General George at Valley Forge (SSKC excerpt 2)

He’s mounted on the intersection of South 5th street and South 5th place, with Brooklyn’s Broadway launching eastward directly in front of him. The General faces South. He and his four-hooved soldier, standing on all four of them have the bright sea-green skin of patenized copper, transformed by the salty air, spit up by the tidal straight masquerading as a river, just a stone’s throw to the General’s right.

All year round, the sun shines on his face on a head held high, his skillfully sculpted eyes, nose, and silently puckered lips stare down with sour judgment at the loud, stinking machines of industry that growl past him daily. Thousands and thousands of cars and trucks, hundreds of subway cars pass The General every day, caking their mythic forefather in noxious soot on their way to the Red and Gray steel blemish on the face of the city’s bridge & highway network, The BillyBurg Bridge; Brooklyn’s brawny little bro.

And I bet none of them ever salute him.

Like Grant, he too wears a cloak, though his is wrapped tight around his chest, for this General is not preparing for a battle in the Autumn Rain, but for a long, cold encampment, facing the depravity of the sadistic winter wind.

This General’s pedestal is a perfect match for his 17th heir mounted 3 miles South; it’s a stoic monolith, nearly a dozen feet high with the width and length of a granite coffin. If hollowed, it could generously act as a mausoleum, perhaps for a soldier of great valor, but not for a General.

His name is nowhere to be found, neither on pedestal nor sculpture. Why would it? With his face staring, unblinking into the sun, the face we acknowledge every time we pay tender for a bottle of water, a soda or a chocolate bar at the corner store and greedily slug down as we rush from errand to errand on these non-stop New York days. It’s a face that any red blooded American should know.

Instead of a name, it offers us the name of the encampment where the General kept his troops trained and ready through the winter of ’77 and ’78, trained and willing at all times, every day through the bloodless cold to protect the good city of Philadelphia against the Army of The King.

The Godfather of our nation forever sits poised on his horse at the mouth of the Williamsburg Bridge: General George at Valley Forge.

The Good General led his men with stalwart courage and diligence, but that’s not to say that defeats were not suffered at the hands of the British. History had many years to slough through before General George would be cast in the bronze of victory. And victory against adversaries would never be remembered, if it were not for the nemeses against whom we stand.

We speak praises of the great Washington from when we are old enough to place a hand over our heart in the presence of Stars and Stripes, but when history is penned by the victors, we forget the names the we once faced with, fear, dread and the vow of resistance.

Sir William Howe.

The resolute Knight of Great Britain who sent Washington and his army fleeing across the same estuary that flows beside his statue in the brutal and terse battle of Long Island. The General who strung up Nathan Hale at the hangman’s tree in Manhattan, and would have gleefully done it again if the young spy had more than but one life to give for his country.

Hmmph. Showboating whelp. Your patriotism is much less glamorous when its dripping down your legs at the end of a noose, now isn’t it, BOY?

But Howe was no monster. Howe was no sadist, and in the same vein, he was no different than the Patriot General who sent thousands of his own young men to their graves in the name of an ideal.

Howe and Washington were Generals. Men of Honor.

After the retreat to Manhattan in the summer of ’76 and the defeats at Brandywine and Germantown, the cold was settling in, and Washington needed to keep his men from losing their morale. He took them to the Valley in western Pennsylvania named for a great iron forge there. Close enough to the Patriot capitol to hold off British raiding parties, yet far enough to thwart any surprise attacks. They arrived on the 19th of December, his men poorly fed and ill-equipped. The Schuylkill River had frozen over and the snow was six inches deep. Clothing was inadequate, blankets scarce, food always in shortage with men forced to eat the charred flour & water mixture they bitterly called firecake. The head of the General’s horse is hung low. Perhaps she’s staring at her hundreds of fellow equine who perished in the appalling conditions of that unforgettable winter.

I think back to General Grant, his eyes hidden beneath his shameful brim, realizing that if it weren’t for Cincinnati, head held high, the General might not have known which way to go. Sometimes the horse leads the soldier, and sometimes…

I look in the direction of Great George’s gaze, down Bedford ave, and can’t help but think that he’s keeping on eye of his next century successor, judging him, judging all of us through history’s impregnable wall.

And the only thing worse I ponder than being among the General’s loyal men…would be the one who questioned the General’s dedication to and certainty of victory. The one who caved to cowardice and frailty and questioned the General’s wisdom. To face those wide eyes, which even in flesh must have been as cold, bright and hard as the patenized copper I stare upon today, his decree, once the sound touched the air would become the stuff of prophesy:

“You hold your tongue soldier, for we will emerge from this cold winter in victory. I know this. The future that surrounds us has told me so.”

