(Note: Every so often, we run short of rational ideas and dip into DCQ’s archives. The bulk of this post, intended to remind our East Coast followers that the specter of the eternal winter is so much peacenik propaganda, originally ran on June 20, 2009.)
Puerto Rican flags and bandanas were flying off the shelves in Los Sures and Spanish Harlem and on D-Block over the last few weeks. On recent weekend days, you couldn’t round the block without catching Big Pun blaring from a passing SUV. The PR trinket hawkers crowded out the Halal cart guys and the Mexican mango stands, pushing them off the corners with sprawling setups dripping red, white and blue. Then, finally, Sunday came: The one day of the year when browns outnumbered whites on 5th Ave. With the JAPs and WASPs retreating to their Hamptons cottages, the Upper East Side belonged to the Boriqueños.
Def Jam’s street soldiers came out:
As did the hooptie crews:
And the merengue fellas, with the requisite porcine drummer man:
Then there was this guy; photos don’t do it justice, but as you’ll pick up, the owner’s clearly a fan of vintage Pacino:
Backside detail: so excessive, it just might be genius. Or a ludicrous waste of money — jury’s still out:
Chicken trike man rocked a picture of his chicken trike ON his chicken trike! A proud fan of fowl:
Jewish Hipster or Hip Jewster? Hewish Jipster? (Did we manage to offend TWO long-persecuted ethnic groups with the latter? Awesome.):
Note: The documentary Los Sures, released in 1984 by WNET and Terra Productions with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is not available for online viewing or outside of limited view-only locations in New York City, including New York University’s Avery Fisher Center. Thus, all photos are physical screenshots, and quality is accordingly poor.
A quarter-century ago, several years after New York City’s flirtation with bankruptcy and societal collapse but well before Giuliani and broken windows, Abner Louima and the jailhouse broomstick, the Hipster Grifter and Sunday brunch on Bedford, south Williamsburg was a ghetto. Forget the abandoned factories and blown-out industrial blocks that begat the schizophrenic skyline of Williamsburg’s modern-day waterfront. Long before developers lampooned city zoning regulations in drowning the northern reaches of the neighborhood in condo towers — many now paralyzed as steel skeletons, rusting in the subprime hangover — the tenements of “Los Sures” served as the heaving, pulsing epicenter of the area’s residential core.
Labeled “the poorest section of New York City” by Diego Echeverria in his 1984 documentary Los Sures, south Williamsburg became the first mainland destination for many Puerto Ricans during the 1960s and 1970s. The film, available for public viewing upon request at NYU’s Avery Fisher Center, profiles five residents of Los Sures — five people whose places in life, while highly divergent in fact and form, are similar in that each arrived there through desperation born of abject poverty. There’s Tito, for one: With a mother, wife and two young children depending on him for financial support, Tito spends his waking hours smoking pot and masterminding myriad petty criminal endeavors. Stoic and centered beyond his 20 years, he appears committed to a life of hustling. “I used to work,” he states. “I was proud…but like I say, eh, if you can (get) faster money out in the street, I’ll stay in the street and make a faster buck, as long as I don’t get locked up, you know, and be a sucker.”
With a friend in tow, Tito takes the filmmakers along as he dives into one of the cornerstones of his considerable portfolio — chopping a stolen car on the fly. Future self-styled repo men of the world, take note (and remember to account for inflation): “We drive (the recently-jacked car) over here in the garage, take everything out right there, and (be) careful, having guys looking out left and right,” Tito explains, describing the process in the matter-of-fact tone of an insurance salesman. “Then we’ll get (to haggling) on the prices: Here, gimme 50 (dollars) for that. Gimme 200 for four brand-new tires. Gimme 15 for the battery. The radio go for 30, with speakers. The interior go for 175. Depends — if it got t-tops, 200 dollars. You want the roof? We’ll cut it off, give us 100 and it’s yours. Cars bring you money, man. It’s a lot of people out there with cars. It’s a lotta cars in the world. Yep.”
Tito (above, at left) and a friend chopping a stolen car, and at home with his wife and children (below).
Among Tito’s 20,000-odd, largely-Latino neighbors is Evelyn, who shares Tito’s embrace of self-sufficiency, if not his interpretation of morality. Vaguely described as an employee for a local women’s nonprofit, Evelyn effectively serves as a one-woman, mobile triage center, coordinating logistics for local families in need (helping one family find temporary shelter, for example, after a fire races through their run-down apartment building). The only subject with any apparent grasp of the city’s municipal structure and bureaucratic shortcomings — as well as the only one, in fact, with a reliable job — Evelyn admonishes the city for its perceived indifference toward the neighborhood’s plight: “You stay with your family, you’re safe. You stay with the system, you’re fucked. There’s no two ways about it.” At the same time, though, she harshly criticizes her own community for failing to police itself as the crack epidemic reaches Los Sures and alters the character of entire buildings and blocks.
“You have to say excuse me to the junkies so you can walk out of your own door,” Evelyn complains, adding that the community’s inaction equates to acceptance in the eyes of the impressionable. “All the little ones are seeing (that this) is easy money…it’s change, and it’s sad. Because it was a joy once. There was a sadness, but there was a joy. There’s no joy anymore. There’s only a lot of pain.”
Not everyone interviewed in Los Sures shares Evelyn’s absolute sense of despair: Marta, a single mother to five children from three different men, espouses the virtues of living in a close-knit community, a place where she’s spent years with virtually every soul in a five-block radius. “I know this neighborhood. I know the people. I know I could walk around; I know I could ask. I know that, to an extent, I’m safe here. I could say I’m among friends, y’know? I don’t find the need to leave Williamsburg to move to another area so that I can solve my problems. I’m gonna deal with my problems here.” She soon admits, however, that she’s got no choice in the matter — conceding that, in effect, her earlier bravado merely masks the fact that she feels trapped in Los Sures: “When you live in an area like this all your life, and this is all you know, how do you get out of it?”
In employing a spectrum of perspectives to bring the full extent of the area’s deprivation into focus, Echeverria also spends time with Cuso, a 43-year-old general contractor who struggles at times to break even on jobs amid fierce bidding wars. Installing a floor’s worth of windows in a tenement fronting Sternberg Park (just across the street from present-day Dunce Cap headquarters), Cuso calls Los Sures “a neighborhood of struggle. We’ve been struggling since we were kids. If it ain’t one struggle, it’s another struggle. You’re always fighting. You gotta fight.”
For Ana Maria, who reared seven children in Puerto Rico before bringing the whole clutch to south Williamsburg, her battle was with one of her sons’ attraction to gangs. Dance competitions among neighborhood b-boy crews became more intense, eventually leading to physical confrontation, retaliatory violence and, ultimately, the calcification of these groups as rival street gangs.
“People would call me saying, ‘Ana, they are going to shoot your son,” says Ana Maria in her native Spanish. “And I would drag him away from the sticks and the guns. All this I fought alone.”
As for Tito, the small-time street hustler, he arguably lost his fight, winding up in cuffs and prison blues as the film’s credits roll. With his brother already gone — shot and killed at the corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets years earlier — Tito says he’s resigned to the fact that, however unlikely in a neighborhood full of lifelong acquaintances, he is alone.
“Nobody is my friend no more,” he says. “I just hang out with a couple of guys…and that’s it. I can’t call nobody my friend no more…it’s hard, bro. And it gets harder every day.”
The corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets, 1984 (above); Tito in the kitchen with his family (below).
Cuso, (above, at left) and one of his workers in Sternberg Park after finishing a job near the present-day headquarters of Dunce Cap Quarterly.
Tito in his new confines (above); looking south through the neighborhood toward Broadway and the elevated J/M/Z subway line (below).
We braved Olympic-sized slush puddles Sunday night to drop by the East Village’s Mars Bar, known around town as an anachronistic ode to “authentic New York.” In bar-speak, this translates to “dim lights, cheap drinks, and Trainspotting-worthy toilets” (it apparently also means “desirable place to stage awkward celebrity photo shoots”).
The occasion: Mars Bar was getting a makeover, courtesy of a dozen-plus local graffiti artists. The show’s curator, Grimace, gave a nod to the establishment’s history as a hub for street art, mentioning Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quiñones and Keith Haring — arguably the three most influential names behind graffiti’s acceptance by mainstream gallery culture — as one-time patrons. Pointing out that he and his collaborators had protected a swath of the bar’s pre-existing wall — a colorful mish-mash of abstract geometrics hovering above a guitar-playing skeleton — Grimace stressed a desire to “bridge the gap between the old and the new” in reinventing the bar as “a living, breathing, drinking art piece”:
The artists overhauled about half of the bar on Sunday, whitewashing and painting directly on some walls and installing hung pieces on others while adding complementary flourishes to the bathrooms and the underside of the weathered, wooden bar itself. Other surfaces — notably the ceiling — will receive facelifts sometime in the future, according to Grimace.
