Vanity Fair's Kate AhlbornBrooklyn Virgin Discovers Naked Dancing
Somehow it happened that in all the years I’ve lived in New York City, I’d never been to Brooklyn...So on Tuesday night, I boarded the L train (heading away from the West Village) and made my way to hipsterville. I’d heard from my more global friends that Brooklyn is a charming borough inhabited by cool young families, gourmet cheese shops, and creative intellectuals. It has parks! And trees! And slow walkers aren’t mowed down on the sidewalk! But I’m what you might call a bona fide Manhattanite. Or, to be more precise, a bona fide Upper East Sider. I’ve traveled the world, I said to myself—how exotic could Brooklyn really be?
Perhaps my tweed J. Crew jacket and Tory Burch ballet flats weren’t the best wardrobe choice for that day, but I overcame the fact that I was a total Williamsburg misfit and hoped my foreigner status wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the natives. (It was.) After narrowly escaping death by skateboard on the Bedford subway platform, I made my way to a rickety building in what felt to me like Brooklyn’s outer banks. (It wasn’t.) [...]
As we entered the space, Lafrance was laying on the table, barely clothed, 8-months pregnant, and wearing deer antlers on her head. Displayed down her leg was a miniature wilderness scene made of moss and tiny plastic animals. We all took a seat at the table and waited for something to happen. I was flustered beyond belief, but the setting was so intimate that there was no escaping without seeming totally intolerant and disrespectful. [...]
They served us tea, whispered in our ears, and even touched our faces.
I’m not passing judgment. Really, I’m not. [...]
I have no doubt that Home will appeal to a certain subset of performance-goers, many of whom will find it illuminating and inspiring. But for the more mainstream audience member like me: don’t be fooled by her carefree Feist video or her incredible stairwell dance (“Descent,” choreographed in 2003). This is a much more intimate, much more erotic, and much more intense experience. (Did I mention that she touched my face?)
I left the rickety building slightly shaken up and eager to get back to Manhattan. After this experience, I’m fairly certain that’s exactly where I belong.
THE COMMENTS
good riddance and don't come back. we don't need you.
dear kate - pretentious loser. please please please STAY in the upper east side where you obviously belong.
Wow again. I know there are people who are very close minded in the world, who rarely step outside their own neighborhood. They live all over the world, including Manhattan and Brooklyn. The sad part is that this person is a writer for a relatively sophisticated magazine. I am surprised there wasn't a part of the article where the writer marvels that the subways aren't covered in graffiti and that you can pay with a card, not a token. This is worse than the tourists of time square. Performance art in a "rickety" building in Williamsburg is obviously not for "the more mainstream audience member." An artist touched your face during a performance? Mon dieu!! People have been doing much more shocking work for decades. Please stop writing. Please.
well, hey, bravo Vanity Fair. You finally published an article ignorant enough to prod me to jump through the hoops of commenter registration. It's not really the tone of the article – plenty of "manhattan people" don't venture to brooklyn, and we're the better for it. But jesus christ – this girl writes like a broken robot.
You're an idiot, Kate.
This is the amateurish work you would expect to find on someone's LiveJournal, not on a national magazine's website. Stilted and egregiously uninformed, this piece speaks to everything that's wrong with Vanity Fair, i.e. vapid journalism with a patina of New York sophistication fit for those who want to read a celebrity magazine without the guilt.
This is a joke, right? I've read better writing in high school newspapers.
What is sad about this piece, is that it's about the writer and not the artist. And the writer is obviously young and bland... If you want to be a critic/writer of any importance, it is best if you get out of your own way. We don't care. Most of us are here because we like to be challenged by all the "strange" neighborhoods/artist/performances in the city. Vanity Fair? Who's daughter/niece/god-daughter is this?
Truly insipid.
Who gave Kate a job? Be careful VF the "little people" will stop reading this kind of drivel.
Wow. You really suck. Williamsburg freaked you out. What's next? How crazy and dangerous Brooklyn Heights is? The evil stroller mafia in Park Slope tried to kill you? Chinatown is really stinky? Go back to LiveJournal where you belong. James Wolcott should personally kick your ass for what you're doing to Vanity Fair.
my grandma is cooler than this broad...
