Slickness: 1, Failure: 0

I live in a comparatively fashionable part of Brooklyn. Like most fashionable parts of Brooklyn, it used to be crummy, and like most fashionable parts of Brooklyn, it likes to think that it still is crummy.

That's not to suggest that my neighbors wish that they could still buy heroin from the old dope peddler down the corner. Most of them would probably call the cops if they so much as saw a hypodermic needle lying on the sidewalk. But as a whole, my neck of the woods is still very attached to its gritty aesthetic, however gritless its inhabitants might be.

Like Donald Trump's dick slapping you in the eye.

In recent years, this neighborhood's cognitive dissonance has been made manifest by its growing population of large, modern condominiums. These condos are not gritty, you see. They shine in the sunlight. They are in compliance with New York's many building ordinances. Their elevators work, and quickly. They have doormen and electronic key fobs. Thurston Moore would furrow his brow in disgust behind his Wayfarers at these buildings (and probably has). Nonetheless, real estate developers continue to build, and presumably rent out, these eyesores.



And eyesores they are. They stick out like patches of futuristic kudzu, choking the old-growth warehouses and exposed brick facades that formerly dominated the landscape. Nobody seems to like them. Even recent transplants like me complain about them. "Who the fuck would live in one of those awful things?" I ask, furrowing my brow in disgust. Since I've been here for less than a year, I haven't earned my Wayfarers yet.

But however ugly the condos may be, they impose a sort of material honesty on the populace that lives in their shadow. North Brooklyn is full of people who go to their friend's rock gig while wishing that they were at an 80s karaoke night. Presumably the condo-dwellers flake out on their musician pals entirely and cut straight to butchering "Whip It" between lines of coke in the bathroom. People like me also live here--people who take guitar music very seriously, who have never sung karaoke, who prefer low-rent failure to high-rent slickness. For all of us, these architectural abortions serve as forceful reminders of our 'hood's real character: safe, somewhat pricy, and not nearly as punk rock as it sees itself.