The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:50:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 How They Got There: A Conversation With Chiropractor Bill Walsh http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-chiropractor-bill-walsh http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-chiropractor-bill-walsh#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:50:12 +0000 Noah Davis http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-chiropractor-bill-walsh Bill Walsh will openly admit that his many former bosses were justified when they fired him. He was "arrogantly unfit," and is not shy about telling tales of his, shall we say, youthful misadventures. Eventually, Walsh righted himself, joined a recovery program, went to chiropractic school, and started a practice in Park Slope. He's been treating people there for the past 25 years.

At Plaza Center for the Healing Arts, Walsh combines his talent for manipulating the spine with an encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy, the body's relationship to itself, and a homeopath's understanding of drugless cures. He enables his patients to make themselves better. "My job is to place myself in people's rearview mirror, getting ever smaller as they drive away," he says.

In an exam room of the brownstone where he has his practice, Walsh talked about missteps, recovery and the art of getting there eventually.

How did you get here, sitting in a room where bottles filled with homeopathic remedies line the walls and a chiropractic table sits between us?

I had a desire to be a doctor from my earliest days. I was sidetracked academically and when I got back on track, one of the people who helped me was a physician. He was eager to help me help myself. It was he who suggested that if I wanted the kind of practice that was a drugless healing profession—one that would fill needs of people in recovery—I shouldn't go to medical school. He said osteopathy or chiropractic school.


Before I did that, I was teaching with Marty Skoble [at St. Ann's]. I started in recovery in the late '60s and early '70s, and I finally realized that I didn't have to just teach, which is what I started doing as soon as I graduated from college. That kept me out of the draft, and revealed to me that I had a talent for teaching. I continued doing that and once I found recovery, I realized I could do other things. I did any number of other things, most of which I wasn't very good at.

Such as?

I was a private investigator. I worked for Pinkerton's. I was a security guard. I worked for the phone company. It's quite a list, and they all end in stories that would humiliate any reasonable person. I discovered that my daughters loved when I embraced my humiliation and turned it into stories I would tell them. They would just roar. I wouldn't leave out that I was not only unfit, but arrogantly unfit, for these jobs. My daughters would say, "No wonder they fired you. You were a jerk." And I would say, "Well, yes. That's the point of the story. When I drink, I'm a jerk."

One of the things that recovery does is it makes you look at your life and figure out what your assets are. I remember thinking that I could get back on track with the things that I already knew I was good at. This is the thing that the world offered someone with my skillsets.

When did you start to pursue your current path?

That was in '76, and I was six years sober at the time. Fred, a really wonderful fellow who I met in recovery, was the one who turned me on to chiropractic school. By 1978, I left St. Ann's, which was until this, the best gig ever. St. Ann's was heaven. I had the richest group of colleagues ever and the most awesome students. I had a mandate to love my subject and love my students. It was very clear: If I was following both of those mandates, they thought highly of me.

Even though you were riding a motorcycle to work?

Yeah, I had a motorcycle back then. I was still growing up. I thought of myself as a romantic figure riding 12 months a year in New York City. I thought that was really something special. [Laughs] I was to discover that it wasn't all that special; it was just silly and brought to light certain character defects. Learning those were also part of recovery. Seeing them. Embracing them. Letting them go.

I haven't ridden since '79. I nearly killed myself and my bride, although we weren't married at that point. That was a real convincer.

I was a private investigator. I worked for Pinkerton's. I was a security guard. I worked for the phone company. It's quite a list, and they all end in stories that would humiliate any reasonable person.
Have you done any teaching since you left St. Ann's?

I was appointed to the anatomy department at the chiropractic college. After four years of criticizing the kind of teaching they had, they dared me to teach and gave me a teaching fellowship in my last semester. They were pleased with it, and they offered me a position on the faculty. I stayed there for eight years until we got pregnant with our first child. Then, it was like, "No more fooling around. You have to work full-time now, Bill." I was already living here in Park Slope at the time. The first building I practiced in is just around the corner. I was there for 20 years, and I've been here for five.

What do you do at Plaza Center?

When you come here, all the cues should tell you that I'm not the healer. The healing happens over there [indicates a patient]. I can remove some of the obstacles that stop that from happening, but I'm not the guy. I never wear a jacket and tie to work. I never wear a white jacket. I don't have any of my degrees on the walls. That's not what I offer. I don't offer an authoritative representation of a healer. I facilitate healing that people take with them, not masquerade as the message.

Can you give a specific example of that in practice?

If a person comes in with pain, nausea and digestive problems that can be created by neurological irritabilities in the spine, I remove the difficulty that was causing the way in which the nerves communicate. That allows the nerves do what they're supposed to do, and when they do that, homeostasis occurs; you fix yourself. As we do that, I try to point out to the patient how they can maintain this, so the solution is their own rather than having them think they need to come back to me to continue. Everybody is welcome to come back if something goes wrong and if there is a new problem, but by and large, my job is to place myself in people's rearview mirror, getting ever smaller as they drive away.

That sounds like a very honest practice, but maybe not the best business model. At the same time, I imagine you get a lot of referrals from people you have treated.

[Laughs] Loads. I've always had an abundant practice even before people started looking me up on websites. It used to be that everybody who came here knew why they came here. It's fun now, starting fresh with someone who has no positive predisposition to my methods working. Some people have never been to chiropractors before. I get to throw them into not exactly the deep end but certainly the left end of health care. Some of the things I do that I've picked up along the way are pretty non-traditional. It's not just spinal manipulation. There's a lot of craniosacral work. There's a lot of stuff that sociological came from where osteopathy used to practice. When osteopathy and allopathic medicine made peace in the '70s, many of these techniques and these approaches sociologically fell to people like me. Osteopaths were welcomed in medical hospitals to learn to do a wider variety of specialties than osteopathic colleges had offered them.

Your undergraduate degree is in sociology. Was that planned or was that a happy accident?

I'm glad that I have it now, but at the time, I must admit, it was the quick and dirty way out of St. Francis with a salvageable GPA, which I think was about 2.501. It took five years.

You got there eventually.

[Laughs] I got there eventually. Exactly. It was a more circuitous route, I think. My first job sober was at St. Ann's, and a dear friend from my undergraduate days was the person who told me about the job. He and I shared a certain revelry with which college is often associated, and said that the headmaster of St. Ann's was just crazy about the old Brendan Behan ethos and that he would just totally love me. I was thinking to myself that I'm sober 14 days and my friend has sold me as this Behan-type. Awesome. But it all worked out pretty well. And I must stay Stanley [Bosworth, the founder of St. Ann's] never gave me a bad time about not drinking.

At 14 days sober, I was shaking apart when he interviewed me. But his interview was kind. I now understand from hearing about so many of the other interviews that he gave that these were all about finding something essential and true about a person, and giving them that observation. In a letter that I still have, he called me a "Eureka." He committed the school to me and told me to show up in September. I was scared to death, took another teaching job, and then came back a year later.

Really? You bailed initially?

Yeah, I was so intimidated. There wasn't a single child I was going to teach who wasn't measurably brighter than me. I thought that should stop me from teaching. I'm now fine with that. I embrace my moderate IQ! It matches me just perfectly.

The first 50,000 times you do something, you get rid of most of the mistakes. I'm way into my second 50,000 now, and I don't make anywhere near the number of mistakes.
You were a docent at the Bodies exhibit. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?

I loved teaching anatomy. My wife and I saw that the Bodies exhibit was coming, and she wanted to go. I wasn't that interested in it, but I was happy to take her through it and answer her questions. While we were there, some people gathered around while I was telling her about something in a display. One of them was a docent who worked at the exhibit. She asked me to be a docent.

It was heaven. For an anatomy teacher to have exhibits that will be precisely the same day after day after day was unthinkable. In the conventional anatomy laboratory, things dry out within three hours of being dissected. To see things exactly as they were the day before was fantastic. Each time I would go in, I would ask questions about things I noticed the day before. I would go there a couple of times a week. Sometimes I would have something prepared, but often I would just start talking about something until I realized I was in over my head and a person in the crowd would correct me. I'd ask them what they did, and they'd say something like "neurosurgeon." I'd correct myself and take a note for the next time in case I wanted to make that same presentation again. I did it for a couple years and loved it every time I went. I quit when I got sick of hearing the sound of my own voice.

Did you ever have a plan?

I don't think this is necessarily the end. I don't know where this will lead me. The other things led me here. I'll show up where I'm supposed to be. If this were for some reason to stop, I would happily do the next thing. It's probably not the only thing that I'm good at, but it's certainly the thing that I'm best at right now. The first 50,000 times you do something, you get rid of most of the mistakes. I'm way into my second 50,000 now, and I don't make anywhere near the number of mistakes. I had a teacher in chiropractic college who said, "Take careful notes when you're in practice, especially names and addresses of people that you see. When you've been in practice for 10 years, I want you to go and send back the money to the people you saw in your first five." I often think of that now. I see his point.

Do you think that you're getting better?

I discover that I am. Every time I come in here, I learn something. That's the delight. Getting to know people a little is surprisingly profound. In a situation like this, people with show you who they are if you're trustworthy. And that's my first job, to be trustworthy. It certainly helps in diagnosis, but you experience them so richly and you see how magnificent people are, then I do what I do, which is really pretty simple. The mechanisms are sometimes complicated but the "what to do" and the "what we want from this" is always very clear and very simple. The clearer I am about why it is that we're here, the more trustworthy I am and the better time I have.

Who should I talk to next?

Brad Reedy, who is the executive director of Second Nature. He's a remarkable, humble, transparent individual. A splendid leader.



Previously: Teacher Marty Skoble and author Robert Sullivan


Noah Davis is frequently lost.

---

See more posts by Noah Davis

4 comments

]]> Bill Walsh will openly admit that his many former bosses were justified when they fired him. He was "arrogantly unfit," and is not shy about telling tales of his, shall we say, youthful misadventures. Eventually, Walsh righted himself, joined a recovery program, went to chiropractic school, and started a practice in Park Slope. He's been treating people there for the past 25 years.

At Plaza Center for the Healing Arts, Walsh combines his talent for manipulating the spine with an encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy, the body's relationship to itself, and a homeopath's understanding of drugless cures. He enables his patients to make themselves better. "My job is to place myself in people's rearview mirror, getting ever smaller as they drive away," he says.

