A shout out to Kate Noll and Solange Roberdeau, the lovely ladies who serendipitously brought me to New York - they used to live together when I first visited Kate last May (how I got to know Solange). As soon as I left then, Solange invited me back to take her room for a month last July, since she was starting her master’s program at MICA in Baltimore. This time around, Solange had found another studio apartment, so again there was a room for me. On the end of Henry Street, in the lovely Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
Kate, as I wrote before, is my roommate and friend from when we lived in Amsterdam. Her profession is sets. She has been lamenting aspects of her current gig for MAN CAVES, a home renovation TV show celebrating macho interior design. I imagine this just might have a similar target audience as the show MANSWERS, or MAN VS BEAST, all equally fascinating ethnographic studies. I think it’s amazing that she’s working on this because her home décor tastes are so feminine. We attended the premier of Kate’s other project, which was the movie City Island. While agreed that it was no masterpiece (it feels like a tame derivative of ‘Todd Solondz’s Happiness’), it was fun and a real blast on a sleepy, hung over Friday night. The real blast was clapping for Kate when the credits rolled, hoorah!
Solange and I recently hung out at a great dive called the Ice House with a patio, cheap beer, 2 dollar pulled pork sandwiches and a music mix of Nirvana and Ben E. King, a complete dream! It was the perfect place for a catch up, to both applaud and gripe about art and life. For instance, the staying trend of pit bulls in Brooklyn versus why they have been banned in Ontario. I think it is because Ontarians are very safe people where one wishes to look down the road of life and see it all clear, straight and true for them, while Brooklyn is probably still full of Puerto Rican dog-fighting! Another point was assuming that great art events happen all the time in NY, but actually there are also tons of terrible ones. Once suffering through part of an 8 hour Sean Landers book reading graced by his famous art people was not near worth the free beer. We prefer the Ice House.
Based on my extensive har har Wikipedia research, H.P. Lovecraft lived in Red Hook at one point in his life and wrote a racist story dedicated to it (I haven’t read) lovingly titled ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Also, ‘In the 1990s LIFE named Red Hook as one of the "worst" neighborhoods in the United States and as "the crack capital of America”’. But these days I have never felt more safe here, and plus the Red Hook swimming pool down the street is by far the best, grooviest outdoor pool I’d ever been to. I love that on their website they state that Al Capone began his ‘career’ across the street, whatever that means.
Walking around this neighbourhood reminds me of roaming the streets only of cities that I have lived in, of Xiamen, Amsterdam, Toronto (ps Scarborough loves!) and of Montreal… and how I hold such strong alliances to these places, while at the same time keeping the distance of an observer, of an empathetic alien with one foot in the door and one foot stretched far out the other way. The crew of old fellas slapping their dominos outside on the corner here remind me of the old ladies on the corner in Xiamen who played a mysterious card game with what looked like domino-sized ticket stubs.