So hold your head high and salute your General the next time you find yourself on that Manhattan-bound ramp, up that ugly fucking Williamsburg Bridge, soldier.

And War was Good again (SSKC excerpt 3)

It’s no wonder that the 6 acre brownstone and brick armory two blocks up from my place, with it’s eight great round turrets, one of which soars dominantly over its peers, and cornerstones the size of coffins on Bedford would resemble a castle. It’s between Atlantic and Pacific streets; in the microcosm of Kings County, I guess that would mean the armory represented the pride of the nation, from sea to shining sea. It was the 1890s, and after a bitter reconstruction, a country searching for its soul for nearly thirty years after losing it in the bowels of hell, America was finding its pride once more.

We had found a new enemy, and praise the good Christian Lord, it wasn‘t us. The greedy, licentious, Spaniards; the Grand Conquistador of 400 years past was now feebly clinging to it’s handful of sad little colonies, island scraps in the South Pacific and scattered here and there in their in the Old New World. A tarnished bronze gauntlet that clutched the peasant colony of Cuba like a vice, while the gold that kept the grip firm grew thin. The Cubans were being forced into concentration camps, mass evacuations and atrocities up and down the coasts.

Those Spanish bastards. This was the Western Hemisphere, our Hemisphere. The United States, still limping and sore was beginning to stand tall once again, taller than it had before. By simple precedent the United States had no just claim on the island. But isn't it true thaat precedents are made, not born? Was it not time for the most civilized nation in the world to assert its presence? Was it not time for An American Empire?

Providence itself had propelled us Westward, teaching the savage Indians of the land the ways of our Lord by any means necessary, and the winds of change now pointed us South through the gates of the justly won Alamo and into the mouth of the Gulf. The beacon that led the way was a ship that burst into flames and sunk nobly into the sea, taking 266 American Boys to the depths with it.

The Spanish had done it. The proof was inconclusive, the evidence contradictory and full of holes, but good God man, for the sake of American patriotism it had to be irrefutable. There was confusion, had the Spanish Navy sunk the Maine? Or was it the Cuban rebels? What did it matter? Hearst bellowed in his Herald paper. What did that matter, if the Spanish could control their harbor, good American boys wouldn’t have gone down, it was our imperative to make change now! By all logic, it had to be true. How and why would we go down there like good Christian soldiers of fortune and freedom if the Spanish hadn’t sunk the U.S.S. Maine?

The evidence was softer than clay, but the fires of battle made it harder than obsidian stone.

It was the dusk of a dark century. A dawn of a new one.

And War was Good again.

It’s a robust, hearty castle, red as the Earth of Adam evocative of the barrel-chested men who ruled the day, McKinley, who had sent the men down into war once claimed that he prayed on his knees to the Good Lord in the middle of the Oval Office for guidance on what to do. That God himself pointed him toward the right way, toward the musket and the bayonette, for the sake of the Cuban people who needed good American liberation.

Coward. The brutish Under-Secretary of the Navy left praying to the women and children, picked up a rifle and bullied his superiors into lead his own squad of wild men up San Juan Hill.

Teddy was his name, a real man of good, rich Dutch-American Stock. a Boy of top breeding who rose as high as the highest rung of New York respectable families. He and his Rough Riders knew that on the battlefield, it is the sword of the Archangel that will guide you to victory, not some vague finger pointed by an absent and ominous God.

They were America’s First Volunteer Cavalry. The Weary Walkers of Colonel Leonard Wood, who found themselves acting as infantry, one of the only three units to see any real action. Roosevelt resigned his Cabinet position to follow Wood into battle, taking with him a mosaic of America’s finest, bravest and most proud, from the Montana Ranch Hand to the Harvard Polo Player, from the Indian Scouts of the Pawnee Tribe to Gunslinger Cowboys of the Dakota Badlands, local town sherrifs and nomadic highway bandits. Even officers who served under Police Commissioner Roosevelt followed their Warrior Prince to the barracks of Texas and Florida where they trained like Spartans during the day and tossed, turned, sweated and burned at night as they dreamed of their Dawn at the Hot Gates of Thermopole.

The first generation of free American Negros lead that charge up San Juan Hill, but being free Negroes, got the complete lack of credit that the White Men of America waned. Returning home victorious, they were lost in the shadow of praise for Theodore. They quietly and proudly renamed their Manhattan West Side haven after the site of their bloody conquest.

