OVERFLOW | Spring 2010

OVERFLOW ISSUE 5 :: SPRING 2010

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Farmacy Petey Freeman's search for the perfect egg cream

by Megan Finnegan

Cut Brooklyn carving out a niche business in gowanus

by Amanda J. Killian

Dean Haspiel the high romance of persona,

by Jeffrey C. Burandt

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Let's Inspire the Bored Composer a comic,

by Hunter Nelson

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Haute Gowanus

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we had something funny here, but we cut it

work harder not schmata,

by Tetsuhiko Endo

Bright Lights, Big Shitty New York in neon,

by Erik Winkowski

Crime Scenes imagined moments with Joey Gallo,

by Samuel Carter Shit You Shoulda' Googled

by Sarah Vandervennet and Valerie Lapinski

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Laundry Gays

A Before and After Photo Spread, by Douglas Calhoun

Flood

Portraits from a Practice Space, by Sam Roudman

Politics of Diversity

A Sense of Community, by Andrew Smith Edwards

Projekt Darkwave

Making a Scene, by Dale W. Eisinger

cover photo by Ian Addison Hall, contents photo by Brian Kennedy

OVERFLOW Published Quarterly by OVERFLOW Publishing, LLC 555 Washington Ave., #2L Brooklyn, NY 11238 www.overflowmagazine.com

*** Publishers Samuel Carter Jonathan Melamed Managing Editor Shane Dixon Kavanaugh ***

Photo Editor Jonathan Melamed Interns Lara Hemingway Amanda J. Killian Sarah M. Vandervennet Advertising Inquiries adsales@overflowmagazine.com Editorial Inquiries editorinchief@overflowmagazine.com Comments comments@overflowmagazine.com

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1. Brian Kennedy takes lots of pictures. www.briankennedyphoto.com 2. Amanda Killian will graduate this May from New York University with a degree in English and Creative Writing. She will either continue to seek refuge in the academic world or continue to fold pants at an overpriced retail outlet. She's not sure which path would be worse. 3. Megan Finnegan used to sell lace, and now she is a freelance writer studying for a masters degree in journalism. She writes about Irish-American culture, theatre and the arts, and neighborhood oddities, among other things. www.meganfinnegan.com 4. Sam Roudman is a man obsessed with rigor and results. He is a calculator in flannel, brought by god to make you happy. He's following you, follow him @bandnamefakes. 5. Sarah Wilmer: www.sarahwilmer.com 6.

Jesse Brown likes taking pictures. Check him out at www.jessebrownphotography.com 7. Kyle Muller, a typical American teenager of the Eighties, is accidentally sent back to 1955 in a plutonium-powered DeLorean "time machine" invented by slightly mad scientist. During his amazing trip back in time, Kyle must make certain his teenage parents-to-be meet and fall in love - so he can get back to the future. mullerfoto.com/kjm 8. Dale W. Eisinger is a writer from Idaho. 9. Sarah Vandervennet is an undergrad at NYU and is currently rekindling a past relationship with her 35mm camera. 10. Ian Addison Hall grew up in West Virginia on Rt. 19 between Weston and Jane Lew. He now lives in Prospect Heights where he's either roaming the streets taking pictures of other people's trash or at home doing very important computer work (i.e. eBay). You can see more of his pictures at http://www.dontnotlook.com. 11. Jeffrey C. Burandt is a writer and rock star living in Gowanus or Park Slope, depending on which day of the week you ask him. Visit americans-uk.com and jefwrites.com to see

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how he do. 12. Marlene Rounds is a photographer. marlenerounds.com 13. Hunter Nelson is a writer, performer, and illustrator. He thanks you for all your letters, and assures you that he reads every one! 14. Erik Winkowski is a Brooklyn-based graphic artist and captain of industry. www. erikwinkowski.com 15. Andrew Smith Edwards is a curious Brooklynite. He spends his days reading history, riding his motorcycle, writing for OVERFLOW Magazine, thinking about the Pacific Ocean and taking long walks through Brooklyn China Town. This is his second piece for the magazine. 16. Walker Esner: check out www.walkeresner.com before it's too late. 17. Matt Levy, a born and bred Brooklynite, came of age well after the Joey Gallo and Jukebox Gangsters era of Brooklyn. Just as well, since his wiry, skinny body, loud clothing, funny-moustache and geeky reverence for NYC history probably wouldn't have bode well with Cleo the lion. Instead, Matt Levy runs a tour guide business called The Levys' Unique New York! for which this article was researched. 18. Brett Beyer's work has appeared on the websites of WIRED, NY TIMES, National Geographic Adventure, U MAG, and CMJ.com. His print work has appeared in Time Out New York, High Times, Swingset, The Deli, "The Magazine", and FREE Magazine. www.brettbeyer.com 19. Valerie Lapinski lives in Brooklyn. 20. Roberto Patella is a freelance photographer. He lives in Jersey City. He thinks Brooklyn is cool (even though she's stealing all of his friends). 21. Douglas Calhoun is littlewoodenladder.com. He works as a Queerespondent for brooklyntheborough.com creating a weekly calendar, throwing monthly parties, booking music, and writing words.

22. Tetsuhiko Endo: when he isn't writing about fashion or action sports, he enjoys surfing, rum, southern rap, and bakin' cakes. 23. Darin Murano is a photographer and motion graphics designer living in South Slope, BK. Please visit muranophotography.com to check out his portfolio.

Farmacy

by Megan Finnegan. photos by Marlene Rounds.

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P

etey Freeman spends much of his time proving that things are not as complicated as they seem. He went to college in Montana because a line in a Brad Pitt movie made him think it would be a nice place to live. When Bush was elected president in 2000, he decided to leave the continental U.S., moving to Hawaii, and subsisting by landscaping. Now, this broadshouldered man wearing a cap and an easy laugh wants to make the best egg cream in all of Brooklyn.

"When people ask me what I do," Freeman says with a grin, "I just want to be able to tell people I'm a jerk."

A soda jerk.

worst, a fire hazard. Freeman looked at this mess and saw an opportunity.

egg cream reconnaissance, so he can see what he'll be up against in the nostalgic drink racket.

Freeman asked Stein if he could start cleaning out the pharmacy, see what he found. Stein had previously declined to lease the space as a real estate office, a law firm, a wine bar, and a bookstore. But for some reason, he said yes to Freeman. Stein can't pinpoint what it is about Freeman that made him agree. Maybe he just pestered him enough. "You can’t set that up," Freeman says. " You can’t go and say, okay, I’m going to create the right time, and I’m going to create the right place, and I’m going to call myself the right person.” He was just persistent.

After a vanilla ice cream soda and a chocolate egg cream, supposedly the specialty, Freeman is ready with his verdict. He shakes his head - not up to par.

"You gotta be on your ‘A’ game, even though it's just an egg cream. You never know who you're dealing with. You always gotta make the best egg cream possible. That's my mission statement - to make the tastiest egg cream in Brooklyn." He says this with a laugh, but he's dead serious.

That mission began amidst a sea of garbage and doubt. Freeman is the man behind the renovation of the old pharmacy in Carroll Gardens, at the corner of Henry and Sackett Streets. The building is owned by the famously reclusive Mark Stein, who will only say that he's not sure why he trusts Freeman, but he does, and he hopes that this new mission will succeed. The store still bears the vestiges of its former incarnation as the Vermont Market and Pharmacy. In the back, ancient pill bottles stand on the wooden shelves behind sliding glass doors. Tiny drawers, once filled with drugs and ointments, still line the walls. The pressed tin ceiling and tiled floor are telling details that the store was constructed in an era when such charming touches were standard.

Stein and Freeman struck a handshake agreement, and Freeman began the excavation. A concept took shape. Freeman would display the quirky expired drug store products he found - packs of Binaca breath freshener from the 1980s, oral nitroglycerin tablets, a 1939 remedy called “Save the Baby,” (which the label warns “is not intended to imply that the product will save babies”) - and install a soda fountain, modeled after the original one in the pharmacy. He would sell egg creams for two bucks a pop. He would bring in local products, sustainably grown tomatoes, handmade organic soap, and anything his neighbors wanted to sell. It would be the Brooklyn Farmacy.

Freeman, 32, moved into an apartment above the storefront last year from Hawaii. "I felt like moving back to the epicenter,” he says. “Getting back into a place where there was a movement happening, that there was, you know, in some ways the beginnings of a wave. You know it's all about getting in front of a wave, and like once you're on the wave, you're too late." Freeman has a way of explaining everything like it’s no big deal. He’ll make friends with anyone who walks through his door. He’s from a tiny town in Maine, where his family owns a farm. Crisscrossing the country on a whim seems logical to him. He came for a landscaping gig in Chappaqua that fell through. He had a savings account and time on his hands. He started to poke around.

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n the 19th century, the building had been a boarding house. Later, it became Longo’s Pharmacy, a staple in the Italian-American neighborhood, dispensing prescriptions, and — apparently — firearms: the pharmacist’s son R. Salvatore Longo was arrested in 1968 for selling guns across the counter.

Stein’s father purchased the building from the Longos sometime after that, and it existed as Mark’s Pharmacy until 1996, when Stein wanted to try something different. He opened the Vermont Market, selling organic maple syrup and locally sourced products, but it didn’t catch on, and the place has been empty since the late ‘90s.

By the time Freeman arrived, the store had become a sad neighborhood curiosity. Behind the grimy windows, stacks of boxes and papers crowded the original tile floor. At best, it was a time capsule. At

Since last June, Freeman has held three fundraisers for the store, importing fresh Maine lobster and soliciting the talents of local residents to throw block parties. He keeps pushing the opening date back, and some people doubt that anything will happen. What people don’t see is that every move Freeman makes is in pursuit of his soda shop utopia.

