Anatomy of a scene

32:02And, you know, people start going on tour, so they're not around as much. And these kind of close-knit, supportive communities just sort of naturally disintegrate. disintegrate right i think success sort of by definition will always inherently alter the ethos of the scene absolutely which is the unfortunate paradox here right like it then makes it about like you said competition success as defined by like our contemporary capitalist society even in like the mid-20th century a lot of the elements of it are obviously necessary for survival but also kind of just antithetical to the spirit of a lot of like what brought these scenes together in the first place.

32:45Exactly. So what were artists' motivations for moving into these neighborhoods in the first place? And how did those motivations vary or differ based on factors like race, class, or sexual orientation and gender identity? I'm wary of making too many kind of sweeping generalizations there because obviously people move to different places for all kinds of reasons. But generally speaking, artists are guided by cheap rent you know whatever will allow them to have as little of a day job as possible and then proximity to things that are already happening you know i think it's it's sort of telling that the neighborhoods that gentrify in new york or have gentrified because of music and because of art it's always one neighborhood over from the last one like it's greenwich village in the 60s, the East Village in the 70s, Soho in the 80s, Lower East Side in the 90s, crosses over to Williamsburg in the 2000s, Bushwick in the 2010s.

33:42It's happening now in Ridgewood, Queens. It's just, you know, people want to live as close as they can to where things are already happening, but not pay a whole lot of money to do that. Of course, one of the big things there is that for people with some means or some privilege, this is a choice that they are making. They are, to some degree, choosing to live in an economically distressed neighborhood or an industrial area to pursue this thing that they are choosing to pursue. and i think for a lot of people uh kind of it maybe even seems romantic you know there's sort of this fetishization of like your your poor artist you know starving artist period and you see it when people talk about like the east village in the 70s especially alphabet city as this like you know wild west thing where like you could do anything like people talk about um the bowery the area right around cbgb i think in the book legs mcneil the writer described it as being like a scene from the batman movie you know that it's just this like kind of cool seeming thing but cbgb was located downstairs from a homeless shelter the entire time that it existed and for people who were staying in the shelter having like shows going into late hours at full volume and people standing outside and smoking, probably not awesome.

35:26People, I think, can sort of act like these were just tabula raso situations. In the industrial areas, or formerly industrial areas, to some degree, that's true, but a lot of them, they're not blank slates. They are lower-income neighborhoods, and the people that are already living there have their own shit going on, and they do not need or want. bunch of loud, drunk, coked up young people coming in and partying. Yeah. And as far as artists' motivations themselves, I was also really struck by the second chapter where you're talking about minimalism and the loft jazz scenes kind of popping up simultaneously.

36:10And they're intertwined in Tribeca and Soho and how just the different sort of circumstances of the two groups of artists was so important, I think, to underscore that like, yeah, on the one hand, you have this minimalism scene, which tends to skew white and probably middle or upper middle class. They're making more of a choice to move there, like almost an aesthetic choice to move there. They even like get grants and stuff from like big classical music institutions or other arts institutions. And then you have this other scene that consists largely of black jazz musicians, jazz musicians of color, and a lot of them move there because they literally couldn't get booked anywhere else and they needed to create their own spaces.

37:03Yeah. I mean, the jazz clubs in the 60s were white owned, you know, and they were all kind geared towards things that would be palatable to the kind of white audiences with money that would come to those clubs. So the jazz loft scene in the 60s and 70s kind of ends up existing as a reaction to that, where it's like, you know, we're not getting gigs. When we are getting gigs, we're not getting paid well, or we're being treated terribly. So we're just going to build our own system outside of that. You see it like especially the first big jazz loft, Ornette Coleman opens this loft venue in the late 60s, at which point he is already one of the biggest and most important jazz musicians in the world.

37:52And he's just inviting people into his home because he's just so disgusted with the mainstream jazz world and the way that he's treated there. you have people who are playing in those lofts, many of whom are thrilled to be doing so, but some of whom are definitely not. And, you know, they're kind of feel like they don't have a choice but to play in these places. And whereas, yeah, the minimalism thing, it's like underwritten by galleries, it's largely people that went to art schools and conservatories. And it's much more of almost an aesthetic choice to perform in loft spaces more than anything else.

