Hey folks, Harry here with the latest of Sheldrake's reports from Tribeca. Technically he's getting an advance look at the films to play at Tribeca, so here's his peek at BOWERY DISH, a documentry about the restaurants breaking barriers in neighborhoods they usually didn't occupy or hold ground in. Here's Shelly to break it down for ya...
Bowery Dish
directed by Kevin R. Frech
Sheldrake here, down on the Bowery and Pell Street, looking around the neighborhood after seeing this documentary, meditating on change. The New York I grew up in and lived in simply doesn’t exist anymore: every reason I permanently returned to this city late in my teens has disappeared, and all that remains is an empty urbanity: the Upper West Side is a charmless shopping mall; the Meatpacking District is now a 24 hour drinking party; Chinatown is full of Vietnamese Restaurants; the nightclubs are simply drug supermarkets; and the lower East Side has become, well, the Upper West Side circa 1987, which means that in another fifteen years… And now let us turn to that last set location for the passing authentic, the Bowery.
The Bowery has long been the end of the road for the love affair between Man and Bottle, and lately Man and Needle, and the general drop-dead seediness of the place always blended nicely into the overlapping and dilapidated domains of city government, Chinatown and Li’uhl It’ly. Home of the flop house and the 25 cent shot, if you loved the Depression, or depression, you could come to the place where the first had never lifted, and the second only for so long as the intoxicant lasted.
BOWERY DISH is an hour-long documentary that is, on the one hand, about the way that restaurants pioneer a rough neighborhood and, on the other hand, about the the process of gentrification in cities across the United States and the world. Along the way you’ll have plenty of opportunity to kick yourself for not having bought a building downtown for $20k thirty years ago, and you’ll get a few frantic minutes to think about where, oh where, such a neighborhood might exist now, since your rent just went up to $4,000 a month. (You can stop looking in Manhattan: Mike Bloomberg just gave the last one to the New Jersey Jets: he tried to do it for free, but when that didn’t work, Peter Kalikow, career hack, still managed to keep the fix in.) BOWERY DISH deals primarily with three sets of people: the restaurant owners and managers who themselves have mixed feelings about ruining the character of the neighborhood whose character they’re trying to exploit; the bums and manager of one of the last flophouses; and a the knowing and wise sociologist, who functions rather like the Narrator in the Rocky Horror picture show, giving us a sort of intellectual framework in which to shelter the oft-told tale of the rich buying a neighborhood that others are living in. It’s a great story, and a fascinating look, for New Yorkers, at the process of eroding middle-income housing in New York.
When the Bowery and the few remaining places like it are gone (East of the Bowery is still up for grabs), then Manhattan will have finally and permanently become a city of imagination and memory, a place where only Frank Miller calls Clinton “Hell’s Kitchen”, a place rendered only in movies the way Masterpiece Theater repeats its silly longings for the British pre-war class system, and finally the process begun by Rudolph Guilinani’s recreation of Times Square as Disneyland will be completed, and the only real New York, replaced by the city of chain stores and Wal-marts, will be the fake New York, Vancouver.
If you’re interested in old New York neighborhoods and how restaurants change them, BOWERY DISH is a fine documentary, though you feel there’s enough material that the story could be expanded to be at least twice as long. Go see this one.
NOTE: BOWERY DISH would be programmed nicely with another short I saw at the New Director’s New Films Festival given by Lincoln Center and MOMA, MUSIC PALACE, about the last remaining Chinatown theater. The closed Music Palace makes a brief appearance in BOWERY DISH.
Sheldrake,
NY, NY
