a través de mis ojos

Our relationships with music sometimes resemble our relationships with people: Familiarity can breed contempt, we can grow apart and our connections can be rooted in specific circumstances that couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be repeated. Music has a way of tethering our memories in place — of making them vivid and specific — but a side effect of that is that our favorite songs and albums often get reduced to little more than fodder for nostalgia.

I didn’t feel secure enough in my biking skills to ride all the way to the all-Brooklyn foodstuffs purveyor By Brooklyn in Carroll Gardens, where you can find dandelion and burdock soda, not to mention lovage soda syrup, and Early Bird granola “gathered in Brooklyn,” nor could I make it to the all-artisanal-mayonnaise store in Prospect Heights. But I knew I could manage Bushwick’s wonderful pizzeria, Roberta’s. Roberta’s has the ugliest entrance of any restaurant I’ve ever seen, barbed wire leading to heavily graffitied concrete cinder blocks: gulag in da hood. I waited almost an hour for a table.