Butcher on Broadway

I don't know how long this butcher has been at this space on Broadway, but Big Joe sent me over there because he claimed there was a big statue of cow on their sidewalk. Of course I didn't get around to walking over there until several weeks later. I didn't see a cow but I was struck by their signage.

I don't eat meat, but I think that if I did, I'd probably buy it here. This sign advertising naturally grain fed meat with no growth hormones or antibiotics makes me think that the place might be new, or at least is catering to a new demographic.

But even more intriguing are their meat 'plans,' plans for the week I'm guessing. For the pork lover, the beef lover and the compact and deluxe family. I love the free items. If you're a meat and potatoes kind of person, you're all set.

This makes me think about what we spend on groceries for week ($120) to feed our family of two adults and one small child. Mind you we shop at the Park Slope Food Co-op which makes all the difference. But I wonder if we ate meat if our food bill would be higher. When I was a kid all I wanted to eat was meat, potatoes and sugar. In many third world countries meat is a luxury. While traveling around Indonesia with my mom I missed out trying all kinds of delicious dishes by abstaining from meat. Which actually makes me want to visit a Hindu populated part of India, where they are vegetarians so I could eat everything. After I saw the fascinating book, "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats," by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio with a photo gallery in Time Magazine, I've been thinking about whether the way we eat is excessive or restrained. After viewing this picture of this family of seven adults and five children in Cairo, Egypt, whose weekly food expenditure is $68.53, I'm inclined to think the former.

Candy

Sweet Corner

Willie's Candy & Grocery

When Big Joe first bought our brownstone, someone had written the word 'Candy' in white paint, in an elegant script circling the manhole cover on the street in front of our house. That was one of the things I loved to see when I glanced out our front windows. Unfortunately I never photographed it and it soon faded and disappeared. I've thought of re-doing it, but my 'Candy' would just be a shrill imposter. Besides, even my own mother can't read my handwriting. One of the many wonderful things about Big Joe is that not only is he able to read my handwriting, he doesn't think it stinks. I love you Big Joe.

And I loooove candy. I grew up on sugar. I could easily put away an entire chocolate cake for dinner when I was a kid. And I was so skinny, my mother would let me in an effort to fatten me up. My lunches consisted of twinkies, ding dongs and marshmallow filled wagon wheels. Breakfast was pop tarts. My best friend and next door neighbour would steal money from her mother's purse and we'd run down to Hardy's Grocery two blocks away and buy bags full of cherry licorice strings, marshmallow bananas, sweet tarts, tangy taffy that nearly pulled our teeth out, pixie sticks, likamaid, unsweetened kool aid packets that made our faces pucker and our tongues turn blue, and gobstoppers we could barely fit in our mouths. Then we'd climb the trees separating our backyards to our 'tree house' (basically a plank of wood balanced on two branches) and scarf everything down in less than an hour. Then I discovered that sugar was what was causing my acne and cut it out altogether. Today it's all about moderation. Now that I have a child of my own, I barely let him near the sweet stuff, because I know it's only a matter of time before he discovers the treasure trove of sugar out there and goes apeshit.

Pit Bull Puppy Season

Yet another sign advertising pit bull puppies for sale.

This cutie isn't one of the advertised puppies, but he is a Blue Staff Pit Bull puppy from England.

Proud poppas. Their stud service only costs 300 pounds (586 U.S. dollars). I don't imagine the puppies to be much less in price.

Why are pit bulls the main dog of choice in Bed-Stuy? Is it just because they look tough? Or are they being used for dogfighting? In researching pit bulls in Brooklyn I came across a number of animal shelters with abused pit bulls. Pit Bulls on the Web has a shocking page with explicit photographs of the abused dogs - I couldn't even scroll down the entire page, it was too painful to look at. They take an adamant stance against breeding pit bulls:

Pit Bulls have it the hardest as most dog shelters in North America have a non-adoption policy on this breed. Healthy and friendly dogs are automatically euthanized just for being a Pit Bull or looking like one. Because unscrupulous people are allowed to breed dogs without any sort of regulation, Pit Bulls are now the #1 breed of dog killed in shelters every month. In Los Angeles alone, it is estimated that up to 200 Pit Bulls *A DAY* are destroyed.

From a 2007 article on "N.Y.'s Blood Sport" in the NY Daily News:

Brownsville and nearby East New York and Bed-Stuy are Ground Zero for New York City's dog-fighting scene, and dogs like this pit bull with one blue eye and one brown eye - Bean hasn't bothered to name her - are more target than deterrent, stolen by the thugs who run the local dog-fighting scene and used for training bait or breeding....

