OVERFLOW Fall 2011 by Overflow Publishing, LLC

OVERFLOW ISSUE 11 :: FALL 2011

gowanus . red hook . carroll gardens cobble hill . boerum hill . park slope prospect heights . windsor terrace

FREE

print ain't dead, it just went local. . .

ADVERTISE WITH

OVERFLOW

published quarterly 10,000 copies per issue + online distributed free for all readers throughout South Brooklyn

adsales@overflowmagazine.com www.overflowmagazine.com

OVERFLOW Published quarterly by OVERFLOW Publishing, LLC 397 President Street, 3rd Floor Brooklyn, NY 11231 www.overflowmagazine.com

*** Publishers Samuel Carter Jonathan Melamed Managing Editor Shane Dixon Kavanaugh *** Advertising Inquiries adsales@overflowmagazine.com Editorial Inquiries editorinchief@overflowmagazine.com Comments comments@overflowmagazine.com

OVERFLOW ISSUE 11 :: FALL 2011

10 12 14 16 35 40 44 47

Movie Mike

silver screen ephemera, by Benjamin Samuel

Hakeem Jeffries,

Prospect Heights' rising star, by Lisa Riordan Seville

Rachel Pollak ladder day saints, by John Shorb

Regarding my Recent Mistreatment a comic, by Hunter Nelson

Body English

broken bones and bruised egos, by Dean Haspiel

play time is over

Dollar Float

Red Hook's seaworthy museum, by Kerri MacDonald

Pet Portraits

our neighborhood critters caught on canvas, by Sayaka Nagata

Don't We Like It Here?

a homily, by Reverend Billy

20 24 28 36

Meat Up

Eagle Provisions puts it to the grind, by Ian Chant

Sad Stories (by Funny People) Scotty Landes' roommate struggles

Foam Party

Prospect Park's protectors, by Jonathan Ritzman

Wall-Eyed

Flavor Paper experiments in two dimensions, Patrick Lamson-Hall

cover photo by Eric Vogel and contents photo by Walker Esner

Time for Fall Planting Mural Painting

Floating Gardens

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 Maintain existing gardens & roof garden Location: The Salt Lot (2nd Ave. at 5th Street) SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23 Fall planting at Ennis Playground Location: 11th Street at 2nd Avenue SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19 Maintain existing gardens Location: The Salt Lot (2nd Ave. at 5th Street)

Save the Dates! Annual Membership Meeting

Cookinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11TH from 6:00 to 9:00pm Presentation by the board to the membership Location: Gowanus Studio Space, 166 7th Street. (bwt 2nd/3rd Ave)

Please visit our website, contact our office or e-mail us for updates on locations and activities. www.gowanuscanalconservancy.org I 718.541.4378 I volunteer@gowanuscanalconservancy.org sponsored by:

Seabox, Verizon, Liberty Industrial Gas and Welding Supply, New York Sand and Stone, emphas!s design inc. and Aguayo Realty Group. With support from NY State Senator Daniel Squadron and NYC Councilmember Brad Lander.

CONTRI 4

2 3

8 6

1. Jeff Brown: Please google HELLApicsBRAH and become a follower of the HELLApicsBRAH blog. I would appreciate it. Sincerely, http://hellapicsbrah.blogspot.com. 2. Benjamin Samuel is the Online Editor of Electric Literature. He lives, works, and pursues his MFA in Brooklyn. 3. Sayaka Nagata adores her lamp-shaded cat Robocop so very much...to see more of her work, visit www. sayakanagata.com 4. Hunter Nelson is a writer, illustrator, and performer based in Brooklyn. He wrote the one-man show ‘Who Loves You, Baby?,’ which appeared at the Hollywood and New York Fringe Festivals this year, and is still out there somewhere if you look for it. Comic collection soon. 5. Lisa Riordan Seville is a writer. She lives in Brooklyn. 6. Craig LaCourt lives and works out of Red Hook. He’s the guy on the blue motorcycle that you think is too loud. His wife, Shami, just gave birth on the 4th of July to their daughter, Mihika. www.craiglacourt.com 7. Ian Chant writes about science, technology and culture, and hopes to one day understand any of the above. He lives and works in Brooklyn, ideally in that order. 8. Scotty Landes lives in Brooklyn. He writes comedy for television, and he cannot dunk a basketball. 9. John Shorb is an artist and writer working from his studio in Red Hook. 10. New! | www.SarahWilmer. com | Thank you 11. Patrick Lamson-Hall is a writer and aspiring urban planner from Portland, Oregon. He recently relocated to 8

BUTORS 10

11 12

13 14

17 15

Bed-Stuy and is trying to learn how to bicycle like a Brooklynite. 12. Kerri MacDonald cannot juggle to save her life, though she’d be curious to find herself in such a situation. She’s all about words (both true and fanciful), visual media and frozen dairy. Find her @ kerrimac. 13. Dean Haspiel: Emmy award winning artist, Dean Haspiel, created the Eisner award nominated BILLY DOGMA. A Progenitor of Cool, Dean illustrates for HBO’s “Bored To Death,” and has drawn many great superhero and semi-autobiographical comic books and graphic novels for major publishers, including collaborations with Jonathan Lethem, Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Ames, and Inverna Lockpez. 14. Jonathan Ritzman is writer living in Crown Heights. He survived the earthquake with only a scratch. Please send free iPad offers to jritzman@gmail.com. 15. Marlene Rounds: Hello Brooklyn! I take photos for Overflow because I take pride in my community. It’s engaging to appreciate independent business and culture. 16. Alexander M. Harrington: www.ikjkljlkjlkh. com 17. If you only work with one photographer this year, make sure that photographer is Eric Vogel. Impeccable personal hygiene and one hell of a jazzy cat. www.ericvogelphoto.com 18. robert dupree likes to dance for his cat Tuna. Check his work out at www. robertdupreephoto.com 19. Walker Esner is a Brooklyn based portrait photographer. Ask him to take your picture: www.walkeresner.com 9

Movie Mike

by Benjamin Samuel. photo by Sarah Wilmer.

e were sitting over plates of ropa vieja when Mike Olshan, a mutton-chopped and fedora’ed man somewhere in his 60s, asked me back to his Park Slope apartment to watch women born in the 1920s take their clothes off. I accepted his invitation, because clearly what Olshan offered was a glimpse of something rare. Olshan, or “Movie Mike,” as he’s known from Singapore to the Lower East Side, has been dumpster diving for 16 mm film since the 1970s. His collection clutters his rent controlled apartment which is decorated by the accoutrements of a lifetime of bachelorhood: vintage Joe Camel ads, clumps of cat hair, photographs of urban decay, action figures arranged in sexual acts, and the poorly fitted suits and gorilla costume he wears as part of his stage persona. Something of a living shrine of nostalgia, a mixture of pseudo-intellectualism and sincere, impassioned camp in the vein of Dr. Demento, Movie Mike is a man in search of an audience. His film archive is comprised of reels upon reels of films and footage that he considers to be original documents, evidence and artifacts from a previous time. Salvaged from the sidewalk outside Baruch College, mined from bargain bins, or passed to him by friends with wives who won’t appreciate vintage stag films, the collection represents a repository of obscurity. The film canisters are loosely organized and categorized by theme: anti-drug PSAs powered by stars like Susan Sarandon and Paul Newman; paranoid pieces of anti-communist propaganda, and; reels of racism (hand-drawn cartoons of whimsical minstrel shows and Bing Crosby jubilantly singing in black face). For years, Oshlan’s screened his films at revival theaters, comic book conventions, and, most recently, at community gardens in South Brooklyn—the closest you can get to a drive-in movie within city limits. Movie Mike, Olshan’s performance persona, emerged from the darkness of the Collective: Unconscious theater on Manhattan’s Ludlow Street. From the projector room he would introduce his films and provide a voice-over as filler while he changed the reels. “I started to do a little business, you know,” Olshan told me, deepening his tone and posture. “I dropped my voice down, slowed it down, pulling the Brooklynese out of it.” It was from this voice—“the voice of the night,” as Olshan calls it— that Movie Mike was born. Though he wears it well, Olshan said the nickname itself was bestowed upon him by his fans, and at that the age of 56 he began consciously cultivating the character out of a certain necessity. “What emerged was a performance persona I didn’t know I had in me,” Olshan said. “Now, at this point, I’m an act

because the film medium itself has become an item of nostalgia.” At his apartment, Oshlan pulled up a chair for me near the foot of his bed, where a movie screen hangs from the ceiling. After he shuffled through film canisters, a projector jury-rigged atop a shelf began rattling away and the ghosts of scantily clad women began dancing and undressing to a score of haunting, but buoyant, orchestral music. “See, now this act was called a striptease,” Olshan said, making sure I was following along. “Wouldn’t make much sense today in our culture.” He explained that the films came from the 1940s, a time when you were lucky enough to see even your wife naked. Back then, strip clubs were illegal in New York and the phrase “You like your eggs on the Jersey side” meant you were having breakfast across the East River after spending the night at nude revues. Originally, you’d find these films in frat houses or in the back room of a garage. Now they’ve found refuge and salvation in Olshan’s apartment. The strip teases and the rest of his collection are centered on a concept of “ideological kitsch,” artifacts of a period’s psychology and culture. “Of course it’s also smut,” he said. Olshan said his films present opportunities to experience cultural history. As an example, Olshan pointed to China Seas, a Clark Gable film from 1936, a time, according to Olshan, when there was a universal expectation of virginity. In the film, Gable’s character has slept with too many easy women while overseas and his shame prevents him from returning home. It’s a cultural and moral conflict that Olshan said is lost on today’s audience. “Is there anybody out there who remembers virginity?” Olshan asked me. “I caught the tail end of virginity. It was no fun.” His smut films, on the other hand, are fairly straightforward. “It’s lovely charming stuff,” Olshan said, while a woman fan-danced on the screen. “The whole deal is you get to see this pretty lady’s body.” But as the dancer’s costume fluttered down to the stage, her skin remained clothed in sheer fabric. Olshan told me that pornography used to be as much about nudity as it was about mystery. However, Olshan proudly claims to be witness and participant to the “vulgarization” of our culture. While he wasn’t a major player of the city’s counterculture scene of the sixties and seventies, Olshan admits he was a part of it. “You see this footage?” Olshan said, holding up a film canister. “Central Park, Easter Sunday 1967: the first big hippie festival. I was there with 500 feet of 16 mm film and a turret camera, and I shot my brains out.”

