Such was the case with Jelena and me. I had been in Williamsburg for a decade when she arrived. I met her at one of the illegal exotic restaurants that sprang up in the wake of the many illegal exotic nightclubs that had put the neighborhood on the map. And from that night onward, and for the year she was in New York, Jelena essentially re-awakened me to the neighborhood I thought I had invented. The music, the clubs, the fashion, the attitude. It was all new, a Williamsburg I did not know.
Only the year before I had been featured in New York Magazine as "Medea," queen mother of the hip new hood in Brooklyn. I ran the weekly paper, I mc'd the shows, I knew all the bartenders and politicians. And then, like an oblique turn in a film noire movie, I found myself being pulled into a side of Williamsburg I had not seen before, and by a beautiful young woman who had just arrived from Paris.
The soundtrack to this episode is undoubtedly "Crazy" by Seal. Jelena changed my life profoundly, and the change moved upon me with stealth, very much the way the opening grooves of that rapturous track by Seal slide up into the song.
I write about the history of the Brooklyn Renaissance, basically, and the afflatus of gentrification, and how art plays into it. And the matter of who started it all, when, and where, is interesting. Much more interesting, though, is what happens when the newer and larger numbers of young artists come to the neighborhood.
This opinion may be counter-intuitive. We look for the heavies, the giants who "pioneered" the place. But in real history, as distinct from the narrative of it, the opposite obtains. The scene gains in intensity and depth. The newcomers are frequently more intense than the veterans. A certain stark realism enters the picture, perhaps because the coziness of the old scene has been breached. And as a result, passion and energy actually increase.
The newcomers annoy the old guard to some extent, because they have an air of being motivated by a force that comes from before, from after, and from outside the scene into which they enter. It is not that the old scene is parochial, it really is not. But even so, the newcomers expand the scene. They cause it to darken and tremble. In any case, I write it down to a certain way of looking at history, and a lesson I first learned from Jelena.
Photo by Eva Schicker, 1993
