10 Things I Learned About Being Young in New York (Gawker)
Tongue ‘n’ cheek, obviously (or not so obviously?).
Coincidentally, this morning I also drew up a list of “Things People Have Called Me on the Internet.” I’m thinking this piece will give me lots of fresh content to add to that list. Each name usually includes some variation of ’self-entitled,’ since that’s the automatic insult for all NYC students. On the whole, I will admit that I feel entitled to call myself self-entitled (meta?).
Princetonian Op-Ed Plays the Rape Blame Game (NYU Local)
Epic (and depressing) comment thread alert.
NYU and New York Times Collaborate on East Village Local Blog (NYU Local)
I’ve been working really hard on this secret project, and finally last week we got to announce it publicly. NYU and the NYT have partnered to launch a hyperlocal blog catering to East Village neighborhood news, and I’m incredibly excited to be a contributing staff editor and developer with the project. Aside from the fact that the launch has (as expected) experienced a rather polarizing reception, I think that the team of people tasked with this mission are well-abled for the work, and can hopefully provide the kind of comprehensive (but fun and interesting!) community news platform East Village residents need and deserve. This project is especially close to my heart, mostly because it combines a ton of my interests (hyperlocal journalism, the East Village, community reporting, citizen journalism, etc.) into one awesome blog. I could continue to gush, but I should probably stop until we at least beta-launch (hopefully within the next month or so); we have a lot to prove–to the community, to the impressive and well-established blogs that have already been successfully reporting EV news, and even to ourselves. It’s been a ton of work so far, and it will probably only get harder from here, but I think in the end it will be well worth the time and energy.
Aspiring to write on the internet is like aspiring to shred on Guitar Hero. The best part of both is wearing your pajamas. The worst part is the tense shoulders.
-JoeCo, All the “Sad” Young Aspiring Media Careers: The Kids Are Apparently Just Fine
I have no idea how I came across this girl’s YouTube channel, but suffice to say that I have been absurdly fascinated by her raison d’etre ever since. “Beckii Cruel,” born Rebecca Flint, is a 14-year-old British girl, whose anime-like features and quirky dance videos have garnered her a tremendous amount of popularity in Japan. Her schtick is this: lithe, beautiful and incredibly young, Flint participates in “cosplay,” a popular form of artistic expression in Japan that requires she dress up in anime-inspired outfits. Her videos feature her flirting into the camera, and then bopping adorably around to Japanese pop music. She seems to have intensely studied the cutesy mannerisms and behavior of manga characters, which she mirrors (in a painfully stilted way) in this video. Despite the fact that she’s British, she also adopts a fake Japanese accent, adding to her anime persona. It’s incredibly bizarre to witness, and the P.C. person in me aches to deem it culturally insensitive, but her Japanese fans seem to eat it up. Her recently released album is expected to hit the number one record spot in Japan, and she recently flew to Tokyo to begin touring.
Flint’s antics strike me as rather controversial; while her act could be chalked up to the innocent whims of a 14-year-old girl swept up by a culture absolutely entrenched in anime fever (there’s even a word in Japanese for manga obsession: otaku), there’s also something vaguely creepy about the way she portrays herself, dressing up in schoolgirl and sailor uniforms, giggling and flipping her hair. You start to wonder how many of her fans are actually just gross old men aching for an anime woman of their own. Well, according to Beckii’s formspring, 53% of them are “old otaku pedophiles.” She touts this number proudly, as if she believes it should be a whole lot more.
I’m fascinated by her parents’ seeming complicity in all of this–doesn’t it freak them out that she’s becoming a sexual icon at 14?–and I don’t know how I feel about it. Part of me wants to just think of her as a cute young girl into anime who unwittingly tapped into this major pressure point in the Japanese cultural psyche that resulted in foreign fame. But part of me is completely grossed out that she doesn’t think it’s weird that 53% of her fans are “old.”
It actually strikes at the heart of a lot of feminist issues. Can a 14-year-old girl even be considered a sexual object, or have our puritanical roots made us all overly sensitive to that sort of thing? Can a 14-year-old girl wear sailor uniforms and knee socks without it being sexual? When I was her age and younger, I frequently made up dances with my friends to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera songs, blissfully thrusting about to the poppy beat. The difference, though, was the audience–only my parents and friends witnessed these performances. So I guess my main question is this: does the creepy demographic of her audience automatically skew the innocent intentions of her video into something more inapporpriate? Personally, I have absolutely no idea.
Since I was just an angsty lil’ teen, punctuating the drum beats of Dave Matthews Band songs with the furious slamming of my bedroom door, I’ve craved a little white box just like this one. Whether it’s because I am inherently a narcissist, inherently over-analytical, or inherently both, I’ve always needed a space to work shit out. Sometimes it was in Harriet the Spy-esque notebooks with “Keep Out (that means YOU, Mom and Dad!),” stickers on them. But mostly the rhythmic turbulence of my life has been confined to places like Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger and WordPress–I’ve had a blog on each service, at one time or another–sometimes private, but mostly public because of that whole “need to connect in a human way” thing. I’m terrible at doing that in person. I’m fumbly and shy. Here I am those things too, only less dramatically so.
So with the shuttering of J&J, my blogging home for the past two years, I’ve decided to launch this website, designed by my incredibly talented roommate David Aragon, as the new space for my mostly-jumbled-but-occasionally-valuable thoughts on media, feminism and–yes–being young in New York (or at least the East Village).
So I hope you have your earnestness hat with you, because I’m a millennial, so all I want to do is drool over rainbows and cupcakes. Join me!