After dodging the draft by claiming to be a man of God and speaking in tongues, Olshan became advisor to hopeful Vietnam draft dodgers. He also captioned naked photos for Screw magazine with “salacious, happy babble and reams of filler.” Commenting on the death of his friend Vaughn Bodé, a legendary cartoonist who was found wearing drag after a mishap with autoerotic asphyxiation, Olshan said, “That’s the second weirdest death of which I’ve heard tell.” The first involved a friend whom Olshan described as a “psychedelic promoter or theo-chemist.” Olshan said “he fell in with a bunch of LSD Hassidim, guys in black coats and hats who were running back and forth between Williamsburg and Montreal with pockets filled with sugar cubes dosed with acid.” That tale ends with a quest to “synthesize an organic molecule that was the analog of the numeric value of the mystic name of God.” Olshan said his friend developed the mystical molecule and “pumped it into his arm seeking perfect knowledge, and it made him perfectly dead.” For Olshan, truth and knowledge have been captured and preserved in the films he collects. Olshan explained that film is made of “clusters of silver halide grains that exist on a molecular level.” To Olshan, these molecules contain the “thoughts and ideas that time forgot.” During a course I once took on U.S. Pop Culture, the professor told me that a man who can quote Shakespeare line and verse is “cultured,” but a man who can do the same for The Simpsons is an idiot. Where does Olshan fit into that paradox? He’s able to look at a man parading in an ape suit as both a cheap gag and as an objective artifact of culture. He speaks about his collection with a practiced eloquence, and wants to develop a college level course on cultural history as seen through film, hoping, he said, to “make known to new generations these wonderfully told stories that are well worth keeping and well worth sharing.” A few weeks after our private stag film matinee, I joined Olshan at a garden on Brooklyn’s President Street, where he was screening the 1940 film Dr. Cyclops. There, it became clear that Olshan’s stage persona resides close to the surface. His voice slipped in and out of character as he toured the grounds of his speak-easy theater, schmoozing with his audience over lemonade in paper cups, wearing a fedora and a black and white suit, looking like a big shot gangster. When the film ended, the heroes of course prevailing, the garden bloomed into applause and the crowd promptly began to make its exit. Olshan’s audience nearly slipped away until the voice of Movie Mike, the voice of the night, straining to be heard over the traffic, called them back for a second feature. 11

Hakeem Jeffries

by Lisa Riordan Seville. photo by Robert Dupree.

n a late afternoon in early August, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries stood in the rain. It was not the ideal day for Summer at the Subway, the evening office hours he holds at stations throughout his 57th Assembly District, which includes Prospect Heights, Fort Green, and Clinton Hill. The weather had dampened enthusiasm for chats outside the Classon Avenue G stop. But Jeffries was there, as promised. “Rain or shine,” he said. Closing his enormous black umbrella, he evaluated the day. Not a great turnout. Then, as much to himself as the staff around him, he said, “But if you say you are going to be somewhere, you have to show up.” Jeffries first showed up on New York political scene more than a decade ago, an ambitious 29-year-old willing to do something he said the Democratic machine had forgotten how to: listen to the people. Since elected to office in 2006, Jeffries has pushed legislation on everything from criminal justice to gentrification—no renaming Crown Heights “ProCro” on Jeffries’ watch. His commitment to constituent services embodies his political shrewdness. Jeffries makes sure those who need to know him do. That includes political heavyweights, businesspeople, and advocates throughout the city and state. Mayor Michael Bloomberg knows him. The two have locked horns several times. Soon, Washington may get to know him too. This spring, Jeffries, who turned 41 in August, opened an exploratory committee for Congress. He is considering challenging 28-year incumbent Representative Edolphus Towns for his Central Brooklyn seat. Some think Jeffries has a chance. “You’re going to see people like Ed Towns and Charlie Rangel move on,” said Bob Liff, a political analyst and senior vice president of M&R Strategic Services. “There are a lot of people preparing for the next generation. And I think Hakeem Jeffries is a part of that,” Liff said. “In many ways, he’s the future of politics in this town.” Plaques, awards, and honors line one wall of his office at 55 Hanson Place. Opposite them hangs a drawing of Martin Luther King, Jr. Between the two, Jeffries sat at a wide black desk. More handsome in person than in photographs, where he often looks awkward, he wore a dark blue pinstripe suit and cuff links. His shoes were buffed to a high shine. Jeffries considers his words as carefully as his wardrobe. He speaks slowly, pausing mid-thought as

if to double-check his next phrase. He trains his light brown eyes on his listener, punctuating each point with a thrust of a hand. “He has an ability to walk into any room and make folks feel comfortable,” said Scott Levenson, president of The Advance Group, a political consulting firm that has worked with Jeffries for years. “There’s nothing alienating about him, nothing off-putting about him. He’s deliberate but without making one feel like he’s being guarded.” The measured delivery often belies a message far more forceful. As I sit in his office, I try to reconcile this even tone with the YouTube video of him at a rally of Verizon union workers a few days before, when Jeffries told the crowd of Communications Workers of America, “If they don’t treat you fairly, we’re going to shut Verizon down and bring them to their knees!” I ask him where the uncharacteristically fiery rhetoric came from. He leans back in his chair, and says this: “It is important for working and middle class New Yorkers to know that many of us in the legislature are prepared to stand up for them.” He pauses. “New York cannot remain a first class town unless we can provide for an affordable quality of life for the middle class.” In the time I spent with Jeffries, I wondered, more than once, if I had come upon a 21st century phenomenon: a revolutionary in a pinstripe suit. During his five years in office, Jeffries has sponsored nearly 90 bills, and co-sponsored over 140 more, including laws to extend rent control, help prisoners transition back into communities, and incentivize developers to build more affordable housing. His proudest moment as a legislator was the passage of a law in 2010 to prevent the NYPD from keeping a database on people—mostly young men of color— that officers stop-and-frisk on the street. At home, he has gone up against City Hall several times, most recently when he filed a lawsuit contesting the approval of Cathie Black as schools’ chancellor. “This guy really passes some heavy duty, controversial and conscientious things,” said one insider. “It’s not just bills about street names.” But Jeffries is not above getting down and dirty about nomenclature. Last session, he sponsored the “Neighborhood Integrity Act,” which would require community approval before longtime New York neighborhoods like “Hell’s Kitchen” suddenly went on the market as the innocuous “Clinton.” This came after people started calling Crown Heights ”ProCro,” hoping the next Dumbo/NoLIta/

TriBeCa might grow in Central Brooklyn. Trying to legislate against what may be the city’s second oldest profession—real estate graft—seems both potentially fruitless and a little absurd. But Jeffries did it, like he does many things, with a straight face. The practice “hurts working families and senior citizens on fixed incomes,” he has said, and misleads those shopping for a house. It also hits the assemblyman close to home. Jeffries was born into a middle class family in Crown Heights, the eldest of two sons. His parents were social workers and members of their union. After earning his masters in public policy from Georgetown, Jeffries enrolled at New York University School of Law. After several years as a corporate attorney at a white-shoe law firm in Manhattan, he decided to try politics. His biography befitted the district he hoped to represent. Gentrification of the 57th brought affluent, liberal, highly-educated newcomers into the working class black community. While tensions can simmer between old timers and newcomers on the street, in the ballot box, they often vote together— Obama swept the district in the 2007 primary. Even before Obama came along, this seemed the right audience for Jeffries, whom the New York Observer recently dubbed the “Barack of Brooklyn.” Along with gentrification, affordable housing and criminal justice, redistricting became one of his key issues. New York politicians have historically drawn districts to ensure it is virtually impossible to oust incumbents. But Jeffries, who has made a name for himself by repeatedly going up against politicians very comfortable in their legislative seats, wants to see that process change. “As long as we have an incumbent protection plan in New York State, we will not get democracy, and our government will continue to be dysfunctional,” he told me. Jeffries has the broad respect of everyone from the business community to the civil rights world. But some longtime players have brushed him off. Asked at a recent rally about Jeffries possible run for Congress, Harlem’s Charlie Rangel, the Dean of New York’s Congressional delegation, said he “had never heard of him,” the Daily News reported. “I can barely keep up with Manhattan.” It seems the Democratic machine wants to dismiss Jeffries. If he chooses not to show up in the race for Congress this cycle, perhaps it can. But Jeffries has already proven that when he sets his sights on something, he’s hard to ignore. “Hakeem Jeffries will be a congressman one day, there’s no doubt in my mind,” said Levenson. “It’s really a question not if, but when.” 13

Rachel Pollak by John Shorb. photo by Craig LaCourt.

rtist Rachel Pollak is a joiner. At different points in her life, she’s found herself breaking bread within Unitarian, Baha’i, Mormon, Episcopal, and Jewish communities. These interests led her to Yale Divinity School to study religion and art history and then to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received an MFA. She now works in her Gowanus studio on artwork that deals directly with her evolving views on individuality and community. Her sculpture, And There Was Evening, And There Was Morning, debuted at the Annual Gowanus Artist Studio Tour (AGAST) last year, and she recently showed the work at the Abrons Art Center in the Lower East Side. Pollak is participating in AGAST again this year, opening her studio for visitors to view her new works in progress. OVERFLOW recently talked with her about her love of Brooklyn and how her life here has shaped her work.

Yes, it’s a feeling I try to invoke in my work— something like what I imagine the groundspeople feel in big stadiums cutting the grass the night before a big game, or the way a mom feels setting out Elmo-themed paper plates for her child’s birthday party. It’s the moment when you are completely a part of something, but also outside of it because it hasn't been fully realized yet, since you are, at that moment, helping to create it. You are aware of your individuality, but also are making yourself into a part of something bigger. You need the thing that you are creating together with other people. But you know that you don’t have control over it, not the whole of it anyway—just your part or maybe not even that. The ladders are about that for me—we all have our own paths, but they run parallel to one another and are connected in an essential, load-bearing way.

I’ve often found myself involved with different social and religious groups. I’ve always been social—my mom likes to tell people how, as soon as I could walk and talk, I would need to go around and introduce myself to every person in a restaurant before we could sit down and eat. The ladders all came from different locations— one was the ladder leading to the attic in an old Lutheran church in the East Village, another was in a house in South Slope, another was sitting in a tool shed on a farm in Pennsylvania before a friend brought it back to the city for me. My most basic impulse, as a person and as an artist, is to take things that are separate and join them together.

Probably because of my varied backround, and experiences moving around a lot. I feel comfortable with a lot of different kinds of people. Since I didn’t have an obvious homebase, I think I’ve always been seeking a sense of belonging. I like feeling that I’m part of something, but I often find myself a part of multiple communities that don’t naturally overlap. So I’m trying to reconcile all of that, to connect us all. In my heart, I have this seven-year-old’s dream that we can live under the same roof and be at home with each other. But this is a big world. There’s a lot of conflict, and people see things in all kinds of different ways. There’s a feeling of expectation in the ladder piece as if we’re going to all try to climb it at the same time.

You use everyday objects in your sculpture like pew benches, padlocks, and the ladders. What draws you to these types of materials? I’m interested in the tension between what people are given, and what they choose to do with what they have been given. There’s a struggle when you engage with physical materials—you’re imposing your will on the materials and they can push back with their own limitations and particularities. I see a parallel here in how we build communities and relationships, in how people come together, and negotiate one another’s various angles and qualities, whether they are hard or soft, brittle or pliable. Using everyday materials is a way to make that connection explicit.

You’ve spent time inside various religious communities, growing up partly in Salt Lake City and then attending Divinity School. How do you see that coming through in your ladder piece And There Was Evening, And There Was Morning?

Why do you think that is?

local business man. He owns a couple of apartment buildings and has lived in South Slope since he moved here from Peurto Rico in the 50s. I met him at New York Old Iron, the flea market under the F-train where it’s elevated near the Lowe’s, and he helped me find about half of the ladders that ended up in the sculpture. He took an interest in the project, and would call me whenever he saw a wooden ladder, even driving me over to a dumpster in Clinton Hill one night where he’d seen one (the biggest one, it was 15 feet tall!) sticking out. We pulled the ladder out, put it in his truck, and drove it back to the studio. And while we drove he told me stories about his life. So now there’s a new group, made up of all the people who helped make the sculpture, and all the people who’ve seen it.

Where are you now in terms of joining groups?

Now you’re here in Brooklyn. How has living and working here informed your work? New York is full of transients like me. People move here for jobs, relationships, school. And being here often means being far away from one’s family. Even folks who grew up here have parents or grandparents who immigrated here from somewhere else. And a lot of us have ended up in Brooklyn. In my work, I’m interested in how people find continuity and connection in a world with so much fluidity and change, how they decide who they will let in to their real and imagined communities. The ladder piece is a good example. Wooden ladders are harder to find than you’d think, and it took me about a year to find them all. While I was collecting them, I made connections with people I wouldn’t otherwise have neccesarily met. Frank Gonzales is a

These days, I work part time at a dinner church that a friend and I started in Brooklyn, and that is a group that I’ve helped shape and which has shaped me. I have also gotten to know some of the other artists working in Gowanus, and that’s another group in which I am invested. Making art has taught me that work is a process, not a finished product, and I think that insight has resonated with my work at the church. The natural inclination for everything in this world is to disintigrate—the second law of thermodynamics applies across the board. Wood rots, people drift apart (and also eventually rot). Making things, the act of creation, is hard and messy. It’s an uphill battle whether you are making a sculpture out of wood or a church out of people. But the messiness makes room for the cracks in things, where the light shines in—the mistakes that turn out to be the best part of something, the difficulties that force people to rely on one another and draw them closer to each other. We’re alone in our heads, but we need each other to survive, and that is the essential paradox that preoccupies me and motivates my work.

J 8530 3rd Avenue 718-238-8020 www.goldcoastdeli.com

11AM-midnight 7 days a week Weekend Brunch

Why not spend

tonight in Bay Ridge

Show this ad, and receive %20 of your tableâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tab at either restaurant. Sorry, but this offer cannot be combined with any other promotion.

A short

ride down

on the R-train 8801 3rd Avenue 718-492-5095 www.cebubrooklyn.com 11AM-3AM 7 days a week Full Kitchen all night

Meat Up

by Ian Chant. photos by Marlene Rounds.

he produce selection at South Slope’s Eagle Provisions is not worth mentioning—so I won’t. The Polish-American-owned dry goods and bottle store has stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 18th Street since 1935 and is more of a meat and potatoes sort of a place. Except that the potatoes have been eliminated to make room for more meat. There is, for the record, nothing at all wrong with this. And if you think different, you’re a communist. Picture the deli, situated behind aisles of organic quinoa, jars of pickled pigs feet, and an obscure selection of European bon-bons. It is the beating heart of Eagle Provisions. While the store hosts a better than normal selection of Boars Head products, safely ignore all of it. That’s not what you’re here for. You’re here for sausage. Kielbasy. Made and smoked on-site, piled in great porky pyramids atop the delicounter, the thick ropes of meat look like they’d be right at home in the greasy window of some Eastern European butcher’s shop. And they almost are. In some ways, the store is a holdout from a time when South Slope was a very different place. Started when the area was a haven for Polish and Eastern European immigrants, Eagle Provisions has turned into one of the most successful brands of holdout— one that evolves with its neighborhood, but stays true to its roots. Brothers John and Richard Zawisny have owned the store since 1979, when they bought it alongside their father, a long time sausage maker at Eagle. And though their selection of groceries has expanded drastically in that span, sausage remains Eagle Provision’s bread and butter. Well, sausage and something to wash it down with.

The kielbasy here comes in several different styles. They vary in thickness and spicing. There are thick ropes of smoked kielbasy; shorter, mellower mysliwskia, and; the kalbabosy, a dry “hunter’s sausage” version of the kielbasa, which is perfect for today’s on-the-go pork aficionado. They will all remind you once again why pig is truly the finest of all possible meats. This is kielbasa that tastes good enough to make being a vegetarian an objectively, measurably incorrect life decision. If you are a vegetarian, I’m prepared to say you have made a

wrong call from which your life may never recover. You have my pity. The most popular is a traditional Polish kielbasy. A pound of it will run you $3.99 fresh, $6.99 smoked, or $5.99 for the savory double-smoked variety. And for $12.99, you can lay your hands on a pound of an all-organic cherry-wood smoked kielbasa. It’s ground, packed, and smoked in a fire-engine red, German-engineered sausage maker that is as old as the store itself. It’s a traditional blend. Ninety percent pork, ten percent beef. It’s spiced, salted, and cured for two weeks before being stuffed into natural intestine casings. The Zawisny brothers used to get the casings from a variety of nearby butchers. These days they have to be ordered from half a world away. “Even a Polish kielbasa made in Brooklyn uses ingredients from China,” Richard Zawisny points out. No doubt Thomas Friedman is smiling somewhere. The casing isn’t the only thing traditional about these spicy, smoky, savory sausages that will make anything from Hillshire Farms taste like ash in your mouth. These kielbasy are greasy delicacies that spit and sizzle on the pan or grill, filling the air with a lingering scent that clouds all other senses. The brothers work with the same recipe the store has been using for 75 years—the same recipe their father, Szczepan, used for the 18 years that he worked at the store before buying it with his sons in 1979. The sausages are smoked in the back over hickory sawdust. “We don’t use any liquid smoke. And we don’t use any color enhancers,” Richard Zawisny says, no small note of pride in his voice. “You can play all sorts of games with a sausage, make it faster and turn it bright red if you want to. We don’t do that.” Not with any of the 500 pounds of kielbasa the store makes every week. And that doesn’t even take into account the kiszka, or blood pudding sausages, ($4.69/lb) and bacon ($7.99/lb) that Richard Zawisny cures and hickory smokes on site. Nor the smoked hams that fly out the door by the ham hock around the Christmas and Easter holidays. The price depends on the size of the ham you’re looking for, but Richard Zawisny ballparks these centerpieces of holiday feasts at

about $50. On the other end of the price spectrum are the the homemade frankfurters ($4.49/lb) and the house-made headcheese ($4.59/lb). The store also offers all the trimmings to go with the ground delicacy, from sauerkraut and a prodigous selection of mustards to homemade horseradish, with or without beets that lend the condiment a sweetness along with a magenta hue. Richard’s sausage recommendation is a Polish classic—the smoked kielbasy grilled, and served with a dark bread like pumpernickel, alongside liberal helpings of hot mustard and horseradish. Trust him on this one. But by all means, feel free to experiment, too. Deli worker Daja Zapasnky immigrated here from Poland 20 years ago, and has worked the deli counter at Eagle Provisions for ten of those. She knows there’s more than one way to cook a kielbasa. “You can grill it with onions. Or cook it with an egg,” she says. “You can serve it with hot mustard and horse radish. Or you can just cut slices off the sausage and eat it cold.” Hell, why stop there? “You can do whatever you want with it,” she adds. Personally, we can recommend quick grilling the savory double-smoked sausage with a hearty healping of sauerkraut and minced garlic, served with a side of applesauce to balance the savory and sweet. Or dicing the standard sausage before frying it up with a couple scrambled eggs, a handful of grated swiss, and a splash of cheap domestic beer for a primo omelette that can take on even the toughest of hangovers. And while bread makes a great starch to back up these grilled sausages, we can’t recommend a heaping helping of mashed potatoes enough. But as Woody Allen pointed out, man does not live by food alone. Often, there must also be a beverage. The Zawisny brothers have you covered there as well—as long as you’re looking for a little hops and barely in it. I mean, you could grab a juice or one of several microbrew sodas from brands like Fever Tree and Fentiman’s, purveyor of shandies and colas whose recipes are more at home in the 19th century, or at a steampunk covention. But seeing as you’re 21

already in the arms of one of the most impressive beer selections in Brooklyn, why would you do a thing like that? Eagle Provisions’ beer department started from scratch just over a decade ago with a small selection of American brews. But it has expanded at the whim of customers. As people kept requesting more and more exotic beers, the brothers obliged, bringing in beers from all corners of the earth, from Maine’s Allagash and San Francisco’s Speakeasy to German selections like Ayinger Celebrator and the excellent, little seen Red Rice Ale from Japan’s Hitachino Brewery. and everywhere in between. Since then, the selection has expanded inexorably, taking over a significant corner of the store. “Anything that gets distributed in New York, we will carry. We’ll find a place for it,” says John Zawisny. It’s a mark of success for a move that started out as a gamble. “When we started stocking more and more of these bottles, we had to ask ourselves ‘Are people really going to buy a $10 bottle of beer?’,” John recalls. “Now we have bottles that go for $50, and they sell.” John is referring to the Scaldis Prestige. A 750 ml bottle of the 2010 vintage will set you back $53.29, netting you not only the bottle but the attached pamphlet, which functions as both a seal of pedigree and instruction manual for the oak barrel aged top shelf ale. Organized by region and style, you can lay your mitts on beers from around the United States and the world, as well as more exotic tipples like sake, cider and mead and gluten-free beers including Green’s. Expensive, hard to find bottles and six packs are the order of the day. Can-oussiers can find favorites like Dale’s and 21st Amendment on hand, but less ballyhooed classics like Hite and Schlitz are also well represented. But the crown jewel is the selection of strong Belgian ales. From old standbys like Chimay and Delirium Tremens to harder to find bottles like Piraat, Fantome and Gulden Draak, the Belgian section is well appointed, thorough, and full of beers that live up to pricetags that hover in the $12 to $20 range. From fruity framboises to potent trappist ales, Eagle’s beer aisles will provide hours of browsable brew porn for beer snobs and mere alcoholics. For some patrons, it’s turned into a local tourist attraction of sorts. “Whenever I have people in from out of town, I bring them here to look at the beer selection,” says Joan Wargo, who had just finished demonstrating what a great deal of excellent beer in one place looks like to a guest. John Zawisny’s personal favorite is Dulle Teve, a Belgian bottle that retails for about $10 and packs a punch at 10% ABV. The potent potable, which only recently returned to shelves following a fire at the brewery, comes with Zawisny’s highest recommendation, and a word of warning more common on pharmaceuticals—take with food. Asked for a particular pairing, Zawisny is ambivalent. “Eat what you want. Something spicy is probably better,” he laughs. “I just wouldn’t have it ahead of a meal.” Maybe something with a sausage? Just thinking out loud. 22

Sad Stories

n 2007, I lost all of my savings to a beautiful, full-figured English woman who lived in Nigeria, was a man, and went by the name Monica James. I was one of the thousands of suckers who fall for an Internet scam that was too good to be true, and within six days lost the $2,000 I had saved before being laid off. But just as the mighty Phoenix rose from the ashes, I had to accept that I’d been stupid and burned and now I had to figure out a way to make ends meet. The first order of business was accepting that I’d have to bite the bullet and find a roommate. So, like any normal Brooklyn resident, I posted a listing on Craigslist. Then I went to nap in my shower for 45 minutes. The first person to respond to my post was an intern at the New York Film Academy. He said that one of the acting students was looking for housing and

that the kid could afford $1000 a month. Beautiful. I met with the student, who I’ll now be referring to as “Framp”—the first fake name I could think of. After a brief introduction, we shook hands, and he moved in the next day. (I should probably mention now, before going any further, that the total rent for the two-bedroom apartment was $1440.63. I was charging Framp $1000 a month and my plan was to cover my share of the rent and bills with the unemployment benefits I was set to receive. Welcome to Brooklyn, Framp!) The first month of our co-habitation was fairly normal. I stayed home and wrote a screenplay about a giant snake and collected checks from the government, while Framp finished his summer acting program. Framp seemed like a typical 22-year-old from a small town in Georgia who had

moved to the city with hopes that his looks and talents would make him the star of the next Mind of Mencia. He scotch taped Maxim magazine bikini models to the wall, walked around shirtless when he was home, and broke out into his impersonations of Robin Williams and Family Guy characters whenever I was enjoying a meal. Annoying but acceptable behavior for most dudes—especially a kid who was unknowingly paying two thirds of the rent. Everything was just peachy until his acting program ended, and he started leaving the first of many massive shits in the toilet. More on that later. By the time month three of our domestic partnership arrived, I had begun to meet the real Framp. Framp liked to lie about things that aren’t worth lying about: his “scholarship” to his acting program, his virtuosic skills on the piano, and how a girl had told

(by funny people)

story by Scotty Landes photos by Jeff Brown.

him he had abs like Ryan Reynolds (Yeah, right. No one has abs like Ryan Reynolds. No one.) The kid was also so obsessed with getting into Juilliard he would pay Internet psychics, a profession I didn’t realize existed, $200 a session to tell him whether they had a good feeling about his admission. (And guess what they said: We have a great feeling! But check back tomorrow just in case!) He also began to compulsively check his Myspace page. I know about these obsessions because Framp was “borrowing” my computer until his “grandparents sent him money for one.” So every night for a week or so Framp would come barging into my room at 3AM, after mysteriously disappearing at 11PM, to use my computer. I should also mention that this point is when I started to hate Framp in a way I’ve never hated anyone before, and this was before the real cracks started to form.

By the time Framp’s big, life-changing audition for Juilliard arrived—the thing that would launch him into the Hollywood stratosphere so that Framp could show the world that he had Frank Caliendo’s skill set, Pete Wentz’ bangs, Elton John’s gift of melody, and Tony Danza’s perfect ass (I made that last one up)—Framp had made a lasting impression on me. That impression: He forgets to flush. Turds #1 and #2 were warning shots that I decided weren’t big enough deals to mention. Turd #3 caught me off guard so I sent him a text to “Try and flush more.” He responded with the infuriatingly false, “I did.” Turd #5 was a real doozy so I left it un-flushed, pee’d in the shower, and taped a letter to the closed toilet lid that read, “THANKS AGAIN, PAL!” I remember #5 especially well due to the fact that when he returned home and discovered it, I was

secretly listening with both of my ears. Door opens… heavy foot steps…dropping his bag on the floor…heavy footsteps…bathroom door opens…the hushed voice of a man who has walked in on an alien autopsy “Oh…no.” It was somewhere around #6 or #7 that I started to mess with Framp without his knowledge. I’d move his drink to the opposite side of the table when he left the room to see if he would notice. He didn’t. I’d push the “repeat” button on his stereo while he was in the shower and see how many times the same song would play before he would notice. 8-10 times. I’d tell him utilities were $88 on Tuesday and he would write me a check and then I’d tell him utilities were $88 on Thursday and he’d cut me another check. Framp was too busy to be bothered with details like where he placed his things or what he did with his money. He was in NEW YORK CITY! He was 25

going to get into Juilliard! He was having sex with lots of women!* *Despite his budding insanity, odd behavior, awful impersonations, and inability to hold a conversation, Framp brought home at least a dozen attractive young ladies who shared his bed at night and then asked me what was wrong with him in the morning. Two of these one-night stands also stole some of his Adderall, which in retrospect seems like a fair wage for having sex with Framp. I was dating a nice girl from Mississippi who moved in with us a week after #8 was left for me on our porcelain horn-of-plenty. (#8 was when I finally took a stand. I taped one of his headshots to the toilet and printed a picture of his deposit and wrote the following ransom note: "Framp, I took a picture of your shit. If you ever don’t flush again I will send your headshot and the picture of your shit to everyone on my email, Facebook, and Myspace and tell them ‘Framp doesn’t flush his turds!" This was effective: social media was involved.) It was also during this time that Framp was not accepted to Julliard’s acting program. His behavior started to spiral out of control. He would play the intro to Jerry Lee Lewis’ Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On repeatedly at 4AM on his heavy-key keyboard. He would exit the apartment at 11PM, as he had been doing for months, shirtless with a guitar. I thought he was having sex with someone in the building who probably needed Adderall but I later found out via a discarded “to do” list that he was playing guitar shirtless every night in Prospect Park. What a treat! Then his grandparents, who’d been paying for everything, asked him to get a job. Framp decided he would become a bartender, and he enrolled in a $1500 one-week intensive bartending school that would help you find job placement. I told him that $1500 was really expensive for training but he reminded me that it would only take 5 days. It took Framp 17 days to complete the training. He worked one shift as a bar back at Spice Market, made $86, and the next day when I asked him how it went Framp responded, “Bars are open really late in New York.” I started working on a web series, leaving my girlfriend, who for no reason at all I’ll refer to as “Munvo,” home alone with an increasingly unstable Framp. Munvo would call me and tell me that Framp just asked her “what color she was” and then clarify the question by saying, “I’m a black,” (he was white), “because I’m brooding and mysterious.” He’d walk around shirtless eating prunes and lie to Munvo about open mics he had performed at the night before, about how he had talked to someone at Juilliard who said that he was on a wait list, and how he got VIP tickets to the Spiderman 3 premiere but couldn’t go. Framp continued to bring pretty girls back to the apartment, and in the morning I’m sure Munvo would give them a “run-away-and-don’tlook-back” look that probably saved a few lives. Within a few days, poor little Munvo decided that she preferred to lock herself in my bedroom until Framp left the apartment. I no longer hated Framp – I despised him. I was physically bigger than Framp so I never really worried for my own safety, but now he 26

