I think this is a post about gentrification, though that's not what I intended. I thought I'd stage a return to Jonathan Lethem, or walking, or food, or... While I've touched on all these things, the result is not a review of anything except what's apparently my new favorite topic.
I first tried to read JL's gentrification epic* The Fortress of Solitude the summer after my freshman year, but only got about a hundred pages in before I quit. I tried again, and tried better, this past week. For a variety of reasons, it felt urgent and relevant to me in a way it hadn't the last time around—my Brooklyniness, for one; my job, for another, since a decent portion of the book's final section takes a look at the NY prison system; also, a series of weird resonances, including:
In the past month or so I've encountered some songs by Gabriel Kahane, a musician from my neighborhood. Underberg** is my favorite track—I've found myself listening to it a few times in a row lately. Turns out that Underberg is also the title of the first and longest section of Fortress; both seem to refer to this building (aw geez, don't get me started on Atlantic Yards) and to evoke a sense of nostalgia, though if you listen close, not everything was so great back in the good old days.
I'd been meaning to pay tribute to Fortress by walking down Dean Street, the site of much of its action. Today I wound up there by a circuitous route—touched down in Carroll Gardens to pick up a chocolate croissant from Mazzola (go go go! if you are in CG; I got addicted while catsitting), decided to thread through Cobble Hill to charming little Iris in Brooklyn Heights. Last time I went to Iris it was basically a snow day: quiet Saturday, latte and book, ham-and-cheese biscuit with egg, picturesque flakeshow out the window. But not this time. This time the place was mobbed with people: angling for tables, snatching chairs from the unwary, hovering over the counter. I got a sandwich to go but it was nothing like the idyll of my winter visit just a few months ago. I am pleased for the Iris folks, since it's a lovely café. And I recognize I am part of the very problem I complain about here. But it's no fun to go somewhere everyone wants to go. Even if I could've gotten a seat, the loomers would have spoiled the mood. Success is a mixed bag, I suppose.
These musings in mind, I walked along Dean. It has to be said, the block JL describes in its infinite variety throughout the 500-plus pages of Fortress is these days one of the most immaculate in Brooklyn. Charming restored brownstones, cherry and magnolia trees, stoop gardens, clean streets. Throughout much of the (to some degree autobiographical) novel, it's a morass of decaying buildings, lunch-money robbers, and uneasy neighbors, a mixture of Puerto Ricans, blacks, and white hippies. By the story's end, it's well on its way to becoming the cleaned-up place it is today. As Lethem's hippie-raised protagonist, Dylan, muses, "I considered now that what I'd loved in [Brian Eno's Another Green World album], and certain others...was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demi-monde, a hippie dream... It was the same space the communists and gays and painters of celluloid imagined they'd found in Gowanus, only to be unwitting wedges for realtors, a racial wrecking ball. A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night." I sensed the echoes of his words on my walk, caught up as I was in frustration at the overrun Iris. The block is beautiful now, but it's no longer the dream it might have been.
I turned onto Dean's next-door neighbor, Bergen, for the walk back toward Smith. On the way, I passed a dead ringer for my mind's eye's Dylan—all grubby t-shirt and shorts, little-boy-long hair—and stopped at one of the stoop sales that proliferate these days. I can never resist looking at a box of books, and what was in this one but Fortress. Of course.
And so, the tides, they turn. I wonder if the woman selling the book had read it or if she, like nineteen-year-old me, got stymied. I wonder how much she was selling it for. I wonder if she found a buyer for it—it's worth buying, worth reading. Maybe she did. Maybe it could have been you.
*The novel defies my attempt at five-second summary, but let's say it's the story of a white boy and a black boy growing up on the same block in Brooklyn in the '70s, and a snapshot of race relations more generally from the '70s up 'til just about the present. It includes such highlights as a stint in California, a ring that confers superpowers, and a whole lot of drugs.
**For what it's worth, the link said I had to be logged in to listen the first time I clicked; the second time it let me, though.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Bicycle! Bicycle!
As someone who's forgotten how to ride a bike (you say it ain't true, proverbially ain't true, but it is), I am ambivalent about them. Y'all will know how I hate cars, and on the (tarred, be-traffic-lighted) surface of things, bicycles seem a good solution candidate. I know several people who extoll their virtues, including a couple of my bosses, one of whom has used public transportation, in his own estimation, only once in the past ten years or so. I am sure the health, enjoyment, and logistical benefits (he lives in Red Hook, where subways fear to tread) are impressive for him and other people like him.
