October 1, 2026 - Brooklyn Downtown Star

SCHWARTZ: Is a Birthday Party a Humiliation Ritual?

BQE Admin on October 1, 2026

BY LANA SCHWARTZ | lana.schwartz925@gmail.com

If there is one single thing that every single person in the entire world has in common — it’s that each of us, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it — has a birthday.

There is a single day in which we came into the world, known each year after that as our birthday. How you choose to celebrate your birthday, if you choose to celebrate it at all, is at your own discretion. Or at least typically it is once you’re past the age of five.

What is appropriate to mark the anniversary of the day in which you joined the living? I must admit that as I got older, I thought eventually my relationship with my birthday would change. It would become a day like any other, not really worthy of celebration or notice at all.

As it turns out about this, like so many other things, I was wrong. Birthdays remain rife with meaning, much to my chagrin. In my 20s, each birthday was celebrated with a party at a bar; the bigger the party, the more people I could get there, the later I could stay out, all the better. Now that I’ve reached my 30s, I actually have no idea what is appropriate to mark your existence on this planet anymore. To do nothing would be sad; to do something small would likely be appropriate, but can still leave one wanting; to do something big could result in disappointment. The worst part of it all is knowing that you can think you know what you want to do for your birthday, only to find it does not live up to the expectations you had in your head. Almost never does it exceed them.

Lacking true direction on what it is I want out of a birthday, I have continued each year to have a party. I pick a bar based on the ever-dwindling number of normal places to drink in Greenpoint. (Read: Places where a drink costs $15 or less that is not flooded with influencers, wannabe or otherwise.) I email my friends and tell them when and where I will be celebrating my birthday. I will not make a Partiful, not necessarily because I have moral objections to Partiful — though I do have those — but because the idea of watching those yes, nos, and maybes pile up floods me with anxiety. Once the email is sent, I hope for the best. I hope the weather holds out, that people show up, that all my friends get along, that I manage to find a cool outfit and that it looks good in pictures. The list is endless.

To me, this entire ritual, from top to bottom, is nothing short of humiliating. The want and need inherent in asking people to take time out of their lives to celebrate you is to be emotionally naked in front of everyone you know. It’s only made worse by those who reply and tell you they can’t make it, though they really wish they could be there; an invitation to a party, if it cannot be fulfilled, should go unacknowledged, like a small child’s spelling error. In the days leading up to my party, I want to claw my eyes out and cancel the whole thing. Then, the party comes. Typically, the weather holds out. My friends show up. I have a pretty good time, actually. I don’t always find a cool outfit or look good in pictures; still, I manage to survive.

Eleven months later, I forget all of this. I have no idea what to do for my birthday. The idea of celebrating at all fills me with dread. I ultimately decide I’ll have a party at a bar, the same one as last year. The cycle continues.

Anyway, I’m sure next year will be totally different.

Lana Schwartz is a writer who was born and raised in Queens and today lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared on The New Yorker, The Onion, McSweeney’s, and more. She is the author of the books “Build Your Own Romantic Comedy” and “Set Piece.”

World’s First Theater for Short Films to Open in Bushwick

BQE Admin on October 1, 2026

Karma Masseli, left, and Jennifer Alexander at the nearly-finished Shorts Movie Theater last week. (Photos: Jack Delaney)

Hooked on reels? Go try Shorts Movie Theater, a new 40-seat short films hub and bar-cafe in Bushwick, instead.

BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com

BUSHWICK — For the past two decades, 236 Troutman Street has been a reliable stop on the Bushwick nightlife circuit. In the beginning there was Tandem, an early hipster outpost that opened in 2007 and rose to local fame as the neighborhood’s “best hook-up bar” before closing in 2015. Then another watering hole, the island-themed Mad Tropical, took up the baton from 2017 until late last year.

Now the beloved location, a warren of side-doors with a sizable back room, is getting something indisputably new: Shorts Movie Theater, a nonprofit, 40-seat cinema that will exclusively show short films — the first in the world, in fact, based on semi-exhaustive Googling.

Viewers stamp a punch card when they arrive, and pay when they leave based on how many movies they’ve seen. The pricing ranges from $1 for mini-offerings of one to two minutes, to $9 for anything over 31 minutes long.

Karma Masselli conceived of the project in August 2023, after encountering a short film director at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival in Vermont. “There should be a theater for short films,” she thought in passing, but soon forgot about the idea. It was only when Masselli returned to the festival the next year and met someone else from the industry — a woman who bluntly told her that “people don’t watch short films” — that the idea took hold.

Was there really no audience for short films? Recent studies suggest that the average American watches a combination of Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Youtube for more than two hours each day, which amounts to 30 days of continuous viewing per year. This rapid-fire format was responding to a real need, Masselli believed, and she set about building a brick-and-mortar space that could channel those impulses, heavily monetized on social media platforms through cynical “attention fracking,” towards better ends.

