Oh Dean street, I love the arse off of you

newyork newyork
brooklyn to me
newyork newyork
is brooklyn to me

and brooklyn to me
is a pair of small shacks
with a length of twine between them and a metal can either end.

Reaching right over Flatbush
sometimes the yellowcab drivers have to pass the intersection of Dean and F
with their hands raised aloft
out the window
so they don't drive right through
the delicate connection.

Such a flimsy piece of string
and so well taken care of.
he walks the line.

did something happen? fuck,
i think i fell into a pit of scorching hot love
this afternoon.
And I'm being eaten alive by these tongues of flame.

This thick pit
and nobody owns it.

Stoop sale scoop, or, All along the watchtower

And it happened right on my very own stoop, also. At least the stoop that is my very own until monday. There's a multi-block stoop sale happening today in Prospect Heights, and much of the proceeds are going toward the Develop, Don't Destroy Brooklyn fund, which is a VERY GOOD CAUSE INDEED, and is fighting off a major megadevelopment in this neighbourhood, which would threaten to change the living face of Brooklyn forever.

So.. the scoop. Well, right outside my current abode up here on Prospect place, amongst the second hand clothes, books and broken electronics, was a sign that read:

Tiffany
From Plaza Hotel Lobby ------->

Hurrah! Somebody in my house stole a bunch of Tiffany from the Plaza Hotel, stashed it in their one bedroom flat for a number of years, and finally purged it for ten bucks in a stoop sale! Fight billionaire development with nicked objets d'art! Hurrah!

Lets hurl Tiffany wares at the Atlantic Yards' "community liaison" building! This revolution has more options than two.

Further down the block, Emily was delighted at having found a wardrobe (a little miracle, she said) because she's been longing for a wardrobe for AGES now! Over the other side of Vanderbilt, Gloria from Jamaica is having a good day, selling her stuff for a dollar or two apiece, though she has to keep moving her chair to stay in the shade, because it is HOT today in new york city, folks. HOT! We sing the song of global warming as we celebrate our ability to streetjive in the heat this late in the season..

And further down Prospect again, by Flatbush, there are some dudes with a 78's record player, playing some Memphis Minnie records, and on the other side of the street there's a family man with a rare copy of the Peyote Awareness Journal, the inaugural edition. This little slender volume came out of a group based in Arizona back in '96, and they've got a Letter From The President and everything in there.. bankers on acid, clearly. Lets take minutes on our psychedelic journeys of revelation and grief! Have bi-monthly AGMs and conference tables and whiteboards as the tears of love flow down our cheeks and we vibrate to the beat of our internal atm machine..

I'm spreading the word, person by person, that I'm looking for a new place to live in this neighbourhood. And so far, each conversation is another reminder of why I want to live here. A weekend of jivin, dancin, rollerskatin, talkin and light aperitifs on the lawn, beckons.

Good morning PS 9

says the megaphone at the children's playground in the middle distance here in Prospect Heights every morning at 9:06 am.

The school principle gives a different sermon every morning. I can hear her voice well enough, but only a few words here and there come through clearly. As I type, she's saying

Always remember, da da da da da
Always remember, ka ka ka ka ka
Always remember, the choices you make today shape your world tomorrow.
(Yeah cripple them from the getgo, why don'tcha, lady?)

Then,
If all else fails, read read read.
(though I could be mishearing this)

I've been up the past couple of mornings, incredibly early. It's a totally different world.

Prospect Heights News: two slugs were seen on 6th avenue moving slowly toward each other this evening

Stay tuned for updates as the story develops.

The Pampas of Brooklyn, def.

Those little patches of wild, scrubby ungentrified green weedy ground it is still possible to find in areas of Prospect Heights, Fort Greene and Bed Stuy. Some are sizable, and fill the area of a brownstone that is no longer there, or a sports arena that would raze all indigenous life varieties in the area, to be replaced largely by a single bud-lite mega-variety.

