Big city, small town: photos from a NYC snow day

I never would have guessed how much four years in the South would completely renew my childlike glee at a big snow storm. OK, so I had off today anyway, and should have been doing other work like figuring out my life and preventing homelessness and all that minor nonsense, but there's still that part of me that can't resist screaming "SNOWDAYSNOWDAYNOSCHOOLNOSCHOOLNOSCHOOL!" and running out into the streets. So here's what New York looked like today, with surprises along the way:

30 rock:

Saw a dude proposed in the middle of the ice rink:

she said yes, obvs

Torrential snow pour:

Underground snowfall at Newkirk station:

Outside our front door:

Down Westminster St.:

Christmas trees in Park Slope:

And, of course, the weirdest part of the day, completely randomly running into WSAV reporter and Beaufort County resident Holly Bounds on 5th Ave. this afternoon.

Her and her husband are here on vacation this weekend. This all reinforces my theory about New York: Big city, small town.

It's a city of 8.2 million, but the amount of random run-ins and such I've already seen in New York City makes it seem like friggin Mayberry. Case in point: I met Barry Schwartz for dinner last September when I was home in Jersey for a little while. Walking down the street, we ran into the intern friend of J. Cribbs from the Roanoke Times, who just happened to be passing by. Then last month, I told Robin and her roommate I met someone who works for Family Circle. "Oh Jane?" her roommate said. "Yeah, I know Jane."

And to think people are scared of New York City.

I'm living in the new San Francisco?

My first foray into Brooklyn landed me in this decent sublet in the Ditmas Park area, sharing an apartment on the third floor of a massive old Victorian style house complete with a few stained glass windows, ostentatious palatial bathrooms (with signed tiles of Don Mattingly baseball cards, for some reason), along with a reading nook and secret room in my closet that mysteriously has a refrigerator in it. The neighborhood is comfortable and relaxed, quirky in some ways, multicultural with lots of middle eastern families and Halal restaurants and such. Nearby Courtelyou Road has a lefty coffee shop, a nice food coop and a bizarre combination flower shop/bar. Even if it wasn't all that nice, it's only a month sublet anyway, but it's more than adequate.

When I tell people where I live, they usually respond with a sort of "uhh..... where?" look, which is understandable. I half-jokingly tell them it's the new new New Brooklyn. Williamsburg is so over it's hard to remember when it began, I say, and Bed-Stuy just can't get the traction. DITMAS, Y'HEAR?.

It's possible this could one day be true, of course, with the large houses that are starting to draw interest as people are priced out of the rest of Brooklyn.

But New York magazine has already taken it a step further. In their Reasons To Love New York issue, No. 39 is: "Because Ditmas Park is the New San Francisco." Here's the blurb:

What New Yorker with a repressed slacker-hippie side hasn’t fantasized about ditching Gotham for calmer, quainter San Francisco? Some locals have been satisfying that yen by simply moving to Ditmas Park, the Victorian-packed enclave south of Prospect Park. It isn’t just that the West Coast metropolis and the west-of-Flatbush hamlet share an abundance of turn-of-the-century painted ladies (which in Ditmas now fetch up to $1.8 million and reach their height of Gothic-Oriental grandness on both sides of stately Albemarle Road). You can also see similarities in the restaurant scene: The reigning culinary draw, the Farm on Adderley (1108 Cortelyou Rd.; 718-287-3101), references Chez Panisse (okay, that’s in Berkeley, not Frisco) in its strident locavorism and mismatched plates. And Ditmas’s tiny, cozy Cinco de Mayo (1202 Cortelyou Rd.; 718-693-1022) can hold its own in the Mexican brunch department against the Mission District’s Pancho Villa Taqueria (although the latter’s burritos are admittedly better). Then there are the political echoes, with the Beat- beloved City Lights bookstore and Café Trieste intertwining at Vox Pop (1022 Cortelyou Rd.; 718-940-2084), where, on a recent Sunday, you could order a Cesar Chavez personal pizza, buy lefty tracts, and listen to a live drum circle from a group called Manhattan Samba. “The vibe there’s very San Francisco,” says local Joshua Levy, managing editor of change.org, a “social-action blog network” based in, naturally, S.F. “It’s a bunch of communists hanging out and drinking Fair Trade coffee while reading conspiracy books,” he half-jokes. Not that every Ditmas denizen embraces the comparison. Political-contribution records show that chunks of Ditmas actually lean red, notes Liena Zagare, who writes the popular Ditmas Park Blog. And Mary Kay Gallagher, a longtime Ditmas Realtor, points out that those Bay Area Victorians are mostly stuck together. “Ours are detached,” she says. “That means a driveway and a garage and a backyard.” But is it big enough to leave your heart in?

