A Row and a Row

Ever mindful of your aesthetic experience, the DOT graciously provides this apology as you approach Fort Greene and Downtown Brooklyn from the east. Well, it's not exactly Il Duomo seen from the Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence...

What lies beyond?

The real view is actually obscured by trees and guardrails: Admiral's Row of the Brooklyn Navy Yards. 10 houses, some built as early as 1864, plus a timber shed used for drying the hardwood that would become masts for sailing vessels, the subject of a battle (on land rather than at sea) between preservationists and the Navy Yard Development Corporation.

A plan is afoot to preserve one of the houses and the timber shed and raze the rest for development. You can check out some beautiful images of what has been lost and remains to be lost on Joseph Chung's blog from which the photo below has been liberated.

Courtesy Joseph Chung

(BTW: Run the words Brooklyn Navy Yard together and you get an interesting consonant pattern.)

The Mystery of Dog Rock

Ever loyal

Growing up in Preston, Connecticut, you took your roadside attractions where you could find them--shooting the "tree tunnel" on Northwest Corner Road or outracing the savage Pappalardo dogs on Rte 164. Then there was Dog Rock.

Thank you, Stanley!

Well, we always called it Dog Rock and speculated about who would give it periodic touch ups. But a recent reconnaissance trip to Preston and Norwich with your correspondent's brother, nephew, and niece turned up some truly startling news. According to a small plaque affixed to the rock (by whom?), this is actually Spotty and the original painter was Stanely Zictorac in 1935--that's three years BBQE (before the BQE)!

Of course, Spotty has many admirers, including Bill Griffith, who has included him (or her?) in a couple of Zippy the Pinhead strips, like the one from June 27, 2004 below. If you go to visit Dog Rock, you will find it, not in Chile, but on Rte. 165 (on your right, about a mile past Preston City School, headed into Norwich--where else?). I can recommend a couple of excellent grinder places within easy driving distance.

Requiem for a Conehead

Agent Orange?

When did the now ubiquitous traffic barrels appear? And has the traffic cone industry taken a nosedive as a result? The barrels certainly have the advantage of size--you could easily keep a small child under one of these. Plus those easy to grasp handles. I can imagine it must have been tough on the back to reach down from a moving truck and grab those cones, especially on a rainy day.

For the man who has everything

You can get your own traffic barrels from, where else, Orange-Traffic-Cones.com. Check out their site for a great video showing how a barrel handles a 50-mph collision in a "memory test"(!) with a plow-equipped truck. To be clear, the truck collides with the barrel, not v.v. They run about $50 but, caveat emptor, the base is extra.

It didn't occur to me until now that Zippy the Pinhead's genesis might have had something to do with traffic cones? Must ask Bill Griffith the next time I am in the Norwich, Connecticut, area--but more on that later.

Classic 28" Cone

How Clutch is This?

Classic VW Odometer 

Walking to the parking lot last night, I heard one female student enthuse to another, "How clutch is that spot now?!" (It had started to rain, and she had nailed a prime parking spot close to their classroom building.)

The use of "clutch" in this context put me in mind of the auto-related lingo of my youth. Long before we could drive ourselves, we talked obsessively about cars. The first time I heard a schoolmate talking about somebody "flipping" a car, I pictured a horrible accident with the car going end over end and the whole affair ending up as a massive fireball. I soon learned, of course, the term means crossing the 100,000 mile threshold, literally witnessing the odometer flip over from 99999 to 00000 - most of those mechanical odometers weren't equipped for six digits (the sixth spot represented tenths of a mile).* As kids, we spent many eager hours waiting for--and often missing--the odometer of our family's VW bus (like the one above) reach all kinds of milestones: 33333.3, 77777.7, and so on. Hey, that was entertainment: No video players or even radios in that bad boy.

The other term you would hear, and still do, was to "total it." Sometime in the late 1970s, my older brother, driving the family's Nova, got broadsided and pushed a hundred feet or so. He walked away, but the car was totaled. (These days, they might say "a total.") A decade or so later, when Chevy revived the Nova brand with little compacts, built in Japan (I'm pretty sure) and nothing like the muscle cars of the 60s and 70s, we used to joke, "This is not the Nova your brother totaled"--a reference to the widely mocked General Motors late 1980's ad campaign.

(*Swedes knew better: I once flipped a 1986 Saab 900 I bought with 174,000 miles on it to 200K. And the damn thing had a cracked head gasket the whole time, meaning it alway ran perilously close to overheating.)

