The Terrain Changes

December 27, 2011
People

Across the board, beyond the limits of age and division of gender, the hierarchy of income or preference in style, people ride motorcycles for three reasons: to find a sense of freedom, to speed through the great outdoors, and to relieve the stress of daily monotony.

Motorcycle culture now thrives in cities such as New York, where the subway still rules as the mode of transportation that can ferry people under and away from traffic. The bikes offer a sleek alternative to the easy movement and convenient size of their pedal-powered counterparts.

Motorcycles have captivated the nation’s imagination since the first yawn of the 20th century, when cars afforded affluent families, and later restless postwar youth, the liberty of mobility. The motorcycle chassis, however, stripped the American dream to its sexiest parts: two wheels and roaring engine between the thighs- and a sense of control over how much the rider wants to risk.

The reasons for riding remain the same, but what they are riding has changed. Despite this decade’s persistently flagging economy, or perhaps because people feel the need to escape from their pockets, motorcycle ridership has been on an almost inverse incline. According to data from the motorcycle Industry Council, there are 9.6 million wannabe James Deans and Wild Ones on the road today, nearly twice as many who dreamt of the highway in the late 1990’s, and they’ve burned through more than 29 billion miles of pavement- a 40% increase since the economic bubble burst.  

Not all brands have felt the distribution of this success. Surprisingly, shops servicing Harley-Davidsons, the original king of the steel beasts, seem to have slipped into outlying areas of the city. While sport bikes, off-highway models and cruisers have been dominating 78% of the motorcycle market, ownership of traditional and touring bikes, the kind that can weather a cross-country trip like Easy Rider’s famous “search for America”, have dwindled. At least one old-school dealership, 15-year-old Pote’s Bike Shop in East Williamsburg, is feeling the bleed.

Pote Reyes, 48, keeps a tough façade- enough to have made Ed, a local Harley mechanic, think twice before entering the doors. A black awning bares skull-and-crossbones to the outside world, and dismembered engine parts, such as a pair of handlebars adorning a shelf like gilded antlers, are camouflaged within the shop’s thicket of metal. A tall covered dog cage rattles and rasps near the checkout desk.

pote

 An award from Full Throttle Magazine for a Kraftec Softail named “Pote’s Creation” is framed at the shop entrance. A fat gold trophy hangs out in the hallway joining the storefront and the garage. This one’s for winning a drinking game. It doesn’t look like Reyes runs a stiff shop. Reyes, covered in graying tattoos, smiles and offers me his hand.

Puerto-Rican born Pote has lived in New York for most of his life and has been fixing motorcycles since he was 18 years old. Having received no formal training, he can put an entire motorcycle together under an exact 9 hours, a feat corroborated by his boys over after-hours whiskeys at the shop. His magic is the result of determination and intuition.

“The heart of the bike is the carburetor,” he says as he explains the working parts of an engine. Even though his technical knowledge comes from parts manuals, his bikes always run, even from the time he assembled his first machine, a Harley-Davidson One Piece. Felo, a lanky guy who sometimes helps around the shop, says that although he can put a bike together in working order himself, Pote seems to be able to pull missing screws out of his pocket like a magician.

The staff varies between five and twenty people, all considered family. These guys are of the old guard who love and live for the ride. As Cindy, a petite redhead who rides with John, a man with the cataract-blue eyes, points out, this bunch developed a bond with their Harleys. They built them by hand, drove cross-country on them and slept on them through many cold nights. “It takes a lot out of you, physically,” she says.  

Pote maintains his business by selling miscellaneous parts and leather gear which he hand-tools. The winter is a better time for maintenance than traveling for sport. He sometimes sells custom bikes, although many of the ones in the shop are owned by members of his motorcycle club, a 50-person unit called “The Forbidden Ones”.  He also houses other people’s bikes inside the shop, such as the small purple thing belonging to a woman who is suffering from terminal cancer. She’s become too ill to travel, but has been keeping her baby in the shop for the past three years.

This year the shop came dangerously close to closing, a result, according to Pote, of rent that has become too high and customers who are moving farther away with few new ones in the neighborhood to replace them. Still, he says he can’t do better than he is. “We treat the customers good and give them good service,” he shrugs. “If the customers don’t complain, then you’re doing well.” They also sell a great line of high-end Snap-On tools.

Pote is known locally as someone with a loyal group of regulars. The store is held together by a community that has been attending his part swaps and block parties for years. Sometimes so many riders show up from all over the city and upstate, he says, that the street lodging the shop has to be closed down. Pote also sponsors mass rides for Toys for Tots, fundraisers for the local Wyckoff hospital and Pampers diaper runs. The guys hanging out at the shop nod enthusiastically when their boss explains his charity work. 

“We ride for the kids, man. Last Sunday, we had almost two thousand bikes riding up from Myrtle Avenue to Woodhaven,” Pote recounts, taking the blanket off the demon dog cage. Revealed inside are two tiny Yorkies, running around the corners of their box and irritating one another.

The rent this month nearly squashed Pote’s shop, but he paid it off by selling his beloved truck. He shakes it off with a such-is-life attitude. “I don’t want to close my shop, man. I’m 48 years old. What am I going to do, get a job? This is my life.”

 motobeast

Motorcycle business is still business, and the success of a brand or dealership depends on its ability to intuit customer’s changing desires. Riders are young once again, but they are more affluent now, yet thriftier, than their parents were when they bought their first bikes in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Gen X and Y is beginning to take its bikes to cramped city streets, having “discovered” them as an urban alternative to the heavy cost of keeping a car.   

“There’s a generational shift going on,” says Tim Buche, President of the Motorcycle Industry Council, “And in many ways, New York is a key spot.”  

Baby boomers on bikes outnumbered their grandkids 4:1 as recently as 2003. According to MIC research, that ratio was 2:1 by 2008. “In 2009, the median age of motorcyclists dropped for the first time in 19 years,” Buche continues. “In 2011, ridership was equal.”

Today, as before, people ride for style, but they need the bike to look good, be storable, and be able to weave in and out of traffic. Buche himself prefers to ride sport bikes. There are thriving motorcycle shops in the city, but what are they doing that Pote’s loyalty-driven, bare-bones approach lacks? Or is the Harley-Davidson- the original “bad to the bone” motorcycle, the original, iconic Captain America- and its fans simply aging?

Adam Barker, 30, has been living in Williamsburg for roughly two years. He has been riding for 5 years and loves it; he “would ride anything.” Barker’s own bike was a Triumph Speed Triple, a classic sports bike. He liked it for its character and streamlined appeal, giving it the appearance of an aerodynamic steampunk dragon. “It’s a stylish motorcycle,” he acknowledges proudly. “I like being seen on it, to be honest.”

He’s only ridden a Harley once.  “Harleys are most popular with people who have been riding their entire lives,” observes Barker. “It’ often what their dads rode, and it’s what they get when they ride for the first time in their older years.”  

All of Adam Barker’s five roommates ride or race, most of them professionally- a strong hub of dedicated young riders who keep at least 10 motorcycles in the building’s parking lot at all times. They look for shops where they can safely leave their vehicle and which can give them the tools and space to do most of their own repairs.

For this, they come to Motorgrrl, which according to many changed the local motorcycle business. It is also the first female-owned garage in the area.

Valerie Figarella has been spreading “good motorcycle juju” for 8 years. Located off the Bedford hub on the L train, Motorgrrl draws customers with budgets of various depths. Val, a petite firecracker in a newsboy hat, used to be a corporate computer programmer and runs a tight ship.

What Motorgrrl has done- and this has been echoed by nearly everyone interviewed for this article- has been to bring a “new” bike culture to Brooklyn. From the wrought-iron gate that gives passerby a peek at the menagerie of Japanese and Italian automobiles in the garage to the Technicolor pop-art display of beetle-like bucket helmets arranged on the inside wall, the shop looks as hip as its clientele.

It’s definitely a draw for the shop’s demographic, an age group ranging between college kids and the salt-and-peppers, although there are a few who have been riding since Death Race 2000 slammed into theaters. The business model is a community environment and a DIY repair spot, a place with style and lifts, compressors and parts washers- a new outlook for riders who, despite knowing how to fix their own technical issues, are often put off from owning their engines by the cost of parking and the danger of not having a reliable storage space. 

Motorgrrl is digital, too, having embraced social networking as a way to connect with customers and reach out to moto-culture junkies: the shop’s linked up to Facebook, Twitter, and even a Tumblr page featuring vintage photographs of men and women behaving badly.

“Researching the competition is like a doctor researching other offices- some specialize in pediatrics, some do full checkups,” she explains. She personally sees a lot of Ducatis, Hondas, Suzukis and Kawasakis, two-stroke engines built for rapid acceleration.

“Harleys come with a stigma of being ‘badass’ and successful,” she says.  But racing bikes, such as vintage Triumphs and Desmosedichis, are analogous to a Porsche or an Aston-Martin. “If you’re a classic cat, you’ll probably like old-school race bikes.” Used wheels are also cheaper and many owners are fascinated by the process of restoring their performance and aesthetics.

Figarella herself prefers racing bikes for their easy maintenance and lower price points. She purchased her first, a Yamaha 52 XT-250, when she was in college, having gotten it from someone who needed money to fuel a journey to Alaska. She now owns a Daytona and services BMW’s.

The garage now has 21 spaces, always mostly full. That Motorgrrl has done so well not just against the economy, but also physically close to local legends such as Indian Larry’s, is a testament to determination and a good sense of business and style.

At Pote’s, Cindy who rides with John tells me that Val is “one hell of a lady.”

“And it really means something that she is a woman,” Cindy explains. “As someone who has been in the biking world for decades, I know true bikers who would never give the time of day to a female mechanic. But many trust Val. And she’s had to work harder than anyone else to get there.”

Val’s toughness is earned, but the visual toughness of being on a motorcycle, of metal, leather and vibrating parts, is still a hot selling point. The wildly successful New York-based Deth Killers brand has been deliberately built on the legend of the actual DK motorcycle club, hot 20-something hooligans who post videos of themselves gunning through flames and abducting fashion models.

The Deth Killers sell their line of asphalt-resistant jeans in Soho, next to Saturday’s Surf Shop, a café that sells surfing gear to the hip and landlocked.

Pockets of people nostalgic for riding’s dirty days still congregate in order to keep vintage style alive. Corinna Mantlo holds a weekly screening of B-movie motorcycle flicks out of the back room at Otto’s Shrunken Head, a post-punk tiki bar in the East Village. The film buff says that now, as always, people love the rabble-rousing, rebel outlaw face of biking, and style is a way to manifest this image.

Mantlo, 31, grew up in Manhattan, raised on the stories her and her friend’s fathers told of their adventures in the 70s.

“We grew up with those stories,” she recalls. “It wasn’t just about riding and getting drunk. It was about art and trips and being broke and learning how to fix things yourself.” She said that as city kids, none of her friends owned cars, but as soon as they were able to pool together the several hundred bucks to go to motorcycle safety school, they jumped right on the seat. 

