OVERFLOW | Spring 2009

OVERFLOW

gowanus . red hook . carroll gardens . cobble hill . boerum hill . park slope

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OVERFLOW ISSUE 1 | SPRING 2009

Slouching Toward Civilization Flight 826 December 1960 Zagar Shooting Zagar

The Next Battleground VINCENT RACCUGLIA photo essay

Searching for

Connie Converse

Aliens, Not To Be Confused With Men in Rubber Suits

Grand Army Winters Over On the Cover: Gene Romero

Photo by David Gardiner

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ife around the Gowanus Canal has its special moments. That first time you spit off the side of the Carroll Street Bridge and watch the guppies jump in fear; stumbling across a hidden bar on Second Avenue; navigating your bike across debris spilling from a new deluxe condo on a superfund site.

Moving between the peripheral neighborhoods, we all notice the dynamism. New neighbors, new shops, new dwellings. OVERFLOW is about these changes, but also about the history these changes unearth— and the people who have lived through it all.

Having hopped between the park and waterfront for a decade, one constant we’ve recognized has been the abundance of talent and ideas that rises up around the canal. OVERFLOW is ultimately about this—about the overeducated and the underemployed. About the drive of our cohabitants and the beautiful products of their work.

In this, our first issue, we try to capture a snapshot of our neighborhoods today. Over time, we hope that we will have archived our little corner of Brooklyn in an honest, sincere wayy that shows us all just what we have going on here.

We welcome your help and your ideas in this project, and we encourage you to write us with your thoughts and comments at comments@overflowmagazine.com.

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1. Phil Matricardi is an avid science fiction reader and physics dilettante. He currently earns his living slinging Internet popup ads, and says that this is what “keeps the Internet free.” 2. Hunter Nelson is an illustrator and performer who grew up in Texas. He’s working on a graphic novel called Critter Show. 3. Nino Cirabisi is grateful to be living in a world known as Brooklyn. 4. Colin Weatherby is a sundeprived San Diego boy living in the warm Home Depot glow of Bedford-Stuyvesant. He recently purchased a pair of snowshoes that may become a nice wall ornament and thinks that Flight 1549 totally legitimized all his procrastination. 5. Lau derette Recordings was founded by longtime friends and audio engineers David Herman and Dan Dzula. Connie Converse’s How Sad, How Lovely marks Lau derette’s inaugural release and will be available March 3, 2009. www.lauderette.com 6. Sarah Wilmer loves adventure. 7. Lauren Wissot is a Brooklyn-based erotica author, filmmaker, and film and theater critic for various online publications including Slant, The House Next Door, Theater Online and Spout where she pens a weekly “Sex Scenes” column. For more information, visit her at beyondthegreendoor.blogspot. com. 8. Shane Dixon Kavanaugh works for a Manhattan-based political consulting firm, is an associate editor for Slice Magazine, and serves as Knox Dupree’s copy editor for The Heartbroke Daily, a literary blog. He grew up in Eugene, Oregon. He rooms and boards in Brooklyn, New York. 9. Luca Giovanopoulos is a Brooklyn-based print maker and illustrator. Her inspirations are deeply rooted in fashion and food.

Lucagiovan@gmail.com 10. Gene Romero !!!BEWARE...of Shapes & Colors!!! They are pesky things that tease you all day & play music on your face when you dream......kidrainbowshines.com 11. Jeanne Hodesh grew up in her parents’ bed and breakfast in Maine and now shops religiously at the Fort Green and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets. In between writing for Edible Brooklyn, Edible Manhattan, Saveur.com, and her weekly e-newsletter Local Gourmands, she makes time to cook applesauce. 12. Jeff Brown has 25 years of experience. www.jr-brown. com 13. Nari Kye considers herself incredibly lucky to have been born Korean, since Korean cuisine is by far the greatest in the world. www.narikye.com

14. David Brenner is a Brooklyn-based screenwriter. He is currently developing a

cartoon series. Brenner.Da-

vid@gmail.com 15. David Gardiner is a Costa Rican ex-professional Triathlete turned Photographer/Photo retoucher who specializes in sports and event Photography. Clients include Red Bull, New York Road Runners Foundation, and Loreal. When not shoot-

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5

“We’re really one of the first businesses to have the balls to open a bar in

what was essentially eight cars leaking oil on a concrete floor,

explains Jack McFadden, as he shows me the ins and outs of the Bell House on a cold Monday. McFadden, who sports a pair of blue jeans, a stocking cap, and a week-old beard, is the talent buyer and program director for these sleek Gowanus digs, a two-room lounge and music venue that opened at the end of August ‘08.

I was early for my appointment with McFadden that evening, so I had spent an hour drinking Jameson on the rocks in the lounge.

The place was empty, except for myself and Noelle Griffis, an enchanting Belle from Birmingham, Alabama, who tended bar. Five years in Manhattan had taken most of the 6

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twang out of her voice, but her congenital southern hospitality seemed intact. We were able to hold a conversation for the better part of the hour, talking about the Beatles, the F train and the Pacific Northwest. The soft golden light from the chandeliers above us cast a sepia glow over the room, inducing me to envision old photographs. The varnished stools, antique chairs, and couches were reminiscent of an upscale saloon. The only things missing were sawdust on the floor and a cuspidor within spittin’ range of the bar.

tapped. The area has a lot of promise.” And promise is precisely what Mr. McFadden, along with his co-conspirators Jim Carden and Andy Templar – the faces behind Park Slope’s Union Hall and Brooklyn Heights’ Floyd – believe they can take to the bank with the Bell House. Last Spring, these enterprising gentlemen chose to hitch their wagons, venture out into uncharted territory, and stake a claim in a neighborhood largely defined by its dilapidated industrial warehouses, its littered and crumbling streets, and its polluted canal.

“We’re between four amazing neighborhoods,” McFadden continues. “We are so close to everything. Yet Gowanus is still un-

Today, in a building that once housed an old printing press and later a shipping company, the Bell House now stands. It is unique

Slouching Toward Civilization by: Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

of water after which it is named. With the arrival of the Bell House into the neighborhood, however, there is a chance that this might soon start to change.

among the predominately industrial buildings of the neighborhood in its ambition and design. The ornate chandeliers and old-world furnishings somehow lack the kitsch and glib posturing of like-minded establishments.

The bar offers a splendid variety of handcrafted and artisanal taps. House cocktails with names such as Mellow Gold, Surfer Rosa, and Pinkerton are sure to intrigue many of those who frequent these haunts, each a shout out to an album from our contemporary fake book: Beck, The Pixies, and Weezer.

