Personal Vehicles, or the Lack Thereof

In the city I came from (Sacramento, CA; if you haven't been paying attention), owning a car was mostly necessary. Even living in the substantially hip live/work area of downtown Sacramento, you frequently found yourself needing a vehicle to get to the grocery store, go visit a friend who lives outside of downtown, or even for mundane tasks like laundry. It's true, people on the west coast love their cars, and there's a good reason for it.

On the west coast, you basically need a car. Most people commute to work in areas that are either not accessible by mass transit, or live in areas where mass transit takes prohibitively long to get from point A to point B. In cities that grow outwards instead of upwards, you'll need a car. That twenty minute drive to work, that two miles to the laundromat, the six miles to the nearest supermarket, they make a difference.

In New York, things are different for a variety of reasons. The first is that everyone lives less than two blocks from a bodega (Spanish word meaning "grocery," something people on the west coast would think of as a very odd convenience store), the same from a laundromat, and mass transit can get you to your job in less than 45 minutes, practically guaranteed. People here, unlike the west coast, do not shy from the idea of walking two miles to get from point A to point B, unless of course they find themselves schlepping an inordinate amount of crap.

This isn't to say that the west coast is necessarily all bad in it's perspective towards vehicle ownership. I grew up in the midwest, where having a car meant freedom. When you live three miles down a dirt road and six miles from anything resembling a business, having a car is a necessity. As soon as you get that driver's license when you're 16, you start spending at least an hour a day driving to or from some location. Where it is seldom matters, it's the fact that you can go somewhere. On the west coast, it's very similar, but different in that most major cities have mass-transit. This wasn't true in the midwest.

The car is freedom, even in cities with mass transit, because you can take crap with you. You can't take drinks or food on mass transit most places on the west coast, and you aren't given the benefit of being able to schedule things reasonably. The busses and trains are almost always late, and even if you catch them on time, it's still likely to take you upwards of an hour to travel the 20 miles you need to go to get where you're going. There's also the point that the only people who tend to use mass transit on the west coast are the oppressively poor, and so riding mass transit tends to be messy and make you feel, well, poor. As a result, even the poorest teenager is saving up to buy their first ride (and usually the dubs to put on it).

The unfortunate problem this causes is that cars quickly become necessary to to be middle class or above, and the mass transit systems not only remain unreliable, but only run during very limited hours. You can't go to the bar and catch a bus home after closing time, or a train. They're not running at those hours. All you can do is call a cab (hailing cabs doesn't really ever happen) and hope it costs you less than $40 to get home. Realistically, this means most people are given the choice of either choosing a designated driver, or driving drunk. You can guess how many take the latter option.

There's also the factor that cars cost money to own, even after you've paid for them. Freedom has a price, and the price is gasoline. That price is oil. That price is frequently also insurance and repairs. Cars cost a bundle to own, but when you need one to get to work on time, you have to pay it. It's almost like a special tax.

New York City, and other east coast cities from what I've heard, have largely fixed this problem by having a bus and train network that operates at all hours. I can get anywhere in the NYC metro area in less than two hours, at any time of day. During business hours, I can get anywhere in under 45 minutes, if I play my cards right. That combined with the fact that once you manage to justify walking a mile to get to a subway station, and realize that walking that mile only took you 15 minutes (if you suck), walking two or three miles to get somewhere similary becomes "not a big deal." Laundry is close. Food is close (and it always delivers), pretty much everything is walkable if you want to shop in your neighborhood, so why drive?

The MTA is amazing. You can hop on a train for $2, and get anywhere (other than staten island) in a perfectly reasonable amount of time. You can ride it drunk at 5am. You can eat food on it. Everyone rides, regardless of race, class, or gender. It's as awesome as it could possibly be. You also always kind of hate the MTA, but that's because you become so used to how it works when it's awesome, that minor delays or perfectly reasonable problems become absolutely infuriating.

Truth be told, I'm glad to be done with my car. I don't have to pay for car insurance, I don't have to pay for gas, I don't have to worry if I've had too much to drink. I don't have to worry that I'm too tired, I don't have to worry about traffic, I don't have to worry if my axles are about to give out. It's super awesome to be able to stumble to the train and know that I am going to get where I'm going, and the worst that's going to happen is I'll have that most reasonable of New York excuses: "fucking train took forever!"

