7th
Take your “Bottle Service” and jam it….
I’m a little behind the curve here, but I am just now reading an article on Gawker about, surprise surprise, how D.C. sucks compared to New York.
The author runs down pretty much every shallow, pointless and hipster oriented reason to not like this place. The music sucks, the people are dorks, etc. etc. The only one he left out, miraculously, was the tired old lament about how there just aren’t any good bagels or pizza places here. But the main thrust of the argument is that he disagrees with the notion that all of the Obama staffers are all of a sudden going to make this place “cool” or “hip.” I think that’s a little bit misplaced, because I can assure you that nobody here gives a damn about whether people think DC is hip or not.
I’m sure that doing things like writing zingers about Nancy Grace’s wardrobe takes up a lot of your time, so maybe you havent noticed, Clementine, but the country is in a boiling vat of liquid crap right now. People are BROKE. People are getting FIRED. Nobody has any MONEY. The folks in this town are doing what they can to fix that. We’re also dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, Pakistan, India, Venezuela and China. If we wanted to waste time trying to get people to come to our freeform poetry readings, or to try to break our AWESOME new band that’s sort of like a cross between Malkmus and Whiskeytown, but with a little bit of Broken Social Scene thrown in, but it’s REALLY TOTALLY ORIGINAL, plus we have a DJ, and somebody told me that the guy who used to play bass for Wilco liked it, so, hey you know, thats something, then yeah, we’d pull up stakes and move to Brooklyn with the rest of you trustifarians. But we have REAL JOBS here, which involve, among other things, trying to repair the damage done by all your Gordon Gecko Wall Street wannabes. You know, the REALLY POWERFUL people who just threw money around and did cocaine and made New York SO COOL! The same folks who had to come crying back here to Daddy once everything fell to pieces.
By the way, I’m sorry that our once perfect and glorious music scene has let you down. Yeah, Minor Threat was really when everything “meant something.” Nothing like going to a rock show where you get yelled at and beat up if you try to have a beer or a cigarette. Good times, man, good times. And what the hell do you know about it anyway, junior? Maybe you read something about it in Spin, or maybe that book by Azerrad. But do you have any idea how ridiculous it sounds when someone your age bitches about the scene and longs for the good old days which ended about six years before you were C-Sectioned into this world? You might as well be complaining about the decline of Vaudeville. “Well, ever since Ezekhial Mayhew’s Moving Picture Review and Miraculous Cure All Demonstration packed up its wagons and moved on, nothing has been the same here in Federal City.”
And while we are on the subject of tired scenes, in the hundred times I’ve been to New York I don’t think I’ve ever seen any bands that were actually FROM there. I’ve seen plenty of bands from Jersey and Connecticut that paid about 600 bucks for the privilege of being crammed into some garbage strewn dump so they could get cheered on by all their friends, all of whom had to buy “tickets” from the band members themselves, but I’ve never just wandered into a club and had my mind blown by the local home grown talent. Maybe you know something I don’t. Maybe I’m missing the REAL music. But I have a real suspicion that, musically speaking, you can’t find your ass without a flashlight, a map and a team of lawyers.
And regarding our low population, I actually like being able to get on the subway without being forced to engage in non consensual frottage with my fellow passengers. I also believe that a commute that gets you from point A to point B without having to smell what is apparently distilled monkey urine is something to be celebrated.
Hey, Mr. World Weary, seen-it-all, jaded-before-your-testicles-dropped New Yorker, would you like to see my apartment? It’s spacious and has a big bedroom, and I pay about a grand a month for it, utilities included. I’m sure you pay much more for your place, which probably isn’t even big enough for you to comfortably get an erection. But at least you got the “hipness” dialed in, huh? Who needs a living room? You’re where the MAGIC happens, baby! The CENTER OF IT ALL!
If “bottle service” (JESUS CHRIST ON A BIKE) is that important to you, then yeah, there are a few places where you can go to pay $250 for a bottle of Aristocrat Vodka masquerading as a bottle of Grey Goose. You can have it brought to your table after hours and get laughed at by everyone else who got the same amount of booze for about $200 less. There aren’t nearly as many opportunities for that sort of money-burning idiocy as in New York, but we have a few of those places. Those places are where the SUCKERS go.
We also have art galleries and museums here, but they happen to be free and loaded with established classics as opposed to costing $25 to get in and loaded with the work of ripped off artists, most of whom have to give 95% of the proceeds to the agents and gallery owners. We should really get to work on rectifying that situation here in the DC area. More rip offs for everyone, please, artists and patrons alike!
Sorry, but we just don’t think that it’s “cool” to live in a crowded, sweaty, honking, claustrophobic little sliver of land where fashion victims congregate and congratulate one another over nothing more than being pleased with themselves about living in a crowded, sweaty, honking, claustrophobic little sliver of land. A place where the local accent is like nails on a chalkboard. A place where you consider it an honor to pay highway robbery rates for EVERYTHING, from food to drink to rent to clothes to oxygen. A place where people make money off of what is essentially horse manure, whether it’s engaging in alchemy with the life savings of Middle America over on Wall Street, or managing to convince all the other victims in New York that some NYU drop out “performance artist” deserves to be on the cover of Time Out, or slipping some steroid-amped guido seventy bucks to get past the velvet rope in order to see the ”most groundbreaking mash up artist in the world.”
You can have it. You can be as “hip” and as “cool” as you want. In the meantime, the adults will be down here, working ourselves to death and trying to repair the damage that happened while you guys were doing blow, arguing about which piece of crap Built to Spill record was less of a sell out, and generally strutting around like peacocks with head injuries. Feel free to stay up there, enjoying your bottle service and other trendoid nonsense while we deal with problems a little weightier than whether or not people came to your off-off-off Broadway rendition of that KILLER play you wrote when you were on break from grad school.
It’s time to get serious, infant. Grow up.
