Wednesday, January 21, 2009

one more thing

i used 'you' a lot, but that doesn't refer to you, necessarily. it is a theoretical you. i apologize for using as examples names of people that we know. i am not implicating them in anything. it's all just friendly speculation.
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2 comments:

  1. dmgrovesJanuary 22, 2009 at 9:45 AM

    Well, despite my toothless grin, this argument left me ages ago - my original (and only) point was simply that Justin Smith wrote a stupid post about Montreal and therefore might be an anus, something you agree with. I never accused New Yorkers of being out of touch with reality (I did say they have a habit of looking at the world and comparing it to New York unfavourably), nor did I say that choosing to be identified as a New Yorker automatically makes you one. What I did was infer, based on what was written in his article, that he was a New Yorker, and go from there. I realize it is purely speculative to assume that because he declares himself a New Yorker he is, but I don't know how we can prove he isn't one either. You say it's because "his fetishizing of the city is the distinctive mark of the outsider"; I think it's entirely possible for someone to live in a city and be a citizen and still talk it up like crazy. More generally, you're making a distinction between real New Yorkers and fake ones - real ones are just hustlin' to get by, fake ones are there for the museums or Sex in the City. I don't disagree that the image of New York is potent enough that people will make it part of their identity even if it really isn't, but the line you're drawing in the sand here is pretty curmudgeonly. People have very very complicated relationships with where they live/have lived. I give Calgary a (deservedly) hard time a lot of the time, for example, but I do miss it, and even though I don't live there anymore when people ask me I say I'm Calgarian.

    Anyway, I liked the long post and I find identity and globalization fascinating, I just feel you may have extrapolated a lot more out of what I was saying than what I was saying. I want my teeth back.

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  2. lionieJanuary 22, 2009 at 10:08 AM

    i'm going to distance myself from any gross overcaricaturing of anyone. justin smith is a twat because, as someone who lives in harlem and studied at columbia, he is quite removed from the daily lives of the eight-and-a-half million other people who do not do these things. it's one thing to move to brownsville, commute to work with everyone, buy your groceries at the gristedes and not think too much about new york. it's a very different thing to go to one of the most august academic institutions in the world and live in what is the equivalent of the student ghetto. would you say that a torontonian living on milton and prince arthur was a montrealer, the same as a french kid born in ahuntsic? if you do, that's a preanalytic choice on your part to use geography as a rather sweeping measurement. for me, class has everything to do with this, and it doesn't have to be represented as crudely as rap slang and bad television. people in queens don't hustle anything. most are comfortably middle class. still, to me, i identify them as a local and as a 'new yorker', not because it comes loaded with connotations of badness or hard knocks, but simply because they earned it. it's really, in the end, a matter of fairness, an issue i should've touched on in my post. if anybody can call themselves anything based on what they 'feel', then very concrete, factual qualities about them--where they were born, for instance--have no meaning.

    i'll amend my earlier comment about how obvious is was to me that he wasn't from new york to say that, once again, throwing class into the mix complicates things. i know that despite how well-read or intelligent my friends are or are not, they would never come up with the kind of statements that he made. i have, however, heard that kind of drivel out of a lot of people who've taken up residence in new york, and in particular a lot of people who've come for the scene. to me, that kind of fetish is, once again, indicative of a strong obsession with image. when i outlined just what it was like to live in the city i did so to illustrate that at no point in time do people sit around thinking about just how awesome it is to be there. that's why it's easy to tell a local from an outsider: a local doesn't think about the place in relation to anything, because a local doesn't think about the stuff around them as being discrete. if you're somewhere for your whole life it is the universe. it doesn't make you feel 'metaphysically grounded', or whatever the phrase was, when compared to another place, because there are no other places in your imagination. only when you have some kind of freedom to move--only, in other words, when you're exposed to some kind of affluence--does that sort of differentiation enter your reality and change your perceptions of the local space.

    also, there is no way in the world that anybody at columbia university, or any private university, gets to have their thoughts represent new york. fewer than 25% of new yorkers have even accessed tertiary education. it's a class thing.

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