Williamsburg, which our nation's greatest newspaper has scientifically determined to be the only neighborhood in New York City that really matters, is responsible for the invention of the swimming pool, the cocktail party, and the man bun. What will the hip young creatives in this hot and happening area give to society next?
Psychotherapist Lynne Rosen and her boyfriend, John Littig, who together hosted WBAI-FM's "Pursuit of Happiness" program, were found dead in their Park Slope apartment of an apparent suicide late Monday night. The New York Post reports that the couple appeared to have suffocated themselves with plastic bags.
Martin Amis, who moved to Brooklyn two years ago, apparently hates it: "[H]e views the Brooklyn hipster scene as populated by conventional posers," a source tells the Evening Standard. "He doesn’t go out as much as he did and has developed a reputation as a curmudgeon." Sounds like he's fitting right in!
Almost one year to the day of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch's May 4 passing, Yauch's friends, family, and fans gathered in Brooklyn this morning to officially rechristen Palmetto Playground as Adam Yauch Park.
O, Coney Island Mermaid Parade! You are a motley procession of tacky body paint and beautifully protruding guts and cheese-puddle fries and broken bath toys (and boobies). You are the only summer Saturday afternoon when it's even remotely tolerable to be stabbed with elbows and suffocated among a burnt-skin throng of ogling strangers, because you are so weird and wild and loud and ridiculous (and there are boobies). You have created so many memories for New Yorkers and tourists and children (and boobies). And now, you are in danger of cancelling your festivities (and your boobies).
Fans of Biggie will remember that the late but relentlessly beloved rap icon often remarked on his hardscrabble younger years in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he grew up in an apartment with a single mother. Now, 41 years after Christopher Wallace was born, and 16 years after he was murdered, the Notorious BIG's childhood home is up for sale. But things, it would appear, "done changed" since Biggie lived there.
I used to fantasize about leaving the front door open for hours so that my roommate's obese cat who shed incessantly would muster enough energy to escape. And I often thought, "It would be much easier to make her life miserable if she had a fish that I could just flush down the toilet." That's a lie, but it's exactly what 47-year-old Brooklyn man, Jose Santiago allegedly did.
It's not just that you don't have anything interesting to say about Brooklyn; we don't have anything interesting to say about Brooklyn. Neither blogs, nor magazines, nor newspapers, nor serious academic thinkers, nor urban planners, nor philosophers, nor international jet-setters, nor fashion mavens, nor foodies, nor social theorists have anything interesting to say about Brooklyn. Neither wide-eyed outsiders, nor wry, self-loathing insiders have anything interesting to say about Brooklyn. Neither griping native Brooklynites nor dewy recent transplants have anything interesting to say about Brooklyn. And—it should go without saying—the glossy, luxury ad-laden fashion magazine insert of the New York Times does not have anything interesting to say about Brooklyn.
Saturday night, undercover NYPD officers opened fire on and killed Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old resident of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. While reports of what exactly happened vary, the NYPD said the plainclothes officers approached a group of men at 11:30 pm, at which point Gray split from the group and reached for his belt in a "suspicious manner." After police reportedly asked to see his hands, the two officers said Gray turned and pointed a .38 pistol at them. The officers then fired 11 rounds at Gray, striking him several times. Gray was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. The .38 recovered at the scene was never fired.
Yesterday, when Williamsburg revealed its designs for the old Domino sugar factory site, people marveled at the gleaming new towers planned for the waterfront, or, more specifically, the giant gaping holes planned inside them. If solid buildings were the past, empty space-buildings are the future. Everything seemed very cool and neat and, at the end of the day, who doesn't love sugar so what were we talking about?
The Domino Sugar Factory is a big old abandoned factory by the Williamsburg bridge. Soon, the Domino Sugar Factory will be a virtual forest of gleaming new condos rentals and office buildings including not just one, but two huge towers with holes in the middle of them. "This has the opportunity to be what new Brooklyn says to the world," said the project's architect. And what the new Brooklyn says to the world is, "It is now easier than ever for the financiers who will soon make up the bulk of the residents of Williamsburg's waterfront to land their hovercrafts inside of their be-holed condominium tower."
Dov Hikind is the asshole New York assemblyman representing District 48, a swath of concrete in Brooklyn that includes Midwood and Borough Park, a famous Orthodox Jewish enclave in the borough's southwest quadrant. Hikind is an Orthodox Jew himself. To celebrate Purim this year, marking the deliverance of the Jewish people from extermination in ancient Persia, Hikind threw an elaborate costume party. Hikind's wife dressed as a red-faced demon and his son painted a yin-yang symbol on his face, reportedly to look like an "angel." And Hikind himself, the 62-year-old elected representative from one of the world's most diverse cities? Why, he went as a basketball player, in Afro and blackface, of course.
The Sunday Styles section of the New York Times exists to make folks mad, to be sure (and to sell handbag ads), but it is not really worth getting mad about this past weekend's paired section-front irritants—a profile of BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, and a trend piece about people forsaking Brooklyn to hipsterize towns in the Hudson Valley—at least not at face value. Each hits the obvious flabbergasting or infuriating notes as it is designed to: OMG LOL BuzzFeed b/w Aren't Hipsters Awful. As far as the intentional content goes, there's nothing to do but roll one's eyes and move on. Let's go ahead and do that, shall we? First BuzzFeedBen:
