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Dunce Cap Quarterly
‘Cuz it’s Friday and the weather’s nice and, know what, just shutup, that’s why. At least we’re lazily posting originals for once:
Brooklyn resident Ben Sargent has attracted a rumbling of local press over the past week for running an underground (in both the “unlicensed” and “in his basement” sense) lobster roll joint in Greenpoint; the buzz seems to have emanated from Liza Mosquito de Guia’s fun video profile of The Underground Lobster Pound for food. curated.
Upon further investigation, it turns out Sargent hosts a weekly online radio show called “Catch It, Cook It, Eat It” for Heritage Radio. On said show, Sargent recently interviewed a memorable group dubbed the Night Crawlers: As the name suggests, the Night Crawlers are fishermen who prefer to spin their reels under cover of night. Armed with a simple motive — “to find the best fishing possible” — and a shared frustration over the dearth of public shore access, the Crawlers duck under barbed wire fences and pogo between rusty pier pilings to find and exploit underutilized fishing spots along the East River waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens.
There’s nothing especially remarkable here thus far — after all, Brooklyn seems to have become ground zero for urbanites who harvest their own food within murky legal parameters. What makes the interview indispensable Monday-morning jackoffery, rather, is the Crawlers’ approach to the taping: They arrived at the studio resembling a gaggle of Zapatistas, donning hoodies, ski masks, dark shades and bandanas while insisting on using voice distortion technology throughout the recording. The “Fish Slayer” and a couple of his sidekicks spend a half-hour schooling Sargent on the nuances of NYC trespassing law, the joys of falling into the soup (“I was lucky enough to fall in at high tide”), and the thrill of the potentially carcinogenic chase (“It’s sort of like a video game. There are, like, different stages, (and) the stakes are higher and it gets more and more difficult the deeper you get in…Yeah, it’s really fun because it’s a balancing act: You literally jump over stuff. I mean, it’s just like Donkey Kong sometimes”).
The highly-recommended full audio interview lives here. To put faces disguises to the voices, jump to the 4:25 mark in the video below:
First Annual Brooklyn Fishing Derby from Brooklyn Chowder Surfer on Vimeo.