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39:11To fast forward several decades, the last scene that you discuss in the book, as we said, is the Williamsburg DIY scene. um that hit close to home for me that's a scene that like many of my peers think of as like the golden years our golden years i was very involved in you know many of the venues that you talk about what economic and geographic factors or even technological factors converged in your opinion to turn Williamsburg into Williamsburg, like the neighborhood and cultural meme. I'm also curious if the fact that this sort of gentrification playbook we've been talking about was already so firmly established by this point, if that impacted the scene's trajectory.

40:02I think it's also just worth noting here that there is a bar, in fact, called Golden Years in Williamsburg. I guess I'll answer the last question first, which is that certainly an awareness of how these things happen in the past definitely led to what was happening in Williamsburg, especially the people that were opening the earliest DIY venues in Brooklyn. I talk about William Vesinski, who had a venue called Arcadia in the 90s. He was keenly aware of his predecessors in Soho and Tribeca, people like Lamont Young and Yoko Ono and was like kind of explicitly patterning what he was doing off of that.

40:46But then he was also well aware of like the reason he was able to do that and the reason the scene was able to take root at all in the first place as the quote-unquote powers that be were also very aware of the ways in which music and art can gentrify a neighborhood. And so So there's this period, especially in the 90s, where there's this kind of explicit decision made to be hands off with Williamsburg and let this scene flourish so that we can, you know, economically revive this neighborhood. The two major, I think, geographic factors there. One is just that it's one subway stop away from the East Village on the L train and one subway stop away from the Lower East Side on the J &M train.

41:32So it's sort of a natural outgrowth of downtown once downtown Manhattan becomes just totally inaccessible. And the other thing is that the Williamsburg waterfront was full of empty factories in much the same way that Soho and Tribeca had been. And without the waterfront, I don't think Williamsburg would have been able to happen the way it did. That's where so many of the venues were centered. Even though people were living all over in the neighborhood, the kind of cultural center of Williamsburg is these empty factories along the waterfront. But the other, I think, the major chronological factor is 9-11, because in the months after 9-11, Lower Manhattan is just shut down.

42:23And it's also this very emotionally loaded thing, even as it opens up again. It's very emotionally loaded. And not too long after that, you start getting tourists kind of morbidly drawn to the World Trade Center site. That's sort of like a way to pay tribute or something. So Manhattan becomes difficult, both like just, you know, actually difficult, but also emotionally difficult to deal with for a little while. And I don't think that it's coincidence, but I think it is telling that Todd P., who becomes the major Williamsburg promoter, his first show is a month after 9-11. but Williamsburg especially offers this kind of safe place to go do something new that doesn't have to engage with what's recently happened in the city or the very dense music history in Manhattan at that point.

43:25I think it's sort of noticeable when you see the music that's coming out of downtown, which is like The Strokes and the Mooney Suzuki or whatever, where it's very much engaging with like these CBGB era tropes versus the stuff that's coming out of Williamsburg, which is like TV on the radio, Black Dice, NIDA, Acceptor, you know, stuff that's kind of totally without precedent. Acceptor, the best band in the world. Yes. Yeah. So glad you mentioned that. Yeah, you're really taking me down a pleasant trip down music memory lane here. Except as John Phil Ryan once looked at me seriously while I was interviewing him and said something like, I am the last hipster.

44:10I'm the last real hipster in New York or something. I love that. My memory could be failing me, but I feel like I remember that. And he meant it and I got what he was saying. He meant the non-annoying kind of hipster. Oh, that's wonderful. like who dedicates your life to the pursuit of obscure music art or whatever even though i like was on the ground through like the second half of this chapter i guess you know the early tens i just didn't connect a lot of these dots like the 9-11 thing that like todd p booked his first show right after 9-11 like that is so wild i think in my mind like maybe because i missed a lot of I was too young to experience the first half of this story.

44:59In my mind, Williamsburg gentrified way more quickly than all the other neighborhoods. This chapter is shorter or something. But I wonder if that's actually true. It is and it isn't. The Williamsburg chapter starts in the early 90s and it ends in 2018. That's actually, I think, more time than it took for Soho to gentrify. Which is so interesting. Maybe it's like just that the narrative has already been so entrenched of like, oh, this neighborhood is over or it's getting overrun that we sort of just expected that it would happen. Well, I think it was also the sort of thing where like the whole first decade of Williamsburg, obviously there were people around, people participating in it, but people didn't really notice or didn't really like view it as a thing.