was scaring my girlfriend so I handled the situation the best way possible: I left her alone with him for the weekend while I went to a wedding. I remember it like it was yesterday… I was driving a rented Pontiac Grand Prix through Virginia with the windows down, Van Halen II blasting on the stock speakers, Corn Nuts spilling across the dashboard when my cell phone—switched to vibrate and pinned between my testicles and the car seat so I wouldn’t miss a call—began delightfully buzzing on my gooch. It was Munvo, and she sounded worried. “Framp is lying on the living room floor crying,” she said. “He’s been calling my name for an hour.” I was concerned but mostly confused. I told her to stay in the bedroom and lock the door. “He asked me if he had been acting weird. He said something like he couldn’t remember the last two weeks. He’s lying on the floor, crying like a baby, Scott!” Classic Framp! Now I knew I was taking a chance leaving Munvo with Framp, and I realized two things during that phone call. First, that the money wasn’t worth it, and I should’ve kicked Framp out months ago. Second, that not bringing Munvo to the wedding was equal parts stupid and horrible. Who doesn’t bring their girlfriend to a wedding? Classic Me! Munvo continued (keep in mind that Munvo was from southern Mississippi so her voice was heavily accented and painfully sweet), “Someone’s here! Framp is crying loud! What should I do?” “Who’s there?” I asked. “Two women, I think. Hold on. They’re knocking on the door. Hello?” The two women in the apartment were Framp’s aunt and the grandmother who had been paying for everything. They’d come unannounced, not only to Munvo and me, but even Framp didn’t know they were coming. Framp was so in shock at their arrival that he stood up, walked into his bedroom, and laid face down on a small mat in his room. Framp’s aunt asked to speak with me so Munvo put her on the phone. “Hello, is this Scott? Hi, Scott, this is Framp’s Aunt Deb. We’ve come to take Framp home. He’s not doing too well. Can we buy your luggage or your girlfriend’s luggage? We have a plane leaving from LaGuardia in an hour.” “No, I’m sorry, please leave Munvo out of this. She’s visiting,” I said while speeding south into North Carolina. “Oh, I’m sorry. Well, what should we do?” (Keep in mind Framp’s family was from southern Georgia so his aunt’s voice was also heavily accented and painfully sweet.)

“I’ll pack up his stuff when I get back, and you should hire movers to put it in storage until he comes back.” “You know what, we can do that! I’m so sorry, Scott. Framp…he’s not well,” I was listening to this with mixed emotions. On one hand, I was very sympathetic to this poor woman’s plight. She had come to rescue her crazy nephew from the big city. On the other hand, NO MORE FRAMP! SMELL YA LATER! “I’ll give you back to Munvo, and we’ll get his things together. Thank you, Scott.” At this point I can hear Framp moaning and shouting at the women sent to abduct him. His dreams were broken, his brain was broken, and he was about to fly home to Georgia with his tail between his legs. My girlfriend got on the phone and asked me, “What should I do?” and I responded with resolve, “Get. The. Key.” She got the key. Framp left the apartment with his aunt and grandmother while I was still on the phone and a great sense of relief washed over me. Two days later I returned to Brooklyn and, after apologizing to Munvo, I began packing up all of Framps’ possessions. I packed up what was left of his clothes and comic books. I packed his shelves of unread books and rolled up his whack-off posters. I broke down his Ikea bed frame, dismantled his keyboard and furniture and wrapped them with padded cloth. It was a pain in the ass but it was cathartic. He was gone. We were safe. I’d never find another unexpected water moccasin in the toilet again. I was happy. The movers came the next day and took his things away. I did keep a couple books and a peanut jar full of coins as a packing fee. Framp called me two weeks later and explained that he had suffered some sort of mental “split.” He’d blacked out for two weeks and he apologized if he had behaved oddly. I held my tongue. He said he’d be back in New York in a month or so but we both knew he was full of shit. He’d tried and he’d failed. I hung up the phone and haven’t heard from him since. A few years passed, and I stopped thinking about Framp. Then one day this summer I saw some other moron playing guitar shirtless in the park, and I was suddenly very sad. My anger and resentment of Framp had blinded me to the truth that what I did to him was terrible. He was just like every other small town dreamer who moves to New York or LA to make it only to get those dreams shoved up a rat’s ass and fired into a medical waste dumpster. And I was a huge part of that. I ripped him off, secretly tested him, and in the end I stole from him. I only needed him to be my roommate because someone had taken advantage and stolen from me and I turned around and did the same thing to him. It took me four years to realize what I had done. I helped ruin a kid’s dream and that’s sad. No matter how bizarre and annoying you were, I shouldn’t have ripped you off. Sorry, Framp. I’m #9.

by Jonathan Ritzman. photos by Walker Esner.

ruce Lindsay pushes a grocery cart up Vanderbilt Avenue on a sweaty Saturday morning in Prospect Heights. Inside his cart are a sword, a staff, a bow, a few arrows, a shield, and some other weapons. Attached on the outside of the cart is a small white sign that reads, “Wanna Fight? Come Ask!” Lindsay scurries up the hill toward Grand Army Plaza. As he reaches Flatbush Avenue, he waits for an opening in the traffic. He looks toward the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch that sits across the northern entrance to Prospect Park. On the old, triumphal arch is a sculptor’s allegory with bronzed, winged goddesses, Union soldiers, and the story of a civil war won. Lindsay crosses the street and anxiously waits for the soldiers of his own civil war. He is a little out of breath from the walk. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s here yet,” he says. Once or twice a month Lindsay and his minions, who come from all five boroughs and beyond, stride through Grand Army Plaza and into the rolling refuge of Prospect Park. It’s here where they line up and battle each other, where they escape the perils of adolescence, unemployment, overemployment, and the unforgiving world outside the one they create. In Prospect Park these quirky combatants discover the elusive balance of the Dionysian and Apollonian—a savory equilibrium of chaos and order. Picture Braveheart on Nerf pills. Picture a foam Fight Club. Beneath the welcomed shade of the Arch, Lindsay pulls a blue bottle of Coppertone sun block from his cart. He begins to liberally apply it to his face. He has trouble getting it past his goatee. Lindsay, 38, is lanky and about six-foot-one. His face has a sharp, villainous shape. A disheveled salt and pepper hairdo curls freely down to his ears and his matching sideburns point to his mouth across his cheeks. His look is calculated. It will soon compliment his white, plated body armor, red tunic, and cape that he’ll wear in battle. At that time Lindsay will become Brutus, taking his arsenal of swords, staffs, and bows into the park. And to think, just two days before— when we first sat down to meet—he was sizing up a fetching young maiden at the trendy diner near his house. You’d imagine some of these players picking up chicks somewhere between the mall and the message board. But Lindsay maintains a surprising suave. “Cheddar or Gruyere?” the waitress wanted to know. “Cheddar,” Lindsay told her with elegant definition

as he raised his chin and goatee a bit. Then we got to talking. I quickly learned that Lindsay isn’t what you’d expect from the leader of a live action role playing realm. He skirts around the stereotypes born in your local mom’s basement. Sure, he’s battled for 26 years and shows no signs of stopping. But then he’s also in a happy, open relationship with a lass who counsels couples on intimacy. In real life, he builds scale models for a design firm in Brooklyn and seems to have carved out a pretty decent existence for himself. He moved to Brooklyn six years ago, and now lives across the street from The Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights, where we met up. Wearing a snug black t-shirt, he seemed at ease with the menu in his hand. At one point, he even winked at the waitress. He wondered if she was Israeli, but couldn’t pin down her accent. Shit, I thought. Lindsay is the rare confident nerd even with his nervous machine-gun laugh. Eventually, I was able to formulate the question to get at this. So what is Dagorhir? And why does the seemingly normal Bruce Lindsay create such a paradox for being a part of it? Lindsay doesn’t bat an eye. “It’s the only time you’ll see a teen punk-rock kid battling a 40-year-old lawyer.” Founded in the late 1970s by a dude in Maryland, “the name ‘Dagorhir’ is derived from Tolkien’s Sindarin Elven language, and translates as ‘Battle Lords,’” according to the game’s official website. Pronounced DAGGER-HERE it is a live action combat sport where people fight each other with fake, foam weaponry. Each player assumes a persona that they choose, with medieval and fantasy derived themes often assisting their musthave monikers. Typically, two teams dressed in classic “garb” (not necessarily of any particular era, but simply in line with ancient fighters and fantasy novels, and preferably void of any brand or logo) go head-to-head with their fake weapons slashing, stabbing, and shooting each other until one is left standing. Depending on where you’re hit and with what weapon, you act accordingly using the honor system and the opinion of your peers. (Often fighters are seen with an arm behind their back or hopping on one leg fake wounded.) Match-ups also include capture the flag type scenarios, battles that involve bridges—often just rope laid on grass—and weapon-specific matches. Lindsay goes on: “I started the group in Brooklyn a year after I moved here, about five years ago, because