In an exam room of the brownstone where he has his practice, Walsh talked about missteps, recovery and the art of getting there eventually.

How did you get here, sitting in a room where bottles filled with homeopathic remedies line the walls and a chiropractic table sits between us?

I had a desire to be a doctor from my earliest days. I was sidetracked academically and when I got back on track, one of the people who helped me was a physician. He was eager to help me help myself. It was he who suggested that if I wanted the kind of practice that was a drugless healing profession—one that would fill needs of people in recovery—I shouldn't go to medical school. He said osteopathy or chiropractic school.


Before I did that, I was teaching with Marty Skoble [at St. Ann's]. I started in recovery in the late '60s and early '70s, and I finally realized that I didn't have to just teach, which is what I started doing as soon as I graduated from college. That kept me out of the draft, and revealed to me that I had a talent for teaching. I continued doing that and once I found recovery, I realized I could do other things. I did any number of other things, most of which I wasn't very good at.

Such as?

I was a private investigator. I worked for Pinkerton's. I was a security guard. I worked for the phone company. It's quite a list, and they all end in stories that would humiliate any reasonable person. I discovered that my daughters loved when I embraced my humiliation and turned it into stories I would tell them. They would just roar. I wouldn't leave out that I was not only unfit, but arrogantly unfit, for these jobs. My daughters would say, "No wonder they fired you. You were a jerk." And I would say, "Well, yes. That's the point of the story. When I drink, I'm a jerk."

One of the things that recovery does is it makes you look at your life and figure out what your assets are. I remember thinking that I could get back on track with the things that I already knew I was good at. This is the thing that the world offered someone with my skillsets.

When did you start to pursue your current path?

That was in '76, and I was six years sober at the time. Fred, a really wonderful fellow who I met in recovery, was the one who turned me on to chiropractic school. By 1978, I left St. Ann's, which was until this, the best gig ever. St. Ann's was heaven. I had the richest group of colleagues ever and the most awesome students. I had a mandate to love my subject and love my students. It was very clear: If I was following both of those mandates, they thought highly of me.

Even though you were riding a motorcycle to work?

Yeah, I had a motorcycle back then. I was still growing up. I thought of myself as a romantic figure riding 12 months a year in New York City. I thought that was really something special. [Laughs] I was to discover that it wasn't all that special; it was just silly and brought to light certain character defects. Learning those were also part of recovery. Seeing them. Embracing them. Letting them go.

I haven't ridden since '79. I nearly killed myself and my bride, although we weren't married at that point. That was a real convincer.

I was a private investigator. I worked for Pinkerton's. I was a security guard. I worked for the phone company. It's quite a list, and they all end in stories that would humiliate any reasonable person.
Have you done any teaching since you left St. Ann's?

I was appointed to the anatomy department at the chiropractic college. After four years of criticizing the kind of teaching they had, they dared me to teach and gave me a teaching fellowship in my last semester. They were pleased with it, and they offered me a position on the faculty. I stayed there for eight years until we got pregnant with our first child. Then, it was like, "No more fooling around. You have to work full-time now, Bill." I was already living here in Park Slope at the time. The first building I practiced in is just around the corner. I was there for 20 years, and I've been here for five.

What do you do at Plaza Center?

When you come here, all the cues should tell you that I'm not the healer. The healing happens over there [indicates a patient]. I can remove some of the obstacles that stop that from happening, but I'm not the guy. I never wear a jacket and tie to work. I never wear a white jacket. I don't have any of my degrees on the walls. That's not what I offer. I don't offer an authoritative representation of a healer. I facilitate healing that people take with them, not masquerade as the message.

Can you give a specific example of that in practice?

If a person comes in with pain, nausea and digestive problems that can be created by neurological irritabilities in the spine, I remove the difficulty that was causing the way in which the nerves communicate. That allows the nerves do what they're supposed to do, and when they do that, homeostasis occurs; you fix yourself. As we do that, I try to point out to the patient how they can maintain this, so the solution is their own rather than having them think they need to come back to me to continue. Everybody is welcome to come back if something goes wrong and if there is a new problem, but by and large, my job is to place myself in people's rearview mirror, getting ever smaller as they drive away.

That sounds like a very honest practice, but maybe not the best business model. At the same time, I imagine you get a lot of referrals from people you have treated.

[Laughs] Loads. I've always had an abundant practice even before people started looking me up on websites. It used to be that everybody who came here knew why they came here. It's fun now, starting fresh with someone who has no positive predisposition to my methods working. Some people have never been to chiropractors before. I get to throw them into not exactly the deep end but certainly the left end of health care. Some of the things I do that I've picked up along the way are pretty non-traditional. It's not just spinal manipulation. There's a lot of craniosacral work. There's a lot of stuff that sociological came from where osteopathy used to practice. When osteopathy and allopathic medicine made peace in the '70s, many of these techniques and these approaches sociologically fell to people like me. Osteopaths were welcomed in medical hospitals to learn to do a wider variety of specialties than osteopathic colleges had offered them.

Your undergraduate degree is in sociology. Was that planned or was that a happy accident?

I'm glad that I have it now, but at the time, I must admit, it was the quick and dirty way out of St. Francis with a salvageable GPA, which I think was about 2.501. It took five years.

You got there eventually.

[Laughs] I got there eventually. Exactly. It was a more circuitous route, I think. My first job sober was at St. Ann's, and a dear friend from my undergraduate days was the person who told me about the job. He and I shared a certain revelry with which college is often associated, and said that the headmaster of St. Ann's was just crazy about the old Brendan Behan ethos and that he would just totally love me. I was thinking to myself that I'm sober 14 days and my friend has sold me as this Behan-type. Awesome. But it all worked out pretty well. And I must stay Stanley [Bosworth, the founder of St. Ann's] never gave me a bad time about not drinking.

At 14 days sober, I was shaking apart when he interviewed me. But his interview was kind. I now understand from hearing about so many of the other interviews that he gave that these were all about finding something essential and true about a person, and giving them that observation. In a letter that I still have, he called me a "Eureka." He committed the school to me and told me to show up in September. I was scared to death, took another teaching job, and then came back a year later.

Really? You bailed initially?

Yeah, I was so intimidated. There wasn't a single child I was going to teach who wasn't measurably brighter than me. I thought that should stop me from teaching. I'm now fine with that. I embrace my moderate IQ! It matches me just perfectly.

The first 50,000 times you do something, you get rid of most of the mistakes. I'm way into my second 50,000 now, and I don't make anywhere near the number of mistakes.
You were a docent at the Bodies exhibit. Can you talk a little bit about that experience?

I loved teaching anatomy. My wife and I saw that the Bodies exhibit was coming, and she wanted to go. I wasn't that interested in it, but I was happy to take her through it and answer her questions. While we were there, some people gathered around while I was telling her about something in a display. One of them was a docent who worked at the exhibit. She asked me to be a docent.

It was heaven. For an anatomy teacher to have exhibits that will be precisely the same day after day after day was unthinkable. In the conventional anatomy laboratory, things dry out within three hours of being dissected. To see things exactly as they were the day before was fantastic. Each time I would go in, I would ask questions about things I noticed the day before. I would go there a couple of times a week. Sometimes I would have something prepared, but often I would just start talking about something until I realized I was in over my head and a person in the crowd would correct me. I'd ask them what they did, and they'd say something like "neurosurgeon." I'd correct myself and take a note for the next time in case I wanted to make that same presentation again. I did it for a couple years and loved it every time I went. I quit when I got sick of hearing the sound of my own voice.

Did you ever have a plan?

I don't think this is necessarily the end. I don't know where this will lead me. The other things led me here. I'll show up where I'm supposed to be. If this were for some reason to stop, I would happily do the next thing. It's probably not the only thing that I'm good at, but it's certainly the thing that I'm best at right now. The first 50,000 times you do something, you get rid of most of the mistakes. I'm way into my second 50,000 now, and I don't make anywhere near the number of mistakes. I had a teacher in chiropractic college who said, "Take careful notes when you're in practice, especially names and addresses of people that you see. When you've been in practice for 10 years, I want you to go and send back the money to the people you saw in your first five." I often think of that now. I see his point.

Do you think that you're getting better?

I discover that I am. Every time I come in here, I learn something. That's the delight. Getting to know people a little is surprisingly profound. In a situation like this, people with show you who they are if you're trustworthy. And that's my first job, to be trustworthy. It certainly helps in diagnosis, but you experience them so richly and you see how magnificent people are, then I do what I do, which is really pretty simple. The mechanisms are sometimes complicated but the "what to do" and the "what we want from this" is always very clear and very simple. The clearer I am about why it is that we're here, the more trustworthy I am and the better time I have.

Who should I talk to next?

Brad Reedy, who is the executive director of Second Nature. He's a remarkable, humble, transparent individual. A splendid leader.



Previously: Teacher Marty Skoble and author Robert Sullivan


Noah Davis is frequently lost.

---

See more posts by Noah Davis

4 comments

]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/how-they-got-there-a-conversation-with-chiropractor-bill-walsh/feed 4 The Scourge Of Pour-Over Coffee http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-scourge-of-pour-over-coffee http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-scourge-of-pour-over-coffee#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:40:51 +0000 Chris Chafin http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-scourge-of-pour-over-coffee On a recent Sunday, the crowd at the Brooklyn Flea was dangerously under-caffeinated. Blue Bottle Coffee, the only coffee vendor at the popular flea market, had just that weekend decamped, with little fanfare, until spring. The marble counter where their coffee wares were usually arrayed sat empty. The crowd—the weekend shoppers for costume jewelry and vintage iron-on decals—became indignant when told that they would have to go across the street—to a Starbucks—to get their caffeine fix. “Are you serious?!” a woman demanded of the hapless cupcake vendor who had the misfortune to have a spot next door. “Yes, I’m serious,” he replied, affecting the blankness of an airline representative with a line of stranded holiday travelers. “You’re not the first person to ask me that today.”

