The Changing Face of Brooklyn
Oct. 13th, 2006 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat[Hey, I finally figured out how everyone was doing html links. What I haven't figured out is why everyone isn't suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome. Maybe you are? Just on morphine and not copting to it?]
Woke up clinging to my bed and not wanting to face the world, but kept to initial plan - showered, ate, dressed, dried hair, put on make-up and took off on a walk. A long ambling walk where my internal demons wrestled, eventually growing tired and taking in brief glimspes of the world around me.
I'll start with the last glimpse. A moment frozen. Standing on the opposite side of Smith street, just below the overgrown and funky transit garden with its blood red sunflowers and yellowing bushes, waiting for the light to change in order to enter my own tree bordered block, a children's mural behind me on the wall of the elevated subway track, I watch a monarch butterfly frozen in midair in the intersection, just above the roofs of the cars as if it is hanging by an invisible thread. It wavers for less than a second. Long enough for my eyes to see it. Direct in my sightline. Long enough for me to forget my own struggle. I watch it push against the wind that appears from my vantage point to propell it backwards. Away from its destination or towards its doom - the onrushing traffic below. But it succeeds. It pushes past the current and flutters safely to the other side to land momentarily on the edge of the wrought iron fence encompassing the garden that sits surrounded by concrete on all sides.
I stare at it for a few moments, even though the light has changed once again and I can walk to my own home across the boundary. Such a fragile thing really: The Monarch Butterfly . Its wings made of crepe paper and its thin body, not much thicker than a twig. Black and orange viened wings, gossamer wings, move back and forth as if it were breathing or sighing. Watching its struggle reminds me of my own. Fighting a current that wishes to thrust me backwards. The people in my life sitting underneath - an onrush of traffic, anxious to race past in a direction that is neither parallel nor in the same direction of my own, but crosses the path. And like the monarch butterfly, I rest upon the other side, just a moment, before fluttering upwards, in spiraling circles towards an unknown light.
The Changing Face of Brooklyn
When I first visited Brooklyn in 1992, Smith street was weeds and mismatched businesses. A bike shop once sat next to an open lot strung with unpulled wildflowers. Two-inch cracks divided broken tiles of sidewalk, and beer cans dotted the gutters. Patois - a gourmet French restaurant sat alone on the street surrounded by laundramats, insurance companies, and a couple of Italian Delis. The only other businesses there at that time were the Korean bodega next to the auto repair shop and the subway terminal.
Years later, when I moved here in 1998, a few additional businesses had moved in. Amongst them was The Gowanus Yacht Club , with its cheap beer and cheaper dogs, the edible variety. And Court Street, a block to the West, was the bustling place of business, old style Italian restaurants such as Helene's and a discount houseware stores. Pizza parlours dotted the block somehow managing to survive next door to each other. A Brick Oven Pizza Place which was notable for refusing to sell Pizza by the Slice, but had the best sauce in town - contained a statute of a Catholic Saint in it's garden, which the inhabitants carted out for parades. Next door sat my bank and across the street the local pharmacy. Two blocks down, a video store tucked in what amounted to a closet next door to Key Foods - cheaper than most city fare. If you kept going towards my pal Wales' apartment, you'd find a video store that specialized in the hard to find cult classics, the owner most often stoned out his mind and smelling literally of weed. To join you filled out a library card, and gave a deposit. Each video returnable within two days. Further down the block, next to the Catholic Church, Saint Mary Star of The Sea, was an old bar called Sparky's where even dogs were welcome to drink a brew. When I first moved to Brooklyn - I joined a literary book club sponsored by a bookstore, entitled TellTale Books (long gone now and specializing in mystery, science fiction, literary and suspense - it had been driven out by Barnes and Noble that appeared a few years later ten blocks north of it. Small, discrete, tucked away, it was everything B&N was not. One of the owners was a noir/science fiction fantasy writer - who'd started a separate book club for the mystery genre that continued long after the book stores demise, made up mostly of a bunch of old Italian and Irish born and bred Brooklyn Dames), that would meet once a month at the bar. In its smokey interior we'd chat with the authors of Breakfast in Bablyon (Emer Martin about what it was likeslumming squatting in Europe on a student's allowance) and An Ordinary Seaman (Francisco Goldman about deep sea fishing.). The book club survived until it attempted to tackle Don Dellilo's Underworld - which just three of us pushed our ways through. To this day, I remember an odd conversation with a Leftist Irish bar maid and a tall skinny gent with thinning hair regarding the pros and cons of Dashiell Hammet's The Maltese Falcon compared to Delillo's denser works. The month before, we'd attempted John Anderson's Che and had the same results.