The images of guys in the 1950’s and 60’s “smoking a cigarette and looking great next to a British bike” were real to these kids, but outside of the aesthetic allure, it was also an accessible hobby. They discovered a bike-centric Manhattan, a secret since noticed by many.

Mantlo, who keeps an eye on culture, views the popularity of Japanese and British racers more as a result of practicality than an abandonment of values. While she agrees that choppers are no longer the norm, she says it may be more about a price point that allows people, like the ones who are just beginning to grow their paychecks, to pick up a ride for about $1200 and feel the same rush afforded by any kind of status bike.

Her favorite move, The Wild Ones, is timeless because “speaks to our generation and city kids coming from broken homes.” For her, as it is for all riders, motorcycles are a means to escape the claustrophobia that inevitably settles into the soul from the city, a way “to just be able to split.”  

In the world of 3-D action flicks, people ride expensive streamlined vehicles and look increasingly bionic, but we agree that “whether it was the Hell’s Angels in the 1960’s or today, it’s still about the same camaraderie.”

 motorgrrls

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To the Bridge

October 31, 2011
Shorts

They packed to head home against news of the storm. In Big Pine they folded their clothing and their fear into two black suitcases, sweating with the sun on their backs as Hurricane Joaquin coagulated like a blood clot off the sandy artery of the East coast.

At 2 PM, Mila shut the door to the cool breezes rippling through her apartment. She paused before swinging the wooden pendulum closed, feeling the silky air as if called to stand and be touched by the calm pleasure of late summer. This weather was so curiously clear; the East had sucked away the reserve of clouds and fog that usually reached over the Northwest like a layer of cream.

 She locked the door against the instinct to stay on safe ground.

Harry, already in the hallway with their skinny suitcases, said nothing when she asked him, he noted for the first time, how he felt about leaving so suddenly. Thinking he was being reserved, she picked up his hand and wrapped it comfortingly with her fingers, but Harry was ready to speak first.

“I know you’re afraid,” he said. Mila’s jaw set. There was nothing she hated more than to be comforted; the admission of softness directed towards instead scraped her like an expression of weakness. Harry knew this.  

She was once very attuned to the deep-set voice that filled in for Harry’s soft shoulders and thin jaw, but four years of cohabitation had worn away its ability to sweeten her defenses.  

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she picked after him. “They’re still letting people land in the airports, which means no one is in critical danger. This threat; I know it’s all made up.”

“Everything is going to be fine,” Harry continued as if she had agreed with him. “This is the right decision, no matter what.”

In reality, Mila thought, it was difficult to tell what was risk, what was propaganda, and what was panic-driven myth.

The airports were open only to a weak trickle of jets carrying those people who had petitioned case-by-case at their state customs bases, hastily thrust into operation by the Supreme Court just two weeks prior.  Mila’s aging parents lived and cared for their own parents in a first-floor apartment in Brooklyn; she was allowed to stay with them. Harry, her husband, said there was no way she was going to be the only solid rock between four elderly people, raving wind and a city packed with alarm; the very real possibility of a crowd frothing for escape at the steel bit of the subway system made him uneasy enough to tell Mila how things were going to go.

This was the dark cloud that drove Harry from sleep the night they decided to leave, but he didn’t share his apprehension with his wife, who dreamt her own florid nightmare about a school of sharks patched from black clouds. When the rubbery fish opened their mouths, instead of teeth she stared down rows of people with faces distorted in a thousand expressions of terror. When she woke up she found Harry already looking at her. He told her they were both going to New York.

“Now even the support beam needs another support beam.” He knew she’d want go alone, stone-cold in her stern heroism, careless that Harry would be left in the sun to worry while she sacrificed herself to the random evil of weather.

The inconvenience of the cross-country flight ban had flared into protests. The Farmers, a small but fiery grassroots group, had posted incisive blog posts about the caution tape the federal government had issued to insulate the country. As the criticism was linked from website to profile, the cry of logic went up: if even death-row inmates were allowed the luxury of a choice last meal, then it was unethical to prohibit ordinary people choose to die beside their families- especially if they weren’t flying directly through the storm.

The flight staff consisted of a few hundred rotating volunteers traveling daily to and from the ominous coast; countless gallons of fuel were donated anonymously. Some of these donors were struck by the romantic notion of choosing one’s own destiny, and others had long wanted the government to pay greater attention to fortifying frail infrastructure rather than tracking where its citizens chose to hide from the rain.

Mila had been at the Laundromat, watching a debate about the ban on the C-Span channel, and remembered seeing the woman in sweats and pink nails who had jumped out of her seat, yelling in frenzy, “It’s a celebrity culture, people! They government keeps death-row slobs well-fed to show how good they are up from up in those offices, how much they care, but when it comes to me and you, they keep us locked up here like animals waiting to get blown away!”

“Amen,” someone shouted from the front seat. It was no longer C-Span; it was action TV. Mila wondered if the fuzzy shape on the screen knew that her words would be used to inspire emotion, that animals would be spray-painted and stickered on walls as the mark of lurking distrust, maybe she wouldn’t have worn sweats to the town hall. She wondered if the woman had ever taken an interest in debate, ever wondered that her outbursts could cause a chain reaction, before she had the bejesus scared out of her. Mila was better-dressed, probably better-educated, and better-mannered than this woman now known to every eye in America, but before the catastrophe neither had she given a thought to what clever mechanics might be crafting the arc of law.  And so it must have been with many.

The storm was nicknamed “Hurricane Hades”. Within a single week, news networks hatched and grew the monster in the imagination of its audience, and the bigger it grew, the more urgently it needed a moniker. It lurked in legend and fit alphabetically at the heels of Hurricane Holly, the last wrecker to terrorize Florida: Hades, the chaos predicted to burst apart eastern cities by their neatly seamed streets. 

The couple started the ignition on their Volvo at 2:30 PM. Mila watched out of the window of the car as Harry inched towards a ferry in the idling molasses of traffic.

At 3 PM Western time, Joaquin began to dip its outer fingers into the waters of Virginia and stir. Families watching the slate sky through boarded windows saw flocks of birds swirl restlessly through pinprick sheets of rain. The deer grazing in forested backyards, calmed by the mysterious absence of human traffic, merely perked back their ears.

Harry and Mila escaped the hideous chatter of the ferry’s radio inside their muggy car.

 “The mayor of Norfolk has ordered 10,000 body bags to be marched down Main Street, Mayor Evans announced today. ‘Even if we evacuate the maximum amount of people, we may still find the streets flooded with bodies when this is over. There may be nowhere left for those who remain behind at this time. Be prepared. Stay in your homes and follow instructions carefully.’” The reporter wrapped up the segment: “The message is clear: if you are still here, it’s too late.”

The XM radio, broadcasting from Harry and Mila’s destination, skittered nonstop threats across the deck. The boat sailed calmly, holding the car aloft like a water-hating cat above a big blue river.

“Bullshit,” Harry whistled. “Then why is this crack still there?” He pointed at the boat’s speakers, indicating the disembodied reporter.

“He’s doing his civic duty. Crawling through mud and stuff for the story, being a hero,” she said gravely. She decided she was kidding, but it always seemed that Harry either ignored or couldn’t tell when she was deadpan.

“So are we, but we’re doing it for ourselves,” he said quietly, focusing a few inches past Mila’s right left black pupil.  

At 5 PM they arrived at the airport for their evening departure and found themselves staring down a line of almost three hundred people, each one vying for admission onto one of the last scheduled flights to take them home.  Some of these people must not even have tickets, Mila realized. They just came here, hoping against reason that fate would find a seat for them.

Everyone was thoroughly searched for weapons and tickets, and those without papers were turned away by tired, sweating airport attendants. Several of the women in the crowd were dotted with tears, forgetting from sheer exhaustion that their families probably would do better taking care of themselves. They were like little animals goaded into panic by a whip of words, and Mila found it contagious. She squirmed in her cashmere sweater, trying to center her mind in the soft fur of her jacket and away from the flooding tension.

Flights, they were told, were being tapered in preparation for Joaquin. Lightning clouds were reported drifting through the heartland states, but they were merely a ripple tiding of something bigger blowing in from the sea.  All departures would have to wait for the storm to temporarily break.

A seated woman disinterred a cello from its plastic egg and began to loosen and re-tighten the strings. Harry mentally urged her to break the barrier play, to break the barrier of his wishful thinking, to ignore her own private bundle of nerves and stoke the fire of camaraderie. The flow of events was a lucid nightmare, why couldn’t he hope for a ridiculous stroke of good luck? But like everyone else, she was probably trying to hold back from shitting herself. It was a strange and intimate thing to know about three hundred people.

Harry had long associated string players with his own, non-musical wife. Several months into dating Mila, he took to hear a string trio perform Bach. Harry was the kind of person whose mind itches to accommodate all matter; this was his playtime.

Mila liked to try everything once, and Harry had a feeling that he was the arbiter of her first impression of a live classical performance. He wanted her to begin to love this special thing and to know that he planted the seed in her ear.

As the half-light died with the sound of the closing bell, Harry snuck a side glance at his woman to gauge her reaction. Darkness had settled like ink into the thin skin near Mila’s mouth, dividing her face into a well of eyes and crags where there were none before; she looked sculpted, older.

The man on the stage, his hair frayed as a white fleck of snow, began to scrape a vibrating sound out of his violin. It threaded through the hawk’s-wing expanse of air in the concert hall, delivering moments of music that at moments felt like glass breaking, and at times like the end of the world.

A cellist accompanied the old man: a young woman with a stern face, slight in her black silk slip. She had the stony musician’s expression that cloaked everything personal about her except the concentration of mountains.

She threw her body against the cello as if trying to draw blood, re-creating the movement intended by its wild-eyed composer centuries ago. Her music was deep and guttural, produced from the contact between her own hidden physical cavities and the coffin-shaped echoing chamber of the wooden curl gripped between her thighs.

Harry watched the cellist’s black-heeled foot peek from behind the instrument, aroused by the elegant bones that tensed and curled with her rocking.  

He glanced back at Mila after a pause and was stunned to see a look of intensity heating her baby face.  In that moment, Harry could see Mila’s future: the lines that would crinkle her skin like paper, her posture and long curve of neck that would continue to proudly carry the weight of her shoulders. He felt sure that the raging on the stage lived as potential in Mila, and he wanted to be near her every exciting contradiction. It was as close as he’d ever gotten to what moved him most. Harry fell in love with Mila that night.

Theirs was the last plane into New York. The boarding was blissfully short and efficient. There were no luxuries on this trip, just water bottles. Harry extended half a Clanapin to his wife, who gulped it down along with the small shot of Jack they brought in a mouthwash container. Mila hated flying. Time melted nervelessly as she watched a white line of airplane lights ascend into the night sky, and she closed her eyes as their metal box trundled down the runway.  

