Violet is one of Franke’s only friends (and Violet is terrified of her).
(Source: backofhouse)
At BKLYN Designs last week, Caleb and I shared a little corner of the St. Ann’s Warehouse with an older couple who have been living and working together for many, many years. Their names are Tim and Andrea — I thought, at first, that they must be in their 60s, but Tim told me that their son is 50, which means that unless they were children when they had him, they must be at least in their mid-70s. They do tromp l’oeil in rich people’s homes to make a living — on the side, they make gorgeous gilded art deco coffee tables in a tiny studio in Dumbo. Their son is a career bike messenger, still working in the city.
For the past 22 years, they’ve lived in my dream building — the lofty old school house on the corner of Vanderbilt and Sterling in Prospect Heights. When I first moved to the neighborhood in 2005, I swear I walked by that building every day, and said out loud, “I would give anything to live there.”
Today, it’s too expensive for all of us. But Tim & Andrea bought their 2-bedroom for a song in the early 1990s — when they sold it earlier this month, they made an 800% profit. They’re moving because the neighborhood has changed too rapidly. “They planted trees in the middle of Vanderbilt Avenue!” Tim exclaimed of the main street in Prospect Heights, which is bursting with new restaurants and artisanal food stores. Until a few years ago, all there were was barber shops, liquor stores and one tiny restaurant. In the summer, there were stoop parties. In the winter, desolation.
They’re also moving because it will give them a nice little nest egg for when the work runs dry, as it always does when you’re an artist, and you’re making a living from it. They bought a studio apartment in a doorman building — “A doorman building, can you imagine?” — in Brooklyn Heights. They’ll give away most of their belongings — “We’re tired of them anyway,” Andrea said — even though she admits that she’ll have trouble getting rid of her jackets and shoes. “My shoes!” she proclaimed. “I put so much working into taking care of them!”
The one thing they’ll keep is their full bed, which they’ve been sleeping in for many years. “When we travel, and the bed is a queen, I don’t like it, because I can’t find her in it,” Tim says. They still sleep close together. Tim has a big handlebar moustache. He gently squeezes your arm when you pass him. Andrea is tiny and dresses all in black. She has a white bob, and a face that, although she says she hasn’t gotten any treatments, looks as though it’s been lifted and tucked a few times. “Every night, I put cream on it,” she told me. When my sister, who works for a plastic surgeon, came to visit the booth, Andrea asked her for her card for the future.
They drank their daily allotment of free Modelos out of plastic cocktail cups. Throughout the weekend, people came to visit them. A man with tattoos and dreadlocks who does the metal work on the bases of their tables. An Icelandic woman who lives in the apartment next door to them. “They collect rare music, that’s their career,” Andrea told me. “When you walk in their apartment, there’s no furniture, just shelves and shelves and shelves of records.”
I see them, and sometimes I see myself and Caleb, although not this morning, after he gave me some lip when I asked him to take out the recycling. I knocked his bike over on purpose on my way out the door to walk Franke. I have a bad temper. Caleb likes to be the boss.
“Go get a room,” Tim and Andrea joked whenever I would lean against Caleb, and turn my face towards him for a kiss.
I asked them if I could interview them. But interviewing people is what I do for a living, and it can be a fucking pain in the ass to transcribe, and sift, and edit, and reorganize the way that people tell their own stories so that it fits some idea of what you think is interesting. So instead, I think that I’ll write a story about how Tim and Andrea met, entirely made up. It will probably really be a story about me.
There was a point when Caleb and I looked at each other yesterday, and both started hysterically crying. He from the stress of finishing his booth for BKLYN Design by tomorrow; me from the pressure of deadlines.
The good news is that there are lilacs blooming like weeds all over Brooklyn. In the rain today, they bow.
