The summer had proceeded in fits of frantic museum-going, a wave of free concerts, an amnesia of happy hours and frequent, aleatoric pairings of books with parks. It had been wonderful, and it had passed in the blink of a sweaty eyelid.

I realise now that there was no possible way to have a completely satisfactory summer in New York. No matter how energetic one was, there were too many things to do and see, dispersed over too many boroughs (are five really necessary?). If you caught more of the free shows, you saw less movies in the many parks. If you picnicked through the morning you missed brunch (I know – terrible). If you ventured into deepest, darkest Brooklyn, you were not exploring Queens. And if you spent the whole summer delighting in the city, you totally missed the mysterious world of ‘Upstate’, and parts beyond.

August arrived and I had not seen a single beach. I knew the New York beaches would be pretty shitty – and if I ever let this knowledge slip my mind, there was the Californian legion to remind me – but epic public transport pilgrimages to mediocre beaches are a major, seasonal institution in the city. I needed to join the throng.

No self-respecting Brooklyn adoptee would consider the journey across multiple rivers and Manhattan just to reach the beaches of Jersey. It had to be the beaches of Long Island. And for the discerning Brooklyn hipster, this year it had to be Fort Tilden.

I’d been hearing about Fort Tilden all summer. By city beach standards, Fort Tilden was about as undiscovered, unspoiled and under-the-radar as it got. Still, the New York Times had done multiple pieces on it, and an hourly weekend shuttle service from Williamsburg had started up to counter the complexities of reaching the beach by public transport.

Given my confused anthropologist, who’s-the-subject-here relationship with New York hipsters, I figured I at least needed to see the place. But time was running out: the outdoor cinemas were packing away their screens one by one, the festivals were slowing down, and students were flooding back to the city.

On the last weekend of summer, having given up on mustering my own hip beach posse, I took the A train out to the end of the line. Then switched to the S train and took that to the end of the line. Then jumped on my bike and headed vaguely westward.

It was a day of sweltering sun. It was not a great day to realise that my bike couldn’t really shift gears without losing its chain, or that its crank was a warped. I missed the quiet ride through pretty suburban streets and ended up on the main road along the peninsula. None of that mattered. Fort Tilden or bust.

Out past abandoned shacks and overgrown concrete bunkers, along a sandy track through the scrub, and eventually to the very, very end of the line.

And finally, there was the beach. A paradise of semi-clandestine drinking and awkward tattoos and exposed boobs (which are only about a half-areola different from the side-boobs in your average Williamsburg dive). Sarongs and bandanas had been tied to stakes of driftwood to make DIY (i.e. ineffectual) shelters from the sun. Footballs fizzed along the shore. The occasional patrol coughed along the beach, while light planes puttered low across the sky, dragging incongruous advertising banners after them. The closest thing to a beach paradise you can get, without leaving the five boroughs.

I cracked a furtive Foster’s. I cheersed the end of summer; I drank to destiny. I wrapped the can in paper and hid it from the sour-faced patrols, who were missing all the fun.

Between songs, when he wasn’t purring into his microphone and slouching about the stage, Mos Def was talking about how much Brooklyn and Bed-Stuy meant to him. He spoke of the rich weave of cultures in the neighbourhood, of the successive waves of immigrants; he shouted out to the Haitians, the Jamaicans, the Trinidadians. He did not, however, shout out to the Australians. I left the show feeling that I had been excluded from this paradisiac melting pot of island cultures.

A few months later I moved to Bed-Stuy anyway. The rent was slightly cheaper and I’d found a(nother) place with a cat.

Despite Bed-Stuy’s ‘Do or Die‘ reputation, the neighbourhood seemed awfully nice. Where in my old neighbourhood I would be woken at 4am by faux-brawls spilling out of faux-dive bars, on my first morning in Bed-Stuy I was woken by church bells and a gentle breeze. Vines and weeds had grown up around the windows of my new apartment, softening the summer sun and muffling the squabbling neighbours. Squirrels surged through the overgrown yard.