What had broken Blue Bottle’s nearly yearlong run at the Brooklyn Flea? What was the root cause of this rage and frustration? The answer: pour-over coffee, a seemingly simple but incredibly time-consuming method of coffee assemblage which wreaks destruction wherever it appears, a gastronomical ascot whose chief benefit seems to be that it roughly triples the time it takes to make a cup of coffee and allows consumers to then imagine that they can taste a difference.

It was a little over a year ago that The New York Times heralded the arrival of pour-over coffee in a trend story titled “Coffee's Slow Dance.” The writer Oliver Strand described the method by which pour-over coffee is created—water is poured from a specially made kettle into a suspended cup of coffee grounds, through which the coffee seeps to the waiting cup below (that the specialized equipment needed comes from Japan likely will not surprise you). While allowing that the process might sound "precious or tedious" to some, he enthused that the resulting coffee was, in the intricacy and delicacy of its flavor, like “picking up a drafting pen after only writing with Magic Markers.”

This sort of praise is typical of pour-over enthusiasts. Taylor Janes is a 20-something farmer’s market cheesemonger who designs brass brackets for pour-overs in his spare time. (I know him because he's a former classmate of mine at that bastion of Manhattan liberalness, The New School. Yes, I know.) He doesn’t care that it can take roughly four to five minutes to brew a single cup. “I want it to take longer,” he told me. “From opening a bag and inhaling deeply, practicing my pour technique and watching the bloom, to the industrial handsomeness of the galvanized steel pour station, the observance of and commitment to a morning ritual results in a refined sense of personal satisfaction.”

What is it actually like to drink pour-over coffee? I can’t deny that there is something a different about it—its flavors are richer than is usual in drip coffee, hiding underneath a layer of physical heat and slowly unspooling themselves on your palette in the moments after a sip. For this piece, I sampled several pour-overs at Blue Bottle’s Williamsburg outpost, and on at least one day I was struck with an unusually intense caffeine high that left me vibrating and sweating in my desk chair, feeling like I'd been whisked through here.

The technique had its devotees, of course, long before The Times wrote about it. And in the year since the piece ran, there's been even further advancement in the world of coffee pour overs. The Hario VDC-02W Dripper V60 Size 02 White Ceramic Funnel, an unassuming white cone that sits atop a cup of coffee and serves as a pour-over coffee filter is, at the time of this writing, the top-selling item in Amazon’s “Coffee Servers” category (other assorted pour-over tchotchkes fill up three more spots in the top ten). The Hario VKB-120HSV V60 Coffee Drip Kettle Buono, another pour-over accessory, is a sensually ribbed teapot with a long, S-curved spout protruding from its front, giving it the appearance of a cartoon baby elephant, or an incredibly rare orchid. It also sits atop its category (#1 in Kitchen & Dining > Tabletop >Serveware > Teapots & Coffee Servers > Teapots).

Blue Bottle, the only New York coffee cult name-checked in The Times piece, is expanding, too, opening two Manhattan branches in addition to it Williamsburg coffee bar/roastery/shipping facility. There are now more than a dozen other places selling pour overs in the city: Abraço in the East Village, PORTS in Chelsea and O Café in Greenwich Village. Another is Joe the Art of Coffee, whose new Upper East Side location will feature pour-overs, according to this December write-up:


"Rather than batch brewing in big urns, it’s more theater," owner Jonathan Rubinstein said of the art of pour-over. "The way we’re building this, we’re putting in a window pane as a permanent fixture. And how we’re lighting it, we’re making it a glass stage, for lack of a better word."

A visit to that location a couple weeks ago, however, turned up nothing more than two lonely-looking pour-over filters perched atop rather grimy glass pots. Asked about the gleaming coffee bar on a hill promised in the press, the barista on duty sheepishly said it was “under construction.”

Nevermind the mystique; the actual mechanics of pour-overs are more or less those of a broken coffee pot: hot water slowly goes through coffee grounds, making only one cup of coffee at a time. That is all it is! It's not magic. It’s just kind of a more elaborate, maybe slightly tastier way of brewing coffee. But, you know what? It’s not really suited to pleasing a big crowd, even when it’s the kind of crowd you might think would be predisposed to waiting 20 minutes for a cup of coffee. Because, actually, I do not think that person exists. Granted, wait times for pour-overs can vary wildly—I've waited anywhere from two to eight minutes at Blue Bottle’s proper storefront. But when there's a line, it can take much, much longer—which brings us back, full circle, to where we started: Blue Bottle and the Brooklyn Flea.

Blue Bottle is a fine institution and a great local place to buy coffee, but they found themselves overextended here. The pour over requires many things: time, a reliable electrical system and a patient clientele. Their potential customers, perpetually in a line a dozen or so people long throughout the holiday season at the Flea’s winter home—a stall in the lobby of One Hanson, a heartbreakingly ornate former bank and clock tower built in 1927, that served as Jason Schwartzman’s home and detective agency in the most recent season of the (criminally-cancelled) HBO comedy "Bored to Death"—did not cooperate any more than the building’s 80-plus-year-old electrical system. The official line is that the building's wiring was the real culprit, perpetually shorting out and leaving the outpost with only lukewarm, un-pour-overable water. This left everyone involved a little grumpy, including the staff of Blue Bottle, who told me in exactly the same words, with exactly the same mixture of barely-contained rage for two consecutive weeks, “We’re just having a little… problem? right now, with our… heater. So… it will just be a few minutes.” People stole coffees obviously ordered by other people. Some people just wandered off and never returned, despite paying a bit more than you might expect for a humble weekend-morning cup of coffee. There was strife and discord.

Immediately following New Year's, Blue Bottle announced they would not be returning to the Flea until they moved locations in the spring. They’ve since been replaced by Crop to Cup. Who serve coffee out of nice, big, coffee vats like you might find at a movie set or a PTA meeting. And you know what? It tastes great.



Chris Chafin writes for a few places about things you can listen to, play or consume. Here's his Tumblr, which isn't super compelling. Photo by akpoff, via Flickr.

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]]> On a recent Sunday, the crowd at the Brooklyn Flea was dangerously under-caffeinated. Blue Bottle Coffee, the only coffee vendor at the popular flea market, had just that weekend decamped, with little fanfare, until spring. The marble counter where their coffee wares were usually arrayed sat empty. The crowd—the weekend shoppers for costume jewelry and vintage iron-on decals—became indignant when told that they would have to go across the street—to a Starbucks—to get their caffeine fix. “Are you serious?!” a woman demanded of the hapless cupcake vendor who had the misfortune to have a spot next door. “Yes, I’m serious,” he replied, affecting the blankness of an airline representative with a line of stranded holiday travelers. “You’re not the first person to ask me that today.”

What had broken Blue Bottle’s nearly yearlong run at the Brooklyn Flea? What was the root cause of this rage and frustration? The answer: pour-over coffee, a seemingly simple but incredibly time-consuming method of coffee assemblage which wreaks destruction wherever it appears, a gastronomical ascot whose chief benefit seems to be that it roughly triples the time it takes to make a cup of coffee and allows consumers to then imagine that they can taste a difference.

It was a little over a year ago that The New York Times heralded the arrival of pour-over coffee in a trend story titled “Coffee's Slow Dance.” The writer Oliver Strand described the method by which pour-over coffee is created—water is poured from a specially made kettle into a suspended cup of coffee grounds, through which the coffee seeps to the waiting cup below (that the specialized equipment needed comes from Japan likely will not surprise you). While allowing that the process might sound "precious or tedious" to some, he enthused that the resulting coffee was, in the intricacy and delicacy of its flavor, like “picking up a drafting pen after only writing with Magic Markers.”

This sort of praise is typical of pour-over enthusiasts. Taylor Janes is a 20-something farmer’s market cheesemonger who designs brass brackets for pour-overs in his spare time. (I know him because he's a former classmate of mine at that bastion of Manhattan liberalness, The New School. Yes, I know.) He doesn’t care that it can take roughly four to five minutes to brew a single cup. “I want it to take longer,” he told me. “From opening a bag and inhaling deeply, practicing my pour technique and watching the bloom, to the industrial handsomeness of the galvanized steel pour station, the observance of and commitment to a morning ritual results in a refined sense of personal satisfaction.”

What is it actually like to drink pour-over coffee? I can’t deny that there is something a different about it—its flavors are richer than is usual in drip coffee, hiding underneath a layer of physical heat and slowly unspooling themselves on your palette in the moments after a sip. For this piece, I sampled several pour-overs at Blue Bottle’s Williamsburg outpost, and on at least one day I was struck with an unusually intense caffeine high that left me vibrating and sweating in my desk chair, feeling like I'd been whisked through here.

The technique had its devotees, of course, long before The Times wrote about it. And in the year since the piece ran, there's been even further advancement in the world of coffee pour overs. The Hario VDC-02W Dripper V60 Size 02 White Ceramic Funnel, an unassuming white cone that sits atop a cup of coffee and serves as a pour-over coffee filter is, at the time of this writing, the top-selling item in Amazon’s “Coffee Servers” category (other assorted pour-over tchotchkes fill up three more spots in the top ten). The Hario VKB-120HSV V60 Coffee Drip Kettle Buono, another pour-over accessory, is a sensually ribbed teapot with a long, S-curved spout protruding from its front, giving it the appearance of a cartoon baby elephant, or an incredibly rare orchid. It also sits atop its category (#1 in Kitchen & Dining > Tabletop >Serveware > Teapots & Coffee Servers > Teapots).

Blue Bottle, the only New York coffee cult name-checked in The Times piece, is expanding, too, opening two Manhattan branches in addition to it Williamsburg coffee bar/roastery/shipping facility. There are now more than a dozen other places selling pour overs in the city: Abraço in the East Village, PORTS in Chelsea and O Café in Greenwich Village. Another is Joe the Art of Coffee, whose new Upper East Side location will feature pour-overs, according to this December write-up:


"Rather than batch brewing in big urns, it’s more theater," owner Jonathan Rubinstein said of the art of pour-over. "The way we’re building this, we’re putting in a window pane as a permanent fixture. And how we’re lighting it, we’re making it a glass stage, for lack of a better word."

A visit to that location a couple weeks ago, however, turned up nothing more than two lonely-looking pour-over filters perched atop rather grimy glass pots. Asked about the gleaming coffee bar on a hill promised in the press, the barista on duty sheepishly said it was “under construction.”

