MotherSister Brooklyn

My new favorite agony aunts (of the sexual variety), unafraid to tackle any dirty question while baked out of their minds:

Pot Psychology.

(I don’t need to tell you this is NSFW, right?)

Augusta Palmer, co-director of If You Succeed, which I discussed here, is screening the film at Embora on May 30 at 8pm, and May 31, June 6, and June 7 at 10pm. Catch it while you can.

Also, the Written Nerd has kicked off Stimulating Reading as a way to raise funds for a possible Fort Greene bookstore. Show some support if you’re able.

Yeah, I know. It seems like a mighty long time. Fact is, these days I’m writing when people pay me or where no one else can see it, and if I ever want to sleep, I don’t get time for much else.

But my pal Hilary Davidson tagged me, and I can’t ever turn her down. So, briefly, seven random things about me [that I’m willing to post on the internets]:

1. I agree with Charlie Parker that you just really need to listen to Hank Williams.
2. My first apartment in Fort Greene — a ground-floor, rent-stabilized studio on Washington Park — cost $683.50 per month in 1999. I should’ve taken the 1-bedroom in the Clinton Hill Co-ops for $800.
3. When I was pregnant with The Scamp, nothing in the universe tasted better than Cocoa Pebbles in ice-cold whole milk. I seriously ate it for dinner for days straight during my first trimester, which was in the summertime. And hey, the kid loves chocolate now.
4. I am addicted to the Thai coconut curry (with chicken and sticky rice) at Rice and the elderflower water at Smooch.
5. My hair is cut by a well-tattooed California surfer boy named Michael.
6. Whenever I walk over the sidewalk subway vent on Lafayette Avenue near the former Video Basket in warm weather, the smell of the underground that wafts up along with the cool blast of air transports me to July 1999 immediately, every time.
7. I had — and still have, rest their souls — crushes on Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and F Is for Fake — please!) and Robert Rauschenberg (not on my team, I know, don’t care). Warm, open, generous spirits paired with a sexy voice/drawl are irresistible. Hmm…maybe that explains something of why I also adore Peter Falk.

It’s been a trying time: The Scamp has started nursery school in central Fort Greene, and despite the warm and friendly environment, sweet classmates, and excellent teachers, he’s not going easy. If you don’t know firsthand, believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more gut-wrenching than walking out on your kid when he’s screeching in apparent terror and scratching at the air in your wake. And though my nerves would probably drive me straight to Frank’s, they’re not open at 9am, so my feet take me to Academy Restaurant instead.

I’ve been camping out in this diner all week, waiting for a “come get your kid” phone call; forcing myself to eat — even though I have no appetite — in order to justify my butt in the booth; amping up with coffee and finally putting my wrung-out emotions aside, digging into my work, currently a rewrite/update of a travel guidebook. When I first ducked into Academy on Monday, I had no needs other than a warm place to collect myself and pass an hour; now, I can’t imagine a better diner in the city and I don’t know why I didn’t start coming more often a long time ago.

In this gilded New York City of $2,000 one-bedroom apartments, $20 one-course brunches, and $2 one-way fares, it has been easy to undervalue the charms of the diner. After this week, I won’t again. I walk into Academy and I can seat myself immediately, whether in a booth by the window or at the counter. The no-nonsense, nicotine-stained waitresses bring a menu, take my order, bring my food, and drop my check easily and efficiently, without leaving me to wait for anything. I’m left in peace to sit staring out of the window, reading a New Yorker article on Michelle Obama, writing new restaurant reviews from my collected notes, checking my phone anxiously to make sure I haven’t missed the nursery school’s call. And the banter all around, words falling like confetti, every fragment of conversation an inspiration: Tommy Konstantakis with a wry word for everybody coming in and out; a young gringo who lays out his plan to move to Central America and live on the cheap with a full staff of hired help; a drummer on a break who pounds absently on a barstool with his sticks while waiting for his order; the middle-aged guys who point to Madonna as the beginning of the end of the age of sartorial grace (”The pants are falling off their butts now — of course they’re violent!”), but insist they’d vote for a woman politician (”Just not Hillary! And I told her, ‘You only like Obama because he’s black!’”).