Dog-fighting is a felony in New York State, but enforcement is virtually nonexistent, Massaro (founder of the Spay Neuter Intervention Project, a Queens organization that provides care to junkyard dogs) says, and she hopes Vick's indictment will prompt Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council to make animal protection a citywide priority.

"Dog-fighting is far more common in New York City than most people think, especially in this neighborhood," Massaro says. "I've rescued 1,500 dogs in East New York, Bed-Stuy and Brownsville in the past 10 years, and the majority of those animals were involved in dog-fighting."

Massaro talks about local dog-fight fans who stage matches in nearby abandoned buildings. They see the dogs they train and fight as extensions of themselves. When they win, they feel powerful and lavish their dogs with praise and rewards. When the dogs lose, they abandon or kill the animal, as if they were removing weakness from their own psyches.

The animal shelter, Brooklyn's Home for Unwanted Bullies, talks about the nature of pit bulls:

These are really good dogs when trained and raised properly.... They can be in homes with children, other dogs and in some cases can be used as service animals. The key to raising a great Pit Bull is proper socialization, proper training, and proper ownership... These animals can be great family dogs.....They are incredibly intelligent and need a lot of attention. If you don't have a lot of time, don't get a Pit Bull.

And finally from the North Shore Animal League:

Many pit bulls are raised to be fighting dogs, which is a gruesome and bloody sport that is actually gaining popularity across the country. Dogs are actually raised and trained to be vicious to other dogs (and sometimes people, although this is actually against our nature). Smaller dogs are often used as “bait” and ripped apart in training by the fighting dogs that have been driven into a frenzy. Young pit bull puppies commonly have tires chained around their necks and are forced to run behind moving vehicles to make them “tough”. To condition their jaws for fighting, they are often encouraged to hang by their teeth from tree branches or rafters knowing that if they let go, they will fall far to the ground. And if they lose the fight, angry owners have been known to punish them in horrific ways like dowsing them in gasoline and setting their paws on fire; running them behind cars until they collapse from exhaustion and are then dragged to death; or simply throwing them from a rooftop...

Terrible things are done to pit bulls every day. Things that are too gruesome and heartbreaking to relate here, but you should know that they are happening. Contrary to popular opinion, pit bulls are not the problem; they are trained to be the way we are by people. The real problem lies in the mind-set of people who raise them to be vicious.

On our block I've seen children walking their frolicking pit bull puppy which even jumped up and licked my son's cheek while he was sitting on our stoop (my heart stopped, thank goodness it was just a lick) and young men 'conditioning the jaws' of their grown pit bull by making them hang from a stick at our local playground. However, I've never seen someone willfully mistreating their dogs. I would hope that the majority of pit bull owners are lovers not fighters.

The House of Many Colours

When Sheryl, her daughter, and the sleazy drunk guy were evicted from the building above a year and a half ago so that the owners could renovate it, we never expected the changes to come.

First the house was painted a dark cherry red, which I didn't photograph immediately, not knowing that this paint job would only last all of of three days. (This photoshopped picture gives a rough idea of how it looked).

Then both sides were repainted a sort of wild salmon color (on the left) with the pale sage green below. For some reason, Magnifico kept saying it looked like McDonald's. Today, however, two weeks later, it is in the process of being repainted again. This time a dark greyish brown (on the right).

The door has been replaced, once thus far, with this unusual door surfaced with old tin.

The owner, or someone in charge, is clearly of many minds about what colour he or she likes best. And seems to not really know how they feel about the colour until the entire building has been painted. These many changes in such a short period of time remind me of when I was a waitress in Amsterdam many years ago at a French restaurant called Katy Blue. It was named after an amalgamation of the chef/owner's ex-girlfriend and the movie 'Betty Blue' whose main character is a mentally unstable woman. This in itself was not a fortuitous beginning. The owner was a petite dapper French man in his mid-thirties who smoked a lot of pot. He'd taken over the space when it was a successful French restaurant under a different owner. Although he'd inherited the old restaurant's clientele, they soon began to dine elsewhere when he made some major changes to the decor and menu. He was then convinced that all he needed to do was change the decor and menu again. And again. In the month or two I worked there he changed the decor, our uniforms and the menu five times. Only the doomed name stayed the same. He eventually had to let go of the entire staff save for one line cook. I wonder if this building is off to as great a start as my old place of employment.

Funnily enough we ran into Sheryl and her daughter by the subway station a month or so ago. They ended up moving only a couple of blocks away. Sheryl was in an ecstatic mood as her daughter had beaten out several other aspiring singers and was scheduled to sing live at the Apollo. Unfortunately, sleazy drunk guy is also still in the neighbourhood. Apparently he has tried to grab and fondle Little Joe's best friend while she and her mom were out running errands, more than once. When we started bad mouthing him to Sheryl she rolled her eyes and said, "Well he's family, so what can I say." And then she told us he was (currently? or had been?) upstate somewhere at a mental institution.

