Oral History of The Wreck Room

For my final, I want to do an audio and photo project about a place I’ve spent a lot of time at over the years (less so since ITP), The Wreck Room. It’s existed on Flushing Avenue in Bushwick amid industrial warehouse and storefronts since 2005/6. I first stumbled in there during the summer of 2007, looking for a bathroom and oasis during my first adult trip to the area. The scene of small dive-ish bar with a loud all over the place playlist, Saturday Night Fever on the television, and a random collection of friendly and interesting people sold me instantly and I made it my new clubhouse. There’s been plenty of upheavals over the years, but everyone I’ve met there and I have stories for days about discovering the place, the characters we’ve known, and life before and after the bar’s expansion. The story of The Wreck also coincides with the wave of gentrification near the Morgan L stop which many of the people I plan to speak to have interesting (and occasionally conflicting) viewpoints about.

It shall be a story in 3 parts touching on:
1. Discovery and acceptance into the fold
2. Where were you when the back wall came down?
3. Surviving as that corner of Bushwick turned into Morgantown

Friendship Mixtape

For my crowdsourced project, I had two ideas: 1) a time-based series of photos that they would take and send to me with the song they had in their heads that day and 2) what I called The Friendship Mixtape where I’d ask my closest friends what they were listening to and what songs reminded them of moments in our shared past. My good friends Anna, Raquel, and Alex came through because they’re not slackers unlike the less close ones I solicited for pictures (only 1 sent it to me out of 8 people!)

I’ve known these 3 for many years at this point. Raquel and I met on the first weekend of undergrad in the same group of weekend campers. Alex I met later in the semester at my one attempt at capoiera, in later years were in a band together, and I visited him in Portugal the past summer. Anna and I are ex-coworkers who stayed closer longer than either of us were at that old job.

I sent them an email asking for:

1. First song you thought of today
2. Song you’ve listened to most in the past week
3. Song that reminds you of when we first met
4. Song that reminds you of the last time we saw each other
5. Song that reminds you of each other (I meant of them as friends of a friend, but they all took it to mean as the two of us)
6. Song that makes you the happiest right now
7. Last song you thought of today

And made a 15 minute mix out of 13 of the 19 songs they sent back.

It was an interesting experiment. I got to find out what they’re listening to (as diametrically opposed as most of the songs were from my musicals tastes) and challenge myself to make something fun that the 4 of us could enjoy. The best things about friendships to me is the Voltron-like entities that arise when you introduce/hang out with a group of people who know you, but not necessarily each other. Just as I occasionally have to build bridges in real life, this was a fun way to connect 3 very different friends.

The Friendship Mixtape
Tracks:
Youthless – The Beasts
Juiceboxxx – Thunder Jam #3
Britney Spears – Till The World Ends
Oh Land – Son of a Gun (Savage Skulls Remix)
Christina Aguilera – Bionic
Jamiroquai – Cosmic Girl
LCD Soundsystem – Home
CSS – Knife
Florence and the Machine – Howl
The Dead Weather – The Difference Between Us
Cage The Elephant – Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked
Erykah Badu – Bag Lady
The Young Rascals – Groovin’

Convergence Culture and Community Building

The Jenkins was a little tough to get through — or maybe it was just The Matrix chapter since I fell off the bandwagon with that pretty quickly after the 1st movie. A huge part of companies hoping to tap into the convergence culture where the diehards rule is overestimating the attention span or interest of the viewers/consumers. For every Lost where the fanbase is large and vocal and it translates to rating, there are shows like Caprica (that Cheryl talked about in class) or my favorite but now cancelled of the past season, Terriers where the fan base is loyal and evangelist, but too small to make the ratings worth it for the networks. The readings were timely with the release of Sucker Punch last weekend. I’d say I’m a fan of Zach Snyder’s visual style, but the premise and story weren’t in any way compelling to me. It looked like a crowdsourced young male fantasy of what would make a woman’s story interesting: skimpy outfits, action sequences, and unexplained oversexualized situations. It’s considered a failure right now because it lost out to a kids movie at the box office and the word of mouth sucks. The downside of convergence is the overextension of the property without the coherent structure to base it on.

