Dope on the Slope wrote a great post about the Village Voice’s article on Red Hook — excerpted here. Read the rest on Dope on the Slope where you can see the yarnapede DOTS’s wife knitted for him.

Fellow Brooklyn blogger Callalillie has achieved an important blogging milestone – she’s been taken out of context by The Village Voice:

Like a prehistoric, three-legged fish¹ crawling out of some slurpy, subterranean swamp², here is Red Hook in its current state of evolution: two healthy-looking 30-somethings³
wearing drugstore sunglasses, using the backboards at the Harold Ickes
playground to practice their tennis strokes. It’s a real open court,
this neighborhood, part-deserted, well located, and prepared to be made over in the image of its newest and least-hardy settlers³.

Oldish-youngsters⁴
aren’t much newer to this area than gentrification is to certain parts
of Brooklyn. What’s changing, drastically, just this month, is the
basic interface of the neighborhood: One long blink and Red Hook won’t
look, sit, taste, or travel anything like it did before…

Local blogger Callalillie smartly embodies the embarrassed post-yuppie ambivalence⁵
of future corporate shoppers. On the one hand, she claims she would
gladly trek to Manhattan for vegetables, if it meant saving the gnarled
warehouses she adores. On the other, she write⁶ that when Fairway opens, she’ll be one of the first in line, buying each and every one of the canisters in the spice section.

Wow. The sheer power
of the writing is astonishing. The author smartly embodies the sloppy
post-journalist sardonicism of aspiring big media pundits.

Unlike me, Callalillie is much too classy to dish heaping helpings
of snark on the author of the article.  She says "as a blogger, I
consciously put myself and my words out there and part of that is the
risk of being taken out of context. If she had interviewed me, it would
be a different story."

Presumably,  it would have also been a better story.