T

he second time I met Freeman, he made me my first egg cream. The classic egg cream starts with a tall, chilled glass and U-bet Chocolate Syrup, made only in Brooklyn. Hershey's will not do. The next step is ice-cold organic whole milk, filled almost to the top. It's still just chocolate milk, until you add seltzer water from an old-fashioned pressurized spray bottle and stir vigorously with a long metal spoon. It seems like it might be gross, but it tastes like a frothier, lighter, more innocent version of a chocolate milkshake. It tastes like summer in Brooklyn. It's utterly delicious.

Freeman insists that the correct components and methods be employed in the execution of the Brooklyn Farmacy's egg creams. In early December, Freeman proposed a trip to Bay Ridge to check out the competition. “I'll pick you up in my bus," he says.

That was not a joke. Freeman pulls up to the corner of Union Street and honks the tinny horn of a ramshackle yellow school bus with most of the seats removed and a propane-fueled stove shoved inside.

He bought the bus for traveling, camping, whatever.

Freeman just signed a 7-year lease with Stein. He's not going anywhere. He won't open until he's ready.

He doesn't do half-measures. That's why he's driving out to Hinsch's Luncheonette on a Friday night – an

On a warm day in January, Freeman is preparing for heavy renovations to start. Frank Muccio, who's lived across the street since 1967, walks in and asks how much for an old tin of Sucrets. (Fifty cents.)

He remembers weighing himself on the Longo's pharmacy scale - the one that still sits in a corner - as a kid. He starts telling Freeman what he should do with the place. "This neighborhood has an income for yuppies. If you were to open up something like a little cafe, where people could come here at night, and sit and have like, an espresso," he says. "Put a little jazz music or something.”

Freeman says that he wants to market to the people who have always lived in the area.

"You're never gonna market for people like me," Muccio says. Working class original residents, he means. "We're gone."

Freeman nods politely at the suggestions and invites Muccio to drop by again. "I disagree with him a little bit in the sense that I do think I'll be able to bridge that gap," he says later. "What success would look like for me would be somebody like that being able to come in here and find things that not only work in his life that he'd want to buy, but also to be able to step up to the counter and have an egg cream, or have something that he used to have when he was a kid. And at the same time, the person that moved here five years ago that has a couple kids, is 29, you know, also comes in and finds things they want and also can step up and introduce a new generation to what that guy was having when he was that age."

Why is this concept going to work, this time, with the friendly guy from Maine at the helm?

Freeman knows what will catch the eye of the younger Brooklyn set. He's bringing in vendors from the Brooklyn Flea and wants the Bamboo Bike Studio to build him a tricycle so he can transport seasonal fruits and vegetables from the Red Hook community farms. What's going to draw in the Italian guys who hang out at the Citizens of Pozzalo Society across the street, playing cards and watching the neighborhood change?

"I get a lot of old timers here because this is an old time spot," Freeman says. "The people around here know this store and they've been here and they know the old owner, so they're gonna come in, and they do come in, regularly, and that's gonna hook them, and then once they have an egg cream, they're gonna keep coming back."

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Cut Brooklyn

by Amanda J. Killian. photos by Brian Kennedy.

J

oel Bukiewicz stands in his small workshop on 10th Street and Second Avenue, surrounded by several belt grinders, work benches, formidable looking blades of hightech steel, a Macbook Pro, and a healthy coating of dust. For almost a year in this small space, Bukiewicz has cut out ugly chunks from sheets of steel and patiently ground them away into shining gourmet cutlery etched with the Cut Brooklyn logo, a scripted Cut supported by the industrial block lettering of Brooklyn. Despite his humble confession that anyone can do what he does, it is clear that the beautiful utility and sleek symmetry of Bukiewicz’s knives are an art.

Then one day, for no apparent reason Bukiewicz decided to make a knife. Within a couple of months he was selling hunting blades to the local woodsmen, and he had his eye on game and military men that lived on the local army base.

“I think I recognized something of value in that opposed to spending two, three years on something that would sort of hide in my computer for the rest of eternity.”

The first source of satisfaction for Bukiewicz is utility. As Bukiewicz got hooked on knife-making,

Finding something truly artful in New York City proper is difficult enough, and when there’s no clear line between what is artfully useful and just simply novel, small artisan businesses like Cut Brooklyn may receive a weary, pessimistic first glance.

In South Brooklyn you can find knitting clubs where you can make your own tea cozy while actually sipping tea at the ever packed Tea Lounge. You can hand-bind your own independently published book inside an old canning factory at Ugly Duckling Presse. Or even make your own beer in your coat closet. For all these ventures, looking good is half the battle.

Bukiewicz caters to the gourmet knife lovers who are willing to pay for the craftsmanship. His devotion to the product has led to a small but growing selection of utility, butcher, santoku, and paring knives that range from $190 to $350.

For Bukiewicz, founder and sole owner of Cut Brooklyn, it’s too laughable to be compared to hipsterdom even though he readily admits that making a knife is something anyone can do, thus making it a candidate for indie production. “It’s still a very basic process,” says Bukiewicz. “It’s still a thing that can be done by a dude with a campfire and a file.”

Bukiewicz started to make knives with little training, and, actually, barely any warning at all. After graduating from The New School with an M.F.A. in fiction writing, Bukiewicz moved to McDonough, Georgia with his girlfriend hoping to sell his first manuscript and write full time subsidized by the cheap rents of suburbia. After failing to sell his book and losing steam two hundred pages into a second fictional venture, he decided things needed to change. “So I stopped writing,” he says. “In the meantime, I found that I really needed different creative outlets. I made a couple pieces of furniture.

I was just making stuff just sort of to fill this need.”

Stemming from his own passion for cooking (He likes making soups because, as he says, “There’s loads of things to cut up.”), the idea for gourmet cutlery took off in Brooklyn where he admits he “really just got dumb lucky moving into this sort of burgeoning food movement in the city.” After a few months settling into his new home in Windsor Terrace, Cut Brooklyn emerged. The fulfillment and gratification that came from making gourmet knives far outweighed anything he could sell to military men and hunters in Georgia. “These days a knife like that isn’t really useful, so all these knives, people collect them and they sit in their big glass cabinets…

And for me, there was something really bothersome about that.”

he pushed himself to get better by simply taking his time and paying attention (something he learned from the process of fiction writing) – not forcing the creation but letting it form by simple guidance. Yet after three years in Georgia a plan formed to return to the Brooklyn Bukiewicz fell in love with in his graduate school days. A change needed to be made once again.

“There was no way I was gonna be selling hunting knives in Brooklyn,” says Bukiewicz. “I don’t think it’s even legal here!”

Bukiewicz realizes that since knives are one of the oldest tools their fetishization increases in an aura of danger and beauty that he himself feels and enjoys seeing in customers that love, care for, and use their knives. “When I can make a knife for someone who is going to use it every day as their primary tool at work that to me is enormously fulfilling, that really charges me up.” His commitment shows in his product. Handling one of his knives is like holding something feather light and yet extremely powerful at the same time, a tool that will gracefully cut with just a little guidance. If he’s not happy with the end piece, he won't send it out—he starts over.

He even asks his customers to alert him to the knife’s safe arrival at its destination, like flying an unaccompanied minor across country.

So while it’s an ancient craft, the difference between the file and the campfire is significant as Cut Brooklyn's one-year wait list testifies.

Even though Bukiewicz feels the high demand for his knives is astounding and strange, it is much less strange to Bukiewicz's customers. But ever-humble, Bukiewicz always points away from himself and gives credit to his neighborhood, of which he says, “I knew it would be better here, but I didn’t know that it would be like this. It’s just unbelievable.”

Dean Haspiel

by Jeffrey C. Burandt. photo by Darin Murano.

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D

ean Haspiel has been working in comics for most of his life, and there are seemingly few publishers—Marvel, DC, Vertigo, IDW, Image—for whom he hasn’t produced work. He’s probably most famous in the comics world for his longtime collaboration with Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), culminating in 2005’s critically praised graphic novel The Quitter. In 2008 Haspiel started working with his friend, author Jonathan Ames, to produce the graphic novel The Alcoholic. The HBO show Bored to Death followed in 2009, wherein Zack Galifianakis plays a character loosely based on Haspiel’s own exploits.

Haspiel also drew the opening sequence and all of the comics seen in the show. Meanwhile, his own autobiographical works are unafraid to show a man who can take a punch, down a drink, or fall in love (or lust). Repeatedly. When I ask him why one of his autobiographical selves, as portrayed in his comic Street Code, is always wearing bandages, Dean replies, “I wanted to cement the fact that he—and me—tends to get into trouble every time he steps outside.”

Vasilis Lolos (The Last Call), Jason Little (Bee in Motel Art Improvement Service), Steve Ellis (High Moon), and Kat Roberts (Fever Dream). Down the hall is another comics studio, Outpost 51, and a pair of comics journalists work across the way.

For all of his projects and accolades, Haspiel’s greatest achievement may be the community of cartoonists he’s helped gather here in South Brooklyn. For comics noobs, “cartoonist” means an author who writes, illustrates, and possibly colors and letters their own work. “Basically, we’re all waving flags,” Haspiel says of the large comics scene emerging from South Brooklyn. “We’re saying how cool it is, and it attracts people.” Haspiel was born and raised in New York City and has lived in Carroll Gardens for the last 13 years. Despite the financial burdens of living in New York, he has little interest in leaving. “I could do comics anywhere,” he says. “But I choose to stay because of the energy. Creative forces are all around you.”

