By Daniel Rigney
A cherry tree grows in Brooklyn.
When I tell fellow Houstonians I’m traveling to Brooklyn for pleasure, they respond predictably: “Brooklyn?” Why would anyone choose Brooklyn as a tourist destination? (Of course, the same could be asked of Houston.)
For me it’s personal. Lately I’ve been questioning my geocultural identity. I suspect I may be a New York spirit trapped in the body of a Texan.
I’m showing tell-tale signs of geocultural confusion. Though I've lived in Texas most of my life, I subscribe to a disturbing number of periodicals with “New York” in the title (NYT, NYer, and NY). I follow the New York Review of Books on Twitter. I’m a lifelong Woody Allen fan. I watch Stewart and Colbert, MSNBC, David Letterman, 30 Rock. They all originate in, you guessed it.
And as a non-anti-intellectual living in Texas (we don’t’ say the i-word here), I naturally turn toward New York for mental stimulation and sustenance, like a heliotrope toward the sun. I'm drawn to the mysterious East, and to its imperial city.
Okay, you say. I understand. You have a New York fetish. But why tour Brooklyn instead of the more well-heeled and well-trod Manhattan?
I choose Brooklyn as the focus of this cultural scouting trip for several reasons:
Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights Promenade
One: Freshness
I’ve visited Manhattan many times, but I've never set foot in Brooklyn, which is by all accounts the most trending of the boroughs, a place where new buds are blooming like cherry blossoms in April, or so I'm reading in magazines with "New York" in the title.
If I want to check out the the taller borough next door, I can just hop on the underwater express to Manhattan and visit the New Museum (“the Contemp” in the Bowery), or stroll the length of the amazing High Line elevated park (formerly a freight train track), or walk around the now-pedestrianized Times Square. Manhattan is just a short, cheap subway ride away. And speaking of cheap …
Two: Affordabiity
I’m staying in an affordable boutique hotel in Brooklyn, Le Super Eight, just across from the Good News Barbershop (“a cut above the rest”) and the Auto Hospital (“all types of welding”). My room looks out on a picturesque vacant lot and boat storage yard. The hotel is near the Gowanus, a decidedly non-Venetian industrial canal.
My room is small but clean, comfortable, secure and quiet. I don’t aspire to cultivate expensive tastes in any case, so this suits me fine. Call me the Brooklyn Lodger.
From my modest hotel I’m just a short walk away from a metro stop ($2.50 a ride) and other urban necessities, such as coffee, street food (including le haute dogue), and more coffee.
This week I’ve been eating almost exclusively out of food trucks, enjoying lamb gyros with mystery white sauce, steamed goat and chorizo tacos, and beef and feta “cigars” (think middle eastern eggrolls), each costing about $6 a meal not counting the chocolate dessert laxative.
Three: Cultural Ferment
I'm learning that historic Brooklyn has long been a city of docks, warehouses, factories, and working class ethnic neighborhoods. Only recently has it become paradoxically both hot and cool, thanks largely to an influx of young creative people like Lena Dunham’s character in Girls, who lives fictionally in Greenpoint, North Brooklyn and famously aspires to be “the voice of her generation. Or at least a voice, of a generation.”
Brooklyn is now the hot/cool place for those who thirst after cultural ferment. And I don’t mean just the ferment at the Brooklyn Brewery. I also mean historical ferment. Walt Whitman, Norman Mailer, and other famous word artists lived in and wrote from literary Brooklyn, and some say their spirits still roam the streets in search of new haunts.
Nowadays, or so I read here, would-be cultural inventors sit around all day in Brooklyn coffee houses, nursing cups o’ java and collaborating with their Appletops and smartphones in the birthing of the century’s next big ideas.
Brooklyn is a place where new art and culture are made, and then shipped to places like Houston. One noted Brooklyn poet told me, however, that fewer writers and artists can afford to live here nowadays. Wealthy investors and colonizers from the Wall Street and world elite are buying into Brooklyn and driving real estate prices skyward. She tells me that she and other artists have moved on to Queens.
Creatively, Brooklyn may be the new Manhattan, but someday Queens may be the new Brooklyn.
Four: The Last Hipsters
Scouting Brooklyn, I’m on the lookout for live specimens of the last remaining hipsters in their natural habitat (Williamsburg, North Brooklyn) before this rare cultural breed goes the way of the Haight-Ashbury hippie. I’ve read that Brooklyn’s stereo-hyped hipster population of skinny-jeaned, camel-smoking, pabst-drinking, fedora-brimmed ironists is in decline, and that some of the breed have mated and migrated southward to Park Slope for the rearing season. Now that I’m seeing Williamsburg instead of just reading about it, I’m a little underwhelmed by this demographically youthful but structurally aging neighborhood, though it is here that I find the most deeply satisfying breakfast sandwich of my life -- “The Experience” -- a scramble with thick bacon on a toasted and buttered garlic bagel, at the Bagel Store on Bedford. The Egg McMuffin, by remote comparison, is a cry for help.
In Williamsburg I find remnants of the distinctive culture of irony that local hipsters seem to passing on as their historic legacy. I see vintage clothing stores selling period garments to be worn with tongue in smirky cheek, and yet also, paradoxically, with nostalgic respect. Record stores sell vinyl albums by fifties crooners and sixties pop bands, and those hard-to-find albums by the Whoevers.
I find myself wondering if there might be some future nostalgia for nostalgic hipsterism itself, and if so, what this might look like. Stop me before I write “meta-nostalgic.”
A streetpost flyer on Bedford reads: “Dolphins rape humans.” This sign might be taken as a literal absurdity in Houston and other seriously non-ironic outposts. (“That makes no sense! How can a dolphin rape a human?”) But in ironic Williamsburg, the flyer sarcastically says the opposite of what it means. In its more advanced post-ironic sense, the message can be read as a sincere and heartfelt defense of the dolphin, conveyed in an idiom smarter and more provocative than a simple, earnest plea to “Save the Dolphins.”
Hipsters may someday be remembered as cultural explorers of a kind, attempting the uncertain passage from a simpler and more literal-minded pre-ironic worldview to a more complex, cosmopolitan, ironic (and post-ironic?) worldview. Or not.
In any case, now that we’ve arrived en masse at the realization that the postmodern world is overwhelmingly complex, multi-layered and viewable from myriad cultural and personal angles, it’s hard to go back to life in pre-ironic simpletown. Little wonder that the transition to a more cosmopolitan world civilization is happening first and fastest in diverse and intellectually-alive global crossroads like New York.
Our perilous cultural passage through the straits of irony brings to mind a refrain from the sincerely wonderful children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt: “Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it. Got to go through it.” I suspect that postmodern irony is something we have to go through to get to whatever is on the other side. Something sustainably good, I hope.
So were the hipsters of the early 21st century explorers of our cultural frontier and mappers of our postpostmodern future? Or were they just a bunch of ironically self-referential urban slackers? Time will, like, tell, dude.
Five: Museums and Parks
This morning I’m walking my legs off from the top of the vast Prospect Park to the bottom, all the way down to Drummer’s Grove and back again. I'm enjoying urbane, civilized nature while I wait for the Brooklyn Museum to open.
Prospect Park is Brooklyn’s answer to Manhattan’s Central Park, and the adjacent Brooklyn Botanic Garden is reputed to have the largest orchard of Japanese cherry trees outside of Japan. It’s April, and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom.
Almost next door to the museum is the Brooklyn Public Library. Only later do I learn that the library’s facade is designed in a shape suggesting a wide-open book. The library book faces outward onto Grand Army Plaza, whose magnificent archway is modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
We’re still waiting for the museum to open. While we’re waiting, did I mention that the word “museum” comes from a root meaning “a place of the Muses” – the nine Greek goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences? I hope to get in a little musing of my own today.
The museum opens! I live for these moments. I stand in line (“on line” in New York), chatting with the Frenchman in front of me and the Canadian woman behind as I wait to buy my “Older Adult” (no “Seniors” here) ticket.