I Ramble

Mekons 25th Anniversary Tour--Seattle

Query: Name a band formed in 1977 that is still creating music worth listening to. If you're thinking Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan, then you're off the mark on two scores: That great constellation came together in 1975 and they haven't recorded in decades. So it must be the Mekons. 

If the Clash was billed as "the only band that matters," the Mekons deserve the accolade "the only band that matters and endures."

Check out the song "Cockermouth" from the last Mekon's record, Natural, from a a Chicago show in 2008 on Youtube below--and buy the record, cheapskate. Seriously, it's the equal of W.G. Sebald, and that's saying a lot. Nobody does fatalism like the Mekons. 

The great news is a new Mekons record is on the way and they are coming back to NYC this fall. They are playing two dates: Friday, Oct. 7 at the Bell House in Brooklyn (hard by the BQE) and Saturday, Oct. 8 at the NYC Winery. Go to the Bell House show and fuck the NYC Winery with their $22 reserved bar stools. "It's their world, and they can keep it," the Mekons sang years ago. But they go on.

Cropsey on the BQE

For most of us the name Cropsey means little, except perhaps as a convenient rhyme for "dropsy." However, for a couple generations of kids who went to sleepaway camps in New York State, Cropsey is maniac who lives out in the woods and preys on innocent children.

I first learned about the Cropsey legend from the film by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancacio (both from Staten Island). It's a well made  documentary about a series (or not a series?) of disappearances of children, usually with mental disabilities, on Staten Island in the 1970s and 1980s. Andre Rand, convicted of kidnapping in the case, was a semi-drifter who lived at least part of the time on the grounds of what had been the notorious Willowbrook State School,* subject of Geraldo Rivera's breakthrough expose on the treatment of the mentally ill.

I wonder if the drivers of Cropsey Scrap Iron trucks ever get strange looks, or specially wide berths, from those down below.

(The grounds and facilities of Willowbrook now house a number of august institutions, most notably, the College of Staten Island, or CSI to the cognoscenti.)

Horseman, Pass By

Long post today, but many short lines. Today is the 30th anniversary of the poet (translator, editor, etc.) Paul Blackburn's death of cancer at the age of 45. Blackburn was the consummate poet of New York City's streets, bars (especially McSorleys), parks, and subways. An early book, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit: A Bouquet for Flatbush (1960), celebrated the aesthetic, imaginative, and voyeuristic consolations of co-riderdom. He begins "Clickety-Clack" with:

I took
a Coney Island of the mind 
to the Coney Island of the flesh
and goes on to describe his impromptu public reading of Ferlinghetti's famous poem to the crowd in the train who
looked startled at first but settled down
to enjoy the bit
even if they did think I
was insane or something

Like many of his poems, this one is also a story of a seduction--successful or, as in this case, comically foiled. I discovered Blackburn when I was living in Brooklyn in the mid-1980s, making my own D-Train Brooklyn-Manhattan transit. His poems made it tolerable, at times even pleasurable. They could be funny--check out leering narration of "The Once Over"--or almost unbearably sad. Here is the beginning of a long poem from 1961/62 called "One Night Stand: An Approach to the Bridge," with a couple on a train on the Manhattan Bridge (where the D nearly always sat for long minutes):

Migod, a picture window

"The Once Over" for PB

both of us sitting there
on the too-narrow couch
variously unclothed
watching the sky lighten over the city


You compile a list of noes
it is incomplete
I add another
there is no anger
we keep it open
trying
shying 
away, your all 
too-solid body melts, revives, stif-
fens, clears and dis-
solves, an i-
dentity emerges, disappears, it is
like watching a film, the takes dis-
solving into other takes,
splice suddenly to a closeup

Blackburn was a sidewalk and subway man,  not a highway man, but in a late poem, "October Journal: 1970," he provides an oncoming guest with an inventory of The contents of my liquor cabinet/10 days before/you arrive. Vodka's in the refrigerator along with/sangria and sweet vermouth de Torino. The California/wines are down and cooling. Be welcome. He also provides not one but two sets of driving directions from New York to Cortland, where he was teaching when he died. I followed one once about 20 years ago, and it worked--of course Blackburn was long gone by then. Nevertheless, he concludes the second set, and the poem, with Maybe you take train, huh?

You can hear Blackburn reading a number of his poems, including "Clickety-Clack," on the great PennSounds website.

Paul Blacburn's first book