ABC

"Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name; lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."

*

He is blinded by fluorescent lights reflecting off linoleum floors. A woman hands him a card lettered “C” and directs him towards neatly ordered rows of seats. Machinery circulates temperate air with the stinging whiff of rubbing alcohol, and a camera in the corner of the ceiling notes muted gesticulations. Sitting beside “D” he is relieved they arose before the sky shattered in brilliance, beating the throngs of twitching bodies that lined up behind them. Grasping a pencil tightly in his slippery hand, he surveys several check boxes and his eye rests on one that reads “SORES, ‘CUTS’ OR LESIONS.” He scrawls most of the answers but refuses to write his name.

A saccharine smile in a sea of curls calls “C” and he follows her towards a small room down the corridor. She adjusts her glasses and taps her cherry nails, examining the card. “I see you left your name and address blank. I want you to know our conversation will remain confidential. Can I ask you a couple of questions?” He nods. “What is your country of origin?”

“Bangladesh.” He stares at the punctuation of a black spot on his foot. When relatives from the old country visit, their suitcase bears mangos and chilies in syrup, olives pickled in spiced oil, and the stench of salted fish, which inevitably stains the saris and shawls tucked underneath. On the trip back their suitcase is packed with soaps, shampoos, moisturizers, and hair products to scour their muddied hides—a deodorant commercial: Charles Barkley in a pith helmet remarking, “Anything less would be uncivilized.”

“Have you ever shared needles, syringes, or works?”

“Needles?” He stares at his beauty spot. He has a nascent memory: a sickly tree offering chalky fruit that made his face squint. Once he looked up “guava” in an encyclopedia to discover that it originated in South America. Had a seed caught on the wings of a bird in migration?

“You came here with ‘D,’ right? This is good. We always suggest that partners come together.”

The walls of the room are covered with posters: “My boyfriend gave me HIV. I was only worried about getting pregnant”; “‘HIV is not just a white man’s disease”; “No glove, no love”; and copious reminders to know yourself. The counselor prostrates his right arm and ties the rubber tubes tightly. She coaxes him with reassuring pats from her plastic hands, and asks him to look at the white wall to his left. She locates the lifeline, punctures the skin, and liberates a bloom of blood.

His mind drifts along the alabaster edges of the wall. The scar on his left arm had healed nicely, a wound from the thorns of Acacia Cemetery. Acacia witnesses few visitors besides the chance anthropologist. He stole in through a chink in the rusted gate, stirring wreathes of milkweed and the furled slumber of cicadas. Tracing his fingers on coarse slabs of slate, he divines antique engravings. Sophie of old Ozone Park spent her days toiling in tin and copper. She proffered her dowry for a plot of broken beer bottles and vines. Calcified angels are all that remain. Yet old Sophie roams the freeways and stripmalls of Levittown, in the attic of a big box with cobwebs and stale cake. Her call to arms mediates a quiet violence upon her old haunts. He inherits this soil after the exodus to Long Island.

Blood circulates through tubes, collecting into a vial in the counselor’s hands, and “C” quickly turns away to stare at the white wall. There is an intersection in Ozone Park where a mosque of brick and wire stands mid-construction, the dome beginning to take shape. Its cement minarets stand across an iglesia adorned with the star of David. The street is called “Mizanor Rahman Way.” Years ago he had followed the development of Mizanor’s mythology. “Gang War Blamed in Brawl Slay.” A man was pummeled by an angry mob of 20 men with baseball bats, hockey sticks, and iron rods. “2 Confess in Killing Bangladeshi.” A 12 year old Bangladeshi rode over the foot of a Latino teenager with his bike. The teenager stole his bike and ran away. A crowd of Bangladeshis recovered the bike and started a brawl with the Latinos. “Bangladeshi Fatally Beaten in Mistaken Identity.” There was drinking due to the Dominican Day Parade, said the police. Rahman was on his way home from work. Mistaken as one of the men who retrieved the bike, he was clubbed to death with a wooden chair leg.

“United for Slain Victim.” The counterwoman from El Castillo de Jagua places dollar bills in a makeshift memorial on “Mizanor Rahman Way.” The money will be sent to his wife and child back home. Moonlighting as a busboy in a restaurant downtown, Rahman was a photojournalist who had come to New York to report on the 2000 presidential election. Three weeks before he was ready to go home, his clothes and books packed into a suitcase. Now his blood christens the soil of Ozone Park. When the counselor extracts the needle “C” imagines a shattered camera lens, mirrors and gears strewn on the ground like a gutted clock.

“Now it’s time to wait.”

*

Light gleams through the window revealing a silken strand swaying in front of his eyes. Pursuing the thread to its zenith, Pradip studies the machinations of a solitary hunter. “The Roman emperor Domitian had a hobby of pinning down flies. He would needle the seams that prop its paper wings to better scrutinize its exquisite expiration.” Pradip examines the lineaments of his partner’s face, wondering what the worm imagines while arrested in chrysalis. “Want to hear a freaky story?”

“No.”

“In Japan there’s a restaurant where the suits and ties take a break from their control tower to savor rustic eats. From outside the place looks typical, lukewarm décor like a bootleg Venice. You step through a wooden door, then a metal vault, and are conducted down spiral staircases to a dimly-lit basement with a scarlet carpet.”

“Cut to the chase.”

“Have you ever been to the Palm? It’s kind of twisted. Before they serve your lobster steaming red on a platter with drawn butter, they’ll show its clamped claws for your grinning approval. Here, they’ll fetch a plump sow for you to stuff, before it’s roasted whole with an apple in its maw.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pork your pig and eat it too.”

“That’s not kosher.”

“They also offer chickens, goats, even elephants.”

“That can’t be true.”

“The Japanese are crazy; the Atom bomb fucked ‘em up.” He scoffs. “Have you read about the German cannibal?”

“Jeez, Pradip, you’re like Columbus sometimes.”

“—My Montezuma in a wreath of coca leaves—” He kisses Jacob’s hand.

Jacob raises his chin from his chest to view a shrieking baby, taut red with pouting. The mother pauses from her rosary beads to direct the husband, firmly clasping a stone sphere between her fingers. The father breaks off corn bread to feed the raucous child, who ogles Jacob through a cotton cocoon. “You know who’s missing in your account, Pradip?”

“Who’s that?”

“La Malinche.”

“I’m not familiar.”

“And you call yourself a scholar. Look her up, you prick.”

Satiated, Pradip reclines in his plastic throne and views a litany of putrid images transmitted from a TV on the ceiling. “Burning blisters, bloody discharge, sores erupting—are they describing a fucking volcano? Yuck, Jacob, that one looks like a cauliflower!”

“I need some air.”

*

They exit the cramped room, descending a staircase of laconic steel. They sit outside on the steps of the edifice. Elm and oak trees stir in the gust releasing blonde leaves. Acorns plummet, roll, and rest on cemented earth, while a squirrel skitters forth to collect its booty. Women in ermine furs saunter past, weighed by their harvest of paper or plastic. “Your trucker hat’s quite hip, Jacob.”

“My ancestors were truckers. This is my grandpa’s cap.”

“I thought your ancestors were barbarians.”

“Bar-bar-bar-bar.”

Pradip chuckles. “You know, I tried to look up your hometown, Jacob. I couldn’t find it.”

“My dad called me a couple of days ago to say he sold our house in Ohio. A mess of stucco caked with soot, cold chimney, hardwood floors. When me and my brother played hide and seek we’d always get splinters. Out back we had a field of milkweed, where I’d sleep sometimes in the company of cicadas. Indian summers: the nymphs unearth from tree trunks to rest on feather-veined leaves. Fat with sap, they ditch their cramped skins for wings of parchment and leave their calcified selves clinging on bark.”

“Sounds bucolic.”

“The Ohio River Valley’s a trip, Pradip. We should bust out the raft sometime. We can see the world and you don’t need a passport. Cairo, Jerusalem, Rome—ancient towns strung across old River Jordan.”

Pradip ponders the fact. “Can you see stars in Ohio?”

“On breezy days maybe."

“Where’d your dad move?”

“Cincinnati. He gets angry when he hears telemarketers fake an American accent. But the old dog’s teeth are worn down.”

Pradip stares at a couple of pigeons scavenging a mound of muffin on the sidewalk. “I hear your tummy rumbling, Jacob.” Pradip approaches a glinting cart on the curb, and waves to a stocky fellow cloistered within. “Hola amigo. Como estas?” the figure exclaims with a wide grin. Pradip squints with a smile and a nod and offers a fistful of quarters. He procures a large cup of coffee and a chocolate chip muffin, breaking off pieces for Jacob.

“How’s the DUMBO general store?”

“Plumage plucked upon structures of styrofoam; astrakhan tufts of beaver sorry fleece; tanned-tinted cowbell boots; varnished snakeskin coiled to release: another glass behemoth along the waterfront.” Jacob sips coffee to moisten his lips.

“Did you have a busy shift yesterday?”

“Cappuccino, Moccaccino, I made foam and froth and frap all fucking day. I came home stinking of burnt sugar.”

“The smell of your sweat gets me hard.”

“They must be spiking those bottles of water, Pradip; the matrons of DUMBO are spawning broods. The women chat up a storm on their cells, while the maggots crawl over everything, poking their fingers in electric sockets."

“C’mon, you love kids, Jacob.”

"A bizarre fag couple comes in hauling a new-born like a Louis Vuiton bag. After mollycoddling for a minute, they hand her off to a Caribbean lady while they sit at the bar sucking on a bottle of wine. What a sterile creation, Pradip. The milk and honey’s nursed through a plastic nipple.” A burst of gale unfastens prickly thistles, tufts of cotton, and spherical seeds. An acorn plunges into their coffee cup. “I’d rather fling my shit on the wall.”

*

A flight of stairs leads to fluorescent lights and linoleum floors. They reclaim their seats among the furrowed bodies. The saccharine smile tiptoes with a folder clasped between her nails. She surveys the room and calls the letter “C.” Pradip kisses Jacob and walks down the corridor, the door shut behind him. Jacob stares at the blank TV screen on the ceiling as the tape rewinds.

In the stucco confines of their house in Ohio the television was ritually set to the image of a field circumscribed by chalk and seats. Timpani drums of brass band fanfare fueled the throbbing crowd as tiny figures inched back and forth on the green lawn. Or the padded coliseum of American Gladiators: bronzed figures swathed in red and blue lycra repelling an enemy incursion with foam shields and nerf balls. He and his brother would fashion walls and towers out of sofa pillows.

Over years of holidays and good report cards Jacob had acquired a sizable collection of action figures. He would subject the miniature men to rigorous physical examination: flexing their joints in awkward ways, gripping their hands round gunmetal aimed at invisible foes. And when no one was watching, he undressed the dolls to inspect their incomplete manufacture. One year Jacob’s family went to Florida for Christmas. The place felt alien; they never put their scarves and sweaters to use. The football game on TV was the sole continuity with their holiday ritual. When the Steelers scored their second touchdown, the phone rang with alarming urgency, the receiver handed to his mother. Her face grew grave with creases as she shrieked and wailed.

They returned abruptly to find the precarious structure caked with soot, wood panels splintered. The sofas were soaked with moldy moisture, water dripping carpet-puddles. His mother needled old articles—a disfigured Jesus black with carbon, the spine of a charred cookbook, a chiffon wedding dress scorched to embers. The neighbors reported a lightning bolt struck the second floor, starting a consuming blaze. Jacob ventured upstairs to his room and opened the door, smacked by the caustic stench of burnt plastic. He found a mosaic of red, blue, and black molded and melted where his chest of toys once stood.