It takes a singular personality to be at the center of a community of creators and organize them into webcomic collectives and studios, and Haspiel fits the bill. He’s affable and engaging. He likes to party and have adventures. He’s willing to go out and promote his work and do interviews. His studio mate Mike Cavallaro says, “He’s not afraid to walk up to someone and engage them in some way. This tends to create opportunities where mildmannered people would have kept their mouths shut and not built that bridge for fear of seeming pushy or intrusive. Dean’s the pebble that starts the avalanche.” Cavallaro continues, “Cartoonists are typically a solitary, reclusive sort, so having someone like Dean in the community to draw people out and bring them together is invaluable. Many of Dean’s efforts on his own or via ACT-I-VATE are designed to create events that bring us together.”

In 2006, Haspiel started the webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE. Within a year, he had gathered the Brooklyn-based cartoonists involved to form the Deep 6 Studio, which operates out of a warehouse directly under the F and G trains in Gowanus. Of the view of the elevated subway at Smith Street, visible from the studio’s large windows, Haspiel says, “It looks like a Will Eisner drawing. It has a haunting dread to it. It’s a beautiful sight for a cartoonist.”

Inside the studio, cartoonists Tim Hamilton (Adventures of the Floating Elephant), Leland Purvis (Vulcan & Vishnu), Joan Reilly (Hi-Horse Comics), Mike Cavallaro (Loviathan), Simon Fraser (Lily MacKenzie), and Michel Fiffe (Zegas) sit close but face different ways, working diligently in front of their drawing tables, sketches and posters tacked to walls, shelves rising everywhere, heavy with graphic literature.

Soon after Deep 6 formed, the comic-creating community began to take over the entire floor.

Sharing a wall with Deep 6 is the XOXO studio (pronounced, “Hugs & Kisses”), whose ranks include Becky Cloonan (Demo), George O’Connor (The Olympians), Joe Infurnari (ULTRA-lad!),

“We have these concentrated efforts that rally the form,” Haspiel says. “I think what’s really great about our studios is the individuality of all the artists.

We’re all doing different things. I’m probably jealous of them for different reasons, and that’s what makes me go do my thing. You’re learning by proxy and advancing by proxy—by being around really good artists and people who are committed.”

Haspiel admits that comics can be made and discovered anywhere; someone who wants to work in comics doesn’t need a destination like Brooklyn.

But he emphasizes the importance of community, and one that you can’t find with Twitter followers.

He points out the emergence of what he calls “comics lounges,” stores such as Bergen Street Comics in Park Slope, or Rocket Ship on Smith Street, that have parties that are more than just signings by creators.

“A signing is a gathering of tribes,” he says.

But all of this personality would be moot if Haspiel wasn’t such a hard worker. “I’m at the art table 12– 15 hours a day, often seven days a week,” he reports.

“Many a night I’m not going to sleep because I had a good day’s work. I actually have to pass out.” Despite his productivity, at age 42 he’s only been able to support himself as a fulltime cartoonist for the last 5 or 6 years, and he doesn’t have health insurance.

When he announces, “I shouldn’t be working for comics, comics should be working for me,” you understand that he hasn’t come out on the right side of that equation just yet. “I’m only as good as my last page. Every day is about filling a blank page, and I’m about a month and a half from living on the street.

At all times.”

You can’t help but maybe blame Brooklyn for his struggle, where a one-bedroom apartment in Carroll Gardens can easily rent for $2,000 a month. Upon further consideration, however, that notion of community surfaces again. Where else but Brooklyn can you make a comic with novelist Jonathan

Lethem that a local book store is going to release?

Where else can you befriend Jonathan Ames, make some comics, and then end up as a character in a fictional television show about being friends and adventuring around Brooklyn with “Jonathan Ames.” There can be no other place with the same character as this borough, because of our shared experiences living in these neighborhoods. And then I think back to his earlier remark about how he and his friends have been waving flags, and I realize that the people making comics and attending comics lounge parties—well, we’ve been here all along. We live here already because we work in Manhattan, and Brooklyn is better, and we love comics so much we have to make them, and now we’ve got Dino and his crew waving that flag.

Dean says, “I love stories. But you gotta live them, too,” and his work shows his concern for life as story.

He says outright: “Comics are the high romance of persona.” While he’s published his share of superhero stories, he seems to always return to biography and autobiography. There’s his semi-autobiographical web comic about living in Carroll Gardens published

by Zuda, titled Street Code. There’s his emotionally autobiographical, ongoing story about gonzo love in Trip City titled, Billy Dogma. He continually works with Harvey Pekar, a Cleveland writer known for his slice of hard life vignettes. With Ames’ The Alcoholic, he illustrated a raw and powerful biography about addiction. His upcoming comic with Jonathan Lethem narrates Lethem growing up on Nevins Street and contemplating walking down this same street as an adult. He has an upcoming graphic novel from Vertigo titled Cuba: My Revolution, written by painter Inverna Lockpez, wherein he illustrates her story of being a part of Castro’s regime (and wherein Dean cast himself as Inverna’s torturer, so that, in his way, he could protect who he calls his “second mother”). Finally, he’s planning to produce a comic for the second season of Bored To Death as written and illustrated by the character Ray Hueston—the one based on Dean Haspiel.

He smiles knowingly, “Artists have a healthy ego, usually, and are semi-narcissistic.” And when you have a personality as big as Haspiel’s—one that opens doors and galvanizes communities and makes a lot of damn good comics—maybe you need to have several iterations of yourself running around in semi-fictional worlds to even begin to express that personality. Haspiel comments, “I understand that there is more than one version of the truth— I’m not talking about lies, here—the only kind of semi-autobiographical story I can write and draw is reportage. We live a seamless string of events, and it's the author's job to find an entry and exit point to every story told. Ultimately, readers can only be voyeurs in my life stories. However, telling those same stories by expressing the emotional truths of what happened to me allows me more latitude to explore the truth and make art from it.”

HAUTE GOWANUS

by Tetsuhiko Endo. photos by Brett Beyer and Ian Addison Hall.

Lauren Batchelder in the 9th St. Station photographed by Brett Beyer

16

W

inter Fashion Week is an important time for many young designers in New York City. Although the majority don’t show any clothes under the bright lights of the Bryant Park Tents, they show up to see and be the scene. Away from the glare of the media, they take notes from the cheap seats of the runway shows, nibble canapés at the receptions, and hustle contacts over cosmos at the late night parties.

Behind the air kisses, the revelry, the champagne, and the celebrities, a lot of serious work happens. For a hungry textile-phile, there is no better place to be.

When I call my friend, the 29-year-old designer, Lauren Batchelder, to ask what her plans are, there is a short pause on the other end of the line.

“I don’t have any,” she replies.

“You’re not going to anything?”

“Ummm, nope.” She laughs, and I realize, for the hundredth time, that I should have known better.

Batchelder designs luxury women’s clothing under the name Lauren Nevada. Her dresses and blouses are based on elegantly swooping lines, curved seams, and blocked colors that give the fabric an immutable feeling of flow. They are whimsical without being silly, classy, but not stuff y, youthful, but mature.

Not the easiest line to walk, but she's sure footed.

Barney’s Co-Op picked up her autumn collection last September. She will also sell her spring line at the couture powerhouse starting in May. Cue the bright lights, red carpets, cocktail parties, and celebrities, but remember to leave Batchelder out of it — she has sewing to do.

B

atchelder can’t remember when she first picked up a needle and thread, but certainly it was when her age was still in the single digits. “I’ve just always done it,” she shrugs, jumper and sewing needle in hand. It’s 6:30 am, on a bitterly cold Tuesday, in February, and we are sitting in her studio under the F train tracks in Gowanus. The space is a twelve-by-twelve, windowless cell located in an asylum for starving artists. It’s only about nine miles from the revered show rooms of Barneys, but it’s a different world. There is a desk, an old sewing machine, an ironing board, a mannequin, a rack of clothes in progress, and one overstuffed armchair, for visitors. Aside from the soft rumble of trains over head, the space is filled with an intense calm that reflects Batchelder’s own personality.

It’s easy to mistake that calm for shyness. “I can be an introvert, but I love people, too,” she says. “As a designer, you have to be able to tap into the social

energy of different scenes; to take in a culture and regenerate it to create your own inner world, through clothing.” Talking to her, you get the feeling that she is constantly taking in things and storing them for later use in the creation of that world. It’s disquieting, and I tell her. “I’ve been told, before, that I’m kind of intense,” she admits, with a smile.

“But I really enjoy the process of reading someone.

I love observing people’s energies and how they express them.”

she says.

Growing up near Boulder, Colorado, Batchelder can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a designer. “When my friends and I would play with Barbies, I didn’t care about the make-believe stories, I would just dress them over and over, for different occasions,” she says with a giggle that often slips into her musings and evokes an inner, mischievous teenager. After high school, she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, where she was, in her own words, an average student. “I was okay with that,” she shrugs. “I’ve always known that designing clothes makes me happy and that I’ll find a way to do it in whatever aspect of my life that I can.”

“To sculpt it into beautiful lines.”

Around noon, I meet Batchelder in the garment district, where drab, Midtown streets are dotted by tiny stores that look like the proverbial harems of decadent sultans. We duck into a store and I follow her through claustrophobic corridors that wind between mountains of Technicolor cloth. Her hands shoot out, compulsively, to touch cottons, rayons, polyesters, and laces.

But she is also quick to point out that cloth does not give life to a garment by itself. “It needs the experiences and environments and smells and memories of the people who made the fabric, as well as those of the people who will wear the finished product.”

“What is your role in the process?” I ask.

Beautiful lines rarely appear the first time around.

Instead, they require a measure of meticulousness bordering on the obsessive that is evident both in Batchelder’s personality, and the subtle curves of her clothing. Without the money to pay a model to try her clothes, she wears them herself over a matter of weeks to see, not only how they fit, but how she feels in them. Then she adjusts seems, collars, cuts, and hemlines until they are perfect.

After work, Batchelder is back in her studio. The only decoration in the space is a small, framed picture of Queen Elizabeth I that hangs directly above her worktable, peering down on her as she sews.

