I present to you: the ice cream truck, Bushwick style.

The first one was fun, why not do it again? A lot of new readers now.
Post your own below!

The “Ass” sells tofu?
Organic milk in dairy!
Kiss my ass, Whole Foods

Thai spot coming soon
Troutman bar coming in June
Where’s the damn wine shop?

Time to sweep again
Full bottle of orange drink
There in my tree pit

Dude with the corn rows
Stop selling crack, you scumbag
…Sell good pot instead

“White people buildings”
Why pay half your income to
Live in toxic waste?

by shaftbean, from the BushwickBK.com flickr pool

Can’t we catch a break? Once again, Bushwick takes a number one on the shit list, this time for bedbug complaints. Again, I emphasize that this is bedbug complaints, not actual bedbug infestations. I was under the impression that Greenpoint is actually the epicenter of the bedbug “epidemic” (everything bad these days is an epidemic, right?). But since Greenpoint is heavy on the homeownership and Bushwick is decidedly not, Bushwick tops the complaints. Just a theory — if anyone has some harder facts, please post below.

Not to say Bushwick isn’t known lately for its bedbug problem. If I were to take a word association test right now, “McKibben” would have me blurting out “bedbugs!” in a half-second. There are apparently buildings being scarlet lettered to warn prospective tenants and shame landlords.

I can’t figure out from research whether or not the DDT ban really is to blame for the reemergence of bedbugs, but until someone comes up with a silver bullet, we’ll have to keep washing everything in hot water and rejecting cool curbside furniture finds.

I’m used to living in a city that’s #1 in a lot of stuff: my hometown of Miami was simultaneously the poorest city in the United States (and that’s averaging in multi-million-dollar mansions and penthouses) and that with the highest proportion of HIV diagnoses. Also, I think South Florida is the most likely region that you will get your car stolen, since the Port of Miami is the main way they leave the country, disguised in cereal containers on their way to a Haitian chop shop. Oh, don’t forget that Miami has always been the drug capital of the US.

So no surprise from me this morning when Hrag Vartanian sent me a link to a map on which the New York Times plotted the top 200 most violation-laden buildings in the city, and Bushwick shows up (with Bed-Stuy as a close second) as a pretty much solid sea of red. Almost as many violations plague Bushwick as all of the Bronx combined. Crown Heights and East New York are pretty bad, too.

You’d think those areas experienced some kind of riots or arson or decades of general neglect and purposeful destruction by landlords and tenants, and that now since there’s zero profit to be made on the worst buildings, there’s zero reason to fix them. You know, if you thought about it rationally. But I know it can be so fun, and probably quite satisfying, to just declare certain people to be saints and others to be evil, and stomp your feet in righteous indignation and wave big stuffed rats in the air and declare that you have the right to force someone else to house you.

Since I love cooking and am familiar with most of the Spanish Caribbean’s cuisine, particularly Cuba, I figured I’d start a “segment” about cooking with what you can find in your local bodegas. Convenient, huh? It won’t always be Caribbean, but you’ll be able to make it with locally available — and dirt cheap — ingredients.

Plátanos maduros — fried ripe plantains — is a comfort food that also satisfies your sweet tooth. Nothing transports me back to Miami in this cold season like a plate piled high with those gooshy, greasy yellow blobs. Plantains look like gigantic bananas and are available year-round at literally any store that sells food in Bushwick. Sometimes if you luck out you can find them almost ripe at the store, but usually they are mostly green. You’ll have to buy them and then wait for them to ripen, usually a week or more, though you can speed the process up by putting them in a basket over your radiator, or inside a gas oven (don’t forget to take them out if you use the oven for something else!) They’re extremely cheap; you can buy several for a buck sometimes.

Your plantain should be black. Not yellow, that’s still unripe. Totally black. When you squeeze it, it should feel like it’s full of pudding. If it’s still firm, let it ripen more. If they’re too starchy they will come out crunchy instead of chewy, and those are tostones, something we’ll go into another time. more »

One for the homos: I know those Puerto Rican boys can be painfully hot, but they will cut you if you’re not careful. One of our 40-year-old, probably somewhat trollish denizens “struck up a conversation” with undoubtedly sexy 25-year-old Jesús Almestica at Stanhope and Myrtle one night last week at 12:15am. They went back to the troll’s apartment where Jesús, shock of shocks, tied the guy up — and now for the bad part — robbed him of his Gucci watch and gold necklace (did he also run off with his self-tanner and a lock of his graying chest hair?)