This writer who has "traveled the world" seems to be keenly unaware of the idea that perhaps, as her travels ended and she returned to The Upper East Side, the locals danced in the streets waving an effigy spewing burning chunks of tweed and wearing sad ballet flats. (Probably ignited the damn thing with a bottle of Tresor, too.) An Ugly American in Brooklyn, methinks. VF, spare us future ramblings of the smallminded. After the past wearying 8 years, we've had enough.
I'm embarrassed for you, dear virgin Kate. How do you even manage to leave the house by yourself?
It pains me that while talented young writers cannot find jobs, and seasoned writers are losing theirs, work like this is still getting published. If all you could get out of this show was that, "Ew, it was weird" you do not belong in New York City.
What a douchebag. Not only are you a terrible writer, but you have terrible outfits as well. Writers like you are the reasons why print media is marching towards a slow death.
"I’m not passing judgment. Really, I’m not." But really, YOU ARE.
Please take the A or C train to Utica Ave. around 2 AM. Wear your Tory Burch flats and designer jacket. Don't bring your cell phone.
I hope the ten cents per word she got for getting this schlock published was worth making herself a giant target for all the cool kids. Next time she's on the L train, she's going to get a giant wedgie.
As the antithesis of sophisticated, there is no way in hell you are a native Manhattanite or UESider. In fact, a thousand bucks says you're a close-minded provincial prude who hails from CT or NJ. So stop lying, stop writing, and for God's sake get out of my borough, neighborhood, and city. You're ruining the cache for everyone! And props to whatever editor approved this piece. You just knew Kate would get publicly flogged, didn't you? You're a shrewd, backstabbing snake, but if you get her fired, you're a gracious public servant.
She is not from NYC. She is from Ridgewood, NJ, where she lived until going to Harvard. So, she has been living in NYC for 2 years at most.
I actually found the plethora of negative comments more interesting and well-informed than the actual article. Also, the last time I heard a person claim such pride in their TB's I was standing in a sorority house south of the Mason-Dixon.
worst. article. ever.
Oh, dear. This morning, this VERY morning, I posted a note in my building's lobby pleading with an anonymous thief to stop stealing my issues of Vanity Fair each month. And now I see this, and frankly, I'm embarrassed to have so publicly professed my liking of your magazine. Thanks, VF, for making a twit of me.
why is everyone so mad at kate? ...we should be mad at the bedford platform skater who didn't actually hurt her! then this story would have been much more interesting!
Christ what's wrong with you? I mean you went to this fantastically amazing college, you have this dream job, you're rich and priviledged and have willingly wrapped yourself up in the rarefied world that you can't even look outside of yourself for just a moment. I can't really believe that you are as elitist, closed minded and as insipid as portrayed in this article. You live in NYC yet you lack true cultural understanding and any breath of art.
Why is this piece all about you? In reality you didn't give a damn about all the shocking French lady nudity. You just wanted to write a piece about how charming you think you are when out of your element, with your tacky shoes and your cheap jacket. You write like someone who learned everything they know about NYC from watching Sex in the City. You are the reason I live in Paris.
I'm from New Zealand, and even I find this gauche.
Did you venture there in a time machine Kate?Williamsburg is practically Manhattan, only cleaner. What, did the green condo buildings frighten you? Did you see a nice couple walking their dog who smiled at you? You can see midtown from Williamsburg with the naked eye. Dear Vanity Fair, I'm sure this deluded idiot is someone's niece, but fire her. Fire her now. I suspect she may be not-so-secretly retarded. And possibly blind. A blind retard raised in a petri dish. Peace and love, everyone else
"vapid journalism with a patina of New York sophistication fit for those who want to read a celebrity magazine without the guilt. Posted 4/7/2009 by __" Love this. Cause it's true. But, I must call out these over invested commenters. The piece was embarrassing. Whatever. But williamsburg is far more pretentious than Little Kate. Come on. Manhattan was ruined years ago and Williamsburg is right there with it.
We all get it! This article is an insult to all native Brooklynites and all the transplant residents. This article also speaks to the sad state of contemporary media... one where talented and seasoned writers are being let go everywhere and young naive trust fund babies with a 200k piece of paper from (insert Ivy League name here)are getting published in classic publications such as Vanity Fair. My suggestion to Vanity Fair and to young Kate is a formal apology to all of us... this is apparently NOT ok.