“Fabric represents the hand of fashion, the very human touch that comes from the weaving and coloring that people have been doing since the beginning of time,” she explains.

Batchelder‘s love of fabrics can be seen in her creations.

Many combine differently textured textiles in a way that deepens their sensual impact. Wool and silk create a flowing, strikingly feminine vest. Cream colored linen is layered with silk charmeuse, lace, and tulle in a summery jumper that is simultaneously elegant and playful. “I think fabric has a spirit, even a soul, and I kind of like that idea,” photo by Ian Addison Hall

She is fascinated by both the style and the personality of the Queen. It makes sense for a young woman who is striving to combine elegance with the pragmatism involved in owning a company. “A lot of designers dislike having to deal with the business end of their clothing companies, but I find it incredibly stimulating,” she says, in between calling her lawyer to ask about trademarking and emailing a production factory in Tunisia. Small business law and the output capabilities of textile factories in Africa seem like atypical concerns for a New York designer, I point out.

“People give too much credit to the idea of normalcy,” she says, while typing in French. “The stereotype of a designer is someone who is one dimensional or highly judgmental, and, unfortunately, I think some people in the fashion world settle for that stereotype.”

I

t’s nearing midnight and Batchelder is back to sewing. As I prepare to go, I can’t help but wonder aloud whether she’s missing out on the fabled social life associated with being a fashion insider. Fashion week will be starting in a few days; Manhattan is buzzing. She shrugs. “If I weren’t designing so much, I would probably have more energy to go to parties, but it’s hard to do both.”

She pauses, as if meditating on what she just said, then offers, “Sometimes I ask myself why I care so much. No one will notice if I make little mistakes. But I guess I push myself so that when I look back on it, I won’t regret not having done so.”

Outside, the street is desolate, exactly as it was when I arrived this morning.

The only living things to be seen are the occasional rats that scurry across the sidewalk. Across the river, amongst the glittering lights of Manhattan, the fashion world is primping for its big week. There will be shows, parties, and media events galore, all of which Batchelder will miss. There is, after all, sewing to be done.

photos by Ian Addison Hall

646-932-2907 hatsbynadege.com

LAUNDRY GAYS

by Douglas Calhoun photos by Roberto Patella

20

Prospect Heights 632 Grand Ave Laundry City

We’ve all been there. The first free day in ages. The last Sunday of the month.

However you spin it, it’s laundry day. On this day, the smell of Brooklyn, its people, and their dirty clothes is a powerful thing. The reek of productivity. But we clean the clothes to wear them out.

Here are four before and after shots of this urban ritual.

K

evin, the handsome bartender at Bar 4, serves us loudly over a buzzing crowd of musicians and old friends. Jen Tullock is striking under a knit hat, and is never for want of the perfect adjective or a quick joke. When I ask why she moved to New York she responds, “Well, I was living in Chicago in 2007 and I had my heart ferociously broken and was feeling stuck in many ways … I had a friend with an extra bedroom in his Park Slope apartment for free.”

She shrugs, “I haven’t left”.

We talk jobs. “I’m a provocateur,” Jen quips. “I’m really an actor. Sometimes I say I’m a writer, it just depends on what bar I’m at. I went to school for acting.” I ask her what projects she’s currently working on and she whips a braid from behind her shoulder and takes a sip of her cocktail. “I did a show last year at the Broadway Comedy Club with a really talented group of guys. My best friend and I are putting together a twowoman show—a series of sketches and videos of what its like to grow up in Middle America.”

We talk neighborhoods and she explains, “I’ve been a bit of a gypsy the last few years. Waking up in strange places—and that isn’t as hedonistic as it sounds.” She’s recently been hanging out a lot in North Brooklyn. “I have been crashing in Williamsburg and Greenpoint for the past few weeks. My family spent a lot of time in Poland, so being in a Polish neighborhood is really cool, because I can order my bread in polish even though my grammar sounds like a three year old.”

Prospect Heights 748 Washington Ave Washington Commons

When it comes to laundry Jen’s been lucky. “I am a bit spoiled,” she admits. “The house I just moved out of in Sunset Park had a washer and dryer in the basement.” I ask if she separates lights from darks and she says plainly, “I have never separated—I think my mother would be gravely disappointed. Laundry isn’t precious enough. I just throw it in there and hope it gets the smell of sin out.”

Park Slope 835 Union St L&B Laundromat

I

sip tea at Tea Lounge with Mikeah Ernest Jennings, his broad smile, his compact frame, and his tall, All-American beau Matt Schmidt.

Mikeah moved to New York in November of 2001. Matt came the following fall. Along the road they met, and, like people do here, they moved in together.

Mikeah was just in Hamburg with a show called The Shipment. Matt is also hustling the theatre scene, and works days waiting tables in SoHo. One of them is often on tour, so the two actors have only recently begun what Mikeah politely calls the “blending” of their laundry.

Upon asking where they do their laundry they laugh, a combination of shame and glee, a sure fire sign that they “have it done.” “How much?” I ask. After some contemplation Matt guesses, “Anywhere between 15 or 20 pounds?” The words are hardly in the air before Mikeah rebuts, “Oh, that’s you!” a shocked Matt quickly interjects, “I thought it was going well.”

I come to find that socks have recently become a topic of contention. Mikeah explains, “What I thought were my socks, I guess are now also his socks?” Matt swiftly lays it to rest with a simple “Yes.” We all laugh. Matt reflects on his personal style. “For me right now, I’m 25, and I am starting to feel like an adult. The way I dress has changed so much in the last two years…I’m trying to step it up a little bit. I’d rather feel over-dressed than under-dressed.”

Mikeah laughingly points out that his own style is pretty eclectic, “I like to try to balance irregular patterns, which I guess is my mental state on a regular basis.”

Matt belly laughs and Mikeah joins in. The espresso machine interrupts with a loud sigh as busy freelancers mutter at their Macs, I wrap up laundry day tea-time with the complementary duo.

Park Slope 133 7th Ave Video Forum

Red Hook 34 Lorraine St The Wash Stop

B

aked, on Van Brunt and Dikeman Streets, is bright orange and adorable. I hang out in the sun-drenched window seat of the cozy spot with Marina Benedetto and Jessie Gold. Both of them are striking. M’s jet-black hair occasionally gets in the way and is swept aside. J wears her signature camouflage baseball hat.

The two have a lot in common. They are bandmates in a group called Balls to the Wall, neither eats meat, and both are gender-queer. M grew up near the city and hung out here on weekends like most Jersey natives. M works as a counselor at an outreach center, explaining, “You learn a lot from hanging out with kids,” and with what M calls “invisible people.” Jessie grew up on a farm and works as a cook at a cozy Prospect Heights restaurant called Ortine. We talk about what brought J to New York. “There’s more music opportunities here,” J says, “and also there’s more food.” They share a sandwich, and between bites, I ask about being genderqueer. I’ve read a little, but it has to be explained to me like I’m a 5-year-old. Jessie starts, “ We both identify as gender-queer. I inhabit the places in-between the hetero-normative gender paradigm.”

M agrees and goes on to elaborate. “I don’t want to have a label of either one, just because it’s too limiting,” M claims. “I change a lot and language changes.” J injects an opinion, sharing, “Having two categories of male or female really stifles the diversity of the human experience.” These two seem secure and happy living the dream between the confines of gender. I consider how brave and wild it must be to live in that place.

We move on to the topic at hand, laundry. For M, clothing gets done occasionally, while bedding is in the wash constantly. M laments, “I’m doing my sheets a lot because of my cat. She likes to pee on my bed when I’m not there.” We go on to joke about the poor cat’s separation anxiety as J explains that laundry day only comes when the underwear drawer starts to look like an empty shoebox.

Gowanus 622 Degraw St Little Field

Boerum Hill 472 Atlantic Ave Atlantis Wash Center

A

24

Park Slope 125 5th Ave Southpaw

t my dining room table in Prospect Heights, over Stumptown coffee and breakfast snacks, Shane Thor Galligan and I chat about music, drag, and, of course, laundry. A Long Island native, Shane has been in Brooklyn for four years and is a professional freelance violinist, violist, and cellist. He also moonlights as Thorgy, a wild drag queen with a come-hither stare and a “no she didn’t” glare. Shane speaks with his hands and his eyes, which periodically light up and squint when contemplating an answer.

living anywhere else it wouldn’t be as constant, and there wouldn’t be as many musicians to share gigs, because that’s how the freelance world works.”

I ask who inspires him musically, he knows right away. “I really look up to Hilary Hahn, I love the way she plays, because she plays so youthful, and so solid. She plays so wise.”

On scoring weddings, events, and the like, Shane shares, “If I were

Shane’s alter ego Thorgy is a fierce and fashionable femme-fatale that has

Shane talks about future goals in New York, ones he thinks are reasonable.

“I would love to be in a Broadway pit, I’m good enough, I’d love to be playing eight shows a week.”

been one of the in-house queens at the infamous Gender Bender parties that originated at Bar Reis in the Slope and have hit clubs all over for wild and mild-mannered queers alike.

“The first time I ever did drag it was a joke, it was on a dare.” He elaborates on the creation process. “I really enjoy putting on make-up. It’s like creating an art piece, differently every time. It’s really personal and enjoyable.”

I learn that Thorgy is growing up and has become an investment. “I’ve actually been spending more money, I don’t want to look cheap anymore.”

Shane admits that he recently bought

a designer bag for Thorgy to mature her look.

Luckily, laundry day is a retreat home.