Along Fulton St., fried chicken shops stood shoulder to shoulder with hair salons. There were still Obama t-shirts for sale at a few clothing stores; his place in the Bed-Stuy pantheon is probably assured, regardless of the looming electoral shitshow. His portrait shared wall space with those of MLK and JFK in one supermarket. The delis were stocked with strangely familiar produce, evidence that while Australia was not of the Bed-Stuy archipelago, the yoke of Britannia had none-the-less left us with common tastes. The fridges of Bed-Stuy stocked strong, sweet ginger beer, not that pissweak American ginger ale.

It was all so delightful, but word was that it was also doomed. Bed-Stuy was gentrifying; all that doing or dying was having a distinctly evolutionary effect. There were more and more doers about; the area was beginning to prosper.

Gentrification: the death knell of the traditional New York neighbourhood. Newcomers – interlopers from the banished isles – were moving into the area. Pasty-fleshed hipsters were smoking on stoops. Surely it was no coincidence that rent was also going up, and that new businesses – bars, bakeries, wine stores – were edging out older establishments.

Even the place selling $1 pizza slices right above Nostrand Av. station – which I had taken to be a local fixture very much in keeping with the many McDonalds, Crown Fried Chickens, and other slingers of cheap grease  – was a new arrival, and was slowly nudging the other pie vendors out of the market. It wasn’t just the fancy folk that were gentrifying.

Mos Def had seen it coming. He didn’t seem too thrilled by any influx that was likely to change the character of the hood. He liked to think of Bed-Stuy as a Do or Die kind of place; a place where rich white kids feared to tread, and where they certainly wouldn’t clamour for their Frenchly-pressed, fairly-traded coffee at sidewalk cafes.

But it was all too late; there was to be no escape from the insidious spread of gentrification. And yet…

The ginger beer was not being pulled from the delis. The roti shops were not being replaced by cupcake boutiques. Food was still advertised as halal, not localseasonalvegan. The Obama images had not been usurped by Jon Stewart banners. The flocks of Sunday churchgoers still wore suits, not cut-offs. The weekend block parties pounded out soca, not Bon Iver.

Bed-Stuy was still doing, was still not dying.

The approach to the Cloisters is lovely; the fluster and seethe of the city feel very far away. Squirrels gambol and sparrows fossick in Fort Tryon Park. Far below the Hudson trundles towards the ocean. Beyond the river is the flat enigma of New Jersey. It is a fitting location for a medieval museum; it invites ye olde verbs. Even the subway station is an anachronism of hewn stone.

What is a medieval abbey doing in New York? It makes no sense, but it’s nice to look at. Like a lot of the city’s museums, this has to do with money. A very large amount of money; the kind of money that can buy almost anything in the world – any work of art or historical relic – and then give it away to a museum or gallery. New York is awash with other people’s purloined art.

The Cloisters is a fanciful assemblage of elements from five French abbeys, that were brought, disassembled, flung across the ocean, and then reassembled. The resulting confabulation invokes the distant past so longed for in the city of the eternal present. It is a fictional past, but it is beautiful. Fictional, but somewhere deep down in there are the real bones and traces of the past.

The Cloisters is a tranquil, elegant place, but its halls, chambers and courtyards are full of creeps.

Creeps with staring, dead eyes. Creeps wearing slack-jawed grimaces. Wailing, moaning creeps with twisted knuckles and ashen skin.

Creeps riding donkeys, creeps armed with swords and staves, creeps wearing mitres,  creeps bearing gifts.

Bloodied, pierced and broken creeps, flayed creeps, homuncular creeps, creeps with smashed noses, missing hands, splintered sides and eroded faces.

Some of the creeps have hooves or talons, manticore faces or gryphon bodies (I might need a separate post for the fantastic beasts of the Cloisters).

The creeps are, to be honest, one of the main attractions of the Cloisters. They held positions of esteem in the Old World and witnessed the declines of their respective houses, before making the long (and expensive) trip across the seas. Most of them are probably older than America. Here they can command the attention that they knew centuries ago – even if the terms of that attention have changed from veneration to curiosity. People here don’t necessarily get them; they think that they’re kind of creepy, but then again isn’t that what the medieval times were all about? A carnival of the grotesque? Even the word medieval sounds kind… evil. Only spelt funny – kind of like how they spell things in creepy old Europe.