I missed playing. I put up a website that was linked to Dagorhir’s website and let people find me.” Before anyone else finds him at the arch, Lindsay begins nervously pulling weapons from his arsenal and putting them back into the cart. Finally, Justin Cohen, or Gauntlets, arrives clad in a pair of snakeskin pants and a chain wallet. He is noticeably upset. Justin’s had a rough week so far, he says. Girl problems. “She used to text me ten times a day,” he utters shyly. While he and Gauntlets are nothing more than battle buddies Lindsay listens intently and offers advice. In a few hours, Lindsay’s advice will prove extraneous, forgotten by the thrill of the ensuing battle. More and more men begin to arrive over the next 30 minutes. Lindsay diligently begins to inspect new weapons as people chat and laugh in a couple of different circles. “Anyone see Harry Potter at midnight?” someone asks. He gets a mixed response. An elderly couple walks by just as John Mack, or Oswalt-Oswalt, shows up, and they look on with enjoyment. Oswalt-Oswalt wears a black toga with a red sash and headband. A few people quickly greet him, some of whom are wearing simply shorts and inside out t-shirts. Other men have adorned tunics, heavy chainmail armor, and fur leg casings in tow. Fifteen minutes pass and Lindsay is now inspecting weapons. The Dagorhir Manual of Arms lists five types of weapons for battle, each divided by a specific color. They range from crossbows to daggers to axes and even fake rocks you simply throw at one another. Each weapon is subject to the moderator’s inspection before a battle. In Brooklyn, that’s Lindsay. There’s a reason for that, he explains. “Once I was holding a spear and I went to block a swing and it was just a horrible misalignment of the [insufficiently padded] part of [my opponents] axe and the worst part of my thumb.” His thumb bent and broke. “I don’t let anything slide now,” he says. Lindsay begins scouring over one player’s sword from end to end. While holding the sword he asks the kid to turn around so he can test his weapon on him. Lindsay wails on the kid’s back seemingly intent on proving it’s unsafe. You can see the pain in the kid’s face as Lindsay whacks him full force with the PVC and foam sword three times. “Shit, we haven’t even started yet,” the kid says. Today, his weapon doesn’t pass Lindsay’s safety inspection. It’s too hard, not enough foam. Another player’s new spear is deemed

too flexible as it goes past a 90-degree angle when Lindsay applies pressure. A few soldiers begin to stretch and one new member signs a safety waiver for Lindsay. They begin to gather their weapons and armor. Lindsay puts his cart in motion and people start following him toward the park. Their walk is more unassuming than you’d think. They aren’t fishing for attention as they stroll through the Saturday Farmer’s Market in Grand Army Plaza. But their outfits and weapons certainly draw some looks. The farmer’s market itself is a faint homage to older medieval times, save for the 300 yupsters and a missing piccolo. For a moment the troupe of warriors fit in. Another elderly couple stops in its tracks, shifting their attention from the artisanal Asiago in front of them, marveling at the confident battalion yielding their artisanal arsenal. A Park Slope couple with a small dog in a duffle bag is excessively debating bok choy prices. These men don’t have these problems. The marching men belong to Novi Antiqui, New York’s own chapter of Dagorhir. One of the marching men is Joel Gabriel, who goes by Wolfhaus. He is a well-built, dark-skinned 20-something who has made the trip out from Long Island today to play. He’s tired but is still stretching with purpose. He even jumps a little to warm up. After a three hundred yard walk southeast across the main lawn, Lindsay picks a spot in the shade of an oak tree near a water fountain. They begin to gear up. As one-on-one warm-ups quickly sprout up around the tree, Gauntlets remains under it. He is shirtless now, exposing the tribal tattoos that paint his hips. He is playing with sticks in the dirt and is still visibly upset about his love life. “The last thing she said to me was ‘I miss you sweetie’… ‘I miss you sweetie?” He doesn’t look up. “I can’t fight when I’m heartbroken, I just can’t.” He says he asked his friend who’s a social

worker to find him a therapist. Gauntlets works in the permit room in the DMV, adding him only additional stress and you get the feeling his misery will be translated into someone’s misfortune soon. “I’m trying to move out of the permits room, it’s just too much,” he says. But it’s not. He’ll soon quell his personal strife and don his snakeskin wrist and shoulder armor with a scary, matching mask. Wolfhaus had been at the movie theater where he works until 3a.m. that morning. “I’m exhausted,” he says dramatically. It can’t help that he’s wearing an all-black karate gee and kneepads in the hot summer sun. But Wolfhaus remains true to his battle persona, a warrior often yielding a bow and arrow crouching cautiously in back of his teammates. Oswalt-Oswalt, meanwhile, is stretching his arms like a relief pitcher in the bullpen. Another fighter, Sporq has all but sharpened his sword is ready to go at some people. Lindsay slips some spandex shorts up his tunic and is now in full armor. They’ve waited two weeks to be in Prospect Park again and there is now liveliness in everyone’s step. All are standing now like team in the locker room ready to take the field before the big game. Lindsay is now Brutus and gets ready to assume power and enhance his already confident existence. But for men like Wolfhaus and Gauntlets, it’s a suspension of their real life existence, not a vehicle to enhance it. It’s wishing they could swipe a sword or shoot an arrow at every person in line at the movie theater or the DMV’s permit room. It’s getting an innocent taste of the primordial desire that exists within all of us. This is the fantastic feeling that Dagorhir produces on the field. People fake slicing each other’s necks with swords, and stabbing one another in the back with axes is a quick breach in reality. It’s a safe test of what it would be like if they only could. Pedestrians look on with a curious jealousy. Many people stop and ask what they’re doing. What if pent up

Brooklynites all had such a healthy release? I wonder. Would they still argue over bok choy? What if they all could be so uninhibited and just let their shield down for once? What if the world was like this? What if they fought with foam weapons in Iraq and Afganistan? What if world wars were fought with guns made from the shapes of our hands and the sound effects of our mouths? What if Eric Harris and Dylan Kliebold— who committed the massacre at Columbine High School—had Nerf guns instead of TEC-9’s? The world would be that much sillier, that much purer, that much simpler. The members of Novi Antiqui have championed a new form of aggression. Redefining civil war. Having found a way to fight harmoniously and harmlessly. Perhaps maybe someday these foam warriors will be championed like our modern war heroes. Maybe someday they’ll get their own statues in Grand Army Plaza. Probably not, but they’ll keep fighting in the mean time, abiding by their leader, while DMV lines queue up and sweethearts break sweet hearts. The world will continue to spin chaotically out of control and they’ll just keep moving on. Getting by, living to escape the real world battle, in a battle all their own. “If you wanna fight, join the herd and I’ll make some teams!” Brutus says with a nasal authority. The teams are quickly set and Brutus poignantly declares this a “no shields” match. Wolfhaus draws his bow in the back of his team of ten or so. Sporq bends his knees with his sword in hand. Another man holds a spear cocked back as Brutus begins to count down. “5…” A cop pulls up and looks on grinning. “4…” A kite flies above them cutting through the anticipation in the air “3...” A man selling shaved ice stops ringing his bell and watches “2…” a woman stops her stroller and cracks a smile. Brutus yells more loudly “1… Play on!” And suddenly, all is fair in Prospect Park. 33

- aquila ursus galactinus aug massage therapy collective

& prenatal massage, massage for management of stress & pain, and acupressure & energy work

deep tissue, medical

By appointment at plaza wellness 36 Plaza Street, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn www.augmassagecollective.com

718.355.9317

375 9th Street at 6th Avenue in Park Slope Open Monday - Friday: 10:30-7pm, Saturday 10-6pm, Sunday 11-5pm 718-768-2453 www.bklynbikes.com

hen I was five-years-old, my parents took me to PS 87, an elementary school in the Upper West Side, to register for Kindergarten. I had to wait outside of the principal’s office on a bench in the lobby. There were kids in wheelchairs and on crutches (some retarded) roaming around, and I didn’t know what to make of it. The summer goes by and, the night before I was to attend my first day of school, my father kisses me “good night” and I dig my fingers into his back and start to cry. My father asks me, “Why are you crying?” And I wail, “I don’t want to go to school!” My father asks, “Why?” And I choke, “Because, I don’t want them to break my legs!” Perplexed, my father remembered the day we registered me and quickly deduced that I had assumed going to school meant losing your legs and he reassured me otherwise. Fifteen years later I broke both of my legs when I fell off a school library, a three-story building at SUNY Purchase, during a foolish dare and a hallucinogenic night of drinking Herradura Tequila at the ripe age of 21. I effectively crippled my right knee, which instantly became a bowl of cartilage and chum. I landed on my left ankle and tore the ligaments while shattering my heel, creating a spider web of fractures. I also tore the ligaments in my right [drawing] hand when I tried to grab the edge of the building before falling in mid-air and crashing into cement. The tequila made me feel like an invincible combination of Iron Man and Calvin and Hobbes. Only the stuffed tiger in my mind couldn’t break my fall and my repulsar rays were out of gas. I was

in a wheel chair for a couple of months, made a list with a crayon on the wall next to my pillow of the people I was going to beat up for making fun of me while I was down, received a break-up letter from my girlfriend who was studying abroad, and listened to a 45-single of George Michael’s "Faith" on the 33 1/3 setting of my record player, over and over. At that reduced speed, it sounded like an old blues song. I swear. It was religious. Two more months on crutches got me skinny but formidable. While walking with crutches, I had a run in with GG Allin, a famous punk rocker, that had me dodging the hurl of his metal microphone after he rage-kicked one of my bandaged legs during a secret concert in the basement of the university dining hall. My pal, Drew, retaliated for me when he kicked GG backwards and we hobbled to my dorm room to drink malt liquor and listen to Public Enemy. Once I could eliminate the aid of crutches, I turned my limp into a swagger and I never beat anybody up. I was too busy hanging out with girls. Five years ago, my knee gave out. Something in the middle, a cap, a ligament, SOMETHING popped out and sprang to the side. I wobbled to the subway station with the help of my pal, Dan. We were running late to the Meatpacking District of Manhattan where my friend Holle was screening a private show of a short film she edited that won a festival prize. We were at the top steps of the Carroll Street subway station in Brooklyn when, suddenly, Dan’s ankle gave out and he grabbed the railing in pain and slumped to the ground. I thought he was pulling my leg but it was no joke. We shared an eerie