“I do my laundry at my dad’s house a lot, he’s like ‘Come, do your laundry, we’ll have dinner.’” Sorting is serious stuff. “I’m actually really methodical. I like to have an entire floor, and I throw clothing into piles. Whites go over there,” he wildly throws imaginary laundry in the air. “Hosiery goes with spandex, t-shirts here,” another toss. “I have like 5 different piles.” He jokes about throwing stockings at his dad and we both giggle.

the Courtesy Tier

BAND PRACTICE

wading through Flood Studios

Late on a January day, the Gowanus Canal was dressed like a romance scene from the post-apocalypse. A yellowy mist hugged the snaking cancer slick as seen from a drawbridge on 9th street, and in the distance monstrous machines gaped to gorge on industrial refuse, framed by thin legged highway superstructures.

by Sam Roudman photos by Jesse Brown

In rock and roll terms, it was Diamond Dogs, Bowie’s stylized invite to civilization’s after party. In human terms, it was damned cold.

B

ut I wasn’t in Gowanus to freeze my ass off and muse about mediocre Bowie albums, I was there to visit Flood Studios, a set of forty practice spaces and a de facto gestation hold for the music scene in Park Slope. I wanted to meet the people, shake the babies, and ask the tough – if sometimes obvious – questions. I elected myself thermometer, and I would gauge the temperature of the scene.

Flood exists thanks to a man known as Rabs, a structural engineer, multigenerational Brooklynite, and musician. Early last decade, Rabs found himself in a quandary when his band Flood returned from tour to a dearth of quality practice spaces in Brooklyn.

“We went to Queens and that space was in a basement. It was flooding and we were paying an exorbitant amount of money and there were mice and rats on the floor,” he told me by phone, with the relish and disgust best expressed in a native New York accent.

Filling need’s mighty hole, and putting that structural engineering know-how to work, Rabs opened the first Flood practice studio in Williamsburg in 2002.

Today he has five locations and 160 studios.

Let’s do some simple math: 160 rooms X 2 to 4 bands per room = a shitload of bands playing and practicing at Flood, the combined musical permutations of which are so great, so numbingly profound my nose is bleeding in contemplation.

The second Flood studio opened in Gowanus in 2003, and it was there that I visited.

Walking down Flood’s hallway was the equivalent of twirling through the AM spectrum on a radio knob. The sounds encompassed third grade piano practice, fusion wankery, metal destruction, votive ready songwriter emotives, and every other hue of the music cultural spectrum; a subject I (per usual) found so overwhelming that I faced either the possibility of my psychic self compressing into a singularity or just knocking on a door.

So I knocked on a door.

When the elevator opens onto the E shaped floor of Flood Gowanus, the easiest thing to pick up on – before the music even – is the smell: a decrepit, slightly souring funk that brings to mind a garage clubhouse for troublemaking high-schoolers. The walls are paneled with white wood planks on their lower halves and painted a sea blue up from there.

The extensions of the “E” shaped floor are about twice the length of the spine, and every few feet there’s a matte metal door with a serious padlock spray painted with that studio’s number, oftentimes as part of a picture, like snakes, a beer can, a rat holding a bomb, or any number of charming Jungian totems.

This first room I knocked was occupied by a thoughtful, bearded fellow playing oddly tuned, rhythmically spastic guitar riffs. The teensy room had beige carpeting up its high walls. In the far left corner, maybe eight feet away, there was a compressed jazz kit set up. When the door closed, a bit of institution grade claustrophobia was sealed in with it. I mentioned the funhouse-cum-insane asylum vibe gleaned from my brief visit.

“It’s crazy man I think about that,” he replied “walking around the halls you hear everybody working on whatever they’re working on, sort of a bunch of people going crazy in the same spot.”

Kirk plays in a band called Smother Party and answered the most obvious, most annoying question for musicians with relative ease, “It’s like a microtonal noise rock band, it’s two guitars and drums and we tune in different semi-tones and quarter tones, set to some sort of trance rock grooves.”

A South Brooklyn resident, Kirk was sanguine about the current state of its music scene. “There are so many rock bands, like noise rock, indie rock, there’s some hard post grunge stuff happening. It’s cool because everyone is like in the scene together, there’s a lot of cross pollination.” It doesn’t hurt for Kirk’s place in the scene that he shreds at guitar (categorically), and has a graduate degree in Jazz from NYU. “There are still young people in South Slope doing important stuff,” said Kirk, regardless of the perennial focus on Williamsburg.

According to Rabs, this was not always so. “When we moved over there in 2003, I had to explain where it was to a lot of people who called for a space,” he said. Flood has been one of those cultural centers, those cornerstones of the gentrifugal pyramid which have contributed to the Gowanus area’s development in the last decade.

After a fifteen minute jam session with Kirk that called into question both my ability to follow meter

Smother Party

in odd time, and my ability to hear ever again, I made my way back into the hallway at the bottom branch of the “E.”

meat-and-potatoes rock. I was greeted with a glassy eyed smile inside a room that turned out to be just large enough for single drum kit and a guitar amp.

A few doors from where I had started, I heard a fuzzed out wish wash of surf punk guitar, with a catchiness that cut through its skuzzy abrasions. I knocked on the door, to the surprise and immediate befuddlement of Matt, who practices and records there with his longtime band Specific Heats.

The smirk belonged to Omer, the guitar half of The Courtesy Tier. Layton, the other half of the band, was behind the kit in a corner so scrunched it barely had room for his long, tied-back hair. The light in the room was mellow, and a burnt orange tapestry hung from the wall across from the door.

The room, surrounded by spotted yellow foam, had space for a full drumset, a mixing board and computer recording console, and all sort of wires, amps and instruments. As it turns out, the room was a little center of Brooklyn’s indiepop scene (debatable as a genre if not a scene), home also to My Teenage Stride and Knight School.

The two both attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, and moved to Brooklyn three years ago.

Matt works a 9-5 at a “finance and technology company,” but can’t shake the music bug. Asked why he plays, he answered with inquisitive upspeak, “It’s one of the only things I’m good at? I’ve been playing in bands since 6th grade.”

After ten minutes jamming to Matt’s toxic-surfari guitar work, which he was unsure of and apologetic for, in direct, inverse proportion to its surefire radness, I made my way to a door blaring straight-up

“I swear that sometimes you play shit, and then you walk out the door, and someone in a room two doors down is playing something really similar. I’m sure that that happens to us too,” said Omer, before a set of giggles between the two that led me to believe the scourge of “Jazz Cigarrettes” had breached the practice sanctum.

In the couple years The Courtesy Tier practiced in this tiny room, I was the first person to have knocked.

I was also treated to the first in-room performance the two had ever put on. Omer handed me a roll of toilet paper, the placebo ear-plug of choice, and the duo killed it on a bluesy punk number with aplomb and deceptive technicality.

A

week later, at the end of the middle hallway, I heard a funereal organ playing over a solid beat cut through with an impassioned gothic-y, Peter Murphy sort of voice. It was worth a knock.

The room had charcoal carpeting up the walls, but with one, weird, cloth-lined Ikea looking lamp in the far corner, it looked black. The four affable guys in the room composed Tenements, a project started by Jeremy, wearing a skully standing behind keyboard.

The quartet was rounded out by a drummer, a bassist and a guitarist.

“I wanna play out and be really tight, and have people like us when we play,” said Jeremy, one of the many, many Brooklyn musicians I have met who makes a living with freelance graphic design, the reason obvious: “It’s a legitimate way to make a living as an artist.”

After being in a band that had tried to “make it,” Jeremy, 28, was now less inclined to go at it whole hog. “I think we’re all in a place where we’re not 18 anymore, but if an audience dictated it…” they laughed. The dream never dies, it just floats away.

I asked about the atmosphere for making music in Brooklyn, and Isaac, the shag haired drummer immediately offered up “Pretentious.” But just what is this pretense? A software engineer, Isaac had a concise formulation: “Brookyln is a center for American music right now so that draws a lot of legitimate and merited recognition for the borough in terms of cultural development, but it also draws a bunch of people that want to jump on the bandwagon.”

Toeing the dissatisfied line, he continued “I have to base my conjecturing about Brooklyn’s broader music industry on my observations of Craigslist. Every drummer ad on there is like ‘we’re amazing, we’re the next big thing.’”

It had a picture of a Rottweiller on it. Spread out Of course, the situation was different with actual in the yellow foamed, medium sized room was an human contact. “Actually, people in this building are ungodly tangle of wires, pedals, flashing lights and really chill, and places I’ve played, the general quality drum pads. of music is higher than average,” Isaac admitted.

I was in the lair of Mouthus, a longtime noise outfit The rest of the band agreed: once you actually get to who have put out records on Load and Ecstatic know people in bands, everyone is generally, basically, Peace among others. for the most part, pretty cool. So maybe, notions of this “pretension” thing are really just a defense The duo, consisting of Nate, at the door, and mechanism to preemptively combat any sense of Brian, standing bemused across the surly chasm personal deficiency while swimming in a talent pool of technology, have been playing in Flood since it that could drown a giant. opened. Respiratory static cycled through the amps as the conversation lurched forward.

Next, walking the middle of the hallway, in the center of Flood, I felt a serious vibrating tremor, walking Interruptions are generally less friendly for Mouthus. closer to studio 30, the vibration developing from “Usually it’d be something like ‘dude, we’re trying to the sound of a lawnmower inside a washing machine record, could you turn it down,’” said Nate. dropped into a storm on the open ocean as the earth is sucked into a blackhole.

Over the years they’ve seen the place change; nominally. “The trash doesn’t get changed as much, I knocked. I knocked. I knocked. there’s more holes in the bathroom halls, uhhh, they stopped restocking the vending machines,” said Eventually a disheveled, bearded guy opened the door. Nate, smirking and staring down.

He was wearing a shirt that said “rottweiller” on it.

Tenements Some of their memories of the studio are less than savory ”I’ve definitely waded through knee or thigh deep Gowanus water a couple times practicing here,” said Nate. That can’t be safe.

“It’s not pleasant either,” said Nate, before Brian chimed in “that’s probably why we play what we play.”

