Hot Art

thursday day 5

In New York, there's no jumping from AC cloud to AC cloud, avoiding the heat in monster SUVs, taking bites of your Whataburger at intermittent stop signs. The idea of the city forces you to reckon with the outside world-- the heat, the people... It's all about sweet smelling garbage and human traffic. That, and eating your burgers where you buy them.

Point being: it's hot!

However, New York summer heat is quelled by the city's benefactions of free shows in the park. A lot of them.

My Thursday night can be summed up as follows:

FREE Metric concert in Prospect Park

$4 mango martinis on Smith street

a serving bowl of frozen lemon rum-a-lum shared among friends on Smith street

witnessing intense make out sessions on Smith street

meeting UT journalism alum

talking about Lady Gaga and bringing down the man

friday day 6

At 9:30am the power cut off, halting my AC and overhead fan, the things keeping my hangover in remission. I didn't want to wake up my roommates to ask them about the atrocity that was taking place, but I couldn't go back to sleep and the angry hammer in my brain was rising steadily. We had tripped a breaker, which tends to happen when all four roommates have their ACs and fans on simultaneously.

This brings me to another interesting fact: my apartment is pretty shitty/gross/sickening. At night, little moths fly around the house, and there's a large squashed cockroach in the bathroom that no one has the balls to throw away. Can't wait to jet outta that place...

saturday day 7

Brooklyn Public Library

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Andy Warhol

Basquiat/Warhol Collabo

Mickalene Thomas 'A Little Taste Outside of Love' 2007

A bejeweled, reclining black woman replaces the nude white goddess from classical Venus paintings. I love subversion.

"Oil painting was never satisfying to me. I always felt like I had to put something on it or it was never finished." -Mickalene Thomas. 

I feel that.

The Hipster

wednesday day 4

So Williamsburg is supposed to be Brooklyn's most poppin neighborhood, complete with a stimulating nightlife, cheap drinks, good music, beautiful people, funky design and the inundation of what everyone likes to call the "hipster." I live in East Williamsburg, which only partly lives up to the area's reputation i.e. I only encounter 5-7 fedoras on the way to the grocery store; instead, I'm greeted by freshly faded Dominicans calling me 'mami' and telling me I look beautiful :D But "the heart of Williamsburg" as they call it (rolling eyes...) is off the L train's Bedford stop, where today's story takes place.

If you're not labeled a "hipster" in these parts, you're probably striving to be. However, I want to clarify I'm not trying to be a hater. I'm all for free expression, eccentricity, displaying a unique personality through one's daily costume and defying the conformity of today's 9-5 existence, but I honestly cannot resist chuckling at the area's exaggeration and how serious it's all taken. Let me expound...

I sat in a coffee shop named 'Verb Cafe' where this bald guy in some Einstein shirt to my right would every couple minutes theatrically speak aloud some math problem, while the dude to my left had the bottom half of his head shaved and the top fashioned into a crown of points a la Basquiat


What was he doing you ask? Searching eBay for vintage sweatshirts. Yep. That's what he was doing.

Of course, Austin is also known for it's myriad of unconventional dressers. One night at a west campus party, a friend asked while observing a guy with a handlebar mustache, alarmingly short shorts and those aviator-type eyeglasses from the 80's a lot of pervert serial killers wore,



"I mean what do you think that guy really does when he goes home at night?"

Now, I know. They scour eBay for vintage sweatshirts.

I'm sorry but all this seems to be a bit contrived, scratch that, a lot contrived. I really don't think these people deserve to be called 'hipsters.' In my opinion, hipsters historically have been learned, art-appreciating people who reject bourgeoise values and have more liberal yet apathetic attitudes i.e. the poets, musicians, artists from the 50s and 60s, the beatniks. Maybe, I'm just glamorizing an era I didn't live in, and beatniks really used to spend tons of money on fashion and were just kinda faking their poetry... probably not.

I believe the masses have appropriated hipster mannerisms. Maybe I'm wrong, and the way of life, not just the trend, is being diffused throughout the upper classes, but I have a feeling that's not the case. I guess that happens with every subculture though. It's appropriated by rich kids and in turn becomes meaningless.

The Beat poets were the true hipsters, but who am I to call everybody out? And honestly, I'd much rather live around aspiring free-thinkers than Wall street drones. I mean, I have Ray Ban sunglasses too.