In the air, Mila had a dream. She dreamt that she was trying to sleep in a bed inside a dark room. She was completely relaxed, thinking no thoughts, when she felt the sensation of a warm mouth kissing her wrist. She felt no body attached to it. The kiss was like a spider, light but insistent, pink sucking lips creeping towards the papery underside of her elbow. It caressed over her bicep, crawled to her heart, and slowly made its way to her own mouth where it paused, tenderly waiting for her response. Mila tried to brush it off, but petrified, found that her arms were frozen. She didn’t know what she was afraid of in that small, warm, respirating cave on her body; it wasn’t that it might try to steal her breath or suffocate her, but in her watery dream logic Mila experienced the phobia that the mouth would begin to breathe for her, letting her forget the usefulness of her own lungs.  

She woke in a haze. Harry’s hand was on hers. His skin was almost as cold as his wedding ring. The plane rang with alarming silence.

“Is everything ok?” she whispered.

“Yes, everything is fine,” Harry answered. “Well. It should be fine. You’ve been asleep for hours. We’re already somewhere over New York, but it’s been too stormy to land. Most of the other planes were diverted to Buffalo, but the pilot came on the intercom saying he took an extra hour’s worth of fuel, so they’ve kept LaGuardia open for us. We’ve been circling for 50 minutes. We all hope we’re going to get on the ground soon. Very, very soon,” he repeated.

Mila looked across the aisle and saw that the plane was nodding in turbulence. Mostly everyone had closed their windows and put on their headphones, trying to distract themselves. She had a window seat still open. Through it she saw an indistinguishable porridge of steel-wool clouds churning, and the plane was dipping in and out of the morass. Flashes sparked randomly in the storm, causing some of the passengers to stifle a squeal, but Mila heard no thunder. A man behind her was talking to himself, whispering “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” over and over again, urgently as if something was hurting him.

Harry, however, was smiling. His eyes and the corners of his mouth were relaxed. Mila, strangely, also felt no fear. All she knew was that the plane was in the sky and that at some point it would be on the ground. She wasn’t concerned with the method. She could feel the same magical confidence seeping from Harry.  The TVs were turned on in the cabins, and he kept his profile to the screen as he nestled his hand discreetly under Mila’s sweater and between her thighs.

The plane disappeared into the storm without a word from the pilot as lightning tongued around it. The woman on the outer edge of Mila and Harry’s row gripped her seat so tightly it seemed that she was trying to hold the plane up herself, the way that cartoons could levitate above a chasm by holding themselves up by the ears. Several times the plane nosed around in the clouds before it finally hit the shining, wet runway, and when it did everyone cheered. Mila did not. Harry kept his hand where it was.

The scene in LaGuardia airport was inversely calm to the one they had departed. All the shops were gated, and only one path of lamps lit the light-headed travelers to their luggage. The airport’s thick glass windows were locked with boards, and at several stood police members in full bulletproof vests.

“I think we just landed in hell,” said Mila.

“It makes sense. I’ve never felt that kind of turbulence before,” said Harry, ushering her ahead as they passed by the guards, whose eyes followed them down the runway. A man in an outfit that made him look like a SWAT member led the group towards the still baggage carousels, where luggage was already waiting. Everyone remained instinctively in line as he checked their boarding passes and ID’s, saying the same short, terse, “You’re clear” and waving each escapee towards their belongings.

A line of cabs was parked outside in the rain. It was 4 AM Eastern time, and the thunder wasn’t nearly as loud as they had expected.  Mila turned on her phone, fingers trembling, remembering that she didn’t call her mother when they landed. She had forgotten the focus of their flight; her mom’s face, for the first time in a week, didn’t stare at Mila in the back of her mind like the light at the end of a long tunnel.

The phone rang until the answering machine picked up. Mila rang again. This time the rings were tinny, obstructed, and the message machine garbled. There was no beep to leave a message. Harry told her the service was probably poor because of the rain. Mila resigned herself to being ushered into the next open SUV, anxious to be in her parent’s apartment even though she was sure they weren’t being battered by the weather.  Harry slid next to her.

“We’ll figure out what is going on once we get closer to the city. I don’t like all of these police. I knew that they were supposed to be patrolling the waterfronts, but it’s still barely raining. This just doesn’t make sense,” he said mostly to himself, redundantly pointing out his and Mila’s mutual discomfort.

The cab driver was a bald head above the rearview mirror.
“Going into town?” he asked. His throat had a smoker’s grit.

“Yes,” the couple murmered simultaneously. Harry continued, “How have the roads been? Is it as bad as they’ve been saying?”

“You can say… it’s been interesting,” replied the driver. “Tom” was the name tag stuck on the divider between his seat and the passenger’s. Tom’s face, as it was portrayed on the sticker, was heavy-set and thick-browed. He had a small tear tattooed near his right eye.  

“How so?” Harry’s body stiffened for the first time that night.

“Honestly, we’ve been driving people into the city all week, but yesterday we started getting blocked by cops. They’ve literally circled off the city. You can’t get in.” The cabbie coughed.

“Can you get out?” quietly asked Mila.

“I don’t know. All I know is that you can’t get in.”

“So where are you taking us?” Harry pushed on, trying to contain his voice. His arm inched towards the door handle.

“I’ve been letting people off near the Brooklyn Bridge. I mean, I can’t drive over it. It’s barricaded. It’s a weird situation, you know, because we’re not allowed to leave you in the airports either. “

“Harry, my parents!”  Mila whispered urgently. She was no longer worried about imagined storms. She was imagining police helmets and locked doors. Harry put up his hand. There was nothing to be said. Tom told them that the news reports stopped broadcasting Joaquin’s progression, saying that all evacuees were safe, and all residents inside the city were to be contained from danger until the storm of the century dissipated overhead. Subway and bus service, to this effect, were halted.

They neared the mournful, misty bridge. Tom turned around to face the couple, waving away their folded cash. He was much older than he looked in his cabbie’s photo, and the tear near his eye had faded to a crusted, mole-like dot.

“I live in Hoboken,” he told them. “They’ve locked us down over there too; it’s so close to the water. I got up yesterday, and when I got to the airport, the police told me I had to come right back after my shift ended. The crazy thing is, they knew when my shift ended. This doesn’t smell right, but there’s nowhere to go. Sorry you came all this way, you two. Good luck.”

Mila and Harry left the car, shouldering their backpacks.  New York looked ghostly pale in the dawn. They searched down the road and found two more cabs approaching them. They stopped, released a tall man in a business suit and a young guy wearing duck boots. They all walked towards one another.

“So…. Do any of you know what the hell is going down?” asked the boy. The businessman rubbed his red eyes and shook his head. He was trying to find his father at Mt. Sinai hospital and had worked himself a migraine.

“We could try to cross the bridge. It looks so empty here, and the weather’s calm, and I’m sure no one will care about a few crazy people trying to get to the other side,” suggested Mila. She tugged at the businessman’s shoulder; he had started to fall asleep on his feet, and a bit of moisture had pooled near his chin. Like a zombie, he followed the three, moaning softly. They neared the bridge entrance. There was a great amount of yellow caution tape strapped to a gate fashioned from wooden boards. A policeman, black boots clacking on the pavement, walked out from behind the barricade. Harry stepped out to confront him. The policeman, his face obscured by a mask, nodded at the confused trespasser.

“Hi. Hi, how are you,” Harry began. The policeman nodded again. “We just flew in. We’re all very tired and we need to get to our families. Is there a way to get across the bridge?”

The officer looked down at the four from his elevation on the bridge. In their fatigue, he seemed to loom taller than the scraggly group combined.
“You can’t enter.”

“Please. Please. Look, we went through a lot to get those plane tickets. We weren’t informed that there could be a curfew, or a blockade, or whatever is going on here,” Harry pleaded. The wind picked up speed and whipped his hair back from his forehead, which had turned white. He wished that he could momentarily freeze Mila, deafen her from this cruel turning away. Harry eyed the officer’s gun holster, but felt that if he let go of his rage and let his fists fly, he could grab the air and rip away this horrible, surreal reality, and behind the curtain they would again be looking through their window in Big Pine.

“I’m sorry. You can’t enter. Please follow Officer Rangley. He will take you a mile down the road to a shelter. It’s open for passengers who have been delayed from entering the city due to the state of emergency. You will be given a room. Please follow Officer Rangley.” The cop turned to another cop who had appeared from behind the boards, shorter but otherwise indistinguishable from one who had been sentencing the travelers, who by now felt so wired that they thought he could be a hallucination.

Officer Rangley walked to a blue NYPD van, black in the lack of light. He herded them in, but as Harry pulled his legs into the vehicle, the boy with the duck boots backed away.

“No. I’m going to get over the bridge. This is so fucked. Who are you? I’m not getting in your goddamn van,” he yelled.

“Sir, calm down and get in the van,” warned the officer.

“Fuck you!” The boy moved to run, but the officer caught him by the arm, with lethal expertise pulled him into his chest and stifled his neck with his baton.
“Either you get into the van or you will be court-martialed for trespassing on government property.”

The boy spit on the ground and let Officer Rangley lift him into the van. The door slid shut. Four whites of eyes peered at one another like bats in the night.

The officer let them out in front of a brick motel. Rangley took note of their bags and tagged each with a stamp, then opened the door to the lobby. Instead of a clerk, yet another black bodysuit stood behind the polished desk. All the lamps were off, and there was no hum from an air conditioner.  There was no familiar noise from the flat-screen television or a radio.

“Can I get your names, please?”

They were each handed a key and steered up a flight of stairs. Few vacancies remained in the Great Flushing Motel, but neither Harry nor Mila could have told it was inhabited; the silence was so thick and deathly. The elevator was bound to the lobby, so they all walked up the stairs to their rooms. The businessman exited first, shaking Harry’s hand in solidarity. The couple’s room was on the top floor. Mila collapsed on the bed, her thighs burning. The room was as dark as the one in her strange dream. 

 Harry wanted to knock on the neighboring doors to scout for more answers, but to his unsurprised chagrin found that the handle wouldn’t budge from the inside. He leaned against the door and, without warning from his stomach, dry-heaved. Mila called him over to her.

She felt Harry’s weight move the bed. Mila allowed him to pull her close.

“Harry, this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen,” she murmured. He sidled close to her and nuzzled her ear.

“But this is the kind of world where things don’t work like they should. This is the kind of world where things break and get dirty. We forget this, because there’s always been someone to hide it from us.” She wanted to continue, to rail against the rotting wrongness penetrating the good, clean day she lived yesterday, but Harry again slid his hand between her thighs, as he did on the plane. This time his palm was insistent.

Mila stopped talking and lay still. She tuned into Harry’s breath, his mouth, and remembered the mouth on her wrist. And now, knowing whose lips were on the back of her neck, she wanted them.

 Mila wanted Harry. Not Harry- his living body. She wanted his otherness, his distance, to melt. She felt alone, and she felt something older than she, old as the earth, old as the forests surrounding her windows back home in Big Pine, old as the underground roots that fed them. She felt a huge, urgent need that ran deep below steel and the panic above it like a blind worm that knew nothing about itself but a universe of hunger. She turned to face the man in the bed. Harry’s eyes glinted danger.

