An opus on the state of Bushwick in 2016.
Author: Nicole Brydson
Muttering about the rental situation is on par with talking about the weather in New York City. For some it takes getting use to the very direct question, what do you pay in rent? These days it’s common to follow up with, how much do you charge on Airbnb?
We all see a lot of content in Brooklyn, about Brooklyn, geared towards this page view perspective – the neighborhood power ranking competition, the divide and conquer POV, the immense amounts of knowledge we carry about the controversy of babies in bars, or cribs at restaurants, of not-researched factoids about fluctuating real estate prices – and not, actually useful knowledge about Brooklyn beyond its press releases about fashionistas and slow organic local whatevers. Those things are great, but they are not Brooklyn, we are all Brooklyn, and we are not all hipsters at fault for the apocalypse as some new media would have you believe.
The Subjective Objective is a cultural media project that aims to engage artists everywhere to build organic digital media spaces for free self expression unmediated by advertisers. This is the first article in a series based on a solo session I hosted at SXSW 2014 called The Subjective Objective: Building Maker Media.
It has been a long time coming, creeping ever closer with each new luxury condo and $100 million townhouse sale, every $17 bowl of ramen, $10 latte and cup of cold-pressed beet-and-kale juice, but now the end is finally upon us: Manhattan is over. Done. Finished. Manhattan as brand has overtaken Manhattan as place, turning itself over fully to the project that was always its greatest work in the first place: the cultivation of a luxury lifestyle.
Though Zuzuka Poderosa describes her sound as “South America meets the South of North America” we’d like to think there’s some of the Southside in there too. I asked Zu about her new music, favorite Brooklyn venues, interracial music babies, and what’s up with her in 2014.
I’m just going to say it. What happened at 3rd Ward is a symptom of the capitalist corporate structure’s imposition upon the creative arts economy in Brooklyn over the last decade and change. My perch is unique in this arts economy – which includes entrepreneurial journalistic endeavors such as this site, which I own independently – as sites like mine have all popped up to cover what we see before us, but not all have remained completely advertiser free.