is New York City dead?

Driving is easy but it's a constant mental drag. Driving in an urban area is just unpleasant and closed off.

One of the worst experiences in my life was when I had to drive less than a mile in Boston from a hotel garage to the MassPike but maybe this is too off topic at this point

will take driving in nyc over boston any day of the week

I don't really want to live in NYC because my midwest town is ridiculously livable, and there are lots of great restaurants everywhere now (or here at least). It would theoretically be nice to see world-class jazz musicians on any night of the week, but some of those have moved here from NYC, and I don't go see them very often.

All I really pine after is the diversity and club culture (although how healthy even is that now, in terms of DIY-ish spaces?).

will take driving in nyc over boston any day of the week

― Entrepreneurial Jism Unshackler (Hadrian VIII), Wednesday, February 7, 2018 2:52 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh HELL yes

Driving in Boston made me feel insane, I encountered intersections without precedent in my 21 yrs of driving.

it is the earthly worst!

i was saying to Doctor Casino after the FAP for Wins that maybe, just maybe, the slow march to ruin of the subway system might do what street crime once did for nyc rent prices

I don't really believe it though

I still don't hear kids looking to move to Columbus or Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh: they do
Columbus: they should

there is a guy who has always hung out in front of the bodega on my block, a massive friendly guy named Frankie who apparently writes poetry, and once about ten years ago (when my part of williamsburg was still only somewhat gentrified) I heard him tell his friends "There's only one thing that can save this neighborhood. Street violence."

i never drove in Boston or NYC, for which i feel pretty fortunate. however i live in Los Angeles, which is a very different form of insanity. it's less a sense of constant panic or anger for me, it's more a subconscious murmur of apocalypses to come. no one will be able to get out of here alive.

i got to be a goddamned pro driving in boston and it is a point of pride now, these midwestern simpletons here don't know how to drive

https://www.theonion.com/mta-reminds-new-yorkers-they-can-fucking-walk-1822734848

columbus seems to be booming right now but cleveland is the cooler city imo

Pittsburgh is regional, though, right? There's not a lot of small-town teenagers from Georgia gunning for their shot in Pittsburgh.

i would choose columbus because of the comix library and attached scene

I also have been hearing about Pittsburgh from artist-types who have lived in NYC at some point and are looking for cheap rent + a decent scene of some sort, some friends recently moved there.

I have been to ballgames in Akron, Dayton, Cincy and Cleveland, but not Columbus

everything is regional, apart from nyc/chi/la and whatever the seattle of the moment is

yea migration to pittsburgh is regional, so are all the midwestern cities

i'm trying to find it right now but i'm not having luck - some migration patterns thing that showed which cities people were moving from to other cities, e.g. people moving to new york are coming from london, new delhi, etc, and people moving to denver are coming from san francisco, seattle, etc, and then people moving to cleveland are coming from like akron, canton, columbus. highlighting how global, national, or regional migration to different cities is happening

My last Union Pool hookup was Dec 14 2009, age 24, night before my GREs. He was a dashing and successful painter 13+ years my senior. The affair was on-off for 8 years. I missed a whole section of the GRE but still got into Yale. Blessings, Union Pool. https://t.co/47hWA5e8lx

— Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) January 31, 2018

this person sounds deeply obnoxious

xxp yeah, that was my initial thought w/ bringing up Columbus and Pittsburgh - nowhere else is even close to challenging NY's status whether it's dead or not. Other cities can aim for being the Austin of their tri-state area.

Union Pool evokes a lot of memories for me but they're not particularly good or bad memories, it was just a place I happened to go a bunch of times and play a couple times. It seemed very central to a certain group of people that I was just sort of peripheral too by way of being in a band with a couple of them.

i still wind up at union pool once or twice a month it seems. friends work there, friends have played there, it's fairly centrally located. never got laid cuz of union pool tho.

is union pool closing or something?

not while there are hookups to come

i will go to the free shows in the yard in the summer (2x a year)

i depend on my buddy who works there to let me know if something special is happening (sadly he did not text me about the free richard bishop show til a couple hours before start by which time I was buried in laundry or some other adult chore)

i saw some good old fashioned slutishness @ union pool when i was in ny a cpl months ago, it was pretty late and mostly empty, & right in the middle of the main room some girl was giving this total knob of a dude on a chair this, like, ultra drunken, showgirls-style lap dance. it was p hilarious and all the bartenders were taking selfies w/them in the bg.

nowhere else is even close to challenging NY's status whether it's dead or not

la has completely eclipsed/ultramurdered ny in all creative fields. ny still reigns supreme for salarymen

if i had a lot of cash i would definitely choose LA

pic.twitter.com/iTvkRhUZ3H

— Joel Irwin (@irwindigital) January 31, 2018

i moved from nyc to la last year. both are great cities, but both could use an infrastructure week or two.

