Dear Generation,

Why am I so drunk right now? I just got home from Allentown, the supposed artistic Mecca-neighborhood of this town, and all I got was this lousy feeling that I’ve just left Enchanted Forest or Disney World or some other gaudy faux-paradise aimed at removing my cash and sending me home empty-handed.

Newcomers to Buffalo (myself included) tend to see Allentown as though it were the East Village in the early ‘60s, a place where artists and thinkers congregate and drink and avoid the noise and sickly sparkle of the city’s true breadwinning neighborhood, Chippewa. We see ourselves as better than those who go to McMonkeez or Soho because...well, I don’t really know. It’s darker? More denim? More Bowie? Less Beyonce?

The truth is, if you turned the lights on at a place like The Pink, it would look like a Gap commercial, dead on. Guys with scene-cuts ordering PBRs and dancing like they’ve never learned how to new wave songs that peaked on the day they were born or Fugazi tunes they flat-out don’t know. Girls with dark bangs and vertical bland and white stripes ordering the same SoCo-and-Limes as the Alpha-females who called them fat in high school. Everyone knows someone who knows an artist, everyone feels like they’re on the cusp of a dramatically original cultural scene, and everyone knows someone who knows someone.

My reason for writing this is that I see so many of my peers walking these streets believing that if they go to the right bars in this town and see the right shows or openings they might make it somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere better. Or, better but sadder, they feel that Buffalo is on the brink of discovery, a place where’s It’s Happening, an under-the-radar staging point for the next wave of cultural growth. I haven’t seen it yet. I see the same people every week getting shit-faced and postponing their adulthood. I see people I used to look up to touting projects that haven’t been finished. I see a great deal of potential wasted on discussion of said potential. I see an entire scene of people wasting their money on drink and drugs to further the idea that they are the people they could be if they weren’t hanging out in the bars and parties they are right now. It would be tragic if it weren’t so common, but it is, and so it isn’t, and so they’re not even exceptional on that score.

And so my solution is simple: Stop hanging out at the Pink or Hardware or other faux-tistic joints and create a place where artists and their fans — like real artists and their fans, not the applause- and booze-hounds that frequent Kitch. Dist.—can exist. Develop something that’s Buffalo and good because of how Buffalo it is, not because of how much it sounds or looks like something successful that came from somewhere else. That’s my thing.

Please don’t print this,

Jacob Drum