rebutts

i'll make this short, sweet, and point-focused. as we have all been trained to believe since infancy, generalizations are bad things that often leave out many exceptions. what i was doing was describing a mindset that appeared in a trend. that it is a trend is unmistakable. here's a government report that will tell you all about kids moving out of suburbs and going to cities. do you think that's because they like the schools or how safe the neighborhoods are? no, it's a generational thing: cities are cool, now, and cool is a very complex qualification based heavily on worldliness and disaffection (i know that is a radical oversimplification, though not, i think, a distortion). the only reason cities could be cool is if the people who were imagining them thought that the places they were already in were not. the same is true for people who live in some cities who want to go to others.

the way that you describe yourself, sarah, is not like the people i am describing in my post, and not, i think, like the majority of people who end up moving to bigger, more glamorous places. you love everywhere you've ever lived. how can someone argue with that? zak, however, hates calgary, along with most of the people i've met who grew up there; and, almost to a t, the people i know who've moved to new york, inside or outside school, premised their relocation story with "i come from a shitty, boring place which is shitty and boring for reasons x and y." the very aesthetic of the modern, 'international' city should be enough to satisfy any doubts about the zeitgeist of urban migration: fast, heavily commercialized, high in the type of sanitized and deradicalized cultural activity that fits well on walls and friday nights, and self-obsessed. to punch the last tooth out of dave's mouth, the reason why a man like jason smith is not representative of new york (i.e. is not a new yorker) is because his fetishizing of the city is the distinctive mark of the outsider. people in new york do not talk about new york like it is a thing. that's why there are so few blogs run by new yorkers and so many run about new york. the same, i'm sure, is true of montreal or other attractive cities. image informs it, regardless of where your particular metaphor came from television, the movies, eric b & rakim tapes or the orthodox jewish man that you so obsessively follow down the street. remember, to the man, there's nothing special about being an orthodox jew, nor is there anything special about it to his neighbors who've known him for x number of years. it's only a thing when it's part of an image, and image, i think, is something acquired in a very particular setting, one that is somewhat claustrophobic and oversaturated with simplistic information, and therefore ripe for developing obsessions.