My American Way of Life

This video of myself is not representative of every aspect of my life, nor was it intended. This video instead is a look at a very important aspect of my life, my neighborhood; Greenwich Village. Having Lived here since i was 3 years old, I identify myself with it and a large amount of my life has been spent with friends walking around, hanging out in parks, doing random things. I dub it "The GV" at the beginning of my video as a kind of joke, giving what is now an upper class neighborhood, a dope name. This is not a look at my entire life, my family does play a major role in my life, however, in my every day life, my AWOL, my time spent a great deal more outside with my friends than with my family.

In my video, virtually every store, deli, restaurant has a story or event involving me and my friends that goes along with it. At one point we pass, a bakery called "Magnolia" which due to undeserved publicity from some show, has stupid tourists and yuppies clamoring for one of the worst, yet sought after cupcakes in NYC. For the sole purpose of shock value, me and my friends quickly think up a vulgar and amusing story as to how we did..things in the store, and to the ingredients.

I think that overall, my way of life is not good, or bad. It is certainly one focused on friends more than family, but not friends over family. I spend time with my friends in my neighborhood and as a result, I have a massive amount of memorable events that are great things to look back on and make for stories where you just couldn't make-this-shit-up. At the same time I don't feel like this is any different from most kids growing up in New York, and all over for that matter. Almost all kids for better or worse spend vastly more time with friends than family.

I would have liked to include more content about my family, but I thought that it would be more relevant to make my neighborhood the main focus as I was walking around with friends at the time I was thinking about how i wanted to make my video, and when i was considering what MY WAY OF LIFE was, not my life story so much.

The general idea of my life in my video is really not evident if you are not from that group of friends from GV. This is because although I am the only one in my video (except for at the end) this represents growing up in the village, and what we did, how we did it and why we did it. Walking past Magnolia, making fun of the expensive new stores such as Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, and the people who shop at them.

All of the aspects of my way of life, fit together seamlessly. The nature of doing all of what we do when we are walking around tends to have bad outcomes sometimes, and when it does, our parents have to get involved (only happened once). But in the end that is what makes for those unbelievable stories.

In my opinion, I live a typical New York way of life, not a typical AWOL. This is because i know for a fact that my dad who grew up in the Bronx has stories that parallel mine, and so do a great deal of kids at SOF. Living in NYC has its benefits, and this is one of them. Urban environments like those in Chicago and Philli are comparable to NY, while living in Minnesota, or Vermont or any suburban area is just not capable of producing a person who lives a life like we do in New York.

What is interesting to me about my life, is how broad of a social spectrum I have seen. I saw my neighborhood go from a artists community, where every store was a small buisiness, and the people were real New Yorkers, to the opposite. As of about 3 or so years ago, the artists were replaced by day- traders, the small buisinesses replaced by Coach, Apple, Hugo Boss and about four Ralph Lauren stores. This was what me and my friends were part of, and privy to, we were the last of the real Greenwich Village kids, and we knew it.


Jakob Friedman - American Way Of Life. from Binta B. on Vimeo.