The dropped ceilings, exposed wood, and expansive floor plan of the performance space invites a wall of sound that leaves the music hanging in the air like a thick cloud of smoke.

Standing there during a live show one cannot help but imagine McFadden as Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo, a mad man possessed, driven by the fantastic dream of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

Centered above the rich mahogany stage rests a portrait of a lone, majestic buffalo printed on an oversized slab of oval wood. The image alludes to the bold pioneering spirit that has landed this lavish lounge and music hall in the center of Gowanus, a neighborhood that until recently had been a no-man’s land straddling the beaten paths of Park Slope, Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, and Boerum Hill. While over the last couple of years it has become the nesting ground for a small handful of roguish bohemians, Gowanus largely remains, as Mr. McFadden asserts, an area of unfulfilled promise and remarkable potential.

Some folks are quick to draw comparisons between Gowanus and what Williamsburg was, say, 10 or 15 years ago. Still, most living in the surrounding neighborhoods don’t look here to find their bread and circus, turning all-too often instead to that other side of 4th Avenue or to Smith and Court streets to eat, drink, dance, and mingle. And so Gowanus continues to lurk, under the radar, drifting by in relative obscurity, much like the body

This was apparent on an evening several days after my initial visit. I arrived on a Friday night just in time for Rachel Warren, lead singer of Palomar, a pop-driven indie foursome from Clinton Hill, to close out her band’s set. Two more acts were to take the stage before the evening’s end. “Thanks for coming all the way out to this God Forsaken place,” Ms. Warren declared to the rapt and lively audience of about 150 people.

Yet somehow the delivery fell flat. No cheering or applause followed her closing remarks., instead a puzzled grumble rose up from the crowd. It was obvious that the folks around me just didn’t know what to make of this statement. Eventually, Palomar launched into its final song of the night, and the awkward moment passed, though not before revealing in her misstep a view into the heart of the audience. The Bell House addresses a heretofore unfulfilled need for South Brooklyn, a real venue in a neighborhood defined by a drainage ditch, one that promises to collect all the culture flowing downhill in both directions. O 7

Flight 826 December 1960

by Colin Weatherby

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cold December evening on a street corner in Park Slope is an experience to be had. There are few places in this city where an innocent bystander can witness such a steady stream of visibly relieved commuters. They’ve been to hell and back.

They are seconds away from home and you can see the anticipation on their twisted little faces. An amateur reporter with notebook in hand is liable to face severe punishment--but duty calls.

The corner of Sterling Place & 7th Avenue is a postcard image of early 21st century Park Slope affluence. Even a recently blind man could easily describe the scene. The squealing Q train is quickly followed by a din of stilettos and low cellular mumbling. This cycle runs in rough 15 minute intervals. Enter the brass section. Traffic lights change and a flurry of horns answer the cue. Vehicles jump 10

to a crawl as drivers mindlessly inch their way toward the vortex that is Grand Army Plaza.

In nearly every respect, it is a typical block in South Brooklyn--stately brownstones, lots of noise, and a frenetic pace that only a staunch urbanite could love.

There is very little on that corner to remind the average passerby that this intersection was torn to pieces on the morning of December 16, 1960. The details are gruesome. Two pas-

The larger United DC-8 careened across the harbor and quickly descended into Brooklyn.

The plane tore through an apartment building, a funeral parlor, a laundry, and several brownstones before ending its path of destruction, ironically, inside the Pillar of Fire Evangelical Church. One hundred thirtythree people died instantly, including two Christmas tree salesmen, a shopkeeper, and a sanitation worker shoveling the previous

“a plaque was installed in the hospital chapel containing 65 cents in charred coinage” senger jets collided at full speed over Staten Island in an act that defied incredible odds.

The smaller TWA plane quickly plunged into a pasture in a then rural New Dorp, Staten Island. All passengers were instantly killed.

evening’s snowfall. All passengers were killed minus one young boy named Stephen Baltz.

He survived for several days at New York Methodist Hospital, the beacon of hope in an otherwise painful national tragedy. Upon

his death, a plaque was installed in the hospital chapel containing 65 cents in charred coinage removed from his pocket.

The transient nature of urban life does not pay any favors to the act of remembrance. Of the

The host opened the door with an emphatic greeting, met with cries of delight and hugs all around. As the guests worked their way inside, he stepped out onto the landing for some of that crisp winter air. I stepped inside the gate.

“The crash? Yeah, I was here.” Bob Greenberg began. “But I didn’t live here. I was working with the Welfare Office downtown.

We were on the scene really early to assess home loss. I think I was one the first ones here, actually.” In a strange twist of fate, Bob purchased his home in 1970, nearly 10 years after the accident. Mr. Greenberg described the same chaotic scene, but was quick to point out that the accident seemed to be a pretty self-contained affair.

“We tend to forget that New York City is a place marred by battle wounds.” dozens of commuters walking along 7th Avenue this past December, less than a handful were even born in 1960. Even fewer had ever heard of the disaster.

“Is that why it’s called Ed Rogowsky Way?” one man asked, pointing above the street sign. He was disappointed to learn that Ed was an unrelated, albeit generous and civic-minded Brooklynite who had passed away in 2000. One gray-haired gentleman suggested visiting the neighborhood churches to find the real elderly locals. Apparently, a few minutes with the 80-plus crowd are a tall order in these parts. After several hours of defeat, one soft-spoken woman gave a slow nod and a deep sigh. Her deliberate preparation was an assurance that this was not the first time she had discussed the subject.

“My mother lived up at 126 Sterling, although I was not in the neighborhood at the time,” Claire Cooper began. “She was taking a nap that morning and was thrown out of her bed into the kitchen when the windows blew out. She grabbed the children and hid under a table. When she smelled gas, she thought that the Texaco station down on Flatbush had exploded. They all ran shoeless into the road and burned the soles of their feet on the asphalt. My brother saw a man’s arm with a wristwatch.” Virtually her entire tale had been told in one breath. Claire began to inch her way up the street, adding one final comment. “Boy, he was troubled by that sight for a real long time.” Apparently, 48 years of revision had reduced her entire tale to 15 seconds of powerful material. As Ms. Cooper began to walk away, it became clear that her response contained the same reflex of an annoyed local pointing tourists towards the nearest subway tunnel. Simply put, I got a sense of banality one would generally not associate with a personal account of terror and carnage.

Just as Ms. Cooper began to cross the street, a gaggle of partygoers rounded the corner. They edged past me, opening a gate to ascend a frosty stoop three doors down from the intersection.

After the wreckage was removed, the story quickly fell to the back pages of public interest. Incredibly, the only lingering physical effects were the two lots on the west side of 7th Avenue that sat vacant until 2002. They are now both occupied by condominiums. One is a nice example of contextual new construction. The other is called “The Vermeil,” also known as gold-plated sterling silver. Adorable.

