch, who is so far beyond the rest of the cast and knows how to inflect his Khan with the right blend of steely menace and wide-eyed savagery, each line a time-delayed nervous tic; compare with Pine’s tossed off yokel and it’s like, I don’t know, Tim Duncan giving Boogie Cousins a master class in post play and getting steady frustrated because the younger guy just doesn’t get it. Beauty and no brains is no match for the real thing.
McKibben Lofts. Bushwick, Brooklyn. $800.00
ad describes room as “Terrarium”
Toward the end of 2010 I moved into a McKibben room just like this, only the bed—which was just a mattress—was on top, with the desk & everything else underneath. There was no overhead light, just a lamp that illuminated the underspace—I’d purchased a long cable to run along the ceiling pipes so I could hang a light, but abandoned this when I inadvertently shattered the bulb via sleep kicking. It was a hole. I paid $850 a month plus utilities, which was juked a little because the roommate who’d been in the apartment for three years was charging herself a lot less.
I loved it, though. Bushwick was well past the “taking off” point, but not so clotted that we couldn’t get a table at Roberta’s at dinnertime whenever we were carrying enough paycheck money to justify Roberta’s at dinnertime. A group of great friends lived upstairs, so we’d hang out all the time drinking cheap beer and playing NBA Jam on the Wii before heading off to some local adventure—a gallery opening in a repurposed warehouse, a New Year’s Eve party where Ariel Pink played and was so bad I couldn’t stop laughing about it. When the weather got nicer we’d head to the spacious roof to get stoned and enjoy the view, because the building was tall enough that we could see the entirety of Brooklyn and Manhattan sprawled out before us. Whenever I got upset about how much money I was paying to live in such a dark divot of a room, I’d remember how much fun I was having in this neighborhood surrounded by these people and how that was better than having floor space.
What I mean is that such holes are supposed to be a foothold to somewhere else, and that you’ve got to be able to make what you can out of what you have. Yes, it’s obscene to pay as much for a space like this as you would for an entire two bedroom in Pilsen, but this Tumblr is missing a bit of the point—that you’re paying for the right of living in New York, which, all platitudes aside, offers something unique if you’re capable of taking advantage. I’m still in the process of figuring that out, but I know that being here at this moment has opened up a lot of possibilities that wouldn’t have happened elsewhere. Fun and floor space aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you prioritize the latter, accept that you might need to consider a different city—one whose financial realities sound less obscene when spoken out loud.
Sorry but I really LOL when I see that “the privilege of living in New York” bullshit.
Well, especially since we’re not even talking about “the privilege of living in New York” — we’re talking about the privilege of living in a particularly trendy building in a hip neighborhood. The options aren’t “pay $850 to live in a room that’s so small you have to stack all your shit above your bed” or “don’t live in New York.” Believe me, you can be a young person and have a great young-person experience in New York (in Brooklyn, even!) without having to make that choice.
No shit. Plus, rhapsodic as the above description of McKibben Lofts lifestyle (or whatever) might be, what it basically boils down to is, “I delighted in living like a college student well into my 20s.”
…which, if that’s what you enjoy doing, then that’s entirely your decision, no? I currently live in a rather pleasant loft two blocks south of McKibbin (for $780 a month), I have a lofted bed and a decent amount of space, and I’m 35 next week. If that means I’m living like a college student, so be it. I like it here.
Reblogged for Tom’s commentary.
And yeah, you can find places for a LITTLE less, say the $650 I was paying to live in a basement in a legitimately terrifying part of Bed Stuy when I first moved here.
This is my take: not everyone wants the same things, or has the same goals. Some people want to get a job that pays a salary of $50 k, $100 k, whatever, and move to a nice neighborhood and have a nice apartment that’s always spotless and has cute decorations and can contain a big collection of stuff. That’s one goal. My goal right now is to try to live in a way that allows me to experience as many interesting things as I can, and to see what the possibilities are outside of the materialistic/capitalistic goals that have foisted on us our whole lives. Obviously there’s no easy way to live in this city morally - anywhere “cheap” you move in NYC you will probably be part of a gentrifying force. But I feel like condescending to people because they enjoy living a different lifestyle to you is pretty narrow minded.