And Commander and Chief of these Obsidian Buffalo Soldiers was the pale, sickly moon-faced McKinley? A sad, dismal answer to the call for an Emperor. How could a man lead an empire if he can’t take a bullet to the chest, get back up and finish the job? The bullet of a workingman no less, one of the millions broken by the ruthlessness of American industry brought down a President at a train station outside of Buffalo. Now The American Empire needed a Bear to wield its big stick. A Rough Rider, a warrior and civic principal of pure American blood. And when the call came up the rural Adirondack mountain, where the warrior prince lay in waiting, Gotham’s favorite son Theodore was ready to answer. Hell he held the lantern like two stone tablets when he came down that mountain in the pouring, weeping rain.

Eight years later, TR was the fourth man to take the lead-slug test of the late 19th century President. He claimed the The Ghost of McKinley himself compelled the Milwaukee saloon keeper John Schrank to put a bullet through this President's chest. It punctured his glasses case and ribcage, but more importantly ripped a hole through the speech he proceeded to read for the next ninety minutes before sauntering through the doors of the closest hospital.

Ten years later, he died of a broken heart. Weeping for his son who was shot down from the skies over the trenches of The Great War.

In America, being A Man would never mean the same thing again

* * * *

The Armory stands like a fortress, a castle to the might of the American Military. If it only had a moat, it could suit the very court of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. After the return from victory in the seas near and far, the Armory was used for sporting events, keeping young men fit and competitive, when there was no grand overseas victory to claim from the bloodied hands of an adversary.

In 1981 it became a men’s homeless shelter. Scores of broken toy solders now huddled in and around the relic in hoodies, caps, faded jeans and cigarette smoke seeking guidance, hope, and just little scratch to score a hot cup of coffee, a meal or a little something to help them forget. Now at the grand armory, it’s just lost boys; each fighting their own small, sad little wars.

I really had to haul ass up Bedford now. It was almost 6.

Of Virtue and Valor (SSKC excerpt 1)

In ’76, we were all high on the New Idea, something with endless possibilities. In each year that came after the Founders had gone to seed, their vision became distorted more and more with each generation hence. I think Poetry was the first thing to go.

Columbia was out, but the vision she embodied still clung to the nation’s subconscious, not in the head, or even the heart, but in the gut, and in many cases, United States of America; it looked good on paper, and we wore it on our uniform lapels hearts, but Columbia warmed us at night, and kept us fed when our bellies laid bare. United States of America steeled our resolve before the gun-smoke mêlées from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, but it was Columbia that lit the fire that charged us forth. She was passionate and scandalous and fueled us with such purpose, that in no time, she had earned bones and on those bones, supple flesh. Breasts, hips, belly and thighs, her arms thrust open, and feet gripping the Earth, standing firm and forward, her chest swelled with courage.

Our Lady Columbia.

She was the girl that all the Revolutionaries kissed once on the lips before bed each night on the march, The one they sang ballads to late at night in the inns, drunk on old Franklin’s Proof of God’s Love. A hundred years later, the crates upon crates upon crates of iron and pressed copper made their way from France across the Atlantic. Our friends from the Revolution bestowed us with a new colossus of feminine dignity. Cloaked and modest, welcoming, yet chaste, we ignored the awkwardness of the situation. Someone forgot to tell them we were already taken.

They didn’t make the easiest of adopted sisters. Liberty was no bully, but she was a big girl and she outshone her big sister pretty quickly. Fine by Columbia, Libby could play nursemaid all she wanted to boatloads of refugees, lifting her lamp day in and day out, coddling and caring for all those confused plebeians with no clue which way to turn. Yes dear, you’ve made it to the New World. No dear, the streets aren’t really paved with gold. No, I don’t know where you can find your cousin, talk to the man at Ellis I’m sure he could help you.

My god, Columbia thought. How exhausting. No wonder she called it quits and shut down shop in 1954. It was a mundane, tedious exercise for which Columbia the wild girl had no time, she would rather be sneaking out the back door to party with the boys. What did Libby know anyway, she didn’t see The War.

Because The War. The real one, the one that had been sewn like a pack of larva under the countries skin, burrowing deep, just to have the wound burst open with blood, pus and Blue and Gray maggots 85 years later. The Real War. That was Columbia’s last moment in the fires of grandeur.

And in the years after the guns were laid down, two men, wise men of the earth stood on a hill’s crest in the City of Brooklyn and said: “Here. This is the spot we have chosen.” The men were architects. Landscape architects, a new term that combined botanical arts with structural design into creating vast natural landscapes in the middle of bustling cities.

Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead had triumphed over the Herculean task of returning Nature and Peace to the center of New York. And after Central Park opened as the greatest Urban Miracle the world had ever seen,
Vaux and Olmstead had the standing to build a park exactly as they saw fit. A vanity piece. A new park that would embody the Prospect of a new dawn.

Brooklyn would be their canvas.

