by Spitz, Marc
Dedication
For Tracey Pepper. Please try to avoid skimming over the parts that do not involve Glasgow in the early ’80s.
Epigraph
If it weren’t for the nervous people in the world, we’d all still be eating each other.
—Guido (Eli Wallach),
in Arthur Miller’s screenplay for John Huston’s The Misfits, 1961
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Hello “Brooklyn!”
1 The Mean Reds
2 Younger Than That Now
3 The Wild Things
4 Sixteen Again
5 I’m a Loner, Dottie, a Rebel
6 Blue Boys
7 Meet the Tweetles
8 Slings at the Corporate Ogre
9 “You’re in High School Again”
10 Do Something Pretty While You Can
11 Sic Transit Gloria
12 Extremely Loud and Conveniently Local
13 Welcome to the Mumble
14 It’ll Change Your Life
15 Dorks Incorporated
16 Culture Teasing
Epilogue: The Last Donut
Bibliography:
Books
Magazines, Websites, and Podcasts
Interviews
Appendices:
A Thoughtful but Danceable Playlist
A Reader, Books Both Joyful and Sad
A Queue for Many Warm and Quiet Evenings In
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Marc Spitz
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Hello “Brooklyn!”
Summer 2013
In which I, a fourth-generation Brooklynite, marvel at the transformation of my former home from working-class immigrant stronghold and rent haven for a few dozen pioneering artists to open-air supermarket for the privileged and precious. I then quickly dispense with shock, subjectivity, and (most) personal anecdotes in order to scientifically explore how the inhabitants of the new Brooklyn, epicenter of Twee, as well as a sort of global “Brooklyn” are possibly helping the world become a kinder, closer, and cooler place. “Brooklyn” is accomplishing this, in part by embracing artists and objects once-arcane and niche, all of which can be grouped under the vintage, transparent plastic umbrella of the often pejorative term Twee. Twee, in short, may not be all bad. For one, it’s now the most powerful youth movement since Punk and Hip-Hop. It may not be all new, either. For decades Twee has been a school of the larger catchall Indie and a home to the Indie kids who held a close bond with Hello Kitty and the Lovin’ Spoonful as well as if not in place of being versed in J. G. Ballard, the harsher end of Neil Young, and Slint. Slowly, however, Twee is growing and absorbing its Indie host. All things Twee are very Indie. All things Indie are not necessarily Twee . . . yet.
NOTE: When “Indie” is referred to in this book, it’s on the gentler rim of the spectrum of tone and mood ranging from sunny to pitch-black: from the upbeat Free to Be You and Me soundtrack to the dour “Needle in the Hay” sequence in The Royal Tenenbaums.
At times, the story of the rise of Twee will be anecdotal; the making of a Twee-seminal album (the Smiths’ self-titled debut, Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk) or a film (Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming) or key literary works (The Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of a Young Girl, The Bell Jar, the McSweeney’s titles) that changed minds and, eventually, common behavior on a grander and grander scale. Other times, the chronicles of Twee-nia will simply consist of the charting of struggle and progress; the slow transporting of the Twee ethos (bullying is bad, perennials are good, so are Christmas and owls) out of the bedroom and into the streets. Technological advances and new ideas (YouTube as the modern diary) or even the rise of an Epicurean notion (there’s more to pickles than green food coloring and a pinch of dill) will be considered as well.
I will chart a half century of pop cultural revolution from the postwar ’50s to the present; gentle at first, but now seemingly unstoppable. I will also, hopefully, provide you with a satisfying, funny, and educational read that may even inspire some questions along the lines of, “Wait a minute? Am I Twee? And if so, do I need help?” (If you do, there are some useful lists at the end of the text.)