moment of sympathy and sat on the steps nursing our injuries as the rumble of an F-train came and went. Turns out, Dan tore both his ankle ligaments when he was younger and walked with braces for a little awhile. He hadn’t twisted his legs in years. Why we both suffered setbacks at the same time, I will never know. We managed to get onto the F-train and take it to 14th Street while consoling each other. As we bit the bullet and limped to the festivities, taking three times as long to cross a city sidewalk, we came upon a hip-hop video being shot in front of Nell’s, a famous nightclub. No time to wait for the shot to complete as faux-gangsters posed in front of their million dollar endorsements with their diamond studded girls, Dan and I hobbled our broken-selves around the side of their platinum cars adding NYC flavor to the farce of thug life. If only them rappers had tossed us a couple of gold canes and monocles, we would’ve fit right in. I never sought therapy and I don’t have health insurance. The occasional professional massage and visit to the Russian-Turkish Bathhouse is the only thing that helps my frame. If I don’t lie on top of my right knee like how I want to when I try to sleep, then maybe my Frankenstein patella won’t slip and displace like it loves to do before I pass out. Chronic pain has become a normal sensation but keeps my threshold for agitation at a nefarious level. It’s a lucky night of sleep when I don’t wake up to the paralyzing shock of a Charley Horse. What the heck ARE those anyway?

WALL-EYED

by Patrick Lamson-Hall. photos by Alexander M. Harrington.

on Sherman of Flavor Paper is a man unfazed by earthquakes. When the temblor hit Brooklyn (et al.) August 23, neither of us looked away from the shimmering 6’x 10’ image of a hillside favela we were discussing. It is printed on a PVC-free recycled material that Sherman called “bombproof.” Bombproof wallpaper is just one of the many tricks he can pull off with Flavor Paper’s wide format Roland printer, about which he is very excited. The favela started shuddering in its giant spinning rack, and panicked cries for Jon came from all corners of the building.

Sherman and his architect friend Jeffrey Kovel supercharged a former parking garage and beer distributor into an uber-retro, ultra modern, ecofriendly, live/work space that they named the Flavor Lair. It’s got the sort of vintage style that cries out for cocaine and disco, and Sherman came up with most of it. The meadow on the roof, the crisp soul music pumping from ceiling speakers, and the black light elevator wallpaper are all his ideas. He actually had more groovy innovations than the law allowed. “The floor of the elevator used to be astroturf, but we had to take it out for fire code.”

Flavor Paper has an aesthetic that sets pattern fans a-twitter. By itself, the architecture of their Boerum Hill showroom/factory at 216 Pacific Avenue is enough to captivate for an afternoon. Their main business is designing scrupulously detailed wall treatment and screen printing it by hand. This sounds expensive, and I say so.

Of the six full-time employees here, two of them live with their families on the 3rd floor. Sherman has the funky 4th floor to himself, with faux-leather walls and a bathroom with the sweep and glimmer of a 1976 Cadillac El Dorado. Living where he works was maybe not the best idea though, he says. “Sometimes I don’t leave for days, except to walk my dog.” The dog, Julio Cesar Chavez, is a hand-me-down named for a six-time world champion boxer.

Sherman points out that with three rolls of wallpaper you can decorate a 10x10x10 room, for just $450— surprisingly reasonable. A neat new innovation aimed at the flexibly financed is Mobile Flavor, an adhesive backed polyester fabric that renters can use to temporarily wallpaper their rooms. When it’s time to move, Mobile Flavor can be rolled back into a tube and stuck up somewhere else. What about lickable wallpaper? “That’s so gross,” Jon says. Flavor Paper hit Brooklyn in 2010, an innovative New Orleans transplant. To suit their fancy,

Sherman and architect Kovel cleverly centered their design on the main manufacturing space, in what they call an “open kitchen” approach. A set of huge glass windows frame two long vacuum tables that stretch the length of the building. Above them are matching 70’ long mirrors. Passersby stop to gaze in the mirrors as three art school types squeegee water-based ink onto long sheets of recycled paper. In summer, a velvet rope is the only barrier between the factory floor and the street.

This industrial fetishism is a sexy and gritty counterweight to the intensely conceptual nature of wallpaper design. It’s like when they mash up an early Victorian floral print with a medley of bike parts, or stocking-clad burlesque legs with ninja stars. From twenty feet away, it looks innocuous. Get a little closer and it looks, to borrow Sherman’s favorite descriptive adjective, “Fun.” As a self-described “purveyor of pattern,” Sherman is fascinated that digital printing allows him to put repeating designs on essentially anything. A short list: Posters, cutouts, pillows, glassware, and clothing. I suggest that he use his equipment for street art, since he essentially owns an enormous sticker printer. “Well, I thought about that, but they’d probably come right for us,” he says. Sherman offers a glimpse into his obsessive compulsive personality, saying, “Everything you see here is my aesthetic. I designed everything. I work in every aspect of the business.” This has served him well. A former ski bum with degrees in Environmental Science and Entrepreneurship, he now eats at the top of the food chain in the global interior design world. His parties are a good place to rub elbows with people like Lenny Kravitz, whose firm, Kravitz Design, regularly contracts with Flavor Paper. Sherman never set out to make wallpaper. Several years ago, he was visiting a friend who was trying

to source wallpaper from a small Oregon manufacturer. As they drove up to the warehouse, they saw an enormous pile of burning paper, latex, and plastic—wallpaper, aflame. “The owner wanted to quit all the pansy shit, so he and his son could have more time to ride four-wheelers in the dunes. So he decided to burn it all,” Sherman says. He bought all the equipment on the spot and moved it to New Orleans. Comparing himself to other specialty wallpaper designers, he says, “I don’t think anyone else prints like this at all. For the first five years I did all the design and all the screen printing.” The chaos after Hurricane Katrina catalyzed Flavor Paper’s move from NOLA to NYC. Sherman stayed on in the immediate aftermath, but the threat of more flooding, combined with frequent batch-wrecking power outages, made relocation desirable. He also wanted to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by minimizing shipping. Eighty percent of his business is in New York. His paper comes from New Jersey. They now print fabric in New Orleans on the original 30-year-old equipment, and Boerum Hill is the home base of Flavor Paper. Post-quake, Sherman is completely at ease. Before checking to see if an alarmingly delicate 50’ neon sculpture was smashed to bits or checking on Julio Cesar Chavez, he gathers his employees ‘round for an anecdote about being drunkenly tossed out of bed by a quake in a Tokyo hotel. Everyone laughs. As they’re going back to work he quietly says, “Man, we are just such little specks on this planet.”

OVERFLOW

BE FREE

EDITORINCHIEF@ OVERFLOWMAGAZINE.COM

ferriarch Brooklyn-based firm providing full architectural services for new construction, alteration projects, interiors and custom furniture design. (718) 852 6079 Âť www.ferriarch.com 39

Dollar Float by Kerri MacDonald. photos by Eric Vogel.

side from its floating state, it doesn’t look entirely like a boat. Hulking, boxy, a deep, barn red, The Lehigh Valley is tucked into the bay alongside Conover Street, behind the Fairway supermarket. It’s the last thing between Red Hook and Lady Liberty. If you want to get nautical-technical, this is not a boat, but a barge. The Lehigh Valley Railroad Barge #79, to be exact. Its more familiar name, these days, is the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. It is, the records show, the last covered wooden barge of its kind. And David Sharps, the vessel’s skipper, bought it in 1985, for one dollar. On an oppressive Tuesday morning in August, I call out from the dock, where I’m standing, dripping. Sharps appears behind a locked gate. He’s wearing a white wife beater with grey athletic shorts. When he welcomes me onboard, I find him tidying up to a twanging country rhythm. The room looks like the inside of a barn, but cleaner. Artsy-er. It’s wide, and rustic. The floor is made of wooden planks. It smells like musty sea air. A canoe hangs from the ceiling, and kitschy paintings are strung along each of the walls. There’s a Rube Goldberg machine—a carnival contraption that performs a simple task in an overly-complicated way—at one end of the room. At the other, a breakfast bar obscures a kitchen. Aside from me this morning, Sharps is expecting somewhere around 100 visitors, kids from the Union Settlement Association in Harlem. (“They’ll rock this place,” he notes as he spreads mats on the floor for his audience.) The kids take field trips throughout the summer: Coney Island. Central Park. The 97-year-old barge behind Fairway in Red Hook. Two counselors in purple shirts appear on the dock around 10:45. The kids trail behind them a minute later. “Welcome, mates,” Sharps says as the children—some as young as five—plod inside. “Have a seat on the rugs, if you would. Make yourself comfortable.” “It smells like fish,” says a tall girl with braids. Once the kids are cross-legged, Sharps is up at the front, his mouth closed, a big smile on his face. Out of nowhere, he begins miming. When he finally picks up a microphone, he coaxes the kids into a repetitive rhythm. Sharps: Ahoy. Kids: Ahoy. Arrg. (Arrg.) Ayay, captain. (Ayay, captain.) Ahoy, matey. (Ahoy, matey.) Raise the anchor! (Raise the anchor!) Raise the sail! (Raise the sail!) Land ho! (Land ho!) Swab the deck! (Swab the deck!) This goes on. Some of the older kids, sitting on benches, smirk, too cool. My name’s David. (My name’s David.) No, my name’s David. (No, my name’s David.) What a coincidence! (What a coincidence!) I got this boat for one dollar. (I got this boat for one dollar?) It was full of mud. (It was full of mud?) Now they’re listening. 40

“There’s other highways besides the roads that our buses and our cars and our trucks travel on,” Sharps says. At the Waterfront Museum, he says after a brief historical interlude, “we’re all about getting people out and on and in the water.”

that were bringing people here,” he said, with a hint of pride. Yet: “There’s a side of me that loves and misses the Wild West of the old Red Hook— the isolated fishing village, our own little secret that we loved.”

It’s a bit of a line, but he knows what he’s doing. Sharps begins with entertainment, adds a dash of education, and tops it off with some more fun.

For a tourist attraction like this, Red Hook is not the city’s most lucrative piece of real estate. This is not the South Street Seaport. On Saturdays, a range of people wander through—families, couples, boat enthusiasts. The museum is free. (Those who donate get a temporary tattoo.) There

Sharps, by the way, is a clown. Literally.

he first time we met, he was acting for a different demographic. It was a hot Thursday evening in mid-July. The barge was docked further north, at Pier Six, in Brooklyn Bridge Park at the foot of Atlantic Avenue. I had to tap dance through a downwarddogging yoga class on the pier to reach the entrance. Inside, a white projector screen flashed with an image showing a poster of a showboat: A Monumental American Classic. In front of a scattered audience, a bespectacled old man, Norman, began to preach the history of the New York showboat scene. The takeaway: The heyday has long since passed.

de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and took up residence on his first barge. In 1985, he headed to New York and ended up, once again, on a boat. On a Saturday early in August, Sharps pulled out a MacBook Pro to show me some grainy videos— highlights from his commercial clowning career. Wrigley’s gum. Sprite. Wendy’s. (Sharps played Dave Thomas’s body in what appears to be a pioneering use of special effects.) But Buried somewhere beneath his clownish exterior is a passionate sort of anger—the type you might expect to find in a guy living on a boat in a city that seems to forget it’s predominantly composed of islands. (Sharps doesn’t really fall into the angry mariner category. He lives with his wife and two daughters on the barge. He’s an amiable, generally happy guy. When he bought the Lehigh Valley, it took him two years to dig it out of the mud. It was a passion. He turned it into an art. But as we were on the boat that Saturday, rainclouds approaching, he pointed to the paintings on the walls, on loan and for sale: “Do you think I’m going to sell any of these?” he said, voice raised and eyes wide. “You think these people have a job that they love? They don’t. New York City is full of so many talented people, all doing something else.”

Sharps, who sat quietly throughout, is doing what he can to keep that history alive. The Lehigh Valley has what one visitor aptly told me is “a Terry Gilliam feel,” with its Rube Goldberg machine; its makeshift stage; its fanciful art exhibits; its clown. While Sharps is very much a yesteryear man, he’s looking to the future. As varying factors kick in—schools can’t afford field trips; the city is flooding its waterfront with concession stands, not museums—he’s got to think fast. And, at 55, Sharps is starting to think about whatever comes next.

are summertime events, like the onboard circus, Showboat Shazzam! Sharps used to host weddings, but has since made an agreement to keep things educational. That means grants and external funding.

He’s been docked here since 1994. The neighborhood has changed—both for the good, he acknowledges diplomatically, and the bad. “For years, we were kind of one of the cultural beacons

So it helps that Sharps went to business school. But by profession, he's a performer. He grew up in Appalachia. After a stint as a juggler, touring the globe by sea with Carnival cruise line, he ended up in Paris, where he attended l'École Internationale

In many ways, Sharps’s juggling habits align neatly with his passion for the waterfront. In them, he sees something that few others can. “We know we have something that’s wonderful with the tug and the barge,” he said. “I’ve never been one to—” he stopped and took a breath. “I follow my heart. My bottom line had never been, you know, ‘How am I gonna make a lot of money?’ It’s always been: ‘How can I do what I want to do?’ Which is always a challenge. People won’t pay me money to do this.” 43

PET PORTRAITS paintings by Sayaka Nagata.

« Alex + Miele Expert Repair Center in Cobble Hill How long have you had her? Almost 2 years. Why did you name her Miele? Just, the first thing that came to my mind…because we are a dealer for the vacuum company, and we believe strongly in the product. We have a good product, now we have a good cat! Gina + the unnamed » Smith Street and 2nd Place How long have you had her? Seven days. How has the first seven days been with her? It’s a learning experience. She’s very energetic….but she’s a lot of fun. 45

Bob + Petey Court Street and 4th Place It’s my daughter’s dog, but she’s had him for five years. My daughter is busy now. She’s over in Jersey. So I take care of him. He’s part of the family. 46

Here? Don't We Like It

a homily by Reverend Billy. photo by Sarah Wilmer.

ry to imagine how the powerful elites must feel right now. On the one hand, for years they have had the control of the rest of us with their marketing, money and soldiers. They have gained a level of power and privilege that the world has never seen, a power over billions of consumers that borders on mass hypnosis. On the other hand, these same executive rulers must be suffering from their own hypnotic backdraft. Otherwise, how do you explain their silence in the face of what their power has caused? The tsunami that drowned Japan was estimated to have the power of 23,000 atom bombs. I suppose that the presidents, CEO’s, and bankers don’t have a lot of practice discussing power so much greater than their own. Do they consider the Earth their competition for control? Is that why they say nothing for months on the subject of climate change?

In fact, it seems as if the real leader is the Earth. When the Earth takes the international stage with an unprecedented tragedy, speaking with the impact of a tsunami or a biblical flood— now that is a statement. The 900 tornados in the American south and west this year seemed to blow the celebrities off the front page. Tornados a mile wide? Tornados in gangs? If such devastation, such surreal re-arrangement of homes, automobiles, and everything in sight were a statement from a godlike figure called the Earth—then what would be the essence of that message? Who would translate it for us? Maybe Vandana Shiva or Wangari Maathi or Bill Mckibben. Well, those three are talking now, and they are saying that we have to change how we live. The hope that our economy will recover and so return to its addiction to fossil-fueled growth and Wall Street-led policies. That way lies eco-cide. On some deep level I believe the meaning of the extreme weather and geologic events is clear to all of us. We have dumped poisons into the air and water for so long. We have drilled and dammed and even exploded mountains for our much-craved fossil fuel. I think many of us are far ahead of our leaders. We know why this is happening. The political leader who is showing up is Bolivian President Evo Morales, with his Law of Mother Earth, adopted by an international conference that

followed the charade of Copenhagen. President Morales is the indigenous Earth citizen who won power. He wants to start a human jurisdiction called a “Plurination” - that is directly responsible for its action to the Mother Earth. Does that seem unreal and fanciful? Rest assured, the year 2011 will be seen (Although, who survives to “see”?) as a time when the evidence became unmistakable. These waves of extinction of life, the thousands of unprecedented storms, droughts, fires, floods, and the death of the coral reefs. Right now is the moment when national leaders should have declared an emergency of the kind that they reserve for declarations of war.

t’s four in the morning, and I woke up angry and scared. The sentence I keep coming back to, rereading my scree so far: Evo Morales’ concept of an “Earth Nation.” How would that work? Or, is that beginning to happen now? Meanwhile, we go about our daily lives with this strange resignation. We’re suffering from consumer society exhaustion. No large scale social change has taken place in the United States in many years. Maybe late at night when we’re with a friend who can take our most blunt honesty we might ask: What am I doing for the next generation? What am I doing for the Earth? What am I doing? Our activist group –The Church of Earthalujah– concentrates on big banks. Banks finance dirty energy with vast budgets that rival those of nation states. There seems to be no democratic recourse against them, and yet they determine so much about our lives–and certainly about the climate. Earthalujah performs in their bank lobbies, re-deploying old rituals like exorcisms, songs, communions - often interacting in some way with their cash machines and the smiling bleached teeth actors of their marketing imagery. To passersby we are taken by turns as comic, as religious, and as very serious. First we make people stop, then we get our research into their hands. I am headed back to the courtroom soon to face trespassing charges by the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS)—one of the banks in the world most responsible for climate change. The trouble came on the day that the Church of Earthalujah dressed up in white flowing robes and donned

big angelic wings. About 40 of us paraded from Columbus Circle down Broadway, which happens to be solid bank lobbies. Stopping in each bank, a little like carolers, we either thanked the employees for getting out of financing CO-2 emitting projects or we fire-and-brimstoned them for mountaintop removal in Appalachia or coal mining in Australia or tar sands mining in Canada. [Note: Our best research on banks is at the website of Rainforest Action Network (RAN.ORG).] But we reserved an entire concert and sermon for the UBS lobby on 6th Ave, across from Radio City Music Hall. Another protest, another arrest. Lincoln Center accepted a $100 million gift from the owners of the Koch Gas and Oil Company. Charles and Howard Koch are among the nation’s richest men, with high personal assets than our mayor. They are the wellknown financiers of the Tea Party, and dirty tricks campaigns against earth scientists who report climate change. Now their name is emblazoned on the New York State Theatre Building in Lincoln Center. It is our feeling that in this time of the ultimate earth crisis that we need to get big oil out of the arts. So we flash-mobbed the Lincoln Center one night in June, and 500 folks showed up. Rob Greenwald from Brave New Films, John Sellars from Ruckus Society, Andrew Boyd from Agit-Pop, and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra– our partners in so many actions–orchestrated a fine, peaceful event. The Earthalujah chorus led a parade around the plaza. Later, walking away from the protest afterward, I was shoved into a black car by body-builders in t-shirts who claimed to be policemen. They did this in front of my wife Savitri and our 15-monthold Lena. “Trespassing,” they said, as if that was obvious. They claimed Lincoln Center is private property. Information systems being what they are, we take a risk by re-opening the “Commons” and then try to send out Youtubes and Twitters about our performances. Our work for the Earth won’t be the same as yours, but we hope you do whatever you can do. We’ve been asleep, but the Earth is waking us up. Kurt Vonnegut said that after human beings are gone, the living beings that find a way to live on the Earth will remark about us: “Humans… they didn’t like it here.” Can that be true? 47