My new neighborhood is only about a 10-minute walk from my old neighborhood, but the difference between the two is immediately obvious, in the form of Chinese-Fried Chicken combination restaurants, long-ago abandoned road work that the City forgot to finish, and street corners full of loitering, smooth-talking characters. I've seen both a man with a diaper and a woman with an ignored head wound walking casually down the street here.
My old neighborhood -- which is so perfectly balanced with respect to race and income that it seems like Brooklyn fiction -- is charming, safe, and clean, and fancy enough that it's possible to occasionally spot an indie celebrity. It's got a beautiful park, historic brownstone buildings, a farmer's market, and a rainbow of restaurants to exactly coordinate with the rainbow of faces dining inside. It's not uncommon to see movie crews there, or double-decker open-topped tour buses.
(The only celebrity potentially wandering around where I live now is the ghost of the Notorious B.I.G., who grew up around the corner, and whose framed image is on display in the local supermarket, just above the man selling illegal DVDs at the front of the store.)
But while my old neighborhood is easy to love (it's like the good looking popular kid everyone wants to be near), I think I might be more enamoured with my new one. It's not unlike how you feel when you've stumbled upon a pleasant secret. You want to share it with everyone, and want them to know what you know, but as soon as too many people take notice, you want to throw a camouflage blanket over it and shoo them away.
There are a lot of things to like about the place; you just have to look a little harder. I like that a lot of the residents are families who've been living there for decades, and that it's almost like a small town within the middle of Brooklyn -- locals refer to the end of the block as "where Flo lives," and the supermarket door is decorated with personal announcements (funerals, parties, community meetings, and the like). The people here host annual block parties (the music of Al Green can be heard on one end, and hip-hop on the other, with girls playing double dutch in between), and we've even got our own 'den mother,' a creaky old man named Mr. Lyon, who sits on his stoop daily and absorbs all of the action on the block. Although I haven't quite figured out how to be part of the community he watches over (instead of just an observer), I'd like to try.
For the past two mornings on my way to the subway, I've been greeted by a very slick-looking man hanging out on the corner. He wears a flat pageboy cap, wrap-around sunglasses, gold teeth, and loose-fitting patterned shirts. He looks like a fashion icon, but from another time, and someone I might like to photograph. What's surprising to me is that I'm not the one approaching him; rather, he's taken to commenting on what I'm wearing, namely by announcing the predominant colors. For example, when I had on red tights yesterday, he exclaimed, "She's wearin red!" And today he loudly observed that I "got on black!" (I already liked him on Day One, but today he really won me over, by turning it into a ritual.)
I quickly realized the consequence to establishing this pattern, however -- from now on, I'll probably be inclined to hold up my end of the tacit bargain, and take this stranger into consideration when I'm getting dressed in the morning. ("I can't wear red again today. It's too soon.") I suspect that our relationship depends on it.
Hi. I made a new film. This one's called Date Night, and not only is there a cat in it, but no one dies on-screen. I've also been busy updating my photo portfolio, packing boxes, and procrastinating packing boxes.
I apologize that this space has turned into a sort of a bulletin board lately. I'll work on doing something about that.