The TV finishes rewinding the tape and begins to replay its fetid imagery. The door down the corridor opens, and Jacob sees Pradip solemnly walking with a letter in his hand. Pradip carefully produces a scrap of paper from the envelope and hands it to his lover. His name is inscribed in ink. “We keep trying to make babies, but they come out like shit,” he cries, breaking into laughter.

The Williamsburg Edge

My map begins mid-transit on the A train to Broadway Junction, where a pinstripe-suited figure carries a briefcase and a heavy leather-bound book, slowly ambling down the aisle. His exhortations are not the hellfire and brimstone of a Caribbean dialect, but the egalitarian accent of an American black man raised in Bed-Stuy. “Jesus loves you, he died for your sins!” Confessing his life story to the crowded train, we learned he had been a crack addict and a male prostitute, but was redeemed through the power of Christ.

Watching the figures on the L train, I contemplate the political economy of visibility. The body is a spectacle to flaunt a garish look, parry with a sneer, and compel the gaze of an other. The economy of postured images presented by young individuals on the L train fades when sonorous Mexican guitar players busk down the corridor of the subway car. Sitting next to me, a young man with a pad of paper and pencil clandestinely sketches an image of a woman sitting across from us.

Stepping out from the Bedford Avenue stop I see “Williamsburg Realty.” On the corner of the block, a sign says “Northside Shopping District,” indicating a committee of neighborhood businesses coordinating efforts to promote Williamsburg’s commerce. This is a familiar scene in gentrified neighborhoods dominated by consumption, such as places in NoHo/SoHo or parts of Midtown. I understand these organizations as a manifestation of neoliberalism in its privatization of public services; for example, many of these commercial organizations often employ the racialized poor, particularly ex-convicts, to provide the labor that makes these spaces palatable for the freedom to consume.

I decide to take a turn south. On South 1st Street is a real estate agency named “The Jacksonian”; the glass windows of the Jacksonian display various lofts for sale. The architecture is all glass framed by metal—the structural violence is transparent. Right next door is the Elliman Gallery which features an exhibit titled “Face Out” ( www.theportraitpainter.com/) about the Stolen Generation, mixed-race children of Australian Aboriginals who were forcibly extricated from their families by the government in attempts to acculturate proper citizen-subjects—an apt gallery for a space such as this.

Walking down Bedford, passing South 3rd, I see traces of immigrant populations scattered everywhere—numerous iglesias, restaurants with signs donning “comida crillos,” and the ever-present security camera surveying residents and passersby strolling down these lanes. It’s here that I see one clear indication of what we define as hip: a restaurant called “Simple Café,” it's storefront adorned with graffiti while its clientel seems predominately white. The Simple Cafe utilizes the structure of hip, employing the aesthetics of South Williamsburg to promote consumption. As I walk further along, close to the Williamsburg Bridge overpass on Broadway, the dominant commercial institutions are construction companies. The construction industry is profitting with development. Scanning the names of these companies elucidates that many of the entrepenuers are Italian Americans; the laborers also consist of working class whites, as well as Latinos and blacks. These businesses are similarly adorned with graffiti, many of which are marked by the artists’ tag and website; one construction supplier displayed an intricate graffiti piece and the address http://www.ymicrew.com/. I reflect on my own privilege as tourist and colonizer when I pull out my camera.

On Broadway and South 6th there are many landmark buildings, such as the Peter Luger Steak House and the Williamsburg Art and Historical Society. One large edifice is an HSBC Williamsburg Savings Bank, which upon closer inspection has a sign stating it used to be a children’s social services agency. I haven’t researched the history of this site yet, but I would venture that the original function of the building harkens to a point in time discussed by Dowling, either the reform efforts of turn of the century bourgeoisie, or the mobilization and organization of immigrant groups. Now it’s the branch of an international banking institution: the privatization of public services and globalization of markets--another manifestation of neoliberalism. Around these buildings there are scattered sites of hipster consumption such as the retailer “Brooklyn Industries.”

