In Which We Enter The Romantic Section Of The Advertising

Hey guys, I know I've been a little mean the last couple of posts, but sometimes in advertising and promotion you have to break someone down a bit and make him question himself before he'll be willing to listen to your pitch. It's like how High Life tells you you're a dumb bitch for drinking Bud Light but then they roll out this ad:



Things will be nice for the remainder of the blog though, so no hard feelings?

NUMBER 4: THAT VIEW

I read somewhere once that people who have a roof in New York always try to make a “thing” out of it. That is to say, we can’t just enjoy the fact that we’re on a roof and it’s nice out, it has to mean something in the greater scheme of living in New York. Yeah, guilty, we’re navel gazers, so what? If you could go up and see the world’s most awesome skyline every time you were on your roof, wouldn’t you be super inspired and want to share it with everyone? Let’s face it, some second tier cities might claim otherwise, but New York’s skyline is by far the best.

Sometimes I go up on my roof to look at the skyline. I live on the top floor of a three floor walk-up and while the roof isn’t huge, the view up there still stretches from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Citi building. I stare at the lights and as hard as I try, I can’t see anything in front of me that isn’t under the control of a nebbish billionaire with a God complex.

Sometimes I wish it really did look like that

Jonah Weiner, writing about Staten Island’s relationship to Manhattan in Slate, calls the Manhattan skyline a “twinkling kingdom” in the eyes of Working Girl’s Melanie Griffith. Like Melanie Griffith, so many young people in the city are strivers, even if they aren’t willing to admit it. We come here and move to Brooklyn, in part because it’s all we can afford and no one wants to live in Queens. Then we work and when we’re not hustling, we stare at the skyline and tell ourselves that soon enough we’ll be in those skyscrapers looking down on the next generation of kids trying to get into the kingdom.

So you’ll be up there on the expansive rooftop of 75 Stewart Ave, listening to Gunfight. In between one of the songs maybe you’ll stop to look around and see the same things I do: history, beauty, a reason to keep moving forward.