When asked if there was anything spooky about moving onto that block, Bob smiled and chuckled lightly. “No, I have to say that by the time I got here it was pretty much business as usual.”

Indeed, Sterling Place has never seen the throngs of tourists that flock to Church Street in lower Manhattan, but it is still hard to believe that an event of such magnitude has simply slipped through the cracks of history. It is even harder to imagine that the same fate may someday befall the giant hole in the sky that serves as a daily reminder to New Yorkers that witnessed September 11, 2001.

These events do not exist in a vacuum. We tend to forget that New York City is a place marred by battle wounds. Hundreds --if not thousands-of shocking public tragedies have assaulted the city in the last 400 years. Without exception, the gnaw of time has vanished nearly each and every one of them. Occasionally, an event resonates with the masses as something greater than itself and remains in the public consciousness for years beyond its initial role as front page fodder.

This event was not one of them. It should be acknowledged that the winter of 1960 was not unlike the winter of 2008. A nation sat frigid, waiting anxiously for January 20th when a young handsome harbinger of change would rise to power. Let’s hope that the recent miracle of aviation on the Hudson is a more hopeful sign of things to come. O filmstrip courtesy of foundinbrooklyn.blogspot.com

Z agar Shooting

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profile of a cobble hill filmmaker

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eremiah Zagar’s In A Dream documents the story of the filmmaker’s brilliant and mentally ill father Isaiah, a legendary artist in South Philadelphia known for covering 50,000 square feet of ......concrete with chaotic, breathtaking murals. The film offers highly personal battles with infidelity, insanity, and drug addiction, compelling material in their own right, but when I watched the screener, I was taken by the director’s methodology of documentation.

got picked up by PBS when he was 19; his current debut feature In A Dream shortlisted for an Oscar and purchased by HBO. But anxious to learn more about Jeremiah, I met the Cobble Hill-based director for coffee right around the corner from his office in DUMBO.

Jeremiah creates a fascinating filmmaking collage that’s lovingly handmade, a patchwork quilt stitched from celluloid—a parallel counterpoint to Isaiah’s mosaics. While the his white-haired, hippie father has devoted his life to chronicling his family through paintings, photographs, drawings, and mosaics, Jeremiah makes use of everything from Super 8 home movies and black-and-white photos; to intimate interviews with his dad and mom Julia; to grand views of Isaiah’s larger-than-life murals, captured in alternating slow motion and swift, fluid dolly shots. Add in the subtle, soft piano and guitar score that compliments the reverential editing, and the essence of Isaiah’s tileand-mirror murals becomes reflected in his son’s own nonfiction artwork. In A Dream is less truth-seeking documentary, and more a jagged edged kaleidoscope, one where shards of truth jump out to cut—sometimes literally. At one point Isaiah’s finger gets stabbed while brushing dirt from a tile. Isaiah claims he’s not searching for “an answer so much as an encounter,” that he strives to “be alive in the work.” The same could be said of his wise and patient director son.

Like his father, Jeremiah is tall and slender and an accomplished artist. A fan of Errol Morris (stylistically he considers In A Dream a combination of the surreal world of Morris and the hyper-real vision of the Maysles brothers), he was elated as he amiably and animatedly chatted about his heroes, having learned just two days prior that In A Dream Oscar shortlist nomination placed him in the company of Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure. Life itself was becoming both surreal and hyper-real.

I knew some facts about the filmmaker: 27-year-old phenom; one time Student Academy Award semi-finalist, whose first short Delhi House 12

Watching the increasingly animated Jeremiah come to terms with his current situation, I reflected on how much credit is due to him for his risk-taking in keeping the camera rolling, and not flinching from the pain of his family’s infidelity. Sifting through infinite layers of taboo is always uncomfortable, dirty work. This unpleasantness is magnified when it’s your own father holding forth on institutionalization, sexual molestation and the “sensualist” inside that compels him to touch everything from his art to his own shit (in order to literally “feel the beauty” of it all). A filmmaker could be forgiven for calling cut. “All my artwork is a journal of my life,” Isaiah says in the film, and this isn’t a metaphor. Painted everywhere from the walls to the alleyways in huge block letters is “Julia,” Isaiah’s wife, and the names

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By Lauren Wissot Photo by Jeff Brown

of his two sons. Isaiah realizes his art is a public journal—and the name of his mistress doesn’t share wall space with his family. Jeremiah’s film, however, uncovers what Isaiah’s art tries to hide – in front of the filmmaker’s lens, the father blurts a confession to his son.

Taking a page from Picasso, Isaiah surreptitiously tucked the other woman’s image into the tiles.

Though I guess if you’ve spent over forty years with a man like Isaiah you come to expect the unexpected. Julia explains in the film, “he can’t function too well in this world. He’s a rare flower—he can cope just to a certain extent.”

While laying tiles Isaiah blithely mentions his suicide attempt at age 29, which in turn leads to a tale about his institutionalization and his having asked the administration for

the footage of Isaiah’s own creative process – of laying down one tile after another and following where it goes. The director has gone beyond documenting his dad to actually

“I don’t want to be 60 or 70 years old before anybody sees this film.” permission to clean brass. Another inmate snickered, “You don’t have to do that.” Isaiah responded that yes, he did have to do it. He “saw things” in that brass mirror – it became his art. And then, incredibly, in a flash it becomes apparent that this winding admission of artistic discovery is reflected right back in

absorbing his method. The film is a mosaic, assembled pieces set adjacent one by one – a portrait that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Jeremiah would be the last to take credit for his amazing success, for the filmmaking pro-

cess is nothing if not a collaborative one. “All these revelations that you have during the film are, you know, are just part of the process.

The process of making a film is the same as the process of falling in love.” In other words, the struggle, pain and thrill of discovery are one and the same.

But Jeremiah’s chosen medium is perhaps the key to understanding the difference between the director and his father. Jeremiah and his producer Jeremy Yaches have been working together for a dozen years already. Add in a crew that includes the Academy Awardwinning producers of Born Into Brothels (Ross Kauffman, Pamela Tanner Boll and Geralyn White Dreyfous), editor Keiko Deguchi (The Cats of Mirikitani), and consulting editor Sam

war is death’s feast

Pollard, (Spike Lee’s go-to cutter) and the divide becomes even clearer. Isaiah has the love and support of his wife Julia, but when he gets up and goes to work every morning he pursues his passion alone. Yes, silence may be golden, but too much solitude leads to madness.