The culture of the automobile, it's emphasis on displaying wealth and class through which car you drive, and the necessity to have a vehicle to succeed in life are all things I am now done with. In a city that was forced to grow vertically instead of horizontally (actually, more like grow Z instead of X and Y), mass transit simply works. So yeah, I guess you don't need the car culture in a city full of trains...especially one that involves never having to travel more than 20 miles in any direction to reach your destination.

Went out to Lit on a Sunday

What can I say? I'm a sucker for karaoke. I went out to Lit Lounge for Church, hosted by the amazing Kings of Karaoke last night. There was rocking out, there were awesome photos of the karaoke fun, and all in all, a good time was had by all.

Here's a couple photos from the night that I found amusing:



More of these, obviously, over at my my flickr account.

Moving to New York, observations on "hipsters"

This is how it all starts.

I create a blog with the intent of documenting a west coast perspective on the east coast, find out many have done it before, spend weeks agonizing over how to be different, and suddenly realize that I don't care. My uniqueness should override the inherent lack of cleverness of concept, so we'll get started with some basic information.

Hi, my name is signine, and I moved to New York almost two months ago from the lovely California city of Sacramento. While living in Sacramento, I lived in the downtown area, which is known quite rightfully as being full of hipsters. I count most of these so-called "hipsters" as my friends. As I was preparing to move, I was informed by friends already out here that I should live in the Williamsburg area, as it was also overpopulated with hipster-types.

I quickly found out that the East Coast Hipster is a very different animal from the West Coast Hipster. The West Coast Hipster can age and become more mature. The West Coast Hipster is self-sufficient. The West Coast Hipster doesn't lose it's identity when scenes change. The West Coast Hipster rarely ever gets priced out of it's neighborhood. In New York, this is definitely not true, and the attitude differences are pretty severe. In my interest of this particular phenomenae, I started doing some basic research.

The most obvious first step is to check our definitions:
Miriam-Webster: hipster - a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or fashion)
Urban Dictionary: hipster - people in thier [sic] teens to 20s who generally listen to indie rock, hang out in coffee shops, shop at the thrift store and talk about things like books, music, films and art.
Wikipedia: hipster - a frequently recycled media created stereotype, which is often considered a derogatory term^[1], labeled upon a growing mass of younger individuals who take it upon themselves to appreciate and divulge their taste into hype and trends. The term ‘’hipster’’ was created to market upon individuals who were seemingly unmarketable^[2], because of their varying eclectic tastes, which have been able to diverge too far off stream due to modern technologies or philosophies of the times; such as the internet^[3] or racial diversity.

Okay, so that really doesn't explain anything, and I don't have my copy of the Field Guide to Urban Hipsters handy, which is terribly unfortunate. I shall have to, as we (the kids) say, wing it.

A hipster, in the west coast sense, is largely covered by the above definitions. They're people who tend to pay close attention to the newest trends. This will, of course, mean the newest of the new bands, the hottest new fashion, and all sorts of assorted other crap. I happen to fit the definition of hipster in this regard, as I'm downright obsessed with finding the newest rock music out there, and knowing about it before you do; this has nothing to do with a desire to be better than you or be on the cutting edge. The purpose of my obsession is that I've found most perfectly good bands really go downhill when they develop a large audience, vis-a-vis "scenes" tend to kill perfectly good genres. Most hipsters are of this mindset, it gives us all something to talk about and an excuse to feel cool.

When I came to the east coast, I was expecting to encounter peirced and tattooed unfriendly types who listened to way too much indie rock and wore pants that don't fit. That's what I associate with hipsters, you see. Instead, I found a bunch of retarded looking girls trying to look like a cross between a bag lady, Paris Hilton, and someone from the Brady Bunch. I guess that's modern fashion, I've never given a flying fuck about it. I also expected to see people who I assumed had a certain maturity level...no, the obvious hipsters here are, at best, scenewhores. Williamsburg has it's fair share of ridiculously cool people, some of whom I've met, and lots of excellent art. It also has a lot more of these special hipsters.

The New York hipster seems to exclusively be of college age or slightly older. Many seem to be dependent on the financial aid of their families (not trust-fund babies, no, these kids seem to come from upper middle-class backgrounds). They seem to devote the entirety of their being to being well, hip.

I can now understand how hipster became a pejorative term, thank you for that New York.