4/28/2003 » Musings

I went to Williamsburg for the first time last night to catch an indie film showing. I ran into a friend i haven’t seen from high school, and lots and lots of Berkeley people. It was at Galapagos Bar, which reminded me a hell of a lot of a cement factory in India, with a dank pool taking up most of the space, stone walls with hand-lit candles mounted in odd places, not the least behind rows of expensive vodkas. The charms of the torture castle, the provincial, it’s the classic example of art defining itself as other. Even when other means pre-industrial, ouroboros (ourobotic?), a recursion, a folding-in—in developing countries this would not have been recognizable as a chi-chi place in the art sense, handmade is the order of the day and not as admired as standardized and mass-produced, while here...

I felt at home again, it felt like Berkeley, though more upscale. Bedford Ave. at 7th has a pizza place with insanely good veggie slices: portobello mushrooms, fresh basil, delicious things with slithery texture. The one thing Manhattan has a grasp on is lighting design, backlighting mainly and some wall colors; this was the rest of the palette, the texture I craved, it felt like India or Rome sitting across the Hudson from 14th St., this is how you can work in NY by day and trip a transporter beam to Delhi by night.