Perhaps it is this collaborative human check that balances Jeremiah, allowing him to create art without fear of “going off the deep end.” For his dad is an archetype of an artist – his delusion of grandeur is simultaneously a sign of mental illness and a necessary ingredient to achieving greatness. Jeremiah admits that his perfectionism could get out of hand if not for his blood and filmmaking families. He still hasn’t seen the final cut

of In A Dream, and readily confesses he’d be compelled to tinker with the movie despite its recent sale to HBO.

His belief in the innate beauty of everything leads full circle back to those delusions of grandeur. If a piece of shit and a Van Gogh

“Everything he does is innately perfect because it comes from him, from his hand.”

Is his father the same way, I wondered. Is that the reason each mural he creates seems to take on an expanding life of its own? Jeremiah surprised me by replying that his dad is actually the exact opposite. “He’s an imperfectionist. Everything is imperfectly perfect. Everything he does is innately perfect because it comes from him, from his hand.”

are equally perfect, we’re left with nothing but Dada.

And yet it’s this indifference to the art world that Jeremiah most respects about his father.

Isaiah is so concentrated on his craft that he has no time to be a part of anything else, much less the gallery and museum scene. But Jeremiah is highly focused on sharing his own art with a wider audience, admitting, “That’s something I respect so much about [Isaiah], but also something that I don’t want. I don’t want to be 70 years old before anybody sees this film.” He wants In A Dream to be seen by everyone. What he might not realize is that this egocentric vision is actually a humanistic one. After all, the driving desire for us to share our worlds with others is the very thing that keeps us sane. O

http://www.hzfilms.com

Written by David Brenner . Illustrated by Luca Giovanopoulos

The Next Battleground Nersesian Reimagines New York words by Nino Cirabisi photo by Sarah Wilmer

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or most of us living in Brooklyn, work demands that we get on the train and make our way to Manhattan. Today is one of those days, except I am crossing the East River to do something that feels less like job and more of a once in lifetime experience. I’m meeting with Arthur Nersesian, the novelist, poet, and playwright who, for nearly 20 years, has made a name for himself chronicling the dark and seedy underbelly of our City.

I have been a fan of his work since first reading his debut novel The Fuck Up in 1997. Back then, the story of a down on his luck writer stumbling his way through lower Manhattan in the 1980’s felt very much like my own. I grew up in Brooklyn, but came to the East Village with an insatiable appetite for the neighborhood’s uncommon flavors. Needless to say, I was eventually priced out and forced to retreat back over the bridge.

We’re meeting at The Ukrainian National Home, a small restaurant on 2nd Avenue that has been around for decades. I’m early.

I grab a table in the corner. As I look around the joint I ask myself, Where the hell is everyone? It quickly dawns on me that nowadays most people who live around here now probably work nine-to-five in either Midtown or the Financial District. I can remember a time when this place would be packed in the middle of the afternoon, the sidewalks outside

overflowing with all kinds of undesirables.

Freaks. Artists. Musicians. Writers. Slackers.

Fuck-ups. My kind of people.

Nersesian shows up looking disheveled and distracted, like he’s been engaged in an epic struggle of the mind that is beyond my immediate comprehension. However, after we order food and start the interview, it becomes clear to me that his appearance is not just that of a typical novelist, lost in his own mind. We in fact share the same bewildered observations and nostalgia for this once bohemian enclave.

“I feel like New York is kind of dead,” he begins. “I used to be able to walk through the streets and bump into someone I knew. Writers and artists and actors and onwards, and they’re all gone. I certainly can not in good conscience write another book about artists living in New York.”

For anyone unfamiliar with the people, cul-

novels, The Fuck Up, Dogrun, Chinese Takeout, and Unlubricated, Nersesian has compiled and documented the uniquely sordid history of Lower Manhattan. Sex, drugs, and crime on the Lower East Side, the punk scene of the 80’s, and the pain and tragedy that rocked Tribeca during the fall of the world Trade Center spill onto his pages in urgent, vivid prose.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Nersesian continues. “I remember how dangerous and dirty it used to be. I never glorified or romanticized it. I was walking down the street recently and I overheard this one woman saying, ‘Yeah, this neighborhood, there was nothing going on here a few years ago. It was just empty.’ And I was like, I remember seeing Basquiat putting up posters and you had these little storefront galleries and The St. Mark’s Poetry Project, which was a pillar for the New York school of poets and Nuyorican [culture], all in this tight little area. All this stuff was going on and these people have no clue.”

“I certainly can not in good conscience write another book about artists living in New York.” ture and streets Nersesian misses, they need only to look at his previous works, spanning the last two decades. Within the pages of his

With the vibrant and dramatic world around him disappearing, Nersesian has been left with little choice but to create a world of his 17

own. In a series of five novels collectively entitled The Five Books of Moses, Nersesian has turned to creating works of science and historical fiction. Each book, representing one of the five boroughs, still takes place in New York – only this New York is situated in the desert recesses of Nevada, sprouting out of the hard and barren earth after the original city was destroyed. The time period is the 1980’s, but the decade is now placed far into the future.

So far two of the books have been released.

Both The Swing Voter of Staten Island and The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx follow the series’ protagonist, Uli, as he arrives in the surreal, reconfigured city. Suffering from amnesia, he struggles to discover who he is, why he has been brought there, and by whom. But this is just one of many stories held within The Five Books of Moses. Throughout, Nersesian manipulates historical characters and events within a surreal and fictive giving him the ability to move freely about, weaving together dozens of periods and subjects. He explores the relationship between Robert Moses, the man most responsible for reshaping New York into what is today, and his brother, Paul. Well-known, historical movements and figures seep into the pages. The Weather Underground, The Black Panthers and Abbie Hoffman all wander in and out of the text.

Ronald Reagan is running for re-lection, and another character, Mallory, shares more than a passing resemblance to Hillary Clinton. Unconstrained by space and time, Nersesian is able to run free with social, political, and economic commentary. More a take on the country and world as a whole, his New York sees Katrina like floods, Iraq-like wars and plaguing religious fanaticism.

Like the books themselves how Nersesian came about this dystopian universe is a blend of the past, present and future. The idea first

cally bottomed out, and created an alternate city. I wrote this as a trilogy, where somebody finds himself in this place.” Initially, the feedback was mixed, “Everyone I showed it to throughout the 90’s said it was interesting but it felt like a hypothetical novel. The characters weren’t grounded, it lacked a context.”

Frustrated, Nersesian threw what amounted

“I saw things on 9/11 and with Bush’s reaction . . . with Katrina and things like Homeland Security.

These things gave my work gravity.” came to him in the early 90’s, long before many of the current affairs that now color the story ever took place.

“I actually wrote the date, February 3rd, 1991.