Nevermind the mystique; the actual mechanics of pour-overs are more or less those of a broken coffee pot: hot water slowly goes through coffee grounds, making only one cup of coffee at a time. That is all it is! It's not magic. It’s just kind of a more elaborate, maybe slightly tastier way of brewing coffee. But, you know what? It’s not really suited to pleasing a big crowd, even when it’s the kind of crowd you might think would be predisposed to waiting 20 minutes for a cup of coffee. Because, actually, I do not think that person exists. Granted, wait times for pour-overs can vary wildly—I've waited anywhere from two to eight minutes at Blue Bottle’s proper storefront. But when there's a line, it can take much, much longer—which brings us back, full circle, to where we started: Blue Bottle and the Brooklyn Flea.

Blue Bottle is a fine institution and a great local place to buy coffee, but they found themselves overextended here. The pour over requires many things: time, a reliable electrical system and a patient clientele. Their potential customers, perpetually in a line a dozen or so people long throughout the holiday season at the Flea’s winter home—a stall in the lobby of One Hanson, a heartbreakingly ornate former bank and clock tower built in 1927, that served as Jason Schwartzman’s home and detective agency in the most recent season of the (criminally-cancelled) HBO comedy "Bored to Death"—did not cooperate any more than the building’s 80-plus-year-old electrical system. The official line is that the building's wiring was the real culprit, perpetually shorting out and leaving the outpost with only lukewarm, un-pour-overable water. This left everyone involved a little grumpy, including the staff of Blue Bottle, who told me in exactly the same words, with exactly the same mixture of barely-contained rage for two consecutive weeks, “We’re just having a little… problem? right now, with our… heater. So… it will just be a few minutes.” People stole coffees obviously ordered by other people. Some people just wandered off and never returned, despite paying a bit more than you might expect for a humble weekend-morning cup of coffee. There was strife and discord.

Immediately following New Year's, Blue Bottle announced they would not be returning to the Flea until they moved locations in the spring. They’ve since been replaced by Crop to Cup. Who serve coffee out of nice, big, coffee vats like you might find at a movie set or a PTA meeting. And you know what? It tastes great.



Chris Chafin writes for a few places about things you can listen to, play or consume. Here's his Tumblr, which isn't super compelling. Photo by akpoff, via Flickr.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-scourge-of-pour-over-coffee/feed 96 Brooklyn's Return http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/brooklyns-return http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/brooklyns-return#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:30:38 +0000 Brent Cox http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/brooklyns-return Shut up about Brooklyn already. We all know about Brooklyn, that shining city on the hill, where everything is made only of awesome. Yes, there are beards and clunky eyeglass frames and lawyers who skateboard and grandpas with noise bands. The hipsters run-off freely now, the cheesecake is largely appareled American and vice now has a market cap. There's even a successful sitcom that purports to be set there, which is as large a cultural signifier as anything—Brooklyn may be located on the western-most tip of Long Island, but where it actually lives is dead solid in the middle of the zeitgeist. It's now, it's hip, it's hot, it's happening. There is no mystery of Brooklyn to it. And this is why shut up about Brooklyn already.

Part of what put Brooklyn over the top where it is now—both beloved and reviled, a migration target and the butt of jokes—involved a fat shirtless guy being knocked out of his shoes, in front of not so many people.

Brooklyn is back to where it was in the middle of the 20th Century: the capturer of imagination. Back then, the awesome was equivalent but in different flavors. The Dodgers played in Flatbush, the longshoremen looked like Marlon Brando and that burly Brooklyn squonk of an accent was not just uniform in the borough but popular among the entertainers of the day. Back then, Brooklyn served the purpose that Canada does today.

But this was not always the case, there in Brooklyn. There was a time in between these two times when the crime rose and the neighborhoods unsettled. There was a time when all Brooklyn had going for it was the opening credits of "Welcome Back Kotter", when it was living not only in the shadow of Manhattan, but also of its former glories, and this time stretched right up to the turn of the century.

This is not meant to be a travel brochure for Brooklyn: yes, I live there, and I have done so for coming on twenty years, but I assume that anyone that lives in the same place for so long will have similar sentiments. But I've been there (or let's just start saying, here), both in times of ignominious squalor and generally bad borough-reputation (which were more fun than you'd think) and in times of the Bright Shiny Animal-Hat Wearing Brooklyn. Plus also, that transitional moment? I was there.

In 2001, baseball returned to Brooklyn. In Coney Island, a modest little stadium was built, and the Cyclones brought pro baseball back for the first time in 44 years. My friends and I were very excited by this, having lived in Brooklyn for a while, and we obtained a nine game season package.

They were a Single-A short season club for the New York Mets, which meant that the players were largely fresh out of the draft, and generally either starting a long road to the bigs or enjoying their brief stay as the talent was winnowed out. It also meant that there was no such thing as a routine throw to first. But the games were fun, sitting in that park hard on the beach and the Atlantic Ocean behind it, the actually Cyclone visible (and audible) in the distance over the left field fence. In the stands, the atmosphere was festive, old-timers and hipsters alike keeping the taunting PG for the masses of kids there, a fellow named Party Marty running the mid-inning promotions (like "Who Wants A Pizza?" and "What's In The Box?"), and characters attending every game, like this old fellow who looked like he might have been an original extra in "Saturday Night Fever" who boogied in the aisle holding a sign that read "DISCO MANIAC" (though we called him the ESCAPED DISCO LUNATIC). Basically, the Ur-baseball experience, without the complications of drunken fans working blue, or actually caring about the outcome of the season.

On June 26 of 2001, we got to see our first game, the second home game for the Cyclones ever, and the atmosphere was as described above but after a heroic dose of Dexadrine. The people that could remember the last Dodger's game in Ebbets Field were nearly in tears for the day, and the little kids were feeding off that and were spider monkey to an extra degree. It was packed to the rafters (what few rafters the place had). It was a big day for Brooklyn. We all felt prosperous and lucky, and the future was as unfathomably big as the ocean stretching out past Sandy Hook and to the vanishing point.

I don't remember who the Cyclones played or what the score was, but I do remember this: somewhere in the middle innings, between pitches, a man jumped onto the field and started to run around. Usually this behavior is tolerated by the crowd for the spectacle, but on this day we were not in the mood: the dude, an older guy, large, flabby and without a shirt, was almost immediately booed. But the security staff, two days into the job, must not have been particularly skilled at their jobs, because they were unable to catch the fat shirtless guy, stumbling after him in lazy circles in shallow right field.

Once the fat shirtless guy realized that he wasn't getting tackled immediately, he did what every unauthorized field runner does—he decided to round the bases. The other team was in the middle of their at-bats, so the Cyclones were in the field. The infielders all stood well off the bags, with their arms crossed. They were not going to take part in this foolishness. And so the fat shirtless guy made his slow procession, first, second, with hapless security far behind.

Except for the catcher, that is. The catcher, Mike Jacobs, a righty from Chula Vista, California, stood astride home plate. The fat shirtless guy was rounding third. Mike Jacobs didn't budge. And as the fat shirtless guy approached home, unsure whether to slide or not, Mike Jacobs speared him: basically picked him up and drove him into the dirt.

The stadium exploded. We roared because the fat shirtless guy was done and baseball would recommence, and we roared because our catcher was so dedicated as to protect that plate under all circumstances: from fat shirtless guys, from seagulls, from the wind and the rain. But we also cheered because we were Brooklyn, and many of us were feeling that we were Brooklyn for the first time.

Oddly, I seem to have a knack for being present at auspicious New York baseball moments, even though I only catch a couple games a year. I was at the old Yankee Stadium when David Wells lumbered through a perfect game in 1998, and the only Major League game I saw was in the new Yankee Stadium, when Derek Jeter hit his 3,000th hit (and four others). I am apparently good luck for someone (though sadly that someone is the Bronx Bombers).

But that moment, Mike Jacobs leveling the fat shirtless guy, was the sweetest moment of all. Brooklyn was well on its way up at that time—galleries were opening in Williamsburg, a modest restaurant row was popping up on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, and other neighborhoods like Red Hook and Kensington were being chosen by the students and the refugees from Manhattan not just for the rent but for the fabric of the neighborhoods, decades old. That game was a big Brooklyn appreciation party, attended by both the new and the old Brooklynites, and during this party a recent transplant from California defended the Brooklyn institution of baseball from the depredations of the fat shirtless guy.

Mike Jacobs was eventually moved to first base and ended up with four years in the Major Leagues, with the Marlins, Royals and the Mets and then, well, like so many of us, he took a few shortcuts. And Brooklyn? Well, Brooklyn is a movie star now. It's a phenomenon with which you are no doubt familiar, and one regarding which you are likely sick to death.

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.Photo by Pete Jelliffe.

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]]> Shut up about Brooklyn already. We all know about Brooklyn, that shining city on the hill, where everything is made only of awesome. Yes, there are beards and clunky eyeglass frames and lawyers who skateboard and grandpas with noise bands. The hipsters run-off freely now, the cheesecake is largely appareled American and vice now has a market cap. There's even a successful sitcom that purports to be set there, which is as large a cultural signifier as anything—Brooklyn may be located on the western-most tip of Long Island, but where it actually lives is dead solid in the middle of the zeitgeist. It's now, it's hip, it's hot, it's happening. There is no mystery of Brooklyn to it. And this is why shut up about Brooklyn already.

Part of what put Brooklyn over the top where it is now—both beloved and reviled, a migration target and the butt of jokes—involved a fat shirtless guy being knocked out of his shoes, in front of not so many people.

Brooklyn is back to where it was in the middle of the 20th Century: the capturer of imagination. Back then, the awesome was equivalent but in different flavors. The Dodgers played in Flatbush, the longshoremen looked like Marlon Brando and that burly Brooklyn squonk of an accent was not just uniform in the borough but popular among the entertainers of the day. Back then, Brooklyn served the purpose that Canada does today.

But this was not always the case, there in Brooklyn. There was a time in between these two times when the crime rose and the neighborhoods unsettled. There was a time when all Brooklyn had going for it was the opening credits of "Welcome Back Kotter", when it was living not only in the shadow of Manhattan, but also of its former glories, and this time stretched right up to the turn of the century.