A Gigantic Pile of Shit: Some Thoughts On Brooklyn
One sort of “thought meme” that is making a pretty heavy circulation in the media right now is the idea that Brooklyn has become a global brand that is taking over the world. The idea is best summarized in a New Yorker article on Vice by Lizzie Widdicombe. The company seems like it’s run by a bunch of complete assclowns, but might be onto something in terms of both making money off media, and reporting news stories to young people:
“Vice has grown in lockstep with the spread of hipster culture: what was once a Brooklyn-based trend has become the lingua franca of ‘global youth,’ as Vice’s executives call it. Since Brooklyn is a brand, it is no longer necessary to live there. Smith [the founder of the magazine], for example, lives in Tribeca.”
I don’t really understand why Brooklyn being a brand would preclude one from living here. For instance, why wouldn’t Smith want to walk to work? I think Widdicombe is implying that “cool kids” used to be the ones who lived in Brooklyn, while finance stiffs and boring people lived in Manhattan. But now that Brooklyn is no longer cool — ie, it’s become an “everyman” sort of thing — people will no longer feel it necessary to live here to validate their images. Or something. I’m not sure. BLAH.
The Red Hook Criterium: Were You Cool Enough To Be There?
Last night, I had the good fortune to stumble upon the Red Hook Crit, an “illegal” fixed gear bike race in the neighborhood that borders my apartment.
Held in the parking lot of the Red Hook Cruise Terminal, which on a normal night is lit only by the hulking white abandoned storage facilities that buffet the parking lot, the race is an international event that will travel to Barcelona and Milan later this year.
“The Puerto Ricans kept horses in the fields where there’s a Superfund site. It was very nice. It used to be overgrown with grass. There were two or three ponies, and a horse. The city cracked down eventually. People could do stuff before the city got wise.”
—Peter Bellamy on taking photographs in Brooklyn in the 1970s
What the old ladies who own the vintage store near me think a hipster would write on Valentine’s Day. (at Saint Lucy)
A Walk In The Park
Given that AJ and I are both early risers, we decided to take our dogs—her ridgeback Violet, and my rabid gopher Franke—to Prospect Park this morning, where dogs are allowed off the leash before 9 AM.
The problem with discovering something new in New York is that at least 100,000 other people have discovered it before you. Like, I could write this long post right now about how lovely it was to be outside, watching Franke and Violet roll around in patches of other dogs’ urine, while the sun rose, and AJ and I waxed poetic about life. About the curious ecosystem of dog and owner that exists in the park, where everyone chats friendly, even when their dog is clearly an aggressive little bitch—ahem, Franke. About the amazingly happy lesbian, loving life with the accompaniment of no fewer than 10 dogs, who said that watching Franke run up to her pack, bark like a monster, and then run away, was the “best moment of her day.”
Ever since I dropped Franke in my parent’s pool last weekend, she’s been terribly behaved.
I don’t know if it’s because the cold water shocked her brain. Or if it’s because she realized, when I flung my iPhone down, and jumped in after her, screaming, that she owned me. Or if it’s just because she is shaken up that Caleb, her rightful owner, isn’t around. But I cannot walk the little bitch without her barking her face off.
The second I take my eyes off her, she bites a random person on the street. She gave my 9 months pregnant friend Cora’s husband a contusion on his leg. She’s adopted this sort of wheezing, squeaking, cascading “Eh hhh hhh, Eh hhh hhh” noise, that crescendoes as she gets more anxious. When I put on her halter, she bows her head, softens her legs, and acts like I’m abusing her.
In my defense, this is better than she acted when I first started dating Caleb. Imagine how great our sex must be for me to have stuck around.
Everyone has something to say about how I should be handling her, my grandmother and mother the most vocal of them all. “Brienne, you have to be calm around her!” my grandmother yelled as Franke took off like a bullet from my arms, and went straight for her legs.
“Do you see what it’s like to have children?” my mother asked on the phone. “Do you really want one now?”
Yesterday, I spent a little time reading Cesar Millan’s blog, which by the way, isn’t helpful at all.
“Use your body, your mind, and your calm-assertive energy to create an invisible wall that your dog is not allowed to cross. Do it with 100% dedication and focus, and the results may surprise you.”
Um, fuck you, Cesar Millan.