He grabbed her shoulders and folded his muscular body around her, already sweating.  This violence was under their control.

He pushed her deeper into the bed, ripping clothes and twisting soaked bed sheets. Harry grappled with her wrists and pinned her ankles, pulling her backwards, daring her spine to snap against the unbending force of his abdomen.  She remained elastic.  He pulled her with one hand clasping her around the collarbone and the other seizing her wrists, releasing her belly as she unfolded as naturally as a thin moth spreading its wings with its back to him. Mila looked down at the pulsing above her pubic bone, coming from within, and seeing this, she yelled. There was no pain or fear, only the release of her yielding to a place she could not take herself.  

They tried to drag one another in through the pores. When it was over, they fell into a long, bottomless sleep without dreams.

The morning greeted them with sun and an unlocked door.  Harry roused Mila. Stretching, she asked him what time it was.

“It’s time to leave. The door to the hallway’s been unlocked. We should go outside and try to find our luck across the bridge again.”

“Okay. I feel good today, babe,” she told him. “We’re going to be all right now, no matter what. Like you said,” she told him.

Harry and Mila left the room hand-in-hand. They walked downstairs, past the vacant concierge desk, and through the door, emerging into light that thundered into their pupils like white horses. A clean wind scattered pieces of paper freely around building corners, dancing without the obstruction of human limbs.  Rivulets of water, muddy from cleaning the silt of sidewalks, trickled into the roadside drains. The city was empty of movement. The human outlines of policemen stood as still as if filled with cement, holding the straight, sparkling lines of their batons in unwavering hands. The clouds moved apart and let the sun strengthen the color of distant red tape netting across the Brooklyn Bridge.

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Doomtree Speaks (And Yells and Raps)

October 29, 2011
People

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For Doomtree, Minneapolis’s steadfast hip-hop collective, kings and thrones give way to a powerful wall of individual voices winging rhymes and toothy lyrics. Democratically owned, manned and managed by its eight emcees and DJ’s, one of the truly exceptional things about this label is its dedication to effectively breaking ground not only in making music, but also in the business of producing it.
Each member commands his or her own individual style, discography, and fan base, but is a distinctly vital limb of Doomtree, the new model for the all-inclusive, do-it-yourself record label. While not everyone in the team comes from an expected hip-hop background, Doomtree’s dedicated fans, numbering in the tens of thousands, respect the group’s commitment to one another and to building their own house from the ground up.
With the release of Sims’ EP “Wildlife”, the rapper’s second CD this year; Dessa’s melodic, mythology-inspired new album “Castor: The Twin”; and the upcoming November release of the collaborative “No Kings”, 2011 was a flurry of creative activity for the motley group, which consists of P.O.S, Dessa, Sims, Lazerbeak, PaperTiger, Cecil Otter, Mike Mictlan, and their indispensable intern Ander Other.
Backstage at Doomtree’s CMJ show at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory, MotherThunder caught up with emcees P.O.S, Sims, and Dessa about following their own driving forces while keeping true to the success of the Doomtree crew.

P.O.S

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MotherThunder: Most recording artists today have to be involved in their own label and in the process of creating their albums. What makes Doomtree successful?
P.O.S: Is it successful? (laughs)
MT: Well, what is the measure of success for a label?

P.O.S: I don’t know; I really don’t. I know that we work really hard to not have to work normal jobs, or to work normal jobs as minimally as possible. That is my personal bar of success for being a rapper: the fact that I don’t have to do anything except for make songs. I don’t make much money, and I don’t think that I have a better job, necessarily, when it comes to hours. Because in order to be self-employed, you have to work almost all the time, but I like my job. I can call it success as long as I don’t have to do anything else. I don’t know if it’s true for everyone in Doomtree.

MT: I follow Doomtree’s website, Twitter feeds, and Facebook page, and it’s obvious that you’re great at sending out your message. Do you have a team to help you with this, or do you do it all yourself? P.O.S: Everything that we do is us, pretty much. It’s seven of us and Ander and a couple other people who help with different things here and there, but no real plan. We’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now and every year we refine what we did the year before, with no map or a plan.

MT: You each have your own specific style, you all make your own records; then you have the False Hopes albums, and now, altogether, “No Kings”. How is the process different for creating each one?P.O.S: That’s really it, The False Hopes stuff (came) before mixtapes were popular. It was a short mixtape trying to figure out what we were working on while working on solo records. Doomtree’s records are all seven of us collaborating. We only do that once in a while, and all the years in between we make solo records, with each other and with each other’s help, and with each other’s personal ear and taste in mind. We all like working with each other; we’re all friends who respect each other’s musical tastes. That’s the best part about it.

MT: Do you think it’s harder to work with your friends or alone?
P.O.S: I’ve never not worked with my friends so I have nothing to measure it against. It’s always hard to work.

MT: That, everyone can understand. When you write an album, are you trying to reach a specific audience or do you write for yourself?
P.O.S: A little bit of both. If we’re talking about a P.O.S record, I write almost entirely for me. But I’m aware at this point that a lot of people are going to hear it, and that some people are going to pay attention to the stuff I say. So I have to put the way that I feel about things into it; I never liked songs that didn’t mean anything or that didn’t make sense. I want everything to resonate in some way. It’s music the way that I like to hear it.

MT: You have a huge fan base in (hometown) Minneapolis. Where do you get the best response outside of Minnesota?
P.O.S: It depends on who I’m on tour with. Pretty much every city has figured out a little bit about us at this point.

MT: How about internationally?
P.O.S: I’ve done a couple tours through the UK, Australia, and Europe.
MT: Tell me a little bit about The Four Fists. P.O.S: The Four Fists is me with Astronautalis, and it’s one of those things where we’ve known each other since 2004 and always wanted to work together, and gotten to be really good friends over time. We really wanted to work, and we were trying to figure out something that would be unique from what we normally do, not just blending our stuff together, so we picked themes and we started reading short stories. The first batch of stories was written by a St. Paul writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s coming out sometime next year.

MT: “No Kings” is coming out after the release of Kanye and Jay-Z’s latest album, “Watch the Throne”, we’re now in the throes of Occupy Wall Street, and The Four Fists is based off the work of a very iconic American writer. Is there a theme to this record, or did it come together this way by accident?
P.O.S: I don’t know if it is by accident, or according to a specific theme. We’ve been talking down to people trying to rule us since the beginning of our crew; it’s been almost 10 years that we’ve been making little references to kings dying. And Occupy Wall Street; that was only a matter of time too, because due to the nature of money, it’s just bound to pile on top of itself until everyone feels broken by it.

SIMS

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M.T: Does the release of “No Kings” have anything to do with the coinciding release of “Watch the Throne” and the momentum of Occupy Wall Street? Is there a purpose to the title?
Sims: There is, but it has nothing to do with neither Occupy Wall Street nor Watch the Throne. If you go back through the catalogue of Doomtree songs, the idea of “no kings” or the actual words “no kings”, or a similar amalgamation of these words appears all the way back to 2004.
So this is something that’s been ingrained in our belief system as people, and who we are as people comes through our music naturally. I appreciate both those movements, but not enough to speak on them. I’ll leave those topics to people who know enough to speak about them, and I will continue to speak about what I know.

M.T: When you came together as Doomtree, did you start out as a unit or as separate artists?
Sims: We were all solo artists, and we were all struggling. In many ways, we’re still struggling. But in many ways, it’s a different struggle, a different set of dues entirely. So we were all sort of struggling along and decided to band together to accomplish the goals that we could, whether something as simple as “I can give a show and you can give a show”, and “if we put all of our money together, we could get a record out and you can get your record out”.
The idea was to form a sort of artist co-op, primarily because no one would deal with us. No one would give us shows and no one would certainly put out our records at the time. We are a label by choice, because we don’t want to put records out with anyone else. Because we’re doing fine.

MT: Do you ever want to expand Doomtree, or do you feel that you’re working with the people you want to be working with?
Sims: We want to expand, but it’s all about sustainable growth. So if we got a loan for a million dollars, we’re not sure we’d know what to do with that money. We’ve never taken a loan throughout our entire history. We’ve done everything we wanted to do by the revenue generated by the music that we create. Growth is good.

MT: In an age when many artists work off independent labels or create their own music, do you feel like there is a certain metric of success that other labels don’t have, or haven’t figured out yet?
Sims: I mean, I feel like we’re a good model for the idea that you can do it. I think there are people who do it better than us, and I think there are people who do it worse than us, but I don’t care to even think about who’s doing better or worse, because it’s all irrelevant; it’s luck and it’s the people that you reach with song. All that (other) stuff is sort of superfluous parts of the music industry.
I think the idea that you can create your own destiny is the idea. We’re going to work hard on both making good songs and working hard on how we put those songs out, and work hard once those songs are out to continue to let people know that they are out, and to continue touring; we’re going to do all this stuff on a shoestring budget, and I think that the only model that we’re good for is that you have the ability to do it if you’ve got the chops.

MT: That’s a very inspiring message! Sims: But if you’ve got the chops, so don’t just “do it” (laughs).

MT: What now? Now you’re trying to discourage your fan base? Sims: Yeah! I am trying to discourage people. I’m trying to say get your fucking music right before you try to present it to the world. Spend some time with your craft; really work on your music. I think that’s the biggest part of what we did. We’re ten years deep in owning this label, and we’re now starting to come onto the national scene. Because we fucking sucked when we started, straight up! And now we’re starting to get better at what we’re doing, because we work really hard at creating better music every time.

MT: But you didn’t believe that you sucked at the beginning, did you?
Sims: No, but it’s pretty obvious to know when you suck. It really is.

MT: Not if you’re doing work that is, without lying to yourself, to the best of your ability.
Sims: Yeah, but your ability may just be shitty. That’s the bottom line. Your ability might not be there, you might not be talented, or you might be talented, but you might not be living up to your potential. You might be giving it your all, but your all may is just not there yet. What I’m saying is to be critical of your own music, and work really hard at making that music as good as it can be.
And don’t spend all of your time worrying about where you’re at as far as numbers go: record sales, attendance, money generated, all that stuff doesn’t f*cking matter. Make your music perfect, and then put it out to the world. Don’t be afraid to fall on your face a bunch of times. None of us have lived up to our potential yet, that’s all I’m saying.

DESSA

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MT: Do you feel like you work better as a team, or that at times you need to break off into your own music projects?
Dessa: Doomtree has been really good about providing each artist room to be a solo recording artist and to be a member of Doomtree. On the whole, we’ve done a good job of making it an “and” scenario instead of an “either/or” scenario.

