you asked
I answered.
Very random question: are apartments in Brooklyn expensive?
This depends on a few things:
- the conditions under which you are willing to live
- where in brooklyn you are living
- whether or not you want to share an apartment
- how long you are willing to hunt for a good trade off of all these things
- what your concept of ‘expensive’ is (are you comparing to manhattan rents, or to boise, idaho? compared to the former, it’s cheap, but compared to the latter, it’s phenomeally expensive.)
Generally I’d say that if you’re willing to live in semi-ridiculous mediocre-quality-of-life conditions (like, say, an enormous but crumbling, black-mold-riddled, drafty, heat-only-sometimes-works, mugging-on-the-doorstep prewar brownstone in bushwick, or perhaps an 8x8 room in a bedford ave one bedroom being used as a railroad meaning that going to pee means walking through someone’s bedroom and also not having a sink in the bathroom and also not having a kitchen table/chairs so you eat on the floor/your bed, or perhaps a windowless basement apartment in which you are sleeping on a couch and there are 5 other people and 5000 roaches living there, or perhaps a tiny room with a window that looks out on a brick wall and somewhat unsavory roommates elsewhere in the apartment, or perhaps a huge awesome loft space but your room will basically be like, a piece of drywall and a curtain around your bed and maybe a bookshelf, etc) $600-900 for a room is pretty average, the more roommates you have the cheaper it gets. I live in that aformentioned one-bedroom-used-as-two-bedroom thing and I pay near the middle/lower end of that spectrum. Util are pretty cheap especially if you’re splitting (my electric is like $20/month per person, gas usually like $6.) This also usually has to do with the fact that it does not take a lot of electricity/gas to light/heat a shoebox-sized space.
If you want anything nicer than that, or require ridiculous, unecessarily, extravagant things like “privacy” or “space” or “windows,” you’re gonna pay. I’d say $1200-1600 for a decent studio/one-bedroom in a relatively nice/convenient/safe neighborhood is pretty average, and the nicer things start getting up to Manhattan rents ($1500+ for a studio/one BR) real fast. I think the thing in Brooklyn is that shitty apartments are still at shitty apartment prices, where in Manhattan you’ll pay for the nose to live in someone’s linen closet or whatever? Again, it depends what you’re comparing against and what kind of luxuries you’re willing to compromise.
are you flattered or annoyed if someone cops your style?
I’m probably gonna be a lil creeped out if it comes off that someone is making a really deliberate effort to look exactly like me or something or adopts a few things I consider “signature” or some crap like that, or drastically changes their look after interacting with me or something, but it’s not like I’m sitting here hand-sewing everything I wear and waving some huge flag of total individuality. Style is pretty collective and we’re all influenced by each other and I think getting butthurt over someone ‘copying’ you is ultimately kinda pointless.
How can you be queer/feminist and interested in fashion at the same time?
I’M SORRY, I FORGOT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE
In all seriousness though, I’d like you to right now off the top of your head think of ten powerful people you can think of working in fashion, and then tell me how many of them are either queer or female or MAYBE even both (anyone, Kate Lanphear confirm/deny plz?), and then you can ask all of THEM and then we can all chat about how it’s possible. Not that it answers it, but like, GODDAMN THIS IS GETTING OLD.
you seem to have a few h8ers on your blog. why do you allow their comments? are they someone known to you?
haters gonna hate, ain’t no thang. i’ve no idea who they are (also the IP addresses vary.) i kind of only get defensive/ban/don’t approve when people start attacking other commenters/saying really blatantly offensive inflammatory shit.
I think your perspective on things is really interesting. I love reading your opinions on various things. What are you most passionate about?
At the current point in time I’m pretty passionate about egg and cheese sandwiches, which I used to think were totally vile, but I think I’d just never really had a good one. I got this one on foccaccia with scrambled egg and ricotta a few days ago and damn, that shit was tasty.
Putting off going to sleep (even though I’m going to work in the morning), but I saw that you said you’d answer FormSpring questions again. So here’s one, sorry if it’s been asked: What are your favorite books &/or what have you been reading lately?