I like this area -- A group of us went to the Farm on Friday where we were served bacon-flavored vodka, a horseradish martini and a delicious vegan mushroom truffle under a soundtrack that could have come off any of our iPods.
And let me clarify that I've only been to San Fran once on an extended layover from LA back to DC, a trip where I stumbled across an absolutely impressive amount of donut shops and 99 cent porn theaters.

But Ditmas Park, you're no San Francisco. There just isn't that much here yet. The items listed in the NYMag blurb are about it so far. I envision one day someone will build a music club out here that will start attracting the hip crowds, leading to all sorts of new growth. Vox Pop has a big business plan on their Web site about how they want to become the independent alternative franchise to Starbucks, bolstered by the new era of good feelings in the Obama administration. And maybe someone will figure out how to make it significantly warmer in Ditmas in the winters, which would be nice. Even better, perhaps the producers will be swayed to film the Full House reunion next door.

Or they could open up a bunch of 99-cent porn theaters, and it would start to look like SF real fast around here.



(Photo credit: personal collection)

Recommended track

Jay Z and Santogold -Brooklyn (We Go Had)

Put in in your ears, and not just because Brooklyn is probably cooler than where you live.

Bustin' makes him feel good

An important day of Ghostbuster-related news, as all days of Ghostbuster related news are.

First, there's this, the trailer for the Ghostbusters video game, which looks slightly more than 1,000 times better than the old Ghostbusters video game for the NES, probably the only game I played for excess of 2 hours at a time and still hadn't the slightest idea how to get anywhere besides the first two screens. It's also probably about as close to a Ghostbusters sequel that we'll ever get (or EVER NEED DO YOU HEAR ME HOLLYWOOD MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP. Honestly, how many more Lucas films will it take to prove that messing with a legacy just isn't worth it?)



Then, this interesting tidbit that is bizarre and unexplainable, cats and dogs, living together, and confusing and probably has something to do with bribes being offered for open senate seats and threats made against other web sites, but somehow this blog for the past few days has been the No. 1 Google image search result for the word "Ghostbusters." Go on, try it, I'll wait. [EDIT 9:03 p.m.: of course a few hours after I wrote this, the google search results are drastically different, but trust me when I say this was true for several days.][EDIT2 1:30 p.m. 1/12: We're back to No. 1. I guess it just fluxuates]

for this image here, from this throw-away post in September.


Is everybody getting this?

Finally, there's this story, which is starting to make a buzz around the Brooklins, about Bill Murray nonchalantly dropping in on Brooklyn parties Lost in Translation style (until, of course, some Wsburg hipster tries to give him life lessons). My favorite part of the story:

The previous fall, he landed in Britain's tabloids when he followed a 22-year-old female university co-ed to a house party in St. Andrew's, Scotland, where he had been playing in a celebrity golf tournament. Students told the papers he helped them do the dishes when it turned out there were no glasses left to drink from.

So if this whole "job" thing or whatever doesn't come together for me soon, I have a new life plan: designing parties with the specific intent of enticing Bill Murray to appear. It seems like the main ingredient is either hip new indie band or, um, chicks. Lots and lots of chicks.

