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as someone who's all too familiar with nyc's hipster transplants (unfortunately a good number of my acquaintances and friends of friends are exactly that), this is a very accurate statement about their pretentiousness, viewpoints, tendencies, and fashion sense. "bicycle polo or hipster kickball", LOL. so true, man.
thank you
Quote:
Originally Posted by pbergen
one reason why i started to get burned out on the nyc area, despite being born and raised there, was specifically because of the unabashed elitism that bcjohnny refers to. i got sick of the social-climbing, classist mentality that pervades yuppie and hipster areas of manhattan and brooklyn in particular. i still love the nyc region as a whole, especially the down-to-earth areas of the city (i.e. the non-hipster, non-yuppified areas of the outer boroughs) and suburbs. but it's the areas which get all of the hype - i.e. the neighborhods that all the transplants flock to - that get on my nerves. the infamous new york elitism that transplants seem to absorb within days of arriving increasingly wore me down as i got older.
put simply, there are way too many folks who have descended upon the city in recent years to "do the ny thing" because it's trendy and whose main goal is to recreate the "sex and the city" lifestyle.
Wow, you read my mind. I shouldn't be all that surprised, though, because I know for a fact that there are many people who feel the same way. "Burned out" on NYC is the right term. And it's really not NYC itself, because NY is a wonderful city, possibly the best in the world. It's the surge of transplants with crappy attitudes that has ruined it in the past decade+. The " infamous new york elitism" was always a stereotype and always had some basis in reality, because there were always many New Yorker with an elitist, uppity attitude about being New Yorkers (and believe me, I know, being a New Jerseyan, as we often caught the brunt of it). But coming from actual, real, native, lifelong New Yorkers it at least made some sense. And, as bad as they ever were, they were NEVER as bad as the transplants. Not even close. Furthermore, underneath their attitude, they knew the reality that "B&T" folks were essentially as much "locals" as they were.
Thanks for pointing out how there are still so many down-to-earth neighborhoods and suburbs in the NYC area with the REAL people who represent the area well. These days, such good people are relegated to being labeled "B&T trash" or whatever other condescending, smug characterizations by the idiots who move here, don a messy bedhead haircut and proclaim themselves "Real New Yorkers" because mommy and daddy are paying for their roach-infested East Village apartment while they take dog-walking jobs for beer money as they live out college life part deux.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pbergen
(yes, living in the nyc can really make one cynical.)
by contrast, people in LA are generally a LOT more laid back. while the city definitely has its share of social climbing fools whose lives revolve around the hollywood scene/sunset strip/trying to get into "the industry", the average angeleno is a lot less uppity from my experience - a lot more "live and let live" and far more friendly and laid-back. i realize that the LA haters here would scoff at that sentiment, but remember, i'm speaking from an nyc perspective, so it's all relative.
It's interesting - I think there was a paradigm shift in which LA and NY switched roles. When I was a kid in the 70's and 80's, NYC - as you correctly pointed out earlier - had so many problems and was such a filthy, dangerous place. The transplants and majority of people who live there now probably wouldn't even believe how BAD NYC was. Outright horrible. Times Square was a pit of filth and danger, the exact opposite of what it has become.
By contrast, LA was THE place. It was Hollywood, which was not yet a drug-infested dump (and those days seem to be behind it now). It was the beach, palm trees, the entertainment center. Gangs were not the problem they became by the 90's. LA was the place people moved to. LA was full of transplants and the "hipsters" of the 70's and 80's, and they absorbed the uppity elitist attitude of that city's social climbers. NYers hated LA because of it, and that is the attitude that carries over till today. I remember as a kid watching Jack Nicholson (my fellow Jerseyan), the big Hollywood star, cheering on his Lakers, with all the other stars, in beautiful, sunny, wealthy LA as they'd beat up on the Knicks or Celtics or Sixers. TV shows of the time were CHiPS and Three's Company (which happen to be my favorites of all time) and Charlie's Angels and many others set in LA or Southern Cal. Ponch and Jack Tripper, with their respective bevies of hot women - that was LA. NYC tv shows were like Taxi or cop shows which showed grungy, dirty, filthy, industrial old settings, garbage on the streets, etc.; Latka and Alex from Taxi - that was NY.