Walking down further to South 9th and Roebling, one gets a sense of the “old Williamsburg” (not to be nostalgic). Latino music is blasting around an area marked by housing projects, bodegas, places to wire money, and stores selling phone cards—a thoroughly immigrant population resides here. Walking further across Roebling one starts to see the synagogues and private schools of Hassidic Jews. The businesses here revolve around an economic relationship between Hassids and Latinos; for example, the supermarket arefrequented mostly by Jewish residents and also by Latinos, but the workers areall Latino. The relation is obviously asymmetrical, but there were no outright indications of discord.

Having explored South Williamsburg, I veered towards the river and started walking along the waterfront on Kent Avenue. Most of the buildings are either construction sites or municipal buildings owned by the Department of Environmental Protection. Further up are striking forms of hip: the laconic façade of the Domino Sugar Factory, organizations such as the Freestyle Arts Association or this enigmatic building “Duffs.” Intellectual labor reigns supreme, but historic spaces along the waterfront are conserved as repositories of nostalgia for sites of production. There are many new high-rise condos going up along the river. A couple in particular caught my eye. One prominent instance of hip is an apartment building adorned with a smokestack. Another building complex was titled “Williamsburg Edge.” Liminality and marginality are motifs that constitute and inform the hip desire for a space beyond the banality of middle class rationalism. Yet as the website advertises (http://www.williamsburgedge.com/) the amenities of this apartment complex centers around the privilege of seeing and consuming. The hipster embodies a gaze complicit with the machinery of his beloved’s displacement, attracting intensive capital investments from multinational corporations such as Hypo Real Estate, the company that funds “Williamsburg Edge” and other such luxury developments in global cities. The contemporary hipster is produced in conversation with transnational circuits of capital and labor, and an economy of desires that accompanies these relations of power.

One major site that currently looks dim but portends more neoliberal hipsterism is the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal Six, a former docking station when the waterfront was industrially active. This is where I would like to conduct further research, particularly regarding the entitites that are funding its reclamation and development, including The Trust for Public Land, the Rhodebeck Charitable Trust, JM Kaplan Fund, and Citistorage. Right across from this bare park is Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (http://www.nag-brooklyn.org/) a community organization that works with city officials and businesses to come to comprises regarding the forms of development engulfing Williamsburg. As I continue to further conduct my research, this will be an interesting resource.

After walking along the waterfront I ambled up to North Williamsburg/Greenpoint, passing by McCarren Park, once called “Needle Park,” and stopped by a strip of businesses on one block. I went into a café named Mamalu to grab a cup of coffee. Mamalu is what I would classify as a “baby colony,” sites I’ve seen before in neighborhoods like DUMBO, where upper-middle class mostly white women come together for frothy cappuccino, bringing their babies along. The store has every conceivable need for a child , from baby food, diapers, a changing table in the bathroom, to a space with toys for the toddlers to hang out—the entire store brought to my mind the image of a mechanized mammy. I bought a cup of coffee and dropped my change in the tip cup. Latina labor substantiates bourgeois middle class femininity. The other two stores were Grooming and Baths, for petcare, and Urban Rustic, an organic food store big on “green” discourses of environmentally sustainable development. These three stores reflect aspects of the three relations of communication elaborated by Todorov—inter-human communication, communication with nature, and communication with the divine—and the shifts in these semiotic systems produced through neoliberal capitalism.

As it begins to rain, I head back towards the subway, and one if my last views is of the Orthodox Transfiguration Cathedral.

Navigating the East Village

My first instinct upon beginning a personal map of the East Village was to draw on the cultural makeup of the neighborhood as well as my memory, being that I attended middle and high school right on what I now consider its northern end. The map I've posted here indicates what I feel are the general borders of the neighborhood (pink is the EV territory). Interestingly, this one is also the scheme used most often by Real Estate businessmen and the NYC Tourist industry. Despite the myth-making of the business world, these borders do hold up as far as my standards about cultural maps (insofar as borders realistically can). Walking one block beyond them in any direction reveals a clear distinction in culture and general atmosphere, brought on by big businesses on the west, residences to the north, and a relatively different population of residents and commuters to the south (and arguably elsewhere).