Mouthus is the band that Flood forgot, the well sealed off from dilution by the force of the squall that comes from those still wheezing amps. They’re so far down the band road that the question “WHY?” can’t be formatted into the standard “Effort + Time = Expected Results” equation. I asked why anyway.

“I don’t know, it has been happening for so long I don’t really think about it too much. Play, tour, write, work, record…it’s its own beast,” said Brian.

And judging from everyone else at Flood, that beast is, to the surprise of no one, alive and kicking.

... Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are ...

- T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

T

his story starts in our state senator’s office on Flatbush Avenue, detours to the parking lot of the Brooklyn Museum four years ago and ends up in church. It’s a search for community in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is a tribal place. Some of the tribes are real, some of them are invented on the spot or by a New York Times article, but the impulse to divide – though unspoken – runs deep.

The Chabad Hasidic Jews have Kingston Avenue. The Chinese have 8th Avenue south of the cemetery. The West Indians have Nostrand, Bedford, and Southern Flatbush. The upper middle class white people have a veritable grid: 7th Avenue, 5th Avenue, North Flatbush, and Union. The hipsters have Vanderbilt and, more and more, Washington. Even Franklin is starting to feel a touch. It may not be planned, but the borough’s geography is segregated by default. And none of the groups are talking to each other. In between the main streets it sometimes feels like no-man’s land – gas stations, warehouses, and row after row of silent houses and churches – some of them obviously abandoned by groups that clawed a foothold at one point but have since packed up and moved on, churned out in the ongoing tidal surges of immigrant Brooklyn. Sometimes it seems like the geography is the only thing that stays the same, the only common element.

But geography has a corollary: Politics.

I went to Senator Eric Adams office on Flatbush Avenue because he’s one of the few things I was sure we had in common. His district is centered around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, Brooklyn Chinatown, Prospect Heights, Lefferts Gardens, Crown Heights, Borough Park, and (according to the New York Senate website) two neighborhoods I haven’t even heard of: Wingate and Weeksville. It’s borough president Marty Markowitz’s old district, the heart of Brooklyn.

Adams’ storefront was small, painted blue like a campaign flyer. The lobby was crowded. A bearded man in a blue bandana and leather Harley Davidson jacket was taking up most of a couch, and two women were waiting next for the senator. It was senator as service industry, bustling like a small-town doctor’s office.

Senator Adams’ assistant came out to usher me in.

Adams is a big middle-aged black man with a short mustache and a shiny bald head. I told him why I’d come – looking for community - and he sat back, reflecting for

30

Senator Eric Adams, photographed in his office

The Politics of Diversity

by Andrew Smith Edwards photos by Walker Esner

a moment. His desk was covered in photos of him with different constituents including what looked like the class of a Hasidic shul. It was clear he’d considered the problem before.

“We’ve got black people from Bermuda and Birmingham,” Adams said.

The first weekend I was in Brooklyn, I ended up at the dance party in the parking lot behind the Brooklyn Museum. It was a hot summer night and the crowd looked like it might if the whole 20th district threw a massive block party. There were white people, black people, old, young, black men with do-rags and grills, lesbians couples, Hasidic men, hipsters, yuppies, dreadlocks, baby strollers.

Everyone was dancing. An old black man led people near me in Soul Train. The guys with grills and dorags helped out, popping and up and screaming “party over here,” diamonds sparkling in their silver teeth, and getting answers from groups of dancers all around the parking lot. It went on until the museum guards had to kick everyone out. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and I haven’t seen anything like it since.

Adams said that the district, from a politician’s perspective is broken up into different groups led by the borough’s power brokers: religious leaders, school principals, anyone, Adams said, who has the power to provide a service -- physical, spiritual, or social.

dams said the way to experience the real Brooklyn community, the city of churches, was to step out, to interact with other enclaves, ask questions. Adams suggested going to a barbershop. Instead, I figured I’d go to the source. I decided to go church.

“That power can provide an audience,” Adams said. Enough of those can elect a state senator.

Adams said he knew from experience. He said he’d been a founding member of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, which gives out at least $1000 in grant money each month, and gives seminars teaching people how to deal with police in their neighborhoods. That had given him enough profile so that when the time came for him to run, he was already on a first name basis with many leaders.

Just down the block from my house, on the corner of Union and Brooklyn Avenues is St. Marks, a West Indian Anglican church, as good a place to go as any.

“It’s amazing how we live among each other and know so little about each other,” Adams said. “We’re the U.N. of the outer boroughs, but under the surface tranquility of this neighborhood there are tensions that exist… All those like minds not only share space, they share stereotypes.”

Even race, the lazy short-hand of community, was nonsensical here.

Keeping them together isn’t easy. Adams had recently given a speech in the state senate chambers in favor of gay marriage, something he knew might offend some of his more conservative, church-going constituents.

“We have a strong religious base and the second largest LGBT community in the state,” Adams said.

“It makes it complicated. My job is to show the correlation: people suffering. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or where you live. Wrong is wrong.”

A

It was Sunday morning. I entered the sanctuary at the height of the service. There were two lines of people making their way forward to take the bread and wine, slowly shuffling up to the minister standing at front of the room to the music of the organ. The room was bright and big with a dull tang of incense in the air. Huge stained-glass windows with pictures of the saints flooded the room with light. One figure was in a suit and tie: Martin Luther King, Jr. Here’s Senator Adams on what he does at community events: “The first thing I do is scan the room looking for someone who looks like me. Once I’ve got my foot in the door, I can branch out.”

I realized I was doing the same thing, scanning the crowd for an in, someone who looked like me. There were none.

However, having made the speech Adams said he told LGBT community leaders that they must step outside their own interests if they really wanted district support the next time gay marriage came up.

I asked him what they would think of me, if I tried to branch out.

“Gear up. For the next time they should already have a resume -- stood up for something that has nothing to do with them, so people know that they are part of their community,” Adams said.

Adams, of course, was.

So we’ve got a set of boxes, the grid, the tribes.

Adams’ goal was to get those boxes talking to each other enough to realize they have common interests.

It’s a reasonable goal for a politician, admirable even.

I guess I was looking for something more, a sort of dream of Brooklyn. A memory.

He smiled: “Is he a cop?”

I tried to be inconspicuous, but the whole church was, in effect, walking past me on parade. Men in dark gray suits and women in beautiful hats, young women, old people, teenagers, middle-aged – this was a whole neighborhood, on display looking their best. I’ve never been so glad I wore a tie.

The procession ended and a man in white robes struck up a song: “Let my People Go.” A man

standing next to me was getting into the music, swaying back and forth. He was wearing a yellow knit sweater, slacks, and extremely polished shoes, and he was belting out harmony in a beautiful tenor.

I hesitated at first, then started to sing along. We’d sung this song in church when I was a kid. Nothing could have seemed more natural. The harmonies of the old spirituals are deep; they vibrate not so much in the air, as somewhere deep down under your skin.

They make your rib cage vibrate.

A prayer was offered, and the church struck up the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the minister and altar boys, in robes and swinging incense burners, paraded out of the church, followed, soon after, by the congregation. Earlier, a deacon had asked me why I was there. Now I heard my answer echoing down the line of parishioners: “He’s from the neighborhood. He’s visiting.” Old ladies smiled at me. One gripped my hand. “This is a happy church,” she said, beaming out under a powder blue Sunday hat. “You should join!” She called out her friend to give me the church bulletin, which had membership instructions on the back.

As I stepped out the main door and walked down the steps into the street, I realized I hadn’t asked anyone a single question. I had however, gotten a better sense of what I’d gone to Adams’ office looking for to begin with.

Brooklyn has never been static. It’s a stage with a rotating cast. Adams, as a politician, was just a kind of stage manager, scrambling to keep up with the manic energies of the place. Meanwhile, the very blankness of the place, its inability to coalesce for more than a memorable summer night here and there, might be more a strength than the weakness or lack I first thought it to be. It allows people of all kinds to build their own thing, their own temple, their own world, in this place, to re-appropriate it and assert their power within the existing structure, of which Adams’ office is just a part.

And maybe the fact that we don’t talk, yet, that many of these communities are still mute to each others’ ears, suggests less of problem than an opportunity.

Brooklyn in 2010 is not the melting pot of 50 years ago, but a mosaic. Each bright, undimmed color is a chance to experience something rich and new.

It wasn’t what I’d gone to Adams looking for, but perhaps it was something more.

“We live now in our own little silos, but people are more than willing to explain their culture to you, if you just ask,” Adams had said near the end of our conversation. “You can just exist in your own little universe, but if you’re willing to step out, sit, start a conversation, it’s amazing how people are willing to talk with each other.”

I resolved to take that advice to heart.

Crime Scenes

by Samuel Carter additional reporting by Matt Levy illustration by Kyle Muller

B

etween 1945 and 1972, Crazy Joey Gallo was the leader of the Jukebox Gang in Redhook, Brooklyn. A criminal without abandon, Gallo was as much a media star as a murderer. His antics were fodder for the local papers, and he carried his own press clippings in his wallet.

As a kid, Gallo was King of the Cockroach Gang on 4th Ave. and Sackett St. He dropped out of Brooklyn High School of Automotive Trades and was soon committed to the Kings County Hospital psych ward. This is where he spent his 21st birthday, and where he earned the name "Crazy Joey Gallo."

He had two brothers. Larry, the brains, the order, the control. Kid Blast,the youngest, wiry, and not groomed for power. Joey was the energy, the star, the power. Together they formed the Jukebox Gang. They had a legitimate business in jukebox sales and delivery, but padded their wallets like other gangsters by racketeering and security.

Gallo’s probably most famous for his death. He was gunned down at Umberto's Clamhouse in 1972. Here are four other lesser-known moments from the borough of Kings, imagined from the perspective of Louie Cadillac, Gallo’s long-time associate.