Do the shimmer, do the shake shake with all of your might

I was walking through Prospect Heights toward Fort Greene/Bed Stuy this evening around 6, when I saw them. Five groups of white birds, each group maybe 200 birds, dancing in the sky. Weaving into and around each other, playing. They shimmered like the sun against a rippled river surface, continually as they danced, each group moving as one, and moving in and out of each other across the blue sky.

I think I'm in love.

It reminded me of a group of birds I watched one evening in the Amager Faelled wild park in Copenhagen, when I lived there (was it last year? yes, I believe it was last year, though it feels like a hundred years ago) one evening when I was still wearing shorts but the air was crisp and freezing, the way the air gets by September in Denmark.

I heard them first.

They made a huge chatter, getting their chirp on, a couple of hundred birds up the top of a very tall tree. They sat there, sang and chatted and chirped for a few minutes, then suddenly they all took off, as if the tree had run its fingers through its hair, and they moved around a bit like musical chairs, dancing, and then resettled at once in different parts of the tree, resuming their song, chats and chirps with fresh chicas and chicos.

This went on for about a half an hour, and the more they went on, the more birds came. It was like a nightclub by the end of it. About a thousand birds in the tops of three tall trees, and then when they were ready, it was like they just heard the opening bars of Dancing Queen, and instinct propelled them toward the dancefloor. The thousand birds took off at once, as one.

They moved across the great expanse of sky over the faelled, moving like a manatee. All I could do was stand there, and watch. Jump up and down occasionally when the cold got really intense. Because I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave.

As soon as they took off into the sky - a thousand birds gracefully moving as one, a thousand bird iceskaters skating a perfect dance - they were silent. Not a peep, not a chirp. Nothing. Just singular movement. After a while, a very small subgroup developed, of like-minded avant garde birds, clearly, who were in sympathy with the mainframe, but they needed to break away to express their own dance in a more intimate unit. They met the large group every few seconds like a pair of dishwashing bubbles gliding and bouncing off of each other and moving apart again.

This evening, there were five groups of birds, and they moved and weaved and danced too, and shimmered like the sea. I stood on the corner of Dean and Underhill and watched.

Prospect Heights can man

Hey Sweep, what cho doin?
Sweep, I'm yo mistress. I'm yo bride n I'm yo groom.
Whatcha know, Sweep?

I don't have no dollars.
I'm on social security.
I'm retired.

Prospect Heights News: free book offering riches unclaimed!

Book in cardboard box outside a Brooklyn brownstone:
"WEALTH, without risk, going out on a limb, or making any effort whatsoever"

It stuck around highly visible in the little box on the block for about sixteen hours yesterday.

The book was reported having disappeared finally, around 10. The nice bowling shoes are still there.

Hurry.

Kiss-chase

A man in sunglasses is sitting upstairs in the foyer of the 7th avenue Q station, waiting to feel the wind blow, to hear the chug of the approaching train before he dives down into the heat, the humidity, the hot dirt sauna of the subway platform. Outside, the street is actually quite cool tonight. He's humming a tune. I try to catch it. He hums softly. It's so quiet in this station, even this sound has space. Cryin, by Roy Orbison. I catch it and now it's in me and my hum dives down into the platform and the hot dirt and the sweaty people waiting waiting waiting for the train.

I've been playing kiss-chase with the sounds of the city for a while now. It's a game of sonic tag, all over the city. She is so gentle sometimes. The voice of the lady announcing delays on the line can be unusually gentle and mild though her message is anti-New York. Time delays are anti-New York. Time is the most precious commodity here. Time and Money chase each other off the top spot in the precious New York commodities league like Celtic and Rangers.

I caught a beautiful tune yesterday on the air at Prospect Heights, just down my block, where I found myself sitting for an unexpected 20 minutes on a stoop, listening to a solitary drummer playing Arabic and Indian rhythms in his dark ac-free ground floor room. I sat and listened and when I passed later, he was still there, and that time, I caught a tune on the air, and sang it, grooved it, all the way to 2nd st.

