Local
Seaside Stories
VIII. The Brooklyn Riviera
Growing up near Coney Island, a good tan was a key ingredient of popularity among white kids. Because I didn’t have one, people called me a vampire from Transylvania—an insult back then. Yet one needs to be extraordinarily devoted to tanning in order to achieve a year-round glow in New York City. Those who are able to often stick together and cultivate a vitality that seems even tougher than their skin. While the rest of us go into hibernation as winter approaches, the hearty few who sport bathing suits year-round gloat over their ownership of the sun.
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Seaside Stories
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I work at a bar that was recently named best neighborhood bar in N.Y.C. by the NY Times Magazine. While I agree that it deserves the title, I am not exactly sure which neighborhood it belongs to—South Slope? Greenwood Heights? Sunset Park? I thus felt compelled to dive into some bars deeply intertwined with their own distinct neighborhood (Sheepshead Bay).
five
By Amanda DeutchJULY/AUG 2023 | Poetry
Amanda Deutch is a poet born and raised in New York City. Recent poetry collections include the chapbooks wild anemone (forthcoming above/ground press, 2023), Bodega Night Pigeon Riot(above/ground press, 2020) and Surf Avenue & 29th Street, Coney Island (Least Weasel Press, 2018).
59. (Coney Island, 42nd Street, the Meatpacking District, among other locations)
By Raphael RubinsteinJUNE 2021 | The Miraculous
Deserted by his parents at a young age, subjected to abuse by his supposed caregivers, a New Jersey teenager finally has no option but to drop out of school and run away to New York City where he survives, barely and dangerously, as a street hustler. Now in his mid-20s and trying to make his way as an artist he embarks on a project that takes him back to many of the locations where he used to sell his body for sex: “the places I had hung out in as a kid,” he later explains, “the places I starved in or haunted.”
Stefan Bondell: Dark Marks
By Alfred Mac AdamMARCH 2023 | ArtSeen
Stefan Bondell inhabits a unique niche in the herky-jerky continuum of figurative painting in the United States. To find his antecedents, we must jump back many generations and sweep the dust-off names like Reginald Marsh (1898-1904) and Paul Cadmus (1904-1999). Paintings such as Marsh’s rendition of a Coney Island Sideshow (1930) or his 1929 frieze-like etching of a breadline, or Cadmus’s 1936 Public Dock all rise to mind when viewing Bondell’s pictures. To those names we would add German Expressionists like George Grosz and Max Beckmann who lived here, and Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros whose presence in the United States brought socially critical art on a grand scale into American culture.