This is not meant to be a travel brochure for Brooklyn: yes, I live there, and I have done so for coming on twenty years, but I assume that anyone that lives in the same place for so long will have similar sentiments. But I've been there (or let's just start saying, here), both in times of ignominious squalor and generally bad borough-reputation (which were more fun than you'd think) and in times of the Bright Shiny Animal-Hat Wearing Brooklyn. Plus also, that transitional moment? I was there.

In 2001, baseball returned to Brooklyn. In Coney Island, a modest little stadium was built, and the Cyclones brought pro baseball back for the first time in 44 years. My friends and I were very excited by this, having lived in Brooklyn for a while, and we obtained a nine game season package.

They were a Single-A short season club for the New York Mets, which meant that the players were largely fresh out of the draft, and generally either starting a long road to the bigs or enjoying their brief stay as the talent was winnowed out. It also meant that there was no such thing as a routine throw to first. But the games were fun, sitting in that park hard on the beach and the Atlantic Ocean behind it, the actually Cyclone visible (and audible) in the distance over the left field fence. In the stands, the atmosphere was festive, old-timers and hipsters alike keeping the taunting PG for the masses of kids there, a fellow named Party Marty running the mid-inning promotions (like "Who Wants A Pizza?" and "What's In The Box?"), and characters attending every game, like this old fellow who looked like he might have been an original extra in "Saturday Night Fever" who boogied in the aisle holding a sign that read "DISCO MANIAC" (though we called him the ESCAPED DISCO LUNATIC). Basically, the Ur-baseball experience, without the complications of drunken fans working blue, or actually caring about the outcome of the season.

On June 26 of 2001, we got to see our first game, the second home game for the Cyclones ever, and the atmosphere was as described above but after a heroic dose of Dexadrine. The people that could remember the last Dodger's game in Ebbets Field were nearly in tears for the day, and the little kids were feeding off that and were spider monkey to an extra degree. It was packed to the rafters (what few rafters the place had). It was a big day for Brooklyn. We all felt prosperous and lucky, and the future was as unfathomably big as the ocean stretching out past Sandy Hook and to the vanishing point.

I don't remember who the Cyclones played or what the score was, but I do remember this: somewhere in the middle innings, between pitches, a man jumped onto the field and started to run around. Usually this behavior is tolerated by the crowd for the spectacle, but on this day we were not in the mood: the dude, an older guy, large, flabby and without a shirt, was almost immediately booed. But the security staff, two days into the job, must not have been particularly skilled at their jobs, because they were unable to catch the fat shirtless guy, stumbling after him in lazy circles in shallow right field.

Once the fat shirtless guy realized that he wasn't getting tackled immediately, he did what every unauthorized field runner does—he decided to round the bases. The other team was in the middle of their at-bats, so the Cyclones were in the field. The infielders all stood well off the bags, with their arms crossed. They were not going to take part in this foolishness. And so the fat shirtless guy made his slow procession, first, second, with hapless security far behind.

Except for the catcher, that is. The catcher, Mike Jacobs, a righty from Chula Vista, California, stood astride home plate. The fat shirtless guy was rounding third. Mike Jacobs didn't budge. And as the fat shirtless guy approached home, unsure whether to slide or not, Mike Jacobs speared him: basically picked him up and drove him into the dirt.

The stadium exploded. We roared because the fat shirtless guy was done and baseball would recommence, and we roared because our catcher was so dedicated as to protect that plate under all circumstances: from fat shirtless guys, from seagulls, from the wind and the rain. But we also cheered because we were Brooklyn, and many of us were feeling that we were Brooklyn for the first time.

Oddly, I seem to have a knack for being present at auspicious New York baseball moments, even though I only catch a couple games a year. I was at the old Yankee Stadium when David Wells lumbered through a perfect game in 1998, and the only Major League game I saw was in the new Yankee Stadium, when Derek Jeter hit his 3,000th hit (and four others). I am apparently good luck for someone (though sadly that someone is the Bronx Bombers).

But that moment, Mike Jacobs leveling the fat shirtless guy, was the sweetest moment of all. Brooklyn was well on its way up at that time—galleries were opening in Williamsburg, a modest restaurant row was popping up on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, and other neighborhoods like Red Hook and Kensington were being chosen by the students and the refugees from Manhattan not just for the rent but for the fabric of the neighborhoods, decades old. That game was a big Brooklyn appreciation party, attended by both the new and the old Brooklynites, and during this party a recent transplant from California defended the Brooklyn institution of baseball from the depredations of the fat shirtless guy.

Mike Jacobs was eventually moved to first base and ended up with four years in the Major Leagues, with the Marlins, Royals and the Mets and then, well, like so many of us, he took a few shortcuts. And Brooklyn? Well, Brooklyn is a movie star now. It's a phenomenon with which you are no doubt familiar, and one regarding which you are likely sick to death.

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.Photo by Pete Jelliffe.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/brooklyns-return/feed 12 Mosquitos Show Even Less Regard For Basic Decorum Than We Thought http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mosquitos-suck http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mosquitos-suck#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:50:57 +0000 Dave Bry http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mosquitos-suck "Roughly one to two minutes after she starts feeding, an Anopheles stephensi mosquito will excrete urine and preurine through the anus, at the end of the abdomen. Sometimes a drop of the fluid will form and cling to the body before falling off; when this happens, some fluid evaporates like sweat and cools the mosquito’s abdomen by almost four degrees."
—Great. As if mosquitos could get any more disgusting and insulting and life-ruining than they already are: While they're drinking our blood, they're also pooping and peeing. I have a suspicion, based on personal experience and a fondness for dumb puns, that this phenomenon is especially prevalent among the particularly horrible mosquitos who feed on the humans who have for some reason chosen to live in or near the area of Brooklyn known as Gowanus.

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]]> "Roughly one to two minutes after she starts feeding, an Anopheles stephensi mosquito will excrete urine and preurine through the anus, at the end of the abdomen. Sometimes a drop of the fluid will form and cling to the body before falling off; when this happens, some fluid evaporates like sweat and cools the mosquito’s abdomen by almost four degrees."
—Great. As if mosquitos could get any more disgusting and insulting and life-ruining than they already are: While they're drinking our blood, they're also pooping and peeing. I have a suspicion, based on personal experience and a fondness for dumb puns, that this phenomenon is especially prevalent among the particularly horrible mosquitos who feed on the humans who have for some reason chosen to live in or near the area of Brooklyn known as Gowanus.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/mosquitos-suck/feed 0 Restaurant Open http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/restaurant-open http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/restaurant-open#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:50:51 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/restaurant-open Finally, the people of Brooklyn have a place where they can buy hamburgers and hot dogs.

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]]> Finally, the people of Brooklyn have a place where they can buy hamburgers and hot dogs.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/restaurant-open/feed 5 You Should Go Have Soup For Lunch At Karloff http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/you-should-go-have-soup-for-lunch-at-karloff http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/you-should-go-have-soup-for-lunch-at-karloff#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:30:39 +0000 Dave Bry http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/you-should-go-have-soup-for-lunch-at-karloff They call me “Two Soups.” Sometimes. And by “they,” I mostly mean one person. "They" call me this because I sometimes order two soups for lunch. Like, instead of “soup and a sandwich,” or “soup and a salad,” I’ll have soup and another soup. A different soup. I like soup that much. (I could perhaps marry Jennifer Coolidge in Best In Show and sit with her and eat soup and talk or not talk. She’d prefer the latter, I would bet.)

I’m thinking of having two soups for lunch today, in fact. This time of year, when the weather turns cold, this type of day, rainy and gray, is just screaming for soup. And there’s a place nearby that has excellent soups. I’ve been going there a lot lately. It’s called Karloff and it’s on Court Street in Brooklyn and it's a nice, airy room to sit in and if you like soup, I’d recommend you go there, too. And order two bowls of soup.

Unless you're worried that your friends might start calling you "Two Soups," too. And you think that would bother you terribly. I don't mind it so much myself. But I never wrote a symphony.

My favorite soup at Karloff is a puree of kale and broccoli that tastes better than that sounds. It’s full of ginger and garlic and paprika and tastes as bright green as it looks. It’s actually most like a more liquefied version of the dish you find at Indian restaurants called sarson da saag, which is supposed to be made with mustard greens and spinach, I guess, but is often thought of as just stewed greens of any kind and is often made with broccoli, too. That’s a favorite of mine, at Indian restaurants.

But Karloff is a Russian restaurant, as you might have guessed from the name, and my second favorite soup there (the other one I think I will order today) is the “dark chicken soup with meat dumplings.” The dumplings are a specialty of the house—vareniki, they’re called. You shouldn’t eat too many of them, but that’s hard because they’re totally delicious. On their own, they’re served with sour cream and apple sauce, which you basically ignore, except to maybe use as a palette cleanser between bites, and drenched in butter, or maybe it’s oil they’re cooked in, which you should definitely not ignore. In the soup, they combine with vegetables and chopped up chicken (all parts, careful of bones) to make for, yes, a much darker and meatier chicken soup than you’re used to finding. A better chicken soup.

Strangely, being that it’s a Russian restaurant, Karloff’s borscht is not so great. It’s glowing red, the way it’s supposed to be, but it’s for some reason blander and less substantial than the borscht at say, Veselka, which I prefer. It’s a little sweeter than salty, and it lacks large hunks of brisket. It’s probably healthier for you. So maybe get it for that reason, as a third option (we should call you “Three Soups”!) if you love beets, which are supposed to be so high in nutrients. But, wait, don’t get it if they’re serving the split pea soup the day you go. It’s not on the menu, generally, but they’ve been having it a lot lately. And I have, too. It’s about the best split pea soup I’ve ever had. Heavy on dill and scallions and what they call “New York bacon,” which I guess is local. Thick-cut and smoky and I’d better hurry up and go get some.