"No, no, no. I have all new cheap moves."

Recommended additional viewing: One of Bill Murray's best roles in recent years, in Fact Checkers Unit from Funny or Die.

In Brooklyn, enemies of imagination beware

It should come as no surprise to anyone who regularly reads this thing (hello again, dude in Jakarta who keeps Googling "drug-addled cartoonists") that I have long-coveted the prestige of the mighty McSweeney's Web site, all to no avail, because apparently you need things called "talent" and "creativity" and "humor" to be published there, so their rejections are understandable. Plus, the rejection e-mails are always very pleasant and thoughtful, with good punctuation and syntax, and come off as very encouraging. I imagine if they were old fashioned letters they would smell like fresh linen and be printed on crisp paper with a big, impressive letterhead that took up 2/5 of the page. Here's an actual example:

Hi, Tim -

Thanks for considering us for this one, but I'm afraid we're not going to use it. Hope you'll keep trying.

Best,
Chris

That's like 100 times better than the responses I've gotten from most jobs I've applied to in the past two years. Those responses usually look like this:

(uproarious laughter as application packet is opened, crumpling sound) proceeded by the following action:

Thanks for applying, jerk!

But besides highlighting the kind of sardonic, ironic, literate humor I have a particular appreciation for, McSweeney's is the product of Dave Eggers, author of the book with the best title of the past 10 years (besides "Burning Down My Masters' House," of course). I was aware that Eggers and company also run 826 tutoring centers in a few cities in stores disguised as something fantastic and fun, including a Space Travel Supply Store in Seattle and a Pirate Supply Store in San Francisco. (Quote from David Byrne on their web site: "Definitely one of the top five pirate stores I've been to recently.")

So it was a sweet surprise Saturday afternoon as I was wondering down the street (as jobless people tend to do) in Park Slope when I stumbled across the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company right on 5th Ave., not far from where I was staying. How can you resist going into a store with such powerful frontage?



So I went in. And it was, as I expected, pretty awesome. The commitment to the bit was most impressive -- every inch of the store is covered in cans of invisibility spray, boxes of superhero tights, goggles (they do nothing), jugs of elongation serum and so forth. There's a large de-villianifying chamber you can go into, because, as the store staff says, they can't just go selling super products to would-be evil-doers. In the back, there's a trick bookshelf that opens into a secret chamber, which is the room where all the tutoring happens.
I'm on a pretty tight budget up in New York while I'm getting set up, but I couldn't resist the urge to buy something, since the money goes to support the tutoring center. I picked out a bottle of the shape shifting serum to bring to a bday party I was attending that night. Before you can buy anything, you have to read an oath of do-goodery and create a superhero name for yourself (Super Magic Man was all I could come up with in a pinch). You put your money in a vault and they read you your total from a microphone in a control room booth.

Only after you complete your purchase does the staff hint at what actually may be in the bottle you're holding ("Put a few drops in the bathtub to activate the shape-shifting properties," the girl said).

The store is great, one, because it's one of the only place I know of in Brooklyn in which you can (legally) purchase a black hole, and provides the only non-pedophiliac sidekick placement services in all of the city.

But it is also refreshing because it reminds you of the value of actually using your imagination on a daily basis, something that makes me smile when I think of the hundreds of kids who've had to walk past a rack of capes and a shelf of immortality potion on their way to literacy and writing tutorial sessions in the back.

I spent a year in college tutoring kids in a generally poorly performing DC school and I was constantly amazed at the roteness of the education these kids were subject to. Even the program we tutored from was based on workbooks and flashcards for basic ABCs and math, and some of the kids just couldn't make it stick. Then when the time of the year came for standardized tests, all other classwork was discarded and the school hunkered down in Defcon 1 test prep mode.

