9/16/2005 » Music

My Brooklyn ‘hood is on the water facing Manhattan. Aside from being musician central, Williamsburg is a half-blue collar, half-gentrifying neighborhood with four ethnicities: Polish-stan, Hasidic-stan, Latino-stan and Hipsterville (Diesel denim with red stitching, messenger bag in earth tones, fauxhawk bed-head and a big gay belt buckle). It’s also got a high PQ (poseur quotient.) I swear upon your grandma’s shriveled National Geographics that I’ve seen people sell pink trucker hats by the subway entrance with an airbrushed ‘Bitch’ on the front.

Sometimes you run into desis with pierced eyebrows and mutton-chop sideburns. You know those signs on Disneyland rides, ‘You must be this tall to ride?’ The L train has a sign, ‘You must be this hip to move here.’ I’m totally dragging down the curve as a stealth sinc duppie (single-income-no-colonialism desi-urban-professional). Tonight a thin brown girl in a black sack dress rode a big Huffy with wide handlebars down the sidewalk, the kind of bike you see in pre-WWII photos. We exchanged subtle, curious glances while trying not to let the other intrude on our indie brown singularity.

It’s a fun ‘hood — families dancing salsa in their dry cleaning shops, a charismatic revival church which plays Arlo Guthrie and saves souls in Spanish, nice Hasidic landlords in curls who refuse to shake women’s hands, hipsters exclaiming, ‘You’ve never heard of Death Cab for Cutie?’ on the sidewalks, family-owned Polish wine shops, Latino families chilling on stoops and sidewalks in folding chairs and hammocks, communal roofs, polished wine shops and snarky film buff video stores cheek-by-jowl with Latino squids congregating around customized R1s with spinner wheels. A couple of weeks ago someone wrote the following sign in fat black marker on three sheets of sketch paper duct-taped to the wall: ‘We found a cow skull on the roof. If you want it back, come to apartment 3J. We’ve put a rope around her neck and named her.’ (pause) ‘We hope the new name doesn’t mess with her head.’

Williamsburg is in major gentrification clash. My building, a converted munitions factory, has nice lofts but is next to a vacant lot with Scary Drunken Camper Man living out of a pickup. The lobby is fighting a losing battle against graffiti, and the outside has already lost (it looks great), but we’ve also got Victoria’s Secret models who stumble home drunk. One emaciated giraffe in a minidress apologized loudly to her friends for the way we dressed. ‘Sorry, it’s Brooklyn, it’s jean land,’ she whinnied. We sniggered as we left the elevator. Like a picador, a black girl stabbed back: ‘Shit, this is Brooklyn. She might as well paste “victim” across her forehead.’

This year was my building’s maiden Fourth of July. On the left, the Brooklyn Bridge stood in silhouette against the fireworks; on the right, a water tower sat like a squat, ’50s toy spaceship against the rockets’ red glare.

Earlier, the landlord had distributed a letter banning roof parties. But that same evening, there were at least four hundred people on the roof barbecuing, drinking beer, yelling ‘USA,’ ‘God Save the Queen,’ ‘O Canada’ and ‘Don’t Mess With Texas!’ People even found their unlikely way atop the little hut capping the stairwell. And, inevitably, tagged it with graffiti.

A bat flew by erratically overhead. Someone spotted it and yelped. Robin, is that you? There were new fireworks this year: cubes, tesseracts, spheres with horizontal green planes inside. The smiley faces, as always, were a hit.