They line up by the cash machines outside the asphalt yard of the Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School on Clermont Avenue. A Gothic structure, it stands across from the 108-year-old Masonic Temple, which now occasionally hosts Indie-rock shows organized by the “Masonic Boom” collective. The young men here mostly have mustaches, some waxed and twisted into spiny points. Others have thick lumberjack beards that are also carefully groomed. They’re all skinny but seem somehow out of shape and slow, like koala bears. The women wear little makeup. Many have cut their hair in the pixie style that suggests Jean Seberg or have grown out bangs to evoke Anna Karina, Julie Christie, and other ’60s film stars. They wear vintage granny dresses with Doc Martens and a discreet amount of black eyeliner, or loose, carefully worn-in tees, some silk-screened with the faces of other vintage legends: “Hanoi Jane”–era Fonda or the young, snappish Bob Dylan circa Don’t Look Back.
Outside the fences, draped with tattered flags, faded school banners, or burgundy-and-gold faux Moroccan tapestries, there are opportunists on these grounds too. They’re simply selling ice-cold water. These Brooklynites make no fashion statements and thus seem decades older than their customers even when they are contemporaries.
A scattering of eco-Punks distributes flyers from their worn canvas satchels. This literature contains tips and scoldings and general instructions for saving Brooklyn, which increasingly means saving the world. The tourists bear this out. They’ve journeyed, thousands of them every season, from Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, and Iceland, all drawn to this lot and others like it. Since 2001, the number of visits to New York City has increased from around 35 million annually to nearly 53 million, with a large percentage who might not have even considered a trip to Brooklyn a decade ago now making Manhattan their second destination; hence luxury hotels like the chic but bohemian Wythe, a converted waterfront factory, opening in Williamsburg. Brooklyn has become not just a borough of New York City but rather an idea, an aesthetic, a selling device, an industry, and a dream of some kind of global Narnia where everyone has the right books, clothes, shoes, records, cookies, and pickles. Everyone is young and most of the young are Twee.
There are similar marketplaces like the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Flea all over the world. In 2013, one no longer has to be in Brooklyn—the borough, the county, the former “hood”—to be in Brooklyn. Austin is “Brooklyn.” In fact, some argue that Austin was Brooklyn before Brooklyn was “Brooklyn,” but lackadaisical or just plain mellow, the weird Texas hamlet never really had the right fuck-you attitude and Eastern drive to lead a culture-penetrating charge (most of us have seen Slacker). Parts of Chicago and L.A. (Silver Lake, Echo Park, Highland Park) are now “Brooklyn.” Paris is “Brooklyn.” “Among young Parisians, there is currently no greater praise for cuisine than “très Brooklyn,” “a term that signifies a particularly cool combination of informality, creativity, and quality,” wrote the New York Times’s Julia Moskin in 2012 in a feature about the kind of food trucks that line the back of this yard like a smoky, meaty, or vegan convoy, smelling of curry and mint and brisket and steaming rice. In Egypt and Syria and elsewhere in the Middle
East, the young want their “Brooklyn” too. And both Brooklyn and “Brooklyn” keep Twee and its designs, chief among them the freedom (and often the daring) to be soft in an increasingly hard world, alive and thriving.
When the late Apple visionary Steve Jobs envisioned a sort of global, utopian, design-driven planet where all are connected no matter what religion, creed, gender, province, or class one belongs to, he was tapping into a sort of scale model of the current “Brooklyn” in which Mose Allison, Animal Collective, and Drake live in harmony in the cloud, and gluten-free vanilla whiskey biscotti or a cavalry hat made from repurposed felt are status symbols because of their purity, are in because of their outré status, desirable and marketable because they deserve to be; because they are good. We aren’t quite there yet, not completely. There are imposters, knockoffs, and faux Brooklyn crafts. The old divides remain as well. All one needs to do is jog up out of the subway exit and onto the street, under the giant mural of slain rapper and “old Brooklyn” saint Biggie Smalls, to instantly detect these schisms in the new, hyper-gentrified Brooklyn.