Jenkins’s theory of Homer’s writings and Jesus’s story in the Bible as the first examples of transmedia works was interesting. The difference between then and now is that being connected with your culture was being immersed in an oral tradition. Everyone knew the stories and the archetypes/narrative shortcuts were instantly familiar with the smallest detail. It’s almost impossible to for a transmedia work to cross over on that level now. There are a few stories that might cross over in certain cultures, but I think the way properties are currently built is in the 360 advertising model to build awareness through pervasiveness and media synergy, but the development of the stories take a back seat.

The idea of community building is an essential piece to convergence culture and transmedia properties. Once something is out there, a community will either sustain or doom it. The lesson of Sucker Punch and some other overhyped failures like I Am Number Four from a few months ago is overreliance on the most niche of fans, the obsessive mostly male audience who would attend Comic Con and have their own vocal areas of the web. Lost had wide appeal across gender and age lines with the transmedia breadcrumbs that were compelling to the diehard and casual fan in different ways. There have to be many options for entry that feel organic, as well as space for feedback and a dialogue between fans and the creator(s).

Memory, Objects and Location

Visiting the three exhibitions, I began to think about the idea of stories and memories being as important for their content as what is left out.

In the Tenement Museum, the elephant in the room was that the apartments were facsimiles of the actual experience, supported by historical artifacts, some oral history and research, but not totally true to their lives. When I was there on a field trip with the Cabinets of Wonder class last semester, we had the other guide leading our tour which led to an actress embodying one of the former residents. I found that experience way more enjoyable because it felt more real to see a person “living” in the space to simply be told what it was like. At the Brooklyn Historical Society, I found myself drawn more to the artifacts hidden in the binders than the actual voices because of what was left out. I was definitely more negative in my feelings about the City Reliquary. It seemed like a museum of kitsch and I felt removed from it compared to the other two that resonated more.

Thinking of my midterm response, I immediately gravitated towards using my thesis project because it’s all about using personal stories and photographs to paint a picture of a Brooklyn that is lost physically and psychologically now. As spring break went on, I was reading Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger and thinking about the story heard at BHS of the man who went to visit the family of his fellow soldier who died in Vietnam. I also remembered in high school where my drama class made short plays out of the epitaphs in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Master. I then turned my thoughts to doing a project on something more personal for me that I have been thinking about and working on as my thesis has kicked into gear.

When I originally thought of my thesis, I was considering using the idea to explore my own family history/memories. My father’s side of the family is gigantic, spread from here in New York throughout the country. Gatherings are large, loud, and confusing affairs because everyone tells stories about things that happened years ago that are fuzzy to them even. But there are some stories and people who are barely mentioned except in hushed tones and one of those has always resonated with me when the bare details. In my father’s childhood, my grandfather’s young newly divorced sister had moved from Mississippi with her children to start a new life here in Brooklyn. From what I’ve heard, she was enjoying a newly single life in an infinitely bigger place than Buford, MS and took to going out to party and drink with new friends. One night, she went missing and then turned up assaulted and murdered in an abandoned lot. Her attacker was never found and her kids were picked up by their father to go back to Mississippi and eventually moved to Las Vegas where they still live. From what I know, it was a majorly traumatizing event in the family and the cousins who moved away also became a shadowy presence in my father’s life since they rarely if ever came to NYC again.

In my midterm (and final), I want to explore through a fictional work a version of this story told through 1st person narratives. My characters are the sister, daughter, nephew, and granddaughter of the woman plus the case detective and a reporter who is the catalyst for bringing the story back to the surface. I’m considering turning it into a video piece for the final, but right now I’m just focused on writing it all out.

The Woman In The Weeds

Abandoned lot, 2011

June 16, 1982 – a body was found in an abandoned lot near the corner of Putnam Avenue and Irving Place in Clinton Hill. Detective Dan Mills was the officer in charge of the investigation. He discovered the story of Carrie Williams, 22, a transplant from Mississippi, newly divorced with a young daughter in tow. She worked as a waitress at a diner in Clinton Hill called Mike’s Coffee Shop and was last seen having a nightcap drink with a coworker at Frank’s Cocktail Lounge before heading home down Fulton Street. She lived with her sister, Janie Franklin, a widow with 3 small children of her own on Classon and Greene. Unfortunately, the case was never solved and the family had to work to put the pieces of their lives with Carrie behind them. Amy Jones revisits the aftermath of the crime with the relatives and the detective for the Local blog.