Olmstead had been a journalist, reporting as a Northerner in the South. And now in the days of Reconstruction, they wanted a grand sweeping entrance to a pristine urban retreat here in New York’s prominent sister city, a stately yet fervent commemoration to Columbia’s boys that went down.

And Vaux and Olmstead loved their girl, what red-blooded American man didn’t in 1876? They wanted her in all her glory at the doorway to their latest park. Our Lady Columbia atop a Grand Army Plaza that lead into their immaculate Prospect Park. The Arch would be inspired by the French aesthetic, Brooklyn’s own Arc De Triomphe that would welcome trolley-cars through, and horse carriages all around, a wheel with it’s spokes stretching out to the far reaches of the city, this Plaza would be it’s nexus, and our Goodbye Girl would preside from it’s top.

Her Quadriga, a four-horse chariot leads her into battle, two Spirits of Victory, bearing trumpets on either side declare her awesome presence. She too, holds a torch, but this is no blaze of enlightenment. The flame sits atop a long lance, crowned with a ring of fire that she no doubt stole from Helios himself and sweet-talked that sap Icarus into taking the fall for it. Columbia’s fire is a weapon, a herald of the carnage that stood in her path, and would lay in her wake.

Flanked under her, on either side are her boys. Columbia always had the highest standards for her men, and after the first shots were fired, she would only run with fellas who served. The Sailors and Soldiers. The men who threw themselves into battle for her. Would you fight for me, boys? Stand up for you girl if a bully was treatin’ me mean? Would you bleed for me, boys? Would you die for me?

You can bet the farm, the horse, the cow and the hen that that they would, and they did. The boys threw themselves to the slaughter for her favor, The Civil War was Troy and Columbia was our Helen.

Spirit of the Army and Spirit of the Navy; Fred MacMonnies called the two collections of figured that rested in the center of each of the legs of the arch. On her left stand her sailors. Lead by some wide-winged, eagle-crowned daughter of Poseidon, a trident thrust high, her tits: perfection, poised like torpedoes. A captains wheel and quiver of arrows stand behind her. At the forefront stand shirtless chaps and bearded vets, willing and eager. white men and Negros alike. A young black-skinned boy is crouched in front with a cannon by his left knee. And in their right corner, one young boy felled by the villain’s volley, he lays limp in his comrade’s arms.

Under her left Angel of Victory stand the Soldiers, guided by a trumpeting messenger of Athena, their muskets blazing, their bayonettes glinting in the autumn sun. One zealous troop rushes forth with his squadron. Both squads are guided by a buxom angel to an certain doom they accepted long ago.

And they did it all for her.

I’m standing at the mouth to the park, staring up at that sculpture, I can see why they sacrificed their lives in her honor; her lithe frame fully upright behind her blazing lance. Her scandalously voluptuous form is freed from all restrain; the same cloak that Liberty wore with modesty and decorum, is flung wide behind her, swirling through the air and she stands poised in a delicately sculpted and, even in bronze, almost translucent blouse.

MacMonnies must have wet his sheets dreaming of the Hourglass Harbinger.

SOLDIERS AND SAINTS OF KINGS COUNTY- Prologue

Kings College became Columbia University in 1784. Five days after the declaration was signed, The Continental Army then tore down the sculpture of King George III at the Bowling Green. They melted cast-bronze eyesore down and molded it into over 40,000 musket balls.

The war-tested devotion of farmers, blacksmiths, tradesmen, free men who raised arms as Patirots after the massacre at Boston was clear: The King is no longer welcome here.

So why did Brooklyn remains Kings County?

There’s a theory. There’s always a theory, often more than one and here’s mine. The "S" in KINGS isn't a reference to the Monarch of Britain, heavens no. There’s no apostrophe on the “s”. That’s because it doesn’t denote possession. It denotes plurality. Brooklyn doesn’t belong to the King: It is the County of Kings.

This is where they landed, after rising from the peasant’s tenement; the faceless, nameless brick prisons on the strange-named streets from which they fled. The labyrinth of stone and black tar were tossed there as an easy solution to the swarms of locusts that infected the malignant tumor jutting east off Manhattan’s neck.

They hived there. Bred, warred, gambled, bargained, struggled, strived, worked, gained, earned, and rose. Their hope was what erected the stone towers of the Great Bridge and the steel foundations of its northward younger brothers shortly after. Most of the wretched refuse, christened by the golden lamp didn’t live to make it over. But they raised sons and daughters who did.

The Roeblings had cast a miracle on them all: Just like The Saviour, they too could walk across water; though they were made to learn early on, that it was not the lamb who granted the marvel, but the lion. The angry, vengeful God of Abraham and Moses.