Masselli organized a string of pop-up screenings across Brooklyn last summer as a proof-of-concept, and the results were promising. In June, attendees crowded into a makeshift theater in the bowels of Threes Brewing, a bar in Gowanus, for a Pride-themed lineup of short films. A second gathering followed later that month; in November, Shorts Movie Theater won a $5,000 grant from the Brooklyn Public Library, helping to fuel a partnership with Art House New York and more sold-out events through this spring.

As fun as that period was, Masselli is eager to see her original plan come to fruition. “The danger of doing something besides the goal is that we do it well, and people say, ‘Just do that!’” she explained. “There are so many incredible screening series, festivals, and one-offs every night of the week for short films. The one thing that’s missing is the physical space.”

Last Friday, as New Yorkers began battening down the hatches for the impending Nor’easter, Masselli and collaborator Jennifer Alexander sat contemplating the layout of the lobby, set to be a bar and café called The Suggestion Box, under the washed-out glow of a skylight.

Illustrations by Pilar Herrera-Land feature several Easter eggs – like this nod to Connor Storrie, who plays Ilya Rozanov. (Photos: Jack Delaney)

Patrons from the Tandem days will recognize the countertop, rescued from an Elks Lodge in Elmhurst where Ella Fitzgerald used to sing, and the stained-glass doors, made of repurposed scrap from Frank Gehry’s IAC building in Chelsea. But the faux-jungle foliage of Mad Tropical is gone, replaced with illustrated details of characters holding smartphones — a Tibetan monk, Masselli and her older sister, and Connor Storrie of “Heated Rivalry” as a gladiator — courtesy of local artist Pilar Herrera-Land.

Shorts Movie Theater is looking to carve a niche for itself between 10-second videos and feature films, and the decor reflects its rich but uncertain relationships with both extremes. Take Herrera-Land’s work: Although Masselli wanted to make an explicit visual link between social media and short films, she also considered banning visitors from using their phones — short films’ main competition — before her team convinced her otherwise.

“The goal is to create a space that is so enticing that people naturally don’t pull out their phones,” said Alexander. “Sometimes when I enter a place that’s like, ‘No phones,’ it can create a barrier for entry.”

“It’s just not the relationship we want to have with our audience,” agreed Masselli.

If Shorts Movie Theater aims to keep social media at a reasonable arm’s length, it actively seeks out resonances with the heyday of film culture. The lobby will have a custom split-flap board, the kind that greeted travelers at train stations in the 1950s, but displaying showtimes rather than arrivals and departures. And Masselli plans to revive the even older, 1910s-era tradition of movie theaters showing newsreels, too, with a twist — once per week, she hopes to invite local journalists to give a 10-minute recap of citywide news.

“There’s this sense that we’re at the end of humanity. We’ve totally messed up, and we’ve ruined what was an ongoing thread,” noted Masselli. “But one hundred years ago it was the rise of fascism, it was economic collapse, and it was short films in movie theaters. We’re not that different now.”

While some movie theaters sell the chance to step outside of time, Shorts emphasizes its passage. A sun crosses over the bar on a mechanical track; in the back, twelve panels painted by Herrera-Land depict dreamlike scenes from each month, accentuating the feeling of a 1930s jewel box theater. (A review of last year’s Gowanus pop-up in the magazine Copy described the aesthetic as a “worn-in saloon transformed into an idyllic summer-camp movie night under the stars.”)

The space is ultimately in service to a mission. From the outset, Masselli was committed to establishing Shorts as a nonprofit, funded by a combination of donations, grants, and ticket sales — an arrangement that allows her team to focus on providing a tonic to an age of disaffection and disconnection.

“I think that the negativity around diversity is a response to an existential fear that we don’t have enough resources for all of us. That we have no ability to coexist, so the more people there are, the more ways there are to kill each other,” said Masselli. “But imagine if you could frame diversity and the size of the world as a positive, and say that for as many people as there are, there are just as many solutions, stories, and parallels.”

“It’s crazy when you see a short film and you’re like, I’ve never heard this language before, or I didn’t know this country existed,” she added. “And then it’s exciting when you’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is my sense of humor. This is my sense of beauty.’”

Shorts Movie Theater is scheduled to open in late October. For more updates, visit shortsmovietheater.com.

COBB: From Driggs Ave to the Champs-Élysées: How Paris Transformed Henry Miller

BQE Admin on October 1, 2026

BY GEOFFREY COBB | gcobb91839@aol.com

Henry Miller grew up in Brooklyn, but it was in Paris that he found the distinctive voice that made him famous. Memories of his childhood in Williamsburg, particularly the streets around Driggs Avenue, would remain important throughout his writing. Yet the nine years Miller spent in and around Paris during the 1930s transformed both his prose and his understanding of America. Paris gave him poverty, freedom, new friendships, sexual and artistic experiences, and—perhaps most importantly—distance from the country in which he had grown up.