They serve the bacon with their breakfasts, too, and the breakfasts are also totally dynamite. If you go for breakfast, or opt for breakfast food at lunch (never a bad idea) you should get the potato latkes (another specialty of the house!) which will remind you of the first time you ever had potato latkes, when you peeled and shredded the potatoes yourself, sitting next to O.E. Hertler at the long table at Winding Brook nursery school, and marveled at how the thin little sticks of potatoes (like those you’d later love eating from those greasy conical cans, but softer) stuck together in the oil and egg, and how the ones in the middle, where the latke was thickest, turned creamy and sort of melted, while the ones on the outside, around the edges, got a crispier shined golden brown and crunched when you bit into them. Sorry for that silly bit of revery. But I’m telling you: these are the perfect potato latkes.

And here’s what you do with them: You order them with fried eggs and the bacon, and with your fork, you gently pull the eggs over the latkes. With the strip of bacon making for a mouth, this will give your plate the appearance of a face caught in an expression of wide-eyed surprise. The latkes being like frames for the fried-egg eyes with the yolks being the eyeballs. (If you happen to be dining with a 6-year-old, he or she will probably get some enjoyment out of this. But that’s not why you’re doing it.) Now, stab both eyes in the eyeballs with your fork. Hard, so the tines hit the plate below. Then let them sit for a minute. The idea here is to let the yolk drain through the holes in the eggs and seep into the latkes, making them even more mind-blowingly delicious. I suppose if you have a particularly enthusiastic expression on your face as you do this, you might terrify your 6-year-old, if your 6-year-old is particularly sensitive. But probably not. Six-year-old children are bloodthirsty little monsters, and most of them were likely imagining doing the same thing with their fork as soon as they saw the that eggs looked like eyes. They’re probably thinking of doing this to you and your real eyes when you sleep, too. Anyway, if you don’t do this to your eggs and latkes, I don’t know what to tell you. Try to enjoy them anyway, I guess.

I’d better wrap this up. But Karloff serves dinner, too. And while I’ve gone there for that a couple times, too, I haven’t tried everything on the menu. (I’d like to try the beef stroganoff.) There is a salad called a Tsar salad, which is grilled hearts of romaine and croutons and parmesan with a creamy dressing that does sort of make you feel like an emperor when you eat it. And a wide variety or blintzes and burgers. And the dumplings. But also, you could just get soup. Lots of soup. That’s what I’m going to do today.

Oh, and for dessert, they have incredibly good ice-cream that’s made “in small batches” at this place up near Hudson. (It’s served at a shop up there called Jane’s, too.) Lots of the flavors are fancy-pants style and too aromatic for me, with rosewater, orange blossom or lavender. They have beet and dill ice-cream, too, which I am sort of philosophically opposed to. (But which I have heard is good by more open-minded people who have tried it.) The peanut-butter fudge, though, is phenomenal. Like, as good as any ice-cream I’ve ever eaten. I was stuck on that stuff every single day for too long of a stretch this summer. But it’s too cold for that, now.

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]]> They call me “Two Soups.” Sometimes. And by “they,” I mostly mean one person. "They" call me this because I sometimes order two soups for lunch. Like, instead of “soup and a sandwich,” or “soup and a salad,” I’ll have soup and another soup. A different soup. I like soup that much. (I could perhaps marry Jennifer Coolidge in Best In Show and sit with her and eat soup and talk or not talk. She’d prefer the latter, I would bet.)

I’m thinking of having two soups for lunch today, in fact. This time of year, when the weather turns cold, this type of day, rainy and gray, is just screaming for soup. And there’s a place nearby that has excellent soups. I’ve been going there a lot lately. It’s called Karloff and it’s on Court Street in Brooklyn and it's a nice, airy room to sit in and if you like soup, I’d recommend you go there, too. And order two bowls of soup.

Unless you're worried that your friends might start calling you "Two Soups," too. And you think that would bother you terribly. I don't mind it so much myself. But I never wrote a symphony.

My favorite soup at Karloff is a puree of kale and broccoli that tastes better than that sounds. It’s full of ginger and garlic and paprika and tastes as bright green as it looks. It’s actually most like a more liquefied version of the dish you find at Indian restaurants called sarson da saag, which is supposed to be made with mustard greens and spinach, I guess, but is often thought of as just stewed greens of any kind and is often made with broccoli, too. That’s a favorite of mine, at Indian restaurants.

But Karloff is a Russian restaurant, as you might have guessed from the name, and my second favorite soup there (the other one I think I will order today) is the “dark chicken soup with meat dumplings.” The dumplings are a specialty of the house—vareniki, they’re called. You shouldn’t eat too many of them, but that’s hard because they’re totally delicious. On their own, they’re served with sour cream and apple sauce, which you basically ignore, except to maybe use as a palette cleanser between bites, and drenched in butter, or maybe it’s oil they’re cooked in, which you should definitely not ignore. In the soup, they combine with vegetables and chopped up chicken (all parts, careful of bones) to make for, yes, a much darker and meatier chicken soup than you’re used to finding. A better chicken soup.

Strangely, being that it’s a Russian restaurant, Karloff’s borscht is not so great. It’s glowing red, the way it’s supposed to be, but it’s for some reason blander and less substantial than the borscht at say, Veselka, which I prefer. It’s a little sweeter than salty, and it lacks large hunks of brisket. It’s probably healthier for you. So maybe get it for that reason, as a third option (we should call you “Three Soups”!) if you love beets, which are supposed to be so high in nutrients. But, wait, don’t get it if they’re serving the split pea soup the day you go. It’s not on the menu, generally, but they’ve been having it a lot lately. And I have, too. It’s about the best split pea soup I’ve ever had. Heavy on dill and scallions and what they call “New York bacon,” which I guess is local. Thick-cut and smoky and I’d better hurry up and go get some.

They serve the bacon with their breakfasts, too, and the breakfasts are also totally dynamite. If you go for breakfast, or opt for breakfast food at lunch (never a bad idea) you should get the potato latkes (another specialty of the house!) which will remind you of the first time you ever had potato latkes, when you peeled and shredded the potatoes yourself, sitting next to O.E. Hertler at the long table at Winding Brook nursery school, and marveled at how the thin little sticks of potatoes (like those you’d later love eating from those greasy conical cans, but softer) stuck together in the oil and egg, and how the ones in the middle, where the latke was thickest, turned creamy and sort of melted, while the ones on the outside, around the edges, got a crispier shined golden brown and crunched when you bit into them. Sorry for that silly bit of revery. But I’m telling you: these are the perfect potato latkes.

And here’s what you do with them: You order them with fried eggs and the bacon, and with your fork, you gently pull the eggs over the latkes. With the strip of bacon making for a mouth, this will give your plate the appearance of a face caught in an expression of wide-eyed surprise. The latkes being like frames for the fried-egg eyes with the yolks being the eyeballs. (If you happen to be dining with a 6-year-old, he or she will probably get some enjoyment out of this. But that’s not why you’re doing it.) Now, stab both eyes in the eyeballs with your fork. Hard, so the tines hit the plate below. Then let them sit for a minute. The idea here is to let the yolk drain through the holes in the eggs and seep into the latkes, making them even more mind-blowingly delicious. I suppose if you have a particularly enthusiastic expression on your face as you do this, you might terrify your 6-year-old, if your 6-year-old is particularly sensitive. But probably not. Six-year-old children are bloodthirsty little monsters, and most of them were likely imagining doing the same thing with their fork as soon as they saw the that eggs looked like eyes. They’re probably thinking of doing this to you and your real eyes when you sleep, too. Anyway, if you don’t do this to your eggs and latkes, I don’t know what to tell you. Try to enjoy them anyway, I guess.

I’d better wrap this up. But Karloff serves dinner, too. And while I’ve gone there for that a couple times, too, I haven’t tried everything on the menu. (I’d like to try the beef stroganoff.) There is a salad called a Tsar salad, which is grilled hearts of romaine and croutons and parmesan with a creamy dressing that does sort of make you feel like an emperor when you eat it. And a wide variety or blintzes and burgers. And the dumplings. But also, you could just get soup. Lots of soup. That’s what I’m going to do today.

Oh, and for dessert, they have incredibly good ice-cream that’s made “in small batches” at this place up near Hudson. (It’s served at a shop up there called Jane’s, too.) Lots of the flavors are fancy-pants style and too aromatic for me, with rosewater, orange blossom or lavender. They have beet and dill ice-cream, too, which I am sort of philosophically opposed to. (But which I have heard is good by more open-minded people who have tried it.) The peanut-butter fudge, though, is phenomenal. Like, as good as any ice-cream I’ve ever eaten. I was stuck on that stuff every single day for too long of a stretch this summer. But it’s too cold for that, now.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/you-should-go-have-soup-for-lunch-at-karloff/feed 14 Just How Many Active Serial Sex Predators Are There in Park Slope? http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/just-how-many-active-serial-sex-predators-are-there-in-park-slope http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/just-how-many-active-serial-sex-predators-are-there-in-park-slope#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:50:55 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/just-how-many-active-serial-sex-predators-are-there-in-park-slope A plausible suspect in the serial assaults in greater Park Slope has been held for questioning; he was caught in the act, or at least "an act." But police are saying that they believe there's more than one of 'em. In fact, they have "four sketches of suspects on display" at the station. (AND HOW DEPRESSING IS THAT?) Some news: here are some free self-defense classes in Brooklyn; Safe Slope is still offering walks home for ladies and other folks who may feel vulnerable.

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]]> A plausible suspect in the serial assaults in greater Park Slope has been held for questioning; he was caught in the act, or at least "an act." But police are saying that they believe there's more than one of 'em. In fact, they have "four sketches of suspects on display" at the station. (AND HOW DEPRESSING IS THAT?) Some news: here are some free self-defense classes in Brooklyn; Safe Slope is still offering walks home for ladies and other folks who may feel vulnerable.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/just-how-many-active-serial-sex-predators-are-there-in-park-slope/feed 6 One of New York City's Great Streets http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/one-of-new-york-citys-great-streets http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/one-of-new-york-citys-great-streets#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:45:01 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/one-of-new-york-citys-great-streets A trip down Bedford Avenue.