45:46Like there's an article that I cited in the book in the late 90s where I can't remember what publication it was, but they were basically arguing that Williamsburg was over and that people were moving back to Manhattan. Oh, that's funny. Like before any of this stuff that we remember like even really starts. I also wonder how much of it is maybe due to the fact that so many of the people who were helping tell the narrative were also to an extent some of the people also doing the gentrification. Mm-hmm. So that sort of created a little bit of like a, you know, the frog in the boiling water sort of experience that maybe made it seem accelerated or shorter.

46:27You mean like the New York Times writers? Um, I don't know. I guess I'm thinking of Vice a little bit. But, you know, just the folks, a lot of the folks who were moving into Williamsburg, at a certain point, it shifted to no longer just being the starving artists. it was maybe the starving artists with trust funds a little bit yeah well i mean there have always been starving artists with trust funds uh it's just a lot easier to find out who people's parents are now you know that's so true yeah like i just read lou reed's first wife's kind of trashy memoir about their their marriage and um sort of struck by this period where between the velvet Underground and Transformer coming out.

47:16Lou is basically spending all this time at his parents' country club and is drunk driving their Bentley to and from that country club. That kind of changes the narrative a little bit. Yes. I mean, I think from my memory of it, there were a lot of rich kids from fancy schools, like the Oberlin kids, the Sarah Lawrence kids, living alongside some people who were from less well-off backgrounds or who didn't have help from their families, at least. But the thing that struck me that you pointed out that hadn't exactly occurred to me was that by the point that people of our generation were entering the scene in Williamsburg, The rents had already gone up to a large extent.

48:08And I know that there's inflation issues, but like you look at the numbers that we're working with, like in the late O's, early 10s, when you hear the stories like, oh, they rented this loft space for X amount of money. And then you compare them to the numbers we were working with back in Manhattan in like the 60s and 70s or whatever. You point out that because there was already sort of this high cost of living relative to before, the artists of this scene had to go in with this like generally much more enterprising, almost capitalistic or business savvy mentality. and that really really hit home especially having like been a young person around like the Todd P machine I guess like knowing Todd P like he developed like a formula and you kind of talk about this like if you had to kind of run these venues like a well-oiled machine and you had to like aggressively find like different income streams yeah I mean I think the major thing that gets lost is that it's it becomes impossible to come to the city and make art make music without family money or whatever without having a day job that's the thing that ceases to be possible you really do have to become a lot more aggressive about it and just have a lot more focus and a lot more energy to make shit happen.

49:39And I mean, Todd is like, I think Todd is just a genius. Maybe for our listeners who are not for like, Andrea, you're from LA. Do you know about Todd P? I do just because I was in college on the East Coast at the time and I would go to New York sometimes and check out those parties. So I guess the short explanation of who Todd P is, is that he was this promoter in Williamsburg who started out in the early aughts who was putting on shows all over the place. They were all-ages shows, which were a very rare and difficult thing to find at that point. And they were largely in semi-legal or totally illegal DIY spaces.

50:29and Todd had a website and a email list that he was really really aggressive about updating and so even though he's putting on shows all over the place and even though it's happening on this very underground level it was also very easy to find and to get involved in and Todd Todd then kind of put together this like community of younger people who were interning for him and working for him, who he taught all about like booking and promoting shows. Yeah, for the people that were, you know, in Todd P's circle, like my former business partner, Rick from Ad Hoc is also in the book, like, it was almost like a system of apprenticeship to like, learn this trade of this like system of doing things that Todd kind of devised and perfected.

51:32And Todd's a good place to start with this. What role did the internet play in this scene specifically? Todd, I think, was one of the first that's part of his innovation was to use the internet in this effective way. But what happened when you threw social media and the internet into the scene mix? God, a lot. And it starts out being this really incredible thing, especially in the way that Todd was able to harness it and use it. And then, you know, you get this proliferation of music blogs that take these, this, this stuff that's happening at ultimately a very small scale and kind of take it global.

52:14they're able to kind of circumvent the more traditional like ladder framework in that way and so a lot of these bands especially the bands that kind of like come up out of the todd p scene they're able to become like kind of big and and celebrated bands on the strength of like a single but then the other kind of like negative side effects of that stuff i think there's two really major things that happen uh the first is that you know musicians can now just go online and find like a hundred other bands that sound exactly the same as as they do all over the city all over the country whatever uh you know i remember when i was starting out in bands like my space was just huge like that was just the way that you would find people to play shows with but the kind of side effect of that is that you're no longer making do with who's around and so uh even though we suddenly have access to so much more music than we've ever had you end up with a lot less cross-pollination you know things become much more kind of separated in that way.

