Flashback

Money, Hypocrisy, Williamsburg and Wall St: They're not as bad as eachother

In the last couple of weeks I’ve somehow found myself in 3 separate jobs, working almost 7 days a week and simultaneously moving house. Phhew! My feelings of guilt towards this blog hold what I imagine to resemble the awkward feelings of a busy, neglectful mother towards her child. All I want to do is look after it and write for it and plan more things to do with it, but unfortunately, earning money has to take precedence.

In about a month I’m going travelling, and come September I’m going to have bills and expenses flying out of my bank account left right and centre. You know, like other functioning members of society do all the time? My break from the world of careers and study will soon be over, so I’m going out with a bang. The day before my 21st birthday, my friends and I are flying out to Amsterdam! We’re going to spend 3 weeks interrailing round Europe, and fly back to the UK from Venice in September. If all goes well, I won’t even notice myself morphing into a responsible adult. That’s what happens when you turn 21, right? I’ll return to the country an of-age young lady, and with all these exciting experiences under my belt, will settle immediately back into Birmingham life. I shall get a job and pay my rent on time and never drink too much and shall consider hand sanitiser, plasters and tissues as handbag essentials …


I’m going to have to get myself a handbag…

So unfortunately my writings have suffered in this new onslaught of life-stuff. It’s a bit of a sad situation. But while I have a spare couple of hours, rather than leave this space blank, I thought I would make like a dodgy sit-com episode, and go over content I’d made before. I curled up with my notebook, and had a read through the old scribbley pages from New York that hadn’t made it into digital form yet. So, again in afternoon television fashion,

HERE'S ONE I MADE EARLIER

:

I’m sitting in a café on Bedford Avenue (aka Hipster High St, Brooklyn). I’m in the corner on a rickety chair; the walls are stained with chipped yellow paint, which strange stained glass lamps on the wall dye orangey red in places. An exceptionally raucous Buzzcocks number is playing, much louder than a coffee shop should. A large black woman is taking orders behind the bar, belting out every instruction and customer request in bold soul-singer style. ‘Plain bagel and cream cheeeheeese, yeah!’ ‘thankyouuu, coohoome again!’ She doesn’t worry about making her tuneage meld with the angry guitars also blasting through the small shop.


I’m watching the queue for the bathroom begin to snake out of a dark, red-painted tunnel, at the end of which I can only assume is a tiny door shielding a toilet lodged in a cupboard. I really need a wee. I bet there isn’t any loo roll.


On using the toilet, I found band stickers plastered from ceiling to floor, across the cracked mirror, and even on the toilet seat. The one right above the sink said ‘fuck your job, write your screenplay’. The soap was kept in one of those plastic ketchup bottles you get in diners. There was loo roll.


I like Williamsburg. I like the cracked paint, the rickety chairs and the loud music. It tickles me, rather than repels me, that it is has been necessary to put up a sign saying ‘no spitting’. I like that I am asked whether I want ‘big or small’ as opposed to ‘grande or tall’. I like it, but I’m also faintly amused by the whole atmosphere I now find myself in.


Looking through the bookstalls stationed up and down the bustling street – every one of which has at least two Camus books, a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics and a minimum of one novel by either Virginia Woolf or Doris Lessing – I can’t help but crack a bemused smile. There’s something undeniably hypocritical about an area where people sell their art on the street every weekend for $10 or $15, and give their books away for any donation, but where the shops sell ‘vintage’ clothing for upwards of $150 and bespoke indie jewellery for as much as you would find in Manhattan. You can’t help but wonder whether the sellers are just setting up bookstalls in order to show the world that they have read Camus, and philosophised over the Greeks. The majority of people here are not short of cash. The local houses are beautiful family homes, or river view penthouses. With this in mind, the rickety chairs and chipped paint of this café become highly intentional design features, rather than odd quirks. People seem to be paying a lot of money to appear poor, anti-establishment, and grassroots-y. And frankly, thanks to their ripped levis and genuine ray-bans (even though it’s October), it’s a slightly half-arsed effort. Haight-Ashbury this is not.

All this amuses me, but doesn’t anger me at all. I have no judgement to pass on Williamsburg, as I did on the BusinessAwards Dinner. I don't have the same vom-ball forming in the back of my throat when I overhear conversations here, about tattoos of cats and bikram yoga. People here have just as many image hang-ups and hypocrisies as their Wall St counterparts, but at least the image they are conveying is one of sharing, and a lack of emphasis on money and value. Their hypocrisies don’t effect global finances, or lead to tax evasion, or deny school places to children in Africa. Hell, I’m sitting here too. Writing in my hardback notebook, wearing Calvin Klein jeans. And I have a copy of Ariel in my bag. I’m right at home. I don’t really see a problem with maintaining an atmosphere of dilapidation and retaliation despite the wealth of the area. 

Isn’t it actually nice to think that some of the people giving away books on the street must be highly paid city-workers…?