Mighty Christian of you, Jesús.

photo by jenblossom from the BushwickBK flickr pool

Every Bushwicker knows that before the 80s, this place was full of Italians, plenty of whom stuck around long after the Germans packed up and fled to Long Island. The faded signs peeking out behind yellow plastic Ecuadorian restaurant awnings and even the extant Italian-owned businesses around the hood remind us that neighborhoods are ever-evolving. What hasn’t changed is Italians getting in trouble with the law.

Pietro Polizzi, who has run old-school Tony’s Pizzeria on Knickerbocker for 30 years, is in court after being arrested on charges of downloading child pornography. The Sicilian immigrant claims he was molested as a boy and was using the images to recall his own abuse. He faced a tough choice: be found guilty and go to jail for five years, or claim insanity and go to a mental institution for possibly even longer. He chose insanity. Doesn’t he have a bookie cousin who could explain his odds?

Just in case you’re not already sick of the stereotypes, Joshua Baldelli, 16, tossed a sack of concrete off a building at Stockholm and Irving, hitting a man in the arm. That’s right, one of probably 3 Italian kids who may have actually grown up in Bushwick and he’s involved with concrete.

photo by eppleart from the BushwickBK flickr pool

For the first time in a long time, I spent Saturday night in Bushwick. And I don’t mean making dinner and watching foreign films until 2am. After we finished painting the hallway in the house, we got changed and went to the home of fellow BBKers Jen and Mike up on Broadway and Arion — 10 minute walk at the most — for cocktails and food. A bunch of their friends, some local, were there, boozing it up with rum punch and munching on duck sloppy joes. Sadly, Petra from Bed-Stuy Blog had to go home in a car drunk off her ass before I got to chat with her. (I’ll pay for this.)

We were having such a good time (Luis was enjoying being sexually harrassed by chicks) and were there so late that we had to cut the conversation short to run to my neighbor’s house for his birthday party BBQ. We arrived too late for food (besides, we were stuffed), but got to hang out a bit in the garden and chat up the pan-South American clique that populates his parties. I always enjoy hearing yet another of his friends tell me about how they were going to buy our house but (insert reason they didn’t here).

Lately we’ve been spending more time in the hood as we meet more people to hang out with. Between the BBQs and dinners and straight-up house parties, not to mention meeting friends for coffee at various places in the hood, there is less reason every day to leave Bushwick just to hang out or have some fun.

I guess you could say that in Bushwick, we even have DIY amenities. Or maybe these thoughts are my way of coping with the gross lack of decent commercial dining experiences here. You decide.

Oh, the bodega.
So many on each corner,
Like ghetto Starbucks.

Gushing and flowing,
Relief from summer’s torture.
The hydrant bursts forth.

The fight rages on.
Renovation the weapon,
Hipsters the army.

Shouting and yelling
At empty windows and doors.
Why not a cell phone?

Friends from the island,
Wary of walking alone,
Jealous of my rent.

(Leave your Bushwick haiku in the comments!)

Know what I’m sick of lately? Activist types showing up here, getting all up in our faces about our part in advancing gentrification — or at least that we don’t weep enough about gentrification. The worst part is that for all their many hundreds of words on the subject, they can never seem to get any real ideas across. They’re infected by vapidity and are crammed full, top to bottom, with empty rhetoric. It’s hard to even look sometimes.

I had actually been somewhat avoiding the subject of gentrification, mainly because whether we debate it or not, it’s inexorable, a given. I didn’t see the point. What little bits I let slip as I otherwise walked on eggshells here brought me nothing but whining and hate posts. So you know what? Fuck it. I’m putting down the shield I use to bounce weak anti-gentrification spitballs back at their launchers and pulling out my bazooka — and I’m taking no prisoners.

Take, for example, poor Katie. She’s a volunteer at Make the Road by Walking, every Bushwicker’s favorite two-million-dollar-a-year protest organization. She’s a freshly-minted college liberal on a mission to “combat inequality in all its incarnations.” Aw. But it seems after Round One, she’s been KO’d. What a disappointment. more »