BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, LIVE from New York! Gorgeous weather for the NYC Marathon today, where more than 50,000 runners will go through all five boroughs. Still that doesn’t beat the number of costumed freaks, monsters, fairies and K-Pop Demon Hunters at the Village Halloween Parade, where over 80,000 costumed participants (and around 2 million spectators) flooded the streets Friday Night.
On the street and on the subway, in corporate and boutique offices, in the library, and in the frozen food aisle of your grocery store, Friday was full of children and adults in costumes prancing and preening, looking for goodies, posing for pictures, and battling the autumn winds that feel like they could lift and carry some small children and dogs that were not tied down. Shout out to the hot babe in fangs and clever cleavage leaning out the window of her Escalade at the stop light on Delancy Street yesterday afternoon. Despite all of these jubilant and tempestuous personalities parading across the city, there is only one Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, the New York punk rock band that gave a free concert at Tomkins Square Park leading up to Halloween.
In other number news, reinforcing the growing disconnect between festivity and hardship across the city, nearly 3 million New Yorkers receive food aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the federal government shutdown is cutting off their food, as of yesterday. The New York State Governor Kathy Hochul declared a food state of emergency. It makes us all wonder who the true monsters are.
Speaking of politics, roughly 370,000 New Yorkers have already cast early ballots in this new mayoral race. As the country leadership leans hard right, it looks like New York City is going left, like the Netherlands did this week.
For a few more days this week, BlankMagBooks (17 Eldridge Street, Chinatown) — run and curated by Jun Ohki — is featuring photos by Sonny Gall from her newly launched book 99 of New York, with texts by Mila Tenaglia. The streetwise romance of this photographer’s eye draws the viewer into often overlooked streets and scenes of New York with acute observation, adoration, and a sense of possibility. With texts that contextualize and accentuate the images throughout the slim and ample hardcover, the reader comes to see everyday scenes anew. If you’ve spent any time amid the post-industrial rubble of Brooklyn and Queens—graffiti, clouds, pigeons, basketball courts, and construction cranes—you’ll recognize that Gall has captured them precisely as they are lived.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring AKUD, BornOner, ENT, EXR, Frodrik, Humble, Never Satisfied, OPE TFP, One Mizer, SOULS, Tess, VENA, Vers 718, Zero Productivity, and Zooter.
Here’s a live performance of “New York Groove” by that Space Man and his KISS brothers at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