The gist of the story was to write about a city that basically had rotted, kind of economi18

to more than 1000 pages into the bottom of a filing cabinet and considered it a noble effort that would never see the light of day.

All of that changed after September 11th. “I saw things on 9/11 and with Bush’s reaction.

Then with Katrina and things like Homeland Security. These things gave my work gravity.”

Suddenly, Nersesian saw that the groundwork for his new creation was no longer hypothetical.

As we part ways and I head down Second Avenue, back to the train that leads to Brooklyn, I worry less about all that is missing, all that is gone and forgotten back in Manhattan. I feel a sense of relief returning to Brooklyn, a place where the streets are still filled with artists and musicians, writers and freaks. Nersesian is still struggling, trying to morph the city into something better, reminding people of what this place was, what it could be, but it all seems less bleak when I am back home.

There is still a feeling of purity in Brooklyn; some things are left unspoiled in this borough and its relatively affordable housing and progressive residents. It will be interesting to see Nersesian’s take on my home in the next book of The Five Books Of Moses series entitled The Battle For Brooklyn. O

Photo Essay

VINCENT RACCUGLIA Photos by Sarah Wilmer . Words by Nari Kye

In 1958, if you found a stray and you lived in Carroll Gardens, there were only two options: name the dispossessed pup and call it your own or bring it to a cobbler.

This is proffered by an exquisitely dapper man from an all-together different time than mine, Vincent Raccuglia, of Raccuglia & Son Funeral Home on Court street. He looks at me as if this is the most obvious statement in the world; that’s just what you did, strays go to cobblers.

According to Vincent, there were lots of cobblers and shoemakers in the neighborhood back then. Each cobbler had at least six or seven kids that all lived in the back of their tiny, crowded storefronts. Most of them were Irish. They never turned away a stray, ever. He firmly grabs my arm with his large hands, brings me to the front of his funeral home, points to where a condominium now stands, and starts to talk about the union days.

The afternoon winter sun streams through the windows and hits the resplendent chandelier hanging in the main foyer. The light casts a rainbow onto a multitude of plaques, photographs, and religious relics. The carpets and drapes smell of cigarette smoke, layered from decades of chain smoking bereaved. On the

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front desk there are impeccably arranged business cards, a box of Kleenex with the price sticker still on it, and a vase full of artificial flowers with plastic drops of water delicately trickling off their petals.

It is completely silent. Vincent emerges in a dark cardigan, a broad striped tie, and a rakishly tilted Fedora. He has unmistakably bold features. His eyes are wide and tall, dark and sparkling. His nose is prominent and handsome. His mouth rounds off the rest of his striking features. They are neither shy nor absent. I long to see his hair, but he never removed his hat.

“Where do you come from, why did you move here, and what does your father do?” When Vincent asks you a question, you answer quickly. He doesn’t give you much time to mull over your thoughts. He also demands your attention by grabbing your hand to emphasize certain points in his stories. The climaxes and the punch lines are all accompanied by squeezes. You never forget who you’re talking to.

Vincent doesn’t enjoy silence.

The union hall used to be just across from Raccuglia & Son Funeral home. That’s where all the young men would hang out all day, everyday, waiting for the big ships to dock so they could clock in some hours and earn an honest paycheck. They sat, drank coffee, and smoked cigarettes. Everyone knew everyone else by name. Vincent knew everyone by name. Carroll Gardens has changed but some people never do. When you find a stray, just ask Vincent Raccuglia where you should bring it. O

Searching for

Connie Converse

by Daniel Dzula and David Herman Lau derette Recordings

I

t was early 2004, and we were on the ugliest stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike in a red pickup truck. Up until that moment, her music had never been played on the radio.

The host of the program was speaking with a guest, a jovial, cackling old man, about obscure recordings. Some unearthed John Lee Hooker tapes he had made more than 50 years prior. A rare find, and a rare moment when the frayed loose ends of culture and history come together and prove that— come flooded basements, mildew, and fickle memories—all is not lost. And then, her voice came across the radio: We go walking in the dark We go walking out at night And it’s not as lovers go, Two by two, to and fro, But it’s one by one One by one in the dark…

The host told us that the singer had long since disappeared.

“That was back in the 1970’s, is that right?”

No response from the old man. He was choked up and couldn’t speak. It seemed very cruel.

So again, the conversation turned casual, and the old man played an unrelated recording. Just something else he happened to catch on tape in the 1950’s.

D

avid Garland’s Spinning On Air broadcast with the venerable animator Gene Deitch never quite left our minds. And Connie’s song, “One by One,” haunted us for years. After countless dead-ends, three years of fruitless, simple research, and the realization that Connie was at risk of being lost in the shuffle of time (and our own fad-

ing memories, we finally decided to contact Gene Deitch, hoping that he might share other tapes of Connie’s music or, better still, if he would allow us to produce an album.

We never expected to hear back from him within two hours of sending the letter; the man lives in Prague. He pounced with an eager reply, as if he had been waiting next to his computer for decades to hear from us. As it turns out, sharing Connie’s work and producing an album of her material had been one of his life’s “greatest most unrequited dreams.” Here is a man who has dreamed—and accomplished—a heck of a lot in eighty years.

So Gene digitized his tapes and put us in touch with Connie’s brother Phil in Ann Arbor, who sent two more reels of tape. The songs on Phil’s reels had been recorded by Connie herself, and comprised a collection that she referred to as Musicks, Vol. 1. It 25

Connie Converse in her apartment, 1958 was this homemade compilation that Phil had shared with a handful of people over the years (accompanied by an elegant pamphlet with biographical details, lyrics, and notes) in hopes that Connie might garner a few more than her “dozens of fans around the world.”

From what we’ve been able to piece together, the story goes something like this: Elizabeth Converse was born in Laconia, New Hampshire in 1924, the middle child of three siblings. She was bookish, the valedic-

There were two major developments during Elizabeth’s time in New York. The first was her procurement of her nickname “Connie.”

It is unclear how or why or when exactly, but the name stuck. Connie made her home in various neighborhoods of Manhattan, from the West Village to the Upper East Side, all the way up to Harlem. Initially she worked as an editorial assistant at the Institute for Pacific Relations (before the organization was dissolved over accusations of subversive communist conspiracy) and later as a typographer in an offset printing shop, where she

“The old man was choked up and couldn’t speak.

It seemed very cruel.” torian of her class at Concord High School, and described by most who knew her to be a polymath. She attended Mt. Holyoke College on an academic scholarship beginning in 1942, studied French and wrote for several campus publications. By 1944 she decided to leave college, at which point the records of her whereabouts are sparse until about 1949, when she made her way to New York City.