When I moved to Cripplebush in September 2011, it felt like an outpost on the savage frontiers of hipster Brooklyn. Beyond Cripplebush, the L train plunged into a wilderness of suburbs and neighbourhoods utterly devoid of dive bars and vegan bakeries. Out here in the post-industrial wilds, the final battle for Brooklyn would take place, as humans fought bed bugs for dominion over the borough.

If nothing else, I figured there’d be a lot to write about.

The bed bug invasion, as it turned out, was almost over, but there were other interesting things going on. Every week or so a new Japanese kid would get stuck at the door of our building, looking for the illegal hostel on the third floor. Rumours circulated that the dealer on the second floor had a secret stockpile of weapons. The band on the second floor had riotous parties but were incapable of playing more than one instrument at a time. From the first floor came the occasional cascade of far better music, and it got about that Twin Sister was rehearsing down there.

Things took a turn for the worst when we lost our roof access. Thick padlocks were knotted around the doors, accompanied by stern signs warning that the doors were now alarmed. The given pretext for this was that people had been throwing shit at police officers from the roof. Actual shit. It was too weird to be made up, but too logistically implausible to make any real sense. Whatever the reason, about fifty apartments lost their own common meeting space, and with it the only hope we had of ever figuring out who had been flinging faeces, and how, and why.

As the months went by Cripplebush continued to promise great things, but could never quite deliver on these. A new ramen place opened up, but one of the longer-standing cafe/bars closed down. The frontier of gentrification moved on to more fertile ground in Bushwick, leaving Cripplebush looking pretty much the way it always looked – kind of interesting, kind of dingy, kind of sort of vaguely promisingish.

With rent rapidly rising, people began to flee Cripplebush. My housemates and I packed up our apartment, and eagerly awaited the chance to move to other parts of Brooklyn. An endless parade of possible future tenants – each group younger than the last – knocked on our door, chaperoned by a landlord with a remarkable gift for creeping everybody out. The guys that eventually signed for the place brought a contractor with them; they had plans to gut the space so they could build an indoor half-pipe.

There will always be new arrivals eager to realise their dreams of half-pipes or recording studios or speakeasy hostels or whatever out in the Cripplebush wastes. It is a region of particularly high turnover in a city that is constantly coming and going. Where it might take decades or generations to become truly local to other parts of the city, anyone who has lived among the Cripplebush lofts for more than a few years can claim seniority, having witnessed the many almost-changes, almost-realisations and almost-fulfilled promises of the hipster utopia in the post-industrial badlands.

In place of a drummer, Sleigh Bells are playing in front of a wall of speakers and a relentless backing track. Alexis Krauss is cavorting about like a demented, fishnetted cheerleader, while Derek Miller is slashing at a guitar, his every move mirrored by an anonymous doppelganger guitarist on the other side of the narrowed stage.

New York may be as expensive as balls, but it does offer a lot of great free stuff, like this Sleigh Bells show, for the discerning cheap bastard. Given my instinctual proclivity towards thriftiness, I’m more or less in my element scouring the city for free wine and entertainment. When free admission to concerts – such as Converse’s City Carnage series – is on offer, I become a dervish of RSVPs, requests, bids and emails; whatever it takes to get a free ticket, even if I know I can’t go to the event. It’s the cheapness that really matters. It’s the hunt.

The only problem is that being a cheap bastard, I bought a cheap bastard smartphone (more of a special needs phone than a conventionally intelligent phone), which means that while I can attend some of these free events, I can’t really document them. Everything just comes out as a blurry smear of pixels. I signed up for Instagram specifically because I hoped their fancy filters would disguise the shabbiness of my photos. It hasn’t worked yet; all Instagram seems to do is wrap photos of my housemate’s cat in the sepia fuzz of invented nostalgia.

I was resigned to another night of failed documentation when Sleigh Bells took to their narrowed, drummerless, speaker-stacked stage. We’d already missed Rye Rye’s set because although I’m good at getting tickets to free shows, I’m bad at turning up on time (and free shows start and finish earlier – guess there’s a limit to how much diversion will be on offer. No encores please). Still, we made it in time to see the opening blaze of lights as the band took to the stage. Every riff was a reference to the eighties; a nod to the retro past that most of the crowd was too young to actually remember. Krauss kicked about the stage, gasping and moaning into the mic. A burlesque version of a parody version of old school metal.

The backing track didn’t quit for a moment. Light blazed out of the stage and glittered from among the speakers. It was an awesome performance. I missed my drumkit – stowed away and gathering dust and ratshit in Sydney – more than ever. There was something unsettling about a stage without a drumkit.

I snapped a few photos, knowing they’d turn out crappy. They did, however, do a kind of justice to the night. The stage was an out-of-focus ball of energy. The band was more energy than substance: the music more swaggering sound than lyric or note.

A free show in a park by the water, swigging whiskey from a flask in the shadows, trying to figure out whether this song was really any different to the last song. Nights like this don’t really need high-res documentation. They should be a little bit blurred, a little bit difficult to remember clearly, a little bit cheap and nasty.

J.P. Morgan didn’t make books, he made money. But he made so much money that he decided to start collecting books. Then he built a library to house his books. And hired his own personal librarian.

The Morgan Library (& Museum) is proof that money can buy style. The entire complex is an elegant assemblage of heavy velvet chairs, stately fireplaces with ornate cast iron firebacks, delicate stained glass windows, and soaring frescos. And the walls are covered in books. Shelves and shelves of books. Storeys and storeys of shelves and shelves of books.

Over the years Morgan acquired three Gutenberg Bibles (because one copy of the oldest printed book in the world is never enough), countless other illuminated manuscripts, fragments of original cuneiform (the oldest written language IN! THE! WORLD!), and a trove of other original texts, like the first (extra-sodomitical) manuscript of Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray.

A letter from Hemingway rejecting George Plimpton’s interview request displays his characteristic style, but little of the tact of For Whom the Bell Tolls:

“I might say ‘Fuck the Art of Fiction’, which would give a wrong impression as what I would really mean was Fuck talking about it. Let us practice it and shut up.”

Standing in the main library chamber, ogling all the folios, it takes a minute to realise that there is no way of accessing the upper levels. The room has three levels of book shelves, all loaded with literary deliciousess. There are, however, no apparent stairs or ladders; no way to explore the full wonders of the library.

This is Morgan’s masterstroke. An elegant library may be a bookworm’s every delight, but he goes one step further. His library has secret passageways. Behind the shelves are concealed stairways that climb up to the curving walkways of the higher levels.

It was when I learned of these secret passages that I decided that the Morgan was not merely a repository of rare books; it is itself a giant, inhabitable novel, a work of fabulous, fictitious fantasy. A three-dimensional Poe tale. A garden of motherforking paths.

It was to have been the summer of grand plans, but it quickly became the summer of small mercies.

The grand plans involved working a couple of days each week, interning a few more, and leaving whichever office I was in at 5pm every day to revel in the gloriously long evenings. There would be parks and evening movies. There would be weekend beach trips and the odd museum. There would be brunches – preferably deeply, deeply fried brunches.

The grand plans did not involve waking up bathed in sweat. They did not involve mandatory afternoon siesta-comas. They did not involve fans carefully triangulated to ensure a constant breeze, regardless of how you slumped on the couch. They did not involve growing mounds of napkins piled on the brunch table, as I tried to staunch the flow of perspiration from my brows.

The heat wave turned friends into enemies. The huge, south-facing windows that had kept our apartment warm all winter became our oppressors. The cat that loved to sleep in the crook of my arm became a cruel, fur-shedding harridan at 6am every morning when she insisted that it was snuggle time.

On the weekends I found myself – as I tried to make the most of the summer’s plethora of free, mostly outdoor, in-direct-sunlight events – dreaming of returning to the office on Monday, to the air conditioning and the pretext for sitting perfectly, blissfully still.

