caro:
In which I attempt to explain why New York tastemakers are suddenly obsessed with the real New Jersey (versus the impostors of Jersey Shore):
In Brooklyn, a new hipster gastropub named St. Anselm is mining its owner’s North Jersey youth for menu items: Newark hot dogs, Hacksensack-style sliders, Trenton pork rolls, cheese-and-gravy-covered disco fries, even the enigmatic sliver of cadaver-colored meat known as scrapple. The high-concept SoHo shop Kiosk, which typically sources its “anonymous design” objects from far-off countries such as Japan, Portugal, and Finland, just launched a mid-Atlantic collection that revolves around the Garden State. And recently it seems as if every new indie-rock “it” band—Titus Andronicus, Vivian Girls, Real Estate, Ducktails, Screaming Females, and Julian Lynch, to name a few—hails from (and, in most cases, sings about) Sopranos country. Not even the Boss was able to make N.J. this chic…The Jersey trend taps into the defining cultural obsession of the moment: the allure of authenticity. In cities from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Maine, bookish lumberjack types are wearing hunting garments to art galleries and brunch. It is difficult to find a new restaurant that doesn’t require its brick to be exposed, its wood to be reclaimed, and its bartenders to be mustachioed. Heritage brands—Levi’s, Keds, Filson—have never been hotter. The attraction is simple: by consuming the “actual article” (or, more often, a carefully crafted simulacrum), urbanites everywhere feel they’re distancing themselves from the increasingly insubstantial, Internet-driven nature of contemporary life. As states go, New Jersey may be the ultimate real deal. It isn’t obvious. It isn’t marketed or mythologized. It isn’t easy to love. It just is. By scarfing down a tray of disco fries with gravy and ricotta at St. Anselm, or by admiring the unheralded output of small Garden State manufacturers at Kiosk, consumers are subscribing to a sensibility that’s very much in vogue right now. New Jersey is just the vehicle du jour.How much credit are we forced to give Zach Braff?
none at all, i think. it’s romanticism vs. something authentic that’s always been that way. i’m very proud of the state i live in and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
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