As for the tenants to come, we've recently seen a Hasidic Jewish man and a young woman with a shorn head, piercings and tattoos standing on the sidewalk staring up at the fresh coat of wild salmon and discussing the house. But I think they're likely the owners, not new tenants, as the interior of the house isn't finished yet. Their seemingly odd association might account however for the continuing changes of the building's exterior. I can't wait to see what comes next.

Yesterday's Local News - American Apparel and Other Dirty Laundry

Load Giant Load I Love you. Somebody's having a love affair with our laundromat.

So where was I before I was rudely interrupted by that stop and frisk operation? Ah yes, laundry day. You know the neighbourhood is gentrifying when you see hipsters washing their sundries at the local laundromat. It used to be just us black, brown and yellow people with the occasional white person thrown in, wearing our everyday clothes pumping the quarters in the machines, folding the sheets. But now (meaning a dramatic showing in the last three months) there are skinny white boys wearing skinny jeans and skin-tight ironic t-shirts, and not so skinny white girls in American Apparel shiny leggings and tops inspired by eighties fashion that barely cover their asses with those scrunchy eighties boots and both sexes sporting expensive layered haircuts with bangs that obscure their eyes. All doing laundry at my laundromat. It looks like some big artsy fartsy loft in Williamsburg got a bed-bug scare and all the residents boarded a bus for Bed-Stuy. Hopefully they left the bed-bugs on the bus. Plus the Muslims now have hipster bootleg dvds for sale at their stand inside the laundromat. Lucky us. I mean you can only watch so many slasher films, action films and slapstick comedies.

Meanwhile, next door Reggie and Celia have new tenants. A young Polish family - mom, dad and baby all quite friendly but they really stand out because they may be the only Polish people in northern Bed-Stuy. And some youngish tenants of indeterminate origin. One of whom I saw do a discreet drug deal (okay this is supposition, I don't know for sure) with some white guy in a van. Here's what I saw, you make the call. I'm sitting on the stoop with my kid in the early evening, and a teenager with wild dark curly hair, seventies hipster musician type, comes out of R+C's house, runs down the stoop to the waiting van, greets the guy at the steering wheel, their hands make quick contact - not quite a handshake, and the teenager runs back in the house and the van zooms off. And the day before I saw a similar transaction take place across the street - two guys in their twenties, one white, one Latino walk down the sidewalk together, suddenly stop make the handshake/pass and then quickly go in different directions, the Latino counting a wad of bills as he walks away. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I need to get a television and stop watching the action on the block. Because it's starting to worry me. It seems that gentrification doesn't mean less drug deals in our hood, just different customers.

So back to the laundromat. Little Joe and I are in there taking the clean clothes out of the dryer when one of the Chinese ladies who works there, the one I've been feeling most sympatico to lately after watching her difficulties with some of the people who come there, stopped by our dryer, patted Little Joe's head (which he absolutely hates) and said to me with a big smile, "He have a girl face. Not a boy face. A girl face!" And then she laughed uproariously and walked away. Little Joe, quite livid at this point, snarled, "What did she say about me?" Wanting to stop him from going completely over the edge, I said, "Nothing. She wasn't talking about you." Weird. Just plain weird.

Clyde was admiring our tree yesterday, commenting on how much it's grown. I beamed, like a proud parent. It has grown. At least two feet. And he's the only person on our block who's noticed or cares. I really do like Clyde sober. He's charming. He also loves his van. Now that the weather's warmer he may be sleeping in there again. I noticed him move a t.v. in there month or so ago. But how can he possibly get any electricity? His home-in-a-van reminds me of when I was kid, and would stand outside in the pouring rain during recess with no one to play with, wet and freezing and wishing I was tiny and had a little heated box that attached to a corner of the building where no one would see it, and I could climb inside and there'd be a t.v. and hot cocoa and big comfy chair. Kind of like Woodstock's fancy pad in the Charlie Brown Easter special before Snoopy gets jealous and destroys it.

We've applied for our block party permit. Should happen in August, weather permitting.

A couple I've never seen before were cleaning up the broken glass and other debris in front of the eternally empty lot on our block, so the kids wouldn't fall in it and hurt themselves. Just took it upon themselves to do a block clean up. This inspired Big Joe so much, he and Little Joe took a garbage can up and down our street last weekend picking up the trash. I got an email back from the sanitation department saying they received my request for trash cans at each corner of our block. Apparently they're assessing the situation and will get back to me. But really, how hard is it to just drop off a couple of trash cans?

And this week is the week we find out which preschool we're able to send our son to. All decided by the great computer in the sky. Well at least the one at the DOE. Our fate is in their hands. Not a comforting thought.

