Crazy Stable

I went to Red Hook today, but not to visit the much-hyped new Ikea. I just wanted a bag of seed starter mix, so I stopped in at the Liberty Garden Center. Since my last visit, much has changed. It's still a verdant tangle of plants set incongruously in the midst of wharves and warehouses, down the cobblestone streets of this once-rough waterfront district. But they've now got a lush sidewalk garden spilling out onto Conover Street, with cleomes and huge potted exotics.

I headed down to their dock. This guy looked menacing from a distance, but up close was a sweetheart.

The garden center didn't have seed starter, so I settled for potting soil.  This old girl (named Brooklyn) guards the check-out desk; she was found in a darkened cellar, malnourished and wary, but now rules the counter confidently and even demands that people share croissants with her.

 
Liberty also no longer had their stock clustered along the pier, but their adjacent field is still brushed by salty breezes and within earshot of chiming buoys in the harbor.

There are zany mini-gardens with found artifacts; one features a boat, another a row of some sort of pumps.

The area has a cluster of odd, artsy businesses--a glassworks, a framer, and a place selling very overpriced key lime pies. It is also home to a huge satellite dish and tower.

Even on the surrounding hardscrabble streets, more gardens flourished. I've never seen such wonderful hollyhocks growing at curbside.  

It's no wonder that hipsters and preservationists fall in love with this strange neighborhood. The remnants of its dock-walloping past, mostly in ruins, make you feel wild and knowing just for walking around down there.

But ruins are tricky things to freeze in time, and they tend to be less beloved by natives than by visitors and newcomers. Speaking of which, I passed the hysteria-inducing Swedish meatball emporium on my way home; it seemed downright deserted, with many workers in reflective vests stationed around the perimeter to direct traffic that wasn't there yet.  

He wasn't always this funny or this wise. (I am thinking of his "why is having an abortion any worse than making an omelette?" argument.) But when it came to two of my obsessions, Houses and Stuff, George got it right like a Zen master. Here's a houseblogger's tribute: Carlin, free-versified. (Or catch him here.)

That’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it:

            trying to find a place

                    for your stuff?

That’s all your house is;

your house is just a place

for your stuff.

If you didn’t have

            so much

                        goddamn

                                    stuff,

you wouldn’t need a house.

You could just walk around all the time.

That’s all your house is,

           just a pile of stuff

                        with a cover on it.

You see that when you take off in an airplane

and you look down

and you see everybody’s got

a little pile of stuff.

Everybody’s got their own pile of stuff.

And when you leave your stuff,

you’ve gotta lock it up.

Wouldn’t want somebody to come by

and take some of your stuff.

            (They always take the good stuff…)

That’s all your house is:

            a place to keep your stuff

                        while you go out and get

                                    more stuff.

—George Carlin,  1937-2008

Photo: New York Times 

For those of you who thought that you could find refuge from Brooklyn's plague of artists in the leafy precincts of Victorian Flatbush, think again! Just because our neighborhood is  more porch-swing-and-gingerbread  than post-industrial gritty doesn't mean that we're not crawling with creative types, too.  And this weekend, you can visit them in their lairs for free on our first Artists Studio Tour! (It's conveniently the same weekend as the Victorian Flatbush House Tour, which happens this Sunday; the Studio Tour runs from noon to five both Saturday and Sunday.)

No, the CrazyStable is not on the tour; the studio where I engage in desultory flings with the book arts is tucked away on our top floor, and the logistical and housekeeping hurdles were just too daunting. (The whole scruffy-but-hip thing works a lot better in a loft.) But I will be showing some stuff in the lusciously appointed home of dear friend and studio tour founder/rabble-rouser Karen Friedland, who conjured this event out of the same fertile imagination that produces her vibrant paintings.

We had an opening reception for a group show tonight spread across two  local coffee shops, Connecticut Muffin and Vox Pop (above), on Cortelyou Road (both good places to start the tour this weekend, they'll have maps). I converted an accordion book from my Transformation Psalter to a sort of vertical triptych for the show;  it was the first time I've seen my work hung in a public place since high school, and it was ridiculously gratifying.

As was the proclamation issued to our fledgling project by Borough Prez Marty Markowitz (and presented by his stand-in, a lovely and self-possessed young lady named Jamilah Joseph, on the right next to impresario Karen). Everyone acts bemused by these proclamations, but they are big and beautifully lettered and secretly, we love them when they're all about us.

 Some day, maybe the tour will include my book-art atelier right here in the Stable. Until then, hope I see you in elegant borrowed digs this weekend.

  I can't imagine anyone who self-identifies as a blogger not having a strong reaction to the endless New York Times Magazine ramble by one Emily Gould, who is apparently a Well-Known Blogger (of whom  I've never heard until today, since I've never looked at "Gawker.com").  In a nutshell, Ms. Gould has spent her journalistic youth in a snarky self-created fishbowl, and now regrets her more disastrous Internet overshares (except for this one last time when she'll tell us all about them in gruesome detail). The online readers' comments on the piece are predictable and devastating, of the "Why would the Times give 10 pages to this narcissistic drivel?" variety, with a Paul Lyndian "Kids Today!" harrumph factor.