Jukebox Delivery It was my first gig. “Get the box outta the back.”

Joey shoved me out the truck. He was drunk, and I guessed he didn’t wanna deal with the owner, a new face on Carroll. Joey walked around back, threw down the gate, and waited.

I stood stupid. The jukebox was wide as my arms, heavier than a boat. It had been yanked straight out of the wall and dropped in the truck just before this job. Probably by three guys. How the hell was I gonna do this?

I climbed up and put my back to the box. Bracing my feet against the back of the cab, I pushed back. Slid the box toward the edge by inches.

“Watch it, Louie—nails’ll scratch the glass.”

Joey’s contribution.

Kid Blast had found this one off Flatbush. It worked, he said, but I wasn’t sure. The wiring was split, the buttons worn. The records looked a decade out. I flipped over, stretched out flat— arms pushed the box closer, feet slipping on the splintered bed.

Soon enough, the box was right on the edge. I climbed down, squinted. How the hell?

Before I could blink, Joey was up above me on the truck bed. He gave a kick. I jumped back.

Glass scattered to the curb. Joey looked at me with one eye and pulled a bat from the truck’s cab. He smashed the jukebox up, right in front of

the owner’s joint.

afternoons on the parade grounds. There wasn’t even a plan, we all just knew what to do.

“Always get the money up front,” he said. We got goin’ and that was that.

Meet Cleo The Longshoreman’s Restroom was a few doors down from Joey’s. It was Mondo the Midget’s joint, that freaky friend of my boss. He gave me the creeps. At three feet and a half you didn’t notice him at first, but once you did you couldn’t stop staring.

The first night I met Cleo, I was at the Restroom from about 11 on, getting drunk,staying quiet, playing cards. Mondo was up at least $250, and he giggled every time he stood on his chair to pull in the chips.

Joey was playing, too, and I wasn’t keeping close track. But from the look on his face he was down even more than Mondo was up. He took a slug of whisky, and knocked his chair over as he stood up.

We set out around 4 o’clock, hiked across 9th and down through Prospect.

And once we crossed Caton, there was no backing down. I watched the Southies flinch the second they saw us. I swear I saw a couple run away. I was carrying a blackjack and a switch blade, and charged down the hill. We had at least twenty with us—they seemed like a bigger crowd.

I remember pinning this ugly son down and cut his face. That’s when I got this nick in my ear.

One of his buddies locked my neck in his elbow and ground a ring into the side of my head.

It felt like half an hour,but it was prob six or seven minutes when the wagons actually showed up. We scrambled, bloody, and scattered. A few got picked up, but no harm. They didn’t mess with Mooney’s family no more , so far as I know.

That was a great day.

Protectin' the Coop “Get Cleo,” he barked at Mondo, who started to laugh again.

Roy Roy the Worm, also in the game, walked away from the table, got his coat, and left. I was trying not to look nervous, but Mondo and Crazy Joey were just staring at each other, grinning.

Mondo unbolted a door I hadn’t even noticed before, and disappeared down a stairwell. Joey came over and sat next to me. “Don’t worry, Cleo’s one hell of a pussy.”

A metallic clang rolled up from the basement, along with some frantic, shuffled steps.

“Louie—meet Cleo.”

That thing was on a leash. A lion, on a leash. Cleo yawned, and snapped back at her tail. Mondo patted Cleo’s haunches, which came up about to his forehead. He walked over to the fridge and pulled out a steak.

A Day At the Park I think it was 1950. Back then, I was running around with the Red Hook Tigers. We were kids, you know. Hated school, couldn’t wait to get our knocks. Joey was cookin’ up his own plans, but he still hanged out with us.

I don’t know exactly how it started, but I remember that someone said that Capo, a lieutenant with the South Brooklyn Boys, had been out with Mooney’s sister and felt her up.

She wasn’t happy, ran home, told her brother.

The South Brooklyn Boys lived on the other side of the Canal. We knew they’d spend most

Bugs had suggested looking in the lot behind 47 President. Chicken wire. Where the hell was I gonna find chicken wire?

Joe Profaci, the Olive Oil King or whatever from Bath Beach really had it in for Crazy Joey. I was sick of hearing about it. Last week Joey made me search his car with a magnifying glass, and then hose the thing down. “It’ll short the bomb.” He said.

I turned the corner round the front of 47 and saw four guys carrying mattresses into 51 President, our de-facto HQ. Walking over, I said to Bugs “What’s that for.” He snickered, “Just get the fuckin’ wire.” I walked back down to Columbia and over to a shop. No dice. I walked back to 51.

“I saw it, down there—quit messin’, we don’t have time for your sad boy shit.” Bugs pointed with a ball-peen hammer, drawing an invisible line between himself and the water. I set out again, and after some rooting in the trash, I found four old pigeon coops, stripped them and brought ‘em back.

Joey wanted the windows carpeted with the wire.

“Grenades.” He said. “They’ll throw hand bombs in here, just you wait.”

I was putting in the last screen when someone shouted “Profaci!” The front door slammed shut and the mattresses went up against the walls, pinned in place by our backs.

Joey looked over at me. “Just you wait, Louie.

Just you wait.”

Sam Rosenthal

ProjektDarkwave

by Dale W. Eisinger photos by Sarah Wilmer

he headquarters of one of the longestrunning independent record labels in America – and certainly the longest in its genre – sits hidden in a squat red-orange warehouse on Fourth Avenue at First Street in Gowanus. The graffitiscrawled space houses Projekt Records, run by Sam Rosenthal, its progenitor, since the brand’s inception in 1983.

T

by Steve Roach and As Lonely As Dave Bowman; the straightforward dark rock by Autumn’s Gray Solace, Melodyguild, Mire, and others; the subtle new wave in the electronic etch of Android Lust.

Rosenthal also coined the terms darkwave and dark cabaret, performance genres non-existent 25 years ago. Today on Projekt, Voltaire and Rosenthal’s own band Black Tape For A Blue Girl lead the charge in that department.

With asymmetrical black hair, a small, wiry frame, and strong, jutting features, Sam could play the part of a late-90’s emo kid, perhaps without the naïveté.

Then again, who knows? His label has consistently released music into a niche market of dark and introspective listeners. Often, the audience carries with it Goth, a term somewhat negatively associated with mall-core, if not for theatrics or want of a more practical worldview. In critical circles, arguing the more juvenile of Goth, emo, or death metal is like naming shades of gray – obsessions with newRomantic motifs the three share seem to have run their course. But Rosenthal, and by extension Projekt, happens to be more pragmatic about his business than Goth implies. And besides – it’s only a label.

And you’ve probably never heard any of that.

“Goth was an appropriate description of who was listening to it. But the music itself… it’s always been more the mood,” Rosenthal said recently from the Projekt office, cluttered with old promo posters, boxes and boxes of CDs, and even a box of Projektembossed coffee mugs.

A father of one – Sasha, seven – Rosenthal dresses all in black: a two-toned striped hoodie, a Projekt T-shirt, jeans, and Chelsea boots. In a way he’s fitting a role, but a decidedly different one. Projekt is known as the premier independent American label putting out Goth, but the term isn’t all-inclusive. He rifled around for others, post-punk and coldwave among them.

Really, there are numerous sides to Projekt’s sound and one term alone doesn’t give any of them a fair shake. There’s the drifting, zoned-out ambience, led

That’s the strange dichotomy of Projekt – while nothing in its catalog stands out to most these days as even familiar, the label is still trucking right along.

In the midst of a critical minefield, a genre known more for style than music, and a catalog of relative unknowns, the label is in as good a place as ever, at least as far as putting out music goes.

Even with a massive downturn in sales at the end of the last century, the label has more recently gone through exponential growth. Ten years ago, Projekt released its one-hundredth recording; in 2009 the label put out number 230. So after nearly thirty years of operation, there is no sign of letting up. Again: you’ve probably not heard much, if any, of it.

“I often think I’m the only one who has heard everything on the label,” he said.

After 27 years at the helm of Projekt, it’s still hard for even Rosenthal to pin down the label’s ethos.

“It’s been more diverse than what other people think.

The ambient fans sort of think of it as this ambient label. The Voltaire fans think it’s a Goth label with some weird ambient stuff,” he said.

P

rojekt began as an avenue to release Rosenthal’s own music, which he described in the beginning as “mopey and nonmainstream,” insisting there wasn’t a name for the sounds that interested him back then (this also being the reason he penned the names for the other genres). By now, his band has put out 10 proper full-

length releases of orchestrated, melancholy rock, driven by theatrical vocals and dark waves of synth.

Couple this with insistent arpeggios on a couple acoustic instruments—mainly piano and guitar— and you’ve got the bulk of much of Projekt’s sound.

But then there is the swirling, electronic ambient, lulling the listener into hypnotic states. And the big wall-of-sound shoegaze that appears from time to time as well. Projekt’s records can be listless, unidirectional at times, but when trying to relate this darker side of personal affect, epiphany isn’t the most important aspect; these artists seem content at the bottom of the manic wave.

“I’ve been doing this for my entire adult life. I can’t imagine doing anything else,” Rosenthal said.

What began as a hobby for Rosenthal in college quickly turned into his full-time job. He distributed Projekt Records out of his house in Los Angeles while pursuing his film degree. The label grew organically, and before long he had a couple employees. Projekt advertised free catalogs in the back of Spin and other magazines, amassing a database of some 40,000 interested listeners. Soon after, he had an office. And not long after that again, Projekt began its trek east, landing in Chicago in the 1990s.

“In Chicago it kind of went crazy. I had 11 employees and lots of expenses and I found myself all day being in charge of the employees then working all night to get my own work done.”

Now, with declines in sales in the wake of a collapsing music industry, Projekt runs a staff of two.