In the 90's, NY got cleaned up while LA went down the tubes. LA's gang violence got to its worst point, Hollywood became a transvestite prostitution and drug-selling hellhole. Then there was Rodney King, and a couple earthquakes to give people more to bash about LA. LA's traffic got even worse. LA got a black eye, while NYC got a spit shine. Now you saw TV shows like Seinfeld pop up, along with Friends, Sex and the City, etc. which showcased the NEW NY. That's how I see it. And, of course, the transplants eschewed LA in favor of NYC.
At this point in time, LA is on the upswing, but the stigma is still with LA for having the "fake" people and for being "dirty" and "dangerous". At this point, I see LA making its comeback, and NY not going downhill either. Both will forge ahead well as the nation's two biggest cities. But LA is still overcoming their black eye from the 90's and most of the 2000's.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pbergen
one of the great things about LA is that it's so big that you can inevitably find your niche somewhere in the region. IMO you can avoid the pretentious parts of LA a lot easier than in the nyc region - because if you move to nyc, especially manhattan/northwest brooklyn, you're going to be smack dab in the middle of all that stuff i was talking about earlier. the nyc metro is very much centered around manhattan in particular. so if you want to partake in the culture, nightlife, and everything else that's hyped up about nyc, you pretty much can't help but go to manhattan or gentrified areas in the outer boroughs.
right! Unless he gets to live in and experience Queens or NJ, which is very do-able, but even then you wind up in Manhattan inevitably for much of what's going on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pbergen
OTOH, LA has multiple concentrations of culture, entertainment, employment, and recreation. one of its much-maligned traits - sprawl - is actually a good thing in a sense because it's easier to avoid the things you hate and cocoon yourself into the things you love and prioritize. of course the flip side to this is that without doing much research, you might have a difficult time finding your niche in LA. i think that's a key reason why so many people love to hate on LA - as someone else on these boards has stated (apologies for stealing your quote), LA is very much an "insider's city" that's far more complex and diverse than the average outsider or newcomer realizes. people go to see the "typical" touristy stuff, are unimpressed because they expected everything to look like the movies, and then go home and badmouth LA to their friends. or perhaps they move to the city with similar preconceptions but never bother to venture out beyond their little area of the city. so if their neighborhood/social scene doesn't match their expectations, chances are they're going to hate LA. but if they find the neighborhood/niche/social scene that interests them, then things might be very different.
LA is phenomenally interesting, and those who think it's shallow are ignorant. It's amazing. I will post a thread about my experience with discovering LA, so as not to bog down this thread any more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pbergen
i think there's something for everyone in LA, which is a major reason why i love the city. but not everyone is patient enough or willing to suss out exactly where they'd be happiest in the region. it's a challenging area to really "get".
as an example, a friend of mine moved to LA for one year. after that year, he returned to nyc, bashing LA at every chance. now, he's certainly entitled to his opinion, but the thing that left me shaking my head was how little of the city/region he'd experienced during his one-year stay. for example, he'd say ridiculous things like, "the japanese food isn't all that in LA. i think the food on st. marks place is just as good". and i'd respond, "did you ever go to gardena or torrance?"
of course he didn't, which he sheepishly admitted when i took him to those places on his return visit to LA.
That's like the people I have talked to in NY who say they went to or lived in LA and hated it "because there's no culture like there is in NYC". I ask them if they've been to the Getty, Getty Malibu, LACMA, Skillman, Huntington Library, Little Armenia, Thai Town, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, etc. Inevitably, the answer is "huh???" except for maybe the Getty. Many of them never even went to Griffith Park or Observatory. And these are the more touristy things to see!!! I didn't even get into the Valley or Glendale or Cerritos or Gardena, etc. Ignorant!!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by pbergen
finally, you have to realize that nyc has been riding a possibly unprecedented tidal wave of popularity since the mid-1990s. the nyc of my youth was a scary, rough, dangerous place (the period from 1985-1991 was especially bad for many reasons), but thanks to some effective (fascist?) police work, a surging economy following the early '90s recession, a few popular tv shows that glamorized life in the city (friends, sex and the city, etc), and better PR in general, the city became incredibly hyped up over the past 15 years. while nyc was and always will be a destination city, it went from being one of the top destinations for young, ambitious folks to THE city of choice for many people who might not have considered it in a different era.