Ms. Gould and her post-adolescent agonies are of secondary interest to me; what would be a shame would be if her angst were mistaken for "typical blogging." As someone pointed out at the recent Brooklyn Blogfest, the term "blog" has expanded so wildly that it is now no more informative than the word "book." The political screed-howlers and the Who-I-Boinked gossip girls apparently pull in the big numbers (filling, therefore, some demand, even if it's only for cubicle time-sucking, I guess).  But the world of online journaling is as vast as...the world itself. Many of the Times commenters sternly advised Ms. Gould to do something worthwhile with her copious free time, to "get a life" (building latrines in Guatamala was recommended). In doing so, they betrayed an earnest innocence of the staggering amount of work, prayer, art, activism, exploration, learning, and fellowship that already takes place in the blogosphere, once one gets out of the tawdry front window of sex and politics.  One could argue that Ms. Gould could save the world more efficiently by staying in her symbolic pajamas and blogging about Guatamalan latrine-building, thus knitting together through the mystery of Google every latrine-construction wonk and Guatamalan do-gooder on the planet into a force for good.

Of course, the real question raised for those of us who blog is: Why am I doing this, and am I a solipsistic oversharing ninny, too? I've given it plenty of thought, actually. Both my blogs began as ways to write for pleasure, to get back the joy of writing about what I love instead of what I'm paid to promote. (Even if that happens to be New and Effective Pharmacological Options for a Serious Medical Condition; Ask Your Doctor for More Information!) I've set myself some basic limits on how far family and friends are involved or identified, on what kind of language I'll use, on how personal I'll get; occasionally I bend those rules. In choosing topics, I usually opt for personal delight over readership stats, although I recognized Ms. Gould's crackhead-like response to a spike in readers just as Frodo recognized a bit of himself in Gollum, slavering for the Precious.

I've come to the conclusion that "blogging" is at heart about two things: our passions, and our longing to share them (which is to say, our dire craving for human connectedness). If my governing passion is my ego, then a blog about myself will be an extension of that self: vulnerable, narcissistic, and ultimately empty and sad. But so many people are sharing so many other passions--and not just the infinite sexual permutations that define the Internet's mucky bottomlands.  It would be a shame if Ms. Gould were seen, especially by the Times' cautious old-media types, as the Ur-Blogger, wallowing in pointless self-exposure.

In the few years I've been noodling around  the blogosphere, I've been gobsmacked at how many ways passion and connectedness can combine to make a better world. There are bloggers out there (funny, wildly readable, deeply moving) who are creating virtual communities for every rare disease and devastating disability known to man. There are photographers documenting secret gardens and public places in ways no one's ever seen before. Skills that once were esoteric and daunting--from cycling to knitting, from manuscript illumination to coding HTML--are now vast open workshops filled with eager neophytes and seasoned mentors in fluid, endless communication. Weasels are being exposed, flim-flammers outed. There is also endless silliness--I lost count at 50 when I tried to enumerate the Web's pug-dog blogs--but sometimes, silliness is what's needed.

And there are house blogs, where people who struggle with creaky old homes can trade stories, find sympathy, and get tips on grouting. I understand there is even a blog where some gal in Brooklyn brings you along every day to Prospect Park and shows you something marvelous. If in the course of reading my stuff, you find me, myself, and I appalling or fascinating, my Gollum-ego will, I admit, throb with some pixellated satisfaction. At some level, we're all "attention whores." But I can't imagine a blog that was All About Me any more than I would fancy a life that was All About Me.  There are so many more intriguing things to blog about, and to live for.

I will give the last word to George Bernard Shaw, who would have made one mad mother of all bloggers, baby:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

--Preface, Man and Superman    

Illustration: Edward Gorey 

...that is, if you tune into NBC on Wednesday, May 14, for Law & Order at 10 p.m. (9 o'clock central time). "Our" episode, filmed here a few short weeks ago, will be on; it's called "Personae Non Grata" and in it, "the detectives struggle to solve a case with twists and turns involving an online murder mystery." Our main stairway and kitchen are the ones in which the character "Carl" is interviewed about a victim.  No, we do not keep messy food products and newspapers all over our antique hutch and baker's rack; that was the set dressers' idea.  (We keep dusty cookbooks, baskets, and china stuff on them.) Although the scene is supposed to take place in some upstate exurban location, you, the readers of CrazyStable, can point and say, "Hey! That's Flatbush!" (Well, that's what we'll be doing--perhaps while wearing our cool L&O t-shirts and hats, sent to us by the gracious NBC swagmeisters as extra thanks for our hospitality).