Officer Dan Mills, 2003

I remember when I got the call about it. It was early, like in the morning or something. I had been on the force about 6 or 7 years by then, working the homicide squad. Things were getting bad in that area then. Had to deal with all the stuff going down on Murder Avenue as they called it and Fulton Street was a bit of a rough area too.

It was one of those cases that always stuck with me. Getting called to a field when the sun’s coming out and seeing a bunch of people gawking at a half naked lady thrown in the weeds like garbage. It’s one of those things that breaks your heart you know? She looked so small there, innocent. I had to go talk to the family, the coworkers, the neighbors, and nobody had nothing but the best things to say about her. The city just chews people up and spits them out sometimes.

Carrie and Vanessa, 1982

Over the years, I’ve tried to remember what that last day with her was like. She used to work nights, but would get up to make me breakfast and walk me over to the day care I went to. That night, me, her. Aunt Janie, and my cousins Robin and Troy went to the movies before she had to go to work. We went to the big theater at Kings Plaza to see ET that afternoon and then she had to run off to work the dinner shift at the place she worked. I kinda remember all the commotion around the house the next morning. Aunt Janie sent me and Robin to go play, but we could tell by the way she was talking that things were weird. The days were a blur and then my dad came from Mississippi to get me. I started living with him and my Grandma Jefferson in Buford til we moved to Vegas in 1985. I would come visit Aunt Janie and my cousins some summers and I would be afraid to mention my mother. One time, I made Troy show me…where they found her and just cried and cried. Aunt Janie got really mad and I knew then that to not mention her would just be for the best.

Janie and Carrie, 1981

Just talking about it is painful for me really. I already have to live with it every day. The hurt, the sadness has never gone away for me, especially since the case was unsolved. They said maybe someone on dope just followed her, then attacked her. I never knew if that’s supposed to make it better or worse. Carrie had always dreamed of coming to NYC. She was just like my late husband in that way. Artistic people who knew that this was the place to be. I was always less ambitious, but I loved watching them live their dreams.

She was working at that place, taking care of Vanessa, and doing the occasional singing gig on the weekend. She had such a great voice. Reminded me of a young Aretha sometimes. She sang in the choir back in Mississippi and was always singing around the house. I think that’s what I miss most about my sister: her voice and her spirit. Life has been so…quiet without her.

Zara March, 2010

I always knew that something bad had happened with my grandmother, but my mom doesn’t like to talk about it. We moved here about 15 years ago, I was born in Vegas. My granddad still lives out there and he doesn’t like to visit. I hear them arguing sometimes about why she would even would want to live here considering what happened. I never knew what it really was until you came with all your questions. It made her and Aunt Janey drag out the pictures and tell stories. I was afraid to ask questions myself at first because it was kinda like when you’re chasing a fly and you scare it into flying away? Haha well I guess that’s a bad uh metaphor, but I was just excited to hear the stories and thought that acknowledging that it was out there would make it stop immediately, you know?

I like knowing about her though. It’s like a piece of me that was blank is finally filled in now.

John Franklin, Robin Franklin, Troy Franklin, Vanessa Jefferson, 1982

I was 10 when…everything happened with Aunt Carrie. She and Nessa had come to where we were living then on Greene and Classon when she got divorced from my uncle Neil down in Mississippi. My mom had been in Brooklyn for about 5 years then, my dad had died in 1980, and Carrie and Nessa came in about May 81 I guess.

I remember Aunt Carrie really well. She was really funny. Born and raised in Mississippi but she had gotten rid of the accent quick. She was sharp and smart and could sing like an angel. She was always working and loved Nessa and NYC so much.

It really hurt my heart what happened to her. They tried to say at first that she was….that she was fast or something and that’s why she ended up the way that she did. She worked in a restaurant and didn’t really drink that much. Being older than she was now, I don’t see nothing wrong with a drink on the way home. I wish it wouldn’t have turned out like that, you know?

Storytelling As Selective Mythmaking

The funny thing about listening to The Super episode in class was that I’d read an article about that story (and the twist) and found myself coming to realization of that while listening. I’m not much of a fan of the NPR/This American Life story style, so it was amusing to hear the audible realization that Bob would’ve murdered the main storyteller. The tone was just a little too smug until that point.