The death of the father by tetanus, and the crippling of the son by Caissons disease, these were the sacrifice on the mount. The 1883 stampede was the trial by fire, and Barnum’s elephants were the appeasement of a brutal yet forgiving Lord. It was born the Great Bridge. But christened: The Brooklyn Bridge.

A Bridge to Brooklyn, with townhouse palaces just over the river; Victorian castles in Flatbush, the roughhouse hamlets of Midwood and Kensington, and regal brownstones along the crest of Stuyvesant Heights to Boerum Hill. The son of an Irish brawler on the Bow’ry would become an Officer of the Law down in Bay Ridge. Old Bubbies of Borough Park were once soft-faced, bright-eyed girls made, hunched-over, by fourteen-hour factory days. Their tired eyes would still see their kine yingele grow up to be doctors and lawyers in Park Slope and Williamsburg.

Their yearning to breath free was a distant, ancestral memory only a generation or two removed. Here, we had become Kings.

Victorian House Street Theater and Industrial Loft Art Dorm Parties. (Another here & there tale)

I couldn't believe how long the line was. Stretching all the way down to the end of the block and then another half a block more. I saw at least a dozen familiar faces from the neighborhood among them. The family from around the corner whose mom was on jeopardy once, I was friends with the younger son in High School, my brother with the older. There were our next door neighbors with the twin girls, 10 years old who loved it when my dad or I picked them up and played air plane, or took them to neighborhood pool for endless tossings and splashing.

The neighbors two blocks down whose father was a pastry chef and hosted the unfathomably decadent New Years Day party every January 1st, often the one time of the year I played catch-up with their daughter I went to Hebrew School with, who stood at about 4' 10", maybe 95 lbs to my 6' 5", 195.

We were all trying to look foward, maybe get someone or another to hold our spot while we walked ahead to see if they were still seating people, or if the line was moving at all. There were even astounded mentions that the line stretched on the exact same distance on the other side. There were also faces unfamiliar to the neighborhood. People who had come in by subway from Park Slope, some of them even from Brooklyn Heights, rumors abounded that some of them even came from Manhattan. Big ole' city folk coming here! To our quaint little Brooktopian 'hood!

All for a free outdoor performance of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

It was a very ambitious endeavor. An independant theater company called Brave New World Reperatory decided to use the soft, beautiful ambiance of Ditmas Park West to host a play that took place in 1930's Alabama. The lawns and porches made excellent settings for the idle chatter of young children and legal discourse of Atticus Finch. An improptu jail cell on one porch, another house completely darkened to be the home of the reclusive Boo Radley, even an old Model-T Ford strolling down the street at one point, making us feel that for just a moment, between the goose-neck orange glow of the street-lamp and the arching cover of Sycamore branches, we just might have been in a small town in Alabama.

Well, not exactly. There was the more-than 200 person audience sitting on chairs in the middle of the streets, plus the additional hundred along the sides observing what they could. (Some, such as myself could see more than others due to my height advantage) with a pair of pathways on either side of the seating to allow the actors to run back and forth across the street, addressing the many houses all used as sets and scenes for the performance.

It was a conceptual masterpiece, and for a neighborhood that has sat comfortably in it's serenity for over 150 years, it was a beaming moment of pride for us. We took the stoic composure of a neighborhood that was once a refuge for the upright protestant nativists of New York, fleeing a city rapidly being tainted with immigrants, Catholics and bohemians, a neighborhood that only about forty years ago reinvented itself a a multicultural haven for families was now recreating once again as a place for youth, art, and performance, a place that has now welcomed us all out of our comfortable porches and living rooms to the new neighborhood coffee shops and restaurants. Places to meet our new neighbors and continue to bound upward and onward

On that note, I'm sorry too report that the play was so dull.

Perhaps it was just a cultural misreading. Though the houses and lawns seemed a perfect setting to transform to a different place and time, the audience didn't seem to grip the story written by Harper Lee in 1962. It might have been a North/South thing, it might have been a then/now thing, but though the costumes were wonderful, the acting quite compitent, the story just didn't seem worth standing on the street trying to poke a head above the crowd to see. At least that's what the standing crowd thought, which thinned out more and more as the play progressed. The seated crowd seemed content.

In other news, and on the other side of town, I spent a party-night out in what will soon be my new home: The industrial lofts of East Williamsburg. And it was shocking how much it felt like I was back in college. Dorms. Enormous, fancy college-art dorms, the difference being, it wasn't a college compus, it was an industrial Brooklyn 'hood. I also didn't have to concern myself with class the next day. We went to one apartment where a funk band was strumming away, celebrating someone's birthday, and another where a DJ was spinning jungle music. Both parties had kegs, beautiful young people, and I'm presuming not a single one of them would be interested in seeing a performance of To Kill a Mockingbird on a tree-lined Victorian streetscape.