All the students wore uniforms and sat in ugly classrooms made of those industrial-grade concrete bricks that have been used to build schools for decades. The walls were lined with posters that hadn't been updated since the 1980s and the happiest part of their day seemed to be when they got out of class and got to talk about trading Pokemon cards. When we got to black history month, all we talked about were the same black heroes we've heard about since I was in school -- MLK, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, etc. This was at a school that was nearly 100 percent black too. Surely they were aware of these figures already, I thought.

I often thought of what kind of a world we were preparing these kids for, one where success is only provided through a rigid adherence to conformity, where the correct answers are always in one of the four bubbles provided, where the unforgiving, pale beige concrete walls would line the edges of their lives forever.

Many people would argue that kids in a rough school need some strict structure and guidance if they're going to break the patterns that have hampered some of the poorer areas of DC for generations.

That's fine, and maybe they're right, I don't know the answer. But for kids in the city who sometimes have a hard time picturing their lives beyond the nearest street corner, I can't help but wonder how their education might be different if someone handed them a good-sized bucket of sonar potion, or how they could change the world with a new utility belt in hand, each pocket equipped with whatever gadgets their imagination had in stock.

826 National

NYC day 2: Where they paint murals of Biggie...

Random Brooklyn pictures, for no particular reason:



neighborhood near Ditmas where I looked at a sublet today.



Q line stop under Cortelyou Rd.

Delicious looking Flatbush food co-op on Cortelyou


colorful fruits in the cold on Courtelyou, right before it started flurrying


Also, first thing in the morning I looked at an apartment at the corner of Crack and Hooker Avenues, somewhere in the Stabbing District. I've never seen a directory with so many names that had "Zs" and "Ws" in them. See for yourself, and ignore the free advertising for T-Mobile.


Shout out to Black Star today from the BK. Listen to "Definition."

NYC day 1: Little town blues, melting away

Key purchases on a first day in New York City:

1 winter hat from H & M on Broadway near the Village
Cost: $3.90 + the well being of at least four sweatshop children

1 MetroCard
Cost: $20, with $3 bonus

1 slice of crappy, greasy, yet oh-so-rapturously delicious pizza at Penn Station
Cost: $2.50
(seriously, to think there's a place on Hilton Head that actually calls itself New York City Pizza. More like Hot Circle of Garbage Pizza)

1 entrance to Peter and the Wolf show at Union Hall
Cost: $8 dollars, + scenester application fee

1/2 gourmet grilled cheese sandwich
Cost: Spending two hours in a coffee shop watching Giganti get pummeled by the Wednesday crossword

Other highlights of the day: Sending out a cover letter describing my meticulous attention to detail while also misspelling the name of the organization several times in said letter; finding indoor bocce ball courts at Union Hall; not having to drive to Bluffton, not even once, all day.

Also, finding this LOLcat halping teh needeh kittehs:




top foto, Gothamist; bottom foto, me

The Big Plunge

I found myself in an odd, nearly surreal position a few weeks back. There I sat, looking directly into the eyes of a job offer at a significantly larger paper, on a good beat, for more money, in a nice area, with some room to grow and explore, and with absolutely no desire to take the job.

The job was undeniably a step up the ladder I put in front of myself way back in high school, when I first felt the hot bite of the newspaper bug and immersed myself in the mystique of the newsroom, the clack of the keyboard bouncing off the walls, phones slammed down with harried aggression by bedraggled reporters, my own phone ringing at a late hour with an irate editor at the other end, demanding more information, more questioning, bellowing on about standards and printability; then the satisfying smack of the paper on the front porch the next morning with my name in small print across the front page topped by some dramatic headline, the ego always kept in check by the quick yellowing decay of day-old newsprint, the knowledge that each day's achievements are only as good as the next day's deadlines.

