For about 5 years or so I spent a great deal of time travelling the states by a variety of methods. That was nearly a decade ago. Perhaps it's refracted through the lens of youthful idealism, but what I remembered was vibrant; troubled like any nation, but despite my inherent misanthropy and pessimism, there was a sense of endless wonder. Like I could travel forever and just stop somewhere for a little while and explore whenever the mood struck me.
What I saw of the country this time around was practically frightening. Large swathes of the land, even cities or suburban areas I've seen numerous times were either ghost towns, pitted with or comprised entirely of abandoned, decaying buildings and overgrown plots of land, or cities that mostly seemed either split down the middle with clearly defined areas of wealth and poverty, or cities that looked straight up on the brink of financial collapse.
Nowhere was I so shocked at this stark change of climes as I was in NYC. Bushwick was... full of fucking hipsters, and I could literally smell the American Apparel hounds circling, just waiting for all the monied people to move in so they could then price out the hipsters and what was left of the people of color and build a bunch of luxury condos. I saw this in other cities, but The City is MY city. I was born there. I may have spent most of my youth in it's mountainous backyard (aka, the Poconos), but New York runs through my veins as sure as the dwindling street hustlers, Rockaway Beach, downtown before The Great Cleansing, that shitty roller coaster at Coney Island, pizza, Times Square at Christmas, pizza...
Seriously, fuck this thing.
I moved when I was six, and I only sporadically made it back for family gatherings and the occasional uh... "recreational substances" purchase later on in my young adult life. That never stopped NYC from being my home in my heart, and I never stopped admiring the fierce, independent, artistic, working class social melting pot that city stood for. Birthplace of No-Wave, Hip Hop, co-author of Punk and Death Metal and a million stops in between... I don't know maybe I'm waxing romantic. For better or worse, New York is a very, very big part of who I am as a person.
So it saddens me greatly when I read something like this:
https://np.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/2ryxv2/reshaping_new_york_from_buildings_to_bike_lanes/cnkpcec
(For those unfamiliar with reddit, the link at the very top of the page with the thumbnail next to it is a link submitted by a reddit user, shared for the consideration of the rest of the userbase. All the posts below it are comments and discussion regarding the original link. In this case, the link to the NY Times article at the top of the reddit page should be visited for maximum comprehension of the comment displayed beneath it.)
Not just because it literally pains me to watch my city being dismantled by corporate hagfish, but because a comment mentioned later in the reddit comment section about "national economic trends of de-industrialisation and financialisation" is unequivocally true, and the country that I also love is being further divided into a kind of modern feudalism by which it will be ever increasingly harder to escape the crushing trappings of poverty and crime unless you're either born into, or magically ascend to the domain of the wealthy elite.
As far as I can see, there is no cure for this. Money and special interest rule the land, and maybe not tomorrow, but in some foreseeable next week, we'll be a nation of homogenised, rich white people, littered with the detritus of our criminal poor, while the handful of the middle class that manages to hold on desperately tries to climb the economic ladder in an effort to escape the bought and paid for media scaremongering of the growing "poverty menace."
It's not a future I look forward to. Much as I love touring, it's also a very heavy sense of foreboding that tempered much of the enjoyment of the gloriously bohemian fix for my insatiable wanderlust that playing live music in a different city every night provides.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope digital fabrication matures quickly and becomes commonplace, and steals the thunder of laissez faire capitalism before it sucks us all into a black hole of binary social economic order. We'll probably bomb ourselves into new and unimagined realms of primitivity before that happens though, so I guess that's something to look forward to.
https://np.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/2ryxv2/reshaping_new_york_from_buildings_to_bike_lanes/cnkpcec
(For those unfamiliar with reddit, the link at the very top of the page with the thumbnail next to it is a link submitted by a reddit user, shared for the consideration of the rest of the userbase. All the posts below it are comments and discussion regarding the original link. In this case, the link to the NY Times article at the top of the reddit page should be visited for maximum comprehension of the comment displayed beneath it.)
Not just because it literally pains me to watch my city being dismantled by corporate hagfish, but because a comment mentioned later in the reddit comment section about "national economic trends of de-industrialisation and financialisation" is unequivocally true, and the country that I also love is being further divided into a kind of modern feudalism by which it will be ever increasingly harder to escape the crushing trappings of poverty and crime unless you're either born into, or magically ascend to the domain of the wealthy elite.
As far as I can see, there is no cure for this. Money and special interest rule the land, and maybe not tomorrow, but in some foreseeable next week, we'll be a nation of homogenised, rich white people, littered with the detritus of our criminal poor, while the handful of the middle class that manages to hold on desperately tries to climb the economic ladder in an effort to escape the bought and paid for media scaremongering of the growing "poverty menace."
It's not a future I look forward to. Much as I love touring, it's also a very heavy sense of foreboding that tempered much of the enjoyment of the gloriously bohemian fix for my insatiable wanderlust that playing live music in a different city every night provides.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope digital fabrication matures quickly and becomes commonplace, and steals the thunder of laissez faire capitalism before it sucks us all into a black hole of binary social economic order. We'll probably bomb ourselves into new and unimagined realms of primitivity before that happens though, so I guess that's something to look forward to.
And here I thought it'd be at least a month before I broke my New Year's resolution to be more positive.
i've never been to those places before and i felt something similar to what you talk about here. it would be naïve of me to go to NY and think i'm going to walk into 'taxi driver' or 'midnight cowboy' but i wasn't expecting it to feel just like modern seattle and brooklyn to feel like fucking NE alberta. progress is supposed to be good. but progress and homogenization seem tio have become confused somewhere along the line and that's a bad thing. it's bizarre how so many people think that a monoculture would be ideal because we'd all be the same and all prejudice would disappear. it seems like that's the slow-coming result of multiculturalism. i'm not saying segregation is a good idea, but everyone adopting everyone else's culture makes it all grey instead of a vibrant mass of different characters all co-existing.
ReplyDeleteIt's not so much monoculture, as it's the fact that corporate sponsored monoculture is a byproduct of de-industrialisation and financialisation. Where our biggest industry is, in fact, business, or the business of financing business, and all the labor is outsourced overseas, so the poor get poorer and the rich the richer until we end up like all those dystopian novels warned us we'd turn out. Cultural divides are still firmly in place for everyone but the people at the top trying to sell everything to everyone. Monoculture is an illusion perpetrated by the monied entertainment industry. Yes, it's perfectly possible to be a functioning artist at the highest levels of the industry, but for every Radiohead, there's a million My Darkest Days or a Ke$ha's. Wholly manufactured acts geared specifically to appeal to as many disposable income groups as possible. There's a reason why mainstream Rap, Country, R&B and Pop all sound like techno fusion rejects that got shat out of the toilet at a 4AM rave in 2003. It's because that particular kind of melodically innocuous electronic music has been popular for quite some time, and shows no demographic reason to slow down. It's homogenised non-dairy Milk® beverage that everyone, even infants can swallow, so it's pumped to the four corners of the globe in an effort to turn a profit.
ReplyDelete