All Hallows' Eve in Greenwood Cemetery and Sunset Park, Brooklyn (Special 2020 Halloween Post)

In this post, I regale you with pictures and musing from an All Hallows' Eve visit to Greenwood Cemetery and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was a beautiful Autumn Day and we are all cognizant of the need to physical-distance ourselves — so what better way to do that than to be outdoors in a massive cemetery?

A front lawn on a sidestreet in Sunset Park 

hosts a fortune-telling witch.

Exploring Greenwood Cemetery on All Hallows’ Eve, I scored a handful of great photographs. Located in South Brooklyn, the cemetery is one of the oldest graveyards in the city and is a site of a Revolutionary War battle. @historicgreenwood is also a National Historic Landmark. My friends John and Jennifer joined me; we also went to Sunset Park, my old neighborhood. Scarfed down a torta stuffed with spicy pork at @tacoselbronco, scored a free beer from a passerby, and watched the D train come out of the tunnel on Fourth Avenue — it was a serendipitous day.

 

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Listicle: 10 Things I’ll Miss about Brooklyn

So I’m outta Brooklyn.

After packing up the car2go* Smart Fortwo, here is a list of ten things I’ll miss about living in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.

(N.B. The following list is South Brooklyn oriented):

N.B. You can move out of Brooklyn with the help of a Smart car. #car2go

10. Watching cruise ships arrive in New York Harbor from my bedroom window

9. Getting off at the Atlantic Avenue stop in downtown Brooklyn to do some urban exploring

8. Chatting up Peter at Melody Lanes

7. Talking with the handsome neighborhood guys who promenade Fourth Avenue on a Saturday night

6. Taking the express train at 36th Street - a world of wonder awaits

5. Getting my cheap cinema fix at either Alpine or Cobble Hill Cinemas

4. All the fantastic, smart people (whom I consider friends) I shared an apartment within the last eight years - I’m talking about you, boo.

3. Shopping on Eighth Avenue - they’ve got Louisiana boiled crayfish and hot pot. What more could I want?

2. Picking up my patron hold requests and chatting with Coquille at the Sunset Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library

1. Hanging out with my squirrel friends at the Wash Depot

So — Sayonara, Brooklyn - you’re the fourth largest city in the United States (if you were your own city) - and damn girl, I’m going to miss your style.

Is my list bougie? Inform me in the comments.

*car2go is an on-demand on-the-hour rental car company.

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Re-Post: Obligatory Instagram Selfie from the Year 2018 (Sunset Park, Brooklyn)

In this post, I simply re-post a photo I posted on Instagram. You're welcome.

greigroselli

Sad face / duck face / to face / no two face / confront your face / lift off.

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Photo: I Wish I Were the Camera's Eye

A straphanger is focused on his phone as he waits for a subway train in New York City

I wish I were the camera's eye. I would watch the world the way a film camera surveys its filmic world.

I would be a rare film, one that danced when it surveyed the world, but rarely seen, not distributed like a Hollywood classic.

I am a fan of the long take. Maybe it is because I admire the way some filmmakers are able to capture a moment for as long as it can last.

I'd be the eye on a Max Ophul's film-watching Madame wind a staircase. Or, I'd be the eye in Raiders of the Lost Ark, inventorying lost treasures.

I imagine the camera's eye is lonely and I'll admit I don't agree well with loneliness - who does? - but every once in a while I just want to zoom out and take on what the philosophers call "The God's Eye View."

I'd catch myself in a frame shot - kind of like what happens when I dream. I see myself in the corner of my eye. It's me. In my own dream.

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Location: Brooklyn, NY
Photo Credit: Greig Roselli

Selfie in the Subway

Roto-Scope Style Selfie at West Fourth Street Station, Manhattan

So. I was exploring the city the other day. I took off from the 45th Street Station in Brooklyn. It's my home station. The one I depart from most often. For the commute, for everything. It's my everything station. Lulz. And by the way, there are two entrances,  one on the west side of the avenue and the other on the east side.

Did you know the station is not deep? - in fact, it is like many subway stations in New York City built according to the cut-and-cover method of subway infrastructure building. It is crazy to think that construction on this segment of the subway system underneath Fourth Avenue started in 1906. It took a couple of decades to complete the final project but now - today! - you have a one-ticket ride from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn to Forest Hills in Queens.