To be honest, lately I’ve kind of been rereading a lot of obnoxious theory I had to read in college lately but sort of rushed through/didn’t think about a lot at the time, which is sort of douchey and sort of hilarious (FOUCAULT + BARTHES ON THE L TRAIN WHAT, SOMEONE SHOOT ME IN THE FACE FOR BEING SO INSUFFERABLE.) I reread a lot, which is kind of a problem since I sort of just tend to go through the same books over and over and not buy many new ones, especially short stories, in the past year I’ve gone over and over a lot of Garcia Marquez and Cortazar and Lorrie Moore short stories. So I’m way up for some fiction recc’s though, I’m kind of in a rut there.
Obviously you can be queer and interested in fashion but what are your thoughts on the clichés? I think that’s what the below was driving at. See the first paragraph: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/20/women-facial-hair
I think there’s a lot to be said about this and I think a lot of it has been said already, and probably better.
“I am feminist/queer and therefore do not give a SHIT about clothes and fashion is EVIL and for DUMB BITCHES and I am MORALLY SUPERIOR and a BETTER WOMAN/FEMINIST/DYKE because I look schlumpy” is obviously a really huge pet peeve of mine and I get pretty riled up about it here a lot. Also, dead horse much? Like, allright, cool, if that’s your deal and that’s how you feel good/normal/right/attractive/happy/fulfilled, COOL. Doesn’t mean you need to be all up in MY grill about it though since it’s not like I’m ever going to be all “you know, you should really shave your armpits/wear lipstick” or something, so let’s all just agree to disagree and feel warm and fuzzy about community instead k? Also like blah blah femme as valid queer identity blah perfomativity blah. Again, DEAD HORSE.
But I mean, at the end of the day, to each his own, and when you’re talking about shit like body hair, that gets into an entire can of worms from everything from feminine social beauty constructs to miscellaneous issues with how we socially create a gender binary and the personal effects of both those things on basically everyone, and, like, y’all can take a queer theory 101 course on THAT nonsense. But I guess what bugs me there is that I feel like the ultimate only logical conclusion from all that is ‘whatever feels right for you is fine and pretty much everyone should be cool with this as long as you aren’t intensely offending/hurting/damaging people with it, COOL, and I (and everyone else) am really effing tired of hearing about what is/isn’t queer and how things should/shouldn’t be and what is/isn’t normal/correct regarding sex/gender/sexuality/social presentation of these things/WHATEVER.’ Which is why women being judged for their body hair/clothes/whatever is bullshit, but it’s also why all my “omg fashion queer feminism femme DOES NOT COMPUTE” comments are also a big steaming pile of poo.
There’s really also not much difference than talking about stereotypes/cliches of other marginalized/minority/whatever groups, which ALSO brings into question concepts of identity politics and why people choose to perform/accentuate certain characteristics so as to claim group identity as part of a movement, and the ways in which social change is linked to (and often incited by) those identity politics. (And beyond politics, there’s also the simple issue of visibility within a queer community.) And the fact that for an older generation these identity politics and more militant concepts of queerness and/or feminism are still more important, since it was largely their generation and its organization that set up the stage for the slight privileges and more relaxed attitudes (comparatively, ain’t sayin things are perfect) my generation has today. So in many ways the existence of the cliches (and this is true of many movements I’d say) has paved the way for those who share ideas and motivations BUT break from those strict identity + appearance politics, and are in many ways probably what actually enable me to sit here ranting about the crap I do.
Also I’d just like to say that I also rarely wear a bra either but that’s got more to do with being a 32A than with feminism. Unfortunately I think this ulimately really just tends to accentuate my tendency to look like a trollop than my politics though, oops.
guilty pleasure favourite designer? like, are you secretly in love with ed hardy or anything?
It’s not exactly Ed-Hardy-level, but I think the fact that I’m kind of an undying Chanel whore is probably kind of a guilty pleasure.
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