Maria and I went to Brooklyn for Christmas to be with my daughter Emma, and we loved wandering all over this amazing universe with Emma. We stayed at the quite wonderfully strange Hotel LeBleu in Park Slope. The rooms had amazing views of miles of Brooklyn warehouses framed by the Manhattan skyline, and I loved the idea of the Emerald City rising up from its much less glamorous but far hipper cousin. The LeBleu staff were great, the rooms well-designed (strangely, the shows are a large glass enclosure in the middle of the room).
The LeBleu is beyond funky, sandwiched in between a warehouse, a kidney dialysis center, and a Staples. We loved it and will return. Brooklyn is always a bit bittersweet for me, as I feel different tugs. I love cities, and would love to live in a place like Brooklyn, yet I have become a country boy, I think, and would have a hard time living without donkeys, dogs, paths to roam and beautiful views. I would love to be nearer my daughter, and not to feel that our lives are some completely different from one another. There is a very hip and sometimes smug sameness about the new Brooklyn, I think, as there is in much of New York, one way of looking at the world. But then, on every block, a hundred ways of looking at the world. Homes are tiny, expensive – launching points for the wider world, just the opposite of upstate New York. But boy, you see a million movies when you walk,and eat amazing food at a different place each night. Crossroads of the earth, really. My feet are blistered and sore.
My main Canon 5D is in the shop, getting picked up tomorrow, much junk, hair, dust and mud gouged out of it (“where do you live?” asked the incredulous Glens Falls camera expert who cleaned it.) I brought my 24 mm Lumix point-and-shoot to Brooklyn, and I am always surprised by what this little camera can do, and happy I brought. I am always drawn to Hopper’ish shots of loneliness, connection and disconnection. Writing six short essays on Bittersweet Brooklyn, an aspiring place (bought two creativity candles from a Santeria Shop on Fifth). Come along. The first was New York sunrise from the balcony of the top floor of the wonderful Hotel LeBleu.