Keith Murray is "Complicated but Simple"

T-Bird brings us some old Keith Murray inanity today. Skip to around minute four if you, like us, find the We Are Scientists guys mildly yet consistently annoying.

You Have Corn on the Cob...

...we have fire hydrants and streetball. When the temp breaks 80, the people of Los Sures break hydrant caps.

Then grandma breaks out the oil-drum barbecue, and it's officially a summertime Saturday afternoon.

The only question is whether or not the firefighters will be able to get the thing back together. In this case, the answer was a resounding 'no'; two weeks later and it's still gushing Catskills clear onto brown pavement.

Meanwhile, next to the BQE, a team from Rodney Park is eternally playing some other team from Rodney Park. Or so say their jerseys. I don't even know if Rodney Park is a place or a man (or maybe the requirement for joining the team is you are a Rodney Park?!), but these guys can run. The teams seem to play one of only two styles: Aggressive, flashy and mistake-riddled with lots of sensational dunks or aggressive, flashy and fundamental with no dunks whatsoever. Either way, the Caucasian baller here is regarded as rare a sight as the post-Giuliani Manhattan street whore or the red panda courtship ritual.

Summertime's just the best, right guys?

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).

Opportunistic Lefties Strike Again

Nice, gay marriage proponents: Stealing the concept of nonconventional marriage support from Ben & Jerry's. How very Obama of you. You liberals are shameless. Shameless, I say. 

Two months late and 94 short

Detroit photographer Kevin Bauman has 100 Abandoned Houses (via Volts, Amps and Ohms). We have six. But we swear we shot these before his site blew up earlier this fine spring. Check the trees if you don't believe us. Ha. Moted. 

Nobody's out but the ruffians

One of the first warm weekends of this nascent summer in New York, and the streets on Saturday night were quiet where they should've been cracking and chaotic where they should've been silent. Los Trinitarios seemed to be staying in playing Mob Wars, leaving Los Sures to the older crowd: In the five minutes after I left my house, I exchanged pleasantries with a trio of homeless folks on the shelter steps, passed a heaving circle of Dominicanos going verse-for-verse in front of the mechanic's garage, came upon an impromptu taco stand--complete with two-man mariachi band--in front of an apartment building, and ducked and weaved through fifteen twentysomething men streaming out of a row house to watch a brawl in the making. 

Later, walking to the train through an eerily silent LES, a beater Camry packed with Latino teenagers screeched up alongside me, veering onto the sidewalk across the street and almost hitting a hydrant. On the phone, I glanced over long enough to gather that the driver was fighting with a girl in the passenger side, with another girl riding bitch most certainly not real thrilled about the whole scenario. Before I turned the corner, I looked back in time to see homegirl square up and punch the dude in the jaw, hard, before he drove away. An hour later, after an empty train ride back over the river, I stumbled down from the platform to see a white guy in a Warriors-inspired getup talking to three cops--one uniformed, two plainclothes--with blood caking the left half of his face and big welts rising on his forehead and right cheek. Jumped by kids on the train: "And the worst part was--listen to this--the worst part was, they were videotaping the whole thing! Check Youtube, I think they were doing it to put up there..."

And so on.

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. 

East River on a Sunday afternoon