Ah, the many shades of Brooklyn.

Brooktopia: A native reflects Pt. 2- Out to Bay Ridge

"Yeah. This definetely qualifies as 'way-the-Christ-out-in-Bay-Ridge." My brother Matt says to me as we convene on 68th st. ad Fort Hamilton Pkwy, using his prefered replacement of explatives.

There was this event posted in Nonsense, which is the first and foremost of a collection of 'net athourities for underground and unconventional events in New York City, the kind that don't exactly fit into a Time Out NY category, nor would attract the TONY crowd. Things like subway parties, head-phone dance parties, pirate parades, condiment wars, and so forth. This one caught our eye: Futurist Vegan Dinner-Party. And it's way the Christ out in Bay Ridge.

How'd that happen? Nonsense is occassionally Manhattan, but mostly Williamsburg, sometimes Greenpoint, DUMBO, or LIC, (particularly in the Queens pioneering art-house The Flux Factory) but with the occassional mass bike ride to/from Coney Island, there's never anything down here, and especially ot out in The Belly.

It was o some obscurely named street which tend to pop up and unexpected intervals, breakig up the monotony of consistently numbered streets and avenues, and Matt knew it was around the 60's and late teens. Ovington's the name, and as we found out, it comes in two flavors: Ave and Court. It also disappears for a little while and then reappears after the Gowaus Canal. I know it sounds horrible, but we were able to gague the neighborhood borders through a little racial profiling.

Heading West from Flatbush it was easy: First came the Pakistanis along Coney Island Avenue, complete with kebab shops and Baliwood video stores. after Ditmas ave became 18th, I was booking through Borough Park. Suits and Hats, one and all. Swirls of Payes flowing from the front of all the mens and boys ears. They relief themselves from summer heat by shaving the tops of their heads instead. Almost as if preparing the young ones for male patter baldness sure to come later in life.

Out of Borough Park, into Sunset Park, Brooklyn's own personal Chinatown, except the elevation is lower and the real estate wider, like everything has been squished down and stretched out. buildings, of course, but it feels like streets as well. The sky's much wider here, and it doesn't feel like everyone and everything is reaching toward it. Lotsa double-parking and big fruit and vegitable stands, and Mexicans.

And soon, Bay Ridge came. Ah, the Italians. Muscle T's over Biceps so big that the arms dangled a good four inches removed from the torso and hair greased down and slicked with a fine-toothed comb. Hey, cliches are cliches for a reason. I found myself envisioning a big art-infused courtyard party with a wide table full of delicious animal-product free food, music, varied forms of lighting and various homages to the machine-sex-and-death obsessed Italian futurists. A striking blow to the North-Brooklyn centrists to prove that all the other 'hoods down here got something to prove to!

It was a stupid presumption. The party ended up being a dozen vegans sitting around an apartment with no furniture eating peanut butter-banana-raisin&nut concoctions before the main course of plain rice and vegitables. We discussed the futurists briefly between courses before my brother and I gave each other a nod that it was time to go. There was a long bike-ride home ahead of us.

No offense to all the vegans out there, but I've rarely been to a vegan-hosted party that wasn't mellow and dull.

Maybe it was because it was way the Christ out in Bay Ridge that did it.

Routine

God, I hate my commute. An hour. A goddam hour to get to that seething X-marks-the-spot for neon, advertising, over-priced lousy-quality, factory processed food and souvenirs... (oh, and musical theater) called Times Square.

God, I hate Times Square, especially Times Square in the summer, hordes of tourists, International and Midwestern families that all start to look the same, and sound the same, and don't tip tour guides just the same, and then there's the cars. Traffic and exhaust, buses that make the streets even hotter and the air less breathable to dive and dodge and run out of the way of, seeing how street-signs in Times Square are like crossing guards during a Safari stampede. I ca't believe my "office" my base of operations for work all summer long is Times Goddam Sonovabitch Square.

But the distance to get there is what kills me. I start my day the same way every day- trying to find a way to justfy not going to work. I get over it by the time I'm standing do a couple of quarter-assed yoga stretches and get dressed. I don't shower before work. I need it after, not before.

By the time I'm done, it's all I can do to rush to the train station to get myself home and wash the stench of NYC streets off of myself and then? Well, who's got the gusto to go back out again?

I could, I could find the energy, augment it with a red bull or coffee, get a little more exercise it, but I don't why? It's the routine.