You'd have to pay me a fuckload of money to live in LA.

would you consider an extra bathroom and two spare bedrooms and a garage in lieu of the money?

Well... probably not! We have a really nice apartment to be honest. Two bathrooms, one spare bedroom, big open space, don't mind street parking in our neighborhood.

I have only spent a little time in LA, but I think it would be tough for me to live there. The constant driving, all your friends being spread out, too hot.

It feels too suburban, and the parts that feel walkable seem bad. Of course I'm sure there are plenty of nice neighborhoods, I've just never spent time in them.

and also just that feeling of a city built where the land did not want a city to be...

I didn't find it too hot, and better transit than I expected. But not enough rep cinema.

i think new york definitely took a massive blow when i left, because a lot of people find me very compelling, but yeah, that's a fair description of LA ian.

i work from home here so the driving affects me much less here, but fwiw when i drive to the kinds of places i go it takes me less time to get to them than it did in new york, unless those new york places were walking <10 mins walking distance. but i do miss walking.

Ian, where do you live now? Or is it the place you have been living in for a long time?

life seems great in LA, I have enjoyed visiting, and friends who have moved there in last ten years seem happy abt it, but it doesn't cohere for me as a "city"...like I never have a sense of a single, specific energy coursing through it, never the feeling that something happening in one part is relevant to any other...and this is the quality I most appreciate in a city, above and beyond the robustness of a given scene or whatever

Some friends moved out to LA a while back but didn't stay. I will always remember when they moved back, saying that the only place they saw their friends was by chance in the grocery store.

xp Yerac, I live in Clinton Hill, where I have lived for 6.5 years.

i think new york definitely took a massive blow when i left, because a lot of people find me very compelling

otm!

Ok, the last apt. I remember was when we took Pete to the park nearby (Prospect Heights?). I like having small spaces because it doesn't take me long to clean and we literally hang out in the same 100 sq feet of space all the time.

i find LA a very visitor-hostile place compared to new york, both in the sense that it's physically challenging and it's culturally inscrutable and inpenetrable to the average non-american because it's so unlike anywhere in, say, europe. when i have family over it's a ton of work and they don't like it anyway. i can imagine that feeling persisting for a while, maybe years, when you first move here. i moved here with a local which helps.

ha xp!

i miss the compelling caek too

I've alao been told i should stay somewhere besides Hollywood next trip. I understand things actually go on Downtown now.

Well... probably not! We have a really nice apartment to be honest. Two bathrooms, one spare bedroom, big open space, don't mind street parking in our neighborhood.

I have only spent a little time in LA, but I think it would be tough for me to live there. The constant driving, all your friends being spread out, too hot.

― ian, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 1:04 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It feels too suburban, and the parts that feel walkable seem bad. Of course I'm sure there are plenty of nice neighborhoods, I've just never spent time in them.

― ian, Wednesday, February 7, 2018 1:05 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like we live in the exact right neighborhood for us, close to good friends (or close enough) and one block from our son's elementary school. we're even in a bit of a valley, so we're not baking in the sun all day during the summer. there's even a vv good bookstore nearby, and movie theaters. you can walk! it's very comfortable right here. but a lot of the trendy hoods I don't really dig. I didn't like Silver Lake and Highland Park isn't really my "thing." I think if i was coming to town now, I'd aim to live in downtown or Little Tokyo.

My issue I guess is I've never quite felt at home here, I'm not really a big fan of the climate and eventually it'll be a city only a war boy could love. And really the real estate prices are just depressing for us, a family trying to scrape by and stick around to help out my wife's parents.

i also like to run around strange cities with paper maps in hand, which usually involves getting lost for 30 minutes here and there. I was wandering among all these nice houses in Los Feliz a few summers back with nary a human in sight, and was sure someone was gonna call the cops.

That Judd Apatow show "Love" made me think that LA could be ok. I don't think I have outright ever enjoyed being there though.

My friends in LA who hate living there say they don't want to move to NYC because everyone in NYC thinks they are too smart.

tbf we are pretty smart