Number Five? You Want Spicy?

On Saturday, Listener Egmont picked us up in his big, comfy vehicle and we drove to Brooklyn to see “Angels and Accordions” at Green-Wood Cemetery. First, though, we drove into Sunset Park, just a little ways from where I used to live in Bush Terminal (under the Gowanus Expressway, near all those once-abandoned industrial buildings). It’s been a long tim since I was out there, and I couldn’t get over how much it’s changed. Not that it’s gentrified or anything, but it doesn’t look completely bombed out anymore—there are actual stores there now, and restaurants. We ate in one, but I don’t have the name because it was in Vietnamese.

It was a very rudimentary storefront-type place, with a counter along the back wall, a few plastic chairs and tables around the perimeter in front, and a big empty space in the middle. The menu was limited to just a few items, six or seven sandwiches, with their numbered pictures hanging above the counter and a list of drinks that included a durian milkshake—durian being that fruit that reportedly smells like rotting meat. Normally I am all about trying new things, but the idea of a rotting-meat milkshake in a storefront in my old neighborhood was a bit much, even for me.

Listener Egmont and Sluggo had lychee milkshakes, which they raved about, and I had a milk bubble tea with more big, black tapioca pearls than I could finish. The sandwiches were killer, too. We’re trying to think of other reasons to go back to that neighborhood now, just so we can eat those banh mi again. Maybe if the economy continues on its present course we will all end up living there—you, too!—and then we will have delicious Vietnamese sandwiches every day.

Following our excellent lunch we went down to Green-Wood to see the performance. It began just inside the main arch of the entrance, with Guy Klucevsek playing an accordion piece he’d written especially for “Angels and Accordions.” Dancers from Dance Theatre Etcetera—half dressed all in white (ghosts or spirits, I thought, but maybe angels) and half dressed all in black (mourners) performed to the music. I kind of liked the dance, but Sluggo thought it was sort of corny. Listener Egmont pointed out that all dance is sort of corny, and we all agreed on that.

About halfway through, there was a great squeaking and squawking from above, and I looked up and saw flashes of brilliant green and metallic teal coming in and out of some enormous bird nests built all around the spires of the archway. Even more surprising than the hyphen in Green-Wood is the fact that the famous Feral Parakeets of Brooklyn are welcome at the cemetery because their poop doesn’t wreck the stonework the way pigeon poo does. (Here is a link to some info about the birds, in case you don’t know about them.) Some Web sites call them parakeets and some say they are parrots, but I prefer the former because Feral Parakeets sounds more ridiculous and also because when I lived in Portland, Oregon, we used to visit a place we called the Parakeet Mausoleum. It was a huge building full of dead people filed away in giant drawers, with dozens and dozens of parakeets in cages all over. There was also a stairway to nowhere, a large stained-glass window of Abraham Lincoln, and a statue attributed to some woman who was described as “Iowa’s preeminent sculptress,” although I grew up in Iowa and I’d never heard of her. So—the parakeet, bird of the dead. Of course.

After the short dance piece the rest of Angels and Accordions consisted of a lot of walking around and looking at excessively earnest young people in solemn tableaux vivant. I think it must be extremely difficult to look earnest and solemn while doing trapeze tricks in a tree in a cemetery, but they managed. There was a bit of accordion music here and there, but no more Guy Klucevsek. I gather from reading reviews of past performances that Angels and Accordions has changed a good deal from when it was first presented four years ago. Alas.

On the way home in the big, comfy vehicle we started discussing politics. I said how odd it seemed that the big front-page breaking-news headline in every newspaper after the vice-presidential debate was that the candidate of a major political party actually spoke in complete sentences. (Now, of course, Candidate Palin is going around claiming she meant to sound like an idiot in the Couric interviews.) Listener Egmont said that when he watched the presidential debate (the first one) he was surprised that McCain sounded so old—not old as in his age, but old in his ideas, with his 20th-Century Cold-War point of view about everything. You know how some people get stuck at whatever music was popular when they were young? They really liked the Rolling Stones or something, and now that music, and music from that era, and bands who sound like bands from that era, and tribute bands who play that kind of music are all they’ll listen to? And they don’t know anything about any music that’s happened in the last 40 or 30 or 20 years? I think maybe the same thing happens with people’s political ideas sometimes. It explains why some people are still fretting about things that have become punch lines in real life. So I guess it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the debate tonight.

