Dept. Of Even A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice A Day: That PhillyMag Article About Old City
Merrill Wagner, Small Oasis #1, 2010, Rust preventive paint on steel. Currently on view at ‘THIS COOL’:
Jun 14 – Sep 19, 2010, Larry Becker Contemporary Art.
Even though the story could have been written more or less the same at any time in the past decade, Richard Rys’s “What The Hell Happened To Old City?” is worth a read for a number of reasons. First, there’s the article’s central tenet that Old City has become such a mess, culturally and economically, because there simply was never a plan. Secondly, it outlines the Market St. north/south divide that has always been interesting to us (Rys seems to lament it, we think it’s one of the strongest things the ‘hood has going for it). And then there’s all the other bits, like the fun quotes from our own Conor Corcoran and the assertion that Skinner’s was, in any way, shape, or form, “old school.” This is the quaintly-out-of-touch PhillyMag — the same one that once dubbed this site’s editor/publisher “King Of The Hipsters” and recently proclaimed that “pot, it seems, is having a moment” — and at various moments in the story, if you close your eyes, you can almost see the pleated jeans and cell phone belt holsters that made this article possible.
But we’ll be honest: What really drew us in was the fact that here was the finest example of PhillyMag’s shoulda-been-patented asshole/classist writing P.O.V. we’ve ever seen. That, and the fact that we just moved Philebrity into Old City this weekend. (More on that second bit in a second.) For years, we’ve been leveling the charge among friends in local media that PhillyMag has, for decades now, been written from a classist (although, to be fair, it’s more like white-on-white racist) position that is untenable as it is simply weird. (And it’s not even the strangely enthralling kind, like Steff in Pretty In Pink.) From Rys’s fish-in-barrel marks for quotes about the sprawling douchebar scene down here to the accompanying oof-tastic slideshow (looks like somebody’s been reading their college-age kid’s Vice Dos and Don’ts, but got cold feet when it was time to write the captions), the article positively reeks of something very dark indeed. It’s so dark, in fact, that it’s pale, nearly translucent white.
Here is the thing, though: Rys is right. This time around, PhillyMag is dead-on when it assails the barely literate fuckzombies who populate the streets of Old City on the weekends. They are the very thing we live in protest against. And, in part, it’s why we moved the whole operation down here. And it’s more than just wanting to go where the fight is. (Truth be told, we’re gonna be a little exhausted from the Fishtown Culture Wars we just left for a little while now.) Rather, what we like and love about Old City is that schizophrenia. It was here in 1997, and it’s here now. People groan when we say this, but Philly needs to stay weird any way it can; and when every neighborhood in the city fancies itself the next Fairmount or Queen Village, weirdness gets to be a premium. But somehow, through either inaction or circumstance, Old City got to stay a little weird just on the twin steams of a tumbling economy and having an outsize sense of the cheesy bumped right up against all of those super-snooty, ultra-minimalist Larry Becker paintings. And here in our new perch, smushed in right in the middle of it all, well, let’s just it put it this way: We couldn’t be happier to be here.
