Brian Berger

Jesus is Lord (East New York)

Next up in the Found in Brooklyn Group Art Show hit parade is some photography from Mr. Brian Berger. Brian is a maniac documentary style street photographer. He is obsessed with capturing our disappearing by the second street culture by image and also in words. He is fascinated with people with interesting stories to tell. Stories that predate our current fascination with real estate, demolition and construction. Unfortunately these days this is what is in our faces and can't be ignored. (sigh.) It often boggles the mind that NYC once had a booming creative underground. These are Brian's issues. In addition to being a fab photographer, he gives a great interview.

Check out his blog Who Walk in Brooklyn for today’s interview with Luc Sante!

He also recently interviewed another art show participant, video artiste Donald O'Finn.

And of course he is editor of the fine tome, New York Calling: from Blackout to Bloomberg.

The FIB art show is up for another month!
Do stop by Freddy's and take a gander.

The "Found in Brooklyn Group Art Show" viewing hours are from 11am to 4am, 7 days a week.
Click here for links to see the websites of all the participating artists.

Freddy's Bar & Backroom
located at:
485 Dean Street Brooklyn, NY 11215
phone: 718.622.7035
That's the corner of Dean Street and 6th Avenue in Brooklyn.

New York Calling goes Uptown.

In case you misssed it, my very opinionated (in a good way!) compadre, Brian Berger, over at Who Walk in Brooklyn was interviewed in The Gothamist yesterday.Also the good folks over at Develop Don't Destroy have featured him as well.

F.I.B readers may have noticed I've been pimping the book Brian co-edited called New York Calling:From Blackout to Bloomberg for the last couple months, that's because it's a must read! I believe this is the last stop on the tour.

Here is the info:
December 7 at 7:00 pm
Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth)
536 W. 112th St
The Island of Manhattan!
FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!
novelist Meredith Brosnan
acrobat Marshall Berman
mime Brian Berger & ...
SPECIAL GUEST TBA!!!

Check out Brian's blog people, it does not review restaurants, promote Christmas Craft Fairs or talk about construction violations. It's different. It's weird. It's wacky. It's real. He is interviewing Jim Knipfel from the inside of the Shore Hotel next week. Plus F.I.B has a film review up on his site, stay tuned for my next assignment, it's a doozy.

New York Calling Reading in Queens Tonight

Nevermind the fact F.I.B is todays guest blogger on editor of New York Calling: From Blackout To Bloomberg's blog Who Walk in Brooklyn what's also important is that it's the last stop (for now) on the New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg book tour. The gang is ending up in Queens.

They rep Queens!
Brian Berger (Rockaway Beach, WWIB), Joseph Anastasio (Astoria, LTV Squad) & Kevin Walsh (Flushing, Forgotten New York) are reading TONIGHT!

WHERE?
Barnes & Noble
176-60 Union Turnpike
Fresh Meadows, Killa' Queens
(The F to 169th Street is closest subway.)November 28 at 7:30 pm

Check Who Walk in Brooklyn for more details.

"New York Calling" Reading at L.E.S Tenement Museum on Wednesday!

F.I.B continues her Kafkaesque job search and allows Brian Berger co-editor of "New York Calling:From Blackout to Bloomberg" to guest blog again.
Found In Brooklyn? I’ll eat to that! Let’s start at 3rd Avenue & 9th St, where the lunch special has gone up to $4.50 & rather than replacing an otherwise good sign, somebody broke out the Krylon. What do ya’ll get for that extra 55 cents? It’s tough to say since, like most other things Spanish, Sonia’s Restaurant has been consistently ignored by the chroniclers of Gowanus & South Brooklyn. Perhaps if they hired an autentico publicist, they’d get more attention? Privately, WWIB food writer Zyczymy Smacznego tells me the “rostissieri” (as its charmingly misspelled on their awning) chicken is unmissable.Also unmissable, or so you’d think: New Bopper’s Luncheonette in Gravesend. Jazz diner? Warriors tribute? Reached for comment in hell, retired sewer worker & noted Brooklyn bowling enthusiast, Ed Norton said, “How the fuck should I know?!” While near by the ever-popular Culver Line, the internet again tells us nothing more.

