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View from my roof, April 2008

My loft apart­ment in scenic Bush­wick, Brook­lyn is avail­able for the sum­mer. The dates are flex­i­ble so long as you’re in by June 1. Stay a month, two months, or until the lease expires on August 30. You can use our fur­ni­ture if you don’t want to bring your own or we can throw all our crap in the base­ment and leave you with a big empty space. Wireless DSL, util­i­ties included all for a mere $2000/​mo.  

The place is located on the Dekalb Ave stop on the L or the Cen­tral Ave stop on the M. It’s a rad build­ing full of painters and drum­mers and the like.  The block is full of kids who play wif­fle ball in the street and crack open the fire hydrants when its warm out. There is a mas­sive base­ment only acces­si­ble thru this unit and roof access, per­fect for cook­outs. Just a quick walk to Life Café, the organic mar­ket and the other shops and gal­leries at Mor­gan Ave, gro­cery store and Kicker­bocker Ave shops just around the cor­ner. Maria Her­nan­dez Park two blocks away.

It’s a great spot. Bring your part­ner, bring your pet. Here are some snaps:

© Greg Wasserstrom

Today was a beau­ti­ful day, the first real “win­ter day” of the win­ter – cold and white, with huge snowflakes drift­ing down from a gray sky. Today is dis­gust­ing. It’s about 20º warmer, which means all the snow on the ground has turned into dis­gust­ing slush and it’s rain­ing. It makes me real­ize how much I love the sum­mer. I’ve been think­ing a lot about this past sum­mer, my last in DC and get­ting nos­tal­gic. I didn’t actu­ally think I would miss any­thing about that place once I got to Brook­lyn, but it turns out I miss every­thing. I wouldn’t want to live their again — it’s way too small — but I def­i­nitely miss the peo­ple, the scenery, and, this sum­mer, the weather.

DC’s got hor­ri­ble sum­mers. It gets to be about 95º, it’s unbe­liev­ably muggy and the mos­qui­toes are like a scourge — they’re every­where, and I hap­pened to get these dis­gust­ing, enor­mous welts when they bite me. But I love it. It’s just like Hous­ton, where I grew up; a town that gets even hot­ter and mug­gier and has even worse mos­qui­toes than DC. Now, for the first time, I’m liv­ing in a city that wasn’t built in a swamp. Hous­ton and Wash­ing­ton were both built on land nobody wanted; DC because it was donated to by Mary­land to be the Cap­i­tal, and Hous­ton because it was essen­tially where Galve­ston picked up and moved after being dev­as­tated by a Hur­ri­cane in 1900.

My point is this. I was walk­ing down Flush­ing Ave in Brook­lyn on a freez­ing night a cou­ple weeks ago, wish­ing it was sum­mer. And it hit me, as so many things have since mov­ing here, that a lot of the atmos­pheric things I asso­ciate with the sum­mer — the humid­ity, giant oak trees full with leaves and breed­ing mos­qui­toes, my friends stand­ing around in somebody’s over­grown back­yard wear­ing cut­offs and drink­ing beer, secadas chirp­ing so loudly you almost can’t hear any­thing else — those things are all going to be dif­fer­ent here, for the first time ever. Twenty-​​three years hav­ing one kind of expe­ri­ence is a long time. It’s a big change.

The hottest sum­mer I’ve ever expe­ri­enced was the one spent in New York in 2005. Even though Hous­ton gets to be 108º at the peak of the heat in August, every­where you actu­ally go is so heav­ily air con­di­tioned that you pretty much have to wear a hoodie indoors. Here, there’s no escap­ing the heat most of the time. There are par­ties on rooftops, bands play­ing in Prospect Park, trips to Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It’s great, but obvi­ously there’s noth­ing South­ern it. It’s a whole new way of living.

This is a funny thing to be think­ing about on such a slushy day in Feb­ru­ary. In Hous­ton, I would com­plain about liv­ing in such a bor­ing place that doesn’t have sea­sons. Now that I am, I can’t wait for them to change.

Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty on the lounge chair, NYC, 1988, from the Bal­lad of Sex­ual Depen­dency.