However! Put bikes on the streets and much mayhem ensues. I am all for bicycle lanes in theory, but in practice not so much. Bikers put this poor walker in less-deadly but more-frequent danger spots than cars do. Many bikers do not seem to believe in obeying traffic rules. Depending on what suits them, they act like cars or like pedestrians, swapping tactics at light speed. They tear through streets heading the wrong way, and do not necessarily stop for traffic lights. I have nearly been run down several times (and unfortunately, still-feeling-guilty-at-the-memory-of-it, ten years or so ago opened a car door into the path of one unfortunate cyclist). Given these conditions, biking is not particularly safe for pedestrians or for the bikers themselves. One of my friends was in an accident a few months ago where a car just didn't stop for him at a busy intersection; a cyclist was even recently killed in my neighborhood (not on my corner of doom, but not so far away). I hope you will not think that my flippancy in griping about bicycles in any way means that I don't view that as a tragedy. I do, and it makes the whole issue of bike safety more urgent than my usual cantankerous griping would suggest.
I wonder what can be done to make the streets safer. The city's policy of closing off some streets to traffic on a few summer weekends is admirable in theory, but in practice left the crossing to Union Square hazardous to at least your humble narrator. A constant, unbroken stream of cyclists is not more conducive to safety, enjoyment, or anything good than intermittently-stoplighted car traffic. And even places where bicycles proliferate all the time are no safer--tourists stand in or weave through the bike lane of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I have witnessed narrowly-avoided collisions more than once. That can't end well for anyone.
An interesting unresolved question about bicycles (and the source of inspiration for this post) comes from the Bedford Avenue bike lane in Williamsburg. Several months ago, I wrote about my pilgrimage up Bedford, and in fact have recently found myself bizarrely drawn to that Williamsburg/Bed-Stuy stretch of streets every couple weeks or so. It's an unparalled experience in a sort of ethnographical perspective, sipping my hipstercoffee and watching as skinny jeans are slowly leached from the landscape in favor of Hasidic hats. The bike lane dispute provides a slice of what is doubtless a much larger animosity between the Hasids and the hipsters. (I am largely uninformed about such things, but neither side looks great to me.) I'd recommend reading New York Magazine's (pretty extensive) article on the matter, if you have ten minutes to kill. In the meantime, I'll be dodging bicycles, laned or no.
However! Put bikes on the streets and much mayhem ensues. I am all for bicycle lanes in theory, but in practice not so much. Bikers put this poor walker in less-deadly but more-frequent danger spots than cars do. Many bikers do not seem to believe in obeying traffic rules. Depending on what suits them, they act like cars or like pedestrians, swapping tactics at light speed. They tear through streets heading the wrong way, and do not necessarily stop for traffic lights. I have nearly been run down several times (and unfortunately, still-feeling-guilty-at-the-memory-of-it, ten years or so ago opened a car door into the path of one unfortunate cyclist). Given these conditions, biking is not particularly safe for pedestrians or for the bikers themselves. One of my friends was in an accident a few months ago where a car just didn't stop for him at a busy intersection; a cyclist was even recently killed in my neighborhood (not on my corner of doom, but not so far away). I hope you will not think that my flippancy in griping about bicycles in any way means that I don't view that as a tragedy. I do, and it makes the whole issue of bike safety more urgent than my usual cantankerous griping would suggest.
I wonder what can be done to make the streets safer. The city's policy of closing off some streets to traffic on a few summer weekends is admirable in theory, but in practice left the crossing to Union Square hazardous to at least your humble narrator. A constant, unbroken stream of cyclists is not more conducive to safety, enjoyment, or anything good than intermittently-stoplighted car traffic. And even places where bicycles proliferate all the time are no safer--tourists stand in or weave through the bike lane of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I have witnessed narrowly-avoided collisions more than once. That can't end well for anyone.
An interesting unresolved question about bicycles (and the source of inspiration for this post) comes from the Bedford Avenue bike lane in Williamsburg. Several months ago, I wrote about my pilgrimage up Bedford, and in fact have recently found myself bizarrely drawn to that Williamsburg/Bed-Stuy stretch of streets every couple weeks or so. It's an unparalled experience in a sort of ethnographical perspective, sipping my hipstercoffee and watching as skinny jeans are slowly leached from the landscape in favor of Hasidic hats. The bike lane dispute provides a slice of what is doubtless a much larger animosity between the Hasids and the hipsters. (I am largely uninformed about such things, but neither side looks great to me.) I'd recommend reading New York Magazine's (pretty extensive) article on the matter, if you have ten minutes to kill. In the meantime, I'll be dodging bicycles, laned or no.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Everything waits to be noticed
I'll take a moment this time to muse on the wonderful incongruous things you can find in this here city.
