Caine Blog

Just finished John Darnielle’s new book Master of Reality, and wow - what a potent little volume.  It’s certainly the most formally adventurous of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series; most of the authors in the series go about profiling their given album by way of Behind The Music-style rockumenting, with plenty of first-person pontification thrown in [...]

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That’s the question I have every time I walk down Metropolitan Avenue, in Williamsburg. Why? Because the land under the BQE is like an untapped oil field, or if that’s a little too much for you, like a wind turbine that’s yet to be raised: pure potential.
Dead zones around expressways aren’t unprecedented in New York: [...]

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Lots of people talk about Lindsay Lohan, but few mention her writing style.  Maybe ’style’ is the wrong word; what I’m talking about is more of an assault, a full on em-dash ambush.  Let’s take a peek at her most recent post, in which she assails her father:
If you have something to say to me, [...]

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I went to a Community Board 1 Executive Committee tonight to check up on little old Studio B, the Greenpoint club that all the neighbors hate.  In looking up one of the members - Joseph Weber, a Hasidic rabbi who is also the first vice chair of CB1 - I came across “Welfare Neighborhood,” a [...]

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I belong to a certain educational institution’s parent e-mail list, designed for parents to communicate about school-related stuff with one another.  It is a guilty pleasure, because these parents are often bored and have little to do besides fret over the least significant things and otherwise live vicariously through their children.
BUT: Recently the parents list [...]

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Juxtaposition 1:
|| Elote Mexican Restaurant || My Apartment || Rocio’s Mexican Bakery ||
Above is a rough schematic of my block.  To the left of my apartment we have Elote, a restaurant/bar that serves expensive-ish Mexican food in a yuppified context, as well as decent sangria.  It is filled with non-Mexicans.
To the right of my apartment [...]

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Rather terrifying video, here.

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Meanwhile…there is all sorts of chaos going on outside my window.  Let’s take a peek:

The pace of condominium development continues unabated, even as the market for new construction luxury condominiums in not-quite-gentrified neighborhoods dries up.  I’d love to watch the prices fall on the sucker across the street and buy one of the upper-floor units [...]

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I’m still not sure how to think about the community meeting I went to last night in Fort Greene.  (A write-up is here.)  Sure, there were a lot of angry neighbors, and they’d all lived in the neighborhood for awhile (”through the good times and the bad times,” repeated ad nauseum by various Ft. Greene [...]

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Last night I went to a neighborhood meeting about the Brooklyn Flea market, which is very popular and beloved to everyone except the neighbors.  I filed a longer write-up with Racked, which is here, but I’ll muse more extensively on the issue a little later, when I’m less exhausted.

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