shaka hislop goes somewhere
- Thread starter shakahislop
- Start date
shakahislop
Well-known member
Leo
Well-known member
check out the one in queens (Jamaica, that is)
shakahislop
Well-known member
i've checked that one out and it is indeed pretty interesting. there is an interesting thing as you get out into the further parts of Queens, how it slowly calms down a bit, gets a bit less frantic. it feels more like london actually, that less dense thing going on.
i remember getting to NYC and being on the LIRR and seeing signs for trains that go to both Babylon and Jamaica, and thinking I was losing my marbles
Leo
Well-known member
Jamaica, Queens used to be rough, still not gentrified but a lot safer. And still not cool. Queens is a huge borough, and varied, pretty suburban in parts. Distinct pockets like Station Square in Forest Hills, Greek area in Astoria, South Asian in Jackson Heights. Lots of the signage in Flushing is in Korean.
shakahislop
Well-known member
it's the best. i know you know this, i'm writing it for the benefit of everyone else. queens in general, i guess until you get to bayside or wherever off the subway system where it gets properly spaced out and suburban, is one of the maddest places on the planet i think. an enormous migrant dormitory that serves the rest of the city.
shakahislop
Well-known member
its one of the reasons that for all the (major) hassles and expense nyc is worth it. for me. it has depth. queens and brooklyn are totally different beasts, manhattan again is a different thing, the bronx is something else again. it means that you have this huge and kind of endless thing to think about.
shakahislop
Well-known member
that said, whenever i take friends on long walks around brooklyn to show them the place, most of them don't really get the appeal
shakahislop
Well-known member
It's almost literally everywhere by this point. There's some bits of the bronx I haven't been to, some of the bits of Queens that are in those endless suburbs, and to be fair most of staten island, and east new york and starret city, probably a few other bits I've forgotten. It's been a bit of a determined project, not happened by accident, but quite satisfying. The rest of town makes more sense when you've spent a bit of time in the further out bits, I've found. It's partly an intellectual project, and partly just something to do to kill time.
shakahislop
Well-known member
In the same way, nyc itself only started to make any kind of sense after getting out and exploring America a bit. There's a way in which the existance of somewhere like the williamsburg-ridgewood axis clicked when I'd been to like pheonix and miami and realized that for a certain type of person it would totally be worth paying $1500 for a tiny room in a shared house so that you could be in nyc. Or even if you lived in Boston or something the appeal of nyc is clear. Whereas it was a bit confusing coming from Europe, because it nyc was simultaneously a much more annoying place to live and incredibly expensive.
No shade against the rest of the US but nyc is pretty different to most of the country, that's all I mean. Whereas like London isn't THAT different to Glasgow or whatever.
No shade against the rest of the US but nyc is pretty different to most of the country, that's all I mean. Whereas like London isn't THAT different to Glasgow or whatever.
shakahislop
Well-known member
Don't think that there's another thread on Jamaica to add to. Just got back this minute. Enjoyably, my journey was from Jamaica NYC to Jamaica Jamaica, and then the same on the way back.
Illuminating trip culturally speaking. I might have been unusually cynical about the place before, don't know where that came from, but definitely an education in that respect.
Illuminating trip culturally speaking. I might have been unusually cynical about the place before, don't know where that came from, but definitely an education in that respect.
shakahislop
Well-known member
I've been around, been to all sorts of places, and with all the provisos of making this kind of comment from a tourist perspective, and all the ignorance of the place associated with that, it is a truly unusually warm and open culture. I was really surprised with how familiarly people treated me, even as an obvious outsider.
shakahislop
Well-known member
I kept thinking about the terminology of 'vibes'. It always sounds like bullshit coming out of my mouth. At the same time its a concept without equivalent, that gets at something important. I'm very much a bad vibes merchant myself. But I found Jamaica to very much have good vibes. Actually that good vibes seemed to be something that your man on the street was committed to creating, between people. Shallow analysis I know but that's all I've got, these very subjective impressions. I don't know the truth but it seems possible that the whole vibes terminology is something that came to the UK with Jamaicans, I guess someone will have written about that at some point.
shakahislop
Well-known member
Arses were very much in my face. I saw someone taking a photo of thier massive arse in a thong, like a selfie. And beyond that one incident there were a lot of small things that suggested that big arses are valorised. I know I should already be aware of this kind of thing, but it's the best example I've seen of that whole idea that sexuality, specifically what's attractive and what's not, is culturally created.
sus
Well-known member
Starrett City has a crazy political history, see eg https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/08/...-stop-using-quotas-to-foster-integration.html
Leo was probably around for it, knows all about it, but was wild to see the progressive arguments both for and against the quotas
Leo was probably around for it, knows all about it, but was wild to see the progressive arguments both for and against the quotas