I am new to the borough of kings, but am already aware of all the fights over who owns its — its past, present and future, as this review of a new book of fiction about Brooklyn proves.
So I am not sure what to make of the descriptions of my neighborhood, Fort Greene, in, first, the Times’ Metro section, in a story about a young filmmaker stumping for Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama in Brooklyn:
‘… Fort Greene, an artsy, racially mixed neighborhood that he said was a natural fit for [Barack] Obama.’
and in the Style section this past Sunday in a story about a new bar that serves $300 bottles of Krug (and stocks only one kind of beer):
Fort Greene, a laid-back neighborhood whose main attractions include proximity to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, more French restaurants than some neighborhoods in Paris, and a farmer’s market.
As Don Cherry asked a while ago: Where is Brooklyn?
* By the way, there is a lot of good journalism (see Suzy Hansen’s reporting for the Observer here, for example) and other kinds of creative writing (like Colin Channer, Colson Whitehead and Carl Hancock Rux, among others) about Fort Greene that gets beyond the bottles of Krug and color pieces for presidential primaries.
The image above is one of my own.
