#performance spaces

Another venue was added to the long list of vanishing performance spaces in Brooklyn this month. For roughly fifteen years Goodbye Blue Monday served beer and played music on Broadway and Dodworth in Bushwick, Brooklyn. After the last draft was poured and the last song was sung, Brooklyn lost far more than Just Another Bar. Its shuttered front is another tombstone in a cemetery of closed venues and art spaces. The closing is but one episode of the new reality of New York City in which free community art spaces are falling to financial pressures from development and gentrification. To read this as a young, mobile transplant is one thing, but it’s more horrific to think that the people who lived around GBM and will continue to live there have lost a meaningful place for community, art, and performance.

Before seven in the evening the bar would be slow. It served astonishingly cheap, $2 PBR drafts. The bartenders were much more likely to be playing tacit dice games for hours with patrons while people lounged in worn wooden chairs or read in the fenestrated reading nook amongst dusty books and records. At night, the string lights around the bar and stage would turn on, illuminating walls cluttered with framed ‘art’ pieces, road signs, graffiti murals, and indescribable errata. Appropriately, a mural above the stage, where the eyes might wander during a set, read “FLOTSAM, JETSAM,” as if the decorations, the furniture, the people, and the acts had washed into the small bar like sediment carried into a tributary. Objects adorning every surface possible seemed to be a decade of golden picks from garage sales or grandmothers' attics: for instance, a horse torn from a carousel who resided on the side of the stage and stared at you wildly while you waited for the bathroom. The bathroom was so well graffitti’d that it was impossible to tell what was deliberate and what had been added. It was wallpapered with pages from the Akira comic book and covers torn from seedy pulp novels. The effect of the trash-kitsch detritus was the ecstatic comfort of returning to an imperfect and messy home.

The closing is particularly tragic as it caps a year of classic venues and Brooklyn icons disappearing from the landscape. Brooklyn is changing quickly and with every New York Times article declaring the ‘new spot’ - 2014 was Myrtle-Broadway, 2015 will be ‘Quooklyn’ - cultural death and yuppie-ization seems close behind. 2014 had seen the death of the venues/art spaces 285 Kent, Lulu’s, Body Actualized Center, the bar Wreck Room, vegan restaurant Foodswings, Williamsburg fast food staple White Castle and, worth noting, the iconic Domino Factory and the Kentile Floors Sign. White Castle will be turned into ivory towers of luxury condos. And while 5 Pointz Institute of Higher Burnin’ was signed to demolition and replacement by a four hundred-million condo development in August 2013, demolition began 2014 and was a sort of ‘Picture of Dorian Grey’ for the souls of these outer-boroughs.  Rumor has it that the closings of “down-and-dirty” venues Glasslands and Death by Audio were spurred by rent increases related to Vice Media’s new offices on South 2nd. But I guess there’s that new Starbucks next to the Dunkin Donuts at North 7th and Bedford, right, guys?

Admittedly, GBM was almost not a bar, considering that they lacked hard liquor and weren’t very particular about their beer and wine selection. The defining feature was the stage and those who came to perform on it. And yet it wasn’t quite a venue either - a cover was never charged as a principle and the booking of time slots was as free as sending an email. Maybe you just went to sit for a while, to smoke a joint in the back patio and peruse the encouraging words and addendums graffitied there. Travel blogger Luke Spartacus laments, “Goodbye Blue Monday was not a restaurant. It was not a bar. It was a place where all the misfit toys of the world fit seamlessly in.”

‘Misfit Toys of the World’

A nexus of creative freakishness was the weekly ‘Open Mic the Way Ya Like.’ The host, muse, and guru of the open mic was Joe Crow Ryan. With his wild beard and greying mane of hair he could have been mistaken for a wino or an aging Hagrid, but Ryan’s soft voice was articulate and unmistakably earnest. He recited the policies of the night every week until it became something of a litany or a prayer opening a mass. After explaining, Ryan finished with the question, “Are there any questions?” and paused to look about the small room. Once, a man shouted, “What’s the meaning of life?” Ryan took the most absurd response possible, which was to consider the question sincerely. He took a moment to paw at his beard and gaze somewhere beyond the walls. Then, he said without gravity or elan but with the serious ponderance of childlike speculation, “I think that the meaning of life is that it’s good not to be nauseous,” and without further explanation he summoned the first performer to the stage.