The grand plans evaporated away and were replaced by small mercies. Key lime pie shakes at Jimmy’s Diner. Micheladas wherever and whenever they could be found. Air-conditioning on the L train. Furtive evening drinks in McCarren Park. Hidden, shaded beer gardens. Home-made ice cream sandwiches; toffee ice cream pressed between a couple of Anzac biscuits.

Nahuales are not unique to Mexico. While Mexico may have a long and rich tradition of nahuales – its was there that I first learned the name by which these shape-shifters and lost boys are called – as the US goes back to nature, it is also apparently embracing the nahual. Anything for an excuse to swan around in a pair of antlers and a wolf pelt.

The nahuales in the US seem to function a little differently to those in Mexico. Both can be kind of playful, but Mexican nahuales evoke an ancient past, a mystic world of jaguar knights and shamanism. USAmerican nahuales, by contrast, might do a little more evoking of the recent past. Of your own idealised childhood, or someone else’s. Quite possibly Maurice Sendak’s. He was from Brooklyn after all, which could explain why most of my American nahual sightings have come in Williamsburg. Might also explain why American nahuales are so searingly, ironically hipsterrific.

]]> http://philiad.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/nahuales-in-new-york-2/feed/ 0 This one is kind of Mexicanish too. Apart from the African wildlife in the background. And the cut-offs. phillegitimate These nahuales still have a vaguely Mexican, lucha libre-ish feel. America has, however, antlerfied them. You know the fantasy where a wolf-boy in speedos sweeps you off your feet? By what right do I call it hipster? By the fact that I don't get it. I think I've seen this girl on the L train. This one is kind of Mexicanish too. Apart from the African wildlife in the background. And the cut-offs. For a coat of arms that more accurately reflects contemporary America. This nahual was sighted in Seattle. http://philiad.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/baked-beans-or-bust/ http://philiad.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/baked-beans-or-bust/#comments Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:04:42 +0000 phillegitimate http://philiad.wordpress.com/?p=3822 ]]>

My only ambition for Boston was to find and eat baked beans. I’ve no idea how I first heard of Boston baked beans, but they’d be tempting me with their alliteration and high protein yield (this is pretty exciting for vegetarians) for long New York months. By the time I arrived in Boston, I knew that traditional beans were heavy on the pork (problematic) and molasses (intriguing), but absolutely nothing else about the city.

Apparently there’s a Harvard in Boston (or sort of near it). Apparently there’s a river and a bunch of harbour. Apparently there are a well-tended cemeteries full of dead patriots. Apparently half of the buildings in Boston were once public meeting halls where the free exchange of ideas took place. Apparently there’s a mind-blowingly awesome stained glass map in Boston.

Boston has all of these things, but it does not have baked beans. Or not many of them.

I was faced with a choice: enjoy Boston for what it was, a town in which people do not eat baked beans but do eat many other delicious things (including the best. brunch. ever.), or insist upon my own stunted version of the city, in which the beans flowed freely. I chose the latter.

The Boston that does serve up crocks of beans looks a lot like everything a tourist could want it to look like. It is a city of dark wood bars and red and white chequered table clothes, of bar wenches with Irish accents and black and white photos of people wearing bonnets. It serves up mediocre baked beans, probably because only tourists order beans and therefore the chance of repeat customers is low.

The beans are mediocre but that’s hardly the point. Like any good tourist drawcard, half of the pleasure comes from having your expectations met. Boston tasted the way I wanted it to taste. It tasted like half-hearted beans and cheap molasses. It tasted like a guidebook, or a top ten list.

If I couldn’t find gainful employment, the least I could do was to turn my idle time into free meals. And maybe even free learning. I decided to reclaim as much of my tuition as possible by eating as much free NYU food as possible.

I joined mailing lists. I filled a pocket organiser. I RSVPed to every event. I double-booked. I scampered from one event to another. I learned to predict which events would have booze and which would not. I got my drink on.

