The Old Girdle Factory

A full half of DCQ's editorial team was walking south from the L train on Bedford Ave. this past weekend when it stumbled through a gauntlet of collapsible store signs that virtually funneled passersby through the glass doors lining the sidewalk and into a grungy corridor.

Inside, we found a mix of viable businesses (coffee shop, hairdresser, snobby craft beer outlet) amid empty display windows. We got the scoop from George, the manager of said beer purveyor -- a place called the Spuyten Devil Grocery that has an accompanying bar with myriad unpronounceable brews a few blocks away. George informed us that the compound was originally a girdle factory, and when people stopped wearing those things it turned into a Goodwill of sorts before its owner subdivided it into its current composition.

This latest transformation, Spuyten George continued, happened about a decade ago. The place now carries the familiar North Williamsburg air of hipster funk, but with a bit of a heroin chic nose -- if we were in a depressed I-5 corridor town that lacked a Greyhound station, this would serve as the local shoot-up spot. There was no identifiable urine scent, but twenty bucks says people pee here with some regularity.

The timing of the building's renovation again became relevant a few moments later, when we noticed this sketch, covered with scuffs and adorned here and there with old gum wads, in the corner. Early, overlooked Sam Flores? We need Art Direction here.

In any case, tenants like the place because rent is significantly cheaper for everyone except the coffee shop, which fronts the street. Additionally, more petty operations can take out smaller lots than one would find in street-fronting retail in the neighborhood, creating a few select opportunities for small businesses to establish a physical presence in a neighborhood that's only a couple of credits short of max gentrification (though Hipster Heaven becomes Trinitarios Slashing Your FaceVille real fast a couple blocks south of the Factory).

Puerto Rico Day 2009...

...was tight as always, albeit a little light on the underage freaking. So tight, in fact, that we're gonna let it marinate for another day or two before attempting to describe it. In the meantime, Long Island City looked nice the other day (realtors: photography skills for hire -- yes, it's true, I'm still available):

We ventured across Newtown Creek for LIC Artists' Open Studios and, in typical DCQ fashion, set aside enough time to visit the workspaces of three of the 150-plus participating artists. Converted old factories and warehouses on barren industrial blocks slicing through a neighborhood trending residential housed the studios...

...which held, along with paint-splattered daycare centers, rotting staircases and freight elevators, some nice stuff from relative unknowns:

Symptoms: Robbed.

We were robbed. That we knew immediately. Musty clothes covered every inch of linoleum floor, from the cinderblock walls to the kicked-in back door. Two worn, ransacked backpacks lay somewhere underneath. The passports! Still in their place, alongside the credit cards and insurance cash under the plastic-sheathed mattress. Amid the tumult of the floor, an iPod stood out in its fluorescence, headphones disconnected earlier and stashed separately. They’d left this behind. They didn’t know what it was.

The cameras! The cameras. Gone. They got the motherfucking cameras. The ones with the photos of the beaches and the waterfalls and the jungles and the strutting street kids and the islands and the funeral pyre and the dirty fish markets and Waterloo and Maracas Bay and San Juan de las Galdonas. The cameras packed in our bags an hour before as we’d left our rented, windowless apartment to drink one last Carib with friends and close the book on Port-of-Spain and Carnival Tuesday. To bring closure to three days of round-the-clock costumed, painted, sweaty revelry and three weeks of haggling and tromping our way through Trinidad and northeastern Venezuela. Upon reaching Tragarete Road, we dove into a pulsing current of celebration, each participant a member of a “band” clothed in the stereotypical vision of cultures real and imagined -- ”Egyptians” in full King Tut headgear, “jungle warriors” with leaves covering only the most forbidden of body parts, “Americans” channeling John Wayne. 

The coordinated costumed pranced alongside flatbed semis alternately carrying full bars and stacks of speakers blasting the designated soca songs of the year (and there were about eight of those, played with according frequency). But this was day three -- and we were out of Puncheon spitfire rum, with a plane to Tobago leaving in three hours. Our gang was easy to find -- they were usually hanging in the steel-pan yard on the corner, shirtless and stinking from too many consecutive days of music and beer and just trying to “maintain” through the weeks of nonstop practice leading up to the festival proper. We said goodbye to Nigel and Kurt and Tommy and the kind dreadlocked guy Lennox whose canines were chiseled down to vampire fangs and walked back to the unkempt, ground-level unit to collect our packed bags en route to the airport. Only they were no longer packed. 