Shea Hovey runs promotions, and she’s a formidable presence. A taller woman with neon-pink bangs and tufts of blue gracing her face, tendrils of silver and azure tumble from her head like electric dreadlocks.

She is pierced to the nines and strikingly beautiful in an unconventional way. Shea runs most the electronic correspondence directed at the label – its main way of now conducting business. Sure, they still send out CDs the old-fashioned way in labeled

Athan Maroulis, Vocals. Black Tape for a Blue Girl

boxes the postman has to pick up. But in the days of Chicago, it was all by hand, and it was all mail order.

“There must have been at least twenty mailings….

So what’s that? Four-hundred thousand catalogs?”

Rosenthal says, recalling the total number of Projekt mail orders he sent out. “That’s why I needed eleven employees.”

But this was before the drastic shift to online, digital music, when even Projekt could sell a viable market share of actual CDs. Rosenthal predicted the collapse of the major labels in a 2000 interview, saying back then the big labels were too caught up in profit and not focused enough on artist relations.

This led the RIAA to the wrong course of action against Napster and other file-sharing sites that hit the scene around that time – a huge part of Projekt’s loss has been illegal downloads.

“Now a band that used to sell ten thousand maybe sells two thousand. But it does keep the music flowing, keeps it coming out. And legal digital sales have been growing to make up monetarily for the difference. Obviously less units are being sold, but artists are still being compensated that way.”

Brian Viglione, Percussion. Black Tape for a Blue Girl

Even still a little timid about what he does and the success he’s culled over three decades, Rosenthal admits he had a different idea about how downloading music would benefit record sales.

“I had more of a utopian belief in the positive benefits of it,” he said. “I thought digital was a great thing because people would hear the music and they would love it so much they would run out and buy it – not so.”

Ultimately, his prescience in the fate of the industry led him to Brooklyn to completely downsize his operation.

“Projekt is the easiest now in Brooklyn, even though it’s probably the most expensive place to live. I mean I live three blocks from here. I walk my son to school next to the Gowanus Canal. It’s all sort of like a small town because I really stay in a small area.”

Above the Projekt office is its distribution warehouse, an expansive space lined with thousands and thousands of cataloged CDs. They are stacked ceiling high in some spaces, all packed neatly into cardboard boxes and labeled meticulously by hand.

There’s an old Apple IIE crammed between a couple boxes (the office now uses iMacs) and an entire room is filled with freeze-dried coffee (the last tenant left it, Sam organized it). At the back of the warehouse, there’s a smaller room with a covered window letting in shafts of blue light. A solitary leather jacket, Motorhead-style with big lapels and a clunky zipper, sags on a wire hanger, looking eerie in the gloom.

Rosenthal picked it up in Mexico years ago, and hasn’t worn it in ages.

“It’s just not long enough – I can’t stay warm as I’d like.”

And somehow, that’s the perfect metaphor for the entire operation: while there could be another level of stylistic posturing going on, in the end, Rosenthal just wants to get done what he needs to get done.

Yes, Projekt tends to be a label pigeonholed for something beyond its tunes. But defining success to Rosenthal is as simple some days as choosing the right jacket, letting nine employees go, or knowing when to cut your losses on the retail market. He is Projekt Records, and Projekt Records is him.

Sam and Sasha

Black Tape for a Blue Girl

Shit you shoulda

GOOGLED

by Sarah Vandervennet

puppets and grand army arch

red hook green

For a brief period during 2007, the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Grand Army Plaza was more than just a memorial—it was a misplaced roadside attraction that belonged somewhere in the middle of Kansas, sharing a stretch of highway with a clown museum. Within that very arch resided New York’s Puppet Free Lending Library, home to a collection of giant puppets and the premise for a Stephen King novel. But the puppets were removed in order to prepare for renovations on the memorial. Or so they say. One of these days someone will stumble across the mass graveyard in Prospect Park and dig up corpses with marionette strings attached to their limbs. However, the Puppeteer’s Cooperative, the group that manages the Free Lending Library, swears they keep the puppets around for public use. According to Sara Peattie of the Puppeteer’s Cooperative, “We do parades and pageants, but those are sort of episodic…It kind of goes in and out of favor. It’s kind of like folk memory.” For Peattie the appeal of making and using puppets is that it is both personal and communal.

“You can be by yourself or you can have hordes of people.” Now most of the puppets are in Boston, while a few remain at Brooklyn College. So if you want to get in on that fun and throw the adult-version of your fourth birthday party— or if you just want a puppet all to yourself—let me ask you this, to quote the Puppeteer’s Cooperative website: "Have you considered inflatables?"

Redhook Green is technology and media entrepreneur Jay Amato’s model for a perfect world in which Mother Nature doesn’t curse the human race. Amato’s vision for a net-zero energy building aspires toward total efficiency, starting with its very construction. Located on Dikeman and Conover, the approximately 4,000 square foot building will function both as a home and workplace and incorporate local materials and renewable sources of energy. This place is going to be decked out with all the bells and whistles. We’re talking hybrid solar panels, high efficiency electric heat pumps, even plans for a solar powered charger for an electric car and motorcycle. “Privately, I hope that my project might serve as an example of what could be done with new technology and new building processes to minimize our reliance on fossil fuel electric generation. I'd like to see more net zero-energy buildings and possibly even solar energy (mini) farms to make Red Hook the neighborhood to move to renewable energy in the city.” Come October 1, 2010, the projected completion date for Redhook Green, Amato will have introduced an icon of environmental efficiency into Red Hook. Assuming, of course, that everything goes according to plan. Amato might have to replant a few rainforests to make the numbers work, but seeing the way the o-zone’s been acting up lately, it’s worth a shot.

brooklyn flea

lovecraft horror red hook brooklyn

Everyone has a niche at the Brooklyn Flea Market—Kumquat Cupcakery combines the best parts of the two best meals, breakfast and dessert, in their maple bacon cupcakes; KG+AB makes porcelain Chihuahua heads. Then there are the vendors, who make you think someone’s Great Aunt Hoarder just died and left a lucky young soul a mess of random old shit. Since we have yet to hit Great Depression status, that lucky inheritor can throw away Auntie’s used and reused piles of tin foil and sell the rest of the bric-a-brac for five times what it’s actually worth. For Doug Anson, The Brooklyn Flea isn’t an artisan’s market. It’s the New York version of a suburban neighborhood garage sale. But you don’t have to dig through boxes of old dolls and VHS tapes and unopened infomercial ab-buster machines get to the good stuff. Anson sells a hodgepodge of antique souvenirs and collectible windows into the everyday lives of past generations: vintage key chains, postcards, pins and cuff links. The stuff from decades-old junk drawers. He calls his makeshift shop “Sea Hair,” an appropriately eclectic title. Among his treasures are a few artifacts of the earliest forms of photography, the amalgamated images known as ferrotypes. These flimsy pieces of tin are the wallet-size family portraits of the 1850’s, the spectral faces of the people who owned all this crap.

There’s a reason you’ve never heard of Red Hook’s very own claim to literary fame, H.P. Lovecraft. This guy’s life sucked. First his dad dies, then his grandpa dies, plunging his family into financial ruin. Then his mom goes bat-shit crazy and dies. To top it all off, when he finally marries, Lovecraft’s wife leaves him in the seedy port town of Red Hook plagued by “herds of evil-looking foreigners.”

(Apparently in 1925, when Lovecraft wrote his story “The Horror at Red Hook,” immigrants of all denominations sang incantations together at their satanic cult meetings.) “The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.” Yep, this guy was a classic case of misplaced anger. “The Horror at Red Hook” basically boils down to a list of racial slurs. Throw in some black magic and a poor excuse for a plotline—Detective Thomas Malone to the rescue—and there you have it.

Ultimately, despite police efforts to put a stop to this pagan iniquity, Lovecraft condemns Red Hook to the hellish melting pot it was, and maybe still is. “As for Red Hook—it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear.”

photo illustration by Walker Esner

The Pintchik Oracle?

by Valerie Lapinski

I didn’t Google the Pintchik Oracle. I just walked over there.

It was snowing on Flatbush and Bergen. I looked up at the big LED screen outside the hardware store. When the Oracle is “active,” there’s a telephone outside for people to ask questions, and an answer appears on the screen. It’s not clear who provides the answer. But today there were no cryptic or cheeky messages to delight passersby. Just “Pintchik” in block letters, dripping pixel by pixel down the screen, rippling like a beaded curtain.

I went inside and bought some paint. (I really did have to buy some paint.)

I asked the paint guy if he knew the Oracle. Tom, his nametag said. “Tom,” I said.

The Oracle is only active when a certain writer is not on book tour. The Oracle is probably Jonathan Safran Foer. One blogger unearthed a press release naming the Pintchik Oracle one of his “projects.”

You know the moment in the Wizard of Oz when they catch the guy operating all those levers and buttons? Heartbreaking.

Suddenly I was torn between not wanting to know for sure, and fulfilling my mission to catch him red-handed. I called the store and a woman named Faith answered. “Do you know who the Oracle is?” I asked.

“A few people know,” Faith said. “But not me.”

“You’re a journalist, aren’t you?” he said. “We’ve had a lot of journalists come in here.” He gave me an I-won’t-budge face along with my receipt.

I asked her when the Oracle might be back. Faith took my phone number. I heard her pencil on the page. “I’ll have Mr. Pintchik call you.”

In my zeal to solve the mystery, I’d planned to tirelessly monitor the place for as long as it took. But since all those other reporters already tried, I just went home and Googled it.

But I knew she wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t. I hung up, feeling overwhelming affection toward them, for wanting to protect me. They’re the guardians of the myth. Like parents with Santa Claus, or old ladies with angels. Just trying to keep people like me from killing the magic.

Dozens of articles popped up with findings: the Oracle is a Brooklyn writer.

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