-C.— and I went to see a whirlwind Hamlet Friday. New York Classical Theatre specializes in putting on plays in unusual locations (this time the World Financial Center) then making the audience move around from scene to scene. There's something surreal yet effective about Shakespearean characters emerging from behind corporate edifices, playing speeches to grand stairwells, having it out with foils in front of an office building. There are so many theatrical spaces in this city if you only know where to look, as NYCT so clearly does. Bonus: We quite liked the unexpected comic relief when businesspeople would find themselves walking awkwardly through the "get thee to a nunnery" scene or other such tense moments. Plus the kid sitting in front of us who stage-whispered, "She's dead!" upon Gertrude's sipping from the cup. I loved how child-friendly the production was: maybe more people would be into theater if it were this fun. Go see it!
And, in less salespersonal, more impressionistic bursts:
-On the side of Prospect Park Saturday, a gaggle of seven cowboys crosses Empire Boulevard to make their way into the park. Spurs, hats, fringed jackets, roan and pinto and dun. Why? They're not telling.
-Brooklyn Botanic Garden, secreted between the larger Prospect Park and a bunch of gas stations and drive-thrus. The Japanese Garden a secret pool with giant carp and a family of turtles sunning itself on a rock. The plants all mysterious names and vivid colors. Walking outside the garden, you can just about glimpse the tips of the cherry trees, but only if you look close.
-Chanticleer, in concert at the Metropolitan Museum. They file out through the audience, all bleachy hair, Dali moustache, beatific smiles, good-natured stagy faces, to stand in front of the Temple of Dendur. As they sing, the sun sets on Central Park and gradually the windows fill with mirror-image audience in a warm containing glow. Makes you wonder why there aren't more concerts here. The comfort of the reflections, the solemn silliness of the performers. The sound curls, refracts, solidifies. Somehow it's not only sound. There are moments you can touch it, see it, taste it. To borrow a line from Maggie Nelson, it is the light of early spring.
-C.— and I went to see a whirlwind Hamlet Friday. New York Classical Theatre specializes in putting on plays in unusual locations (this time the World Financial Center) then making the audience move around from scene to scene. There's something surreal yet effective about Shakespearean characters emerging from behind corporate edifices, playing speeches to grand stairwells, having it out with foils in front of an office building. There are so many theatrical spaces in this city if you only know where to look, as NYCT so clearly does. Bonus: We quite liked the unexpected comic relief when businesspeople would find themselves walking awkwardly through the "get thee to a nunnery" scene or other such tense moments. Plus the kid sitting in front of us who stage-whispered, "She's dead!" upon Gertrude's sipping from the cup. I loved how child-friendly the production was: maybe more people would be into theater if it were this fun. Go see it!
And, in less salespersonal, more impressionistic bursts:
-On the side of Prospect Park Saturday, a gaggle of seven cowboys crosses Empire Boulevard to make their way into the park. Spurs, hats, fringed jackets, roan and pinto and dun. Why? They're not telling.
-Brooklyn Botanic Garden, secreted between the larger Prospect Park and a bunch of gas stations and drive-thrus. The Japanese Garden a secret pool with giant carp and a family of turtles sunning itself on a rock. The plants all mysterious names and vivid colors. Walking outside the garden, you can just about glimpse the tips of the cherry trees, but only if you look close.
-Chanticleer, in concert at the Metropolitan Museum. They file out through the audience, all bleachy hair, Dali moustache, beatific smiles, good-natured stagy faces, to stand in front of the Temple of Dendur. As they sing, the sun sets on Central Park and gradually the windows fill with mirror-image audience in a warm containing glow. Makes you wonder why there aren't more concerts here. The comfort of the reflections, the solemn silliness of the performers. The sound curls, refracts, solidifies. Somehow it's not only sound. There are moments you can touch it, see it, taste it. To borrow a line from Maggie Nelson, it is the light of early spring.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
In tsarist Russia...
Pity me, ladies 'n' gents, since I have sustained a pathetic yet strangely-debilitating injury: a papercut neatly between my thumb and index finger, perfectly calibrated to open painfully if I extend my left hand beyond the pathetic claw shape it currently forms. I will now make a pathetic attempt to peck out this entry.
Oh, did I mention "pathetic" a couple of times in that paragraph just now? Know what else is pathetic? The plight of the characters in Uncle Vanya, isolated out on their country estate with only a grumpy environmentalist alcoholic doctor to visit them. Know what else is pathetic (though, as you will see, not so much as I'd feared)? Going to see a three-hour version of Uncle Vanya in Russian when you do not know any Russian. And seeing it from behind a pillar no less (it was either that or with obstructed English supertitles) (apparently Russian-language plays are quite the in thing for the Brooklyn crowd: tickets were nearly sold out a month in advance).