Brooklyn Museum (New York’s second largest) is hosting Judy Chicago’s renowned “Dinner Party” in its feminist art exhibit, along with a great wealth (literally) of other featured works and collections.
I’m still musing about cosmopolitanism today as I marvel at the job imaginative curators here at the Brooklyn are doing to make thematic connections among diverse cultures. One large exhibit expresses the museum’s own cosmopolitan ethos beautifully:
Connecting Cultures: The World in Brooklyn
This innovative, cross-cultural installation was developed to create new ways of looking at art by making connections between cultures as well as objects. Located in the Museum’s first-floor Great Hall, it provides for the first time a dynamic and welcoming introduction to the Museum’s extensive collections, featuring pieces that represent peoples throughout time and around the world.
Connecting Cultures is organized around three main themes: “Connecting Places,” “Connecting People,” and “Connecting Things.” In viewing the juxtaposition of thematically linked works, visitors are invited to consider the importance of place, of self-representation in art, and of the role that objects play in supporting personal and cultural identity.
Later in the day I visit the compact and remarkable underground New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn, where my admiration and respect deepen for the laborers and craftsmen who build the first New York subway lines more than a century ago, doing dangerous work for low wages so that you and I, generations hence, could connect with the people, places and things that make this city go.
Brownstone Canyon, Park Slope, Brooklyn
This community is known for its progressive and playfully self-caricaturing politics. (A popular neighborhood blog is named FIPS, which stands for “F’d in Park Slope.”). The community is also known for its member-owned food cooperative (spoofed here by The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee). I’m told by friendly staffers that each adult among the “food coop’s” 15,000+ members puts in three hours a month of work -- office, purchasing, processing, and a variety of other committee tasks -- to feed the community’s hungry organivores, locavores, vegetarians, flexitarians and free-rangers.
The Park Slope neighborhood is aptly named. It rests on ground that slopes gently downward from Prospect Park toward the Gowanus canal. (My boutique hotel, Le Super Eight, lies just outside the neighborhood’s 4th Avenue western border.) The Barclays Center, a dramatic new sports arena and concert hall that appears to have been designed by architects from outer space, is just to the north of Park Slope in a converted rail yard. This is where the Brooklyn (formerly New Jersey) Nets have played respectable NBA basketball this season.
The R train runs through the urban village of Park Slope every few minutes on its way to Manhattan. If I lived in Brooklyn, Park Slope is probably where I’d want to live, liberal self-parody and all. It has the things I look for in an urban enclave: progressive culture, cosmopolitan diversity and cultural density, walkability and street life, mass transit, points of architectural interest, an array of affordable food choices (including food trucks and carts), ready access to books, magazines and art, and lots of coffee shops where wordsmiths can smith their words in peace.
I’d love to linger in New York’s most trending borough, but LaGuardia beckons. Its’s back to Houston -- still the anti-New York in many ways, but getting better as it rapidly becomes (believe it or not) markedly more international and cosmopolitan in its own right. Houston may be emerging as the Ellis Island of the 21st century, but that’s the subject of a whole ‘nother post.
This has been my first visit to Brooklyn. I have a feeling it won’t be my last. I'll have to come again soon, before the tourists discover it.
Also coming soon to a blog near you: “Street Comedy in Brooklyn" -- comic bits and snippets overheard by the occidental tourist (WesternMan) on his cultural scouting trip to America’s exotic far east.
Danagram
;] ... scouting cultural frontiers since 2011
A cherry tree grows in Brooklyn.
When I tell fellow Houstonians I’m traveling to Brooklyn for pleasure, they respond predictably: “Brooklyn?” Why would anyone choose Brooklyn as a tourist destination? (Of course, the same could be asked of Houston.)
For me it’s personal. Lately I’ve been questioning my geocultural identity. I suspect I may be a New York spirit trapped in the body of a Texan.