On this particular excursion, I, a straphanger with a 30-day MetroCard, took the Sixth Avenue bound express train at 36th Street and ended up at West Fourth Street station in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. Hence the selfie - notice the rotoscope-style photograph. I noticed Facebook added cool animation layovers to supplement the iPhone's camera function.

A Room Of One's Own: Dispatch From My Room (As I Work From Home and Decided to Submit A Blog Entry)

A Room Of My Own (And Virginia's too!) © 2014

When I try to find beauty

At the beginning of September, the heat of Summer begins to dissipate in New York. But Summer leaves behind swabs of humidity, still clinging on as I impatiently wait for Autumn. To give context, I’ve been spending a lot of time alone. I’m an extrovert. So it’s an unusual feeling. I plan to spend September mostly alone, for my work is solitary, and it depends on me monetizing my solitude. I’ve lived in the same apartment for quite a long time, but lately, I have come to know my room. It’s probably because I spend more time in my room than I ever did before, and I will admit that is the prosaic reason. To quell my loneliness, I open my eyes, and light upon something beautiful. There are many rooms in one room. The room you wake up to in the morning, in the half-light, where the room is an exit from the dream you've just had, but can't quite remember. Or the room, as it appears when you first enter it, different from the room you sat in all day writing. For the room you share with another person, but you don't notice the room, or the opposite, where all you notice is the space filling up, but words cannot express how you feel. It’s loneliness. But you don’t say it that way because people cannot handle loneliness.

Brooklyn Notebook: Leif Ericson Commemoration on Fourth Avenue in South Brooklyn

In this post, I take a stroll in South Brooklyn and stumble upon a plaque in a park. Ho, there, Leif Ericson!

According to @forgottenny, the ”Crown Prince Olav, later King, of Norway dedicated this replica of a Viking runestone in Tune, Norway on a 1939 visit. The stone stands on Leif Ericson Square just east of 4th Avenue. (Tune, southeast of Oslo near the Swedish border, southeast of Oslo near the Swedish border, was incorporated into the town of Sarpsborg in 1992)”. @nycparks.

Replica of a Viking Runestone, Brooklyn, New York — Photo Credit: Greig Roselli

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Photographs: Summer Evening Skies in Brooklyn

"Summer Evening Skies in Brooklyn" — I remember I was walking through Gowanus looking for the gloaming. According to the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary, the "gloaming" is a noun is synonymous with "twilight" or "dusk". However, I feel like the connotation of gloaming is that moment when the sky goes from evening to night time — it is a singular cosmological moment. I found it at the canal and I chanted to myself: "Thank you, for being special!". I am the gloaming. Here are my photographic results.

"Summer Evening Sky" (Bedroom Window)

It is beautiful / I am the gloaming (Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn).

Sunset Park (pictured here) looks better in real life @nycparks.

Brooklyn Heights Rocks - "Roadside Hazard"

I wish I could remember where I took this picture. It's either Central Park or Sunset Park in Brooklyn.

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Photograph: "Talking Out Loud"

South Brooklyn, Winter 2014

I am from South Louisiana, so, growing up, I did not have much experience with snowfall. If and when it did snow, the flakes came down in softy, dramatic drops. I remember the front yard of our house blanketed in a thin layer of papery whiteness, almost as if mother nature had covered the earth with a spider-web of flakes. So — living in the northeast, I become a bit giddy during a decent snowfall. Donning a winter coat, and a cap (I seldom wear gloves unless it is bitterly cold), I take long walks. South Brooklyn has a park — Sunset Park — and it is the closest patch of green space near my apartment. I talk out loud, thinking through ideas. When I am in a rut, I have to take a walk. Otherwise, I will just sit in a stew. This "stuckness" mostly alights when I have to plan a lesson or do something creative with a deadline attached. So off I go to perambulate so I can come back home and get down to business.

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Paper in Tree With Unseen Star on the Horizon

I saw a star in the sky at dusk in Brooklyn. The photograph does not do the image justice. Sometimes, what I see with my own eyes is sufficient. Art has failed me.