Of course, the confluence of the business vision of the neighborhood and the cultural one is not new. In fact, the modern existence of the East Village, and its very conception as an individual neighborhood is contingent on such a shared history. Before the 1950s, the area was considered part of the Lower East Side (Interestingly, many of my friends who live in it, particularly the non-white ones or whites who defined themselves by hip-hop, still call it that), and was populated mostly by poor immigrants and racial/ethnic minorities. The architecture was defined by tenements, and there were few businesses. The ones that did exist catered mostly to locals. In the 1950s, Allen Ginsberg moved there, and by the middle of the decade, the neighborhood had become home to various beatniks and self-described bohemian artists of several sorts. In the 1960s, hippies began moving in. By the late 1960s, the immigrant and minority population was no longer a visible majority. It was at this time that various Realtors began describing the neighborhood as "the East Village" to market it as the Greenwich Village, which had been hip in the 50s but had by then become mostly middle-class and decidedly uncool. Calling it the Village also erased its association with the immigrant ghettos. This helped bring more hip wannabes into the neighborhood, but also offended the traditional bohemian sensibility by destroying its obscurity). Many sites now considered landmarks, like the famous CBGB & OMFUG materialized soon after, making the bohemian conception of the space branch out and splinter into different varieties. Today, the neighborhood consists mainly of the relics of this bohemian past and its fetishized vision of the older space.

During my walk, there were several things that stuck out to me, and that made me question my own relationship to the neighborhood. The first thing I noticed was that all of the landmarks and sites which I initially categorized as the "old neighborhood" were actually only so old as to belong to the initial wave of bohemia. Indeed, perhaps the popular vision of the neighborhood had crept into my own. In order to rectify this, I began to envision the ideologies and dreams that had built my own conception of the place, and then to deconstruct them. I began to notice, much to my dismay, that I could not find any signs of the pre-bohemian community, except in the projects that existed on the extreme eastern side, where many Latinos still live, and in fetishized spaces.

There is McSorley's Old Ale House on East 7th Street, a place that has been operating since the 19th century. Back then, it actually was a gathering space for immigrants, many of them Irish. Now, it is being marketed as an "authentic" community space, and its connotations of working-class grit, along with Irish stereotypes, are being flaunted to no end. Of course, it has changed ownership since its earliest days, and in some sense it is being forced to do this to stay open; it is catering to rather than being evicted by the new waves of bohemia, and now, yuppies, that live there. Once inside, I saw a rather diverse group of people, mostly minding their own business. The interior remains mostly unchanged, to help maintain the preferred atmosphere. There are many people inside who would not look out of place in the stereotypical Williamsburg, but there are some who seem to be local, working class residents as well.

There is also the site of the former CBGB, survived only by its new apparel store since the original shut down in the October of 06 after it was seized by the Bowery Residents Committee in the name of starting a home for orphaned children. It may move to Las Vegas, though it has not done so yet. Now, though, plans have changed, and fashion designer John Varvatos plans to open a store at that address sometime very soon, promising to respect the legacy of the site, whatever that may entail. Still, the new CBGB store is something more corporate than before itself, selling all sorts of trinkets and apparel that depend on the old CBGB's image as a site for once avant-garde, underground punk music made by mostly-starving artists. Everything is priced rather high, but the most popular item remains the only apparel marketed by the original CBGB, the black tee shirt with the site's logo printed on it. Once again, nostalgia and fetishism reign.

More generally, St. Mark's Place is changing quickly. There are more Japanese-owned stores than ever before, and a large population of tourists, many of whom are Japanese themselves. Interestingly, the new stores don't seem to be drawing on any of the mythologies previously associated with the street. They do seem to draw local crowds interested in what they have to offer, and they are definitely connected to the influx of Japanese tourists. This is an example of a change that is seemingly unrelated to the past, but perhaps there is more here...