OMG, Kate -- I bet you were totally the Charlotte in your group of friends, weren't you? Insipid little ninnies like you (and the douchebag junior analysts you date) are what has nearly ruined New York for those of us who can take in the unusual without gaping at it like it's feeding time at the zoo. How did you get this job, anyway?
The author no doubt wrote this article to raise some conversation. That said, defining yourself as a Manhattanite is just lame. I suppose it may be regarded as an admition that you "are what you are". However, I am inclined to think it is me and other like me who live in Manhattan, while you perhaps live in a subset. The "coolest" people in this world do not feel they belong someplace or another based on economics or geography.
This is lame. Lame for a Harvard grad. Lame for a supposed New Yorker. Lame for a white person with good teeth. Lame. Effing lame. It's lame even for self-deprecatory "personal essay". Please, Kate, stay in Financial Advising or Philanthropic Gibberish Writing or whatever the eff you do with yourself there in the East 70s. Just STFU on anything else.
What's the over/under that in a few years Kate will be married to a rich Banker/Hedge Fund manager? Guess you will be seeing her mug at the "charity" events in NYC.
__, it's funny how close you are. She's engaged and is marrying a Goldman Sachs i-banker in about a year.
My god. For the many years that I, an ivy-league educated Manhattanite, have been reading Vanity Fair I have never read such an embarrassingly and blatantly ignorant piece by any writer. I'm seriously reconsidering the "sophistication" I've always perceived the magazine to embody. Or perhaps I'm mistaken and missing out on the joke - was this a humor piece, intentionally parodying a UES dimwit? Please...
As infuriating as this blog post is, it's worth it for the comments. Holy hilarity.
kate, back to your internship. go. kate's editor? fire yourself, now. kate's excuses are plentiful (entitled, young, ignorant, sheltered, u.e.s.er, etc). what are yours? there are plenty of bad pitches or pieces that don't see the light of day...one fell through the cracks, apparently. good luck with your second piece.
I actually registered to comment as well, but not to respond to this ridiculous writer girl--everyone else has done a fine job of pointing out all her inadequacies--but to reply to Dasvaki, who actually came to her defence. You, sir, are also an idiot. Yes, perhaps experiencing "mild shock" at a transgressive performance art piece would be the reaction of 99% of the population, but NO ONE CARES what those 99% have to say. Those 99% do not write for Vanity Fair. I doubt those 99% even read Vanity Fair. She may not be a terrible person, but she's at the very least extremely annoying for thinking that this drivel is worth the time and attention of others. And also for grossly offending people who live in Brooklyn either by choice or necessity. Not all of us can afford the UES and Tory Burch, little lady! And for the record, Tory Burch flats are disgusting and epitomize a number of things that are wrong with new money NYC transplants, who think that a giant gold logo signifies fashion/aesthetic validation. (I say this as someone who lives in Manhattan for 6 years and only occasionally ventures to Brooklyn, and yes, it can be disconcerting, but to think you're on some "rickety outskirt" when you step off the W'burg train is just ignorant on so many levels.) Ok I'm done. Thanks! Oh PS Vanity Fair? I have a blog. If you guys wanna start publishing some of my posts about my like, trips to the supermarket? We can totally work something out. Call my people. xo
As I stepped out from the oversized sports utility vehicle, I knew I was in a strange land. A strange land that smelled bad. A strange land with even stranger people. A strange land where tory burch flats were not just for 12 year olds in 2006. I was in New Jersey. I had been through New Jersey before, but the "Drunk? Driving? Call us." billboard for an attorney along the turnpike had been the only piece of their strange culture I had been exposed to. I hoped that my ungelled hair and inability to abstract myself onto fictional characters wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the natives. (It was.) There was pregnant woman with a spray tan waiting for a bus accross the great wide pavement that seemed to go on forever, and a gaggle of blonde girls who thought that Daddy's thrice morgaged home somehow entitled them as "rich" giggling themselves into a stupor over the prospect of visiting "the city"....
This sounded like an obnoxious character on "Gossip Girl".
Someone commented that all the negative feedback is coming from people who are jealous of Ms. Ahlborn, that they just want her life and can't have it. Absolutely true. And what is fueling the rage is that Ms. Ahlborn clearly does not deserve her own life. Her writing would not be out of place in a middle school newsletter, and yet she has a job at Vanity Fair? She went to Harvard, and that experience yielded this world view? Yes people are jealous, because she has what she has clearly not earned.
it's a shame you didn't seem to give brooklyn a fair chance. however, i find your insular world view to be far more exotic than a jaunt through gentrification ground zero could ever be. i look forward to your next article when you talk to a black person.