53:30And the other really major thing that happened is that, you know, people were using social media to promote shows, promote venues and what have you. And landlords and realtors figured that out pretty quickly. And so, you know, if you had a DIY venue in Brooklyn, like your landlord knew everything that was happening there. No question. And so especially in Bushwick, it speeds up the gentrification cycle to warp speed because it doesn't have to break big for people to realize that it's happening. I feel like a lot of these venues were also, they were not rejecting attention. I think that they were actively in a conversation with the internet and with the music press.

54:18And maybe that happened before in another way, but it felt like these really fast feedback loops where this is just a hypothetical, but like a blogger in the scene would like find this really cool artist and be the first to blog about them. And then they would get booked by the booker who was that blogger's roommate or something. And then Pitchfork would stop by and, you know, be like, oh, this is cool. And then give their next single B &M. And then the next time they came into town, they would get like the headlining slot. Like there's really, really fast feedback loops going on that felt like maybe a little bit unprecedented.

54:54I don't know. But if an artist from the scene is getting blown up super, super fast, and then people who are not necessarily part of the scene are starting to flood into Brooklyn to go see said band, I can see how that would speed up the gentrification of the neighborhood. Yeah. And it kind of stunts the musical growth a little bit too, because you have people paying attention to what you're doing almost immediately like i remember that happening with beirut oh my god right like i happened to be at the i believe it was the very first beirut show which was a sold out show at the knitting factory you know like it just it happened that quickly yeah right well it's interesting to see this there's sort of this through thread of speculation that's happening i think both with physically like what's happening sorry now i've been with like real estate and gentrification in the neighborhood But that's also, I think, concurrent with what was happening in the music ecosystem, too.

55:51Like things just became very speculative promise of hype and then subsequent like success and I like capital as a result became sort of the focus a little bit. Absolutely. I also think about how there are tons of scenes probably going on in most cities all the time. When we say the scene in the sense that we're talking about here, we mean something different than like, oh, a bunch of people making music in a style or something. We mean the sort of specific coming together of people in a way that gets like kind of recognized in some way, maybe by the mainstream. Right. Like I hear about like different musical scenes, like even like rock music that are happening in New York right now.

56:46And that like for some genres, there's actually quite a renaissance going on, but it's just not registered by the media. You know what I mean? Or like I live in Philadelphia now. There are a lot of musicians here. Some of them have been at different periods recognized as being part of a scene, right? Meaning that they were written up in Pitchfork or The Fader or, you know, The New York Times or whatever, right? But there's also just like people who are making work all the time who just are not like seen that way because they don't happen to cross over. I'm sure some of this also has to do with like race and class.

57:23I think, you know, a big part of that, too, is just that people are finding music in a different way now. A lot of people are finding music in kind of a vacuum through, you know, playlists or just like music that pops up on Spotify after the thing that you're listening to is over. So a lot of people aren't thinking about music in that kind of way anymore. They're not really looking for that kind of information. Even if the articles exist, they don't have the same influence or sway, I guess, that they would have had. Music has become cleaved from the scene. It's just the product, and it's contextless for the most part now in terms of the most common discovery methods for it, which is, to me, very sad and bad.

58:10Yeah, but I mean, the flip side of that is that then the scene gets to stay kind of a small, special, insular thing for a little bit longer. There are clubs that are thriving in New York right now that have been there for, they should be at the point now where they're like, horny and dumb and bad, and they still seem to be just thriving and influential. I think part of that is that you just, you still have to kind of want to know to be involved, you know, or to go. Totally. Like I think of nowadays, which is like, you know, the big influential dance club in Ridgewood, Queens, which is still just like phenomenal.

58:52Although the last time I went there, I did see a couple of matching Rolexes. So maybe it is over. And it's always a little dicey with electronic music, people. I hate to say it. Yeah. That's true. The sad thing to me, and hopefully this will change, but, you know, there's kind of for the last couple of years, the word on the street in New York has been that music is not necessarily the fulcrum of youth culture anymore. Or at least like the music stuff is not the part of youth culture that is getting the attention and generating all the buzz. if you look at the sort of mainstream media coverage, more and more of the attention seems to be focused around new scene neighborhoods like the Dime Square scene in Chinatown, which is notable to music people, I think, because, yeah, it's like there are bands.

