what new york looks like

Leo

Well-known member
When I visited Toko's future home, Oxford, I was struck by the way the entire town had been colonized by gift shops selling Oxford merch, Harry Potter chess sets, memorabilia of famous Oxfordians, etc. And of course Midtown NYC is the same way, every street has a gift shop selling Statue of Liberty magnets, I <3 NY postcards, snowglobes with the Empire State Building, button pins with Banksy reproductions. Every city's tourism economy acts as the propaganda engine for its host, but the overtness & saturation & self-consciousness of the branding undermines that brand (and the authenticity of the entire city) for its local denizens.

thankfully it's relegated to a couple of tourist areas, Times Sq/midtown and WTC.
 

sufi

lala
some of the best food here is inexpensive, what some call peasant food, from various cultures around the world who have settled here. low-key neighborhood places that don't get written about or featured on IG. yes, there are plenty of silly restaurants and pretentious foodies, but there's so much more to enjoy.
yeah my point was just that it is unlike other parts of US


When I visited Toko's future home, Oxford, I was struck by the way the entire town had been colonized by gift shops selling Oxford merch, Harry Potter chess sets, memorabilia of famous Oxfordians, etc. And of course Midtown NYC is the same way, every street has a gift shop selling Statue of Liberty magnets, I <3 NY postcards, snowglobes with the Empire State Building, button pins with Banksy reproductions. Every city's tourism economy acts as the propaganda engine for its host, but the overtness & saturation & self-consciousness of the branding undermines that brand (and the authenticity of the entire city) for its local denizens.

That's the "overbrand" which is consumed unironically by cruise ship boomers, middle-aged Midwesterners, people who call it "the Big Apple" without hint of irony. There is also the "underbrand" which is what you seem more to be referencing—the water tanks above all the brick buildings; the brownstones; the dirty subway system. The grimy parts of New York that artists romanticize, that makes you think of Pati Smith and Basquiat.

London has really bad "overbrand" cultural icons btw—the Tube logo, Ol' Britannia LARPing, the red double-decker buses, Big Ben, it's all so dumb-looking. It makes even the flag seem cartoonish and silly—the "Union Jack," even the name feels corny, it's hard to believe this was once an empire that ruled over significant portions of the world. Unbridled power to pure camp in a hundred years flat.
did you read that Atlantic article?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
That's the "overbrand" which is consumed unironically by cruise ship boomers, middle-aged Midwesterners, people who call it "the Big Apple" without hint of irony. There is also the "underbrand" which is what you seem more to be referencing—the water tanks above all the brick buildings; the brownstones; the dirty subway system. The grimy parts of New York that artists romanticize, that makes you think of Pati Smith and Basquiat.

Washington too in a more concentrated form, National Mall, MD Ave, Georgetown, Dupont Circ
 
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sus

Well-known member
I do like the new avi though, it feels like an NPC in a Pynchon vidya game, this goofy anthropologist traipsing around in banana republics
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
This was another thing I noticed about Oxford, and probably most older cities/towns by extension. The lack of text pollution is wild. In New York especially, there's a thousand literal signs and messages on every city block all trying to get your attention, all screaming out to you. In Oxford there were just quiet stone building facades, decorative sometimes but the text kept to a bare minimum—maybe an engraved plaque here or there, a building name etched in stone above the entrance, but you could walk a hundred yards with little else to read. NYC has the same cluttered text aesthetic (and the same anarchist mishmash of aesthetics, styles, design visions) that the web has.
Oxford, along with a few other places such as, I dunno, Chester, maybe York I dunno, is one of those ones where the laws make it slightly harder to cover every single space with advertising and stuff. It's weird when you get a McDonalds or something in some building that has a listed facade and they're not allowed to do what they usually do and put their identikit bland signage on it. They have to kinda compromise and you get some strange olde worlde looking MaccyDs.
 

luka

Well-known member
This point is always worth making though

Yet it was also far more multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational than the resorts for the middle classes where we spent most of our time during the rest of our trip—more upscale places where the food and wine is better and the conversation sounds more like Twitter, but the reality is far more exclusive and monocultural.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've only got one friend who hasn't got out of the craft beer phase and it's no coincidence that he is the one with a pathological horror of the working class. They disgust him.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I've only got one friend who hasn't got out of the craft beer phase and it's no coincidence that he is the one with a pathological horror of the working class. They disgust him.
In your paradigm, what succeeds the craft beer phase? A metamodern preference for macrobreweries?
 

sufi

lala
This point is always worth making though

Yet it was also far more multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational than the resorts for the middle classes where we spent most of our time during the rest of our trip—more upscale places where the food and wine is better and the conversation sounds more like Twitter, but the reality is far more exclusive and monocultural.
yeah i thought of your recent experiences in that bit
 
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