And at a time when I feel almost paralyzed by multiple pathways that lead to I-don’t-know-where, and I second- and triple-guess nearly every choice I make from the time The Scamp jolts me awake (”Muh-MAH!”) in the morning till the time my mind finally wears its battery out and lets my eyes close too late at night, it’s comforting to know that “scrambled hard” means the egg will come scrambled hard; that asking for a decaf will get me a cup of instant Sanka, so I’d better buck up and drink up the real deal; and that I am alone together with a steady stream of working stiffs, artists, and those without a trust fund who just want a fill-up kind of meal and a smile for under $10 (or even $5) ‘cos that’s all they got to spare and they just want to make it through the day like anybody else. Some things are too good to change.

4W Circle may be gone and bars in the spirit of Cellars may be giving way to the likes of The Hideout, but signs that black bohemia might be hanging on in Fort Greene/Clinton Hill appeared in the form of this Colson Whitehead review of Brooklyn Was Mine and this Erykah Badu interview (complete with snapshot of the rent-controlled 1-bedroom she’s held on to since she moved here c. 1996). Add to that one of the ex-Hub’s twice-yearly Joie Lee sightings on my block, and hope springs eternal.

Photo of Ms. Badu modeling a Jacob’s Eye purse from Jacob’s Etsy shop.

Bookstores are my temples. From Mugwumps, a funky, early-80s-era shop in Little Rock, to Foyles in London (where, before its renovation and retrofitting, browsing the aisles meant risking burial by a tower of books, precariously crammed from any available surface to the ceiling), I enter and immediately feel more at peace and unable to leave with my hands empty. Which is why it’s deeply odd for me to live in a highly literate New York neighborhood without a local large general-interest bookstore.

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo may be set to finally change that. The keen mind behind The Written Nerd, one of the best blogs on books and bookselling you’ll read, Jessica has also just won the Brooklyn Public Library’s PowerUp! business plan competition. Local residents immediately began lobbying Jessica to open up shop here, so Fort Greene/Clinton Hill isn’t about to lose out to Windsor Terrace or Prospect Heights without a fight. Still, $15K is just the start of the funding that Jessica will need to pull it off, and there’s still the pesky matter of securing a suitable space at a reasonable price.

I have no doubt, though, that Jessica will realize her dream: Not only is her enthusiasm infectious, but she also has worked methodically for the better part of a decade to learn the ins and outs of the business. Find out why she’s bullish on independent bookselling and hear her ideas about the bookstore that could soon be on a Fort Greene/Clinton Hill corner after the jump.
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The Fort Greene Association Retail Survey results have been tallied by our man Jon Zeitlin, and the findings will be distributed soon via your friendly neighborhood media outlets such as The Brooklyn Paper. While the press release and report are coming together, however, I’ll tease you with a few tidbits:

• 58% of the respondents (there were ~400) said they were “somewhat likely” to satisfy their daily needs when shopping in Fort Greene; another 34% were either somewhat or very unlikely to find what they needed.
• No surprise that there was significantly greater satisfaction with existing restaurant options than retail/services options.
• The effect of the Internet on brick-and-mortar stores is overrated, at least for this neighborhood: Only 10% of respondents shop online when they can’t find what they need here, while 51% cruise over to a nearby neighborhood and another 32% handle their business in Manhattan instead.
• The top 10 most-wanted places across categories (retail, restaurants, and services) were: bookstore (overwhelmingly — something like 70% or so of survey respondents picked this), bakery with bread and desserts, seafood store, hardware store, natural foods store, gourmet grocery store, cheese store, 24-hour diner, stationery/card store, and florist. The most-wanted places were fairly consistent across incomes and ethnicities.
• Other desired stores included a bike shop, a food co-op, an Ethiopian restaurant, a knitting store, and a cooking supplies/housewares store. Um, and someone did request a Starbucks.
• The person who requested a Starbucks was a lone wolf, though: Respondents rejected “chains,” Starbucks, fast-food or take-out Chinese, “overpriced boutiques and markets,” porn shops (!), and dollar stores.
• At the Ingersoll and Whitman houses, respondents most wanted a supermarket, preferably either a Pathmark or Shop Rite (though Fairway, Costco, BJs, and Wal-Mart got 1 vote each as well.