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]]> A trip down Bedford Avenue.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/one-of-new-york-citys-great-streets/feed 0 Watching The Jets At The Old Man Bar http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/watching-the-jets-at-the-old-man-bar http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/watching-the-jets-at-the-old-man-bar#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:00:57 +0000 Brent Cox http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/watching-the-jets-at-the-old-man-bar Outside Denny’s Steak Pub, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, steps from the Church Avenue F stop, a would-be customer, wearing a Yankees T-shirt and a bit of a haunted look, shuffled back and forth, focused on the scratch-off lottery tickets that trailed behind him like exhaust. He ducked his head in every once in a while: “Six dollars!” His buddy called out, “Don’t come in,” and Scratcher nodded sadly, and waited for his pal on the sidewalk. “You’re still 86ed,” the bartender added, not unkindly. Scratcher was still a regular; he just wasn’t allowed to come in to this particular old man bar this particular afternoon.

Inside the bar it was loud, and tough to hear the football games we were watching. “Everybody got fucking jokes in this joint.” That was an accurate statement, made approximately halfway through the second quarter of the Jets game, already out of the Jaguars' grasp. The speaker was lucky to get a word in edgewise. On the left hand side of the bar, five Latino men in their 30s stood around the one TV tuned to the Tennessee Panthers game (where Cam Newton alternately dazzled and threw picks); on the right sat two old smokes, one in a polo shirt, and one in what looked to be a Jets jersey but was actually a Brooklyn Cyclones promotional shirt in the same shade of green that the Jets use.

That shade of green was the source of the first controversy of the afternoon. As the game started, there were only four men in the bar: the bartender, Polo Shirt, Jets Fan, a silver-haired man in a windbreaker and me. The Jets were wearing throwback jerseys, in the blue and gold from when they were the New York Titans. Jets Fan was finding this a sacrilege, and how Jets Fan communicated this, and everything, was by yelling at the top of his lungs. “THEY’RE WEARING GREEN, THEN THEY’RE WEARING BLUE! WHY DO THEY FUCKING DO THIS FUCKING SHIT!” He was drinking, as the old smokes do, a mug of Budweiser with a shot of Jameson next to it, money in a little stack in between. “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!” Polo Shirt offered, “They’re trying to confuse the other team. They practiced all week looking for green jerseys.”

Jets Fan set the tone for the afternoon, cheering first downs, receptions, near receptions, commercials: “THE JETS! DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT?” Every few minutes he hopped out of his stool and pranced, “J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS! JETS!” The bartender, a shop-class-teacher-looking fellow in dad jeans, started to lose his patience, amiably. “Don’t make me cut you off.” “I’m not yelling, I’m rooting,” Jets Fan responded.

Open since 1975, Denny's is near the dead center of Brooklyn, not far from Flatbush. It’s in a working-class neighborhood, with Irish and Italian roots now mixed with Latino and South Asian communities and the even more recent Twentysomethings, pushed out of more northerly and expensive Kings County enclaves. From the inside, you could convince yourself that it was still 1975, with the drop-ceiling fixtures and the orange of the fake leather on the stools, but for the flat-screen TVs and the obligatory 9-11 memorabilia behind the bar.

According to this transcribed 1926 article from the Brooklyn Standard Union, a survey of Brooklyn bars six years after the end of Prohibition (which "takes no account of places that [were] still operating as thirst parlors or of the smaller number that have been padlocked for violations"), there were a little more than 160 bars in Brooklyn. Now, this online guide lists 156, but the Yellow Pages gives 1,378. Even though Brooklyn has a little more elbow room than Manhattan across the East River, the bar remains Brooklyn's living room.

And Denny's is clearly a Brooklyn bar. You'd be able to tell that with your eyes closed, as the Brooklyn accent is not dead. Jets Fan had a very loud one, Silver had it as a gravelly bass, and Polo Shirt had a silky baritone that would well suit a character actor.

The vague menace of Brooklyn is also not dead. Before the game, Silver came in, ordered his Captain Morgans, and asked the bartender, “That idiot bring back my knife? The idiot with the mouth.” Silver has a bit of a cough. “He said he was going to leave it here last night, put it in an envelope. The Spanish guy, screams a lot. He took it off my key chain. Fucking cocksucker.” This leads to a wistful conversation concerning switchblades they have known, but it turns out the knife in question is a penknife, and the Spanish guy, one of the Latinos, wearing a red sweatshirt, does indeed show up and return it. “Good thing I fucking like you,” Silver quipped.

Red was not Spanish, but Puerto Rican. This was announced by Jets Fan as soon as Red arrived: “FUCKING PUERTO RICANS!” “Stupid Micks,” Red riposted. This was a ritual greeting. Red and Jets Fan were clearly friends, and their back and forth continued for the entirety of the first half.

N-bombs were dropped too, even as a few black men stop in for a snort and some football. “Why is a white person not allowed to say nigger anymore?” Jets Fan asked. “Because you white guys have said it enough,” a black guy in a Carhart answered, which is maybe as good of an answer to the question as I’ve heard.

As if to make this an even more apt snapshot of Brooklyn at this moment in time, a few young men came in, guys who are called hipsters by the locals even if they might not be, everyone lacking a better term to describe the gentrifying agents inadvertently changing many neighborhoods in Brooklyn. One, a guy with sideburns and a soft voice, asked if the bar would be showing the game, which evoked sarcasm from the old smokes. Two came in together, and stood watching the TV over the pool table, snacking on the complimentary meatloaf left out in a chafing dish on a table in the middle of the room. (Denny’s stopped selling steak years ago, so don’t ask for it.) They got made fun of for being a black guy and a white guy together, and for the wild hair of the white guy. This was a master class in the busting of chops.

And there was me, whose chops evaded busting. I picked out this place, which is not unknown to Brooklyners both born-and-raised and recent, because it was an old man bar in a far-flung location, and because I had never been there. I intended to ask questions: how’s business, how are job prospects, how’s everyone doing? But by the second half I’m not the guy with the notebook trying to look like he’s not listening in; I’m another guy at the bar, watching football, trying to remember stats, reminiscing about decades past. I was expecting the gloom of the recession, a certain shortness of hope, a despair born of unhealthy lifestyle choices, but I found some all-right guys killing a Sunday afternoon in the way they always do. For all the chest-pounding, these men, despite their various life stories and circumstances, were friends, and if times are tight outside, you wouldn’t be able tell from inside.

The second half was relatively more sedate, mostly because Jets Fan fell asleep, and the bartender warned us to leave him that way. The bellowing back and forth gave way to game-watching and appreciation of plays. The guy next to me, about my age and Latino, was a Redskins fan growing up, and we talked about football from twenty years ago, when I was a Bills fan and therefore part of the luckiest/unluckiest fan base in the NFL. I’d planned on leaving before then, but the buyback came and the chat was pleasant, so I put the notebook away. We were not making news. We were watching football at the old man bar.

As the one o’clock games ended and I planned my departure, the bar emptied out. Now, it was just me and the bartender, Soft Voice, and a young woman in a Vikings jersey, fresh out of bed, she said. She wasn't the only woman from the afternoon—an older woman, someone’s girlfriend, was there for a spell in the third quarter, and a few moms brought their kids in to use the bathroom—but the testosterone in the place, so thick earlier that afternoon, was cut entirely. She and Soft Voice were chatting. Maybe they were flirting? On this afternoon, once the smokes and the neighborhood guys went off back to their wives and jobs or wherever they go when they’re not at the bar, the youngsters were the only ones left at the old man bar.



Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

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]]> Outside Denny’s Steak Pub, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, steps from the Church Avenue F stop, a would-be customer, wearing a Yankees T-shirt and a bit of a haunted look, shuffled back and forth, focused on the scratch-off lottery tickets that trailed behind him like exhaust. He ducked his head in every once in a while: “Six dollars!” His buddy called out, “Don’t come in,” and Scratcher nodded sadly, and waited for his pal on the sidewalk. “You’re still 86ed,” the bartender added, not unkindly. Scratcher was still a regular; he just wasn’t allowed to come in to this particular old man bar this particular afternoon.

Inside the bar it was loud, and tough to hear the football games we were watching. “Everybody got fucking jokes in this joint.” That was an accurate statement, made approximately halfway through the second quarter of the Jets game, already out of the Jaguars' grasp. The speaker was lucky to get a word in edgewise. On the left hand side of the bar, five Latino men in their 30s stood around the one TV tuned to the Tennessee Panthers game (where Cam Newton alternately dazzled and threw picks); on the right sat two old smokes, one in a polo shirt, and one in what looked to be a Jets jersey but was actually a Brooklyn Cyclones promotional shirt in the same shade of green that the Jets use.

That shade of green was the source of the first controversy of the afternoon. As the game started, there were only four men in the bar: the bartender, Polo Shirt, Jets Fan, a silver-haired man in a windbreaker and me. The Jets were wearing throwback jerseys, in the blue and gold from when they were the New York Titans. Jets Fan was finding this a sacrilege, and how Jets Fan communicated this, and everything, was by yelling at the top of his lungs. “THEY’RE WEARING GREEN, THEN THEY’RE WEARING BLUE! WHY DO THEY FUCKING DO THIS FUCKING SHIT!” He was drinking, as the old smokes do, a mug of Budweiser with a shot of Jameson next to it, money in a little stack in between. “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!” Polo Shirt offered, “They’re trying to confuse the other team. They practiced all week looking for green jerseys.”

Jets Fan set the tone for the afternoon, cheering first downs, receptions, near receptions, commercials: “THE JETS! DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT?” Every few minutes he hopped out of his stool and pranced, “J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS! JETS!” The bartender, a shop-class-teacher-looking fellow in dad jeans, started to lose his patience, amiably. “Don’t make me cut you off.” “I’m not yelling, I’m rooting,” Jets Fan responded.

Open since 1975, Denny's is near the dead center of Brooklyn, not far from Flatbush. It’s in a working-class neighborhood, with Irish and Italian roots now mixed with Latino and South Asian communities and the even more recent Twentysomethings, pushed out of more northerly and expensive Kings County enclaves. From the inside, you could convince yourself that it was still 1975, with the drop-ceiling fixtures and the orange of the fake leather on the stools, but for the flat-screen TVs and the obligatory 9-11 memorabilia behind the bar.

According to this transcribed 1926 article from the Brooklyn Standard Union, a survey of Brooklyn bars six years after the end of Prohibition (which "takes no account of places that [were] still operating as thirst parlors or of the smaller number that have been padlocked for violations"), there were a little more than 160 bars in Brooklyn. Now, this online guide lists 156, but the Yellow Pages gives 1,378. Even though Brooklyn has a little more elbow room than Manhattan across the East River, the bar remains Brooklyn's living room.