Joe Crow Ryan

Anyone gets ten minutes of stage time to do whatever they want so long as they write their name on one of the randomly ordered cards held by Ryan. However they were always subject to poet and in-house heckler Penny, an older woman with a mordant Italian Bronx accent ripened by years of smoking. The magic of the open-mic built up like a good orgasm, with lots of disappointing foreplay before anything good comes along. I’ve seen more bad acts on that stage than I can remember. The crowd can respond by talking over them and reducing performances to muzak if they're really that awful, and I know of a man who was actually pulled off of the stage for a misogynistic comedy set. The attention seemed crowd-regulated. In the inverse situation a loud audience was vigorously shushed for talking over a set. Artists like Sukato, a transwoman whose unearthly voice sighed atonally over Middle Eastern and Asian instruments, received a due reverence for showing up every week and just being obviously diligent about their work. That was the feeling the night would generate after maybe an initial bafflement: the realization that this weekly church was not about praising an artistic idol, but participating in a ritual constructed as much by the audience as the performer. It is impossible to give proper credit to all of the talent which has graced that stage, in part because of the ridiculousness unique to each memorable act. GBM’s stage was a manifestation of ‘you’re all beautiful unique snowflakes’, it was an electric shock which turns regular schmucks into characters.

My first experience of the joint was at the recommendation of local bibliophile Mark Mitchell who had told me of an elderly blue haired woman who played the banjo and crooned heartbreaking love songs at their weekly open mic, ‘Open Mic the Way Ya Like.’ The mythic blue-haired lady is Debe Dalton. She is small and meekly voiced and looks like your typical grandmother except for her banjo and aqua hair. On the stage she seems much larger, as if no matter where you are in the room she is standing right in front of you. Her eyes search somewhere above the audience and in your imagination you could think that she were projecting images from her ballads onto the back wall. She almost speaks rather than sings, weaving tales about contemplating a Shakyamuni painting or an awkward conversation about what happens when you die with a proselytizer in the park. Often she sings simply about love--of others, of the self, of the world; its beauty always encased in the difficulty of finding what we desire and abating the sacred loneliness which caused us to search. Maybe we’re just sappy drunks, but my friends and I always had to hold back tears by the end of her sets.

The final valediction of Bushwick bar Goodbye, Blue Monday was not its last ‘Open Mic the Way Ya Like,’ nor the last last call on which despondent revelers packed the space to try to empty all of the kegs before dawn. The lease was finally up at the turn of the new year and on the 30th and the 31st of December, Goodbye Blue Monday opened its doors to be picked clean of its myriad antiques, oddities, and quasi-junk by anyone who came through the art-kitschy metal gate made by founder Stephen Paul Strimboli himself--which was also up for grabs.

Local Messy Roommate, Holly Mitchell, was there for the melancholy looting. By Tuesday afternoon the first floor had already been stripped of its accoutrements. The basement was hopelessly filled with uncountable cassette tapes and vinyls of dubious value. The floor had been completely covered by discarded and broken vinyl discs. To explore the music library you had to step on and crush into pieces all of this discarded art, a troubling symbol of the zeitgeist which haunted the building that day.

Holly took an artist’s easel in the looting. Like fungal spores hanging onto boots, Goodbye Blue Monday’s seeds seems to spread from its corpse. Founder Stephen Paul Trimboli moved to that frontier of Brooklyn, Detroit. Joe Crow Ryan continues to host open mics at extant Brooklyn bars and beyond. For now he maintains ‘Open Mic the Way Ya Like’ on Tuesdays but it is homeless; an itinerant carnival jumping between places like Bizarre Bar and The Living Gallery. Sukato, Debe Dalton, et. al. continue to perform. A recent venue for the Tuesday open mic was Bizarre Bar, often host to queer, drag, and shock performances seemingly out of John Waters’ deleted scenes. But Sukato’s twinkling moans over a one-stringed lute seemed hollow. Not many people had followed Ryan’s carnival to Bizarre. But I suppose they’re still out there. Anyone who has had their hearts touched by Goodbye Blue Monday carries the memory that such a place was once, and maybe still is possible. Hemingway called memories of a certain era in Paris the ‘moveable feast’ to be carried and cherished in the soul. But no longer will they feast at 1083 Broadway. 

From Stephen Paul Trimboli’s Facebook