This morning, the sky washed free of clouds, crystal clear and the sort of blue you see on a computer screen, that turquoise blue, I wandered or ambled down Court and Smith, zig-zagged my way past the old Key Food Grocery, now replaced by a CVS Pharmacy - the east coast version of Wallgreens, the Brick Oven Pizza Parlour - replaced by a Dunkin Donuts, thinking my neighborhood has not so much become gentrified as surbanified, if that is even a word. A strip mall one might see in Overland Park, Kansas or Peoria. Onwards I go, passing the sparkling blue and white Chase Manhattan Bank which now occupies the building that once housed the old Carroll Court Pharmacy. It's not until I reach Atlantic that things feel more or less the same. Although you can see the ethnic restaurants, bakeries and dives, being replaced by up-scale salones, Ben and Jerry ice cream parlour, and furniture stores. No longer do old Italian men and women wander with their children or young bohemian artists with half faded leather jackets amble past, now it is young couples with baby carriages.
I look at the sky and leaves, which fall in mottled colors, and feel much like the monarch butterfly I see at the end of my three hour journey. The buildings up here look more or less the same. St. Marks Comics sits on Montague Street still. As does Lassen and Hendricks, the gourmet food store. The promendade remains with its trees and cobbled stone walkway. The view of Manhattan no longer as striking as it had been before September 11, 2001. But still more striking than most city skylines, purely because, and I think this leaning over the rail, the buildings look as if they are rising directly from the water. There is no grass, no trees, just buildings, mountains of steel and glass, modern pyramids erupting upwards.
As I pass these views, the Statue of Liberty behind me, the Brooklyn Bridge stretching across the river on my right, walkers paired in couples in front, from youngest to oldest on a sunny, lazy Friday, I try not to think about my own life. The missteps. The regrets. The mistakes. That appear to be angled in front of my eyes. Instead I stare upwards at the sky, the treetops, and think to myself, perhaps I'll just stop. Stop talking. Stop writing. Not completely. Of course. Just hide it. Keep it myself. Cut the world off. Tempting, just as it is tempting to throw myself off the promenade into the traffic below or off the pier into the sea, tempting but hardly practical and I think, with wry humor, I'd end up in an emergency room a bange up pathetic mess. I look across at the boats sails and barges and downwards I amble in a soft shuffling stride to the pier at the bottom, past the Jehova Witness Watchtower apartments made famous in the old 1970's film The Sentinel (not to be confused with the 2006 film starring Michael Douglas with the same title.). Past the ice cream store, past Jacques Torres Chocolats, to the Dumbo Sculpture Park that sits between the bridges, the Williamsburg and the Brooklyn. Green grass with two huge stone feet sculpted out of rock sitting by themselves on a hill, with a weeping willow tree behind them. The Weeping Willow Tree brings back memories of my youth. When I told stories aloud to the wind and the trees and my cat and a bouncing ball. My voice echoing in my ears. Neighbors convinced I was crazy. Until the day arrived that my parents handed me typewriter and insisted I take my tales upstairs to be pounded out upon the keys. A comforting companion in the daylight, its fallen branches fans, large feathers, and swords for games of makebelieve. The same Weeping Willow that tormented me at night with its branches scratching finger-like against the window pane making me think a monster wished entry. Been a while since I've seen one. And I admire it, how it frames the skyline with its drooping branches. And looking at the sculptures I wonder what it is about humans that instead of trees, we plant our own sculptures, instead of flowering rose bushes, we plant plastic green stalks with plastic roses at the top, hammered into the ground. What arrogance, to think we can improve upon nature? Or is it more humility, a desire on the artists part to demonstrate how we can't? A protest of sorts, perhaps even a mockery of the very skyline this tree filled little park exists to look-upon? I wonder this as I stare at wooden skyline, skyscraper images carved from wood, topped with the carved silhouettes of people.