As for my beloved bowling alley, it seems that mostly black respondents wanted one — it was number 12 of 20 when the data was cut by race. Someone pointed out that there is a bowling alley in the basement of Cadman Church on Lafayette and Clinton; wonder if it could be refurbished and find a new life?

The Fort Greene Retail Survey results aren’t all in yet, but it seems safe to say that grocery stores are likely to rank high as a community want. Yet already the times when your best hope for a quick and inexpensive bite to eat once you arrived back home in Fort Greene were take-out from Cambodian Cuisine or a slice from Mario’s are well and truly gone. Besides all of the restaurants that have opened up in the ‘hood in the past decade, the past three months have seen the introduction of lots of small market options. The latest, Provisions (753 Fulton St.), has been open for four hours and is serving free coffee as I type.

According to Jason, one of the store’s partners, fresh fish and meat will be available on Tuesday; the rest, including cheeses and charcuterie, will show up over the course of the next month. There have been murmurs of concern about the number of groceries in close proximity — including R&J’s, Fresh Garden, Greene Farm, Union Market, and whatever the Brooklyn Heights-based prepared food company that snapped up the former Seven Corners hardware space is going to open — but Jason didn’t seem particularly worried. Speaking of Fresh Garden specifically, he said, “I think we’ll complement each other.”

Now, will all of this stop me from ordering from Fresh Direct? Let’s face it, probably not; the convenience of being able to order online and have it show up at my door is too good to pass up (maybe if I didn’t have a toddler to wrangle and my local Met wasn’t so crummy…). But I’m finding already that I prefer to go to Fresh Garden for good fruit (Fresh Direct’s is generally crap; I used to go all the way to Citarella in Manhattan) and La Mediterranee yogurt, and I may find myself stepping into Provisions for other extras and treats (such as the freeze-dried peaches and Rao’s tomato sauce I picked up today). The prepared foods place could also be a boon (other than pizza, Fresh Direct doesn’t do that well, either). My homelier end of Fulton in Clinton Hill appears to be gaining an organic food shop, which if it’s really worth a damn will be fantastic to have; I’m also looking forward to Choice Market II, whenever they get their landmarks situation sorted and the doors open. Nothing here is really a one-stop solution (though a possible food co-op is promising); still, it’s nice to finally have some worthwhile options.

The best mixtape I ever received was so good that I still keep a Walkman around in order to listen to it from time to time. It was a 21st-birthday gift from Colin Brooks, a friend since high school and a drummer so talented that he was receiving press plaudits before he received his diploma (as I recall, one review in the Little Rock Spectrum appreciatively noted that he “pounds the drums as if they owe him money”). The mixtape, which includes treats such as Frank Black’s “Abstract Plain,” Elvis Costello’s “Welcome to the Working Week,” and the Stones’ “Tumblin’ Dice,” was not only a kind-hearted effort to ease my oppressive anxiety over misguided romances and looming wage-slavin’ but also an eclectic demonstration of Colin’s appreciation of smart pop tunesmithery wrapped in driving rock ‘n’ roll.

