Two Dishes But To One Table

Vandal is a Dish Best Served Cold

I love the brazen incitement to vandalism: Krink Ink wants you to spread the love and even offers these
serving suggestions.

Grand Avenue Runs Through It

It was the best of times it was the worst of times.   Within 60 minutes I saw the extreme limits of what $1000 dollars will buy you in Brooklyn.

The first place was so crappy that I had to run away from it.  No kidding:  as I bid the superintendent farewell, I broke into a run, trying to symbolically put the place behind me.  Close your eyes and think of bad student off-campus housing:  cardboard walls, green carpets, dank smell, common kitchen down in the basement -- five stops out on the L train  It was one of those tar paper Williamsburg houses but the inside was tar paper too.  The hallway had Bowery-drunk patterned AND TEXTURED wallpaper.  It really sucked.  And dude wanted 950 a month.   

The next place, which I have zero chance of getting, is like a home for the gods.  Every vantage point within the 8th floor had 12 foot high grimy industrial windows looking out onto some fantastic future world.  Fifth Element, Blade Runner, and City of Lost Children all come to mind.   It was a waterfront loft that felt like a glass box for God to sit in while he controls the New York Harbor AND all the bridges.  For some reason they were asking only 950 (plus utilities).  Admittedly the part that was being let was windowless but it was fairly big and totally un-dungeon and REALLY creatively layed out. 

So a tough day all around apt hunting.

Framing the afternoon as mythological punishment:  the creepy apt felt like being chained to a rock, having my entrails repeatedly clawed out while the high  glass loft perched above the harbor bridges felt like Tantalus standing beneath a branch of fruit that continually bends away. 

Is it Networking? Apt Hunting?

Kind of a funny, only in New York way to lure people to your party.  Who knows if there is even a real room to rent...

Speak Hoyt-Schermerhorn

A first:  the conductor of the G Train actually  pronounced all three R's in the name Hoyt-Schermerhorn this morning. 

Trad Community

Being known is easier, the farther you get from Manhattan. 
Kensington Brooklyn, my ‘hood, is full of homes that were handed down from generation to generation, everyone knows everybody.  Yet I have become a ‘local’ in just 7 months.  Witness:
1)    the 24 hour bagel baker, probably Russian, possibly visa-less, knowingly pours my small black coffee before I even get up to the cash register.  BTW, no one in New York drinks their coffee black.  You almost have to give a clerk here written instructions on how to make a cup of black coffee.
2)    I know which house my dry cleaner lives in and what he’s studying at Fordham Univ.
3)    The Chinese carry-out clerk greets me in Chinese
4)    The aging Trinidad patriarch on the block calls me “baby” when I walk by and he shoots me a fake pistol shot from his finger as he strikes his fist to his hip.  He invited me to get high, which I had to tell him I’m not into.   He’s a little out of it sometimes, especially once when I saw him in head to toe white, including a long-hair white fake fur in front of the Silver Rod Pharmacy.  He was smiling blankly, twisting in exactly the motion that an inflatable doll does as it stands in front of a carwash, moved by the wind.   Most of the time he is polishing his Continental Mark V (white of course) or walking around the block.
5)    This morning the clerk made my day at the train.  My card swiped as “insufficient fare”.  The clerk made I eye contact that said “I know you, go on in” and then opened the service gate for me.  I never expect a break from the MTA so this made my whole day shiney.

Siempre Neckface

Searching Flickr for Neckface

Should get at least a few hits, right?
Comes the result:  We found 1,682 photos

Matching neckface."

Beyond Krylon

There seems to be no limit to graffiti creativity. Eyebeam / Graffiti Research Lab Open City show closes next week.  Hurry -  go!
It's in Chelsea (NYC) 540 W 21st Street.
My personal faves from the show:
(1) Rolling ink-jet, used to vandalize entire quarter mile stretches of highway, visible from the air.  The array of Krylon spray paint cans becomes a 24 inch wide programmable printer head.

(2)Tools of a crew that takes metal street signage back to a shop where they weld, melt, and twist it, later re-installing the sign back in the original location.  They disquise themselves in reflective vests and other worker garb.  Visible here: tools used for removing the signage, including an aerosol can for freezing the bolts before shearing them off .

(3) The opposite of defacing:  a Berlin vandal turns samaritan, using a squeegee to clean the windshield of trains as they wait for the light.

From my home, Orange House crew made it into the show.  Detroit represent!

Rush Hour Train

Rolling around: the shadow of a screw, stuck up inside a fluorescent lightshade.
Fighting behind me: a dad yelling REALLY mean stuff at his 8 year old.
Pretending to study the ceiling: (desperately) me, trying to disappear into the AIR song on my MP3 player.
Mutually oblivious: two men, in facing seats, bent to their reading, men who not only share a demographic (25-35 year old, white, NYorker subscribers), and a subway car (4th car on the Brooklyn bound F), but are reading the same damn Jonathan Lethem story.  Should I tap them on the shoulder?  What would I say?  Pointless. 

Avant-garde cultural sites and the landscape of the 1950's

Just in case you are in New York and want to do a walking tour of Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al, here's a  map (click larger) showing the 1950s New York Beat Hangouts  near Tompkins Square, East Village / Alphabet City

a. Hudson's Army-Navy Store h. Ratner's    i. Original Five Spot
b. St. Mark's Church    j. Rapport's
c.  Le Metro    k. Deux Megots, Paradox Ukrainian National d.  Home Bar 1. Stanley's Bar
e.  The Dom    m. Old Stanley's    p.
f.  Stewart's    n. Engage Coffeehouse    q.
g. McSorley's Old Ale House    o. Annex Bar    r.
3. Avant-garde cultural sites and the landscape of the 1950's.

From "Selling the Lower East Side" by Christopher Mele, p.141

Map constructed by Neil Wieloch. Source: Sukenick 1987•

And here are home movies the Beats took of each other in the summer of 1959

Graffiti Near McCarren Park

Man escaping from bricked-up windows at Manhattan Ave & Leonard Street.