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would be employed for the remainder of her time in New York.

The second development was Connie’s burgeoning interest in playing and writing music, first for guitar and later for piano. No doubt this stemmed from her love of poetry, as many of her earliest songs were poems that she had written and then set to music.

The songs became instant hits with her family. She would often record herself at home, and then send the tapes to her brother Philip through her own version of a song-of-themonth club. The music also attracted the attention of animator and amateur recordist Gene Deitch. Beginning around 1954, Connie would make visits to Deitch’s home in Hudson-on-Hastings to record almost 40 songs. Over the years Deitch, along with his colleague, Bill Bernal, would continually try to promote Connie’s music. But despite their efforts, the songs remained unheard to all but a few dozen of Connie’s acquaintances. In 1961 Connie tired of New York and left for Ann Arbor. Her brother was a professor at the University of Michigan.

Having dropped out of college seventeen years prior, it came as something of a surprise that within months of her arrival in Ann Arbor, Connie had implanted herself firmly in the academic community of U-Mich. She began as a secretary at the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, a research organization run by the university, eventually working her way to Managing Editor and Co-Editor of CRCR’s Journal of Conflict Resolution.

This culminated with her publishing a com-

prehensive review of the Journal’s work from 1957-1963 entitled, The War of All Against All, in 1968.

Connie’s work in Ann Arbor left little time for music and, while she still happily played at family gatherings, there is little evidence that she wrote new material. She did, however, continue her attempts to promote her music already extant. Susan Reed, the folk harpist, took an interest in Connie’s work and performed a set of her songs in New York.

There were a handful of scores for commercials and some work on a short film. But never the kind of widespread success she had hoped for her music.

Connie became increasingly despondent in the 1970’s, a period she described as her Blue Funk, although her family and friends say they could not detect any outward change in her character. In 1971, she requested an extended leave of absence from CRCR, citing what she saw as her poor performance at work and unspecified medical problems. Her employer responded by organizing a group of Connie’s friends and colleagues to contribute to a pool of money that would allow her to

take a six-month sabbatical in England, which she would later describe as one of the only times in her life that she allowed herself to enjoy “unproductive fun.”

In August of 1974, after waiting for the resignation of Richard Nixon, Connie wrote a series of farewell letters to friends and family, packed up her Volkswagen and disappeared.

She has not been heard from since.

I

n September 2008, we visited Phil Converse and his wife Jean at their home in Ann Arbor. In their infinite graciousness they allowed two strangers from New York to weed through their garage where Phil keeps the filing cabinet that Connie left behind, meticulously ordered in numbered folders and indexed in a table of contents, so as to make clear precisely which poems, letters, tapes, photos, and slides could be found, and where. It was also clear which records had been intentionally “dumped.” As if she had expected us—someone—to come looking. Connie had practically done our work for us, more than thirty years prior to our arrival, and she was careful

which parts of the mystery she would prefer to remain as such. But there were certainly treasures in that filing cabinet: a cartoon score she wrote for the National Allergy Foundation, a tape of Susan Reed singing two of Connie’s songs, and a 16mm theatrical print of a short film based on lush arrangement of Connie’s “Playboy of the Western World,” a stark contrast to Connie’s haunting, melancholy solo recordings.

Despite what we now know about Connie and her work—and despite her family’s contentment—we cannot gauge whether or not she would actually approve of this project. She might blush and say something like “You know, these were only my demos.” Or perhaps more to the enterprising side of her nature, “Why don’t we record them now, for

“Your audience continually grows, and eagerly awaits.” real.” Well Connie, we’re ready to record you, for real. Your audience continually grows, and eagerly awaits. O

Aliens, Not To Be Confused With Men in Rubber Suits: A bestiary of realistically strange aliens from the greatest minds of contemporary science fiction.

by Phil Matricardi Illustrations by Luca Giovanopoulos

You wouldn’t stand a chance against a fully grown cephalopod—at least not against an octopus, and they only grow to a mere 80 lbs. A friend who works at the National Zoo in Washington DC recently told me, “They mostly want to just be in their cave, like a four foot by four foot cave, and just hang out. But when the males reach sexual maturity, they get feisty. So one time this guy was in the exhibit playing with the octopus. We like to have them play and fight because, you know, they’re predators. So he’s playing with [the octopus] with a mop and he gets feisty. A tentacle comes out of the water and wraps around his arm, then another, then another. Suddenly it’s on him and biting him with its beak. So he calls for help, and it takes the whole staff to pull it off of him. He has these crazy scars.” At this point she gesturing up and down her arm and shoulder.

Octopi have enough strength in those jelly-like limbs to crush and suffocate sharks that mass twice their body weight. And they’re smart, too. They exhibit creative thinking, problem solving. They will break out of their aquariums and schlub about on land at night, opening cabinets, looking for food, eating fish out of other aquariums. They teach themselves to open jars. And they can squeeze through anything with a diameter greater than their beak, the only hard part in their bodies. So my question was, can they still think while their brain is all smushed up into a keyhole shape?

In terms of alien intelligences and body types, you can’t do much better than octopi on earth. If we could breed them to be even more intelligent, or to communicate verbally, what would they think about everything? Good science fiction, when it involves aliens, will not neglect their perspectives of the nature of consciousness, life, meaning and purpose. Stories that avoid aliens presented in a way that is not biologically human, or that could not be played by a human, larger or smaller, in make up or a mask, however, are much rarer. This persists even when special effects budgets cannot be to blame, such as in novels or cartoons. To use the human form, however, is totally implausible. Alien life, developing on an alien planet under unknown conditions and out of unknown elements would be about as likely to take the form of giant teacups as they would to take the form of two legs, two arms, upright bearing, erect yet forward facing head with eyes, nose, mouth, etc. Sure, they might have eyes, a nose and a mouth.

They might have appendages. But the whole package in a familiar con28

figuration? Far-fetched. And so I’d like to share with you some of my favorite authors, and the really alien aliens they come up with.

First among these deserves to be Vernor Vinge, whose bestiary includes the following: Tines A race of dog-sized creatures with long flexible necks and expressive, flat faces appear in Hugo award winner, A Fire Upon the Deep. Their necks are plated with enlarged tympanum and contain complex vocal organs. Between four and six individuals cluster together and whisper subsonically—their brains become wired into a network and they function as a single individual with a single personality. The loss of a member is painful and disorienting, but new members can be added and learn to function together over time. They name themselves “tines” for the steel claws that they grip in their dog-like forepaws, and which were their first self-conscious separation Tines cluster and whisper from animals. When tines come close to mate or to fight, they lose their grip on group consciousness and revert to their individual minds and instincts, with scattered reason and memory, so seeing humans stand close together or even touch one another is nauseating. They say that touching or being touched by humans feels like touching livestock, or a corpse.

