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June 11, 2009
A box to put your dreams in
SeanElder.com
The Brooklyn writer/editor/blogger offers a rebuke to the "cultural missionaries" who swallowed Bruce Ratner's Gehry-bait hook, line and sinker.
I was at a benefit for the the Brooklyn Museum not long ago, seated between a couple of well-heeled benefactors — both, notably, from the Upper East Side — when the subject came up.
One of them mentioned how much she loved Jhumpa Lahiri’s last book. I mentioned that Lahiri (or “Jhumpa” as I like to call her) had done a reading at my house to benefit Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a neighborhood association that opposes the AY project. The silence that followed was deafening, or would have been if you could hear silence in the museum’s cavernous ballroom. “We’re all for not destroying Brooklyn,” one of them finally said, “but we also care about The Future.”
She pronounced it with caps like that, and I don’t think she was talking about the Leonard Cohen song either. She meant a big behemoth, representing progress, that cultural missionaries have always brought to simple primitives like us. The fact that the wheels are coming off Gehry’s glimmering gift gives me qualified pleasure (though it ain’t dead yet, kids! Get involved!). I guess we’ll just have to make do with the blossoming food and music scenes here, the non-stop party that is Fulton Street, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the countless artists, musicians and writers who have chosen to make this area their home. Somehow we’ll make do.
Posted by eric at June 11, 2009 11:37 AM