New York state of mind

Brooklyn and Barcelona (but not Alaska)

Look at these fat little birds

Greetings from Bay Ridge!

It’s cold and rainy here but I couldn’t be happier. Longtime readers know that Bay Ridge is where my mother was born and raised. I typically stay with my cousin, Noreen, who lives in her grandmother’s house a few blocks up from Shore Road and down the street from Fort Hamilton where my mother went to high school. I’m never more than a few steps from family history here.

Bay Ridge is small but dense patch of Brooklyn. There’s an entire universe in the blocks around Bagel Boy on 3^rd Avenue and 80^th Street, which for me is the heart of Bay Ridge. (Egg and cheese with hot sauce on an untoasted egg bagel.) I realize this is an arbitrary distinction but Bagel Boy is a couple blocks from my cousin’s house and across the street from her husband’s bar supply business.

I was born in New York, but moved away when I was very young, so I experience Bay Ridge through the lens of a kid from the suburbs. My aunt would visit us in False Church, Virginia with a bag full of bagels that we would put in the freezer and dole out for special occasions. Bagel Bay is the cynosure of Bay Ridge past and present.

I find it incredibly stimulating. There are lots of old school Irish bars, including the one where my grandfather, Pinchy Flanagan, used to work. There’s Nino’s pizzeria, which is not to be confused with Nonno’s a couple blocks down the street, or a half-dozen others. There’s a Chinese dumpling house, a Japanese ramen restaurant, your pick of Yemeni, Turkish, and Ukrainian coffee shops. Dozens of places to get your nails done or your hair cut. There are what feels like dozens of bakeries from Lebanese to Jewish to Italian to French to places that do it all. Halal meat markets? Fresh produce? Books? Hookahs? Legal Services?

It’s all steps away….

A decade of Giving the Finger

Today I was going to reflect on the ten year anniversary of Giving the Finger, my fist creative collaboration in book form with Scott Campbell, Jr. of Discovery’s The Deadliest Catch, but I’m not in the right head space for that right now. I’ve got a ton going on at the moment and moving through time and space too quickly for a proper reflection. I barely have time to reflect on what’s happening much less what went down ten years ago.

For example, last weekend I took a last-minute trip up to Anaheim for WonderCon that included a visit to Disneyland with some incredible people. I didn’t get back to San Diego until two a.m. and then on Easter morning we flew to New York out of Tijuana via Guadalajara. Yes, an international flight to New York with a layover in Guadalajara. That probably sounds slightly insane and it was. Why did we do it then? Because I had flight credits that were expiring and it made the airfare for tomorrow’s flight to Spain cheaper. What can I say? I love a good travel deal.

When I get back to San Diego I’ll do a proper reflection on my adventures in Alaska. Plus, it doesn’t make sense to do a book giveaway when I’m thousands of miles from home and won’t be able to ship those books out for a few weeks.

Media Blitz

My work has been popping up in all kinds of strange places lately.

First, there’s this profile of Don Winslow that I wrote for the LA Times. Last month, I drove out to Julian where Winslow spends half the year. We talked over lunch at a Mexican restaurant off the main drag that is owned by some friends of his and that he helped name. It turns out that we have friends in common in the San Diego arts community, and I’ve been driving by his office without realizing it for years.

I reviewed The Force for the LA Times back in 2017 and The Border for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2019, but this was an incredible experience I’ll never forget. If I never write another piece for the LA Times, and who knows given the state of book culture/journalism/ media companies, this would be a fitting end to my run. I’m grateful to my former editor, Boris Kafka, for assigning the piece, and to Tod Goldgerg, Adrian McKinty, and Lou Berney for their contributions to the story.

My name came up in a recent Pitchfork review of Meat Puppets II—forty years after its release. Matthew Blackwell quotes from an interview I did with Derrick Bostrom in Corporate Rock Sucks, which was nice to see, and also references Greg Prato’s invaluable oral history. Also, Ariane Colenbrander recommends Corporate Rock Sucks in her review of Thurston Moore’s new memoir Sonic Life for Vancouverscape.

When I wrote Corporate Rock Sucks I wanted to gather information from zines and other-than-mainstream media that could be hard to track down, much less verify, so it’s gratifying to see the book used as a reference tool.

Last week I neglected to mention the publication of Sporting Mustaches by friend-of-the-newsletter Aug Stone. It’s a collection of hair-rising tales (sorry) about the intersection of athletics and facial hair through the ages. Here’s the blurb that I was all too happy to provide:

“Puns, double meanings, and wordplay abounds in Stone’s stories of arcane athletic contests whose outcomes are affected by extraordinary facial hair.”

Aug is launching Sporting Mustaches at WORD in Brooklyn tonight at 7pm. Unfortunately, I have a previous engagement and won’t be able to attend.

Do What You Want in Barcelona

Lastly, your final reminder that I’ll be doing an event to celebrate the Spanish edition of Do What You Want in Barcelona on Saturday at 12pm. That’s not a typo. The event will be held at La Conxita at noon.

Thanks for reading! I’m especially grateful to those of you who upgraded your membership last week. If you’re new to Message from the Underworld and you enjoyed this newsletter, you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, science, and killer whales.