59:54There's been articles about the new bands coming out of Dime Square or whatever, but it's not really the center of the scene, maybe teaching and parties. But I'm curious, as a historian of this stuff, how does the Dime Square scene as sort of a meme and a hub for youth culture, how does that feel like a reflection of this particular time or place? Not even getting too political about it, or we could get political about it, it's fine. No, I think there's kind of two contradictory answers to that question. One being that music has never been the totality of youth culture. There have always been scenes, especially really media-friendly scenes, where the music is peripheral at best.

1:00:45like i think of you know the club kids in the 90s where like i guess they were listening to house but it wasn't really their like mo or you know the people that were like going to studio 54 which you know was like disco ostensibly but i don't think that eliza minnelli and halston were like geeking out over you know different remixes or whatever like i think they were just there to do blown fuck the music is often in history just been like a uh a point of connection that brings people together or you can you could say that there's a reading of music yeah right but you know so dime square like there's they're not i think the totality of of youth culture in new york city but there's there's always been something like that i think going on but the flip side like the the contradictory statement there would be that um they're not totally uh without influential music because um new york's hottest band is the dare i know which uh which i oh my god i was hoping the dare was gonna come yeah like i'll just i'll be afraid about it i i kind of love that guy I think it's great like the lyrics are stupid but you know the Ramones weren't like T.S.

1:02:06Eliot it's just dumb fun and I think it's kind of nice to see something that's dumb fun and you know to that guy's credit he's still doing this packed DJ night and he's getting people to go out there's one that I think is like maybe the most telling and important lyric of the year which is I'm in the club while you're online.

1:02:40I do like that one. I love that that's the brag is that he's not online. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I kind of think it, cause I've sort of, it's been fascinated like watching his rise just because it is so much of indie sleaze revival, I guess it was like the shorthand for it. Right. And part of me is almost kind of looks at it with, with a little bit of affection just because I'm like, I'm glad the kids are still getting hedonistic, like that he's trying to make that a thing. And so I wonder if about how, when we were talking about sort of these post 9-11 scenes, I think forge in this fulcrum of like a need for a little bit of kind of escapism.

1:03:16If maybe the reason that feels salient to a younger generation now is because of the post pandemic need a little bit for the same thing. Absolutely. Like, it's so physical, like that kind of music and that kind of aesthetic. That's also how the scene kind of, like that whole scene was like, you know, sprung up around that area, which was like the kids who still wanted to hang out when the pandemic was still going on, whatever. And they were sitting outside in chairs in the street. Right, yeah. So I think there's definitely that locally and then also in youth culture in general. But I also think that it is notable that This is like a scene that is back in Manhattan.

1:03:59And also it revolves around, you know, yes, there is a dare, but it didn't start. It didn't like arise out of music. It's a lot of literary readings, chess clubs, DJ nights. Yes. But like other things to music. And I wonder like, does that say anything about, you know, music being more difficult right now? Or does it just say something about like music no longer being, as like central to the zeitgeist? I don't know. Well, I think the really, one of the really interesting and notable things about music in the city right now is that the stuff that is really, really thriving is, you know, electronic music and dance music and hip hop, like things that you need drums and amps to do that's much less possible.

1:04:47And music, especially in a situation like New York, is often kind of driven by economics and technology and so like the cheapest easiest way to make music like that's the way that young people are are going to make music and then you know the way that dance music is consumed is through dj nights more than live performance or even like like the dare his big thing is a dj night and that's also like everybody makes more money when it's a dj uh the clubs make more money because people don't have to stand reverently and watch a band for 45 minutes they can keep going back and forth to the bar people are more likely to go out more often because you know it's not so formal they can just kind of schmooze and and take it in at whatever level they want if the dj gets paid a hundred bucks at the end of the night like that's a hundred bucks if a five-piece band gets paid a hundred bucks at the end of the night that's like cab fare so the stuff that really is able to thrive now it's just a different kind of music and it's consumed in a different kind of way but it's still i think really interesting and really valid yeah it's funny to me how the dare just played crazy sold out show at this venue the echo here and i was on his instagram there were all these like photos of kids jumping on the stage you know and joining him on something a phenomenon that we all know and love it that i feel like i seen in a while and i was like this looks like a girl talk show which like is probably what he's going for you know yeah speaking of the the mid-arts right yeah exactly i mean to me that like crystallizes like so much of that energy uh yeah so as we're talking about this and the relevance of music or not relevance of it are we right to continue to expect scenes to look the same as they did in the 20th and early 21st centuries, especially in the sense of them being so tied to physical location.

