Thus the Name: Inspiration From Above

Where the Highway Meets the Street

The mighty Gowanus
frames the landscape
cuts across the horizon

The Road Through Leisure

*More Plastic Bags Impaled on Barbed Wire

These are the flowers of the industrial landscape (endless variations on a basic structure).

*See Industrial Haiku #2

Brooklyn Playgrounds (No. 2)

The Brooklyn playground is a functional thing, often installed (seemingly as an afterthought) beneath ramps and overpasses and next to expressways. This is a legacy of Robert Moses, whose auto-centric vision of New York melded transportation and leisure in a perverse way that was oblivious to humanity and aesthetics.


Nonetheless, this is the landscape we’ve inherited, and it’s oddly stimulating. Maybe this is a result of the collision between Moses’ anti-humanist vision and the power of social adaptability, that assertion of humanity in the face of hostile forces.


This hopeful attitude is diminished, though, when one sees these concrete-and-metal-filled spaces barren of people (as they often are). Then it becomes apparent that there’s really something uninviting about these playgrounds, these footnotes to the highway.


I still like the highway playground, in the same way I might like an old dysfunctional radio that looks just right on the window sill. But I mostly appreciate the highway playground because it’s essentially, undeniably Brooklyn.

Some Books I’ve Found on the Streets of Brooklyn

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Döblin)
Selected Works (Cicero)
On the Good Life (Cicero)
The Information (Martin Amis)
Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe)
The Pat Hobby Stories (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Selected Poems (T.S Eliot)
A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams)
Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller)
The King of the Fields (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
The Recognitions (William Gaddis)
Dracula (Bram Stoker)
Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
Scarlet and Black (Stendhal)
Selected Poetry (Byron)
Jerusalem, Selected Poetry and Prose (William Blake)
The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden
Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats
The Art of War (Sun Tzu)
This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen (Tadeusz Borowski)
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
The Tenants (Bernard Malmud)
The Grifters (Jim Thompson)
The Fuck-up (Arthur Neresian)
The Outsider (Colin Wilson)
And the Ass Saw the Angel (Nick Cave)

Industrial Haiku No. 5

Gutted bus with
ripped out seats beside it
sun sets behind the water tower

Industrial Haiku No. 4

Trophies in the garbage
spring cleaning means
scrapping trinkets of victory

Ninth Street Bridge Vista

The Ninth Street Bridge and its environs is a hallowed spot, a signature corner of Brooklyn where industry and transit converge in a dramatic way. (The picture above was taken from the platform of the Smith and 9th subway stop, the city’s tallest.)

The Ninth Street Bridge vista is at once bleak and majestic, an intoxicating mixture of everything I find wondrous about Brooklyn. When I first gazed upon this panorama, I felt the pulse of the sublime coursing through me and I actually swooned. Such breathtaking grittiness defines Brooklyn's mystique.

This panorama is dense with contradictions. It's a cold industrial landscape, yet also it pulsates with a warm neighborhood charm. The area radiates harmony, yet discord is right on the surface. The factories whose smokestacks and storage silos dominate the landscape are symbols of the past over which hangs an air of doom. These hulking relics of tangibility seem exotic compared to the gleaming towers downtown housing the apparatus of the ethereal new economy.

Industrial Haiku No. 3

Tugboat rolls down the canal
it’s come to tow
the scrap metal barge

Brooklyn Playgrounds (No. 1)

Windsor Terrace is On a War Footing

Industrial Haiku No. 2

Windswept plastic bags
snagged on barbed wire
the building’s safe from garbage

Industrial Haiku No. 1

Bumpers in a dumpster
spilling out
collision souvenirs