I was in Hous­ton almost a week before I both­ered to see what was going on there in terms of art. It hap­pened that Nan Goldin has a large show up at the Museum of Fine Arts, Hous­ton. I went to see it with Bryan Schut­maat and it was ter­rific. The Bal­lad was there, play­ing every hour on the hour, along with gal­leries full of grids of Goldin pho­tographs, clas­sic and recent.

Goldin is per­haps enjoy­ing a sec­ond Golden Age. Her influ­ence can be seen every­where from a Wolf­gang Till­mans show to an Amer­i­can Apparel ad. Bryan noted at one point that Goldin’s work, a highly auto-​​biographical doc­u­ment of the seedy Down­town scene of the 1980s, comes across in the Bal­lad as some­thing of a cau­tion­ary tale. Con­versely, much of the con­tem­po­rary work it has inspired is far more cel­e­bra­tory of the lifestyle depicted. I seem to remem­ber read­ing some­thing about Dash Snow that described his work as “Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.”

And when you’re doing a line of coke of somebody’s dick, why would you want to stop to think about what that actu­ally means? These are the times we live in. Goldin’s New York was a much more men­ac­ing place than ours. For all the cama­raderie and inti­macy on dis­play in her work, dan­ger, death, were lurk­ing every­where. AIDS claimed many of her clos­est friends and she strug­gled with addic­tion, all fully doc­u­mented in here work and on dis­play in the Hous­ton exhi­bi­tion. These themes are largely absent from the work of her twenty-​​something dis­ci­ples. We live in a low-​​risk envi­ron­ment and we know how to have a good time.

Early New Years res­o­lu­tion: more dick in my pictures.

Her hair is up, tied up some­how, I can’t really describe it, but it’s like a lit­tle girl’s might be. It’s this kind of muddy, inde­ci­sive shade of brown. White wires come down from the ear­buds she’s got in her ears, her head bobs, her body sways back and forth, lightly, com­pletely asyn­chro­nously with the rhythem­less flute music drift­ing across the sub­way plat­form. Her coat is white even though it’s the first day of fall and she has a scarf tossed around her neck, its white and black and fuzzy, like TV sta­tic. She looks down at her feet, her toes pointed inward and maybe wrig­gling a bit in her black on black can­vass shoes.

Another time I fell in love on the sub­way, I was com­ing up out of the sta­tion in a part of town I only visit when I need to buy some­thing for the apart­ment. A girl was walk­ing ahead of me, there was a cer­tain some­thing to her stride, and again those black can­vass shoes. It was still warm then, or I should say, much warmer than it is now, and her skin shim­mered slightly. On the street we went dif­fer­ent direc­tions. I turned around to watch her round the cor­ner. How pleas­ant that she’d done the same.

Back on the plat­form, the girl in the white coat she steps for­ward, peer­ing down the track, check­ing for the train. It’s com­ing, and then it arrives. I loose sight of her. I write about her from memory.

Phew! Here’s a news­flash: mov­ing to New York isn’t really that easy! Even so, I man­aged to get moved into a pretty sweet loft in Bush­wick — Stock­holm right off Knicker­bocker. It’s a phe­nom­e­nal neigh­bor­hood, bustling and busy, and will soon be the sub­ject of exten­sive pho­to­graphic doc­u­men­ta­tion. I’m real­iz­ing how much I love to focus on describ­ing neigh­bor­hoods or parts of places that some­how relate to my life — this is what I did with La Brea, my upcom­ing project, The Hon­or­able Parts does this also and now I can’t wait to start shoot­ing Bush­wick. Any­who, my room­mate Will and I are all moved in and now I’m ready to start par­tic­i­pat­ing in my life again.

Another rea­son why I’ve been so slow to blog — I’m still work­ing for Won­kette and I picked up another blog­ging gig for Raw Story, which is about 30 hours per week. That’s a lot of blog­ging! So after I’ve done that for 8 or 9 hours, it’s tough to sit down and write my own blog, but I’ll try to get bet­ter at it. This, after all, is important.

Any­way, more will trickle out about my life soo, I’m sure, but for now I have a cou­ple of other posts to write!