vip in the city

Where have all the hipsters gone?

Back to P.S. 1 for Week 2 of the 2007 Warm Up series. This time around, I accompanied J for an architect’s view of the Ball-Nogues “Liquid Sky” installation and the whimsical poster series curated by Israel Kandarian.

We arrived in LIC, bracing ourselves for a crowd similar to the one I encountered last week, but this afternoon the scene was remarkably sedate. What’s this? Hardly a line outside, where last Saturday it wrapped around the block… no crowding at the bars, and actual floor space visible in the courtyard outside the museum…?

It seems almost every other hipster was at the 77BoaDrum show at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in DUMBO, where Japanese band Boredoms staged a 77-minute, 77 drummer performance, in celebration of 7/7/7. The Times was somewhat unimpressed by the stunt, but no matter: the line for the free show stretched over half a mile long. New York magazine summed up the overwhelming response in the week’s “Approval Matrix” feature — That’s NYC: A million fun things to do; a million people who want to do them.

Greenpoint photo shoots

Decisions, decisions. I had to bow out of JL’s belated birthday celebration at Bon Chon – Korean fried chicken: it’s the Next Big Thing! – due to pre-existing plans in Greenpoint the same evening. Not that my presence is actually all that much in demand; July happens to be a popular month for birthdays – second most in fact, just behind August. In any case, I was hoping to cruise by still on the goodwill generated by my birthday gift to JL of some two decades ago: ZZ Top’s Afterburner – on cassette, obvs – during our first summer at CTY (read: geek camp.)

Unbeknownst to me, the Reuters boys had already begun the festivities several hours before my arrival with German chocolate cake. I turned the corner on Manhattan Avenue to discover a couple of serious Żubrówka-fueled photo shoots already in progress.

The boys agreed to take a break at the spin-off location of the much-loved Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, which opened last month on Commercial Street in the space that once housed our favorite Greenpoint Jamaican (then later: not-so-Jamaican) café Bleu Drawes.

Instead, we found two rather forlorn looking girls and a man who I assumed was their father, sitting on the benches outside the shuttered storefront. No ice cream today. The man confided that he’d never actually seen the shop open for business. With no operating phone it’s difficult to confirm, but New York magazine reports that a sidewalk crêpe cart – ooh, crêpes! — is in the works for summer’s end, so we’ll just have to keep coming back to check.

On Franklin, our ears were met with a tinny tune on incessant loop, which could only signify one thing. Not Mister Softee, (R.I.P.) but his fiesty Brooklyn cousin: Kool Man.

This being Brooklyn and not the UK, there would be no 99s for AC. And while the menu was more familiar to me (soft serve cones, Klondike bars, Popsicles, and good ol’ American Bomb Pops), the tune emitted from the brightly logoed truck was not quite that earworm of a jingle that I recalled from all my own childhood summers, but rather “Turkey in the Straw“… with a pounding back beat, which somehow, among the warehouses, felt just right.

Boo.

Noodle abundance

Back to Cantoon Garden on Elizabeth for another helping of the Braised E-Fu Noodle with Black Mushroom with a side of the baby bok choy.  Is it possible that the dishes were even larger than the last time?  This is what the platter looked like after  we had both eaten our fill:

On the way back to the Canal Street Station, we stumbled across one of the new(ish) R2-D2-wrapped mailboxes that the United States Postal Service rolled out in March to help commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) – the second highest domestic grossing film of all time.  (#1 is either Titanic or Gone with the Wind, depending on whether the adjustment is made for inflation.)

The whimsical tribute to the 2003 Robot Hall of Fame inductee is appearing in 200 cities nationwide to promote the USPS’s new Star Wars -themed products: a set of fifteen first class stamps and three Express Mail envelopes – none featuring the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks.