The city that cares.

There are many reasons. Chief among them is that I could not concentrate on my creative practice: There were too many cultural events to attend. There were too many parties, bars, restaurants, plays, films, galleries, concerts, readings, lectures, interesting ethnic neighborhoods, street fairs. I don’t know how anyone makes anything in New York when the lifestyle revolves around looking at things other people made.

I moved to a town where there is nothing to do. It is much more conducive to being creative. This is the case in large part because there is very little evident creativity here and only one culture, which is not new or interesting. It makes perfect sense that amazing bands always come from some boring town or the armpit of a state you’d never want to go to.

I have never been more creative. And I don’t censor my productions out of inadvertent inferiority to the wonderful production I saw last night in New York. There are no wonderful productions in my new town. Anything goes!

Goodbye Brooklyn

Photo shoot in front of the Morgan L stop. A parked SUV is blasting “Everyday I’m Hustlin”

The Sights of Bushwick

(Cars: burned out, hoodless, flat tired, painted over Impala with hubcaps missing; brand new volkswagon beetle. Flora: potted shrubs on steps of Mob cement factory. Signage: graffiti on side of burned out building — “CALL YOUR MOM.” Public art: graffiti by artists from France, Brazil, Queens.)

Listening to: Tuner, by Mogwai

No Brooklyn blog is complete without Mobsters. As I said, my neighborhood has the makings of a 1980’s Vincent Spano movie. Ingredient A: the Mob. Here are the owners of the closed cement factory next door:

Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau and New York City Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik announced today the indictment of 38 individuals and 11 companies on racketeering charges stemming from a three year joint investigation into organized crime’s involvement in the construction industry in the City.

The indictment charges that the members of the criminal enterprise, denominated “The Lucchese Construction Group,” engaged in a number of labor bribery, bid rigging, and other anticompetitive schemes that systematically siphoned millions of dollars from both public and private construction projects. To generate the criminal proceeds of these schemes, corrupt contractors, who were required to use union labor and pay “prevailing wages,” instead used non-union labor and did not pay prevailing wages. However, they billed the public agencies and private developers as if they had complied with the law. The difference between what was billed and the contractor’s actual labor cost financed bribes to corrupt union officials to allow the use of non-union labor and payments to organized crime officials of a “mob tax” of at least five percent of the contract’s value to facilitate the schemes.

These movies are the best representation of what artsy Brooklyn is like today, even though they’re about downtown Manhattan in the ’80s.

After Hours, 1985
This is Bushwick, today. Taxis won’t drive here. Young professionals are terrified of it. Come here at 2 am and you might wander into a circle of men on high bicycles throwing fire. Or a group of artists playing hide and go seek with a countdown of photoshop commands instead of numbers. Be sure to stop by the dance party, Surreal Estate. If you get bored of artistic types, stop by The Lair on Grattan and Varick and get accosted by some gangters.

Slaves of New York, 1989
There is actually a line in this movie where Bernadette Peters says that poor artists are slaves to their roommate leaseholders in New York City because of the housing situation. This phenomenon is alive and well.

Alphabet City, 1984
This pretty much just happened to me while I was looking for my lost cat in Bushwick. I think the actor who plays his cokehead partner was just smoking a joint on the front stoop of a tenament across from the junkyard behind my apartment, and he’s named “O.”

Stealing wifi in Bushwick

Listening to: Rumble by Link Wray

This tumblr blog keeps clearing the number of “plays” for songs I’m posting. I can’t figure out if it’s because they’re copyright or because of some glitch. In any case rest assured that hundreds of people are listening to each awesome song I post.

This song is dedicated to my bar, Kings County, and its bearded bartender, Bobby, who makes me want to drink a few shots of Wild Turkey, get on a motorcycle, and rumble through the hills of South Carolina.