friday, towards st. george

Farm by the Sea

I finally had the good fortune to visit the farmer's market at Added Value, aka Red Hook Farms, for the first time this summer. I often wonder what kind of relationship they have with Ikea, which is on the next lot, if the store's brought more traffic their way or heightened their visibility in any meaningful way. From Ikea's exit (where you wait to have your receipt checked against your purchases) you can see the farm through the window, but maybe not exactly understand what it is if you didn't now already.

The farm is the most amazing place, shockingly quiet enough to hear the crickets and the sprinkler spray hitting the beds, and the people there are about as nice as I've ever come across, even if they wouldn't let me shop from the CSA section of the market because I'm not a member. I took it well and from the "for anyone" section got beautiful green beans and a pile of plums, but passed on the bitter melon, shown above, because something tells me it's more than a little too bitter for me.

hookers, happy and not so much

In my secrect fantasy life I live in the building that houses Fairway, otherwise known as the Red Hook Stores building, built in 1860. Somewhere in there Look North displays Inuit sculptures such as these soul replenishing works in stone. Interior view of the building, I mean my apartment, here.

You know what I do in my apartment in Red Hook? I drink a lot of tea and rustle about in high-necked silk garments. I rustle A LOT. I sniff snuff. Once in a while I look out the window to see if any prankster artist is trying to hijack a cruise ship in a homemade submersible that looks like a giant olive.

If Duke Riley isn't available for such amusement (what is he up to these days?) then maybe this fan of amber wobbles over to the studio of Dustin Yellin, hoping to catch a glimpse of him merging painting and sculpture as his odd life forms appear in accumulations of resin. But then again, the view is lovely, and the tea so fine. And there's some oranges too (from Fairway).

I read that H.P. Lovecraft hated Red Hook, I suppose it was very different in the 1920's, or maybe he was a tad bigoted. As Peter Cannon noted "racism makes a poor premise for a horror story."

Fiasco in Vlissingen

After this weekend I never have to go see the Dragon Boats race in Corona Park again. Naively I thought it was some sort of Chinese cultural festival but found out it was in fact a festival of corporate underwriting with really diminutive dragons. Or maybe these days the corporations are the dragons. Tent after tent bore no trace of anything but the brash logos of every bank and insurance company you ever hear about with people lined up to get some sort of corporate goody bag, trash overflowing the cans, plastic cup after cup tossed in after people made it through the long line to taste various flavors of something called "lifewater." Drink the corporate Cool Aid? Blocks away, the fountains around the Unisphere don't seem to work anymore. Though I walk through the valley of shadow of death...

Recovery today in Red Hook, where we saw amazing, thriving tomatoes at the Liberty Sunset Garden Center in what we've come to know as the Tomato House, rode a Canoe around the Valentino Pier for free with the aid of Roger and the other volunteers who've been providing this opportuniy on Sundays and Thursday evening for three years now, watched the crowd-pleasing dog Othello plunge off the embankment over and over in chase of a tennis ball, and saw this boat swiftly and magically emerge from the Buttermilk channel, especially milky today, making up for the trouble in Flushing.

Menhaden

I have little confidence that anyone knows the derivation of the word Manhattan, interpretations vary widely. Delaware Indians were believed to have used the word to desribe a place where good timber for bows and arrows could be found, it might also be Algonquin for a hilly place, Munsee for "a place of general intoxication," or something or other for "people of the whirlpool."

I just assume say that it is named after these fish, which Bruce Franklin argues are The Most Important Fish in America. These, the very same that Squanto taught settlers to plant with the corn, are critical plankton feeders, who not only bridge the highs and lows of the food chain but purify the water, as Franklin writes in this historic Atlantic scene:

Dense schools of menhaden, sometimes numbering in the hundred of thousands, pour through these waters, toothless mouths agape, slurping up plankton, cellulose, and just plain detritus like a colossal submarine vacuum cleaner as wide as a city block and as deep as a train tunnel. Each adult fish filters about four gallons of water a minute. Purging suspended particles that cause turbidity, this filter feeding clarifies the water, allowing sunlight to penetrate. This in turn encourages the growth of aquatic plants that release dissolved oxygen while also harboring a host of fish and shellfish. Even more important, the menhaden's filter feeding prevents or limits devastating algal blooms. page 8

Here's the other shoe dropping... they are presently hugely overfished for their use in manufacturing linoleum, cosmetics, health food supplements, lubricants, margarine, soap, insecticide, paints, fertilizer, animal feed. Once again, Homo Sapiens have been too smart for our own good, or not quite smart enough, depending on how you look at it, or maybe just tragically ignorant and distracted.

We came across these menhaden cut up for bait by anglers fishing off the Valentino pier in Red Hook. They caught a striped bass, threw it back, too small.

point of origin

There were snowdrifts on Sackett and Hicks last evening, at first I believed there'd been an explosion at an insulation company, until I got close and saw that each tiny puff encased a small white seed. The wind coming off the river was blowing them towards the BQE, so I headed West to find the source of such abudant softness. The trace disappeared when I got to the entrance of the Human Compass Garden, and seeing the gate was open I went inside. I wandered around still unable to find the source for too long I think considering that the drifts snowed from two tall trees I had initially taken to be Tulips, which grew not far from the Garden's entrance. Tall, tall trees with heart shaped, toothed leaves about 3-4 inches wide that drew to long points at the tip, sheltering cascading tear-drop shaped pods packed to bursting with compressed downy parachutes woven around seeds that seem far too tiny to engender such large trees.

From the garden's sign I took in the quote from Leonardo Da Vinci, "In this small space, the universe can be completely reproduced and rearranged in its entire vastness!"

