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.