I’m showing tell-tale signs of geocultural confusion. Though I've lived in Texas most of my life, I subscribe to a disturbing number of periodicals with “New York” in the title (NYT, NYer, and NY). I follow the New York Review of Books on Twitter. I’m a lifelong Woody Allen fan. I watch Stewart and Colbert, MSNBC, David Letterman, 30 Rock. They all originate in, you guessed it.
And as a non-anti-intellectual living in Texas (we don’t’ say the i-word here), I naturally turn toward New York for mental stimulation and sustenance, like a heliotrope toward the sun. I'm drawn to the mysterious East, and to its imperial city.
Okay, you say. I understand. You have a New York fetish. But why tour Brooklyn instead of the more well-heeled and well-trod Manhattan?
I choose Brooklyn as the focus of this cultural scouting trip for several reasons:
Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights Promenade
One: Freshness
I’ve visited Manhattan many times, but I've never set foot in Brooklyn, which is by all accounts the most trending of the boroughs, a place where new buds are blooming like cherry blossoms in April, or so I'm reading in magazines with "New York" in the title.
If I want to check out the the taller borough next door, I can just hop on the underwater express to Manhattan and visit the New Museum (“the Contemp” in the Bowery), or stroll the length of the amazing High Line elevated park (formerly a freight train track), or walk around the now-pedestrianized Times Square. Manhattan is just a short, cheap subway ride away. And speaking of cheap …
Two: Affordabiity
I’m staying in an affordable boutique hotel in Brooklyn, Le Super Eight, just across from the Good News Barbershop (“a cut above the rest”) and the Auto Hospital (“all types of welding”). My room looks out on a picturesque vacant lot and boat storage yard. The hotel is near the Gowanus, a decidedly non-Venetian industrial canal.
My room is small but clean, comfortable, secure and quiet. I don’t aspire to cultivate expensive tastes in any case, so this suits me fine. Call me the Brooklyn Lodger.
From my modest hotel I’m just a short walk away from a metro stop ($2.50 a ride) and other urban necessities, such as coffee, street food (including le haute dogue), and more coffee.
This week I’ve been eating almost exclusively out of food trucks, enjoying lamb gyros with mystery white sauce, steamed goat and chorizo tacos, and beef and feta “cigars” (think middle eastern eggrolls), each costing about $6 a meal not counting the chocolate dessert laxative.
Three: Cultural Ferment
I'm learning that historic Brooklyn has long been a city of docks, warehouses, factories, and working class ethnic neighborhoods. Only recently has it become paradoxically both hot and cool, thanks largely to an influx of young creative people like Lena Dunham’s character in Girls, who lives fictionally in Greenpoint, North Brooklyn and famously aspires to be “the voice of her generation. Or at least a voice, of a generation.”
Brooklyn is now the hot/cool place for those who thirst after cultural ferment. And I don’t mean just the ferment at the Brooklyn Brewery. I also mean historical ferment. Walt Whitman, Norman Mailer, and other famous word artists lived in and wrote from literary Brooklyn, and some say their spirits still roam the streets in search of new haunts.
Nowadays, or so I read here, would-be cultural inventors sit around all day in Brooklyn coffee houses, nursing cups o’ java and collaborating with their Appletops and smartphones in the birthing of the century’s next big ideas.
Brooklyn is a place where new art and culture are made, and then shipped to places like Houston. One noted Brooklyn poet told me, however, that fewer writers and artists can afford to live here nowadays. Wealthy investors and colonizers from the Wall Street and world elite are buying into Brooklyn and driving real estate prices skyward. She tells me that she and other artists have moved on to Queens.
Creatively, Brooklyn may be the new Manhattan, but someday Queens may be the new Brooklyn.
Four: The Last Hipsters
Scouting Brooklyn, I’m on the lookout for live specimens of the last remaining hipsters in their natural habitat (Williamsburg, North Brooklyn) before this rare cultural breed goes the way of the Haight-Ashbury hippie. I’ve read that Brooklyn’s stereo-hyped hipster population of skinny-jeaned, camel-smoking, pabst-drinking, fedora-brimmed ironists is in decline, and that some of the breed have mated and migrated southward to Park Slope for the rearing season. Now that I’m seeing Williamsburg instead of just reading about it, I’m a little underwhelmed by this demographically youthful but structurally aging neighborhood, though it is here that I find the most deeply satisfying breakfast sandwich of my life -- “The Experience” -- a scramble with thick bacon on a toasted and buttered garlic bagel, at the Bagel Store on Bedford. The Egg McMuffin, by remote comparison, is a cry for help.