<— Edited for grumpiness. Of course you can live in other neighborhoods that aren’t Bushwick; of course you can have fun without being a junior alcoholic; of course there’s a spectrum of possibility in between the binaries I laid out; of course I enjoyed living like a college student right after I’d graduated college for a period of 9 months, at which point I moved to a roach-infested room that was close to the city and a little cheaper. I was trying to say something specific about my experience and what I got from it, and of the air of privilege in a Tumblr that mostly posts rooms from hotly trafficked, happening neighborhoods with subtextual indignation that they’re not the apartments dreams are made of because if you only want to pay $700 to live in the East Village of course you’re getting a couch. (This is the only price/room correlation that really makes no sense, considering I know you can find much better rooms in that neighborhood for less money.) If you simply want to live here, then there are tons of cheaper places in fine neighborhoods where you won’t be living in a shoebox; I have friends who live in Crown Heights, South Slope, Ridgewood, Astoria, Washington Heights, etc., who pay less than I do now to live in gorgeous spaces at the expense of having to commute a little more. We’re not talking about families trying to figure out where to raise their kids; I live in my own bubble, yes, but literally everyone I have seen sharing this Tumblr is either a young figuring out where to live or an old glad they don’t have to put up with this shit anymore. Unless you have unlimited capital then you’re going to have to sacrifice something—”sacrifice” being the best word I have—no matter where you live (and yes, I consider it a privilege to be able to live somewhere that costs so much; please do not make me break down every single thing that must break right in order for a young to live here). I was just offering a “rhapsodic” memory of how I was able to make the most of that situation. Sorry about that!
McKibben Lofts. Bushwick, Brooklyn. $800.00
ad describes room as “Terrarium”
Toward the end of 2010 I moved into a McKibben room just like this, only the bed—which was just a mattress—was on top, with the desk & everything else underneath. There was no overhead light, just a lamp that illuminated the underspace—I’d purchased a long cable to run along the ceiling pipes so I could hang a light, but abandoned this when I inadvertently shattered the bulb via sleep kicking. It was a hole. I paid $850 a month plus utilities, which was juked a little because the roommate who’d been in the apartment for three years was charging herself a lot less.
I loved it, though. Bushwick was well past the “taking off” point, but not so clotted that we couldn’t get a table at Roberta’s at dinnertime whenever we were carrying enough paycheck money to justify Roberta’s at dinnertime. A group of great friends lived upstairs, so we’d hang out all the time drinking cheap beer and playing NBA Jam on the Wii before heading off to some local adventure—a gallery opening in a repurposed warehouse, a New Year’s Eve party where Ariel Pink played and was so bad I couldn’t stop laughing about it. When the weather got nicer we’d head to the spacious roof to get stoned and enjoy the view, because the building was tall enough that we could see the entirety of Brooklyn and Manhattan sprawled out before us. Whenever I got upset about how much money I was paying to live in such a dark divot of a room, I’d remember how much fun I was having in this neighborhood surrounded by these people and how that was better than having floor space.
What I mean is that such holes are supposed to be a foothold to somewhere else, and that you’ve got to be able to make what you can out of what you have. Yes, it’s obscene to pay as much for a space like this as you would for an entire two bedroom in Pilsen, but this Tumblr is missing a bit of the point—that you’re paying for the right of living in New York, which, all platitudes aside, offers something unique if you’re capable of taking advantage. I’m still in the process of figuring that out, but I know that being here at this moment has opened up a lot of possibilities that wouldn’t have happened elsewhere. Fun and floor space aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you prioritize the latter, accept that you might need to consider a different city—one whose financial realities sound less obscene when spoken out loud.