Jobs died of cancer in October of 2011 before really learning whether this color- and class-blind vision could possibly hold. (It still remains to be seen.) Biggie never lived to see what happened to the corners where he used to sell crack and battle-rhyme. The realities of life inside the Twee model for the world are complicated. Today, most “street” Brooklynites are college educated, white, and affluent, or at least middle class, with semidisposable incomes, or at least enough cash on hand to search for a Galaxie 500 album on vinyl rather than simply downloading (or stealing) it. “I personally think of the modern Indie aesthetic as a lifestyle,” says Tamara Winfrey Harris, a writer and blogger who has explored this divide with humor and frankness on her blog What Tami Said. “It relates to people with a lot of time on their hands to ride around on bikes with giant wheels and stick birds on things. There would be a cost to a black man or a black woman walking around in holey clothes they got in vintage stores. That’s not to say black men in suits aren’t rousted in stop and frisk,” she adds of the city’s controversial policy of randomly targeting its citizens regardless of whether or not they have committed or are about to commit a crime. “But you are probably increasing your chances [if you are wearing vintage clothes].”
Few speak as openly of the divide between class and race, but on a bright, hot Saturday in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it’s certainly detectable. A middle-aged African-American man in a sweat-soaked navy T-shirt (sans 1960s icon or personal statement about loving bacon) has set up a pile of old issues of Jet, Ebony, and Vibe magazines to sell on the sidewalk.
“Nineties, man! Nineties! You got it!” he says, hoping to impress a group of bemused white kids in thick glasses as they pass. “Retro!” They don’t stop. They’re on their way to the aforementioned cash machine and then to the Flea, to browse coffee mugs etched with ducks, owls, squirrels, and foxes; old green glass Coke bottles; hatboxes printed with violets and daisies; fake-fur cropped jackets; and wind-up, spark-spitting King Kong, Godzilla, and Creature from the Black Lagoon toys. I wonder, in my darker nights of the soul, “Am I writing a book for well-off white people?” But I press on and remind myself that to even question that is part of the problem. Twee, like Punk and Hip-Hop, no matter who pioneered it, is at its best pure and open, a meritocracy and a good party. This is why it’s lasted. “Profile the aesthetic, tell the history, and you will be okay.” Still, it’s hard to ignore that many of these old brownstones and apartment complexes used to belong to working-class, nonwhite families. Greenpoint used to be a real, livable neighborhood with low rents that attracted first immigrants and then pioneering artists. Now it attracts the arty, and the next few waves of artists savvy enough to feed their need for all things Twee. The divide can cause fleeting moments of discomfort during an otherwise idyllic weekend outing. Some of these new residents stand fascinated by a local wood-carver’s booth. He’s set out a plastic sign indicating that he will happily accept Visa, AmEx, MasterCard, and Discover for his decorative whittled logs. Brooklyn has simply boomed, and few booms are graceful or without collateral damage. The number of business establishments in Kings County grew from around 37,000 in 1998 to nearly 50,000 in 2011. Since 1990, the population has increased by nearly 300,000 with a whopping 222,842 falling between twenty-five and twenty-nine years of age. Of Kings County’s 2.5 million residents, according to Census Bureau data, nearly 50 percent are white. Nearly a quarter of the population is under eighteen. One is almost assaulted by the youth energy upon hitting the street, and the pockets of Old Brooklyn need and fatigue become things the mind can sometimes yearn to bypass.
“Williamsburg and Greenpoint replaced the East Village,” says the droll and bold Brooklyn-based writer Jonathan Ames, one of those pilgrims who in the early 1990s moved to the still quiet, affordable family neighborhood just one subway stop from East Fourteenth Street in Lower Manhattan. The streets of Williamsburg were desolate after ten P.M. back then. Some of them smelled like gasoline, or burning chemicals. There was no view of Manhattan across the East River because massive, often abandoned Gothic factories obscured it. No developers had yet built the skyscraper condos that now edge the shore. “When the real estate developers gave artists these cheap lofts they were chumming the waters. ‘We’ll let artists live here and at some point a really cool café will open up and then the New York Times will write about that really cool café,’” Ames says. “After a while, if you said, ‘I’m moving to DUMBO,’ they wouldn’t think you were moving there because you wanted to be in an art scene. You just wanted to be where all the restaurants and bars and young people are living.”