Cobbers Intelligent, ten-foot-long spider-like creatures with gaping, mandible covered mouths and fixed eyes all over their bodies. Their young have only two pivoting eyes in the front of their bodies until their first molting, which leads the adults to feel an instinctive protective impulse against humans, whom they call “monsters with babies’ faces.”

The adults are able to see in a greatly expanded spectrum with their

multitude of eyes, which filter into their consciousness at priority according to various considerations, including their environment and their emotions. They often describe emotional situations as “seeing plaid,” for perpendicular bands of various colors cloud their vision.

The Cobbers’ planet orbits Cobber protects molting youth an astrological phenomenon known to humans as the “on/off star”—35 orbits of light and heat, followed by 215 years of darkened dormancy. To survive, all life on the planet hibernates underground in a frozen state, frozen to survive the long, cold cycle, and underground to survive the supernova of the star reborn. The religion of the Cobbers reflects the life-preserving nature of the earth with the phrase, “Good God in the cold earth,” and their underground shelters, “deepnesses” (historically regarded as holy sites) give the book, which is the prequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, its title, A Deepness in the Sky. Other excellent creatures spring from the mind of Larry Niven: G’owaoth Would look exactly like the starfish in Verner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. They live under water under the ice of a frozen, but by no means inhospitable planet (warming the planet would for them, of course, be a cataclysm). Their brains can function as networked computers by suckering their tentacles onto each other, enabling them to make a coordinated and sudden conquest of new technology and the surface of their planet, watched by human observers as a side note in the book The Fleet of Worlds.

First, they build crude pressure suits from the skins of lesser sea-creatures.

Teams of starfish pressurize these with hand-pumps beneath the surface, while their pressure-suited companions climb to the airy surface through holes cut in the ice. Access to the surG’owaoths engage in team networking face allows them to experiexercise. ment with fire for the first time, and their organic computer network quickly lets them develop advanced metallurgical techniques, radio, and solid-state rockets. They create welding stations underwater in air-evacuated ice structures, and pressurized, water-filled above-surface structures for sending and receiving radio transmissions, eventually bouncing them off of satellites and enabling global communications between their underwater cities.

Puppeteers Herbivorous aliens resembling headless, three legged cows with two one eyed sock puppets rising out of their shoulders. Thus, one head may eat while the other scans for danger. Inherently skittish and cowardly by nature, they herd together obsessively despite the extreme

technological achievements of their civilization. Any “Citizen” who can resist this urge is regarded as dangerous and insane, and also enlisted in their crucial cadre of scouts, operating advanced starships to scan the galaxy for any possible danger to the heard, or to the home world, known as “hearth.”

Despite their intergalactic capabilities the puppeteers refuse to colonize other worlds, and therefore hearth is home to over one trillion of their kind, crowded into huge arcologies across all available landmass of the planet. Citizens may only reproduce by explicit grant from the planetary governing council. The extreme heat of so many bodies also

Puppeteers hearding--not hoarding--over a light snack. led the puppeteers to move their planet away from its sun. It is orbited by a growing number of other planets collected by the scouts, ringed by equatorial bands of tiny orbiting suns.

These other planets are used for farming and ecological preservation (their biodiversity being an important safety feature to guard against cataclysmic disease—a concern that the paranoid puppeteers would not neglect). The farms are run by criminals and exiles from hearth, as well as by alien slaves. So great is the power, and cowardice, of the puppeteers that they often use their scouts to covertly incite war among other races that they regard as “aggressive or threatening.”

Their machinations wreck havoc among the civilizations that populate Niven’s Known Space suite of novels.

Moties Inhabitants of a planet orbiting a star within an interstellar cloud known to astronomers as “Murchenson’s Eye,” these aliens have three arms and no spine. In The Mote in God’s Eye (co-written with Jerry Pournelle), humans make contact with these aliens, who try to shield the human ambassadors from a secret that gradually becomes clear, that each alien naturally undergoes a complete sexual transformation several times within their lifespan that must culminate in either pregnancy or death--feeding a cycle of explosive population growth followed by starvation and vicious warfare that has occurred for a hundred thousand years or more of their planet’s history.

The Moties are equipped with one large strong arm firmly anchored to much of one side of their bodies (including the head) and two smaller, numble arms with fully articulated shoulders on the other side. The large arm has a hand with three huge fingers, the smaller hands are each equipped with four digits and two thumbs, one on each side. Their counting system is therefore predicated on sets of twelve (rather than the human ten). After conversing with humans, they say that we have a bias toward dualistic analogy, while they prefer to veiw the world in terms of triangular possibilities; on the one hand, on the other hand, on the gripping hand.

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Due to an accident of their star’s particular form, the inhabitants of the Mote have failed to discover the technology that humans use to travel between stars, despite their advanced scientific and engineering abilities. Motie civilization spans their solar system, with colonial habitats throughout the planets and asteroids. So many cycles of growth, war, death and re-growth have seen the race split into specialized subspecies, who either cannot interbreed or can only produce infertile, and therefore very short-lived, offspring. This includes specialized races of engineers, doctors, porters, couriers, decision-makers, and warriors.

Each is born with an ingrown, instinctive knowledge for its particular task--doctors know how to set bones and cure common diseases, and will seek out proper materials from birth as they know them by heart.

Engineers are born knowing how to make a wide range of advanced tools and machines, as well as how to assess and improve upon existing constructions. Warriors have claws, fangs, a built in meat-hook where their ancestral fourth arm used to be, and are born with a natural ability to shoot straight and a knowledge of weapons, including firearms, as

Mote weighing his options well as practical combat tactics. All Moties are also adapted to life on the planet or in space, where zero gravity does not trouble them, and they will happily chat while floating at various angles.

There are also smaller, degenerate subspecies, “Warrior Rats” and “Watchmakers,” that pursue these instincts in an unintelligent, animalistic way. Watchmakers are often employed

by Engineers as assistance or for difficult/ dangerous maintenance operations, especially in cramped quarters in space, as they will nat-

urally assess and repair any problems they find with whatever machinery into which they are released. Moties always take care to closely control their population, however, as they will reproduce cataclysmicly and continue to make eventually disastrous modifications to any technology around them. The humans eventually fight a losing battle to save one of the starships in their expedition from an out of control Watchmaker infestation that warps the ship’s interior, scavenging resources from propulsion, navigation, weapons and communications systems to create more living space and aid in the ship’s current function--supporting the crew while maintaining orbit.