But let me back up. In the bleak, dark, peasanty days of 2006 (or was it 2005?), intrepid director A.— got it in his head to stage some Chekhov at our venerable institution. I signed on as assistant director, relegating my and M.—'s own darling Arcadia to the (arguably more-suitable) spring. Months and months of living in Vanya's world ensued. As A.— explained, the play isn't about plot, it's about characters inhabiting a space. We as director-y folk, as well as the audience (and of course the actors, for whom I am told this is a transformative experience) are invited to see this world unfold in real time.
And Vanya is a real-life experience indeed. There's humor, relationship drama, ennui...but no easy answers. Even a would-be murderer is not subjected to any form of vengeance; even a pretentious old windbag can earn our empathy.*
I had not devoted much thought to Vanya of late, but about a month ago A.— emailed with a proposition: Would I like to see the Russian version at BAM? Yes, I decided, I would. It'd be intriguing to revisit the piece after such familiarity followed by such a remove. Perhaps we could drift away into a nostalgic fugue state of vodka and guitar songs.
Like the situation Chekhov wrote into being all those years ago, my actual experience of the evening proved both more and less complicated than I'd anticipated. On the one hand, the play (all three-plus hours of it) was, simply, a really enjoyable experience. Through, I suspect, a combination of my familiarity to the piece and the skill with which the production was executed, I immediately got swept into the scene. It's easy to relate to the characters, and this production really played up empathy, in a way I'm not sure we did in ours. There were comic moments everywhere: botched seductions, offers of vodka, and much pontification abounded (man, Dr. Astrov has a lot to say about trees). That tree note, actually, is another way the play invites you to empathize: the doctor, unusually for his time, is quite an environmentalist. He's a bit windbaggy in his descriptions of the dwindling flora and fauna in the land around the estate, but his concerns are spot-on for today. When he talks about the destruction of the natural world, you don't picture some turn-of-the-century woodland; you imagine all the environmental challenges we currently face.
The more complicated and personal aspect of the experience involved remembering our production. It is, above all, a rare privilege to work with a text for so long and then get a chance to see it through someone else's interpretation. As mentioned, I feel that this production played up the empathy card in ways we didn't consider. Conversely, they also dredged up some knotty difficulties we didn't explore—in particular, the character of Sonya, young and stranded on the estate, hopelessly in love with the good doctor, always seemed the most sympathetic to me. In this production, her bossiness and nagging and just general cluelessness are played up in a way that makes her less saintly. She doesn't remain without nuance, though. A.— felt that in our play, Sonya's end-of-show assertion that "we'll rest" was more openly hopeful. Here, she exhibits such despair that it ripped at least this audience member apart.
But something about the show transcends even that despair. I think it may have to do with the characters' interaction with, and love for, their landscape, despite all the trouble it brings them. The scene where Sonya and Elena stand lost in their own worries, on the brink of a connection, Sonya silhouetted by the blue rain of an open window, Elena yellow-lit by the warmth of the room—it conveys all the love, sorrow, and beauty that the characters can't bring themselves to express. And the set design consists, largely, of a trio of haystacks suspended on wooden beams above the action on the stage. The stacks, on their wooden feet, reminded me of these, albeit much more graceful. In mock-English-paper-symbolism mode, I told A.— they represented the crushing weight of the estate looming above the characters. Jokiness aside, this was basically the case. And at the play's end, after Sonya's appeal for rest, the whole haystack structure softly lowered onto the characters, enclosing their desk and chairs with beams and stacks. Claustrophobic in a way, to be sure, but also lovely and somehow comforting, much like the show itself.
*Sorry not to give you more plot points and character descriptions, but if I did, we'd be here all day.
Oh, did I mention "pathetic" a couple of times in that paragraph just now? Know what else is pathetic? The plight of the characters in Uncle Vanya, isolated out on their country estate with only a grumpy environmentalist alcoholic doctor to visit them. Know what else is pathetic (though, as you will see, not so much as I'd feared)? Going to see a three-hour version of Uncle Vanya in Russian when you do not know any Russian. And seeing it from behind a pillar no less (it was either that or with obstructed English supertitles) (apparently Russian-language plays are quite the in thing for the Brooklyn crowd: tickets were nearly sold out a month in advance).
But let me back up. In the bleak, dark, peasanty days of 2006 (or was it 2005?), intrepid director A.— got it in his head to stage some Chekhov at our venerable institution. I signed on as assistant director, relegating my and M.—'s own darling Arcadia to the (arguably more-suitable) spring. Months and months of living in Vanya's world ensued. As A.— explained, the play isn't about plot, it's about characters inhabiting a space. We as director-y folk, as well as the audience (and of course the actors, for whom I am told this is a transformative experience) are invited to see this world unfold in real time.