in other words, nyc has become an incredibly trendy place to live. "doing the ny thing" for a few years has become the fashionable thing to do, and people have actually told me that they "had to do it once, just to see what it's like". and that's fine.
on the flip side of the coin, LA has experienced a ton of negative publicity in recent years. people always focus on the traffic (legitimately), smog (overrated if you live near the coast), gangbangers (not always an issue, depending where you live), minorities/immigrants (only an issue for some people), and so forth.
basically, it's become cool to hate on LA. LA and nyc are the two leading cities/regions in the country, so they're always going to be compared against one another, fairly or not. so while one is perceived to be down, the other is viewed as being on the up and up. but great cities always rebound from tough times, as LA and nyc both have, and the relative trendiness of each will fluctuate depending on the economy, popular tastes, and so forth.
What can I say? AWESOME post!! thanks for the reps and likewise. But I do think we are approaching a point where LA and NY will for once be both perceived as the hot spots... I only shudder to think of the hipster jerks who will move to LA and ruin it. I know there are a handful of hipsters in Silver Lake/Los Feliz, but Williamsburg, in NY, on its own probably has 10x the amount of hipsters those areas have, and that's not counting NYC's east village/LES, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill, etc.
By the way, are you from Bergen County? Just from your screen name, I'm making a wild speculation
To NewCalifornian: Then get the Moderator cut: language out. Seriously, go back to the pristine south. I guess unpaved streets and blatant racism is better than dirty ones and class separation.
1. A rep to NewCalifornian. Well said, sir.
2. Typical comment here, and typically hilarious. The South is a region on the ascendance, while the Southwest is declining. Meanwhile California, and especially Los Angeles, is America's most spectacular ongoing, cascading clusterModerator cut: language. We are in the middle of a historic shift in regional influence and importance, the kind that occurs once or twice a century, and that shift is away from CA.
3. Nowhere in the South, or anywhere else I've been in this country, have I seen infrastructure at such an advanced rate of decay as that which exists throughout most of L.A. County. Racism? I'm not aware of a single Southern city that is on the brink of anything resembling what happened in L.A. in the spring of '92. Some would argue that L.A. never fully recovered from that, and some would also argue that the potential for a repeat performance is never far around the corner.
Last edited by Green Irish Eyes; 08-06-2009 at 03:08 PM..
Reason: Language
When asking that question always remember that the time scale of a movie is always compressed compared to real life, so a cop in a movie of 90 minutes will fire more bullets than a real cop does in his entire life and that goes for everything else relationships ,tragedy and the good times.
Of course its not documentary but on the whole I think that film does portray various aspects of life in LA reasonably accurately.
I've also seen L.A. just through movies and music videos. But when I visited the city, I was very surprised. It is by far the ugliest city I've ever seen. Nothing is beautiful there, nothing.
Downtown has extremely ugly stores, you feel like in a ghetto. Everyone is speaking Spanish and there is dirt everywhere!
Hollywood is not that spectacular. It just looks like a wealthy neighborhood. Nobody has a yard as big as they show e.g. in music videos or movies and the streets in Beverly Hills are very narrow.
I don't need to talk about the rest of L.A. It is just a huge ghetto, although I haven't seen any gangs yet. There are almost no plants in this city, but the streets are as bad as in NYC, the condition and the traffic.
When we returned and I took a bath, I realized that I had some weird parasites in my hair (definitely because of Downtown). Really, there is nothing to see in Los Angeles.
PS: And no, thousands of high-qualified, well-paid citizens are moving out, while millions of low-paid workers are moving in. If you want to move to California, better have a well-paid job because the taxes and prices for the same standard of living as e.g. in the South are way higher.
These are all the things we say so that when it is -20 degrees in Chicago in February with 10" of snow on the ground and it is 70 degrees in So Cal and we're going to Disneyland, nobody moves here.
OP: Scrape up a grand and go out there and see for yourself. Your going to get a thousand different answers to your question. I never thought of LA as like "the movies."
Movies are movies, they are fiction and while they may be based on true events and some things may be like real-life, LA is in no way like a movie. Sure there's rich young dudes speeding around in million dollar sports cars and hot woman strutting down the street sippin a latte while various guys walk by wearing outfits that cost more than your car, but that's LA man (Hollywood mainly). The rest of the country is "real" so you have to have a place like LA where people can play, people can be "fake" if they want to. LA is like a little escape from reality for some, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. The world is huge and no matter what anyone says about LA I will defend it and it's bad rep.