Yesterday's Brooklyn weather: sunny/cloudy/windy. Today's Brooklyn weather: wet and cold.

Today's Local News - A Brisk Stop-and-Frisk Kind of Morning

Illustration: Seth Tobocman

This morning, being laundry day, I was stripping the beds when some movement outside the window caught my eye. I stopped to get a better look at two beefy undercover cops, one black, one Latino, in an unmarked car smack in the center of the street, pat down two black teenage boys, even checking their baseball caps. The cops, one wearing a NY Yankees jersey, the other in an NYPD sweatshirt seemed to be acting civilly to the young men, but I kept watching just to make sure. They were so civil in fact (no pushing or yelling, or slamming them against the vehicle) that when they let the boys go, everyone involved seemed quite amiable as though that had just been the normal way that people greeted one another in our neighbourhood. I was relieved and impressed at the cops demeanor, recalling our white neighbour's account of a recent stop-and-frisk in front of his house around the corner where the cops were anything but civil and his presence observing the scene seemed to make no difference whatsoever. But then I noticed one of our black neighbours had been sitting in the car directly behind the cops' vehicle talking on his cellphone the whole time. That explained everything.

The American Civil Liberties Union has an excellent "Know Your Rights: What To Do If You're Stopped by the Police" page that they suggest you print out and carry in your wallet, it's fairly lengthy but worth reading in its entirety, here's part of it:

IF YOU ARE STOPPED FOR QUESTIONING

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1. It's not a crime to refuse to answer questions, but refusing to answer can make the police suspicious about you. If you are asked to identify yourself, you must show your driver's license and registration when stopped in a car. Otherwise, you don't have to answer any questions if you are detained or arrested, with one important exception. The police may ask for your name if you have been properly detained, and you can be arrested in some states for refusing to give it. If you reasonably fear that your name is incriminating, you can claim the right to remain silent, which may be a defense in case you are arrested anyway.

2. Police may "pat-down" your clothing if they suspect a concealed weapon. Don't physically resist, but make it clear that you don't consent to any further search.

3. Ask if you are under arrest. If you are, you have a right to know why.

4. Don't bad-mouth the police officer or run away, even if you believe what is happening is unreasonable. That could lead to your arrest.

However, alarmingly, the NYCLU discovered last year that the NYPD is compiling a database of innocent New Yorkers who've been stopped by the police:

"In the coming days we will review in detail the newly-released data on the demographics of the people whom the police stopped and frisked in 2006," said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. "But the revelation that these individuals' names are being improperly collected and retained by the police is an added source of concern. The NYPD's collection and retention of this information represents a violation of the privacy rights of New Yorkers, may be illegal, and - given that the individuals stopped are disproportionately black or Hispanic - raises major concerns about racial profiling. People who have done nothing wrong should not be in a police database."

The NYCLU learned of the database from an internal NYPD operations order, dated 2006 (and now available on the NYCLU's website), that mandates that "stop-and-frisk worksheets," which officers fill out after stopping and frisking any individual, be submitted for inclusion in a new database. According to sources with first-hand knowledge of the database, the names of persons stopped are included in the database and can be obtained through a query of the system.

Below is the "CopWatch Video" from Brooklyn's Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in their words, "In this short documentary film, you ride along with a Justice Committee / MXGM CopWatch patrol in the streets of Brooklyn, where - just like in any city around the world - police disregard our rights as citizens and humans... and we do something about it.":



I'm constantly surprised by cops of colour treating their fellow humans this way. Big Joe says it's probably because they have something to prove to the rest of the force, that they're not going to treat a black or Hispanic person more leniently, in fact they'll be even rougher than a white cop. Perhaps the extreme evidence of this is the two black cops involved in the Sean Bell tragedy. The behaviour of some cops of colour is similar to what I've experienced with a few women bosses who acted extra tough to prove that just because they're female they were not going to be pushovers.

This local news post has clearly become something else. So I guess I'll be giving you Today's Local News tomorrow.

Urban Decay

Big Joe and I share a common love of urban decay. I guess we like pretty/shiny/designy/newfangled if its the right kind of pretty/shiny/designy/newfangled but give us a graffitied run-down shack to feast our eyes on over a glassy condominium any day.

Russell Loves Tina Maria. Tina I Miss You.

The outside of the wire fence protecting Russell's shack had the biggest assortment of steaming stinking dog shit I've ever seen in my life. Just masses and masses of it. Right outside the shack's closed door was a toothless man eating his lunch out of a styrofoam container and sitting on a beaten up old couch missing much of its stuffing. He claimed that it was his shack. I didn't ask about Tina Maria.

Although this shack has no story that I know of, if shingles could talk, this would be a tale worth listening to.