D I Y

D.I.Y. stands for “Do It Yourself”, a wide ranging craft movement, with a distinctly pioneering spirit, that has captured the imagination of many young people. Walking around Manhattan on this lovely Saturday evening I realized that our little borough has its own peculiar version of D.I.Y. Young people here, out en masse for the evening, create entire worlds.

In the Lower East side I witnessed a kind of downtown jazz sensibility. The young people here are heirs to a sort of countercultural beat identity that probably began long before Allan Ginsberg was born. In contrast, on MacDougal Street I saw a Manhattan abandoned by Manhattanites on Saturday night and given over to the “Bridge and Tunnel crowd” – kids in from New Jersey or Staten Island, for whom the entire isle of Manhattan is one large beer keg.

As I walked West I found myself walking through the now trendy Meat Packing District, where crowds of young people engaged in the collective creation of Fabulousness. Dressed to the nines, these sophisticated young folks glittered and shone, the young women teetering on heels that matched their slinky black dresses, the young men trying to look nonchalantly debonair while awaiting their turn to be admitted (or not) through the velvet rope leading to the latest trendy dance club. On these streets real fashion models mingle with the crowd of mere pretenders, and an air of theatrical artifice hangs over the scene.

In each of these places, you can sense the feverish activity, as all participants in the evening’s theatre, having carefully dressed and prepared, wanders out into their own little collectively constructed universe.

What I like about this dressing up and showing off is that it is far more participatory than, say, going to see a movie. Each participant is expected to dress the part, to carefully calibrate their appearance before joining the show, to collectively lift the entire experience up until it becomes a perfectly realized dream of itself.

All very D.I.Y., in a New York sort of way