By the way, what is a HIPSTER??? I know I should know but I really don't. Is it one of those dudes with chiseled features who strut around Hollywood ignoring those outside of the world in their brain?
By the way, what is a HIPSTER??? I know I should know but I really don't. Is it one of those dudes with chiseled features who strut around Hollywood ignoring those outside of the world in their brain?
1. You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn’t won a game since the Reagan administration.
2. You frequently use the term ‘postmodern’ (or its commonly used variation ‘PoMo’) as an adjective, noun, and verb.
3. You carry a shoulder-strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn a pair of horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-tyle glasses.
4. You have refined taste and consider yourself exceptionally cultured, but have one pop vice (ElimiDATE, Quiet Riot, and Entertainment Weekly are popular ones) that helps to define you as well-rounded.
5.You have kissed someone of the same gender and often bring this up in casual conversation.
6. You spend much of your leisure time in bars and restaurants with monosyllabic names like Plant, Bound, and Shine.
7. You bought your dishes and a checkered tablecloth at a thrift shop to be kitschy, and often throw vegetarian dinner parties.
8. You have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your ‘one Republican friend.’
9. You enjoy complaining about gentrification even though you are responsible for it yourself.
10. Your hair looks best unwashed and you position your head on your pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks.
11. Your own records put out by Matador, DFA, Definitive Jux, Dischord, Warp, Thrill Jockey, Smells Like Records, and Drag City.”
Last edited by Green Irish Eyes; 08-06-2009 at 05:11 PM..
Reason: Please post only pictures that you have taken, yourself -- thanks.
1. You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn’t won a game since the Reagan administration.
2. You frequently use the term ‘postmodern’ (or its commonly used variation ‘PoMo’) as an adjective, noun, and verb.
3. You carry a shoulder-strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn a pair of horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-tyle glasses.
4. You have refined taste and consider yourself exceptionally cultured, but have one pop vice (ElimiDATE, Quiet Riot, and Entertainment Weekly are popular ones) that helps to define you as well-rounded.
5.You have kissed someone of the same gender and often bring this up in casual conversation.
6. You spend much of your leisure time in bars and restaurants with monosyllabic names like Plant, Bound, and Shine.
7. You bought your dishes and a checkered tablecloth at a thrift shop to be kitschy, and often throw vegetarian dinner parties.
8. You have one Republican friend whom you always describe as being your ‘one Republican friend.’
9. You enjoy complaining about gentrification even though you are responsible for it yourself.
10. Your hair looks best unwashed and you position your head on your pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks.
11. Your own records put out by Matador, DFA, Definitive Jux, Dischord, Warp, Thrill Jockey, Smells Like Records, and Drag City.”
LA is like any other big city, and so it is accurately portrayed on any tv show/movie watched. Some parts are beautiful, some are dangerous. There is ridiculous traffic that will make you orchestrate your life around the time of day and the traffic patterns. It really doesn't compare to NY with regard to culture/the arts, but the museums are nice and the Philharmonic is good also; I've given up on the opera. Boytown is trendy, BH is posh, the beaches are fine. People are fake and real everywhere, but it's only been here in LA that your waiter/waitress regularly acts like they are too good to be waiting tables. Weather is good, it's almost always sunny (but that gets boring after a while). Cops are absent on the freeways, so people go 100mph and shoot at each other and are not ticketed--yes, seriously. Image is priority here, bordering on pretentious, and shamefully ludicrous with some senior women tragically dressing like clown-inspired playboy bunnies. But you'll also see some amazing cars that you'd only ever see on a showroom floor. More homeless than you can ever imagine, with people coming up to you and some even angry when you don't give. Santa Monica/Venice is like a dog with fleas, it's so littered with the homeless, many of whom are psychotic. Lots of pretty people, lots of interesting communities, lots of normal people. Serious gang activity. Definitely an interesting place, but overall it's noisy and crowded. Money buys comfort. Either have lots of it or have a great job lined up. Looks like a mass exodus leaving LA, many moving sales on CL and dozens of rentals on every street. Life is what you make it anywhere, so if you've got a yen to be here, go for it.
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