I can't avoid Brooklyn. It's in my books, music and films. Close friends of mine from high school now live there. They call at all hours of the night to celebrate their newfound home, telling me that whiskey is unheard of in their nook of the borough. Only rum my friend, only rum.
This could be a problem if I took issue with the place; this being psychologically stuck in a Brooklyn bubble of culture while my poor body is pillaged by Southern California and its gleeful hedonism.
The fact is however, that I love the Borough of Homes and Churches in absentee. Some would say I've manifested (creating a sort of new meaning for the word entirely and beautifully) Brooklyn into my life.
It's not as if Brooklyn is a new thing in our culture, which I know despite my ignorance of New York. I seem to remember that Whitman and Crane wrote quite famous poems about the place. I remember reading a book as an early teen by the name "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Spike Lee brought the place back into cultural prominence in the '80s with his films "Do the Right Thing" and "She's Gotta Have It."
In the last five years, however, the place has exploded on the cultural scene. A new interesting band is born in Brooklyn at a faster rate then new babies are born in the Big Apple. Two of last year's biggest bands, MGMT and Vampire Weekend, are from there as are loads of others. Bohemians are to Brooklyn as surfers are to San Diego.
Then there are the books, which make my head want to explode with joy! Jonathan Lethem comes first. Brooklyn-born and bred, Brooklyn is what he writes about. His "Fortress of Solitude" is absolutely fantastic. Jonathan Safran Foer ("Everything is Illuminated") makes his home here with his writer wife, Nicole Krauss ("Man Walks into a Room"), along with other contemporary greats Jhuma Lahiri ("The Namesake"), Paul Auster ("The Brooklyn Follies"), his wife Siri Hustvedt ("The Sorrows of an American") and Colson Whitehead ("The Intuitionist"). Michael Chabon (whose father was Brooklyn-born) often weaves the borough into his work ("Kavalier and Clay").
All this and films too? Yes indeed. Noah Baumbach, one of my own personal favorites, set "The Squid and The Whale" in Brooklyn. The Documentary "With Allah in Brooklyn" is certainly worth seeing. One of my favorite movies of all time, "The Royal Tenenbaums," was filmed in part at the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn is today's U.S local of cultural creation. I'm hoping that references to it never stop, and that when I turn on NPR, Idris Elba, from HBO's "The Wire," is still waxing about experiences in the borough. Brooklyn is in the zeitgeist to stay. It's not leaving so, as they say, "Fugheddaboudit."