MT: Each Doomtree member has an individual style: you and Cecil Otter are very literary; POS has that spark, etc. Do you think that this variety of feeling and nuance speaks to your fans? Dessa: I think that people who aren’t members of Doomtree are better commentators on that. It’s like trying to guess how you’re perceived when you walk into a room. I can make some guesses about the assumptions that people make, rightly or wrongly, but as a member of the collective I think my primary concern is making good stuff, working hard to promote the music that the guys make, and worrying less about exactly why it would appeal to fans, instead trusting that our art will find a place in the wider world.

MT: When writing together, do you ever have a sense of yourself trying to guard your own voice- you’re the only woman in the group, for example, somebody else is coming from a rap background, and someone else has been doing this for a very long time- or do you forget all this and write in a collective voice?
Dessa: I couldn’t speak for all the guys, but I think we worry more about trying to make fresh and authentic stuff, and if we’re at all aware of the caricature that we fill in DT, we’d be more interested in expanding out of that role than making sure that we fit into it. So if somebody says, “Oh, she’s that chick that writes soft, introspective stuff”, I’d be tempted to write a song to prove that I’m more than that.

MT: Did you siphon different inspiration into “Castor” than you did into “No Kings”?
Dessa: Yeah. My most recent record, “Castor: The Twin”, is 11 songs long, and 10 of them are ambitious musical rearrangements of songs that had been released earlier. That album was actually born out of a West Coast tour that we did with a live band, and when we came back, we found that the live songs we did were really different from the ones that had been recorded.
So we found that for the stand-up bass, the guitar, for grand piano and strings and a live drummer, we’d rearranged a lot of the production than we were initially interpreting. So we made that record because in part, showgoers said “Hey, I really like this version; do you have this anywhere?” And it’s happened enough times that I said, “We should go make that”. So the band and I visited the studio for a week and recorded those new versions.

MT: Do you want to spend more time in the future pursuing that kind of musicality, or now have the urge to make something more forceful?
Dessa: I don’t know that they’re diametrically opposed, but soft, organic stuff tends to lead to mellow, melodic lyrics, and hard, banging production leads to edgier rap. But I don’t think that the two need be mutually exclusive, so for my next record, instead of choosing a direction to go towards, I just like to consider my palate expanded.
When sitting down to write any one song, I can say, “Would an 808 be good on this song? Would a double snare be good on this song? Would a clarinet, or a field snare, or orchestral drum or vibraphone be good on this song?” From the past year of working with live instrumentalists, I now know what those sounds can do.

MT: You are the latest member of Doomtree, correct?
Dessa: Yes, Sims and I joined the latest; six years ago.

MT: And do you ever feel like things fall into place the way the way they are supposed to?
Dessa: Let’s just say, I thought I would be a professor.

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The Scalper

October 29, 2011
People

ticket-stubs_0I’m not expecting to write tonight. It’s 10 pm on a Friday and I’m taking my bike out for a 50-mile spin despairingly early the next morning. Which is why I’m at my local watering hole, using free Wi-Fi and nursing a beer. I don’t pay attention at first to the young, blonde kid on the next bar stool, but he’s drawn to my monitor-illuminated face like a drunk moth and starts up a conversation. We banter for a few minutes; I ask where he’s from and what he does. I can tell he is not from New York. His name is Daniel, and he tells me that he and his buddy- the sullen one watching the TV- are professional ticket scalpers. Whether he’s weaving a very tall tale or bragging about his line of work, I need to hear his story:

Mother Thunder: How does one get into the business of scalping tickets?

Daniel: Somebody brings you in- it kinda happens on accident. For me, it was my brother, while we were working on a farm in Wisconsin.

He told me to pack up a bag of clothes and move to Chicago with him, where he lived. He said, “I’ll show you how to work and make money. Stay with me for a month, and we’ll see what happens. If after a month you don’t make any cash, you can go back home.”

MT: What happened in Chicago?

D: I slept on his floor. He took me to work with him. He said that all I have to do is act naturally.

MT: Which venues did you work? Did you start out small?

I started at Wrigley Field. It’s like a national event; people come from all over the world to see it. When tourists come to Chicago, they go see the Sears Tower, the Magnificent Mile, and Wrigley Field. I got put right out on the street for one of the biggest events in the country. And from then on, you learn how to hustle. There’s definitely a learning curve to it. I went from chopping wood and feeding animals, and all of a sudden I needed to learn how to feel people out and become a salesman.

MT: Did you run into any trouble?

D: Not in Wrigley. But yes, you get locked up sometime. You either get a warning, a fine, or you get locked up for no more than 12 hours.

MT: You said that you travel with your friend. How did you meet?

D: A lot of debauchery happened. I don’t even remember how I met him…(Aside to friend Adam) Might as well have known you my whole life, bro.

MT: Is it easier to work in teams or alone?

D: It’s easier to work in a team- you can have one person talking to the customer and the other handling the money. Plus, when you’re on the road, you can share expenses.

MT: How do you get people to trust you?

D: I don’t screw with people’s money. There are guys who sell fake tickets, or “blinkers”- they don’t care who they screw. I’m the most honest person you can meet. I walk my customers to the doors and see them in. If anything’s wrong with the ticket, I either buy them another one or refund them. You don’t have to trust me, but you’ll get a signed receipt from me. It’s a dirtier side of life than most people are used to, but I don’t steal from people. I’m not a thief. Today at Yankee Stadium, I walked 3 people to the door. I spent an hour of my time making them comfortable when I could have been making more money.

MT: Have you seen a loss in business with the economic downturn?

D: Yeah, it’s terrible. I used to buy for $50 and sell for $150. But the margins have gone down, and it means you just have to work a little harder.

MT: Do you have a plan when you move from city to city?

D: No! For example, I can’t go to Washington and do the nationals. They’ve lost 100 games. You go where there’s winning baseball and high profile teams, international events. Like, the U2 show is a big, international event. You go online and find cities where you’ll make a profit.

MT: How often do you work?

D: Every single day of my life. There’s always something going on somewhere. Any day I’m not doing something, I feel like I have to get up and find the action.

MT: What’s the record number of cities you’ve traveled between in one stretch?

D: In a day, I’ve driven from Chicago straight to Miami. I’ve driven from Chicago to New Orleans. You can only do so much in a day. I’ve done 3 month stretches where I’ve gone New York, Boston, Miami, out to Phoenix, San Diego. I’ve gone coast-to-coast in a few days and back again.

MT: Do you plan on expanding your business out of the country?

D: I’ve lived in Japan for a few months, but I didn’t work. Actually, you could do that in Japan. They like their baseball over there.

MT: Do you ever take vacations?

D: My whole life is a vacation! Look what I do. I get to lay in the sun in the winter, go to huge events all over the nation. Plus, no one tells me what to do. You only have yourself to blame if something goes wrong.

MT: Are there any icons in the business?

D: No names that you’d recognize, but if you were in the business you’d know. There are definitely some legends in the business. Anything you can learn, you learn by experience. I went to school twice, once for psychology and once for business. But I got good by working.

MT: Do your friends know what you do?

D: Yeah, they do. Some of them are really offended by it. I grew up in a small town, and they can be offended by my fast-talking. But they also get starry-eyed when I tell them I live in Chicago. Some of the stories I tell, they don’t believe them. And I don’t even tell them the half of what’s going on. Some really crazy shit will happen with what I do. I’ve sold tickets to celebrities…. sports stars… you get to meet all sorts of people. Go backstage at all sorts of events.

(Adam, the friend, interjects with a laugh: “But, really, we’re in real estate”. Daniel then pulls out his phone and shows me his pictures of dozens of stadiums and concerts he’s visited from the beginning of 9/2009 to now, the end of the month. Some of them are the same concert in different parts of the country. He answers me too clearly, too earnestly. He looks and talks like a street-smart kid; definitely not real-estate salesman material. My instinct says that he’s not bluffing.) Do you believe me now?

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Guerrilla Renaissance

October 29, 2011
People

floydAs the marketing mix mantra of “Product, Price, Place, Promotion” emits is monotone sales pitch, guerilla marketing is the caffeinated antidote to our advertising doldrums. It is imaginative, experimental promotion; it’s the guy dressed in a gorilla suit handing out restaurant menus in front of a ramen restaurant. It’s also how Cunning, a London-based creative ad agency, won fame while working for FHM Magazine in 1999: it projected an image of centerfold Gale Porter, towering in her naked Amazonian glory, onto the Houses of Parliament in London.

Cunning now has offices in New York, where I meet Head Creative Bloke (his official title) Floyd Hayes. Floyd is no sales shark. On the contrary, he is sincere and curious. His side projects include “Twipple” (the “world’s kindest Twitter feed”) and Seksi Spam Buttons, pins printed with hilariously misspelled taglines from pornographic spam e-mails (sales profits go to the Sexuality Information & Education Council of the US). Nothing seems to be off-limits in this creative space.

As Hayes shows me around the Cunning office,  I note the staff’s meticulously arranged Smurf action-figure collection and the basketball-headed statues created for L’Oreal Vive displayed near the foosball table.

Hayes adeptly navigates the untested terrain of guerrilla advertising. He’s been filmed and for documentaries about marketing and widely quoted. I repeat one such phrase to Mr. Hayes: “those who don’t risk anything risk much more”. He answers that the quote is relevant and eloquent- but he must have dropped it whilst hung over. Thus, I sit Floyd Hayes down to learn about the unconventional limb of an old profession.

Motherthunder.Com: How long have you been at Cunning ?

Floyd Hayes: I’ve been at Cunning for eleven years, and I joined the company as the first employee in 1998. I joined with Anna Carloss in the London office.

We used to work out of her garage (he pronounces it “gAh-rahj”, then chuckles and re-pronounces it “ga-rAjh”, the American way). And that’s where it developed.

I moved to the States in 2004, to start up with Mark (Voysey) at Cunning New York.

So yeah, it’s been quite a long ride.

MT: Is the marketing landscape different here in New York than it is in London? From a bird’s-eye view, they are both cities with similar viewpoints.

FH: I think there’s more of the same as there is that is different, really. London likes to think of itself as being more creative than New York.

There has always been this rivalry between the financial centers, the fashion groups, the graffiti groups, the MC’s, the rappers, and the urban culture; and it’s very strong in the advertising communication industry as well.

England’s certainly more irreverent. They’ve got a cheeky sense of humor- and the word “cheeky” is used a lot more in the U.K than it is in the states. The Brits aren’t as afraid of litigation, political correctness; every ad we do doesn’t have to have every single race in it that’s on the face of the planet.

But that’s not to say that British advertising is insensitive to race and cultural issues. It’s a very multicultural city; there are 300 languages spoken in London alone.

I think it can be a little more sexual; a little more edgy in its humor, its imagery. The humor is just a little more subtle. And those are the differences I saw here. I like the New York advertising scene: it’s quite switched-on, culturally.

It’s very brave. People aren’t afraid to think big here. I think that’s part of the American DNA; that “can-do” spirit, the not-being-afraid to move forward with exciting, big ideas. On occasion….

MT: How big?

FH: Well, the big agencies here, they’re not afraid to push their ideas out. You know, anything from Subservient Chicken down to Microsoft launching Windows, originally, by bathing it in different projected lights.