We caught up with a couple other street art vets, New York natives both: Like Grimace, who spins regularly at 3rd Ward’s massive “Danger” bacchanals in Bushwick, ShazOne and Milk are renaissance men of sorts. In addition to their involvement in street art, both now focus, to varying degrees, on music, with Milk professing to having “retired” entirely from graf writing. They also share a measure of dismay over the perceived degradation of graffiti etiquette in New York, with ShazOne the more outspoken of the two. Here, he describes the graffiti community’s self-imposed justice system — and we’re inclined to trust his explanation, given the assumption that his residence “in the mountains for a couple years” doesn’t mean he was opening for Don Rickles in the Borscht Belt:
Milk employed a different, yet related, euphemism, explaining that “in the early 1990s, I kinda terrorized the L train, the M train, and…doing that type of work kind of led me to a 10-year vacation.” He also forwarded a theory that sound entirely plausible to anyone who’s familiar with the recidivism rate of American ex-convicts…or the origin of the MS-13 street gang…or the move Blow: that New York City abolished its practice of sentencing artists convicted of vandalism to clean graffiti-adorned walls because such programs promoted networking among artists, who would bond over the cleaning and plan future ‘bombing’ sessions — with “future” typically being “right after we’re done cleaning this wall”:
The man-boy who bragged last fall (while chewing on a gob of Twizzlers for dramatic effect, mind you) that one of the myriad entities suing him had “folded like Mitch Williams in the ninth” in settlement negotiations has pulled the ultimate fiscal implosion: Lenny Dykstra is bankrupt.
Dykstra’s well-documented rise from scumbag athlete to Wall Street darling for bored bankers in desperate need of cocktail party fodder begs a number of questions:
a.) Why does anyone listen to Jim Cramer anymore? Or, more accurately, why did anyone listen to Jim Cramer up until Jon Stewart reduced him to a blubbering, goateed effigy for financial media’s rather long shortcomings during the subprime buildup and collapse?
b.) Who brings Twizzlers to a closed-door meeting in a federal courthouse? During which hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake? “Ashtray money” aside, Lenny either planned out his Twizzler feast hours in advance and stashed the goods in his briefcase, pockets, underwear and/or socks, or employs an assistant whose sole duty as such is to keep Mr. Dykstra with Twizzler-in-hand at all times. “Where’s my fucking Twizzler brick, dude? I didn’t hire you and buy probably one of the top-five most badass Twizzler briefcases around for you to carry everywhere I go and not open and give me Twizzlers LIKE NOW!!!!”
More to come, without a doubt, sooner or later, but hopefully frequently for the rest of our natural lives.
Walking south from 86th on 5th Ave, something seemed odd: Bootyshaker Basin — appropriately located in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — was missing its bootyshakers. Cops blanketed the museum’s steps; no trademark freaking to be seen. Moving south, it became clear that the tenor of the day was, perhaps, a bit less flirtatious than that of years past:
Not a happy woman…
and then an innocent sociopolitical debate turned nasty; out of frame, some young guy cold-clocked another grrrl and everyone went “aaaaahhhhhh” and started pushing each other. It was great fun…
…until the cops came and ruined it for everyone…
A peaceful procession resumes:
DEES EES NO CAHNIVAL! HOO LET YA EEN??
Creeeeeepy:
All in all, the standard hot vibe, a disappointing freakage level, mediocre pics, and many men (and women) with whom you would not want to engage in argument. 51 weeks till next year…7.5 platanos out of 10.
Puerto Rican flags and bandanas were flying off the shelves in Los Sures and Spanish Harlem and on D-Block over the last few weeks. On recent weekend days, you couldn’t round the block without catching Big Pun blaring from a passing SUV. The PR trinket hawkers crowded out the Halal cart guys and the Mexican mango stands, pushing them off the corners with sprawling setups dripping red, white and blue. Then, finally, Sunday came: The one day of the year when browns outnumbered whites on 5th Ave. With the JAPs and WASPs retreating to their Hamptons cottages, the Upper East Side belonged to the Boriqueños.
Def Jam’s street soldiers came out:
As did the hooptie crews:
And the merengue fellas, with the requisite porcine drummer man:
Then there was this guy; photos don’t do it justice, but as you’ll pick up, the owner’s clearly a fan of vintage Pacino:
Backside detail: so excessive, it just might be genius. Or a ludicrous waste of money — jury’s still out:
Chicken trike man rocked a picture of his chicken trike ON his chicken trike! A proud soul:
Jewish Hipster or Hip Jewster? Hewish Jipster? (Did we manage to offend TWO long-persecuted ethnic groups with the latter? Awesome.):
We were robbed. That we knew immediately. Musty clothes covered every inch of linoleum floor, from the cinderblock walls to the kicked-in back door. Two worn, ransacked backpacks lay somewhere underneath. The passports! Still in their place, alongside the credit cards and insurance cash under the plastic-sheathed mattress. Amid the tumult of the floor, an iPod stood out in its fluorescence, headphones disconnected earlier and stashed separately. They’d left this behind. They didn’t know what it was.