At the time he gifted me with the tape, Colin had already provided the backbeat for at least 10 Little Rock punk bands, including the Numbskulz and Substance; in the 10 years since, he has also served time with Skeleton Key, Sea Ray, The Stills, and now Dan Zanes & Friends. That’s right: Dan Zanes, formerly of the Del Fuegos and now the free world’s best hope for all-access music that doesn’t make you want to break the CD player after your child has listened to it 50 times.  The group has won leagues of devoted fans and industry respect (including a Grammy Award); guests on their records include Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Aimee Mann, and John Doe. Still, I never quite foresaw the day when my grizzled friend would be surrounded by any bottles that didn’t contain beer, so I used the excuse of the band’s upcoming February show at BAM to pester Colin about exactly how it came to this.

Find out how Colin navigates the underbelly of rock stardom — y’know, the soft one that involves pajama parties and plenty of coffee — while staying true to his indie rock roots after the jump.

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When most people think of surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding, New York City is not usually the first image that comes to mind — but that’s because they just don’t know. They’re starting to find out, though: the Gray Lady recently took notice of a Brooklyn band of skaters, and new shops such as the Harlem-based Everything Must Go and Homage in Cobble Hill have started serving up gear. But one company that pulls board sports into a truly 21st-century reality (it’s all about the mix, y’all) is Brooklyn Surfer. Established just several years ago by Michael Green, a surfer/skater/snowboarder and “creative dude” in the ad business, Brooklyn Surfer is an apparel company and a conceptual brand; Green’s affiliate company, BSI Agency, has clients that include MTV, Sony, and Microsoft.

Michael is soon off to a trade show in Germany, followed by a few days to enjoy the powder in Vermont before returning to dig into the next season of Brooklyn Surfer products and concepts. He took a time out, though, to tell me how Brooklyn Surfer represents the true surfer of life.

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The bitter winter cold makes me think of my two-year lost weekend in Southern California, and thoughts of SoCal plus watching The Scamp toss his lithe body around into yoga poses makes me think of surfing. Which I never attempted, to my regret; I opted to live vicariously through my then-boyfriend, a dedicated surfer practically since he could walk. It was a boys’ club and an exhilaratingly fun one, though I longed to meet other women who weren’t part of the beached girlfriends brigade.

That’s why Andrea Kabwasa is an inspiration. The California-born, Europe- and Africa-raised Kabwasa is a diplomat’s daughter and special-education teacher who first stood up on a surfboard at the age of 32. She’s been a dedicated surfer since (her 40th birthday is next August), and the first black woman to surf longboard competitively; she’s even building her own surfboard now. She teaches free surf clinics with the Black Surfing Assocation – “I’ve taught a lot of moms, which is so cool,” she says – and she’s an ambassador to the easily intimidated (like me), noting that she hadn’t been swimming for 10 years when she started (“You don’t need to be an excellent swimmer,” she says encouragingly).

My complete chat with Andrea is after the jump.
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As a member of a Fort Greene Association subcommittee on commercial development in the area, I suggested the inclusion of a food co-op as an option on the residents’ survey that’s currently circulating. So I was thrilled to read that DK Holland and Kathryn Zarczynski are already on top of the idea and working to bring it to fruition. If you’re also keen to have an affordable, healthy, community-minded grocery co-op closer than Park Slope, check out the Fort Greene Food Co-op blog here.

Update: The first organizing meeting for the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill Food Co-op will be on Wednesday, January 23 at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church at 85 South Oxford (btw Lafayette and Greene aves.) from 7 to 8:30pm. On the agenda for discussion: Why do we need/want a co-op? What it will take to start it? What support do we have now? What will the structure of the co-op be? What’s on our wish list? How can other co-ops help us?

Back in Brooklyn, and I’d hoped to return from Orlando with a special gift for my sweet landlords, who live across the street and are unflaggingly helpful. Something beyond a standard tacky souvenir — citrus fruit, maybe? And then it occurred to me that I could simply order that online and have it shipped, sparing me from lugging it on the plane.

Which inspired another thought: In the age of the internets, can traveling still provide a special shopping opportunity?