Last night, I tried to put a wall of treats around Franke on our way to the wine store. Literally, I held a treat in my hand, and taunted her with it so she kept her eyes on me, rather than on what was going on around us. Half way down the block, she ate through it, and started barking, hoarsely, with abandon.
We passed the pizza store like this. We passed the Italian men’s club. The men standing outside of it in their undershirts, smoking cigars, said something nice about my ass, but I couldn’t hear it over Franke’s barking, and that really pissed me off.
Outside of the laundry store, two little old ladies sat. When they saw Franke approach, they started laughing their heads off.
“Look at that thing!” the first one said.
“Isn’t she adorable.”
I stopped, first to tell Franke, in a firm, authoritative way, “No.” And then to literally clamp her barking mouth with my hands so that she would stop, for one sweet second, with the yelping.
“You must really appreciate your dog walker,” the first little old lady said, which would be presumptuous most places, but in our white-bread, bourgeois, “Pleasantville” neighborhood must obviously be the norm. I secretly kind of detest it here.
Fortunately, for once, Franke started barking again so loudly that the lady couldn’t hear me say, “You’re looking at her.”
Smiling apologetically, I gave them a small wave. Leaving a trail of silence in our wake, Franke and I continued on our walk.
Yesterday, on my bike, I came across a neon green bird perched on a chain link fence in a construction area alongside the BQE.
A couple was standing next to it, waiting for it to do something.
“Is it hurt?” I asked them.
“I don’t know,” the girl said.
Not one to miss an opportunity to photograph something, I took out my iPhone, and began snapping away. “Look at its little eyes!” I exclaimed as I circulated around it, capturing it from every possible angle. “It’s shutting them. Do you think its about to die?”
“No,” the guy said. “When I was little I lived near this place called Parrot World, and I learned that parrots have these films over their eyes that protect them from the sun.”
“That’s not a parrot,” Caleb said. “That’s a parakeet.”
“Sssh,” I said to him.
“Maybe someone clipped its wings, and now it can’t fly?” I ventured, sticking my face closer to the bird so that I could watch the film open and shut, open and shut. The bird sat there, placidly, and ignored me.
“How did it get to the top of the chain link fence, then?” Caleb said
“It climbed,” I said. “Duh.”
“I don’t think it could climb that high,” the dude from the couple said. “And how would it get over the BQE?”
“Maybe it came off the water?” I ventured. And then, “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I think it’s just sitting there, enjoying life,” the dude said.
“Unlike me,” I joked, waving my iPhone. “I only experience life behind this thing.”
Caleb nodded his head in agreement. Right before we had come upon the parrot, we had been arguing about how much time I spend on my iPhone when I’m supposed to be spending time with him. “I’d say 80% of the time, we’re alone, you’re on that thing,” he said.
“I wasn’t on it when we were watching Prison Break this morning,” I said. “Or last night when I was sleeping.”
“I guess we’re going to get going,” the girl from the couple said. They waved goodbye to us, but not to the parrot.
“Do you think we should take it home?” I asked Caleb.
“No,” he said.
“It looks like it’s sick,” I said.
The bird looked at us, and the film over his eyes opened and closed, opened and closed.
“You should take him home,” a voice said. While we were watching the bird, an elderly couple had creeped up behind us, to see what all the fuss was about.
“Do you think Butters the Cat would eat a parrot?” I asked Caleb.
“That’s not a parrot,” he reminded me.
All of a sudden, the bird darted off the fence, and sped off towards the pier. It jerked and swerved, dropping to the water and then reappearing in the air. After only a few seconds, we lost sight of it completely.
A Day At Fort Tilden
In the past few years, Fort Tilden has become the preferred beach for Brooklyn hipsters to go to on weekends, for a variety of reasons that include proximity to bike paths, relative inacessibility, no lifeguards, topless bathing, the promise of food trucks, and the “x-factor” bonus of abandoned old army bunkers covered in fucking killer graffiti. I say that with deadpan meant to convey sarcasm.