Brian Berger, Marshall Berman, Philip Dray, Leonard Levitt & Robert Sietsema, all of New York Calling, will discuss New Bopper’s Luncheonette & other urban mysteries at The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
108 Orchard Street this Wednesday at 6:30 pm.
Admission is FREE!

Check the Who Walk in Brooklyn blog for more information.

If you want to know who "The Boppers" are click on this!

Photographs taken by Mr. Berger.

Food & Lit Saturday on Staten Island!

One of the few things I know about Staten Island is that it the home of an old kitschy Polynesian/Tiki style Chinese restaurant called Jade Island in an old strip mall on Richmond Avenue. I made it to Jade Island one Sunday when an attempt to make it out to Englishtown, New Jersey was bamboozled by traffic jams of epic proportions, leaving us miles away from the Outer Bridge Crossing with our spirits deflated and our stomachs rumbling. An ideal moment to make the pilgramage to one of the few old school tiki style restaurants left in the tri-state area and just as exciting as going to Englishtown! The bland exterior is deceiving because once you enter the doors of Jade Island the only thing that reminds you that you are in a strip mall that also houses a K-Mart and not in an exotic local, is the fact that there is a very busy NY LOTTO machine in the bar area.

Check out this spot on review from Tiki Central.

In business since 1972, Jade Island is a restaurant and cocktail lounge located in a Staten Island strip mall. The locals all seem to agree that the restaurant has been well maintained over the years, and the Chinese food and tropical drinks are both excellent. The flaming pu pu platter and the jumbo shrimp with garlic sauce are expecially recommended for food, and the headunter is regarded as their best drink (seved in a Tiki mug), although you can’t pass up the recipes served in fresh coconut shells. That said, Manhattan reviewers seem to think that the food is greasy and the drinks are too syrupy and sweet.

You be the judge.

With backlit 3-D waterfall scenes, bamboo booths, a tiny waterfall flowing next to a fake volcano, and the requisite pufferfish lamps, Jade Island makes the grade for Tiki decor. Staten Island has some very groovy 1960’s architecture, take a drive around the neighborhood.

* Please note although F.I.B enjoyed the fab decor and food and drink immensely her dining companion was hospitalized the next day for gallblatter complications, we often wonder if Jade Island induced it!

Another interesting place on Satan I mean Staten Island is the "Every Thing Goes Book Store" where the latest leg of the "New York Calling:From Blackout to Bloomberg" five borough book reading tour is landing Saturday night at 8pm.I think this peacock must of escaped from Jade Island!

The folks over at "New York Calling" say........
"Meet the Shaolin warriors & challenge their Wu Tang sword styles:
Staten-native Steve Maluk, Village Voice food writer Robert Sietsema & WWIB air personality, The Wally Champ of South Brooklyn, Brian Berger, will all be present.

"Every Thing Goes Book Store" is located at 208 Bay Street, Staten Island

Check the Who Walk in Brooklyn for more information.

Peacock photo taken on Staten Island by Brian Berger.

CONTEST! WIN PRIZE! FOR REAL!!!

FREE COPY OF "NEW YORK CALLING: "From Blackout to Bloomberg" to the first person who can name the location of this photo!

Good Luck Brooklynites!! Photo was taken by Robert Sietsema in the early 1980's

My email address is at the top upper right- F.I.B.

Go to Bluestockings Books * Friday 7pm.

This week I did NOT allow Brian Berger to guest blog but I DID allow him to guest photag!

Photos taken winter of 1997 around the Gowanus.

9th Street Nude.

This weeks stop on the "New York Calling" book reading tour is at Bluestockings Bookstore on the Lower East Side. If you've never been there, it's a bookstore specializing in underground and left leaning literature, as well as independent zines and whatnot. I keep pimping this book "New York Calling" because not only does editor Brian Berger live in the neighborhood and have his own iconic blog, Walks In Brooklyn but because the book is a must read. The book contains true stories about life in our fair city from every borough and subjects range from general life in NYC to gentrification to drugs to music and more from the 1960's to the Atlantic Yards. Checkitout! even Norman Oder liked it!.