Suspects abounded: Bryan, our drug-dealing landlord with stitches sealing a two-inch mystery gash above his Adam’s apple. Anthony, the skinny dark-skinned man who charmed us weeks earlier with his sordid story of growing up in The States for 35 years before being deported in the ‘80s for smoking a joint in San Fran’s Washington Square Park, who had led us to Bryan when we were in desperate need of shelter? The group of standoffish teenage boys loitering outside Bryan’s apartment when we left for the parade earlier? Nigel, the band leader and our entree to true Trini culture, our unofficial Tragarete Road tour guide? Could he have!? Someone who knew we wouldn’t have time to call the cops over for a report. Someone poor; that eliminated nobody. Someone who knew our schedule -- someone who knew us. Someone we’d never find. 

One Month and Counting, Papi

The responsibility inherent to this blogging business has had us all flustered recently, so we decided to just sit around and eat corned beef hash out of the can and wait for someone to finally invent the remedial device that will read our Cleverest/Poignantest Thought of the Day and transcribe it onto this limp-wristed blog. Seems basic enough, right? But Jackass Scientist Man is evidently preoccupied with more trivial matters, so we regretfully return to pounding the keyboard with our middle fingers and opposable thumbs while eating more corned beef hash out of the can, because that shit is delicious. 

In keeping with tradition, then, we once again eschew literary substance in favor of photos and throwaway captions while celebrating the now-rapid approach of the Day the Puerto Ricans Retake Manhattan. It's a mere month away now, so maybe it's time I overcome my newly perfected machete phobia and saunter over to Sazon Perez for a mound of greasy, crackily pernil, since it's allllmost as delectable as corned beef hash and it doesn't typically come with aluminum splinters and other tasty surprises that sometimes make non-crunchy canned foods crunchy. Oy...hurry up, Jackass Scientist Man. For now, shutup, you, and marvel upon the shiny soul-drawrings:

Shouldn't wear a wife-beater for the same reason I don't wear an afro: Because it just looks stupid 

Shake it, mami

"Frommer, you've failed us again"  

"Not...ideal..." 

GoodNews/BadNews: Mice and Machetes

Trinitarios de Los Sures

The Good: Specklebutt seems to have taken care of the mouse situation at DCQhq. 

The Bad: The gangs have apparently emerged from their slumber for the warm-weather machete-attack season. 

The Badder: Some of them are spicing things up by slathering poison on their sharpened machete tips. You know, for max sliceage points. And the ones that weren't before will be once they meander past La Dolce Musto in this past week's Village Voice. 

The Who Knew!?: The hood used to be much, much worse. 

The OK: The attacks seem to revolve around the southern edge of the Bedford Ave. gentrification corridor, where randomly chosen victims are more likely to be trust-fund hipster kids than, say, I dunno, me. That said, Sazon Perez pernil expeditions may henceforth be restricted to daylight hours. 

The Doubly Related: A member of the DCQ family once obtained a rusty machete while vacationing as a child in the Yucatán. Said homeboy tried to carry it on to the plane. Inspection failed. A classic customs blunder. 

Good Girl in a Stuy Gone Bad

The homegirl JS took one for gentrification the other week, sacrificing a non-shining eye and a purse full of goodies in exchange for 18 months of cheap rent in Bedstuy. Moving time. Pics coming, but five days later and her face is still a horrid mess. Fucking teenagers. 

With that said, methinks this blog needeth an explanation: IDM's been preparing to come at ya for more than two years now, an idea that developed into a concept and has remained such since summer '06. We're into the latter stages of dropping our first print issue, with a website also forthcoming. Once we're fully operational, you'll be looking at an online zine with periodic print releases distributed in our three hubs: NYC, SFC and LA/OC. We're onto music, politics, art, multiculturalism and sports, with a focus on the places we live (see previous sentence) and visit, and creating under one overriding rule: We don't print pieces on anything that we don't find entirely enthralling or hilarious (and sometimes both). 

So there it is. Time to get get on with the damn thing already. Enjoy.