The cameras! The cameras. Gone. They got the motherfucking cameras. The ones with the photos of the beaches and the waterfalls and the jungles and the strutting street kids and the islands and the funeral pyre and the dirty fish markets and Waterloo and Maracas Bay and San Juan de las Galdonas. The cameras packed in our bags an hour before as we’d left our rented, windowless apartment to drink one last Carib with friends and close the book on Port-of-Spain and Carnival Tuesday. To bring closure to three days of round-the-clock costumed, painted, sweaty revelry and three weeks of haggling and tromping our way through Trinidad and northeastern Venezuela. Upon reaching Tragarete Road, we dove into a pulsing current of celebration, each participant a member of a “band” clothed in the stereotypical vision of cultures real and imagined — ”Egyptians” in full King Tut headgear, “jungle warriors” with leaves covering only the most forbidden of body parts, “Americans” channeling John Wayne.
The coordinated costumed pranced alongside flatbed semis alternately carrying full bars and stacks of speakers blasting the designated soca songs of the year (and there were about eight of those, played with according frequency). But this was day three — and we were out of Puncheon spitfire rum, with a plane to Tobago leaving in three hours. Our gang was easy to find — they were usually hanging in the steel-pan yard on the corner, shirtless and stinking from too many consecutive days of music and beer and just trying to “maintain” through the weeks of nonstop practice leading up to the festival proper. We said goodbye to Nigel and Kurt and Tommy and the kind dreadlocked guy Lennox whose canines were chiseled down to vampire fangs and walked back to the unkempt, ground-level unit to collect our packed bags en route to the airport. Only they were no longer packed.
Suspects abounded: Bryan, our drug-dealing landlord with stitches sealing a two-inch mystery gash above his Adam’s apple. Anthony, the skinny dark-skinned man who charmed us weeks earlier with his sordid story of growing up in The States for 35 years before being deported in the ‘80s for smoking a joint in San Fran’s Washington Square Park, who had led us to Bryan when we were in desperate need of shelter? The group of standoffish teenage boys loitering outside Bryan’s apartment when we left for the parade earlier? Nigel, the band leader and our entree to true Trini culture, our unofficial Tragarete Road tour guide? Could he have!? Someone who knew we wouldn’t have time to call the cops over for a report. Someone poor; that eliminated nobody. Someone who knew our schedule — someone who knew us. Someone we’d never find.
The responsibility inherent to this blogging business has had us all flustered recently, so we decided to just sit around and eat corned beef hash out of the can and wait for someone to finally invent the remedial device that will read our Cleverest/Poignantest Thought of the Day and transcribe it onto this limp-wristed blog. Seems basic enough, right? But Jackass Scientist Man is evidently preoccupied with more trivial matters, so we regretfully return to pounding the keyboard with our middle fingers and opposable thumbs while eating more corned beef hash out of the can, because that shit is delicious.
In keeping with tradition, then, we once again eschew literary substance in favor of photos and throwaway captions while celebrating the now-rapid approach of the Day the Puerto Ricans Retake Manhattan. It’s a mere month away now, so maybe it’s time I overcome my newly perfected machete phobia and saunter over to Sazon Perez for a mound of greasy, crackily pernil, since it’s allllmost as delectable as corned beef hash and it doesn’t typically come with aluminum splinters and other tasty surprises that sometimes make non-crunchy canned foods crunchy. Oy…hurry up, Jackass Scientist Man. For now, shutup, you, and marvel upon the shiny soul-drawrings:
Shouldn’t wear a wife-beater for the same reason I don’t wear an afro: Because it just looks stupid
The Badder: Some of them are spicing things up by slathering poison on their sharpened machete tips. You know, for max sliceage points. And the ones that weren’t before will be once they meander past La Dolce Musto in this past week’s Village Voice.
The OK: The attacks seem to revolve around the southern edge of the Bedford Ave. gentrification corridor, where randomly chosen victims are more likely to be trust-fund hipster kids than, say, I dunno, me. That said, Sazon Perez pernil expeditions may henceforth be restricted to daylight hours.
The Doubly Related: A member of the DCQ family once obtained a rusty machete while vacationing as a child in the Yucatán. Said homeboy tried to carry it on to the plane. Inspection failed. A classic customs blunder.
Two months till the Puertoriqueños retake Manhattan. We stopped by Sazon Perez tonight to honor the date. (I can’t believe they have a website! Dinner costs like four bucks.) The thick girl behind the counter explained that their two fish dishes were “catfish and regular fish.” Went with the catfish and habichuelas, with a side of pernil. The guy next to me in line started talking to me in broken English, telling me to order the pernil, which I obviously was going to do anyway. This happens literally two out of three times I go there. It’s risky business to migrate to Spanish mid-conversation, though, so usually my little talks with the locals end with one of us saying something the other one doesn’t understand, and then the other guy nods in feigned agreement. Then we both slide away slowly to opposite sides of the room, staring at the ground.