If this girl went to Harvard and ever ventured out of Harvard Yard (or, God forbid! onto the red-line), she would have seen loads of people way more outrageous than pretty much any hipster babe she saw in Wmburg. Definitely more skateboards. Several people I have spoken with, writers amongst them, think that this article is a sham, and that no one employed by Vanity Fair could be so out-of-touch, insipid or utterly lacking the class that Ms Ahlborn presents. Me, I have met several UES gals who think that their world is the only world and everyone else is useless and I'm not so sure this is as staged as all the Brooklyn bloggers are reporting. I do think that a magazine of the esteem of VF should look a little more closely at those they hire to represent them (a Harvard degree does not actually make one educated). And, if not, who does a girl have to blow to get this gig?
what a douchebag. i "venture" into brooklyn with tory burch flats all the time and guess what....NOBODY GIVES A SHIT.
@__: No kidding. I've wandered around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx without anyone giving a second look to my business suit or Target shoes. I think poor Miss Kate's issue is that she hangs out with the posers who want everyone else to be impressed by their outfits. Ten to one she's mad because the Brooklynites really DIDN'T care about her overpriced shoes.
Manhattan too may be too big for her. Heck even Upper East Side may have a dangerous corner or two. She is probably best off never leaving her J. Crew store, where things are as they should be.
I once ventured into her closet and found myself surrounded by Tory Burch flats. I felt a tad out of place, clothed as I was only in paper mache. I touched my face repeatedly and tip-toed to the nearest L train station. I was sure that that's where I belonged.
This writer is why New York print media is becoming more and more irrelevant.
@__: Not in its own mind it isn't...
@__: Take a look at the declining ad revenues, shuttering of magazines, and almost shut down of the Boston Globe. Print media is failing in the most spectactular way. People don't aspire to be this woman. They don't want her clothes. Or want to eat where she eats. Or drinks where she drinks.
They want to throw things at her.
People in fly over states don't look at this woman and think, Wow. I want to be just like her. She's just like Carrie Bradshaw. She comes off spectacularly stupid. If something as banal as Gossip Girl manages to get the cultural relevance of Brooklyn, it astounds me that aspirational magazines are this tone death to culture.
And you just know when she got home she kissed Mother good night, locked her bedroom door and pleasured herself, remembering the wicked scene in the rickety building in that far-off, exotic land.
Omigodomigod what if she went to Queens
@__: "I was ducking off-duty doormen left and right..."
@__: We'd cut her in the parking lot of Queens Center Mall.
@__: I'm pretty sure Astoria alone would literally make her head explode.
Blame Vanity Fair. She's out of school for two fucking years and gets a job at Vanity Fair. WTF. She sounds like a goddamn hack. I wrote better shit in my second year in high school. Hipsterville?! Seriously?! Shut up, Bitch!
@__: You don't think her parents KNEW somebody who got her a job? She's been groomed since she was three years old for four years at Harvard, enough of a career to meet Mr Right, a brief marriage and a divorce settlement that will let her finish out her days living the Martha Stewart life in Connecticut.
@__: She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and a Vanity Fair internship on her resume.
That sounds exactly like what hipsters in Williamsburg wear to me. Except they claim to wear them "ironically."
guess what. manhattan doesn't want you either.
Uh, I'm feeling grossly inadequate over the fact that I had to google image Tory Burch flats. $195 people?!
@__: Some stuff is just so lame and banal you just don't need to know about it; carry on as you were, darling.
@__: What a great public service she's done by mentioning the Tory Burch flats and associating them with a specific socio-cultural category. As I see it, they're a marker of faddish consumerism and shallowness in a person, that is, for the type of woman I always feel dirty afterwards for associating with.
@__: You should consider your ignorance of Tory Burch a testament to the quality of your character.
Give her a few more years in publishing, she'll be blowing guys for coke in the Lower East Side bars, dating ex-trannies from craigslist, living in Sunset Park and commenting on Gawker.
@__: Hold it, what's an 'ex-tranny'?
@__: Someone who actually made the transition, no?
