November 2011
1 post
Why I left Brooklyn
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...
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
1 post
May 2011
4 posts
Listening to: Tuner, by Mogwai
Listening to: Music to Spazz by, WFMU →
The Mob
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...
Best Movies About Brooklyn, aka, The '80s are...
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...
April 2011
3 posts
March 2011
4 posts
Listening to: Swimmers by Broken Social Scene
Peel Me a Grape You Geezer, 2004
This OG...
February 2011
7 posts
Listening to: On Such Favors by Sam Prekop
NYT Profiles Urban Pioneer Sloane in Red Hook
“A Vacation Cottage in Red Hook”
David Hay — When he went to see the 1899 building, he was equally undaunted by what surrounded it: the vacant lots on either side, the large expanse of overgrown land behind and the neighboring house that appeared to be collapsing.
He quickly made an offer, buying the 2,000-square-foot house for $760,000, and moved in.
The ground floor,...
Bushwick=Beatnick
I wish I had a camera. But ever since I wrote that manifesto against bourgeois spending, I haven’t allowed myself to buy one. The reason I wish I had one is that on a regular basis when it’s temperate outdoors, like tonight, there are guys with facial hair playing guitar on the benches outside Brooklyn’s Natural, the local grocer. Some wear army jackets, and they sit in front of...
The L Magazine Profiles Brooklyn's Urban Pioneer...
A whole issue devoted to the proud culture! Brought tears to my eyes.
Generation DIY: Do, Make, Say, Think
by Catherine Thompson
It seems like everyone in Brooklyn these days is either making something and selling it, teaching other people how to make it, or learning how to make something with plans on selling it. While this boroughwide DIY drive to become more self-sufficient than a...
January 2011
5 posts
Idiotarad NYC 2011 (a shopping cart race)
Unfortunately, as soon as the shopping cart racing teams gathered here in Bushwick on Saturday morning, a bitter local lady called the cops and claimed they were going to scratch her car with snowballs or shopping carts or something. She was swearing at everyone in her pyjamas.
Here the police are arresting a semi-nude guy.
The popsicle team is wondering what to do. 2/12: It has been...
Watching: "Slacker" →
Cause I’m really slackin off on this blog
Listening to: Writer's Block by Just Jack →
Is it legal to link to something from Tumblr that requires you to watch an ad first?
Listening to: I've Got Your Number by Passion Pit →
Listening to: La Vendeuse des Choussues des Femmes...
December 2010
13 posts
Hello Winter
9:00: work
2:00: eat giant Toblerone bar
4:00: become convinced that life is just going to keep getting worse, tweet: “reaching your 30s alone and financially unstable in a city is like being a refugee in the same camp 20 years into conflict. you think it’s all going to resolve just because you’ve been waiting a long time, but then you’re just deeper into the...
Blizzard music: Sweet Thing by Van Morrison
Listening to: Lovesick by Lindstrøm and... →
Happy Birthday!
It’s been a year since I came back from Congo and decided to celebrate the diversity of Brooklyn with this blog. I’ve moved three times — to Vanderbilt and Fulton, then Myrtle and Washington, and now Morgan and Knickerbocker. I’ve lived on the C, G and now L trains. Today I considered buying a sweatshirt with the Virgin Mary spraypainted on it.
Here’s a list of my...
Surprises in the life of an Urban Pioneer Sloane
When you’re an Urban Pioneer Sloane, your domestic life will be full of surprises. For example, it isn’t unusual to wake up one morning and find that someone has thrown cinderblocks over the fence into your backyard.
A Night at the Urban Pioneer Sloane Inn
Well-bred hardy people talk about smart things without being afraid of the ghetto they live in
Park your horse at Roberta’s, an unmarked warehouse on a creepy alley in Bushwick, any night of the week and you will enjoy the Urban Pioneer Sloane Inn.
Tonight there was the usual centerpiece of Sloanes surrounded by their adoring acolytes. The restaurant is long and dimly lit by vintage...
The Sloane Ranger, urban pioneer variety, part I
In England, they have a cultural demographic called the Sloanes. Several wonderfully hilarious books were written about them, one in the 80s called “The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook,” and its next gen follow-up a few years ago, “Cooler, Faster, More Expensive: The Return of the Sloane Ranger.” These people are bougie or even aristocratic by class, but have a unique set...
November 2010
1 post
Listening to: “Diva” soundtrack
October 2010
3 posts
The Tim Riggins Pizza: tomato, smoked ricotta,...
It’s a sign from God when your favorite restaurant on earth names a pizza after your biggest TV crush, a hick football player, and the very reason you like the restaurant is because it reminds you of rustic environments. We’re on the same page, Bushwick.
Dinner party
I will not enslave less established, poorer young...
Having been a Slave of New York multiple times in my life, aka, the roommate with the small overpriced room renting from the leaseholder who is richer and more established and has a huge room and pays almost the same rent but keeps his/her stuff all over the place so that I was essentially a gimp in a box,* I will never, ever, violate a person’s human rights like that. So, now that I am...
September 2010
7 posts
Scenes from the Morgan stop
An Italian photographer in a ripped t-shirt plays Carrom, a table-top billiards game, with his friends in the backyard of a an apartment. He drinks Budweiser with a Japanese citrus tincture and smokes hand rolled cigarettes, smiling like someone who just had sex. “To take a shit on the beach is fantastic,” he says in a discussion of where and where not to go to the bathroom in...
Woman Returns Home from Italy and Finds Vast...
USA appears to be an entirely fake nation, with all its components nothing more than 2-dimensional cardboard cut-outs
A U.S. citizen returning to her home last week after a vacation in Italy was shocked to discover that the place she had once considered to be a nation in existence since 1776 with the motto “In God We Trust” that harmoniously comprised a melting pot of human beings...
Listening to Bushwick's own Newtown Radio →
Bedbug is the last straw for Bushwick artist
This morning my neighbor announced that he is thinking about moving. It was prompted by my asking if his dog would be okay with a cat if I got one.
“I’m thinking about getting out of New York for a while,” he told me as he squinted at his Mac laptop at a table in our backyard. “I might go to Idaho for a while to my parents house and build a studio apartment in their barn....
"The Brooklyn Griffin Finds a Perch" (I live a...
By EMILY RUSSO MILLER
Photographs by Evan R. Wexler The robot surveys its domain.
Perched high above an industrial stretch of East Williamsburg, a menacing robot nine feet high and seven feet wide surveys the street below, watching cars steal past graffitied factory buildings as if they were prey. Its fierce head sways and dips when a wooden rudder protruding from the back of its neck...
Bushwick Backyard
Oh, backyard
You are serenaded by a singer who sounds like Janis Joplin
A guitarist who sounds like Jeff Buckley
A blues radio station
And Musica Romantica full blast from the body shop next door
You host debris including the world’s first dog chain
An old wheelchair someone brought home drunk
The first nail
Glass shards
Lots of dog poo
A yellow marble
And wood that my neighbor...
8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York... →