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Photography: "Rocks in Brooklyn Heights"

Traffic in Brooklyn Heights (View Through the Mountains)

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Photograph Of A Summer Evening Sky in South Brooklyn

"Bedroom at sundown" 

(Sunset Park, Brooklyn)

When I wake up I am up. I do not dawdle. When I shared a hotel room with two friends on a recent holiday, I woke up with a start, dashed out of the bed in our shared room and jumped in the shower. "What the hell?" my friend Michelle said. "How do you wake up like that?" I said that I do not have a transition time. I am up. And I have a distaste for morning routines.

At sundown I enjoy the transition. It is a different time of day and the ending of the day demands a slow-down that easily lends itself to ritual. Sitting on the stoop. Writing emails. Reading the next chapter in the novel I am leisurely poring over.  "Want to come to bed?" one of my boyfriends asked me. "No. Not yet," I told him. I waited on the couch. Finishing a crossword puzzle. Watching another episode of some treacly television show.  

See other pictures in this series.

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Photograph: "Plato's Cave"

"Plato's Cave"

© 2013 Greig Roselli

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Repurposing: Alice in Wonderland Book Clock

This nifty book clock clocks at fifty bucks at the Brooklyn holiday bazaar. Too bad I cannot afford it.

www.bugcicle.com 

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Theater Review: Performance of "The Skin of Evil"

My friend and colleague Steve Ewaschyn directed and adapted the play the Skin of Evil with a group of wonderful young people at the Radha Govinda Hare Krishna Temple in downtown Brooklyn on Friday, March 9th. The play recounts the wrath of a malevolent demon who is destroyed by the help of Krishna and the deep faith of several village folk. Here are some pictures.

Anupa presented the divine role of Krishna with grace and majesty.

Music and dance preceded the performance to pay homage to the deities manifested on the altar.

Malika and AJ evoke the god.

This boy was rushing through the crowd of dancing women.

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Why I Write Better When I am Homeless

Writing is probably good for you.
Even with a due date.

When homeless I am uprooted. But I have money in my pocket.
Why do I write better? Because it is something to do to fill in the emptiness. When Maslow's needs are met I think we are less prone to be creative. It is the pang of hunger and thirst that spurs us on to aesthetic heights.

The hungry artist is the short-lived artist but his art is intense. I think Arthur Rimbaud was such an artist. He wrote until he exhausted himself. He wrote first then ate later. Even then it was not so much as a need but visceral. A part of creativity. His eating became his aesthetic.

I cannot be an Arthur Rimbaud. I enjoy creature comforts. Take-out. Lunch on a subway bench. A gin and tonic after work.
They do not make me more creative. I could say something pretentious like the life of the middle class intellectual deadens my creative sense. But that sounds wrong. I am a creator because I am a middle class intellectual. And I am not even sure if that label fits me. A lost boy is perhaps a better descriptor. A stranger in a strange land. A man who happens to have a degree who happens to teach Plato, Aristotle, Virginia Woolf and Camus to community college students in Brooklyn, New York.

I am a man who loves the color of apples. But I like stiletto heels as well. I like the religious ritual of going to the movie theater on a Thursday evening after work. I eat lightly buttered popcorn with the same laconic motivation of receiving the holy eucharist on my tongue. The darkened theater and the womb-like cavity of stadium seating — where there is always less people and more space feels like an experience of daily Mass.

Photograph Series: The Yellow Phone

In this series of photographs, Greig Roselli serves up some yellow pay phone realness.

Photograph: All Saints Catholic Church in Brooklyn

All Saints Catholic Church in Brooklyn, New York, Throop Ave.

I walk past this church every day on my way to teach. It's a nice example of classic Romanesque style architecture. It is difficult to notice in this picture, but the rectory is a handsome building, as well. It sits to the left of the church in this photograph.

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Walking to Work on a Sunday

How I walked to work on a Sunday (thinking it was Monday) and what this says about my current state of being . . .

Walking to work on a Sunday, thinking it was a Monday, but then realizing it was Sunday and not Monday. What finally tipped me off that it was still the weekend (and not Monday like I had thought) was the discovery that the M train to Brooklyn through the Chrystie Street Tunnel and over the Williamsburg Bridge was not running (because it does not run on weekends). *puts the shape of an "L" on my forehead*. Well, at least on my walk through Lower Manhattan I took the above shot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Do you like my photograph? Let me know in the comments!

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Boy on Vintage MTA Bus

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:MTA Bus Festival, Boerum Place and Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, New York