The sounds and energy can be so hard in New York city, so you appreciate the gentle stuff when it comes.

I fell over in the street when my scooter hit a jutting footpath slab. Scooter did a 360 and caught my flipflop clad ankle full on. Scooter hit the deck and I had to sit down with the pain. Only thing available to rub on it was some beeswax lip balm. Sat there and soothed it until it was okay enough to get up again. Maybe five minutes. People passed, wordlessly. One guy looked back, giggly, like it was entertainment. A young couple passed, and the man said 'weird'. I sat there, with my scooter at my feet, soothing my ankle until it didn't hurt so much.

I got back on my scooter and rode into Chinatown, stinking of fish carcasses, spit and blood and filth and people paying $3000 for a studio.

We meet again.. and again

It happens all the time. Casual conversation, getting lively, getting on a roll, both people sharing the experience happily and sharing their observations about life and agreeing wholeheartedly with each other. Then something else takes over.

The agreeing just takes on a life of its own. The whole thing becomes about agreeing with each other, even when it's just a load of bollocks. He says something about feeling insecure sometimes in situations with people he doesn't know very well. She's not feeling insecure, nor does she have an immediate recollection of feeling insecure with a new person, but she agrees anyway. Yeah yeah absolutely. It's like the Titanic. It takes too long to stop. The iceberg is not moving.

But it doesn't resonate. He's not stupid. He knows she was insincere on that last oh-my-god-i-totally-get-you. He's suspicious now. He's met chicks like this before. Oh yeah, it's all great at the start. Then they start lying and he doesn't know where he is.

So the tide has turned, but it's way too uncomfortable for anybody to actually acknowledge, even to themselves, until later, when they're alone and analysing the whole thing. But right now, they're still together. Sitting at that table. And now, instead of manic agreement, what happens is a big fat silence, each of them alone in their own little self-bubble. Nothing is said. Nobody says "I don't get that". Nobody says "It's all suddenly gone strange, hasn't it?" Whole worlds are left desolate in the space between one person's declaration and another's lack of receptiveness to it. Tumbleweed blowing through and two desperately grinning people peeking in at the scene but unable to make anything grow there at all.

Last night I walked along my street in Brooklyn just slightly ahead of a couple who began to argue. I have never heard a fight between two human beings conducted at such a light, pleasant conversational level before. Not an ounce of passion. God, I remember the aria-pitched furies that Johs and I performed for the Danish public, blazing fire through the freezing cold Danish streets. Not pretty.

But the volume between these two last night was kept low, and gentle. Discreet in their aggravation. Keeping things looking good on the street. Having a fight. Totally comfortable in it.

They're talking about money. Both have thin, white voices. His is the first voice I tuned to:

- I mean it as a legitimate question. Where do you think we're going to get the money? I'm not coming over all no-we-can't-do-this. I'm asking you for ideas.

- But it's always the money. The money the money the money the money. First thing. Straight away.

- Look, I'm not trying to shoot myself in the foot here...

- It's like when I say like, like fifty times in a sentence. I don't have to hear about it all the time from you.

- Well I don't see you taking that burden off o' my shoulders.

- I just wanna make our lives more fun. It's like it's... regimented.

- I like order. You have always known this. I don't like debt. Especially not for something so... frivolous.

Walk down Grafton street in Dublin at 4 in the morning and you'll hear plenty of conflict, people screaming things that never make sense. Or Camden Street, down some alleyway, some girl is sitting on her ankles, heaving sobs and breaths, he having shattered her world in pieces again, and stormed off in disgust at her. Rage and pain and hurt, at volume.

Not like this.

This was something that would probably continue at that level for hours, days, weeks, without climax.

They crossed the road and I was tuned out of their bubble.