Miller arrived in Paris on March 4, 1930, nearing his fortieth birthday and still struggling to establish himself as a writer. He had written before coming to Europe, but he had not yet developed the uninhibited, digressive style that would distinguish his mature work. Nor did he arrive in the glamorous expatriate Paris of the early 1920s. The Great Depression had begun, and Miller had almost no money of his own. Dependent initially on what his wife could send him and later on the generosity of friends and acquaintances, he was destined to experience Paris largely from the bottom up.

Unable to pay rent consistently, Miller moved frequently, often into cheaper and shabbier rooms. He went hungry, sometimes subsisting on fruit or striking up conversations in the hope that someone might buy him a meal. Friends in New York sent money and clothes. Legal employment was difficult to obtain, and finding work during an economic depression was difficult in any case. Much of the Paris that later appeared in his writing was therefore not the Paris of luxury hotels and fashionable restaurants, but of cheap rooms, borrowed meals, cafés, streets and temporary beds.

Yet these hardships did not destroy Miller’s enthusiasm for Paris. On the contrary, one of the striking characteristics of his writing is his ability to transform material deprivation into a feeling of liberation. Hunger, uncertainty and dependence coexist with moments of extraordinary exhilaration. He famously wrote, “When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.” The tension between poverty and delight would become essential to his literary vision of the city.

Paris also changed the way Miller wrote. His prose became increasingly conversational, rhythmic and digressive. He wrote long letters, and something of the intimacy and spontaneity of correspondence entered his literary style. Living in a French-speaking environment may also have heightened his sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of English. Instead of trying to construct a conventional novel, Miller increasingly allowed memories, conversations, sexual encounters, jokes, philosophical reflections and descriptions of everyday life to collide on the page. The wandering structure of his writing began to resemble his wandering life in Paris.

The city also liberated Miller from some of the literary and social conventions he associated with America. Before leaving the United States, he had felt constrained by ideas about respectable careers, morality and what serious literature ought to look like. Paris exposed him to a cosmopolitan artistic culture in which experimentation seemed possible. His writing became more autobiographical and sexually explicit, less dependent upon conventional plot, and increasingly willing to move abruptly between the vulgar and the philosophical.

Europe also gave Miller something equally important: distance from America. From Paris, he could look back at New York more critically. The two cities gradually became imaginative opposites in his work. Paris represented disorder, sensuality, poverty, wandering and artistic freedom, while New York increasingly represented commerce, organization, conformity and spiritual restriction. Paradoxically, leaving New York helped Miller find a more powerful way of writing about the America he had left behind.

Another important influence was Anaïs Nin, whom Miller met in the early 1930s. Their relationship became literary, sexual, emotionally intense and frequently complicated, but Nin’s importance to Miller went beyond their affair. She became an enthusiastic reader of his work at a time when he was poor and largely unpublished. She admired the rawness and freedom of his prose, while Miller responded to her psychological sensitivity and encouraged her own writing. Nin also supported him materially at times. Their exchange gave Miller an unusually receptive literary companion during the crucial period in which his mature style was emerging.

That style found its fullest early expression in Tropic of Cancer, published in Paris by the Obelisk Press in 1934. The book would have encountered formidable obstacles to publication in the United States. Its uninhibited descriptions of sex, prostitution, poverty and bohemian life challenged contemporary standards of literary respectability. The novel remained unavailable through a regular American edition until 1961, when its publication generated a series of obscenity cases. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively settled the book’s legal status by extending constitutional protection to it.

Paris is therefore far more than the backdrop of Tropic of Cancer. Miller turns the city into a symbol of freedom, poverty, artistic discovery, sexuality and escape from conventional life. His narrator wanders through streets, rooms, cafés and relationships with little money and even less security, yet experiences this precarious existence as a kind of liberation from the expectations of middle-class American life. Material failure becomes, at least in Miller’s literary imagination, a form of artistic freedom.

Paris did not erase the Brooklyn writer in Henry Miller. In an important sense, it made that writer possible. The distance between the two places gave his work much of its creative tension: Brooklyn supplied memories of childhood, family, work and American urban life, while Paris supplied the freedom and perspective from which he could transform those memories into literature.

Miller had to leave Brooklyn before he could see it clearly. In Paris he discovered not only a new city to write about, but a new way of writing about the world he had left behind. The result was the exuberant, unruly and unmistakably personal prose that made Tropic of Cancer his breakthrough and established the voice for which he is still read today.

Geoffrey Cobb is the author of “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past.”

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