I also kept track of most of the events I attended, and what I ate there…

Feb 8. Institute of Public Knowledge (IPK), Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. Wine and cheese

Feb 10. Works in Progress in Latin American Society and History (WiPLASH), Mexico and its Diaspora in the United States: Past and Present. Wine, cheese and M&Ms

Feb 14. Institute of French Studies, Armed Love: the Place of Humanitarian Care and Compassion in French Immigration Policies. Sandwiches.

Feb 15. NYU Abu Dhabi, Girls’ Education in Afghanistan: 7 Million Reasons for Hope and Optimism. Snacks: delicious almonds.

Feb 22. Centre for Global Affairs, International Careers with the United Nations. Wine, cheese, pickles and aggressive networking.

Feb 23. Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies, February Meet-up (not technically an NYU event, but I only found out about it through NYU). Fruit and cake.

Feb 24. Steinhardt Dean’s Education Policy Breakfast. Bagels, pastries, fruit.

Feb 29. Steinhardt Global Programs, information session. If I hadn’t turned up there would have been more pizza than attendees. I ate as many slices as my lunch break would permit, and then left before the propaganda started in earnest.

Feb 29.  Cinema Research Institute launch. Wine, beer, cheese, mystery hot food, cake, a horde of sneering film students.

March 6. NYU Wagner. Conflict, Development, Security series. Bagels and fruit.

March 22. Development Research Institute. Debates in Development: the Search for Answers. Sandwiches and wraps (I didn’t actually go to this conference; just grabbed lunch and left).

March 23. Media, Culture and Communication Neil Postman Graduate Conference. Bagels and fruit; lunch buffet (including hush puppies); cakes; wine, beer and cheese. The conference motherload.

March 26. Mystery pizza left in Kimball Hall. Don’t ask questions; just eat it before someone else does.

March 29. Steinhardt International Education Conference. Bagels and muffins.

March 29. Institute for Pubic Knowledge, Into the Current: Burma’s Political Prisoners. Wine and cheese (and awesome movie).

March 30. Steinhardt International Education Conference. Wine and buffet (which ran out way too fast). Flushed with the success of my first conference presentation, I killed the wine, complained loudly about the department, and sang Colours of the Wind.

April 11. Mystery pizza in Kimball Hall. See above.

April 13. Wagner IPSA Conference: Revolution, People, Politics ad Change. Disappointingly  light breakfast of muffins and pastries. Post-conference reception was outsourced to a bar, where overpriced drinks were discounted and elegant snacks were inhaled. I expected more from Wagner.

April 17. CLACS , Campaigning for human rights in the Americas: a perspective from the field. Wine and cheese and pineapple that only I was eating. I destroyed that pineapple.

April 27. WiPLASH, When the Courts Make History: Understanding the Impact of International Justice in Latin America’s Conflict Zones. Wine and cheese and cookies. Can always rely on the Latin American department to pair booze with dairy with chocolate.

April 27. Liberty in North Korea, The People’s Crisis Launch. Beer and wine. Also received DVD upon arrival. Note: The People’s Crisis is a film, not a rocket.

May 4. NYU Strawberry Festival. Fistfuls of red candy, a small piece of NYC’s longest strawberry shortcake, and too many undergraduates in line for the cups of strawberries.

May 7. International Education end of semester potluck. Wine, pizza, cookies, donuts, queso, falafel, donuts, wine.

May 11. International Education end of semester happy hour. Thin, slippery, gourmet (this was emphasised) pizza.

As the semester ends so too do the free feeds (and the free learnings that sometimes come with them). I know I didn’t get close to reclaiming a semester’s worth of tuition, but I did make a decent dent in my food budget. Now, as I face the prospect of a summer spent working (yes! for dollars!) and interning (for karma? something?), I may have to resign myself to just free coffee, and the odd celebratory cupcake as coworkers have birthdays or find better jobs. This, I take it, is why people choose to become perpetual students. I already miss the sweaty cheese cubes, the stale bagels, the packets of hardened cream cheese, the endless paper plates, the teeth stained purple by wine.