Okay, those reviews I promised? Coming. Really. I mean it. Probably.
In the meantime: I don't know if you ever read my other blog, Probable Working Sequence, but if you don't, you don't know that I've had a studio in Brooklyn since August. I have. Over the past few months I've found myself drawn into the neighborhood. These things happen. You see the same guy behind the counter at the convenience store, you see the same people on the train, you bump into the same people at Lowe's. It's inevitable.
Today I finally reached the point where I picked up a copy of the free local paper with my bagel. It's the Brooklyn Paper, subhead: "Brooklyn's Real Newspaper". I'm kind of sorry they don't have a sub-subhead, something like "The Paper, with News on it, really, from Brooklyn".
The February 7, 2009 issue leads off with a great article titled ART ATTACK by one Mike McLaughlin. I'd like to give Mike credit -- and I really do mean this as a compliment -- for taking a subway station's worth of advertising and turning it into a blistering article -- with carryover! -- belittling the Museum of Modern Art and, by extension, all of Manhattan. Mr. McLaughlin accuses MoMA of attempting to poach museum-goers from Brooklyn by filling the Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street subway station with posters and informational displays and digital gewgaws about the paintings in their collection. Mike apparently loves loves loves the Brooklyn Museum and feels like MoMA is a pretty crappy johnny-come-lately to the New York museum scene.
I personally love these little internecine borough squabbles, since I grew up in Staten Island, which is always the loser. The idea of Brooklyn asserting its superiority in anything is something I find endlessly amusing. Brooklyn's main claim to fame, to my mind, is that it's nicer than Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx, which is sort of like saying it's less virulent than smallpox, the bubonic plague, and influenza.
Then again, it's worth reiterating that I grew up in Staten Island and yet have never been in the Brooklyn Museum. I didn't even know Brooklyn had a museum. Why would they? I thought they kept all their art in Manhattan like everyone else.
My favorite part of the article, though, is the eminently unbiased, objective, and newsworthy table which I reproduce for you here:
| Brooklyn Museum | INSTITUTION | MoMA |
| 1825 | FOUNDED | 1929 |
| Bursting with Egyptian and African art | STRENGTHS | Large collection, if you like that kind of thing |
| That "Star Wars" costume show | EMBARRASSING MOMENT | Once hung a Matisse upside-down! |
| No money for subway station ad campaigns | WEAKNESSES | $20 admission price |
| Native | RELATIONSHIP TO BROOKLYN | Interloper |
I don't know about you, but I'm thinking about heading to the Brooklyn Museum sometime soon. Did you know they're native to Brooklyn? I'm thinking they need a subhead: The Brooklyn Museum: Brooklyn's Museum.
You have been commuting to Brooklyn since August, and you have yet to recognize that Brooklyn is infinitely, empirically, self-evidently superior to Manhattan in nearly all respects? Concerts and performances at BAM are consistently more interesting and cutting-edge than what you'll see at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens blow Central Park out of the water. We get free concerts and films in the park all summer, by kick-ass musicians, even Laurie Anderson. The Brooklyn Museum may occasionally put up an atrocity like the Murakami exhibit, but it has also shown installations by Swoon, Ron Mueck, and a John Singer Sargent retrospective. Brooklyn has beaches, and bike trails, and little streets in Cobble Hill with designer boutiques that occasionally have sample sales, and a Chinatown that is not only superior to Manhattan's Chinatown, but has one of the best and cheapest Indonesian restaurants in the world, too. It has affordable wine bars, affordable sushi, affordable Thai, Italian, Salvadoran and French restaurants all within walking distance of my apartment.It has the Greenwood Cemetary, which is not only a huge magical place to take a walk, but has stunning panoramic views of lower Manhattan and the East River. It's got Red Hook. It's got a Home Depot and a Lowe's within a stone's throw of one another. It's got Tea Lounges. It's got the Community Bookstore, Park Slope Food Co-op and affordable yoga studios. It's got sunlight, because most of the buildings are no more than four stories high (except the 12-story condos that are beginning to infest Park Slope), but it in no way resembles a suburb. Brooklyn ROCKS. Manhattan is an overpriced chrome-plated Disneyland shadow of the authentic vitality that is Brooklyn.
A museum grows in Brooklyn... who knew.My Dad was from Brooklyn and to the day he died he was always a Dodgers fan and hated the Yankees. I grew up in Brooklyn, well kind of as my grandmother lived in Brighton Beach so I used to spend a lot of time there Coney Island, and the boardwalk.My memories of it are the smell of thanksgiving dinners, and noisy clanging steam radiators, the smell of the ocean, she lived a block from the boardwalk.I remember the old musty apartment with the funky elevator that took me to my grandmothers domain. She had plastic covers on her couches and all sorts of weird kitschy figurines in every nook all over her apartment. She made great chicken soup and apple pies.
I visited BMA about a dozen times since Sensation (about once a year), but I must say I don't know Brooklyn very much. I don't even know when I'm passing stations if I'm in a good or wrong neighborhood, but I hear they change fast from corner to corner.Pretty Lady should provide a list of her best addresses. Maybe I could hop at some points. I liked that Murakami show.Not the Vuitton bar, though.Cedric Casp
Brooklyn, Pretty Lady, is crowded, smelly, inconvenient, consistently ugly, parochial and backwards. I know this because the absolute worst of Brooklyn has, for my entire lifetime, gathered up its skirts and crossed the Verrazano into Staten Island, thereby making itself known to me. Except never in my memory were people beaten to death on Staten Island simply for being the wrong color. You need to stay in Brooklyn for that.No, Brooklyn's okay. It's just big and confusing in a way Manhattan isn't. Manhattan's somewhat tamed. Brooklyn's still wild.Staten Island, meanwhile, is caged and cornered.
'Wild' is exactly what I like about it. I can get tame anywhere.
I don't like wild. Wild means altogether too much dog poop on the sidewalk.