@__: An ex-tranny is a guy who was goth in high school, bisexual in college and then androg and skinny and into heels and handbags when he first moved to NYC. But then after a few years here, and a bit of coke and greasy Asian food, he's got a puffy face and bigger ass and a square body. And he can't pull off being a girl anymore. So he wears eye liner and chain smokes and dates other sexually ambiguous people.
@__: Wow. Spot on, my friend. Spot. On.
Wow, its like a parody, only sad. Even if you think all those things, why would you write them down for other people to read?
I really didn't need another person to hate. It's all becoming so time-consuming.
@__: But the seething, the loathing, the resentment - it's all fun, no? Or is it me?
And, honestly, someone edited this tripe? They wouldn't let slop like that pass muster at the 10,000 circulation fishwrap I started out at 15 years ago.
The Evil of Banality.
Oh Kate. Your tweed jacket was boss, don't let anyone tell you different.
(Let me know when you get what this means.)
Honestly, I feel bad for her. Her life is probably incredibly boring, and she obviously has no intentions of taking advantage of all the crazy, weird, scary, amazing, freakish things this city has to offer.
HOW does this insufferable Kate person have a job at Vanity Fair? And I don't?
@__: Sweet, sweet nepotism...that's how.
And a big "Thank You" to the commenters on VF's website for laying the full-force smackdown (just incase she never ventures outside to the scary internetty borough called Gawker).
@__: I really expected at least one person to stick up for her. Nope. I mean, really, who did they think read their website? Only upper east siders? That's a pretty small population.
thanks. this is what i needed to make me realize that its time to get the f out of media.
I can barely imagine what would happen to this poor soul if she dared venture outside of New York.
Perhaps she'd crumble to dust from the shock of seeing all those middle-class and blue collar Americans roaming about.
Also, no one who graduated from college in 2007 should be writing in Vanity Fair. Which... I guess this proves?
I looked through her contributions, and I have to say that she's fairly lowbrow. She isn't exactly at the center of the cultural universe when she merely reports on kitschy ballet photographs (--and not very well at that) and doing Q&As with Twilight cast members.
I was going to conjure une petite histoire of snark, replete with translucent-skinned debutantes from London, summering and slumming with the "earthy," "base," "sauvage," dock-working locals of Marseiile, France and their crude, yet artful, custom of dress, language, and ritual, to draw some parallel to this poor young lady's frightful, hesitant voyage to realms unknown, but … crap, I decided this g-d tone-deaf, isolated, myopic, inflexible, culturally unaware, immature, stereotypical and stereotyping pile of fail just did not warrant the time.
@__: It's interesting to me how she turns what should have been an article on art into some sort of name-dropping game to establish and inflate her purported socio-economic superiority to wealthy Brooklynites.
Seriously, isn't the whole purpose of a Harvard liberal arts education learning how to effectively name-drop and what to mock-criticize without looking like a complete boor? At least, "I went to school at Yale" isn't the first thing out of Yalie's mouth. A much subtler species, they prefer instead to confide that they "Went to school in New Haven."
@__: Yeah, or I've heard: "I went to a little college on the east coast." Ugh. Then again, even if you are not a douche, it's probably tough to say, "I went to Yale/Harvard/Vasser etc. without FEELING like you are name dropping …
ANYWAY … I think the consensus is that she missed the opportunity to provide insight (I HATE art criticism, so I avoid that term) and analysis on an art form / from an artist she would normally never personally view (although technically it would be her JOB to do so, seeing as she is paid to write for Vanity Fair). She could have brought a unique perspective, one from a new witness to this type of art. Instead, she opted, I assume out of lack of creativity, chops, etc., for an obvious story line, borne out of her self-obsession (and dare I say, self-obsessed youth, as I'm sure I was the same way at that age, having experienced next to nothing in my life except my needs, wants and preferences). The only thing apparent to her was her discomfort, her fish out of waterness. She's not even trying for objective reporting, or choosing a story angle (outside the confines of her psyche). And she's not doing it because she doesn't yet know how, and apparently no one at VF cared enough to suggest one, or were told, because she was handed this job, that she has carte blanche.
I recall a few essays I wrote my freshman year at college. Periodically I have revisted them, and one or two had a similar tone - misdirected subject line, played for irony, falling miserably flat.
And yet ANOTHER reason not to read Vanity Fair emerges without even trying.