Anything seems possible, if the budget and the will is there to do it. I like that sense of horizon, which allows me to think in such broad terms.

MT:Take me through the process of taking a big idea from the drawing board and making it a reality. How many different people, steps, and materials are involved?

FH: There’s broadly 10 steps. I won’t go through them 1-10, but essentially it’s broken down into these areas:

At the beginning, we meet for a brief with the client. Usually the client has a brief written out, or we encourage them to fill out our brief, which is a little different. We’re looking at business issues, what they want to achieve, their advertising, their strategy, their planning, what kind of media they want to use.

What kind of resources do we have? Do they have a website already? Is there a celebrity involved? Do they want a sample? You know, what their goals are, how we measure those goals, and should we reach them- that’s the briefing part.

From there, we get into a kind of inspirational area which is part research and development. We look at the competitive set, we look at other people’s strategies and where we can find a space to communicate them- somewhere it won’t be full of competitive clutter.

We try to get excited, because the main thing is to get your imagination turned on. Often, clients give you a brief that’s like a tax return. There’s a lot of text and statistics. It’s my job as creative director to translate that into something that creative minds are going to really open up to, find exciting, flourish, and develop ideas.

Research and development just checks on what (the client’s) done before. Does this client like exciting advertising, or do they like television ads, for example? Then we have to figure out ways to make them feel comfortable in non-traditional terms. From there, we then do brainstorms.

We have very free-form brainstorms here, but like any other company we have the whiteboard up. We encourage everyone in the company to work on it, not just the creative side. So everyone from the secretary to the CEO will have the brief and will be listened to, as much as anyone else, for ideas and insights.

From there, we have solo brainstorming sessions, where people just go away and do what they need to do. Then we come together and reality-check all the ideas against the brief. So if the brief says, “We’ll never use the color blue”, and if one of the ideas uses the color blue, it’s out. Example. Bad example. Dreadful example.

We just make sure it’s tied together, it’s feasible, it’s affordable from a resource point of view, and that the tonality of the idea fits whatever the brand’s trying to achieve.

And then, we create presentation decks, which can be a keynote, a PowerPoint, theater, or it could be just sketches, or it could be a Word document. However we just feel right at the time, and we gauge what particular clients like to either see or read or hear or feel or understand.

MT: Do you stand by your quote: “Companies that don’t risk anything risk much more.” Do you think that’s true across the industry, or do you think it’s mostly young companies like Cunning that aren’t afraid to take risks?

FH: I think it’s true not only for companies, but it’s true for people as well. If your reason for being- as a company or as a person- is just to coast and not to take risks, make some money and that’s your lot, then you’re not really reaching your potential.

And I think that’s a great shame. Especially when I see companies that have wonderful legacies and really intelligent people working for them, and yet there is some kind of “community think” group which holds back ideas that could be a little more interesting or brave.

MT:Sorry: “community think”. Would you capitalize those words; I mean: is that an actual group or a phrase?

FH: I guess I meant “groupthink”. I often see this in corporates. There’ll be 15 people involved in any decision. Often, decisions aren’t made, or if they’re made, they’re made far too late.

I think that in the smaller companies, you have one or two visionaries, and someone who can actually sign a checkbook and make decisions. They have to be more nimble, and that’s certainly more work.

Companies that have that mindset, think of them as the “Apples” of the world…Netflix… people that are creating categories and establishing new rules. I think marketing and communications can be looked at the same way, and I find that exciting.

MT: New markets are being created now, with products that are completely groundbreaking. So I agree. Recall the “mustachioed Marlboro man” that you would see in ‘70s magazine ads in Playboy. Do you think he’s still out there? Is there a type of behemoth company that goes for that image versus a fresher approach?

FH: There is indeed, and I won’t name names, but I can see them from this window. They’re a very well-established company- one of the biggest in the world- and in the top 5. They have an incredible amount of money.

They have large global corporate clients, and their advertising is essentially information-based, product-short, with a bit of copy. And that’s all these clients want. And that’s what they pay this company for.

So those kinds of companies still exist, and they still serve a function, and they still are healthy businesses. They’ll probably always be around, which is great for us because we can nip in through the gaps and talk to clients who would like to change with the times and talk the language of their audience.

I think they’ll exist side-by-side in the way radio still exists with television and television still exists with the internet. One new paradigm of thinking doesn’t necessarily mean it deletes the paradigm before it; does that make sense?

MT:Absolutely! Let’s go into specifics. What was the first idea you brought to the table, and was it accepted?

FH: Oh, gosh… at Cunning, specifically, I put together hundreds of ideas beforehand when I was in a band, and I used to promote bands and DJ’s and all sorts of things.

I was into “guerilla marketing” before I even knew it was guerilla marketing. We just wanted to be famous and had no money!

So, specifically at Cunning- yeah, I remember the first brief I worked on, and I was very green. But it was very exciting; it was for a magazine called “Bizarre”, which had weird stuff in it. Very different magazine.

…Kind of gross stuff; a little sexy. Very “out-there” pictures and thoughts and things.

MT: This was back in the U.K?

FH: Yeah, this was back in the U.K. They liked icky stuff, so my very first idea was incredibly icky and gross. It involved a large billboard with large Perspex letters spelling out the word “Bizarre”, and the Perspex letters were like boxes against the billboard.

I wanted to fill the entire billboard- the letters and the entire Perspex box behind it- with different-colored maggots, because they come in all kinds of colors like green, red, blue. From a distance, it would look just like the word “Bizarre”, like you would see in a magazine title. But when you got closer, you’d realize it was a living billboard.

And of course, maggots hatch into flies…It was very, very disgusting, but I thought it would get a lot of news coverage and make people go, “Oh, my God!” and talk about it in bars and so on. That was an original idea I remember amongst many others.

Then I costed it all up- I knew how much a pint of maggots went for, and the billboard space that went with it- all that kind of stuff. It was just so out there, but it certainly got me a phone call. I went down for an interview, and I got the job.

That (the maggot plan) didn’t actually happen-

MT: Maybe for the best?

FH: Yeah, maybe for the best. You can have that one. The idea that did happen was for a channel (in the U.K) called Channel 5, and they bought the rights to air the classic Lassie series. They wanted some sort of PR stunt to celebrate this and get it in the papers. The idea was very simple: we brought Lassie over from the States as if she was Madonna.

So we had a private jet, security detail, a sexy publicist with her and she went to all the hotels, and went jogging in Hyde Park.

She did all the sorts of things that major celebrities do in London: go to the Waldorf, the Ivy Club. We took Lassie around, and it was successful. It got PR coverage and coverage from news on TV.

We eventually got a phone call from the Houses of Parliament. This guy was furious because he thought we’d brought the dog from the States. At the time, there was a big row about passports for pets.

Britain’s very careful about animals coming in the country because we don’t have rabies, whereas continental Europe does. We don’t want it anywhere near our country, so they (foreign pets) are quarantined for six months. It’s a really involved process.

This story was happening in the news at the same time Lassie was coming over, so we made a segway for the two stories. We told this member of Parliament, “relax, because this dog wasn’t really from America. We sort of snuck her in from down the road in London and made the whole thing up”.

We only hired the jet for, like, half an hour. It was only as much as we could afford to hire it and have it stand around, take a picture and open the door. And that was it- don’t believe everything you read!

MT: Is there a certain style or media in which you prefer to work? Or do you like to mix everything up?

FH: I do, you know. Cunning is a group where we talk about being “solution-neutral”, meaning we believe there’s no one channel that answers a creative brief from a client. Our logo is all different because we like to say every single brief we get, we approach completely fresh.

We’re media-agnostic, so we don’t sell a media channel to a client because we make money on it. Now if you go to Madison Avenue, they’ll tell you otherwise, but they are lying.

They’ll try to sell a client the channel that makes them the most money. So if they specialize in TV production, they will sell TV ads. If they sell outdoor media space, then that will be the top of their deck.

Cunning doesn’t make any money from any media channel in particular. It makes no difference to us if we do a clothing line; or we do something online; or we do a billboard, or an event; viral or Twitter campaign with social media; publicity stunt; or even just a basic ad. We look at the solution that is perfect for the specific media issue at hand.

But what do I like the most? I like very simple ideas that you can just look at and “get” immediately. Some very complex, multi-channel, strategically-led, deep concepts are really intellectually pleasing to work on. But personally, I like to be able to look at a guerrilla ad or a piece of print and have it make me smile.

I want to learn something from it. I want it, in some way or another, be of some use to me whether it gives me something funny and new to say to my friends, or whether the actual media itself has some utility to it. For example, it’s like a coffee-cup holder, that has utility: stops your fingers getting burnt.

What I hate is irrelevant adverts shouting at me in a dictatorial manner, which is how 90% of advertising works. They just buy as much space as they can afford, repeat a message to anyone who’s in the area. I don’t want to know about Ugg shoes or anything else that’s not specific to my needs and desires. People call it “urban spam”, and I think with good reason.

I think there’s a lot less of it here in New York, because it’s easier to tune out. You’re not stuck behind the wheel of your car, forced to stare out at a billboard. But when I went to L.A, I was. I felt confused, because there was no value given by these enormous ads.

I would go much further than that. I wouldn’t even say “no value”. I would say it’s damaging. Information does one thing, and that’s use attention. It uses up your time; it uses up your thinking and clutters your mind.

It’s often said that the average New Yorker gets 3,000 messages a day to filter. That’s commercial sales messages like billboards, logos, e-mails. This is my life! I find it offensive that it’s cluttered with all this nonsense I don’t want to hear. It makes me quite angry.

I really dislike advertising, and I think that informs my work. I hope…to create stuff that, even if it isn’t particularly relevant to you, you can still enjoy it. If it’s a pleasant experience, a useful experience, or a learning experience, I feel much happier there than I do just grabbing attention.

I used to do a lot of that with PR stunts, and I feel like I’ve moved on. I’ve put adverts on people’s foreheads, you know what I mean? (He’s referring to the 2008 Air New Zealand campaign).

 

MT: Maybe that’s part of growing up…

FH: Yeah, of course it is, and I don’t regret any of it. But I feel now that I want to create things that have social utility. It doesn’t have to be boring, but I want my work to be a little more useful to people than just shouting messages at them from a billboard or radio or TV ad.

fhm

MT: And it shows. Marketing reaches out into every media, as you said. Where can it possibly spread now?

FH: I think I had an interview question once that asked, “What happens when non-traditional becomes traditional?” It’s like saying, “What happens when you’ve used every instrument?”

There are millions! There’s an infinite level of iteration and combination that you can use. We’ll never run out of space or ideas simply because some twenty-odd months ago Youtube didn’t even exist; something like that.

MT: Wow, you’re right. How old is the internet, like, twenty years old?

FH: If that! In ’98, we had the internet for the company, but it was barely anything. Then the dot-com boom happened in England around 1999-2000, but it didn’t reach video for being too bandwidth-hungry.