And Denny's is clearly a Brooklyn bar. You'd be able to tell that with your eyes closed, as the Brooklyn accent is not dead. Jets Fan had a very loud one, Silver had it as a gravelly bass, and Polo Shirt had a silky baritone that would well suit a character actor.

The vague menace of Brooklyn is also not dead. Before the game, Silver came in, ordered his Captain Morgans, and asked the bartender, “That idiot bring back my knife? The idiot with the mouth.” Silver has a bit of a cough. “He said he was going to leave it here last night, put it in an envelope. The Spanish guy, screams a lot. He took it off my key chain. Fucking cocksucker.” This leads to a wistful conversation concerning switchblades they have known, but it turns out the knife in question is a penknife, and the Spanish guy, one of the Latinos, wearing a red sweatshirt, does indeed show up and return it. “Good thing I fucking like you,” Silver quipped.

Red was not Spanish, but Puerto Rican. This was announced by Jets Fan as soon as Red arrived: “FUCKING PUERTO RICANS!” “Stupid Micks,” Red riposted. This was a ritual greeting. Red and Jets Fan were clearly friends, and their back and forth continued for the entirety of the first half.

N-bombs were dropped too, even as a few black men stop in for a snort and some football. “Why is a white person not allowed to say nigger anymore?” Jets Fan asked. “Because you white guys have said it enough,” a black guy in a Carhart answered, which is maybe as good of an answer to the question as I’ve heard.

As if to make this an even more apt snapshot of Brooklyn at this moment in time, a few young men came in, guys who are called hipsters by the locals even if they might not be, everyone lacking a better term to describe the gentrifying agents inadvertently changing many neighborhoods in Brooklyn. One, a guy with sideburns and a soft voice, asked if the bar would be showing the game, which evoked sarcasm from the old smokes. Two came in together, and stood watching the TV over the pool table, snacking on the complimentary meatloaf left out in a chafing dish on a table in the middle of the room. (Denny’s stopped selling steak years ago, so don’t ask for it.) They got made fun of for being a black guy and a white guy together, and for the wild hair of the white guy. This was a master class in the busting of chops.

And there was me, whose chops evaded busting. I picked out this place, which is not unknown to Brooklyners both born-and-raised and recent, because it was an old man bar in a far-flung location, and because I had never been there. I intended to ask questions: how’s business, how are job prospects, how’s everyone doing? But by the second half I’m not the guy with the notebook trying to look like he’s not listening in; I’m another guy at the bar, watching football, trying to remember stats, reminiscing about decades past. I was expecting the gloom of the recession, a certain shortness of hope, a despair born of unhealthy lifestyle choices, but I found some all-right guys killing a Sunday afternoon in the way they always do. For all the chest-pounding, these men, despite their various life stories and circumstances, were friends, and if times are tight outside, you wouldn’t be able tell from inside.

The second half was relatively more sedate, mostly because Jets Fan fell asleep, and the bartender warned us to leave him that way. The bellowing back and forth gave way to game-watching and appreciation of plays. The guy next to me, about my age and Latino, was a Redskins fan growing up, and we talked about football from twenty years ago, when I was a Bills fan and therefore part of the luckiest/unluckiest fan base in the NFL. I’d planned on leaving before then, but the buyback came and the chat was pleasant, so I put the notebook away. We were not making news. We were watching football at the old man bar.

As the one o’clock games ended and I planned my departure, the bar emptied out. Now, it was just me and the bartender, Soft Voice, and a young woman in a Vikings jersey, fresh out of bed, she said. She wasn't the only woman from the afternoon—an older woman, someone’s girlfriend, was there for a spell in the third quarter, and a few moms brought their kids in to use the bathroom—but the testosterone in the place, so thick earlier that afternoon, was cut entirely. She and Soft Voice were chatting. Maybe they were flirting? On this afternoon, once the smokes and the neighborhood guys went off back to their wives and jobs or wherever they go when they’re not at the bar, the youngsters were the only ones left at the old man bar.



Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/watching-the-jets-at-the-old-man-bar/feed 16 Brooklyn's Guide to Hurricane Preparedness http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/brooklyns-guide-to-hurricane-preparedness http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/brooklyns-guide-to-hurricane-preparedness#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:00:42 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/brooklyns-guide-to-hurricane-preparedness Although we're currently only at a 30% chance of sustained winds in excess of 58 miles per hour in Brooklyn, and the weather forecast for the 11211 currently only says "gusts up to 85 mph" for Sunday, it's still not a terrible idea to be prepared. Some thoughts for you!

• A device that creates light. As you likely know, the light in your home comes from "electricity." In Brooklyn, much of your electric comes into your townhouse by way of above-ground electrical lines. (You can call your contractor and ask about this if you like; he won't return your call.) Those lines are often disturbed in high winds, due to trees and such. So it might be worthwhile to get a battery-powered lamp or some such, like a flashlight even. N.B. If you order a cute little electric generator on Amazon it will not arrive prior to the storm, no matter how much you yell at Fedex. Pro tip: fire can also be used to create light. (Use sparingly.)

• A hard-sided cat carrier. Not just for cats anymore! Should you need to transport your baby in the storm, your natural-cloth Baby Bjorn carrier is not going to protect little Chavley, Simon or Clementine against the elements. Stuff that kiddo in a cat carrier and he'll be as safe as can be. (Bonus: floats a bit.)

• Did you also know that the internet in your house is powered locally by electricity? It's not impossible that you could be without the internet this weekend. That also means Netflix and even television, if you still watch that. (It also likely means a lack of VOIP phone service.) Prepare for the weekend and its aftermath with "paper books" and even board games. (Try a deck of cards, yes.)

• Food. There will likely be no delivery of food to your home, and you may be forced to create or assemble edibles yourself. If you go to your fridge right now and you see eight yogurts, half a loaf of hemp bread and a deli box of cut fruit, that is not actually food. But: get some food that does not require electricity to create; your "stove" may require it to create heat. (N.B. Remove shoes and/or papers from stove before using.)

• Don't worry about the homeless people. They'll take shelter in drains and sewers!

• Hey, you know what else runs on electricity in your home? The hot water in your shower. Surprise! (Also? Your iPhone will stop charging.)

• One other thing to note about this is... exactly how long do you think it'll take for the City to restore power lines if they go down all over Brooklyn and Queens? I'm putting that at about two to six weeks. Just a thought!

• Move your hard drives up to the second floor. What if you lost all your early design work from RISD?

• Be creative!

Well, we've filled up all our empty Prime Meats growlers with water. #irene #brooklyn #yuppiescumFri Aug 26 12:43:43 via webAbby Aguirre
abby_aguirre

• You should know that gravity causes water to move downwards, such as toward your basement.

• People who will not help you this weekend include: your nanny, the folks at 311, cab drivers, the trash guys, your neighbors, your cleaning lady, bus drivers, people on Twitter, the people who sit in the subway stations and give directions to tourists because they have a really good union (who will not even be there anyway once the subway shuts down tomorrow), the pot delivery guy whose number you got from a friend "just in case," the really nice barista you see every morning and strangers on the street. They have problems of their own, and you are, at last, on your own.

Photo by Mattijs Grannetia

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]]> Although we're currently only at a 30% chance of sustained winds in excess of 58 miles per hour in Brooklyn, and the weather forecast for the 11211 currently only says "gusts up to 85 mph" for Sunday, it's still not a terrible idea to be prepared. Some thoughts for you!

• A device that creates light. As you likely know, the light in your home comes from "electricity." In Brooklyn, much of your electric comes into your townhouse by way of above-ground electrical lines. (You can call your contractor and ask about this if you like; he won't return your call.) Those lines are often disturbed in high winds, due to trees and such. So it might be worthwhile to get a battery-powered lamp or some such, like a flashlight even. N.B. If you order a cute little electric generator on Amazon it will not arrive prior to the storm, no matter how much you yell at Fedex. Pro tip: fire can also be used to create light. (Use sparingly.)

• A hard-sided cat carrier. Not just for cats anymore! Should you need to transport your baby in the storm, your natural-cloth Baby Bjorn carrier is not going to protect little Chavley, Simon or Clementine against the elements. Stuff that kiddo in a cat carrier and he'll be as safe as can be. (Bonus: floats a bit.)

• Did you also know that the internet in your house is powered locally by electricity? It's not impossible that you could be without the internet this weekend. That also means Netflix and even television, if you still watch that. (It also likely means a lack of VOIP phone service.) Prepare for the weekend and its aftermath with "paper books" and even board games. (Try a deck of cards, yes.)

• Food. There will likely be no delivery of food to your home, and you may be forced to create or assemble edibles yourself. If you go to your fridge right now and you see eight yogurts, half a loaf of hemp bread and a deli box of cut fruit, that is not actually food. But: get some food that does not require electricity to create; your "stove" may require it to create heat. (N.B. Remove shoes and/or papers from stove before using.)

• Don't worry about the homeless people. They'll take shelter in drains and sewers!

• Hey, you know what else runs on electricity in your home? The hot water in your shower. Surprise! (Also? Your iPhone will stop charging.)

• One other thing to note about this is... exactly how long do you think it'll take for the City to restore power lines if they go down all over Brooklyn and Queens? I'm putting that at about two to six weeks. Just a thought!

• Move your hard drives up to the second floor. What if you lost all your early design work from RISD?

• Be creative!

Well, we've filled up all our empty Prime Meats growlers with water. #irene #brooklyn #yuppiescumFri Aug 26 12:43:43 via webAbby Aguirre
abby_aguirre

• You should know that gravity causes water to move downwards, such as toward your basement.

• People who will not help you this weekend include: your nanny, the folks at 311, cab drivers, the trash guys, your neighbors, your cleaning lady, bus drivers, people on Twitter, the people who sit in the subway stations and give directions to tourists because they have a really good union (who will not even be there anyway once the subway shuts down tomorrow), the pot delivery guy whose number you got from a friend "just in case," the really nice barista you see every morning and strangers on the street. They have problems of their own, and you are, at last, on your own.

Photo by Mattijs Grannetia

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