Brooklyn Soul

Like my pops said years ago during a family visit up north, "Queens has no flavor" in comparison to Brooklyn, and he was right about that. Brooklyn was an incorporated city apart from the other boroughs for many years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn), and the seventh largest one in this nation. We didn't/don't need a lot of outside influence to hold our own as an area. As a result, its become a haven for many native New Yorkers, for being way off the beaten path of the much more saturated borough of Manhattan during the summertime, teeming with angry, tired, sweaty, and scared European tourists who just want a decent bite to eat, some cold water, a clean restroom, and a nice place to sit in the shade, which midtown does not do well.

What Manhattan does do really well is gouge the living daylights out of each and every tourist who steps foot on the island, just as it is designed to do as a business district and trade center for the world, and we do humbly thank you for your business (http://www.opentable.com/bryant-park-grill?cmpid=poi_page_referral#). Brooklyn was (and I imagine, will always be) my safe haven from the madness of Wall Street and the suburban nut-jobs working there desperate for cash and blow, in that order most of the time (until payday, at least), the crazy expensive and openly gay theater district (both of my parents are just as histrionic as any really expensive theater ticket so, thanks, but I'll pass on your tourist fare), and the out-of-towners who say they want "the real New York experience" but have no idea what that actually means, unless it involves a tour guide and a shopping trip. Uh huh...well, you ain't livin' it then.

Brooklyn was, for me, blessedly free of douchebags during my years there (from 1993-1998 and 2003-2013), and the insane foot traffic of so many people from around the world, each looking to make it and cash out before moving back to the 'burbs. But, to me, Brooklyn was the starting and finishing point that existed outside of the money-grubbing madness of the average Manhattanite seeking to put us down as "B&T" (Bridge-and-Tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel), which, for an island city, is one of the most asshole things you can say to a proud maritime people. Well, yeah, bitch, I do take bridges and tunnels to get the fuck away from insane assholes like you. Kudos! It spoke to the striving bourgeois mentality of Manhattan and their fucked up values, but not of my hometown.

In the Slope, I could grab a bite to eat and sit on a bench in peace by one of the worlds great city parks, unmolested by clusters of Asian tourists with too-big cameras, or the young Hasidic couple lost and looking for a subway to take them out it all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borough_Park,_Brooklyn). Almost every day that I commuted from home to work and back, someone would ask me for help or directions, and I always knew why: I was the safest and sanest person they would meet that day (if not the year or their lifetime), in a too-crowded metropolis designed more for commerce than living. I looked both completely at home and totally on top of all the exit points around me, which I always tried to adhere to, like my group's motto of "Get in, get out, and nobody gets hurt."  

Word. It takes a lot of soul to do that right, and the people around me in so many office environments who were/are freaked out by the size, scale, and scope of my town(s) knew that, too. I played the game for all it was worth, and I didn't lose my soul in the process. That's "Brooklyn Soul" y'all, and it ain't fo' sale, ya dig? Yeah, you do. Sure you do. So, take a listen for yourself, kids. We're not goin' anywhere for quite some time. Get used to it. We did. All soul, baby!

http://sharonjonesandthedapkings.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Jones_%26_The_Dap-Kings

https://daptonerecords.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daptone_Records

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bradley_%28singer%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk

The Praying Mantis

Shit, dude! I open the door to an extremely large Praying Mantis that scuttles towards me and a yellow grocery bag very quickly.

Years ago after college, I set up camp at an aunt's old apartment way out in Kensington, a still unfashionable Brooklyn neighborhood that remains resistant to gentrification and most types of hipsters, barring the toughie who likes to visit authentically scary, rundown Irish bars with actual Cirrhosis-nose victims. You know, those telltale purple and red broken blood vessels of the nose that come to all who spend the bulk of their days sodden and drunk on a bar stool. To give myself a break from the grind, I'd hooked up with a state school friend and her Roosevelt Island crew; a wealthy set of upper middle class kids who still smoked pot and drank mostly unmolested, because their hippie parents smoked with them, either in their upper west side apartments, or in their posh "rustic" cabins in upstate New York. 

That thing is, like, horror-movie huge.

Naturally, they were clustered around "tighty whitey" affluent Woodstock, and I felt uncomfortable in both locales, because unlike these boarding school kids, I was (and am) a product of actual working class roots, which is not so cool when you want to light up with your parents in their impeccably decorated country homes with an Acadian who doesn't play around with that mess. It was horribly awkward and the whole situation eventually blew up like I knew it would, with broken loyalties and intermittent friendships that lasted between high school and college, over divided lovers and who slept with who and when and such, the usual typically boring hippie shit, but in the meantime, summer was warm and fine in these rich kids parents' apartments around the city. 

Damn, dude. What crevice did you crawl out of?!

On one day, me and a bunch of these kids lit up on the terrace during an absolutely gorgeous summer NYC afternoon, enjoying the cool high floor breezes over glasses from a fully flowing batch of Margaritas that stood on the outdoor cafe table in a beautiful glass pitcher. The parents were gone, and harmony ruled the day. Surprisingly for such a high apartment, this kids' parents also had a stunning garden of plants and flowers, which we enjoyed greatly, watching the lazy, fat bees circle above them, surprised that they could make the journey to the 80th floor, or however fucking high we were. It was awesome! 

Great. Now it's scaling the front of the house, to attack from above.

And then, just like that, the vibe changed, when this ginormous fucking preying mantis landed on the edge of a planter, grabbed a bee as quick as a gunshot, ripped its' fucking head off, and then sucked the goo out of its' neck, like we sucked drinks from a straw. What was even weirder, is in that exact space of 60 seconds, each and every one of our group all saw it at the exact same time, as we screamed our heads off, like we just watched a 60s horror flick for the first time, high and drunk and getting more so by the minute. It was glorious, it was summer, we were 20-somethings in the city, and life was good. That was what I thought about later, after the initial shock of seeing a huge preying mantis scuttle at me on the old porch of a big farmhouse in the Hudson Valley on a warm day wore off. It was that good.

For scale: note size of house number in relation to "It".

The First Day of Spring

Springtime in Stuyvesant Square Park.

Stuyvesant Square Park.

Flowers in bloom, Stuyvesant Square Park.

Clusters of buds like barnacles.

Hello! Welcome to the new season. In celebration, I've put up a series of photos I took in 2013, when I lived (for a brief time) in Stuyvesant Town, a neighborhood in lower Manhattan. It was the first time I'd ever lived in the borough that is officially New York, New York, and as a native New Yorker, I had other surprising (and rare) "firsts", too: I discovered parks, foliage, trees, flowers, plants, and people I hadn't encountered before, as the glorious, gorgeous Spring of last year unfolded before my eyes. Here's to the newness, and yet timelessness, that marks the first signs of Spring. Enjoy!

Around Town: Sakura Matsuri

Cherry Blossoms in Stuyvesant Town

Stuyvesant Square Park

Spring's lush bounty is brief and beautiful in New York. I'm savoring the sights and picking small bouquets as often as I can. Enjoy.

Around Town: Post Office at 34th

The ceiling at the post office on 34th Street and 8th Avenue

Around Town: The Haier Building

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Savings_Bank