Edward Hopper Rolls over in his Grave

It is difficult to agree with Mr. Rogers that today is a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Today marks the grand opening of Ikea, Brooklyn, a massive big box store that will irrevocably alter life in the formerly tranquil waterfront reaches of our beloved Red Hook. On weekends it is predicted that as many as 17,000 cars will come here bringing shoppers, and many of them will inevitably clog Red Hook's main drag, the formerly somnolent Van Brunt St., already much busied by traffic heading to the Fairway Supermarket. Last night we wandered down to enjoy Red Hook's last sleepy evening and have a look at the monstrosity.


The last days of emptiness

The owners of an equally vast lot next door are hoping some other massive retail developer will jump on the bandwagon, raising neighborhood fears that this district of ancient red brick warehouses and desolate pilings is destined to become a grotesque, gigantic shopping mall.

Hoping to generate some press and advance publicity, Ikea suggested that eager buyers camp out, competing to be the first lucky entrants to the store. The prize? A free sofa to the first 35 visitors, and an armchair for the next 70 or so. This is the first truly urban Ikea, and this promotional idea, while it might be cute in the suburbs, attracted a motley crowd who reduced the pristine facade of the new and massive structure to a squalid vision peopled by refugees and strewn with crumpled blankets.

Squalor and Pathos: The tragic blight of homelessness? The unexpected cancellation of a regional bus service? A pre-dawn ritual of chronic users awaiting the opening of the methadone clinic? No, it's the grand opening of Ikea!




None of those waiting claimed to be in desperate need of a new sofa, although many agreed that Ebay and Craigslist would next week be full of cut-rate deals on brand-new seating, offloaded by winners of this perverted "contest." Instead the campers suggested that they were excited to be part of an historic event, as if being one of the first to enter the new Ikea was akin to meeting Obama, or shaking hands with the pope. Many shared a sense of fleeting celebrity that seemed for them to obscure the desperate lack of imagination and shuddering boredom manifested in this simultaneous embrace and indictment of consumer culture. (There were also greasy-haired and bleary-eyed fellow bloggers, irate at being herded about by Ikea security guards. To which we can only say that if you join the line waiting to go into the corral, expect to be treated like cattle.)

Object of desire: the elusive sofa, glimpsed through the still-locked front door of the Ikea store.


If the grimness of this waiting game and our anticipation of the traffic horrors to come weigh more heavily on our minds than the easy access we will now have to cheap candles and furniture predestined to collapse, we must admit being impressed with the public esplanade, which has many massive benches, waterfront views, and abundant landscaping. Ikea seem unaware that they have moved into the ghetto, and have dotted the walkway with numerous chaise longues perfect for taking in the afternoon sun, with none of the usual bumps and "armrests" designed to prevent actual sleeping. There is room for many people to live here, and it could be quite comfortable, particularly if the port-o-potty near the ferry terminal remains unlocked and in operation. Here Laura takes a quick catnap. We're considering renting out the house for the rest of the summer and moving to Ikea plaza. After all, it is Ikea itself that is promoting the idea of stopping by and camping out.

UPDATE: Although the free water taxi shuttling to Lower Manhattan every ten minutes certainly eases the sting, I'm afraid this post, more heartwrenching than the smartass postcard to Ikea I wrote above, really nails it.

Cañones, a photo essay

Just wound up a week of filming in Cañones with Meredith Monk, Babeth VanLoo and Brigit Hillenius in a spectacular corner of north-central New Mexico where the mountains start to slide down into the desert, a country of high mesas dotted with evergreens. It is an open, brilliant, sunlit habitat where cactus litter the forest floor and Townsend's solitaires flit from bush to bush. The gulches carved by the many arroyos are at this time of year full with burbling silver ribbons of snowmelt, fast-flowing watercourses lined with naked, bleached cottonwoods that at 7500 feet above sea level are still awaiting the first buds of spring. Towering red and ochre bluffs, exposed millions of years ago, once home to Anasazi cliff-dwellers, now loom over adobe vacation homes built for those seeking a remoteness they used to find near Santa Fe.


