Beat on the Brats with a Baseball Bat

This article is a little old (from May of this year), but one of the kids at work asked me about the infamous Bushwick dormitory, McKibbin Lofts, this morning, and I saw it as my solemn duty to do some research and convince her that it was indeed a whitey scourge ghetto, a deeply uncool, irrationally self-important cesspool of Midwestern transplant filth. Unfortunately, the author of this Times profile, while making it clear that the living is unsanitary, does, in her own loserlyness, give these dummies too much credit--"This could have been Greenwich Village 60 years ago, or SoHo 30 years ago, or the East Village in the 1990s." Hardly! And SoHo in the 70s is a family matter. I take it personally. Plus, it's just really lame and boring to be constantly referencing New York's past in fumbling toward a future (or present even). Granted, I've been posting a bit about 1992; I think all of the time about New York poets of the 50s and 60s; I am nuts about Gordon Matta Clark's FOOD, and, for that matter, my beautiful parents who ate there and lived beautifully and had beautiful babies. It is our generation's strong suit, deconstructing and repackaging recent history. But pretending that you're recreating the Factory is not being a historian or a nostalgia-ist--it's just being an egotist (and an uncreative, sad-sack one at that). Plus, NO TELEVISION??!!