I loved it. Still do. The problem is, it doesn't exist any more. Or maybe it does still exist only in the hearts of the dedicated printies, those with ink and fire in their veins, the people whose idealism is being strangled to death every day by the latest budget cutbacks, staff shortages, shrinking news hole and general top-down malaise infecting the newspaper industry that makes a newsroom about as cheery a place to work as a factory that produces greeting cards for dead pets. Those people are still out there, the ones with good ideas, the energy, the talented enthusiasm and dedication to a higher purpose and an understanding of the damned importance of the journalism newspapers provide that should have drawn us all to this profession in the first place. Honest truth is: we are being shunned away from the industry in droves by an overarching mindset stuck in the old model of journalism, when newspapers were fat with advertising wealth and market dominance, and technology was seen as an annoyance rather than a tool. At too many papers, it was too common for everyone to enjoy their privileged perch atop the world of information purveyance, never stopping to see the ripples of evolution rocking the foundation. (The music industry went through the same thing, fyi. So don't say we couldn't see it coming.)

With salary freezes, job cuts, shrinking circulation and a future strategy that is focused on paying off creditors instead of trying to regain ground, what incentive is there for us to stay?

I sat in that interview in Virginia and asked the editors point blank "What are your ideas to turn this thing around?" and "What is the plan??" only to have them look back at me, shift papers on their desk and say things to the effect of, Well, , uh, we need to hold on to the readers that we have, we need to keep providing the top-quality product we've always produced, we need to redesign to attract younger readers, we're experimenting with web video, and so on with the same thing I've heard echoed from coast to coast, A section to the classifieds.

I kept after the line of questioning, not something I was doing to impress my interviewers with tenacity. It was the only action I could harness to repress my inner voice wanting to scream: "That's not enough."

And it isn't. The strategy for newspapers to save themselves at this point, according to every person I've heard from at my paper and others, from low editors to top executives, from three years ago to just last week, is the following:

1) Offer readers shorter stories
2) Offer readers fewer of those stories
3) Hire less staff to cover a smaller area
4) Provide your staff with a smaller pool of resources with which to do their jobs
5) Charge more for the product
6) Add superfluous video to newspaper Web sites
7) Wait with open arms for readers to return

I'm not a business person, but that strategy seems redonkulous to me, and I have yet to see any evidence to disabuse me of that notion. I'm not in the position to say I have all the answers (though several people have proposed many good ideas that deserve review), but at our paper alone, the fact that every day we walk through the door isn't a Defcon 2 lockdown all-hands-on-deck affair trying to figure out how to turn this ship around is baffling to me. How long do you let yourself keep getting smacked by cannonballs until you stop worrying about bailing out the water and start returning fire, or, at least, turning in the other direction?

The editor from Virginia called me back a week later. How would I feel about taking on an crucial beat out in Suffolk? We need someone who can dig into things, she said, and you'd be a perfect fit.

I thought about it and talked to her again. I just can't do it, I said, the echo of the response surprising even a part of myself still. I need to find something else. Newspapers are clearly not the answer. Not the way they've been handled, not the way they're set up now, not with the stubborn impediments to progress that are frustrating our generation with no end in sight.

And that was it. That phone call was essentially my break up with the newspaper industry (at least for the short term). And that bitch still had my CDs.

So then the big decision lumbered back into the picture: what the hell else are you supposed to do when the only industry you've ever had interest in no longer is viable? I bounced around several ideas that included the obligatory trip-to-Europe-to-find-myself-or-at-least-someone-who-looks-like-me, or moving to the ATL to live with Cribbs and Pouya and turn freelance tricks for any john publication willing to pay. Neither seemed to click as the immediate answer.

I knew I couldn't stay here, on Hilton Head, this quiet rock I've lived on for damn near four years, where I've gathered an intricate collection of life experiences, heartbreak and help, but where the tank on challenges and excitement has long since run dry.

After a period of heavy thinking, er, heavy drinking ... that is to say, heavy thinking while also drinking ... and consultation with friends, my spinning Twister blade stopped and I realized uncertain times call for uncertain measures.

New York City.