The Schank reading was interesting for me. The story that stood out the most to me was the story of the author talking to a cousin about their distant grandfather and the part that made her excited was finding out that the man would go to the movies alone. I found myself going down a few paths of interpreting the grandfather through the tale. Him being lonely, him being more interested in avoiding his family, him as finding a creative outlet from work and life by going to the movies, him as a tough distant painful part of his children’s lives. The cousin just seemed like a weirdo because going to the movies alone doesn’t seem like something worth sharing with your kid as a family member breakthrough. Though perhaps the author’s limited viewpoint left out the detail that the cousin was trying to convince her daughter that going to the movies alone had been a respectable activity for years or something. I guess it’s something we’ll never know.

I thought the book excerpts all touched on the theme of point of view being the main color of any story. The collected writing based on the Sudanese lost boys’ stories was fascinating to me in how well it all flowed considering the stories had very different protagonists and settings.

My audio clip was interviewing my bartender friends in a place that I once spent a regular amount of time, less so as ITP and life has moved on. I was interested in distilling what they thought made for a good (or bad) bartender/customer interaction because to seem that knowledge seems a little elusive. I used my own mp3 player sound recorder because it seemed like the quality was decent when I tried it at home. But, the Monday night background bar noise was way too overwhelming for it.

Tips From Your Bartender

Fan vs. Fanatic

This week’s readings definitely struck a nerve for me. It touched on things that I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about over the years: the nature of being a fan of things and where is the line it veers off into obsession — or is that just a part of the nature of being a fan(atic).

Anyone who knows me can tell you of my loves for music and certain TV shows. When I get into something, I am super INTO it. Tracking down info on a band’s other music, articles about them, going to all the shows. Before Facebook and MySpace fan/band pages were ubiquitous, I was on Yahoo Groups and newsletters for my favorite bands. I would order albums only released overseas, comb through the basement racks at Tower looking for a foreign addition of magazines, and sometimes be right there after the show for an autograph. Yet at the same time, I would be quick to say that I like them, but I’m not obsessed. My idea of being completely obsessed was someone like my high school friend Elizabeth who had a love for certain groups that had no bounds. She’d cut school, make friends with total strangers, travel thousands of miles for shows, and only talk about them all day long as if she really knew these artists and they were her friends. To her it was her life, to me it was a hobby.

In late high school/early college, I discovered the Mighty Big TV site (now Television Without Pity) and its forums. It was the first time I could chat about the shows with other people who also were watching every week and had interesting things to say. We could read the spoilers gathered by people who cared enough to hunt and/or just casually speculate on how storylines would go. I knew there were people who took it way further and wrote things like fan fiction, but I just liked to watch and wonder. While I was in Europe last summer, I realized just reading the recaps for True Blood wouldn’t be enough for me and I would stay up every Sunday night until 3am just to watch a live stream of the week’s episode. Or download it to watch the next day if that didn’t work out. When I thought of extreme, I considered my friend Olivia who was a Harry Potter freak. A Snarry shirt wearing, convention going girl who flew to England to be on line to get the last book when it was released at midnight and loved to tell me stories about the fandom wars happenings on Livejournal — and actually got me on Livejournal in the first place. Where I joined the True Blood community to get the spoilers and summer saving viewing links.

I felt like the readings were almost too focused on the extremes of fandom. Though the evangelists can mobilize and recruit others, it’s the casual to serious fans who make something popular. There’s a lot more people who watch True Blood every week who have never been to Comic or Dragon Con and spoilers are widely available in places like TV Guide. A site like TWOP’s bread and butter is the recaps where you can find out what happened on your show with funny commentary. I wasn’t even into True Blood until midway through the first season and then went to TWOP to read the recaps and was off and running ever since. Communities like theirs are inclusive of everyone and you can read/participate as little as much as you want, but you’re all united in the love for the show.

I, Eddie

The beginning of a story about the origins of the dear departed character Eddie from True Blood:

Sometimes life just kicks you in the ass. There was this song about that sort of thing I remember from high school. Well, I really remember the video. Dude in a white room hitting himself. I do that sometimes now. Anyway, the song was something like you may ask yourself, well how did I get here? I ask myself that every day.

