Hello. Look this Vanity Fair blog post and you'll see why, despite Graydon Carter being a fucker par excellence, the magazine is despised. It is also why young Harvard-educated writers who write for Vanity Fair and live in the UES are also despised. (Above right) If you are like me, when you read any sentence in bold you'll spit out, "You Fucking Fuck, Fuck You!" Why so angry? Though so clear it obviates the need for explanation, here it goes. Kate Ahlborn, Harvard 07, insists on adopting this inane exoticization of Brooklyn which is not funny and makes her look like an asshole. She also makes the obligatory Bard reference and Feist-drops as if she is the only finishing school twat to have liked the video. They all did. They all spent time at Bard! Argh! But equally infuriating is the entire tone of the piece which boils down to, "I went to an art performance. It made me uncomfortable. It was weird. I didn't like it." People like this should not write things down and certainly not anywhere where anyone must read it.
Somehow it happened that in all the years I’ve lived in New York City, I’d never been to Brooklyn. But when I heard that choreographer Noémie Lafrance had a new show opening in Williamsburg, I decided it was as good an occasion as any to venture beyond Manhattan for the first time. I loved the music video she choreographed for Feist’s “1234” in 2007, and “Rapture”—her piece for aerialists staged on the side of a Frank Gehry building at Bard College—was undeniably awesome. So on Tuesday night, I boarded theL train (heading away from the West Village) and made my way to hipsterville. I’d heard from my more global friends that Brooklyn is a charming borough inhabited by cool young families, gourmet cheese shops, and creative intellectuals. It has parks! And trees! And slow walkers aren’t mowed down on the sidewalk!But I’m what you might call a bona fide Manhattanite. Or, to be more precise, a bona fide Upper East Sider. I’ve traveled the world, I said to myself—how exotic could Brooklyn really be?Kate Ahlborn, go back to the Upper East Side. Watch Scrubs. Listen to Feist. Stay the fuck out of Brooklyn.
Perhaps my tweed J. Crew jacket and Tory Burch ballet flatsweren’t the best wardrobe choice for that day, but I overcame the fact that I was a total Williamsburg misfit and hoped my foreigner status wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the natives. (It was.) After narrowly escaping death by skateboard on the Bedford subway platform, I made my way to a rickety building in what felt to me like Brooklyn’s outer banks. (It wasn’t.) A sign instructed people heading to Lafrance’s performance to go up to the second floor, where I was warmly greeted, asked to surrender my coat and bag, and told to wash my hands.
[Photo: Nick McGlynn]