On the way back, I pass business people, tourists, coming to lunch, and am reminded it is a work day. A man, half crazed, half not, mutters epithets that make little sense aloud to the street. Yelling, shrieking it seems, to no one in particular or rather to whomever may pay him attention, if only by accident. And I think, yes, life can always be worse. The breeze brushes past me and I think it was a good idea I passed on those Jacques Torres marshmellow treats - ten bucks that can be spent on a book or groceries. So down Smith I trot and into the RocketShip Comic store, with it's framed underground comic drawings lining wooden walls. Apparently Bruce K. Vaughn, the comic book writer of Runaways and his new graphic novel the Pride of Baghdad is signing books tonight at 8pm. I wander for a bit. Check things out. Flirt with Vaughn's the Last Man, finally buy volume one of Runaways about a bunch of teens who discover their parents are super-villians out to recreate the world, not the superheroes they've fantazied about becoming. The idea intriques me, mainly for its otherness. And the proprietor invites me to come to the signing later that evening. I shrug, uncertain. BSG is on tonight, I think. And an acquaintance is playing at a bar somewheres in town. Of the three BSG is most appealing. Going to strange venues by myself without a friend to lean on feels unappealing at the moment. BSG comforting. Writing even more so.
Within a few more blocks, I'm home. Stopping briefly for groceries and to watch the before mentioned butterfly.
Brooklyn, I think, has changed. Grown. The schoolgirls who used to do chalk-drawings on the sidewalks, pretty in pigtails, now, silent moody and tall teens. Where has the time gone? It feels like water that has fallen between my fingers, leaving a brief stain on the pavement that will soon be erased by the sun.
Woke up clinging to my bed and not wanting to face the world, but kept to initial plan - showered, ate, dressed, dried hair, put on make-up and took off on a walk. A long ambling walk where my internal demons wrestled, eventually growing tired and taking in brief glimspes of the world around me.
I'll start with the last glimpse. A moment frozen. Standing on the opposite side of Smith street, just below the overgrown and funky transit garden with its blood red sunflowers and yellowing bushes, waiting for the light to change in order to enter my own tree bordered block, a children's mural behind me on the wall of the elevated subway track, I watch a monarch butterfly frozen in midair in the intersection, just above the roofs of the cars as if it is hanging by an invisible thread. It wavers for less than a second. Long enough for my eyes to see it. Direct in my sightline. Long enough for me to forget my own struggle. I watch it push against the wind that appears from my vantage point to propell it backwards. Away from its destination or towards its doom - the onrushing traffic below. But it succeeds. It pushes past the current and flutters safely to the other side to land momentarily on the edge of the wrought iron fence encompassing the garden that sits surrounded by concrete on all sides.
I stare at it for a few moments, even though the light has changed once again and I can walk to my own home across the boundary. Such a fragile thing really: The Monarch Butterfly . Its wings made of crepe paper and its thin body, not much thicker than a twig. Black and orange viened wings, gossamer wings, move back and forth as if it were breathing or sighing. Watching its struggle reminds me of my own. Fighting a current that wishes to thrust me backwards. The people in my life sitting underneath - an onrush of traffic, anxious to race past in a direction that is neither parallel nor in the same direction of my own, but crosses the path. And like the monarch butterfly, I rest upon the other side, just a moment, before fluttering upwards, in spiraling circles towards an unknown light.
The Changing Face of Brooklyn
When I first visited Brooklyn in 1992, Smith street was weeds and mismatched businesses. A bike shop once sat next to an open lot strung with unpulled wildflowers. Two-inch cracks divided broken tiles of sidewalk, and beer cans dotted the gutters. Patois - a gourmet French restaurant sat alone on the street surrounded by laundramats, insurance companies, and a couple of Italian Delis. The only other businesses there at that time were the Korean bodega next to the auto repair shop and the subway terminal.
