¯\_(ツ)_/¯: A Year in Absurd Brooklyn Stories
GOMORRAH
Brooklyn girls
When they walk in, they rule the world
Brooklyn girls
Tough and pretty, break the rules
We all chuckled at Catey Shaw after the “Brooklyn Girls” video: an outsider white girl, unironically uncool, singing and dancing in front of graffiti walls in Bushwick without a shred of anything that signified the insider knowingness with which the cool Brooklyn commentariat talk about the borough. It didn’t matter that the song was actually catchy—”Brooklyn Girls” was corny as hell. Shaw was speaking the wrong language.
Here’s a thought, though: Maybe “Brooklyn Girls” was just a little too real? The sanitized, branded Brooklyn of the song is the same one many of its critics live in. It’s overrun by outsiders, a group that not only includes the SVA graduate Shaw but many of the people who work in Brooklyn media, patronize Roberta’s and Swallow Cafe “in 11206,” and drink “on top of the brownstones.” Watching the “Brooklyn Girls” video was like staring into the uncanny valley: a reminder that certain swaths of Brooklyn have become simulacra of their own pasts.
There were lots of other reminders of that, too! Who can forget the Girls bus tour, Bushwick’s brush with SantaCon (“that yearly yule festival of vomit and invading personal space“), or the hipster beard transplant craze? “Whether you are talking about the Brooklyn hipster or the advertising executive, the look is definitely to have a bit of facial hair,” is something a licensed doctor told to a reporter for a reputable news outlet in 2014. We’re living in the end times.
Closing the loop entirely was Underfinger, a “real and serious” restaurant from Do or Dine chef Justin Warner that began as a satirical review lampooning Brooklyn’s experimental food scene but became, for one night only, a functioning restaurant serving “farm-to-finger” delicacies like seahorse sashimi, sweet bread sweetbread, sea bream fish sticks with carrot foam, and charcuterie glove, an actual glove made of meat.