The tall, gleaming condos lay empty and spooky for much of George W. Bush’s second presidential term and well into Obama’s first. I recall a sold-out Belle and Sebastian concert on the waterfront in late September of 2010 that basically took place in their shadow and seemed stranger for it. Here was a Twee superband that personified the new Brooklyn, playing their ballads and jaunty rock for an adoring crowd, but backdropped by ghost towers. With the election of President Obama in 2008 and the return of optimism, these haunted houses began to fill up, as did Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg’s main thoroughfare, as crowded on a weekend afternoon as Times Square or Piccadilly. The pilgrims came back with a vengeance. Just as it was after the Second World War, we got a big scare with 9/11, and in the wake, all we wanted—us Westerners anyway—was youth, beauty, and food that made us feel special for selecting it.
TV got a lot better. So did hot sauce. “It’s going to make your mouth happy,” a woman hawking probiotic hot sauce promises to passersby inside the yard. Did probiotic hot sauce exist five years ago, when there was talk of another Great Depression? The Bush era aged us all, and some of us before our time. It enervated the actual young, and made the aging older before their time. Once it finally concluded, young and youngish Americans seemed to be determined to get their lost innocence back with a vengeance; even the thirty-somethings and young boomers wanted to reclaim some youth taken by fear and war and “truthiness” and . . . more fear. “I’m into this woodworking stuff,” the mysterious Adam (Adam Driver) says during a rare and revealing moment from HBO’s award-winning comedy Girls. Most days, as imagined by creator Lena Dunham, he’s a cool customer, but clearly there’s a part of his soul that is crying out for beauty and truth. Adam, who drinks milk like an infant, constantly and compulsively, is searching for the right way to grow up.
Some Narnias are not full of industrious souls. Rather, they are otherworlds, which simply enchant without stoking the urge to collect and consume. They’re fantastical, mostly fictional. In Brooklyn and “Brooklyn” (the real world, if you will) you have to purchase the snow and the creatures and the experience itself. While it might seem folly to some, this retail-happy land is not without its share of genuinely inspired inventors. Among these aesthetes is the clever soul who has penetrated the lid of an old-fashioned glass mason jar and welded a metal
straw to the top for sipping. It’s not the lightbulb, the combustion engine, or the silicon chip, but America doesn’t make these things anymore. What we produce is . . . “Brooklyn.” It’s our greatest export to the world right now, the way “Hollywood” was a half century ago and Silicon Valley was three decades later.
Another vendor has set out a basket of quills. They’re glossy and long and, upon first glance, one can imagine someone writing a poem with them, dipping the tips into ink. “I haven’t decided what to do with them yet,” she says. “I’m just selling them. Sometimes I stick them through my hair.”
Pursuing youth and beauty can be dangerous too. There are children, again mostly white, in shorts and sneakers, snapping off those old firecrackers against the asphalt, one after the next—“Pop! Pop! Pop!”—and cackling gleefully. Some are plucking rubber noses and wax lips from rough wood bins on the ground, and it occurs to me that they are acting the same as the adults around them who are looking for their initials among the rusted metal letters or inquiring about how the cucumber-mint lemonade comes together, percentage wise.
“There’s much less interest from certain members of the young African-American community in joining,” says Winfrey Harris, whose blog often deconstructs issues of popular culture and race, “in posing as Twee, and not growing up.”
The actual children are the whimsy-obsessed offspring of a largely unchallenged generation. This generation used to be called X. Then came Y, or the Millennials. Today they’ve all combined, even along with some late-cusp baby boomers, and fused into some kind of multiheaded Generation Twee, or Twee Tribe, all the while breeding ever-gentler boys and girls with epicurean taste and a love for the formerly obscure and the baroque. To many this hydra is a serious threat to culture.
“Chiefly derogatory,” warns the Oxford English Dictionary before defining the word twee as “excessively affected, quaint, pretty, or sentimental.” It’s derived from the sound of a small child attempting to say the word sweet. Imagine a three-year-old pointing at a rosebush and observing, “Flower smells twee!” Now imagine a twenty-five-year-old man saying the same, or a sixty-year-old grandfather. Now imagine him dressed like a vested, precocious Truman Capote in 1948. Who wouldn’t want to punch that guy in the ear?