The village of Cañones, where we spent the last five days, is a modest centuries-old community of latin americans that has felt the pressures of a sort of rural gentrification, with the explosion in the price per acre of once impossibly remote mountain land bringing riches to those selling off a parcel or two from the old family spread, but discomfort and resentment to a generation looking to get out of their parents' house, hoping to set up a household of their own, only to find themselves limited by circumstance to living in a trailer in a corner of a field. Unlike the newcomers, spread out on as much land as possible in their eagerness to protect views devoid of neighbors, structures or other impediments to tranquility, the earlier hispanic residents of Cañones are clustered together in what must once have been an extraordinarily remote mountain village, a collection of humble ranch homes and single-wide trailers, where the pavement turns to dirt tracks leading up into the canyons.

The town cemetery is a football-field sized plot in which many of the dead make do with simple wooden crosses, homemade headstones or the tin sign provided by the funeral parlor. Plastic flowers and ersatz memorials create a baroque and desert-durable flash of color at the entrance of town.


I took these pictures yesterday, and in what seems an astonishing coincidence (how often does the New York Times run a story about Rio Arriba County, New Mexico?) Erick Eckholm writes today in the NYT about the plethora of addictions that plague the Hispanic communities of the region. "More than one in five residents is below the federal poverty line and far more are just above it," he notes. Although someone we met here had mentioned that Rio Arriba had the highest rate of death by drug overdose of any county in the nation, I hadn't given it much thought or credence--everywhere I go seems to be the best or worst or tallest of this or that, or have the most or least of something, and often the very same claim to fame seem to be repeated in many different places. But there it was, right in the paper of record.


While it seems a stretch to blame the local heroin devastation on gentrification, some local activists, according to Eckholm, think there may be some relationship: "Many in the fight against drugs," he writes, "...believe the heavy use of drugs and alcohol is rooted in a shared sense of loss, starting when the United States refused to recognize many Spanish land grants in the mid 19th century and building more recently as struggling families, accustomed to farming and ranching, became dispirited as they had to sell land."


I wasn't thinking of the Cañones cemetary in terms of overdoses, or even thinking particularly about death when I took these pictures; I was more intrigued by the aesthetics of these hand-tended memorials. It was only because Brigit and I had some time to kill as we waited for Babeth to return with a fresh videotape that I prowled among the graves. But picking up the Times in the Houston airport on the way back to New York gave them an additional resonance.

An American Master

Regular readers have had ample opportunity to read my bitter, middle-aged gripings about the ruination of the lower east side by an overabundance of faux-european watering holes and the wandering weenies who clutch their hipster guidebooks while stumbling through the neighborhood from one poncey boutique to another, leaving a trail of gentrification and American Express Gold card credit slips in their wake. For curmudgeons like myself, of course, the glory days were long ago, no matter how old you are; if you are too young to have been there, well, too bad, it was better then. Before I moved away. More real. More authentic. More dangerous. More fun. More like Bushwick. At that time Clinton St., now a three-block-long restaurant row of overpriced finesse, was an open-air narcotics Wal-mart, an endless parade of slow, trolling cars, surreptitious palmslides and the flashing of green paper and yellow butane in gloomy bulb-smashed alcoves. In 1989, with the exception of one or two grimy Mah-Jong parlors and the Parkside Lounge, a blighted inner-city whiskey-shooter ballasted by a resident handful of crumpled puerto-rican geriatrics, there was scarcely a bar to be found in the entire district east of the Bowery and south of Houston street. Now, of course, there appear to be hundreds, and the once urine-streaked tenements have been done up with aluminum and glass storefronts. On Ludlow St. one of the pioneers of this pernicious process was Max Fish, where, gentrifiers all, my cronies and I spent far too much of our leisure time through much of the early 1990s, acting artistic.

In fact Max Fish was (and is) the center of a thriving arts scene; it's just that the staff on the side of the bar where they keep all the bottles was more prolific, more dedicated and in every way more serious about actually making art than most of those who were warming the stools on the other side. Over the years a number of wonderful artists paid their dues schlepping the ice-tub there; some of them are still at it. At Max Fish, if you wonder after the whereabouts of your favorite bartender, you are more likely to learn that they are off on a sculpture retreat in the Berkshires, in Oregon teaching a seminar on print-making or at an artists' colony in Canada, rather than vacationing on a tropical beach somewhere. The bar also serves as an art gallery, with monthly shows, some curated by bartenders. I hadn't been by in a few years, but the prospect in late April of an imminent Swipple group show offered the promise of a reunion of sorts, so a handful of us Brooklynites put principle aside and headed into Manhattan on a purely voluntary basis to go to the opening.