Not so long ago, I was just a regular suburban guy. Commuted to my office in Shreveport every weekday for 45 minutes – an hour with traffic. I worked as the finance assistant manager at Delacroix and Sons. Old Mr. Delacroix was a great guy, a friend of my uncle’s. He had been smart in business and made the place a decent place to work. Since he died last year, his two sons have been driving the place into the ground. I was a little tired of the place after 15 years, but I knew I could stick around and do another 10 until retirement unless it went bankrupt first. I was home for dinner every night at 6 and we ate by 6:15 as a family. Me, my wife Sue, and son Jake sitting around the table silently. Always something bland drowned in salt. Sue isn’t the best cook, but after 20 years, I’d gotten used to it. Jake is 17 and finishing up at Bon Temps High. I always dreamed of a son who would be captain of the football team, so I could go to every game and cheer. And when he won the big game, I could be on TV screaming, “that’s my boy!” Instead he’s the captain of the chess squad and Matheletes. Stuff like that is never televised, but he’s smart enough to get a good scholarship to LSU or something.

After dinner, I’d go downstairs to my office and look at my magazine stash. I had a secret hiding spot in my desk drawer under the Bible. Maybe the Lord is pissed at me for that and that’s why I’m in my predicament now. Sue would’ve flipped out if she had seen them. Black Studs, Butt, Dark Fantasies. I would spend hours flipping through and dreaming until I tired myself out. Then off to bed to sleep until the new day. Rinse and repeat for years until one day six months ago.

Jed Delacroix had called me into his office that Wednesday afternoon. I even carried my notepad, expecting the usual conversation of move funds from X account into Y account to cover the company losses. But instead he just looked at me kinda sadly with his hands crossed on his desk and said, “Eddie, you know times are tough here at the company and how much we appreciate you, buddy, but I’m sorry to say that unfortunately we’re gonna have to let you go.” I blinked at him a few times and imagined how good it could feel to leap across the desk and knock everything over, then maybe even beat him with his #1 Salesman trophy. I always hated the smug bastard. Instead, I thanked him and shook his hand after we discussed my severance package. They gave me three months, pretty generous, only because I know all the dirty money secrets. I went back to my desk, packed a little box, and left, saying good bye to some coworkers on the way out.

I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes watching some others stream out with boxes, wondering what I was going to tell Sue. She was going to be so upset. We had been planning a cruise for the winter with her folks. My father in law would have a field day lecturing me for hours about the decline of industry in Louisiana and brag about how he had worked for Texaco for 30 years and a got a gold watch and iron clad good pension for his labor. I was a little sick just thinking about it. I needed a drink bad.

On my way to the highway home, I saw a little roadhouse on the side and decided to pull in. The sign by the door said Fangtasia and I hesitated for a second. I think I heard of this place in the kitchen at work. Ginny the receptionist had said she heard from her cousin that it was a genuine vampire bar. I’d never seen vampire before in the flesh, even though they were all over the news nowadays. I started thinking that as bad as my day was shaping up I could use a little adventure. Maybe I’d meet a real one…maybe even a cute one. I took a deep breath and went in.

It was all dark in there, red walls and black everything else. There were people milling around, some drinking at the bar, others watching the go-go dancers in the center of the room. There was a big throne looking chair on the stage with a huge, blond guy sitting there, staring out at everybody, half bored. He was…perfect in every way. I wondered if he was a vampire and surprised myself by wondering what it would feel like if he bit me. Suddenly, he stared right at me. I could almost feel it going right into my skin like a laser. I gulped and licked my lips nervously and then he smiled like a cat about to chomp down on a canary. I think my blood may have ran cold and I hightailed it out of there. I was rushing in a panic towards my car and then something knocked me over. I struggled to see what it was and then everything just went dark.

Assignment #1

6 words: Doors closing, I could only stare.

55 words: I was slumped watching the man get off at Flushing. The mouse ran across the platform. He quickly struck it with his cane and then stepped down on the body. Doors closing, I could only stare in horror. He stared back at me as the train pulled away. It was hard to sleep that night.

Both stories are based on the same event of me witnessing a man kill a mouse in a subway station the other night. I chose the shortest word constraints because the biggest problem I have with my writing is where to cut the extraneous words. With the first, I always found myself struggling with having 7 words instead of 6. What I finally could be happy with still seems a little off grammar wise, but it was important to me to let it go and move on. The 55 word one was even more challenging. I wrote the story out as I would tell it to someone. And it was about 30 words too long. Then I started parsing details and taking out the flourishes and I was down to 65, 61, 57, and finally 53 before I added 2 words back. It was an interesting assignment to see how sparse it could be/feel and yet still feel the essence of the story was there.