In Williamsburg I find remnants of the distinctive culture of irony that local hipsters seem to passing on as their historic legacy. I see vintage clothing stores selling period garments to be worn with tongue in smirky cheek, and yet also, paradoxically, with nostalgic respect. Record stores sell vinyl albums by fifties crooners and sixties pop bands, and those hard-to-find albums by the Whoevers.
I find myself wondering if there might be some future nostalgia for nostalgic hipsterism itself, and if so, what this might look like. Stop me before I write “meta-nostalgic.”
A streetpost flyer on Bedford reads: “Dolphins rape humans.” This sign might be taken as a literal absurdity in Houston and other seriously non-ironic outposts. (“That makes no sense! How can a dolphin rape a human?”) But in ironic Williamsburg, the flyer sarcastically says the opposite of what it means. In its more advanced post-ironic sense, the message can be read as a sincere and heartfelt defense of the dolphin, conveyed in an idiom smarter and more provocative than a simple, earnest plea to “Save the Dolphins.”
Hipsters may someday be remembered as cultural explorers of a kind, attempting the uncertain passage from a simpler and more literal-minded pre-ironic worldview to a more complex, cosmopolitan, ironic (and post-ironic?) worldview. Or not.
In any case, now that we’ve arrived en masse at the realization that the postmodern world is overwhelmingly complex, multi-layered and viewable from myriad cultural and personal angles, it’s hard to go back to life in pre-ironic simpletown. Little wonder that the transition to a more cosmopolitan world civilization is happening first and fastest in diverse and intellectually-alive global crossroads like New York.
Our perilous cultural passage through the straits of irony brings to mind a refrain from the sincerely wonderful children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt: “Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it. Got to go through it.” I suspect that postmodern irony is something we have to go through to get to whatever is on the other side. Something sustainably good, I hope.
So were the hipsters of the early 21st century explorers of our cultural frontier and mappers of our postpostmodern future? Or were they just a bunch of ironically self-referential urban slackers? Time will, like, tell, dude.
Five: Museums and Parks
This morning I’m walking my legs off from the top of the vast Prospect Park to the bottom, all the way down to Drummer’s Grove and back again. I'm enjoying urbane, civilized nature while I wait for the Brooklyn Museum to open.
Prospect Park is Brooklyn’s answer to Manhattan’s Central Park, and the adjacent Brooklyn Botanic Garden is reputed to have the largest orchard of Japanese cherry trees outside of Japan. It’s April, and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom.
Almost next door to the museum is the Brooklyn Public Library. Only later do I learn that the library’s facade is designed in a shape suggesting a wide-open book. The library book faces outward onto Grand Army Plaza, whose magnificent archway is modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
We’re still waiting for the museum to open. While we’re waiting, did I mention that the word “museum” comes from a root meaning “a place of the Muses” – the nine Greek goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences? I hope to get in a little musing of my own today.
The museum opens! I live for these moments. I stand in line (“on line” in New York), chatting with the Frenchman in front of me and the Canadian woman behind as I wait to buy my “Older Adult” (no “Seniors” here) ticket.
Brooklyn Museum (New York’s second largest) is hosting Judy Chicago’s renowned “Dinner Party” in its feminist art exhibit, along with a great wealth (literally) of other featured works and collections.
I’m still musing about cosmopolitanism today as I marvel at the job imaginative curators here at the Brooklyn are doing to make thematic connections among diverse cultures. One large exhibit expresses the museum’s own cosmopolitan ethos beautifully:
Connecting Cultures: The World in Brooklyn
This innovative, cross-cultural installation was developed to create new ways of looking at art by making connections between cultures as well as objects. Located in the Museum’s first-floor Great Hall, it provides for the first time a dynamic and welcoming introduction to the Museum’s extensive collections, featuring pieces that represent peoples throughout time and around the world.
Connecting Cultures is organized around three main themes: “Connecting Places,” “Connecting People,” and “Connecting Things.” In viewing the juxtaposition of thematically linked works, visitors are invited to consider the importance of place, of self-representation in art, and of the role that objects play in supporting personal and cultural identity.
Later in the day I visit the compact and remarkable underground New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn, where my admiration and respect deepen for the laborers and craftsmen who build the first New York subway lines more than a century ago, doing dangerous work for low wages so that you and I, generations hence, could connect with the people, places and things that make this city go.
Six: The Brownstones
Forward,
then, on foot to the legendary brownstones of Brooklyn Heights, with
its scenic promenade along the East River. The bench-lined concourse,
cantilevered over the Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway (BQE) roaring below,
offers views of the Manhattan skyline so picturesque that I suddenly
feel like an extra in the cast of a Woody Allen movie.
I
half-imagine Woody and Mariel Hemingway sitting on the next bench,
being filmed in black and white, as the strains of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody
in Blue” swell in the background. The Brooklyn Bridge is to our right,
the Statue of Liberty to our left. Across the river, the spire of the
new One World Trade Center (eventually to be 1776 feet tall) is rising
to completion.
The
brownstones of Brooklyn Heights, standing behind us now, are four and
five stories tall, well-weathered, dignified, and profoundly brown. Many
of these are multi-million dollar minimansions, now affordable only to a
global elite. Rows of brownstones in Brooklyn Heights stand together in
solidarity like the walls of a class fortress.
More
modest but no less appealing to me are the brownstones of Park Slope,
the epicenter of Brooklyn's left-liberal community, where life is
organic and young families with precocious children come to stroll and
be strolled.
Brownstone Canyon, Park Slope, Brooklyn
This community is known for its progressive and playfully self-caricaturing politics. (A popular neighborhood blog is named FIPS, which stands for “F’d in Park Slope.”). The community is also known for its member-owned food cooperative (spoofed here by The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee). I’m told by friendly staffers that each adult among the “food coop’s” 15,000+ members puts in three hours a month of work -- office, purchasing, processing, and a variety of other committee tasks -- to feed the community’s hungry organivores, locavores, vegetarians, flexitarians and free-rangers.
The Park Slope neighborhood is aptly named. It rests on ground that slopes gently downward from Prospect Park toward the Gowanus canal. (My boutique hotel, Le Super Eight, lies just outside the neighborhood’s 4th Avenue western border.) The Barclays Center, a dramatic new sports arena and concert hall that appears to have been designed by architects from outer space, is just to the north of Park Slope in a converted rail yard. This is where the Brooklyn (formerly New Jersey) Nets have played respectable NBA basketball this season.
The R train runs through the urban village of Park Slope every few minutes on its way to Manhattan. If I lived in Brooklyn, Park Slope is probably where I’d want to live, liberal self-parody and all. It has the things I look for in an urban enclave: progressive culture, cosmopolitan diversity and cultural density, walkability and street life, mass transit, points of architectural interest, an array of affordable food choices (including food trucks and carts), ready access to books, magazines and art, and lots of coffee shops where wordsmiths can smith their words in peace.
I’d love to linger in New York’s most trending borough, but LaGuardia beckons. Its’s back to Houston -- still the anti-New York in many ways, but getting better as it rapidly becomes (believe it or not) markedly more international and cosmopolitan in its own right. Houston may be emerging as the Ellis Island of the 21st century, but that’s the subject of a whole ‘nother post.
This has been my first visit to Brooklyn. I have a feeling it won’t be my last. I'll have to come again soon, before the tourists discover it.
Also coming soon to a blog near you: “Street Comedy in Brooklyn" -- comic bits and snippets overheard by the occidental tourist (WesternMan) on his cultural scouting trip to America’s exotic far east.
Danagram
;] ... scouting cultural frontiers since 2011
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