visitation

The other day I went out searching for my lost journal, retracing the steps of the day I lost it and slowly working backwards. I walked into the Fairway Market and approached the customer service desk with skepticism. I asked the woman working behind the counter if a black book had been left in the store recently, and without hesitation she reached down and pulled my lost journal out from underneath the desk she was sitting at. Without saying a word she handed it to me and gave me a very awkward look. The placement of my journal seemed far to convenient (is the store’s entire lost and found underneath her desk?), and I realized that every employee of the store had read my journal. I wasn’t sure if she was scared or surprised to see me, but certainly a bit perplexed. Perhaps I didn’t look the way she had imagined, or maybe she thought I was a super creep. I am just glad she didn’t reach for the intercom to call security or announce to the other employees that the mystery journal loser (pun intended) had finally come to claim his book. It is too easy to imagine everyone there giving each other a nod or an elbow and whispering “hey, that’s him, that’s the guy who…”
But I was glad I found the journal, and figuring I was on a roll, I thought I might as well re-check their shelf of shaving products to see if they had my razor. That store had been the first place I had looked for the elusive Gillette Sensor days earlier, but their selection was so pathetic I assumed that maybe their stock was just abominably low. Journal in hand I strolled over to the self-hygiene section and, as if it were on a glowing pedestal, there was the Sensor. There sat the razor I had been dreaming about, sitting on a shelf that only days earlier had been barren. It must have been my lucky day. I went home and shaved and then read all the embarrassing stuff in my journal, just to see exactly how much damage had been done.

A few days later, I sit in my fake loft apartment and recall a very busy week of social exchange, but realize that, although I have been in New York for eight days, I have only spent one of them with a real New Yorker. A day after my well documented two-day affair with The Shins, my old pal Sam Green came through town on his way back to San Francisco after spending a week in Long Island. I like to refer to Sam as “Academy Award Nominated” Sam Green, and always remind him that I was the first person to predict he’d get a nod for his doc The Weather Underground. Academy Award Nominated Sam Green and I met up for dinner here in Red Hook at a nice diner that, to our surprise and dismay, turned into a karaoke venue about 15 minutes after we sat down. Our table was about two feet from the stage, and our hopes for conversation were dashed. We had planned on getting caught up on the new documentary he is making about utopian societies, and specifically his recent trip to Italy to sit in on the World Esperanto Conference.
But, not unlike the free-clothes after the rainstorm incident, another example of utopianism gone wild took over. A large transvestite stood directly next to our table with a microphone and got the karaoke started off with a nice rendition of “I’ll Be There.” That was just about when our food arrived, and while he was singing ‘I’ll Be There,’ there I was eating veggie meat loaf. If that wasn’t awkward enough, the next singer up was a kid who was probably about 12 years old. He was there with his parents and they appeared to be regulars, so I assumed the boy was one of those theatre/choir kids with aspirations for Broadway. But when he got up on the mic, he proceeded to shyly sing Toby Keith’s pro-war-anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”. We figured only in New York would you find a black male transvestite and a white 12-year-old boy raised on Fox News singing karaoke back to back, three feet away from us while we were eating dinner.

“…cuz we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way…”
On the heels of Sam’s roll through town, my friend Cecily came to visit and was the first to take me up on the David Gatten Red Hook walking tour. Having not visited Red Hook before, or even knowing of it’s existence, Cecily was the perfect test subject. I realized I could have told her just about anything concerning the neighborhood’s history and she probably wouldn’t know the difference. But I figured the tour was really more about performance than factual history, and when a tour ends with Key Lime Pie, who really cares if the facts and dates are a little off? We walked down Beard Street, gazed at the old sugar refinery, looked at the mysterious window displays, peered into the windows of Sonny’s, and walked out onto the docks for the perfect view of the Statue of Liberty.

I have actually been doing a lot of research about Red Hook lately. Red Hook is an interesting neighborhood, with a long tradition of industry, unions, crime, drugs, and mafia. It is a pretty far walk from the subway, and as a result it missed much of the late 90s development explosion that hit Brooklyn. But times are definitely catching up, and Red Hook now seems to be the new bastion for the young hipster artists who have been priced out of Williamsburg and Fort Greene. I found a great flickr blog about Red Hook and contacted the photographer, who surprisingly was familiar with my films AND had even been to David’s space for a film-screening event a few months ago. We have been corresponding over email and hope to meet up in the next couple days.