Next chapter: Hostile Bipeds; Science fiction as cultural critique from out-of-bounds. Biological alienness is a prerequisite for believable alien fiction, but the potential of the genre extends to radically alien cultures. Often writing with the most insightful analysis features aliens that appear like actors in makeup.

While the above stories properly base psychology on physiology, this is a speculative field, and less scientific material which features human-like aliens often presents a critical mirror upon the nature and function(ing) of culture, religion, knowledge, and politics.

Photography by Doug Todd

Grand Army Winters Over

by Jeanne Hodesh

T

he Saturday before Thanksgiving, when the temperature had dropped to a piercing 22 degrees, I hopped on my bike, like I do every Saturday morning, and rode up to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. Today would mark the end of the season for many of my favorite farmers, bringing the year to a close.

The weekend after Thanksgiving their stands and staff would retreat, and “off season” projects like fixing up the barn, taking care of bookkeeping, or going on a trip to someplace warm would become first priority.

I ventured in, starting at Maxwell Farmstand. My eyes feasted on bushel baskets heaped with pie pumpkins and butternut squash, the last purple onions, and wooden boxes of potatoes, little tags of paper distinguishing one variety from another. I did away with the shopping list and started stuffing my market bag with everything that looked good—the straps began to dig into my fingers.

Bill Maxwell has been vending his produce at the Grand Army market since its beginning in the early ‘90s. He likes to tell people that selling here is like returning home. Did he grow up in Brooklyn? “Well, I grew up on Long Island,” he says with a chuckle. In late March or early April his farm stand sets up on the northwest corner spot in the market where they preside through the last Saturday before Thanksgiving.

I tell him I remember the day they came back to market last spring, and he seems disbelieving, or not to remember—it was, after all, many Saturdays ago. The return of greens meant that the menu was finally going to change—the spell of winter had been broken, and Maxwell Farmstand had been the source to deliver the sweet news. Each week throughout the season, the introduction of Maxwell’s arugula, bouquets of basil, and eventually juicy tomatoes and sun-ripened bell peppers, marked a change in temperature, the advancement of the year. Now, at the end of his season, the boxes and tables were still laden with a cornucopia of crops. In the

hoop house at the farm he had kale, spinach, and lettuce growing.

“It’s enough to cobble together a market,” he said modestly.

In his “primitive” root cellar he can keep wintered-over potatoes that will make a re-appearance at the stall come the earliest days of spring next year. “We push it— [we] work hard for eight months, and then you need to get away. Not doing markets opens up time for ordering, bookkeeping, and equipment maintenance.” It was already late November, and though his six HQA certified farm hands had recently gone home to Mexico, they will be back again in just a few months. “When it comes down to it, there’s not that much time” before they will start the greenhouse going again with seedlings for the next season.

Across the way at Blue Moon Fish the line was at least fifteen people long, stretching out into the middle of the plaza. While customers hopped from foot to foot, breath fogging in the air, I wondered if they were all buying oysters for stuffing, or if they were here for their weekly fish fix. Because the ocean cools down at a slower rate than the land, the variety on offer was still pretty substantial.

“Right now you can get bluefish, tuna, swordfish—that’ll go away soon, but then herring will come in. Fluke, which is a summer fish, is about to run out,” the fishmonger told me. In 2007, they had tuna into December, and the herring, a winter fish, didn’t arrive until their market days were nearly through. In the 2008 winter, the markets would echo these effects. Shellfish show up year round though.

“A lot of people don’t understand seasons in the year. It’s mussels in the summer, oysters in the winter.”

This year Blue Moon’s last day at market will be Christmas Eve. After that the owner, Alex Filain, takes off to Florida where he fishes for fun and is able to enjoy more quality time with his wife and their daughter.

“One drawback to working in the markets is that we all have to get a different job for four months out of the year,” the fishmonger told me. This is his fourth season working at Blue Moon. He’s started doing some work for one of the stands who is at market year-round selling bread; he can hardly remember what he did to make money last winter. “I taught bike repair to kids for a while…It’s always only a two-day-a-week job, so you’ve got to have something else. I’m a pretty good saver, though,” he says. This year he’s started to can vegetables and make jam, which will help tide him over.

As we are talking, a farmer tells him to go over and take his pick of produce from his neighboring stand. We make our way to a table of baskets holding various dirty root vegetables and squash and he takes his share of baby beets. “The best part of working here is that you eat like a king.”

T

wo weeks later I’m back at the market on a significantly warmer day. Maxwell Farmstand’s corner spot has been taken over by a truck selling Christmas trees, and it takes me a minute to reorient myself to the new layout—as summer stands have left, the ones who will keep the market going through the winter have moved in close together. I strike up a conversation with Dan Madura, of Madura Farms.

Back in 1977, when he started with some white button mushrooms, he was the first commercial mushroom farmer in Orange County, NY. This is his second winter at the Grand Army Plaza market. He dubs it one of the best in the city “because of the people and the arch,” then riffs into a history on the The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch that towers over the traffic just behind us. I ask him how it’s going so far, now that we’ve officially transferred into the winter.

“The only thing we have to worry about is freezing,” he says. And he means the mushrooms, not himself. If it gets into the 20’s on a market day, he’ll keep more of his stock in the van, and his neighbor, Milk Thistle Farm, has to keep their milk bottles in a the truck so the glass won’t explode. “As long as it’s in the 30’s, we’re good,” he says, bundled in black Carhartt overalls and a flannel shirt, his cheeks are red and covered in gray stubble.

“Primarily I grow exotic mushrooms. Shitakes, Mydock, King Oyster, Lion’s Mane Oysters, Inotaki mushrooms. And they all have medicinal values. Shitaki have lentinan, which boosts the immune system. It’s also a good source of Vitamin D—great in winter when your body is lacking the vitamin it would get at other times of the

year from the sun. Oyster mushrooms have statens, which lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and Myataki mushrooms are a great cancer preventative.”

Madura has five mushroom houses which are constantly expanding. He also rents space from a friend’s farm where he has seven greenhouses. To help with profits he supplies mushrooms to several local restaurants, but says of all the factors— weather, crops, and irrigation—the biggest challenge in the winter is to keep growing organically. It would be much easier to use a chemical fertilizer to get the job done, but Dan Madura is a purist, and besides, he eats mushrooms for the health benefits himself. “I graze when I pick, ‘cause you can eat them raw. But their full benefits are released when they’re cooked.”

His set up is working. “No one has garlic now,” he says. But he demonstrates how his efforts are defying the winter by zooming in on his iPhone to show me sprouts. And there they are! Little rows of baby greens, just as tempting as the idea of spring itself. O

Photos by David Gardiner