1:06:48How much is the physicality of these spaces a necessary ingredient for countercultures and music scenes, etc.? It's funny because I think I would have given you a very different answer a few months ago. Say more. Yeah, especially coming out of COVID, so much of life had migrated online that it just kind of seemed like that was where it was going to be. But I think in reaction to that, there's just such a thirst for physical experiences, for community, for engagement and interaction, that the stuff that's happening now, the scenes that are existing now, do look a lot more like the ones in the past than I would have expected.

1:07:30And one of the really interesting things that I see happening in the city now is that a lot of venues are pretty aggressively anti-phone or anti-social media. They don't want geotagging. Nowadays, we'll just straight up take your phone away if you use it on the dance floor. There are a lot of places where you have to RSVP to the show or to the party in advance, and they only tell you where it is the day of. it exists much more outside of the public eye and the way that we're used to things existing now it's almost like they're kind of aggressively forcing this old-fashioned community type thing to exist because otherwise it's like i don't know i feel like we lost a lot of mystery and lore through the internet exactly yeah like that's the thing they're kind of like working to bring that back.

1:08:29People miss that, I guess. Or maybe if they use the internet, it's to create that mythology or something and mystery. And spontaneity and anything organic, really. I mean, what's more antithetical than those two words and the internet, right? Yeah. I mean, it's not all spontaneous. There is this other level where it's like, Who is funding this party and why are they funding it? Right. And is this like a culture washing effort for some like crazy libertarian experiment or something? But it's a very, very important point. It's not just always like, oh, young people like spontaneously putting together a part, but creating that feeling.

1:09:13We want that feeling again. Yeah, I think people need, people have a deep emotional need to be around other people. They have a need for kind of ritualistic experiences, for lack of a better word, ecstatic experiences. That's not just going to go away. You know, it might be harder to find, but it's only going to make people want it more. Yeah. I think. As far as like, you know, a city like New York being able to offer the right set of conditions for music-centered youth subcultures specifically, is there still hope? Like, can we still create the conditions for a thriving music culture? Or is it time to move somewhere else?

1:10:02Like, if that's what you're looking to do, like Patti Smith said, Poughkeepsie, or in my case, Philly. I don't think we're past the point of no return. The version of the city, especially the version of the city that existed in the run up to the pandemic, was, you know, a pretty depressing iteration. But no previous version of New York stuck around. So there's no reason to think that one's going to stick around. You know, that's going to be the one that like, just doesn't go away. And I think really interesting possibilities are opening up coming out of COVID because especially with working like so many people working from home, which, you know, you're just they're not going to ever be able to totally put that genie back in the bottle.

1:10:52But because of that, Midtown is weird as hell right now. Like there is no one there. And the people that are there are like confused. Maybe it's Pollyanna-ish, maybe it's overly optimistic, but I think there's the potential for a situation where Midtown empties out in the same way that the factories in Soho or Williamsburg emptied out. And there's going to be a lot of empty face. And, you know, enough of an established thing at this point that people know that the way to bring a neighborhood back is with music and with art. It will take some time because they're going to try everything they can to keep things going the way they were going.

1:11:33But I think it's not totally impossible to imagine that in like 20 years, they're going to be having raves in like the Seagram's building or something. That would be super, super cool. Right? Like, it kind of sounds amazing. Yeah, you know, and there's such a housing crisis in the city now, which is awful and depressing. But this current version of the city like cannot survive. It can't just only be rich people. It will collapse. And what comes out of that collapse? I mean, who's to say what it'll be, but I think it presents a lot of opportunity, maybe. So in a roundabout way, I'm kind of rooting against the city economically.

1:12:17But yeah, I don't know. We'll see. well jesse rifkin this has been a wonderful conversation it's been really fascinating getting to hear your perspective and just all the research you've done thanks so much for coming on and sharing with us yeah thank you this was this was a lot of fun

1:12:52This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominick, with editing by Harry James. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To find out more about Jesse's book and his tours, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts to help support independent journalism.

1:13:21you