And each time I break the routine and do something I want to do, I think that's the start of something bigger. I go to a fiction reading and say that I'll start going every week, start reading soon, get noticed, get published, etc. etc. Then I miss next weeks reading. The end.

Or not. Routine is just habit, a friend and co-creativist I hadn't seen in a while reminds me. Why not just create new habits? Ones I like better?

It used to be habit to go the Bowery Poetry maybe twice a week. And I loved it, why not again? Would it be worth it to put off my post-work shower long enough to stay in the city and do something I really wanted to do? Well, I may not get laid afterwards, but I'm not getting laid now anyway, so no loss, no gain.

It'd be one thing if i started from nothing and nowhere to go, but I didn't. I just lost my momentum, and got lost in the work. It just takes one step in the right direction. And then a second step. And then a third. It's all in follow-through. Same in golf, same in life (to quote Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn. If that a'int a pair of inspirations, what are?)

So that's that. I'm at the Bowery. I'm writing my blog. And it's not so horribly hot out anymore. I'm not so sweaty. The shower can wait.

Summer Colds and the AC divide

Does anyone remember those hand disinfectant ads? The ones that tried to gross you out about all of the germs all over the seats and the handrails, attempting to germaphobe everyone into running to the closest Duane Reade to buy their product to rub all over yourself every time you touch anything. See, what that does is actually anesthetize you to germs and bacteria, which both weakens the immune system by not fighting the germs itself, and also encourages the germs to evolve to stronger and more dangerous so when you run out of disinfectant, well, it’s party-time. Look what it did to Howard Hughes.
I don’t bother with that nonsense, I trust in my body. Humanity has lasted against the ickies for centuries now, and although there are always new ickies here to attack us, we’ve been able to fight back without disinfecting every ten minutes. Washing my hands before eating and after dealing with tourists from all over the world seems good enough for me, even though I happen to deal with the toxic, contaminated smells, and infected air of New York City in the summertime, I trust my body.
And, I’ve been sick for four days now.
Symptoms? Well, in short, I feel like a giant leaking human-shaped balloon filled with snot. Quite literally, I’m dripping all over the place, hacking up phlegm, my head weighs about ten pounds heavier than it should, and I’m achy all over, just trying to walk from room to room feels like trying to keep…well, a big human-shaped balloon full of snot upright and active. But what makes a summer cold so miserable, is that colds aren’t supposed to hit in the summer. Colds are for the wintertime. The cold puts the body’s immune system on overtime, so when it shuts down, you get to curl up in a blanket and drink hot tea and stay inside and all that.
Summer is sweat. Especially this summer, and trying to snuggle up in bed when it’s in the 90’s and humid is unbearable, let alone drinking hot tea. The only way to actually treat this cold the way a cold should be treated is to jack the AC to full to convince myself it’s colder out than it is so I can do the tea-and-bundle treatment.
AHA!!! THAT’S IT! The AC. It’s had the same affect on me as the disinfectant. See, on a daily basis, I try to understand how people without AC in this city have been surviving the summer. This summer has turned the city air into a giant bowl of soup, and all of us humans into living croutons. But there are those out there who don’t have an air conditioned room/home to run to at the end of the day. They’ve adjusted to the heat index and have survived. They’ve built up their body’s heat immunity, and in turn, are stronger for it.
There’s no doubt in my mind that this cold came on from working and talking and jumping up and down the stairs of a double-decker bus for five days a week. I do not have the strongest body systems in the world, and over-exertion can beat and batter an immune system into submission, welcoming in all the microscopic nasties that I can normally battle off with the greatest of ease. Hmm, maybe that disinfectant stuff would have helped at the end of the week…
No! See, striving and thriving without disinfectant has got me through to the ripe age of 23 without any life-threatening illnesses, and will continue to, and you know what? Maybe not having AC would have helped. Maybe I would have dropped dead from heat exhaustion, maybe not, but I do know one thing.
Anyone who rides the subway in the summertime is well aware of two truths:
1. The subways cars are the most wonderfully air conditioned public space the city has to offer, and can make the commute from point A to B more important than the destination itself, and
2. The subway stations are sweltering, airless, humid pits of merciless heat and stench, making the process of waiting for a train it’s own special nightmare.
And switching between the two, especially when transfers are involved can beat and batter and immune system down like a ripe grape used as a ping-pong ball.
It seems that balancing myself between the extremes (working in the heat only to run to the refuge of my room, a subway car, a movie theater, what have you) has done worse for me than sweating it out. And if you look at global warming on a microcosm, you get all them big ol’ buildings pumping in cold air, where do you think all that hot air is being dumped? That’s right, on to them city streets we gotta walk on every day.
Sure, it’s always been a city of extremes. That don’t mean the bodyhas to like it.
Well, after three days of this crap, I’ve been sucking down lozenges and blowing out tissues by the dozen. I think this summer cold is on it’s way out.
And the goddam heatwave looks like it’s over too.
Time to turn off the AC.

