Vanguard Artist Living Situations Redux

In the latest of a series of articles making me want to puke, the NYT has a perfectly precious article about white artists moving to Bushwick and forming "combines," which is somehow different from both a commune and harvesting a grain crop using a cutting, threshing, and cleaning machine. "This kid put a box cutter to my throat right on the corner out here," [Aaron Nauta] said. "I gave him $9 and my credit card. I tried to tell him that he doesn't have to do what he's doing, and the kid actually apologized as he was walking away with my money." These young white people have moved into an old schoolhouse on the fringes of the L line to pursue the dream of a sustainable artist lifestyle. "A friend told me that real estate agents in the city have a term for us: risk-oblivious youth," Mr. Bitar said. "They say we're the precursors to the gentrifiers, and that makes us all ill at ease. But it's true that we're mostly white, and we're all college-educated. We all have some level of luxury." The article also tells us that the inhabitants "put in hours that would shame a first-year law associate," although we get little proof of it, mainly the inhabitants just seem to shuffle in and out of a makeshift kitchen and smoke cigarettes. They have a performance space into which the audience trickles in for an experimental sound manipulation show. Yippy. I'm moving into a great place in Fort Greene in a few weeks and I'll have a real and renovated apartment with kitchen, bedroom, a very large upstairs office and spacious backyard and I'll be paying the same as these kids living in crapola land and I'll also throw sound manipulation parties (read: dancey party good times). I'm sick of the telling of this apprently evergreen story. It's like getting excited about the forest. Did you know that saplings are growing on the eastern slope, where all those burned stumps are? Yes, it's a natural process called ecological succesion where the grasses grow among the stumps, small bushes grow, then saplings, then big trees, then they get old and fall down and there's a fire and you have stumps. It's the urban ecosystem, get over it.

Comments

[john]

This has to be the best rant I've heard in a while. Fucking Fabulous!