Swipple is a sort of loose association of artists with a strong online presence. Founded by Jason Wright, himself a former Max Fish pourer, Swipple has curated and put on group shows of Swipple artists on both coasts and even in some of the flyover states. Although having made drinks at Max Fish is not a prerequisite for Swipple membership, those who have put in time on Ludlow St. are well represented in its ranks. Many associates from the golden age of the lower east side have dispersed across the continent, and new artists unknown to us have been added to the Swipple fold, but the extravaganza at the Fish did not disappoint. The crowd was filled with familiar faces. Peering at those who some years ago had existed on the edge of acquaintance was slightly disconcerting in that one wasn't quite sure who in the crowd had come back and who might quite possibly never have left.

Jim Damron, however, I knew had decamped some years ago to an unknown and isolated frontier somewhere in central California. It was immediately obvious from one glance at the wall that the bucolic isolation of his self-imposed exile has refreshed and invigorated his painting and that while toiling away in the wilds of the tomato fields or whatever, he has made great strides as an artist. His portrait of Fidel Castro positively leapt off of the wall at me, and the few minutes it took between spotting it and determining from Jason Wright that it had not yet sold were fraught with anxiety. Fellow Brooklynite and chief boon crony Joseph, himself yet another former cocktail stirrer at the Fish, now turned real estate mogul and furniture designer and the (currently and only temporarily) faster half of the Atlas Cycling Team, was much taken with Damron's masterly portraits of Galileo and Newton, and suffered similarly stressful moments. (A slideshow of the entire show and even a photograph of the festive opening can be seen here.) Luckily we had arrived early. It took us no time at all, like emigrants made good returning to a little mexican village in fresh Nike sneakers, to demonstrate that we have thrived, at least financially, in the outer boroughs. Whipping out mountains of cash and slapping them on the bar in dueling piles, we then rubbed our palms with glee as Jim Damron himself affixed little neon-orange "SOLD" stickers to the sheetrock walls beside our new purchases.


Fidel in situ, back in Red Hook, Brooklyn

Meanwhile, twinkling on the café tabletops were examples of another Damron masterwork, the "Fertility Light." Small, glowing, battery operated lamps made out of recycled Beech-nut baby food jars, they are the sculptural equivalent of a doodle. At only $25 dollars a pop I felt these were such a steal that in my infectious enthusiasm I quickly convinced a number of attractive young ladies propping up the bar that their lives would be incomplete without owning one. It was only then that I realized to my horror that I had single-handedly sold out the entire world supply of Damron votive lamps without managing first to secure one for myself!



Now that Jim, safely back in California, has managed to supply me, I feel feel much better in urging you to get one too.



Three of the many moods of the world's coolest lamp, my Jim Damron "Fertility Light," Red Hook installation view. The Swipple Website warns: "May cause birth control failure."

The Ballad of the Mary Whalen

Aaah, is that the Big Apple I spy through my porthole? Delightful

Even before I abandoned rent-controlled Manhattan tenement life five years ago and up and moved to my very own little shack of a frame house in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the latter neighborhood had become a throbbing termite-mound of home renovation, new construction, face-lifting and just all-around progress, as they call it. On the waterfront, the original setting for the play that became the classic Brando vehicle of that name, Red Hook is on the front lines of the epic gentrification still sweeping New York City's neighborhoods, leaving only a few hidden corners of ground too barren for Starbucks. Gracias a Dios we don't have a Starbucks here yet, but the Ecuadorian bagel and caffeinated swill spot where methadone survivors buy their oversweetened coffees has been supplanted by baked, a delightful free-wireless-internet hipster emporium with glowing pine wood walls and puff-pastries filled with goat cheese and herbs, where one manages all too easily to be dinged seven dollars for a designer latte and a muffin.

In there the other morning I ran into my friend Carolina Salguero, one of the first people I met in the neighborhood and herself a gentrification victim who was asked last summer to move on, when her affordable apartment was caught in the rising rental tide. Now she lives in Oyster Bay, Long Island. She still has interests in the neighborhood, however, as the founder of PortSide New York, an NGO which "seeks to breathe life into the relationship between Red Hook’s landside community and the maritime sector—to the advantage of both." Last summer the organization aquired the defunct tanker Mary Whalen, and Carolina spent much of the fall and winter repairing and restoring it. Getting a 172 foot steel ship built back in 1938 into action again makes makes most of the gut renovations of houses around here seem about as daunting as, say, washing a car, and I've been eager to see the beast since she first told me about the project.