Since bandwidth has grown, technologies and therefore commercial messages have grown with it. Subservient chicken and things like that.

As new technology’s invented, obviously there will be new ways to sell to people. Look at the iPhone, and look how apps work with free downloads and sponsored content and product placement, etc, etc, etc.

MT:Is there a pattern that you’ve gotten into?

FH: No. If I find myself getting into a pattern, I consciously try to break them. I think it’s not healthy, mentally or for your imagination, to get too stuck in its ways. If one thing’s successful, that’s great and just let it be. Find something else. There are always people copying ideas, so you have to keep creating to move forward.

MT: It’s almost strange to have marketing programs in colleges, because the profession is shifting to be made “by the people, for the people”. Things that seemed obvious and set five years ago have completely turned on their heads. Would you put more stock in skill or a college degree?

FH: What happens if students don’t get their grades to go to university, and still want to follow a career in advertising? Should they despair?

Personally speaking-and I guess I’m very different than a lot of people who’ll interview at ad agencies- I know if I want to hire somebody by testing them with a creative brief.

If their imagination is unique, inquisitive, sharp, fast, and exciting, that’s all they really need. Everything else can be learned. Everything else can be bluffed, actually. I know because I’ve done it myself.

You learn enough marketing jargon- which I reject if I can- but for a while, I had to learn the professional language in order for marketing directors to say, “Oh, this guy knows what he’s talking about. He’s just said ‘integrated 360-degree thinking’” or some bull(sh*t) like that. But really, that’s not what all this is about.

It’s about good ideas- very good ideas- that are far and few between, and so are precious. I’d take someone like that over someone with a degree any day of the week.

But, I’m far from the corporate norm. If you want a job at a big corporate company as a creative director, like at a cable channel, then yes. You’ve got to be qualified as much as you possibly can be because you’re up against very fierce competition.

I think qualification can only really give you an edge, but if you don’t have soul from a creative point of view, it won’t help you at all.

Well, different strategies. Planning strategies, of course, that’s a different conversation. For me, it’s your personality and your mind that counts. I rarely look at people’s resumes, and it hasn’t really failed me yet.

MT: Finally, will you mention SeksiSpamButtons?

FH: Ah, yes, that’s looking into the future of what I want to do, as is Twipple.info. The idea of creating interesting ideas and combining it with business and branding, and also social causes: I think those 3 areas can flourish together.

Without making it sound too grand, I think they can potentially make the world a better place.

I see how much money marketing people waste on terrible print ads, dreadful sampling campaigns, and useless TV commercials that look like exactly like every other TV commercial. The sheer amount of cash is obscene.

If you took that money and still created commercial communications, it’d still be efficient but could also have a big eye towards social areas. That would be a really important step for this industry.

I know there are Corporate Social Responsibility setups and it’s a big part of almost every corporate, but if every marketing department joined with every CSR department, there could be a much brighter future for this industry.

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Revival of a Ghost: The Brooklyn Navy Yard

October 29, 2011
Places

A Strange Sentinel

 navyyard3

The far-east corner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is the stuff of George A. Romero’s most delicious nightmares. Behind the “Government Property” signs that promise to sic dogs on trespassers, tendrils of ivy have climbed the walls and spilled down, their curls almost touching the street. An overgrown green fortress broods among the neighborhood’s behemoth gray warehouses.

Rooted among all this thriving vegetation is an old wooden hospital, beautiful and abandoned. A single boarded window watches silently, often unnerving late-night passerby who peer through the dark to realize that they are inches away from a crumbling cemetery. The history behind that fence is palpable.

This landmark’s story runs parallel to that of America’s. It has housed soldiers during the Civil War and during World War II (for the good of the country or more sinister reasons), manufactured several of our most famed warships, including the U.S.S Maine and the U.S.S Arizona, and sat at the helm of the Industrial Revolution.

Now so obscure, The Brooklyn Navy Yard’s has been quietly earning New York City millions of dollars daily. The Yard’s 200 (and counting) corporate tenants are also positioning themselves as leaders in tomorrow’s clean, green technology. All in all, it’s 300 acres of damn cool stuff.

A History of Violence

The Brooklyn Navy Yard’s official timeline boasts that it existed when Brooklyn was part of a land of trees purchased by the Dutch for a fistful of cash. It existed during the Revolutionary War, when 11,000 American patriots died as prisoners on Confederate ships. The legendary Battle of Brooklyn was fought on what is now Fulton Street on August 27, 1776 . The corpses of the revolutionaries, sustaining heavy losses, were buried at the Vinegar Hill memorial. Thousands of bodies were later disinterred from the Navy Yard, years after the Hospital Annex was built … well, more on that later.

Americans were building boats at the Wallabout Bay location since 1781. The USS Adams was the first ship made on the premises, protecting the then-pristine coast from French bullying. The Navy acquired the Yard for exclusive use in 1801 for the production of warship accessories, guns and artillery cannons.

Beautiful housing was erected for the yard’s overseers, and the country’s prominent architects were commissioned for the design. The researchers at the Urban Oyster tour group presume that the Commodine mansion was the creation of Charles Bulfinch, one of the gentlemen responsible for the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

Today it is privately owned, so the public is not welcome to take a look. However, this privacy may be a boon to the house’s preservation, as many of its city-owned brothers have fallen. Admiral’s Row, named for its historical residents, suffered from a devastating fire in the 1980’s and, lacking the funds for repair, has since been steadily collapsing.

Banana Lube and Welding Women

 

Technology began to gather speed in the 19th century, which meant better production machines and more of them. One star of these operations was the United State’s first steamship, the Fulton Steam Frigate.  Dry Dock 1, America’s first steamer-building dock, was assembled in 1851 for a price now equivalent to $2 million. A canal floated materials into the dock, stranded them for the duration of construction, and then pumped a boat out into the bay.

It was a time of experimentation and enlightenment: the new-fangled monsters necessitated lubrication to slip into the water, and a troop of men would rub bananas along their hulls to help budge the ships.

It was also a time of mistakes: the Fulton accidentally exploded in 1829, killing 29 soldiers. Forward movement progressed nonetheless.

Marvelous feats of construction were realized during World War Two. The U.SS Monitor and the U.SS Maine, which ignited the Spanish-American war, were born at the Navy Yard. The USS Arizona was made during World War I and sunk by the Japanese in the next world war.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard plunged headfirst, along with the rest of the country, into construction during the turbulence of World War II. Seventy thousand employees worked on 70 ships at once during those productive years. The Hammerhead Crane, the world’s largest, towered over the concrete to lift 350 gross tons onto ship superstructures.

Women were called upon for the first time to fill workforce gaps. While pop culture trumpeted Rosie the Riveter, Wilma the Welder was toiling away at the Yard.

The fire-wielding Wilma’s of 1938 to 1949 were unique to Brooklyn. They were the first to utilize a revolutionary method called “cold welding” to quickly adhere metallic parts. Instead of waiting for the metals to melt, they applied vacuum pressure to stick the molecules together. Reminiscing about their work, two former Welding Wilma’s Sylvia and Ida vividly recall wearing leather to protect their skin against rampant sparks, and yet they were paid 15 to 30 cents an hour– less than half of the men whose work they rivaled. An audio excerpt of their story is available at www.bnyc92.org, and the full series is at the Brooklyn Historical Society’s library upon special request.

Although the Wilmas ultimately won wages equal to men, they were still subjected to suspicion. According to a bit of juicy gossip from Adam Schwartz of Urban Oyster Tours, female employee’s beds were stripped of anything soft to discourage the ladies from engaging in “inappropriate acts”.

Cranes and Ghosts

By the end of the first world war, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a complete community with its own market, Wallabout,  and a miniature red-light district to satisfy other needs. The Hospital Annex offered rest houses devoted to drink, dance, and film screenings. The Yard has had its fill of human experience, but the voices that flowed freely inside have quieted.

The U.S Navy cleared out in 1965, after its last ship headed for Vietnam. New York City didn’t purchase the land until a year later; it was acquired for over $24 million.

The Hammerhead Crane has been reduced to a latticework of rivets on the ground. Most of the factories are no longer in use, their starved skeletons left exposed and rusting. Lawn chairs and torn umbrellas are littered in odd places. Still, the Hospital Annex provides the most impressive vision of the life that once was.

If ever a zombie war were to plague the earth, it would originate in the grassy knolls of the Hospital Annex. It was built separately in 1838 to house soldiers, but it was also used by Bristol-Meyers Squibb for an ether-stabilization laboratory. The gorgeous Surgeon’s Residence was put up in 1864.

As for ghosts, rumor says that there are plenty. While checking out the hospital on special permission, an employee of current renter GDM heard a voice whisper into his ear, “Tell my wife I’m okay”. Group tours make a brief excursion into the Annex grounds, but the only man with door keys is Tom the gatekeeper. It’s possible to peep through the locked doors of the Surgeon’s Residence and see a single whitewashed cabinet spiral staircase looming up into obscurity.

The area would attract Halloween revelers in droves, but it can no longer support large quantities of people. Mr. Schwartz explains that no electric or sewage infrastructure runs through it, and it would now be too costly to install. Care is taken to save the Annex from decay; the adjoining cemetery has been closed and its occupants reinterred at Cypress Hill National Cemetery. It may soon be used as a rest area along the Brooklyn area of the Greenway, a thin paved road for bikers that extends along the Eastern coast from just under Canada to the Florida Keys.

navyyard1

Bright Sights for the Future

Great things are sprouting from the post-apocalyptic, previously asbestos-riddled rubble. More than 200 private tenants have rented out the useable structures. Businesses ranging from art restoration to warehouse storage operate in the perfectly secluded workspace.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard is racing ahead of the game in clean technology innovations. The Yard resourcefully conserves material by not constructing any new buildings. All its residents work out of cleaned buildings that have been standing since the 19th century. The three remaining dry docks are fully useable, and are now “graving docks” that repair ships instead of creating them. Their business contributes tens of millions of dollars yearly to the city’s economy. The Yard employs 4,000 New Yorkers, and that number is expected to expand by 1,500 as Bloomberg and BNYDC (privately) pour in $250 million dollars of funding.

A list of private businesses is publicly available from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but the notable ones physically stand out among gray factory coils. What looks like a lot of model homes is a plant that makes prefabricated housing from recycled supplies. A company called IceStone turns broken glass into a sturdy, granite-like substance. The futuristic CoGen (short for CoGeneration) headquarters uses waste heat to boil water for energy. It is also solar-powered and collects rainwater for its toilets. Perhaps not all the companies are so dedicated, but they do sport LEED-accreditation.

To Hollywood and Tomorrow

Hollywood also has its Eastern stronghold in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Steiner Studios is New York’s very own film production house, the largest outside of Los Angeles. It is responsible for Spider-Man 3 and the hit show Damages. The complex is leased for private events, introducing rich and interested patrons to the BNY. The nonprofit Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation is helping it expand by 280,000 square feet.