And Vanya is a real-life experience indeed. There's humor, relationship drama, ennui...but no easy answers. Even a would-be murderer is not subjected to any form of vengeance; even a pretentious old windbag can earn our empathy.*
I had not devoted much thought to Vanya of late, but about a month ago A.— emailed with a proposition: Would I like to see the Russian version at BAM? Yes, I decided, I would. It'd be intriguing to revisit the piece after such familiarity followed by such a remove. Perhaps we could drift away into a nostalgic fugue state of vodka and guitar songs.
Like the situation Chekhov wrote into being all those years ago, my actual experience of the evening proved both more and less complicated than I'd anticipated. On the one hand, the play (all three-plus hours of it) was, simply, a really enjoyable experience. Through, I suspect, a combination of my familiarity to the piece and the skill with which the production was executed, I immediately got swept into the scene. It's easy to relate to the characters, and this production really played up empathy, in a way I'm not sure we did in ours. There were comic moments everywhere: botched seductions, offers of vodka, and much pontification abounded (man, Dr. Astrov has a lot to say about trees). That tree note, actually, is another way the play invites you to empathize: the doctor, unusually for his time, is quite an environmentalist. He's a bit windbaggy in his descriptions of the dwindling flora and fauna in the land around the estate, but his concerns are spot-on for today. When he talks about the destruction of the natural world, you don't picture some turn-of-the-century woodland; you imagine all the environmental challenges we currently face.
The more complicated and personal aspect of the experience involved remembering our production. It is, above all, a rare privilege to work with a text for so long and then get a chance to see it through someone else's interpretation. As mentioned, I feel that this production played up the empathy card in ways we didn't consider. Conversely, they also dredged up some knotty difficulties we didn't explore—in particular, the character of Sonya, young and stranded on the estate, hopelessly in love with the good doctor, always seemed the most sympathetic to me. In this production, her bossiness and nagging and just general cluelessness are played up in a way that makes her less saintly. She doesn't remain without nuance, though. A.— felt that in our play, Sonya's end-of-show assertion that "we'll rest" was more openly hopeful. Here, she exhibits such despair that it ripped at least this audience member apart.
But something about the show transcends even that despair. I think it may have to do with the characters' interaction with, and love for, their landscape, despite all the trouble it brings them. The scene where Sonya and Elena stand lost in their own worries, on the brink of a connection, Sonya silhouetted by the blue rain of an open window, Elena yellow-lit by the warmth of the room—it conveys all the love, sorrow, and beauty that the characters can't bring themselves to express. And the set design consists, largely, of a trio of haystacks suspended on wooden beams above the action on the stage. The stacks, on their wooden feet, reminded me of these, albeit much more graceful. In mock-English-paper-symbolism mode, I told A.— they represented the crushing weight of the estate looming above the characters. Jokiness aside, this was basically the case. And at the play's end, after Sonya's appeal for rest, the whole haystack structure softly lowered onto the characters, enclosing their desk and chairs with beams and stacks. Claustrophobic in a way, to be sure, but also lovely and somehow comforting, much like the show itself.
*Sorry not to give you more plot points and character descriptions, but if I did, we'd be here all day.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
The internet is full of lies (and your poster is full of insomnia)
Scrabble rule changes are not exactly an April Fools joke or a reality, just a not-very-good variation...
(PS: Tried to read Fatsis's book once but it was rather intimidating. I do not anagram 15-letter blocks in my head for fun, so am perhaps not a true word freak.)
On the other hand, the world of words is still going to hell in a handbasket...
(PS: Tried to read Fatsis's book once but it was rather intimidating. I do not anagram 15-letter blocks in my head for fun, so am perhaps not a true word freak.)
On the other hand, the world of words is still going to hell in a handbasket...
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Nouns nouns nouns
Normally would not post twice in one day but since I have been a bit absent of late, I shall now overcompensate because: A travesty is being perpetrated upon Scrabble! Behold (with excellent commentary by grumpy ol' 'ninja).
Back in my day we did not go in for any of this proper-noun nonsense. We made our weird little two letter words for Iranian currency or abbreviated pizza or whatever and we liked it. Man, Scrabble. A longer post on that dear game is forthcoming, to be sure.
Back in my day we did not go in for any of this proper-noun nonsense. We made our weird little two letter words for Iranian currency or abbreviated pizza or whatever and we liked it. Man, Scrabble. A longer post on that dear game is forthcoming, to be sure.
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