Oh sure, not everything is available online — but a lot is, to a degree I never would’ve imagined growing up in the Old Country. As a little girl, I used to read books with characters who ordered clothing and rare luxuries from the Sears Roebuck catalog; I wasn’t doing anything far removed when I admired the copy in a J. Peterman catalog (I mentioned I was young, right?) or breathlessly awaited the arrival of Scholastic books ordered from those onion-skin-thin paper flyers or imagined a shopping trip to New York or Los Angeles to buy the cool products I saw in Sassy. When I was old enough to venture forth alone, I looked forward to buying John Fleuvog shoes in New York, Muji notebooks in Covent Garden, Nuxe dry oil in a Parisian pharmacy; the men in my life might gift me with carved turtles from Mexico or flower tea from Shanghai. Now there isn’t a single one of those things that you can’t purchase online; there’s even a great shop in SoHo devoted to the idea.

I know people still take shopping trips to major cities; where would Suzy Gershman be if they didn’t? And when I think about it, the thrill isn’t gone for me — it has simply changed. It remains my custom to buy a book in every place I visit, some famous (Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, where I purchased Edmund White’s The Flaneur; City Lights Books in San Francisco, where I purchased a copy of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl), some not (such as a nameless shop in Norfolk where I scored some vintage Françoise Sagan novels for 50p a piece). When I last returned from Paris, it was with a stem of a gorgeously scented (but totally poisonous) flowering plant from the balcony of my hotel room; from Rhode Island, a passel of freshly picked sweet corn. An acquaintance comes bearing mint leaves plucked from an Armenian field for tea; an old friend presents me with a particular type of English dime-store fountain pen that I like.

The best souvenirs are always the most personal, anyway; that’s a piece of the travel experience that the Internet will never deliver, wherever else it may transport you.

In Florida again for the holidays. I’m over my need for face-breaking cold weather in order to enhance the Christmas spirit. A tannenbaum looks just as festive in the sunlight, Santa looks even jollier with nut-brown skin and sunburn-red cheeks.

It’s added balm for my sin-sick soul to ride around in a car with my brother blasting music, like we used to do when he was 19 and I was 12. We’re less bored now, with weightier subjects to talk about; it’s a convertible Pony instead of various ’70s and ’80s-era Chevys; more crunk and less P.E. or N.W.A.; and a Scamp in the backseat approving of the beat and clutching his curls to stop the breeze from tendril-whipping his face.

“OK. Where are we, again?”

“We’re going north, and we’re about to turn west on State Road 50, which becomes Colonial Drive in the east –”

“Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Something about Orlando just ruins any sense of direction I have.”

“Well as long as it doesn’t fail you in New York, I’m glad.”

But New York looks like somewhere, I think, as we pull into a mall like every other mall I’ve been to in Florida, with the same architecture, anchor stores — hey, this Dillard’s even smells like the Dillard’s in Little Rock, with the same peculiarly fusty but practical clothing –

“–but it’s in Orlando,” laughs my big brother.

“Yeah.”

Back in the car and on our way to the tattoo studio to check in with the artist who’s going to ink my brother’s arm, I only begin to regain any sense of place near downtown, close to the crumbling ghetto of Bahamians and Jamaicans living in plantation-ish shotgun shacks that remind my brother of New Orleans and me of the Caribbean. There are also bungalows that, given some care, would be lovely places to live.

“But the money’s coming and these will all be –”

“–swept up and the area gentrified soon?”

“Right.”

Living in New York, I am convinced that the paradigm shift that made people of means realize that inner cities and their bungalows and rowhouses and commercial/residential density and centralized transportation were more desirable and interesting than 1-hour car commutes to disconnected suburbs is complete. But then I visit the rest of America and remember how narrow my view has become. I wonder, now that the Little Rock I remember looks more like Orlando looks more like Dallas looks more like nowhere and everywhere, will there be a movement to restore character to the sprawling landscapes littered with the same big box stores and gas stations and parking lots and strip malls? Someone’s trying.