A 2007 press release by Mayor Bloomberg announced plans for the restoration of the Commandant’s Residence. By 2010, the building will be BNY Building 92, the official museum of Navy Yard history, meeting place of the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment, and part of the new paradox of an environmentally-friendly industrial park.

Building 92 is removing the BNY’s mysterious shroud. According to the press release, the $15 million project will display 35,000 original architectural plans and thousands of digitized photographs. Audio recordings are being stitched together to form a comprehensive timeline of the Yard. The Welding Wilmas will speak again.

Marilyn Gelber, Executive Director of private funder Independence Community Foundation, puts it best: “This exciting (restoration) project will provide access to and context for the Yard’s rich military and industrial past, while simultaneously introducing visitors and students to the Yard’s current tenants: the media and green manufacturing firms in the vanguard of Brooklyn’s economic renaissance.” It is hard to keep history silent.

Special thanks to Cindy VandenBosch of Urban Oyster Tours for helping me get access to this juicy piece of history.

http://www.urbanoyster.com/

http://www.gowanuslounge.com/2006/07/25/wallabout-update-affordable-housing-coming-to-brig-site/

http://www.brooklynnavyyard.org/history.html

http://www.bnyc92.org/

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Hey, Aesop!

October 29, 2011
People

aesop

from 2008

Although hip-hop’s roots are deeply settled in the fertile soil of the musical underground, it has divided fans into those who prefer the time-tested style of Biggie and Tupac and those who keep their ears open to definition-defying tracks. Aesop Rock’s lyricism has caused controversy with its overwhelmingly complexity, prompting critics to claim that his words are based on style rather than content. But why would one expect anything less than both style and substance from this former Boston University art student?

Love him or hate his music, Aesop Rock’s carefully fashioned and strange lyrics bend language in ways that might be illegal in some states. In his single “Daylight”, Aesop Rock (born Ian Bavitz) admits, “I did not invent the wheel”, and then subversively adds, “I was the crooked spoke adjacent”. The rolling wheel of his music has evolved since the society-oriented fury of his earlier recordings. Each of Aesop’s tracks is a story that adds layers to his dark urban fantasy. Populated by greedy pigs and washed-out stragglers struggling to find color in the city’s grungy underbelly, the scenarios show the grotesque humor teeming within social hierarchies. Aesop Rock’s latest album, 2007’s “None Shall Pass” on the Definitive Jux label, is A.R at his best, peaking in sketches and writing in images- and earning him recognition as one of the decade’s 100 most innovative artists by betterPropoganda.com. Mother Thunder prods the wordsmith’s unusual brain about writing, growing up, and keeping the beat steady even when life changes.

Mother Thunder: There is a synesthete-like, complex quality to your lyrics, as if you are painting your rhymes. How do you process so many component lines and images into one narrative?

Aesop Rock: I don’t really know! I just overstuff everything– I tend to like it to all unwrap in layers. I’m not into making something that is only worth one spin, and for me, that means really bouncing around off of the words and trying to throw in imagery that best allows someone to get their ear pulled in. The thing that’s always done that for me is hearing how people put their words together, which words sit well next to each other and why, etc.

M.T: Your earlier songs were angry, anti-establishment bombs, now they’re like beautiful, angry storybooks. What changed? Experience? Lifestyle?

A.R: Well, I wouldn’t personally say they were “anti-establishment bombs”, but I definitely did not want to be waking up and giving someone 8 hours of my day. I think I hit a point where I was writing so much about “me, me, me”, and then you hear other music and everyone is just writing about themselves like there’s no other subject in the world. It’s interesting – people always complain about artists losing their edge, or kinda softening up as they get older… not being able to capture that urgency, etc. Meanwhile you got people who were young and active with a million things to feed off, and now they are older and settled and pulling their lives together behind the scenes.
Now, for me personally: Music works best when it’s dark, or has some sort of haunting qualities. I think it would be difficult to make songs only about me for my whole life without losing something. So I tend to let things change. If I need anger in a song, I try to describe an angry scenario. It doesn’t have to be “I’m mad, here is what I’m gonna do”.

M.T: Now, about your collaboration with the excellent group, The Weathermen. You guys are still touring even after the passing of Camu Tao (a member of the band as well as a producer). What does it take to keep a project evolving after it comes so close to shattering?

A.R: We are all close friends who take it all one day at a time.

M.T: You’re married now (to Allyson Baker, most excellent guitarist and musical collaborator) and you’ve moved to San Francisco, city that houses Haight-Ashbury. When your kids are born, could fans expect a psychedelic hip-hop fairytale album? Like an audio version of your and graphic artists Jeremy Fish’s book, “The Next Best Thing”?

A.R: Well, the word ‘psychadelic’ is throwing me off there, but a kid’s story rap album? Who knows, I wouldn’t rule it out. I tend to curse a lot and much of my subject matter is kinda adult-y, so it’d be interesting to try. I could just be true to myself like “Alright you little motherfuckers!!! Let’s rideeeee!!!!”

M.T: You are originally from New York, where the pace of life can swallow you like a wave, while San Francisco is more comfortable and human. I imagine that the tension in your earlier albums like “Float” and “Labor Days” came from the anxious buzz of your environment. How has the move affected your writing?

A.R: I like San Francisco. It does have an interesting vibe that can be conducive for creativity– it’s nice to write in a quiet city.

M.T: I imagine your brain to be 4/5ths creative rhyme making matter, with maybe 1/5th devoted to “sleep” and “eat”. How do you manage to switch that off and speak to normal people?

A.R: I don’t speak to normal people.

MotherThunder

Afterthought: Allyson Baker, Aesop Rock’s wife, is a prolific guitarist. According to her hubby, she has a new project in the works with the bass player from former San Fran band “Parchman Farms”. The new group is called “Dirty Ghosts” and their music will be up on Myspace very soon. Check ‘em out!

by Anya Khalamayzer

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On the Rocks in the Artist’s District

October 25, 2011
Places

oysterengravingDeeply attractive to some diners and intensely repulsive to others, oysters are an unusually engrossing food. They should be savored slowly with the tongue, slipping by unnoticed if swallowed in one cold sip without even an echo of an aftertaste- but with their gourmet price tag, why bother ordering if not to explore?

One doesn’t have to be a foodie to find the folds of salty, gray-pink of oyster flesh an aphrodisiac. In the 1985 Japanese film Tampopo, an erotic comedy about the pursuit of creating a perfect menu, a traveling yakuza approaches a young female oyster diver, who shucks an oyster for the traveler and extends it towards him. He leans in to eat the catch out of her tiny hand but cuts his lip on the bivalve’s bony shell. Excited by the sight of the stranger’s blood mixing with the soft tissue in her palm, the girl kisses him on the mouth.

Formed from the lightness of salt and sea, oysters are at their best when they are bare, fresh, and local. The object of desire in this case was a Kumamoto oyster, a deep-shelled lover of balmy waters.

So what do the warehouses of Williamsburg, Brooklyn have to do with the salt of the sea? Restaurants dedicated to these delicacies have been served by the dozen in the past year. The neighborhood of young artists and historically low-income families have been re-imagined as a hotspot for upscale dining, but even if recent residents can afford to splurge on seafood, oysters don’t fit with the vegetarian, Asian and South American fare that dominates the district.

Ankita Mishra, 21, a college senior and part-time educator at The Rubin Museum of Art, dines on oysters two Fridays a month in the West Village, but is amenable to having them closer to her Bushwick home, where a dedicated bar has opened just two blocks from her apartment.

“I think that oysters don’t have to be crazy expensive, because they’re cheap for a restaurant to have. They are specialty items that draw people in, and they go well with drinks,” she says. “On one hand, it does seem like these places have a desire to be fancier, but oysters are ‘different’ and fit into the Brooklyn, East Williamsburg and Bushwick interest.”

Her favorite pieces are bright blue-cased bivalves from New Zealand, which she enjoys with champagne.

Fishermen harvested sheets of oysters, specifically Bluepoints, from the New York Harbor until twentieth-century pollution choked the bay surrounding the city. Although they are now imported from other east-and-west coast states, bivalves are still an iconic part of New York’s gastronomy. Tourists come from the world over to snack at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, one of the creature’s top American importers, with the menu price to match.

Four years ago, a sign simply stating “Bar/Oysters” was tacked outside a door on Bedford Avenue. With two magic ingredients: absinthe and bivalves, Maison Premiere positioned itself as a spot for the professional working adults of Williamsburg, a demographic that has had enough torque to turn the area into a dining destination.   

Behind the bar is a dining room reserved for seafood.  Two white-coated gents shuck oysters out of troughs of ice piled behind a dining bar and serve them immediately on platters by the dozen. The waiters, who are primped and polished in vintage button-down vests and trousers, explain the oceanic origins of each meal to diners.

The Premiere sources its forty-plus varieties of seafood, including crab legs and lobster tails, from more than 100 merchants and farmers along both coasts. Maxwell Britten, Maison’s red-headed, twenty-something beverage director, prefers to pair the menu with wormwood-based absinthe, the eatery’s specialty spirit.

Blanche, or white, absinthe from Switzerland complements oysters best with notes of star anise, hyacinth, lemon balm, and fennel, he says. The mix, as well as the precise service, goes over well with local foodies. A daily happy-hour is a hook, with $1 oysters sold during the hours before the dinner rush.

“What we do here is driven by hospitality, which isn’t common in an environment of young artists and musicians,” he says. “We work to re-create an authentic vintage experience, down to our French-style absinthe fountain. It’s an atmosphere of general bacchanalia.”

Not all diners are impressed by the restaurant’s carefully groomed vintage appeal, focusing more on the authenticity of their food.

“They’re a little wimpy,” commented one Thursday-night customer visiting from New Jersey, pointing to his dozen half-shells. “If you want an oyster with meat in it, then you have to go down to New Orleans; even these things stick to your ribs there. You don’t go to the sit down places, though, if you want real seafood; you go to the hole-in-the-wall joints.”

Funny that the diner in question was sharing the table with the same oyster species found down south.

Land-locked foodies, however, can now go east to find variety with the opening of The Morgan, a “new American” place near Morgan Avenue, further down the L-train line.

Chef Kyle McClelland, 30, formerly dished out seafood at a chateau in Nantucket, and at Caviar Russe in midtown, which he names as the largest caviar importer in the U.S. He now enjoys working in this quiet, up-and-coming former industrial zone.

McClelland works with seafood companies from New Jersey and the Bronx, which sources marine life, such as mussels, from as far as Canada’s King Edward Island. Water location and quality show through the flesh, he says.

“I prefer East Coast oysters, which are meatier, saltier, and brinier when compared to milky, fruity West Coast ones.” He believes that both pair well with champagne or a chilled Riesling, and even beer.  

Just like the food, the chef prefers his brew local, citing Brooklyn summer ales with shades of lemon and fruit.  Although the days when Williamsburg residents could get their fare straight from the Brooklyn bay, they can once again enjoy seafood along the waterfront.

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