The plunge into the center of it all, the beating heart of the beast, in search of something different on lost city streets or in the shadow of shiny skyscrapers, where the great sum of creative forces amass before trickling down to all the rest. The goal is Brooklyn, an interesting place with interesting people, where lots of friends and associates have already landed and made a successful go of it since college.

The action came hot and fast after that. I told the Packet I was quitting effective Nov. 4, the latest in a stream of resignations, and that they had best get a replacement ready. I called my mom and told her the plan, and she reacted with a sort of verbal shrug of the shoulders, a surprised complacency. You always seem to land on your feet, she said. I sighed with relief back at her and silently hoped she was right.

I spread the word at work and started reaching out to any and all contacts in the city. My boss's first thoughts were to give me the name of a good soup kitchen. True story: St. Anna's near Rockefeller Center, he said.
"Do you know this from experience, Fitz?"
"Well ... no, no. I just know the guy..."

Sure you do. (Note: I just Googled this and am not sure if it is a real place or not.)

The nerve-wracking part is that I have no job leads, no housing arrangements and pitifully (I do mean pitifully) little money saved up, even less so maybe after this weekend when I stepped on this dude's over-priced Quicksilver sunglasses and may have to buy him a new pair.

All I've got right now is the pledge of a few couches to sleep on, a familiarity with the regular content of Brooklyn Vegan, some friends who are making a living in some writing related fields in the city and a tall pile of clips that I've got no choice but to put full faith in at this point. Surprisingly, no one has advised me that this idea is a bad one, or even warned against incautious career evacuation. A handful of my editors were even visibly exuberant at the thought, saying things like, "I wish I could do that too," and, "What a great idea." Mostly I'm sure this is meant to either console my soon to be homeless sorrow, or to reflect their joy at being able to hire a newer reporter at lower pay rate.

Part of me always knew I'd end up in the city at one point or another (I also have the same assumptions about California, where I was heartily applying for jobs up through this summer), possibly a byproduct of growing up in Jersey, the gleaming heights and roar of the subway train just a school field trip's journey away at all times, the excitement always bleeding over state lines and down to our suburban enclaves. I was in the habit for awhile of telling all creative types I met that I'd see them again when we crossed paths in the city, the terminus everyone must pass through.

About Nov. 10 or so, I'll pack up my tiny red Saturn, having sold most of my large belongings to the new reporter taking over my bedroom in the apartment, point the car north and plunge into the great unknown, the wild tumult of houselessness and funemployment (the new buzz euphemism) and all the excitement that is being an wandering journalist full of pent-up writing vigor, searching desperately for an outlet.

Cut to Paul Mitchell's house days later, my birthday actually, when his parents weren't home and we climbed a ladder up onto the roof of his dock house, ignoring the warnings of instability broadcast by the tequila warming inside our stomachs, us gripping tightly on to the ridges of the slightly sloping roof that was thankfully, maybe presciently, made of a sturdy, non-slip material.

It was Hsieh and I up there this time, and, as we crouched on the roof facing over the black expanse of Broad Creek, we decided to jump in toast to our different adventures on the 15-foot drop. I rocked on my heels and threw myself off the perch feet first, opening my lungs to a mad scream of "BROOKLYN!" stretching out to the vast patch of marshland in the distance, with Hsieh a second behind chasing after his echo of a hurried "ALASKA!", both screams tearing through the silence that buffeted the still creek-front houses. We hit the water with a quick splash and I sunk deep into all the salty memories of the last four years, the edges lined with waving marsh grass and the top crowned in Spanish moss dripping in to give everything that sleepy, dream-like quality.

I swam to the dock to hoist myself out of the brackish creek, its waters still not hinting at fall even in the bottom of a September night.

It's these things about Hilton Head I'll miss the most. But my time here has come to an end.



[photo credits, bottom up: 1) Jay Karr, 9/30/08; 2) personal collection, 11/07; 3) Social Security Administration; 4) masternewmedia.org; 5) ecx.images-amazon.com]