NYC #7. Brooklyn Street Art

If you ever want to whinge about your lot in life, catch the subway train to Bushwick in Brooklyn and see how the other half live, that’s why I had to tell Rhonda, “today it’s a mystery tour”, if she knew where we were headed it would have ended up been a solo trip.

After crossing the Williamsburg Bridge in to Brooklyn, New York becomes dirty, crumbling and depressing and the only activity there seems to be graffiting so there was barely one surface of the landscape that hadn’t been attacked with a spray can, the only place you couldn’t see any was where rubbish was covering it up.

Sunday seems to be looney day on the subway, it’s not that you don’t get a fair share of them during the week but the weekend must be allocated as their special time and they make full use of that honour too.
Everyone knows of the standard ranter and raver, the crazy ones you definitely don’t want to approach but there’s a quieter sub species that get around too. Their craziness seems to have turned more introspective though their dress sense give them away.

There was Sir Lunatic who was a cross between an English Knight and Merlin the Magician, either this was his persona or he didn’t have the outfit to complete either character so a little mix and match was used to create his own unique one.
The sword part of his outfit was pretty neat, he had the stabbing bit right but then the hilt was made from a crystal ball. The armour was a mixture of armour, magicians robes and court jesters gear. I gave him 10 out of 10, a very good effort or the day.

Probably a runner up was a woman who had very thick, long hair. I don’t know how she did it but she grabbed a bunch of about 100 hairs and dyed them fluorescent green the next 100 dyed blond, the next 100 left natural brunette. She then braided them all together into s sort of dreadlock style.
Set against her metallic gold shoes and metallic robe type things she wore, maybe she could give Sir Lunatic a run for his money on the winners score... oh yeah, in her hair she had stuck a mass of flowers so maybe the hair style was supposed to represent the earth or something cosmic like that.

There were quite a few others who weren’t really trying they just muttered and gesticulated to themselves constantly, both the knight and flower power lady did that so if the others put a little more effort into their costumes that would have raised their personal score.

A lot of places that were once grand and have now fallen to pieces seem to get reborn, gentrified as money comes back in and this is usually by hipsters pretending they are slumming it but they don’t want dirt and poverty, they want art.
So what happens first is, artists who really are slumming it move in because they can’t afford anything better. A group of them form a collective then go crazy all over the neighbourhood because the place is such a dump the police and anyone else couldn’t care less.
The street art they create gives the place a real “vibe”. Hipsters thrive on vibe, they feel they are now part of the “artistic scene” so that’s hip. But now they need hip restaurants and hip bars and all the rest. This is just starting to happen in Bushwick and maybe it will kill off what they came here for but at the moment the place is still lousy with great street art.Read more