Welcome to Brooktopia

Hey everyone. Welcome aboard, grab a bagel and a cream soda, take a seat on your stoop and come reminisce with me about the good old days of Brooklyn. Or, if you're new to this borough, like so many Brooklynites are these days, take a look from the POV of a kid who grew up one of the most utopian, peaceful, mutli-ethnic and inviting neighborhoods in the whole of New York City (in my biased opinion) Ditmas Park!

Never heard of it? Well, it's wedged right between Flatbush and Kensington, about a mile south of Prospect Park. It's also known as Victorian Flatbush, because of the beautiful and spacious three-story houses with triangular shingled roofs and wraparound porches, way back in the late 1800's in was a blueprint for the very first suburban community in the country, of course, before suburbia went sprawling out into a bland, sprawling picket-fence purgatory.

It's a neighborhood where there isn't much concern about leaving the front door unlocked for a few hours, where children play on their front lawns with sprinklers spraying, where the trees outnumber the cars, and people smile and wave from the street. Then again, walk two blocks and you find yourself surrounded by section eight housing, unsurprising populated by minority families, black and hispanic in throw-back jerseys, hanging out on the sidewalk, eyeing the more affluent as they march head-down from the subway station to their safe, green blocks.

It's a neighborhood of the Q train, quite proudly at that, even though there seem to be far, far too many stops between us and Park Slope, the closest Big Brooklyn satalite 'hood, and obviously one that others recognize much more easily by name. Where many of us go to shop, run errands and have dinner and drinks out on the town. Such as the frustrating " stops within 4 blocks" of Cortelyou, Beverley and Church (rd. rd. & ave, respectively.) Why this is necessary, I will never know, but I'm sure to always give myself a solid 45 minutes from my front door to my Island destination (note: in Brooktopia, Manhattan will here and always be referred to as The Island) more than 30 on the trains seems to be what divides "accessible" Brooklyn from the rest of the rapidly developing 'hoods

But the need to leave the neighborhood for a social venue all seems to be changing in Ditmas Park, particularly on the thoroughfare of Cortelyou rd. For most of my childhood, it was the destination for the neighborhood grocery. (Associated. Medicore selection, but there in a pinch.) Of course, the bodegas, who silently agreed to stop IDing me for beer around 19 years old. The local pizza shop San Remo, which was the lifeblood of every kid at the elementary school P.S. 139 (and then again for many years after) and the deli shop/bakeries. Providers of the obligatory bacon/egg/cheese breakfast to go I was dependant on for too long, before I starting taking a healthier, though more caffinated approach to breakfast.

Then came The Cornerstone. A no-frills neighborhood dive which dared to establish itself in the midst of a family neighborhood claiming up the corner outside of the Cortelyou rd. train station, thinking it would draw many a long-time-riding passenger out for a quick beer before home. The blocked path construction work didn't help business. Neither did the unsavory crowd, kerosene stove, and generally bleak atmosphere.

But two more pioneers soon put our quaint little 'hood on the map, first being an NY Times restaurant review darling, named (quite aptly) Picket Fence, a friendly, small and often packed haven for comfort food, treating it's customers to bowls of popcorn instead of baskets of bread. But even more daring and proud in it's mission and cause was Vox Pop, Ditmas Park's new home for Coffee, Books, and Democracy.

A coffee shop! How in the world did we survive this long without one? Brooklyn is quite unapologetically proud of the fact that we've kept Starbucks to a bare minimum here (two in the Slope, though. HAH!) and instead, has opened it's arms with full-throated glee to a place of community and thought-provocation, a place that welcomes all points of view from a neighborhood that welcomes all walks of life, and people of every nation and heritage of the world. the 2000 census proclaimed the Cortelyou neighborhood as the most ethnically diverse in America. How about that?

I guess once the 2010 census comes around, we'll see if we can maintain the title. With once secular Jewish family on our block (us) one White Christian family, an Albanian family, an African American family, a Jamaican family, a Cambodian family, a Latino family, and I'm sure many more I just haven't met yet, I'm guessing it will stay as such.

Then again... I;ve been seeing more and more young, white faces strollin up and down my block. I, sitting on my soft porch-chair, computer in my lap, and wary eye on them, almost tempted to jump up and shout: "You there! Where are you from, and what brought you here!" More young people introducing themselves at the stained wood counter ordering the same coffee drink.

With rent prices spreading higher on proximity to The Island, Perhaps 45 minutes to the city has started to seem like an okay deal.