French Blue Union

Friday nights representatives from the book are Margaret Morton, photographer who documents the homeless. Tom Robbins and Robert Sietsema from the Village Voice. Bian Berger will aslso be in attendance.

Bluestockings, 172 Allen St between Stanton & Rivington, Isle of Manhattan.
Starts at 7pm.

Brian Berger Allowed to "Guest Blog" Again!

Found in Brooklyn? From sea to wine dark sea, whether it's Colonial Road or Cypress Hills, Avenue C or Canarsie. Here it's a little more common, starting at the Union St drawbridge over the Gowanus Canal, in the years before propagandists & fools began making claims its ecology can't come close to supporting. Still, there was sand on these shores, with the mighty Crusader Candle around the corner on Nevins, where High John the Conqueror & many other guardians of Gowanus remain.From South Brooklyn to southern Brooklyn, Coney Island Creek, where everybody's heard about the bird. (Bird bird bird, the bird is the word.) This isn't my favorite spot for BK crustaceans-- Rencher's Crab Inn on Flatbush near Avenue O is-- but for a romantic waterfront dining experience, it's the best in the borough.Heading west across the burning sands lovers say goodbye Bensonhurst, farewell Fort Hamilton, adios Bay Ridge; wuzzup... Seagate! How we got in & how we got out isn't something to talk about now but soon after jumping the fence back onto the shores of Coney Island proper... Shy, he thought she'd never ask: bivalve curious??

At 7 pm this Saturday at Vox Pop, Brian Berger of whowalkinbrooklyn will appear with Marshall Berman, the great Tom Robbins and moderator Neil DeMause to discuss the recently published book: New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg.

B.Y.O.A: Bring your own aphrodisiacs?

Vox Pop is located at 1022 Cortelyou Road at Coney Island Avenue, Flatbush! (Ditmas Park) (Kensington)

*All photographs taken by Mr. Berger.

F.I.B's first "guest blogger" Brian Berger!

Found in Brooklyn? Definitely. In this apartment alone are two bookcases, two chairs (one brown leather, the other blue vinyl), a box of scratched up (alas) 1960s Ray Price lps, a single volume of collected Shakespeare & a superbly printed copy of R.H. Blyth's "Zen And Zen Classics Volume 5" (Hokuseido Press, Tokyo). Gone: a ridiculous orange lounge chair the cats finally tore up, a high-quality Olympus point & shoot camera sold on Ebay for $30 ten years later & a really nice dropleaf table I gave to friends on Powers Street in Williamsburg; since then, it's moved to Bushwick, Inwood & Las Cruces, New Mexico.Left on the streets, taken on film 1997-1999: hundreds of photos of South Brooklyn, Gowanus, Red Hook & so-called "Carroll Gardens" too. I used the last name myself a few times, although even then I wondered why I'd never seen it in the great works of South Brooklyn literature by Hubert Selby Jr., Gilbert Sorrentino or Emmett Grogan. These images seem very sad and lovely to me now, like my memory of the Spanish voices we always heard on Smith Street, the sight of mama dog & her three pups loping past the Jewish Press building on 3rd Avenue or sliding into the vinyl booths at Helen's Place on Court Street, excited for the sausage, escarole, garlic bread, linguini & clam sauce to come. They always had oldies, the Mets or the Knicks on the radio there & neither of the old-timers who ran the joint were named Helen.

Here is the detritus of Carroll Street, one winter morning between the Canal & Bond. As far as I know, Robert Doisneau never took pictures of Brooklyn--so who the fuck needs him?

Brian Berger is the co-editor, Brooklyn essayist & roving street photographer of the recently published anthology, New York Calling: From Blackout To Bloomberg .

He'll be discussing his work with co-editor, urbanist Marshall Berman, & crime writer, Tim "Brooklyn Noir" McLoughlin at Book Court this Thursday October 4th at 7 pm. Book Court is located at 163 Court Street.

For further information please see whowalkinbrooklyn.