DUMBO

Cabbages on lightposts.The hunt for an elephant that paints (really). Stacks and stacks of iron stairs to climb, chasing abstract arrows to an artist’s open studio. A net, strung with glittering decoupage. The smell of Barbosal; $2 PBR. At least a half-dozen wedding parties—layers of ruffles; aqua, pink, chocolate brown, bobby pins and smiles—oblivious until they arrived. This was DUMBO’s Under the Bridge art festival, Saturday afternoon.

I adore festivals unconditionally; art, beer, books are among my favorite excuses. I particularly love festivals that I leave, inspired. The day is warm, sunny. Jeans, layered tanks, sunglasses, Converse. It’s not winter yet—yet. I hoard information in my satchel, constantly scanning, constantly scouring the flyers, the upcoming shows. It’s the hopefulness. I hoard the feelings of the day, determined to catalogue, so that in February I can remember it.

[I love this photo. It's a chicken (get it?) fashioned out of entirely consumed/entirely recycable materials (mostly). This cluck of chickens is so fucking cute.]

You can also see this rambling at www.artsreporting.blogspot.com.

Jane! Jane! Jane!

...And then there was Jane. New Yorker's conduit de jour to talk about their general freak-out at the progressive gentrification/ homogenization/ corporatization of their nabes is none other than Jane Jacobs, that champion of neighborhoods feeling like, well, neighborhoods. (Her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) outlines her ideas much more eloquently.)

First, the Jane Jacobs show evaluating New York City nabes based on her criteria opened at the Municipal Art Society of New York. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Astoria, Queens come out looking pretty good, curator Christopher Klemek told the New York Observer. A Time Out cover story, Has Manhattan Lost It’s Soul? (Sept. 20-26) followed en suite, using a Jacobs-inspired rubric to rate Manhattan neighborhoods. Alphabet City topped their list. And this weekend (Sept. 29-30), the Center for the Living City is leading ambitious free "Jane's Walk New York" tours through a dozen or so neighborhoods including the South Bronx, the Atlantic Yards, Manhattanville, the UWS, and more. (There are more walking tours and a series of panel discussions scheduled through November in conjunction with the MAS exhibit.)

While I love the celebration of the many varied identities of the many varied New York neighborhoods—and the excuse for us to get out of our own neighborhood bubble—I can't let go of the suspicion that these sinking ship declarations are New York snobbery in disguise, aka "New York pride." They're another way of declaring "New York is nothing like it was back ..." or "I remember when..." Statements that essentially are stated to remind you, the recipient, that the speaker remembers the good/old New York because they were here then. ...And all that's left today is crumbs.

New York was, is, and always will be — different. But it will always be New York. And I can only think that when people lament the New York that was, they're missing something about the New York that is. I'm not championing the opening of another megachainstore in your neighborhood, or the closure of a nabe institution because of rent disputes. All I'm saying is that if that's all you see then you're not looking close enough. And as for gentrification? It happens. I like what Jan Lee, a furniture designer and Chinatown store owner, tells TONY in the same cover story (Chinatown ranked #2): "Chinatown hasn't resisted gentrification. Chinatown was gentrified 100 years ago by the Chinese. I know—my grandfather was one of the people who participated. There's a Chinese bank on every corner. There's a multimillion-dollar gold and diamond business. But because it's been done by an ethnic group, it's not considered gentrified."

plastic bags: the new low-carb diet

Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une Pipe" has become latently popular, an anthem for the cool tastemakers of the early 21st century. The painter's latest copycat—in his day he was a peer to such surrealists as Dali and Ernst—is British couture designer Anya Hindmarch. Her $15-dollar canvas totes, (read: nothing else in her store has ever cost so little), read, "I'm not a plastic bag." The anti-plastic totes have caused such a fuss among the eager eco-consumers in Manhattan that they lined up 600 deep outside the new Whole Foods at Bowery and Houston this last Tuesday to buy the latest "limited edition" of Hindmarch's canvas tote.

On the subject of plastic bags--you know, the sort they usually double-bag at your local grocer--I recently heard that plastic bags cost 2-cents to make and 8-cents to recycle. Which is why you have to take them, stuffed inside eachother again and again, to that specific deposit site at your local grocer. And they're still not making money. (Don't know the drop? Just ask a clerk.)

Wouldn't the man behind the pipe have gagged at the idea of his playful masterwork being co-opted by a 21st century promotional campaign, stripped entirely devoid of its original intent? Eh, maybe not. "This is not a..." is ever receiving new meaning, guaranteeing Magritte's name in the art history analogues just a little longer.

All of this makes me feel *slightly* less bad about posting on Laura Bush's "Feed the Children of the World" burlap shoulder bag campaign--a la Spring Fashion Week NYC 2007. Sort of, but not really. That posting came from a period in my blog before I gave perimiters to my blogging form. (Which, for the record, will henceforth only on rare occassion link to a post that is not entirely my original thoughts.) !

culture is dead.

That's a bit of hyperbole on my part. But I did recently hear someone whom I think knows a thing or two about the subject issue a not-unlike indictment of the state of cultural affairs. Culture has been in a headlong tailspin since the mid-twentieth century, she lamented, and she's sorry that this is what we've been left to work with.

I beg to differ. If only because of the sheer volume of information that’s available to us—literally at our fingertips—we are living in the most diverse, dynamic cultural period yet.

Granted, it's nearly impossible to compartmentalize the cultural sphere in a postmodern world, particularly after the explosion of digital technologies in the last decade. That wasn’t a death knell, but a signal of evolution.

Culture today is a kaleidoscopic vision, fragmented into a thousand pieces, constantly shifting, expanding outwards, various forms spontaneously intersecting and collaborating before evolving again, all within a decentralized power structure.

In short, it's a minor revolution.

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The purpose of this blog is to document in that evolution/revolution as manifested in New York City, my home turf. This blog is my breadcrumb trail tracing my discoveries, my encounters, my revelations. It is also an entirely subjective catalogue of the best references I can find for information on goings-ons within NYC's fringe culture—the locus of my interest.

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I realize that this all sounds very high-flautin’ and I hope you’ll bear with me. A majority of my future entries are going to be very grounded in actual events and experiences, informative and hopefully entertaining. But that doesn’t mean the occasional waxing poetic won’t slip in… every once and a while.