Comments

[michael C]

Great post, Bronwyn.
Vietnamese heroes (or grinders as they're called in Southeast Asia), are awesome. I love the mystery meat part...
But as for the beverages, durian milkshakes (or pastries) are not bad. You only get a bit of the mustiness/stinkyness of the "king of fruits" because they use durians that are put in the deep freeze before being shipped here. I was forced multiple times in Malaysia--where my wife is from--to have freshly hacked durian, and I can say that it was very challenging. I never got used to the taste of raw onions mingled with ice cream, with a hint of vomit...But her family kept pushing it on me...time after time. I've actually grown to like those shakes and pastries made with the de-natured stuff.
And the Malaysians knock the Vietnamese and Thai people for eating lame, under-ripe durians, that don't stench enough. Go figure.
But nothing--NOTHING--compares with what I tasted this weekend in Elmhurst at a Taiwanese restaurant. My friend, who is Hong Kong, ordered something she translated as "rotten tofu." It looked like normal cubes of friend tofu covered in chilies and scallions...and oh my god, when I tasted it, I had to spit it into the bowl filled with fish bones. Another friend, who is from Malaysia and loves "stinking beans" and durian, almost threw up. The tofu smelt like a piece of meat that was left in the back of the fridge for two months...and it tasted worse. I challenge that bizarre foods guy on the cooking channel to eat some...
Cheers! Michael C
PS--the birds at Green-Wood are called monk parakeets, but they're actually parrots from Argentina. They're said to be the descendants of escaped or released pets. They were the target of an eradication campaign conducted in the 1970s because they are agricultural pests (they rip up fruit trees), however, the powers that be at Green-Wood wouldn't let the hit squad kill the birds on cemetery turf. They live in giant communal nests made out of mud and sticks (the parrots, not the hit squads).

[michael C]

that's "My friend, who is FROM hong kong"
sorry!

[Ivy]

I've seen Monk parakeets flying wild in Miami Beach. Apparently over the last twenty years they've formed colonies in Chicago and also in a city in Spain. There are colonies of feral Ring necked parakeets flying around suburban London.

[Listener R. McNally]

Just out of curiosity, how many hours did it take you to get to Sunset Park, DJ Bronwyn?

[dividend]

Bronwyn-- First let me say how much I enjoy regularly listening to your (and Kelly's) show. Sadly, let me follow up by saying that I think (the area between Park Slope and Bay Ridge) is very quickly gentrifying. It's a process that doesn't exactly trickle to a halt when it gets repeatedly hyped in paper media (I feel like I read a very similar Times article about banh mi and Greenwood like 3 years ago) and on the web and then seized upon as cachet by realtors (I'm sure this post will see some links back from some "neighborhood bloggers" in short order).

For the record, I moved in 4 years ago, a musician, and my roommate, an artist, 6 years ago. You're right that it's not quite out of control yet, but looking at our rent increases, he and I will quite literally be out of here in a couple of years. I know, Bronwyn: these sad violins change the more they stay the same.

I'm a also a little puzzled about what you mean when you write, "we will all end up living here"-- who exactly is meant by "we?" The "we" I see ending up here seem more and more to be kid-friendly-to-a-fault and of undue privilege-- not so much WFMU listeners as soy-zombified pirate-booty munching NPR ones, spillover from Park Slope and elsewhere. Sure, I'm glad I'm not living in a bombed-out hellhole (at least for the moment), but I sure hope I'm unscientific and non-expert in my observations on what appears to have gone on here for at mimimum the better part of a decade. Those are some damned good Vietnamese sandwiches, though.

[craig]

now that i have left nyc and moved to portland, i gotta ask - WHERE is the parakeet mausoleum? have to have sumpin to do here.....