Today I found more of the quote, the lines which indicate that Da Vinci was actually reveling in the faculty of vision: "Here, right here, in the eye, here forms, here colors, right here the character of every part and every thing of the universe, are concentrated to a single point. How marvelous that point is!"

buttermilk

An unexpected joy of seeing "Hoffman," an Offenbach opera performed on the Red Hook Pier, was getting such a close view of the Buttermilk Channel, and being shocked by how close Governor's Island seemed. It is, as I read, only a quarter of a mile away. So maybe it's true what Whitman wrote in a newspaper article, that during Revolutionary War times the channel was so narrow and shallow that at low tide dairy herds waded across, leaving a milky trail in the brine. In watercolor painting, that would be called a wet on wet technique. All of this would have been before some hard core dredging, obviously. Now the channel's depth is 35 to 49 feet, deep enough to support the business of the piers, and only passable by very bouyant cows.

The other explanation for the name is that by the time Breukelen dairy farmers made it across the channel to sell their milk in Manhattan it had soured from the rough ride.

Hmmm, these are 2 very different explanations. Being an HUGE fan of the bathers tradition in painting, I fancy the wading cows explanation STRONGLY.

I would have favored a warmer night for the opera. We froze, but luckily the strength of the performance plus a little wine prevented the blood from curdling. We sat there in the outdoor theater flanked by stacks of shipping containers 3 high. The moon was visible through a break in the two stacks on my right, and by the time the show was over it had risen above the highest container. Meanwhile broad swathes of clouds, ethereal drifting proscenium, seemed to embrace The Vertical Players endeavors.

I wondered how far away from us was the pipe that draws the water from the channel a mile inland to flush and oxygenate the Gowanus. If the 600 horsepower pump is the Gowanus' artificial heart, that pipe is a critical ventricle, slowly rinsing the canal of whatever effluvia made it lavender before the pump was fixed in 1989. Of course its original heart was not mechanical, just the endless evaporation and condensation cycle, the tides, and the local watershed created by all the Brooklyn brooks that must have creased the slope of the Slope.

Drinks that are Green at the BCUE tomorrow

Tomorrow night at 7. As per the email: BKLYN Green Drinks @
The (Brooklyn) Center for the Urban Environment located on 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. Celebrate their exciting and innovative new headquarters as they become LEED-Certified Gold for Commercial Interiors by the US Green Building Council, the first of its kind in Brooklyn! http://www.bklyngreendrinks.org/


Wish I could join you Greendrinkers, because I am inspired by the BCUE and smitten with Ruth Edebohls articles for the Gowanus Lounge, but I've already pledged this week's allotment of babysitter funds to see this Friday's performance of Hoffman, an opera concerning stories told by a hard-drinking romantic about 3 curious women who broke his heart, performed on a Red Hook pier. Maybe you read the article in the Times? It does a good job of exploring the way the Opera's production has provided chances for members of the Red Hook community to participate in various ways. To sew costumes, to glue glitter on shoes, to usher, to sing in the chorus. Looks like the opera's become a community effort drawing life from a more diverse group of people than my presumptions about opera would lead me to expect. I'm already shouting bravo, Vertical Player Repertory.


You might also be interested in this symposium on sustainability that I just learned about. Wish I weren't working that day! According to the release, "On Thursday, September 18th, the Center for the Urban Environment will host Green Brooklyn…Green City—drawing over 3000 residents from all five boroughs to a full day symposium event at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. “Green Brooklyn…Green City is unique in its sheer size and breadth,” says Aisha Glover, Director of Public Affairs and organizer of the event, “its New York City's largest showcase of green and sustainability issues, programs, and products.” For full details visit www.greenbrooklyn.org

In Honor of Schnäck

I have temporarily added an umlaut to the title of this blog to prostrate myself before that source of Red Hook comfort food on Union Street called Schnäck. They tolerated my family on a night when we were in very poor form, my daughter dumping her gingerale all over me and the banquette where we sat, my son whining non-stop because of his cold, the two of them fighting with spoons over the last crumb of brownie with ice cream they were sharing. My son trying to shoot snot out of his nose not in rudeness but because he was having trouble breathing. Kids crawling across my lap like kittens as I tried to eat a salad. We don't go out to eat much for good reason, but I really wanted french fries last night. At one point a woman came in to pick up her carry out order and stared at us with a look I found somewhat inscrutable but which I hope belied understanding. Or maybe it was a look that said "Oh, so now I see." As we left I apologized for the mess under the table and the waiter said, as so many good people have said to me over time, "Don't worry about it."

Also in gratitude for the banana bread pudding dessert which was one of the best things I've tasted in a long time. And in understanding that when you add an umlaut to a word like shnack, it's not a pretentious but an ironic gesture as are the tremas in Mötley Cruë. Perhaps it's also a nod to the curiosity of the german spelling of Big Mäc.

I would have stayed home with the grumpy son, but would have had to miss seeing a friend for the first time in three years. She brought her fiancee to meet us. I wonder if they hope to have kids someday? Perhaps last night was very informative for them.

One of the last times we ate out we went to Pies and Thighs. We were there about a week before it closed, and I actually wondered if having my kids in the Rock Star Bar, which adjoined the restaurant, was in part what shut the place down. Thanks to the GL I soon learned that couldn't have been the case legally. So much for my grandiosity.

My daughter calls Pies and Thighs "The Hippy Bar," I don't understand why, and she still asks to go there because they had a great time eating comfort food and playing air hockey with a little kid from the Williamsburg hood. We didn't spill anything that night the only problem was the toddler wandering off to play on the stage on the other side of the space, for which the bartender, very justifiably, kept giving me looks. I too miss that big hippy bar in the sky. Hence the depth of my gratitude for the comfort food and kindness of that affordable Shnäck shäck in Red Hook. But don't worry, chances are you won't run into us there, it's just easier for us to stay in our crib.