Modern Wonders

Brooklyn. What is it? Is it the mix of skeletal bums, heavenly hipsters and drunken, tough-looking jerks, mean like a manic bulldog with barbwire tattoos, beside hilarious misfits in retro haircuts walking down the block, or is it the neon-lit diners that frame the night and look like movie-sets near bad Indian and Mexican cafes that I can picture Brando, leaning against a red Mustang and smoking a Marlboro light in the back parking lot that makes me love it? Immigrants, poverty, Puerto Rican biker gangs, thundering past Hasidic Jews running home for the evening prayers; the Italian cop who seemed to be from the 1920s with his manner and grace as we held up rush-hour traffic looking for Lorimer street; the grimy buildings taken over by yuppie monstrosities; the street art of the factory district with New York City across the river, or that bloody pigeon feather on the curb of the pavement. . . .

They tell me, Brooklyn still has character. I'm not sure exactly what that means. But it sounds right.

I can see it in the expression of their faces. I can see it in the fight, cynicism, and expressions of their will. In that rugged force I see in their swagger. You've got to watch yourself in this town. A look will give away where you're from, what you've been through, and what you're made of. Are you a square, a poser, an emo artist or just emo . . . does titanium run through your veins? It's the street mix of old and young, the clash of culture, the clash of time, the clash of history and contemporary, the clash of character and drone.

This is the town where I walk down the street and imagine Ginsberg yelling "Moloch!" from the rooftops, "I'm madder than you are Carl!" Aluminum serpent and hallucinogenic wine to get drunk on Baudelaire hypnotizes the imagination in the vitrines of the vintage shops. Eighties and Nineties pulp-noir a few blocks away from an art installation in the back of a European clothing store and three blocks south of a Warsaw bar that serves Brooklyn Lager and Perogies.

The only vegetables in this town seem to dwell in the condo high-rises, who occasionally venture out, for their weekly massages and spa treatments in their posh salons. Everyone else is either in the fight- or dead. Action Action Action. Any minute I half-expect Oz to pull the curtain back and say, “Yes, kid, you’re actually in a movie, but nobody’s seen it.” The streets round themselves and you better be careful not to get too lost or you too shall see the sheet-metal eat the day.

There’s a poetry in the gusts blowing from the East river. I travel through that wind, to old New York. To the New York of the Twenties and before; the half-built masterpieces of architectural brilliance cut in half by the diagonal scimitar of the golden sun. The streets pulsating with music from factories whose only machinery are rusty sculptures that blast vibrations from their rusty shoulders.

Camus saw little more than the rains of New York, the horrific pale manikins and ghastly streets. I guess he forgot to take the eL across the river. To look at the Remington in the thrift shop on Bedford. What do you think he would have written Allen? A tragedy, I agree.

These are the streets, the only streets I know, to still bring out the light in my eyes. Maybe it’s the toxic goo running beneath the pavement and the machinery that you speak of, eating away at the heart of these walking wonders: that sick combination of everything to live and die for, caught beneath an oncoming tidal wave of corporate metal on the horizon. . . . and it stares back at you. It’s there. You see it. You know it.