Years later, when I moved here in 1998, a few additional businesses had moved in. Amongst them was The Gowanus Yacht Club , with its cheap beer and cheaper dogs, the edible variety. And Court Street, a block to the West, was the bustling place of business, old style Italian restaurants such as Helene's and a discount houseware stores. Pizza parlours dotted the block somehow managing to survive next door to each other. A Brick Oven Pizza Place which was notable for refusing to sell Pizza by the Slice, but had the best sauce in town - contained a statute of a Catholic Saint in it's garden, which the inhabitants carted out for parades. Next door sat my bank and across the street the local pharmacy. Two blocks down, a video store tucked in what amounted to a closet next door to Key Foods - cheaper than most city fare. If you kept going towards my pal Wales' apartment, you'd find a video store that specialized in the hard to find cult classics, the owner most often stoned out his mind and smelling literally of weed. To join you filled out a library card, and gave a deposit. Each video returnable within two days. Further down the block, next to the Catholic Church, Saint Mary Star of The Sea, was an old bar called Sparky's where even dogs were welcome to drink a brew. When I first moved to Brooklyn - I joined a literary book club sponsored by a bookstore, entitled TellTale Books (long gone now and specializing in mystery, science fiction, literary and suspense - it had been driven out by Barnes and Noble that appeared a few years later ten blocks north of it. Small, discrete, tucked away, it was everything B&N was not. One of the owners was a noir/science fiction fantasy writer - who'd started a separate book club for the mystery genre that continued long after the book stores demise, made up mostly of a bunch of old Italian and Irish born and bred Brooklyn Dames), that would meet once a month at the bar. In its smokey interior we'd chat with the authors of Breakfast in Bablyon (Emer Martin about what it was like
This morning, the sky washed free of clouds, crystal clear and the sort of blue you see on a computer screen, that turquoise blue, I wandered or ambled down Court and Smith, zig-zagged my way past the old Key Food Grocery, now replaced by a CVS Pharmacy - the east coast version of Wallgreens, the Brick Oven Pizza Parlour - replaced by a Dunkin Donuts, thinking my neighborhood has not so much become gentrified as surbanified, if that is even a word. A strip mall one might see in Overland Park, Kansas or Peoria. Onwards I go, passing the sparkling blue and white Chase Manhattan Bank which now occupies the building that once housed the old Carroll Court Pharmacy. It's not until I reach Atlantic that things feel more or less the same. Although you can see the ethnic restaurants, bakeries and dives, being replaced by up-scale salones, Ben and Jerry ice cream parlour, and furniture stores. No longer do old Italian men and women wander with their children or young bohemian artists with half faded leather jackets amble past, now it is young couples with baby carriages.
I look at the sky and leaves, which fall in mottled colors, and feel much like the monarch butterfly I see at the end of my three hour journey. The buildings up here look more or less the same. St. Marks Comics sits on Montague Street still. As does Lassen and Hendricks, the gourmet food store. The promendade remains with its trees and cobbled stone walkway. The view of Manhattan no longer as striking as it had been before September 11, 2001. But still more striking than most city skylines, purely because, and I think this leaning over the rail, the buildings look as if they are rising directly from the water. There is no grass, no trees, just buildings, mountains of steel and glass, modern pyramids erupting upwards.
As I pass these views, the Statue of Liberty behind me, the Brooklyn Bridge stretching across the river on my right, walkers paired in couples in front, from youngest to oldest on a sunny, lazy Friday, I try not to think about my own life. The missteps. The regrets. The mistakes. That appear to be angled in front of my eyes. Instead I stare upwards at the sky, the treetops, and think to myself, perhaps I'll just stop. Stop talking. Stop writing. Not completely. Of course. Just hide it. Keep it myself. Cut the world off. Tempting, just as it is tempting to throw myself off the promenade into the traffic below or off the pier into the sea, tempting but hardly practical and I think, with wry humor, I'd end up in an emergency room a bange up pathetic mess. I look across at the boats sails and barges and downwards I amble in a soft shuffling stride to the pier at the bottom, past the Jehova Witness Watchtower apartments made famous in the old 1970's film The Sentinel (not to be confused with the 2006 film starring Michael Douglas with the same title.). Past the ice cream store, past Jacques Torres Chocolats, to the Dumbo Sculpture Park that sits between the bridges, the Williamsburg and the Brooklyn. Green grass with two huge stone feet sculpted out of rock sitting by themselves on a hill, with a weeping willow tree behind them. The Weeping Willow Tree brings back memories of my youth. When I told stories aloud to the wind and the trees and my cat and a bouncing ball. My voice echoing in my ears. Neighbors convinced I was crazy. Until the day arrived that my parents handed me typewriter and insisted I take my tales upstairs to be pounded out upon the keys. A comforting companion in the daylight, its fallen branches fans, large feathers, and swords for games of makebelieve. The same Weeping Willow that tormented me at night with its branches scratching finger-like against the window pane making me think a monster wished entry. Been a while since I've seen one. And I admire it, how it frames the skyline with its drooping branches. And looking at the sculptures I wonder what it is about humans that instead of trees, we plant our own sculptures, instead of flowering rose bushes, we plant plastic green stalks with plastic roses at the top, hammered into the ground. What arrogance, to think we can improve upon nature? Or is it more humility, a desire on the artists part to demonstrate how we can't? A protest of sorts, perhaps even a mockery of the very skyline this tree filled little park exists to look-upon? I wonder this as I stare at wooden skyline, skyscraper images carved from wood, topped with the carved silhouettes of people.