Fuck me. She writes like that and works for Vanity fucking Fair?! I'm fairly sure there is no way I would've gotten away with a self-indulgent bush league essay like this at my lowly state-school alma mater. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Is her head so far up her own delicate ass that she thought there would be no backlash for this little article? I'm sure there are plenty of Manhattanites who understand and identify with Kate's elitist point of view, but what made her feel like she would be embraced by this small group rather than reviled by the rest of the city (and most of Vanity Fair's readership)? I believe Carrie Bradshaw already spoke for this particular sector, and I daresay her talent with the written word is clearly far more developed than Ms. Ahlborn's.
@__: Yeah. This chick wants to BE Carrie Bradshaw so bad it's not even funny. And Carrie was annoying on a TV show...the real-life translation is even more so.
I have to admit it is somewhat satisfying to actually hear someone who is a tourist admit they are a tourist instead of pretending they fit in to a world that is clearly not theirs.
@__: Those kinds of admissions are best saved for group therapy sessions when you have the talking stick.
@__: Oh, and she's not actually a tourist. She's from the same damned city. I would forgive her if she were some impoverished young woman without a high-school education from Appalachia, but she's a wealthy girl from one of the most diverse cities in the history of human civilization who attended one of the top-10 universities in the world and writes for a prestigious cultural magazine. In other words, she has no excuse for her being a tourist in her own city other than her own self-serving pretensions.
She's the type of person you go on a date with and listen to her tell you how great she is, and she tells you how she's afraid of squirrels, which you're supposed to think is adorable, but which you find more than a little unbelievable, and you listen because she's vaguely cute and it might be worth it, but after a couple hours, it's no longer worth it and you make up an excuse to get away forever. It's not surprising that she wants to be a writer. Most of these self-absorbed types just want to listen to themselves talk.
@__: Spot on. And her having hopped around for four years at Harvard in modern dance workshops while the others were doing biomedical engineering projects designed to improve kidney transplant results or plowing their way through Leibniz's collected works in the original Latin and German just clenches the whole thing for me.
Thank God she escaped Brooklyn with her life. She might have gotten lost and ended up in Bushwick.
The whole "how is this person working at Vanity Fair" line of argument is bullshit. She's young, Harvard, cute, well-off: THAT'S WHO WORKS AT VANITY FAIR. For good or for ill, that is what the magazine is about; it's never purported to be anything else. It's not the Daily Worker. It's not Granta. It's not an assistance program for people who dolefully surf Mediabistro. (Incidentally [instert name of dyspeptic commenter here], whoever you are, you probably shouldn't be working at Vanity Fair, despite what you tell yourself, your friends, and your former high school English teacher who mentored you). Shut up already. The post might be tin-eared but it's not surprising.
@__: Exactly. VF has one of the WASPiest, elitist staffs at Conde. Not surprising in the least she works there.
I'm starting to think that Vanity Fair published this in order to mock her, yes?
@__: Yes, they shouldn't have let her go through with it. They had to know what would happen.
Vanity Fair is soft core porn for lit wannabees, more gay than straight. I know nothing about its elitist pretensions.
Wow, I really hate everything about her. Especially that she's an '07 grad writing for Vanity Fair.
@__: I was thinking the same thing. That being said, her vacuousness is slightly relieving: it means usurping merit will always reveal the cracks. She doesn't deserve to be writing for Vanity Fair, and this article definitively proves that.
Ya'll can't have it both ways. A major national glossy that defines the mainstream runs a casual little piece of class drama reinforcing the notion that Brooklyn is just too rickety for a certain breed of people, and you are offended? You should be rejoicing, that yet another wave of *them* will continue to fear the borough that you call home, and that you will be free to mingle another year amongst only those who are too guilty about their privilege to wear J-Crew in public.
@__: "A major national glossy that defines the mainstream"? I think you're thinking of People.
HA-HA hipsters! Meet the only people left more culturally arrogant and annoying than you.
I agree with all the comments. However . . . I'm wondering how this young girl feels after reading the comments on the VF page (and gawker, also, if she actually dared to come here). I get the feeling she thought she was being all hip and stuff when she wrote that drivel but she is now feeling deflated and needs a glass of wine. Poor girl!!
@__: Spare us your sympathy.
@__: She strikes me as more the "handful of Valium" type.
