Saturday August 21, 2004

JOURNALISM 000. It's been a while since anyone brought up irony, but get a load of this from the Metro Section of today's New York Times (registration required):

New York neighborhoods do not announce their sea changes. There is no news release or banner draped across the street. Sometimes there is just a certain guy, and a thing that guy does, and before you know it the neighborhood has made one of those subtle shifts, the sort that keep New York City fascinating.

The neighborhood is Williamsburg and the guy is one Todd Fatjo, a former record store clerk who is moving to the Bronx to live with his girlfriend. That's really all there is to it, but the story goes on for a thousand words, these among them:

[Fatjo and his roommates] held five parties during their tenancy that Mr. Fatjo would later describe as major, defined as involving three separate sound systems blaring away in different parts of the apartment. "It was just insane," Mr. Fatjo said...

He wrote with a simple yet passionate eloquence, speaking directly to his peers in a parlance that showed him to be of the place and moment. "If you've ever been to my duplex loft you know how truly dope it is," Mr. Fatjo began...

If you have to ask why proximity to multiple 99-cent stores might be an advantage, you will never know. Mr. Fatjo's truly dope duplex loft is not in the gentrified Williamsburg of investment bankers and corporate media types. Those 24-hour bodegas he mentioned have bulletproof glass...

Love is a funny thing. It can spin a cynical hipster around like a record (baby, right round, round, round), and it has done a number on Mr. Fatjo, who is 28. He quit the music store this year and took a job showing apartments in Manhattan. He is working toward a broker's license, and this month he had the Afro shorn to a nice, respectable wave...

The fate of the truly dope duplex loft may be a sign that the hipster scene is fading in Williamsburg, or who knows? Some new generation could reinvigorate the neighborhood with its own brand of cool. As for Mr. Fatjo, who is fast becoming just some guy who has a job, the end of the party is bittersweet...

Here's my question, and I ask it in all sincerity: is there any way to tell if the reporter is kidding? The hipster-exodus story is a staple of metro sections, and one can get a lot of resonance out of some schlub's life changes if there is any trend or home truth with which to hook it up. But this guy just got a new apartment and a new job. Williamsburg has been gentrified for years, and from what I can see, from my vantage point a few blocks from Mr. Fatjo's dope duplex, kids are still shoving dollar bills through bulletproof glass. So what's the story? People move? Williamsburg has condos?

I wouldn't bring it up if I could be sure the reporter was just filling a news hole with a lazy-ass story -- hell, I've done that plenty of times. But I have this nagging suspicion that I'm hoping you can allay. I worry that this is actually news. I worry that, if the Olympics weren't on hand with its many color photo opportunities, Todd Fatjo would be on the front page. (Bad enough that today's actual front page had a story about the political significance of Bush hugging John McCain.) I worry that I've had my nose buried in the editorial, sports, and comics sections so much in recent months that, without my noticing it, all absolute values were completely overturned and I am now living in a Bizarro World where Todd Fatjo is copy!

Or maybe it's just a joke. I'm not ruling that out.

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