Carolina is big on getting people involved, so I wasn't surprised when the second sentence out of her mouth was a request for me to volunteer at "our first volunteer Sunday," an occasion she seemed almost to have invented on the very spur of the moment to take advantage of our bumping into one another. I mumbled something about the non-sustainable flooring I was trying to get laid down in my living room and then counter-attacked with the observation that she hadn't updated her previously fascinating blog about the Mary Whalen renovation since January. She then mumbled something about someone having suggested she really ought to write a book about it, as if that were an excuse. I took that as an implication that she felt that by blogging it she would be cutting the legs out from under some future publishable opus. Had I already drunk my latte I might have been quick enough to observe that nothing would make a better outline for a book than a completed boat-renovation blog, but it was early and I was still a little thin on the ground. You just might see me on Sunday, I said.

In fact I was the first volunteer to arrive, making me that much more certain that the "spring-cleaning" had been invented for my benefit alone. Fresh from my new floor, in sawdust-covered work pants and greasy suede gloves, I waited for Carolina by the guard-house at the entrance to the Red Hook container port; when I told the guard I didn't have photo-i.d. he said "what are you thinking? This is New York City." Nonetheless, if Carolina would vouch for me when she arrived he would let me in. I've been in the container port only twice before, once to film the behind-the-scenes of a big-budget commercial for a Brazilian shipping company, when we followed a camera crew following Claudia Schiffer walking in front of the Manhattan skyline, before delivering two or three quarter-of-a-million dollar syllables, and once on another shoot when we interviewed a guy who wasn't sure if he was an actor playing a goombah, or a real, actual goombah, standing in the doorway of a warehouse full of cacao pods that smelled like paradise. Carolina picked me up in her pickup truck and we whizzed around the deserted Sunday port, slaloming through stacks of containers until we got to the Mary Whalen's pier. There are acres upon acres of open waterfront space here with the greatest views of lower Manhattan imaginable, and now that this neighborhood has gone from being one big crack bodega to the home of the latest gourmet Fairway supermarket, the developers must be salivating and scheming and hoping the last remnants of New York City shipping would just load up and steam off into the sunset.

In the belly of the beast: eager volunteer and recent Red Hook arrival Jim Clark, proprietor of LOOK NORTH, an Inuit art gallery. That's right, Red Hook now not only has art galleries, it has Inuit art galleries!

The Mary Whalen began life in 1938 as a local gasoline tanker and was eventually converted to haul loads of diesel fuel throughout the harbor. The Captain's cabin still has original mahogany trim and the former oil storage holds will hopefully soon become a maritime museum but she's pretty humble. Which may be the point. We set to work offloading the winter trappings, mostly coal and firewood and the woodstoves that had made the ship bearable to work on over the winter. I coiled some vast ropes in piles on a shady corner of the steel deck, where the summer sun shouldn't batter their uv-sensitive strands. We moved some mattresses. We considered what to order for lunch.

At last another volunteer arrived, Jim Clark, an Alaskan fisherman who recently moved to Red Hook. We had barely been introduced before he clambered down a long ladder into one of the Mary Whalen's innumerable gunk-filled foredeck caverns, carrying a shop-vac and a submersible pump. Shortly waste-water began spurting out of a tube and running along the decks, but Jim himself was never seen again. I assisted Carolina by hauling buckets of rust-sludge out of another hatch. She did the dirty work, sweating below decks, shoveling pounds of what was literally the oxidized inner wall of the ship into white plastic buckets donated by yet another Red Hook fixture, Steve's Key Lime Pies. Once these buckets had held some ingredient of his delicious desserts; we filled them with vile metallic goo that smelled like foetid cheese, and lined them up along the starboard side for disposal. After a dozen buckets or so of this I stuck my head down into the overripe compartment and yelled to Carolina, some twenty feet below, that I had better be getting along; I needed to return to the ongoing flooring emergency back on Coffey St. It wasn't quite an Amish barn-raising, but it was a morning that offered up the hope that Red Hook's community spirit, its old-school neighborhoodyness, so exceptional in the heart of the city, may actually be surviving the real-estate feeding frenzy snapping at its shores.


Carolina even further down in the belly of the beast. The small intestine of the beast, as it were. Today's task: shoveling out countless buckets of rust-sludge

Eight of the countless buckets...

I warned Carolina not to wear this crisp white Armani henley for such a foul task, but she wouldn't listen