Generations

I never subscribed to the bumper-sticker sentiment that when you’re leaving New York you’re going nowhere, a conceit now rendered ridiculous by the ascendancy of cities like Shanghai, Moscow, Mumbai, and Berlin. New York seems to be constantly proclaiming itself, constantly burnishing its own myths, compulsively reassuring itself of its supremacy, an insecurity one would have thought unnecessary in a great city. In the end, tough, gritty New York is the most sentimental of places, at least when it comes to itself.

But still, of course, a great city, and while I may have been fortunate to have experienced it at a time when the balance between the sheer terror of daily life and the excitement of living in a newly resurgent downtown was perfectly calibrated—getting mugged at five in the morning not quite as bad if it was walking home from watching the Talking Heads at the Mudd Club — I’m sure there is a whole generation in Greenpoint or Red Hook busy stacking up its own store of memories. Greenpoint or Red Hook, perhaps, but not Manhattan, where the rich and richer have completed their rout of most of what was different or interesting, leaving only a few pockets of sad and rapidly aging hipsters — a generation so obsessed with looking good that they forgot to actually do anything. There they are, freelancing away in Starbucks—Web designers, graphic artists, unpublished photographers (and, you have to wonder, why are they all so, well, … visual?)—unpoliticized, unangry, uninterested. Some apparently feel quite strongly about wearing fur, others about the virtues of the vegan life (and don’t get them started on Tibet), and all have seen every film made in the last 20 years. Soon they will all be living in upstate New York, in their late 30s and 40s, looking really good, with exquisitely dressed accessory children, driving a perfectly beaten up pick-up truck and convincing themselves that they are there out of principled rejection of city life rather than failure to land that big ad campaign. True, perhaps, but hardly their fault. While it’s always better to be young (age having nothing to be said for it, failing to confer even wisdom), the hipster generation got a raw deal. Impossible any more to shock, impossible to rebel, impossible to create anything not immediately appropriated by commercial interests, it was a generation destined to live in the long shadow of candle-waving boomers and desperately hip, dope-smoking parents. That would have driven anyone into Starbucks or the Catskills. You also have to wonder, when did the 60s become the template for youth, when did this become the generation by which all others are measured? If I wasn’t one of them, I couldn’t wait for the bastards to all die off.

Brian McNally