On the way back, I pass business people, tourists, coming to lunch, and am reminded it is a work day. A man, half crazed, half not, mutters epithets that make little sense aloud to the street. Yelling, shrieking it seems, to no one in particular or rather to whomever may pay him attention, if only by accident. And I think, yes, life can always be worse. The breeze brushes past me and I think it was a good idea I passed on those Jacques Torres marshmellow treats - ten bucks that can be spent on a book or groceries. So down Smith I trot and into the RocketShip Comic store, with it's framed underground comic drawings lining wooden walls. Apparently Bruce K. Vaughn, the comic book writer of Runaways and his new graphic novel the Pride of Baghdad is signing books tonight at 8pm. I wander for a bit. Check things out. Flirt with Vaughn's the Last Man, finally buy volume one of Runaways about a bunch of teens who discover their parents are super-villians out to recreate the world, not the superheroes they've fantazied about becoming. The idea intriques me, mainly for its otherness. And the proprietor invites me to come to the signing later that evening. I shrug, uncertain. BSG is on tonight, I think. And an acquaintance is playing at a bar somewheres in town. Of the three BSG is most appealing. Going to strange venues by myself without a friend to lean on feels unappealing at the moment. BSG comforting. Writing even more so.
Within a few more blocks, I'm home. Stopping briefly for groceries and to watch the before mentioned butterfly.
Brooklyn, I think, has changed. Grown. The schoolgirls who used to do chalk-drawings on the sidewalks, pretty in pigtails, now, silent moody and tall teens. Where has the time gone? It feels like water that has fallen between my fingers, leaving a brief stain on the pavement that will soon be erased by the sun.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-10-15 02:23 am (UTC)Yeah, I'd seen that quote of Whedon's. He's been repeating that quote since the show was cancelled. In fact if you scan the net, you can find similar ones in numerous interviews. I think he thought Firefly was his chance to break out of Buffy/Angel to move onto something new - a whole new universe. And it didn't pan out.
He's still mourning it and trying to find something else to grab the marketplace. I'm not unsysmpathetic, feel much the same way - my brain and the marketplace seem to be unmixy things. Except for one difference, Whedon was raised in it, his father and grandfather are tv scribes - slaves to the medium, his step-brother is a tv writer, and all four of them are hugely successful. David Fury and Jane Espenson and Marti Noxon dream of having the success Whedon accomplished - to run a successful, genre bending, pop cult sensation like Buffy, Firefly and Angel and have your name irretrievably attached to it. Whedon's hugely talented, but also has had it very easy by industry standards and comes across just tad spoiled.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-15 02:53 am (UTC)I can definitely understand your POV, Joss has actually been more successful than either his Father or Grandfather (who were very successful writers, but never had their very own show). And maybe he is spoiled, and/or has a huge ego, but I wouldn't want him to love his work less passionately, because I think that that is what I respond to.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-15 03:58 am (UTC)I think Whedon does love his work passionately. Still. My worry is that he is doing what the rest of us frustrated writers are doing, wasting time flitting about the net looking for reassurrance, when we should be writing. The net is crack for a writer - seriously.
It's not BTVS that I got addicted to in 2002, it was the fanboard reactions to my writing. I can only imagine what this did to people like Joss Whedon. To go online and find a website devoted to your work put up by people you don't know and who adore you based solely on your writing? That's a heady feeling. Particularly for a TV writer or screenwriter. Writers in Hollywood are treated like crap. They are considered the least valuable commodity, disposable. Actors and Actresses - kings and queens. Directors? Gods. But the writer? sigh. They are rarely even recognized. And up until the internet, people didn't even think fans cared that much. An actor can get a writer fired, not the other way around. But the net changed that a bit. Now writers can go online and interact with fans of their shows. Note - it's only the writers who really do this. You rarely see James Marsters, Gellar, Boreanze, Katee Sackoff, etc online - but you do see Whedon, Ron Moore, etc blogging like crazy.
I totally understand why they do it. It's why I'm doing it.
Having someone come out of the woodwork and tell you that you write beautifully, that your writing is amazing - is miraculous. Writers don't get that very often. It's a lonely sport writing. We also don't get to discuss what we've done, what works, what doesn't, or see how someone responded. The internet is like one huge writer's workshop support group...which is free of charge. I fell head over heels in love with it in 2002 and that was based on just a few media essays on a show Whedon wrote. I can only imagine how Whedon feels.