Editor's Message
Brooklyn Counts!
If separated from the rest of New York City, our beloved borough of Brooklyn would be the fourth largest city in the United States. With an estimated 2,539,206 residents, Brooklyn’s population surpasses the official #4, a place below sea level in Texas, by 297,013 people; and we trail #3, a place in the Midwest that still likes to think of itself as #2, by a mere 313,098 heads. Even more important, Brooklyn is comfortably #1 among the five boroughs, with Manhattan a distant third. In terms of sheer numbers, #3 is actually much closer to the Bronx, a place where few Manhattanites would dare tread.
All of this is by way of saying that it’s census time, so we need to let people know who we are and why we’re here. Yes, many of the questions on the census survey are a bit mundane, but the survey does provide respondents with the rare opportunity to evaluate their housemates’ language and motor skills. So let folks know. Pretty soon we’ll catch Chicago, and be able to call ourselves the real “Second City.”
***
Regular readers of this column may find the above entry unusually earnest, upbeat and civic-minded. But so much happened in the first two weeks of this summer that not even Nostradamus could predict what’s in store for the next two months. Of those events, allow me to say that: I have nothing to add to the conversation regarding Michael Jackson; my poster of Farrah meant an awful lot to me as a boy; like Mark Sanford, I find the temptations of Argentina to be greater than those of Appalachia; and I do hope that Sarah Palin retires somewhere north of Alaska. Closer to home, the ongoing shenanigans of the State Senate have pleased nobody except the real estate lobby; and it was absurd that in the same week that our fares went up, the MTA gave yet another sweetheart deal to a certain well-connected developer.
In any case, thus began the summer of 2009—and right now, my only hope is for a few consecutive days of sunshine. See you in September.
—T. Hamm
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
The Brooklyn Presence at SXSW
By Nic YeagerMAY 2022 | Film
Between March 11 and 20, four Brooklyn-based short films screened at SXSW, each shot in Brooklyn and made by and featuring Brooklynites. SXSW is known for celebrating innovation in tech and education, and these projects offer their own kind of innovation: namely, an irreplaceable artistic ingenuity that flows out of this borough.
76. (The Brooklyn Museum)
By Raphael RubinsteinNOV 2021 | The Miraculous
At the sparsely attended opening of his first museum show in the United States, a German artist carries a 16-mm movie camera on his shoulder throughout the event. As people come up to congratulate him, he says almost nothing while pointing the camera at their faces. It’s unclear whether or not he is actually filming, but the camera effectively insulates him from his fans, however few they are.
from City of Blows
By Tim Blake NelsonFEB 2023 | Fiction
Those familiar with Tim Blake Nelson's work in Coen brothers films, the Watchmen series, or last year's Old Henry, will immediately understand that this novel's depictions of Hollywood machinations are of a higher caliber than those in any other literary work that's attempted to depict that world. City of Blows abounds in the economy and fluidity that accompanies true authority—seen in this description of a producer: “One of the biggest pricks in LA. But he gets his movies made. Directors rarely work for him twice.” What's less expected is Nelson’s investigation of the relationship between insecurity and toxicity, seen in Weinstein-esque predators but also applicable to masculinity at large. The psychological motivations and character examinations develop City of Blows from a roman à clef to a work far more universal.
79. (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Columbia County)
NOV 2021 | The Miraculous
An artist in his mid-30s living in New York and working in a 300-square-foot studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds himself consumed by frustration and anger. Although he is having exhibitions, after the shows close his paintings inevitably return to his studio, unsold. He’s not sure he wants to go on being an artist. A psychiatrist he consults helps him to understand that his anger revolves around his feelings about race, class and entitlement. Eventually the psychiatrist recommends that he begin working with a physical trainer, who has him start boxing and working out with a punching bag. Around the same time the artist, who is half-Choctaw and half-Cherokee, has been meeting with traditional Native American artists who tell him how the practices of dancing, drumming and beading have saved their lives. These experiences lead him to make a breakthrough in his work. Instead of focusing on painting, he begins to adorn Everlast vinyl punching bags like those he has been using at the boxing gym in extravagant styles inspired by Native American beadwork, pop culture, and everyday life. Along with beads, he adds tassels, sequins, brass and steel studs, yarn, chains, and sundry items. Some of the bags feature beaded texts quoting everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Public Enemy.
