M A N H A T T A N I T E

The raison detra of this brand has always been discussing things in too much detail that not even all the people reading cared that much about. If we give the keys to Foster at any point, he would probably breathlessly describe this mode of writing as some variant of a ‘high wire act’ because bloggers love nothing more than investing unearned drama into literally the most insipid and lazy form of journalism ever invented. Anyhoo, this is has been a pretty stock opening (give us some slack, it’s been years) so let’s get to the thing: earlier this week, we were graced with a deep dive on the D.

[We also specialized in the parenthetical aside – I’m pleased to know that even though Ozone Park probably has an axe throwing goat’s milk chocolatier, somehow Avenue D still hasn’t come up enough in the world to be worthy of a pithy Lockhart Steele web presence noted gastropub. For years, I had been yammering on about how I wanted to open the first hipster bar on Ave D — back when the idea of going to Williamsburg was still acceptably absurd — and name it ‘D-List’. One night I mentioned this to John Carney, who literally took out his phone and called Sasha Petraske to share this clearly brilliant idea. Note that very little of this aside has aged well, but you can’t really ask drinking acquaintances if they intend to turn out to be fascists or gropers now can you?]

The dive is fine for what it is, aside from the horror of realizing that so much of it is devoted to explaining, you know, 2008. And it contained this observation: “This was the late 2000s, remember, not a time of deep self-reflection in which we were collectively interrogating a historically patriarchal discourse. Most of us just kind of went along with it; Perez Hilton was our pop cultural id.” For the life of me I cannot tell if this is ironic or not.

I’m sure there is some kind of yells at cloud sort of scale I am placing myself on by both: 1. being honestly confused, and 2. investing energy in trying to determine what the various poles represent, yells at cloud wise. I mean, I was out of short pants in 2008 and I don’t remember that much ‘boys will be boys’ shrugging at Perez Hilton (though any survey of the YM archives pretty much indicts us as swimming in the sea of arch, snarky detachment that excused a lot of tendentious stylings). 

I do profess ignorance to the gradations in gossip blogging. I readily admit to dismissing the whole enterprise as grubby — or more finely, not of my particulars, since I think the overall project of gossip blogging creates a pretty big venn overlaps with haus style — and that pretty much is because of the sploogy diccs Perez was so fond of. That’s an underbaked justification for a wholesale GIGO stance, but whatever complex or interesting sociological arguments you can make for gossip, I’m just going to be honest and say I personally discount most of them filtered through the lens of celebrity journalism.

As this not take wends inevitably to a mushy big picture conclusion (and some struggling yells at clouds wise trying to sort out if glib iconoclasm is still a viable sosh medians stance), I’m mostly mulling over things like generational rifts at appearing at ever tightening intervals, and the kids doing their own thing is just fine, but along with every other ignominy that mortality visits upon us, trying to re-calibrate the intervals at which I need to adjust my sight lines is another invitation to crawl deeper into a shell girded by a collection of 70s vinyl. Man, this just really limped home.