Crazy Stable

It may be Eastertide, time of resurrection, but there is some really cool dead stuff decorating the premises just now. Try to imagine the scenario whereby one of Bagel's kin managed to expire while half-inserted into our porch lattice. Heart attack? Cat ambush from within? Either way, it's one less quadruped whose pitty-patting feet will be heard within our walls. Daughter was the one who noticed that he appears "deflated." I feel like leaving him there to observe his passage into Squirrel Jerky; maybe I could get an NEA grant for that as a piece of installation art.

On the south side of the house, I've been doing just that--observing the slow dance of decay--on this beautiful blue jay since last fall. His feathers are still vivid, even as his little skull has started to emerge. I suppose I should inter him with respect somewhere (but not on top of one of the cats' graves).

Lest you think that all is rot and corruption around the CrazyStable, here are some proud-Mama shots of the front garden. Spirea (I think)...

vinca...and my brave pot of pansies, which Bagel dug up five times before I finally foiled him by laying pieces of slate across the soil. Hey, guy, you wanna see what happens if you mess with my flower pots? Check out your buddy up the alley.

Now I am terrified at the Earth,

it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

Walt Whitman

It's funny how every Holy Week, the poor ad-starved newsweeklies "get religion" for their cover stories. This year, Newsweek tries to stir the pot with a dire red-on-black headline: "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." One hears the editor add hopefully, in the spirit of Coffee Talk: "Discuss amongst yourselves."

The article is a muddled but earnest attempt to knit together the recent modest statistical downturn in "self-identified Christians" (and upturn in agnostics and atheists) with the political becalming of the so-called Religious Right, Christopher Hitchens, Obama, and, probably, the declining fertility of the Easter Bunny. As a "self-identified" New York City Catholic, I can't say this is exactly my story; some of my most faithful Christian friends tend to be social-justice liberals who cock a worried eyebrow at my scary pro-life sentiments. But the larger question--whether we're now a "post-Christian nation"--has the whiff of timeliness to it, and not just because today is Good Friday.

How "post-Christian" are we? Well, just in the past few years, "post" enough for Jesus to have slipped several major notches in the cultural canon. Yes, we've been pretty hard to shock for several decades now, but there's a new frat-boy casualness to mocking Our Lord.  Some of it really is funny, if you already consider Jesus your friend and not above a little ribbing. I'm personally fond of the Jesus Action Figure from Archie McPhee (left), put to good use by LOLcats (right).

Elsewhere, the Lord has been popping up more frequently as an icon of mere nuttiness, unmoored from the scholarly ballast that made Monty Python's Life of Brian so sharp and even perversely reverent. He's been rocked by Steve Coogan and Jack Black; reverence-wise, He's edging into becoming just another "character" in the Hallowe'en-costume pantheon at Party City. (Somehow, I blame Xenu, the first truly ludicrous modern deity, for at least a small part of this ribald relativism.) I don't watch "Family Guy," but a few weeks ago I flipped past as they sent up Christ as a wine-pouring sleazy playboy. These days, I guess that sort of thing doesn't merit a whimper, much less a boycott.

Of all days, today is one of reassurance. Because that's how He ended His life, before taking it up anew: as just a man among other men, kicked to the ground and jeered at. His own friends had vanished in cowardice; snark ruled the day, from the elegant musing of Pilate ("What is truth?") to the testosterone-fueled antics of the soldiers. It's only in medieval art or modern cinema that we can cue the halo or the sanctifying lighting. On the real Good Friday, He must have looked like hell, and the memory of His brief glory days must have seemed like a mortal embarrassment to all but the women who were with Him to the end. (Apparently, they didn't give a rat's ass about the three-hour-old post-Christian era.)

Maybe a "Christian America," whatever that looked like (or would have looked like in its conservative dream-state), makes things too easy for us. He was never about triumphalism. He was about being recognized, by one heart at a time, dead or alive again.

"If, at the moment of our death, death comes to us as an unwelcome stranger, it will be because Christ also has always been to us an unwelcome stranger. For when death comes, Christ comes also, bringing us the everlasting life which he has bought for us by His own death."

--Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

Fra Angelico, Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Okay, repeat the CrazyStable catechism. What makes a great blogger? One: a passion; and two, sharing it generously with others. Today, kudos to one of the finest writers and photographers on the blogroll: Bed-Stuy Banana, a young lady who describes herself as "a yellow girl raised in a white suburb shacked up with a white boy (who) had a tan kid in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a primarily black neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York."

A tender observer of such paradoxes, BSB set herself the task of chronicling every street in her storied neighborhood. Her stream of hauntingly beautiful images has introduced me, a fellow Brooklynite, to the heart and soul of a community into which I seldom set foot. Along the way, she has shared much else with candor: her journey to American citizenship, prickly liberalism, financial heartaches, and identity struggles. Mostly, BSB lets her pictures do the talking, but her recent post on having finally walked every one of those Bed-Stuy streets (some 173 miles over 63 weeks) was so good I will share it here. Congratulations, BSB, on a great journey, and I hope it continues, with us in tow:

Have I gotten a greater insight into what makes Bed-Stuy tick? Possibly. I do know that it is a neighbourhood of extremes, rough blocks with deserted buildings and trash and dog crap filled empty lots and a negative vibe that we speed-walked through - although there weren't many of those. Well-maintained blocks with gorgeous architecture and abundant greenery and flowers, mostly in the southern end. The Hassidic area that looks like another era and world - a world it's hard to believe is part of Bed-Stuy. Deserted industrial areas full of both hipster and gang graffiti. Mosques and a thousand and one churches of every shape and size and denomination, from an unmarked unassuming door, to impressive spires and towers that reach to the skies. Fast food restaurants, mom and pop cafes, black owned hipster restaurants, bodegas and Chinese food restaurants with bullet proof glass. Flourishing community gardens. Depressing uninspired clusters of buildings that form the projects. Storefronts with an impressive array of Obama memorabilia, chic boutiques with African art, junk shops, dollar stores. Detailed memorial murals and scribbled graffiti honouring everyone from gang members to children hit by cars.

Groups of tough-looking teenagers giving us dirty looks, laughing pre-schoolers, smiling welcoming working class neighbours, dirty white people on bikes, skinny white hipsters doing laundry, Mexicans in a block long wedding procession with a live band, black hipsters at just opened cafes and restaurants, church ladies selling red velvet cake at fundraisers. Joyful block parties, smoking barbeques in front yards with families spilling out on to the streets, pre-teens throwing eggs and water balloons at cars and bikes, pit bulls and their owners, Chinese people hanging laundry out to dry next to their cars.

It's a colourful, lively, dirty, ugly, beautiful mix - a microcosm of New York City. It's our neighbourhood. It's our home. And now we're going to do it again. Walk every street, take pictures, talk to strangers, make new friends.

Momentous and sad news for Catholic schools was buried in the last paragraph of our Brooklyn Bishop DiMarzio's most recent column for the diocesan newspaper, The Tablet: Plans are indeed afoot to turn three Catholic parochial schools in the Brooklyn Diocese into charter schools. The proposal, previously discussed in a surprise joint press conference by the bishop and Mayor Bloomberg, had only been in the exploratory stages before; this seems to represent a marked hardening into reality. Of course, the bishop didn't say which three schools, leaving the field open for the rumor-mongering and Maalox-guzzling that understandably haunt the beleagured ranks of our parochial school communities.

Jake and Elwood (above) wouldn't approve, and neither do I. The proposal has being floated as a way to "preserve" quality education in the same building, giving dibs to the formerly Catholic school's students and even its staff. In reality, it would amount to the Church leasing its building to the new public-school entity, removing any sign of religious identity, and banning religion from the curriculum (fittingly, since the school would now be funded by taxpayer dollars). The promise to preserve teachers' jobs may founder on the public-school system's requirements for certification, a technicality many of our wonderful teachers lack and could only obtain through costly further education. And the experience of Catholic-turned-charter schools down in Washington, D.C., where this new "model" was first rolled out just last year, bodes ill, not well, for "strengthening" the surviving schools. (See this article for wince-inducing details like a teacher whose classroom has an "empty nail" where a cross used to hang and kids now reciting "values" instead of prayers.)

