I know a lot of people in the book business and I would have guessed that the book release party I was invited to tonight, for a picture book about Brooklyn strongman Charles Atlas, would have been a prim, family-friendly affair decked out with cake, stuffed animals and furniture with a minimum of sharp edges. Well, there was a cake, shaped like Charles; I got a mangled piece with one of his eyes. But other than that it was a funtime Brooklyn apartment party with no kids in sight and lots of literate, attractive hipsters. Could Knopf have done better? I doubt it.
The party was in the slightly grubby Spanish segment on the fringes of Williamsburg in the basement of an apartment building. On our way there, before stopping at a bodega for Tecate, we passed the fruitcake factory depicted below, which I like to imagine is haunted. It sure looks that way in my grainy, ominous photo. When has there ever been great enough demand for fruitcake to necessitate an entire factory, one member of our band wondered later. A fair question, and possibly the reason the factory is abandoned and haunted, or so I’ve heard.
We learned the party building overlooked the Hewes Street stop off Broadway on the J line when we made our way through a thicket of bicycles and up several flights of ancient wooden stairs to emerge on the roof with a panoramic view of Brooklyn, and Manhattan in the distance, with various bridges and airplanes visible. We were suprised to learn the group of party people on the roof actually belonged to a different party somewhere in the building, so we eventually retreated back down the spooky stairwells to the basement.
In the den area, someone was projecting episodes of The Prisoner from a PowerBook onto a painted brick wall, interrupted intermittently by shadow puppets and also when a millipede skittered onto the floor from under a couch. The apartment’s resident cat pounced on the insect and ate half of it. As the other half of the millipede attempted to escape, someone stepped on it.
There was plenty of beer and liquor, wine and champagne, and some PathMark brand cheese balls that were too salty. And speaking of salty, I enjoyed this note, scrawled on an envelope and pinned to a wall near the bathroom.