What Williamsburg is she talking about? The one I live in is littered with million dollar apartments and I get accosted more by strollers than skateboards. The 'burg hasn't been "difficult" for ten years... are you sure this isn't some article from 1999?
So, basically, she wrote about Brooklyn the way everyone in New York (including Brooklyn) writes about the rest of America?
@__: Ha ha! For real.
But the fact that she knows her Tony Brunch ballet slippers could be recognized in Brooklyn just shows how much (she knows). Brooklyn is like Manhattan. She's not even kidding herself. I hope this fake-ingenue 'reporting' isn't a new trend.
In other words: In Brooklyn, I learned not all art looks like the fountain-sculpture outside the corporate offices of Vanity Fair.
Another example of why print media is dead. Why would a magazine waste paper and ink to publish that article?
That article is about 10 years too late.
@__: It was a blog post. What does that say about print media?
Brooklyn... isn't that where they have an Ikea?
Oh dear, look at her. She's one of those horsey-lacross-ey babes who has to plug her Ivy pedigree, clothing labels, and magical Manhattan address into every conversation, just so everyone knows how Really Really Fabulous she is. Of course, if she lived anywhere outside of New York, she'd be a...suburbanite. *gasp*
Against my better judgement, I have made the visit to see the shoe stylings of Tory Burch. So, I have gathered this about life... You can design, and sell, revoltingly hideous shoes, and talent has nothing to do with getting a job with V.F. I am totes dejected and going to take a Vicodin with a martini chaser.
This is why journalism is dying. What a fucking moron. Williamsburg hasn't been scary since it was spelled Williamsburgh.
At least my out of town friends will be impressed that i live in an SUCH an edgy neighborhood... that is, if they still read the quickly-becoming-irrelevant Vanity Fair.
Once again, I feel like someone is baiting me to engage in class warfare.
Manhattan snobbery. A fine tradition with its roots in the Revolutionary War. I believe it was Gen. George Washington who, pushed back by the Redcoats from the Manhattan, penned the first pretentious article: "'Twas as good a time as any to explore the old village of Brook'lyn as my troops bivouacked on Prospect Hill. I pushed past the prams on the Main Street where crude and lower-caste people of the Nether Lands (along with free'd men of dark completion) perform'd in all mann'rs strange and base. I wrote to Martha that I could not wait to return to the comforts of Islem, where I belong'd."
Later I believe Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall passed the "Manhattan Civilian Act," which required all immigrants to the city (those who moved to the city from the province) to act with extreme airs of pretension in order to gain acceptance, whereupon the blue armbands would be removed and they could feel like higher-class natives to the city.
This tradition has survived to this day, where people from outside of the city move to New York practice becoming "real New Yorkers" by adopting the airs and buying the products embraced by the fictional characters of such televised productions as Sex & The City, Seinfeld, and various films by the famous late 20th Century Ameircan Ashekenazi filmmaker Woody Allen.
What confuses me, sincerely, is the whole, "art experience too edgy for her" thing. Did she not take any art history classes that ever mentioned performance art? Is she completely unaware that people have been taking off their clothes and calling it edgy Art for several decades now? At least? Does Harvard teach nothing?
Her description of Brooklyn is almost beside the point -- I can't get over how she could be shocked by an art experience that's only a minor step removed from say, "Hair", or "Tony and Tina's Wedding."
At this point, VF has to have her write a response.
I don't think I've ever seen such a crazed outburst of envy. It's positively shameful. Y'all are driven crazy because, Miss Ahlborn 1) Went to Harvard; 2) Lives in Manhattan (on the UES); and 3) Has a job at Vanity Fair. What it shows, underneath all the complaining and vituperation, is that none of you has a particle of self-respect.
@__: Because clearly every single person commenting both here and on the Vanity Fair site (I read all those comments too) thinks Harvard is the best place to go to school, the UES is the best place to live, and Vanity Fair is the best place to work. Obviously! How could anyone want anything else out of life?!
Gag. You are just making this worse for yourself, Kate/equally bland elitist proxy.
@__: Seriously, things can only get better for elitists and their bland proxies. I don't envy her the crap job at Vanity Fair, but y'all do.
BED-STUY, DO OR DIE, BITCH!!!
It's like wearing a shirt that says "Hate me, I love it!"
Maybe someday the twits will just stay on Twitter.
Congratulations, Kate. You've managed to successfully embody everything I hate about everything.