Nonetheless, since a flip to charters could turn under-enrolled Catholic schools into ATMs for cash-strapped dioceses, the gambit is being eagerly watched by Catholic educators all over the country. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the first unholy trinity of schools to qualify for the Empty Nail Award. The diocese seems genuine in its determination to prune and eventually transform the parochial school system into a leaner, more independent constellation of "academies," along the lines of the still-thriving private Catholic high schools; it is hard to see how this sure-to-be-controversial venture will not muddy the waters of those good intentions.

Last Saturday, lunch with friends brought me to Brooklyn Heights.  There, on a tiny street called Willow Place, I was transfixed by a Mystic Crazy  Stable--an old house so compelling and fascinating that I can hardly breathe when I first spy it. No, not the one on the right, very funny (although that one has its own tales). I mean the little blue antebellum relic on the left, paint peeling ravishingly from its columns. The bizarre juxtaposition of 1840s neo-Classic and 1960s moderne was noted here some years ago in Brownstoner. An anonymous neighbor commented:

"The 'Tara' house on the left has been owned for approximately 35 years by two academics (both with impressive careers) who renovated it extensively initially and then, suddenly...stopped. Why they did so is probably not the business of Brownstoner, but to those who do visit the street and stand outside this house and make mean comments, I'd like to say, hey!--in the summertime, when windows are open, people inside can hear conversation on the street."

Mean comments? I worship the place. It looked lived-in, not Boo-Radleyish, with fresh yellow pansies in some pots out front; I willed an owner or resident to emerge and chat (no luck), and yearned for my imaginary handheld GPS/data device, the HouseHistorian, which would yield construction dates and all cool stories of record for any intriguing building in New York at curbside. (Uploading the data for every block and lot in the city would be the hard part, the technology would be easy!)

Since my gizmo doesn't exist (yet), I came home and found out what I could. Architecturally, the house is the last survivor of a colonnaded row, much like this adorable set of contemporaries that survive directly across the street (above; compare to a picture from 1936 by Berenice Abbot, here). Architecture author Francis Morrone writes of these gems in An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn:

The "colonnade row" was a popular concept in the Greek Revival 1830s and 1840s...Thirteen square wooden columns screen four redbrick row houses that have doorways flanked by columns of the same design, though much smaller in scale. Note that right across the street...is a single house of exactly the same design, as though it were originally a part of the row but decided it preferred living on its own and moved across the street. Actually, there was once an identical row of four houses on this side of the street, of which two were torn down and one altered beyond recognition, leaving just this one.

Bricks and mortar aren't enough when you're smitten. Like the Brother from Another Planet, I want to know what happened there just by touching the flaking columns. So I looked up my little blue survivor in the digital archives of the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Times. In October 1856, a yellow-fever scare virtually turned the street into a ghost town. (City health officials pronounced the danger overblown.) The peaceful little house witnessed this scene of domestic violence (above)  on July 24, 1867. On April 16, 1881, it saw the arrest of one John Torpey for "having burglariously entered the cellar of John Recka's beer saloon at No. 28 Atlantic avenue, on the night of the 12th inst., and stolen a keg of beer. Justice Ferry held the prisoner for examination."

In 1878, resident Mrs. Jane Burk, aged 60, was seriously injured falling from an Atlantic Avenue streetcar. And there was real tragedy: At the turn of the last century, two children's deaths were reported here (age recorded only as "less than one year"): Nellie McKay in October 1902, and James Guilfoyle in July, 1903.

Of course, that's just what made the papers over 160-odd years. Imagine the stories that will never be told, in this or any old house you pass. Funny enough, Spouse and I happened on a real-estate agent's open house the very next day in Carroll Gardens, and we toured a brownstone (of later vintage) that had been gutted and renovated to "like-new" condition. It was luxuriously appointed but an utter bore, its ghosts all silenced.