Space Billiard Cafe

A couple weeks ago a high school friend of mine living in NYC informed me of a billiards hall on 32nd Street, in the heart of "K-town." In all honesty, I had always thought of Koreatown as being more along Broadway through the lower 30s. That is, I never knew there was a stretch of 32nd Street, just off Broadway, that was crammed with Korean restaurants, spas, karaoke bars, etc. But what got me especially curious was how my friend said the place was in a 12th floor penthouse and open 24 hours a day. It sounded too interesting not to check out. So there I was last Wednesday night, happy that it was not a regular "school night" due to Thanksgiving being the next day, riding the B/D express from Grand Street to Herald Square. I wasn't on street level more than 20 seconds before I spotted a bright sign for the place, on the south side of 32nd in the middle of the block between Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

I know that the billiards scene in New York has a pretty big Korean influence. I know the originator of New York's billiards mecca, Carom Cafe, was a Korean by the name of Sang Lee. On my way to 32nd I had suspected the place might have pocketless tables, or at least I had hoped they would. Riding the elevator upstairs I was pretty excited to find out for sure. Indeed, the moment the elevator doors parted my eyes went straight to a set of red, yellow and white balls on the nearest table. I went over to the man behind the counter and he immediately pulled out a tray of 16 pool balls for me. I was like "No, I just want the three balls."

About half of the room's 14 tables were in use. I went over to a corner table and got down to practicing. The first thing I noticed was that the tables were a bit smaller than I'd played on before, definitely not the 5x10 monster Chevillottes and Verhoevens in Queens. Another thing, and probably the biggest drawback to playing at Space (and most ironic considering its name), is that the tables are incredibly close to one another. At one point during my hour-long practice session one of the players on the next table was aiming a shot and the butt of his cue was perilously close to a ball on my table.

I noticed that not everybody was playing with the trio of red, yellow and white balls. Some people were playing with two reds, a yellow and a white. I'd take brief glimpses just as they were about to shoot. Their games seemed to be less about hitting three rails and more about simply caroming one's cue ball off one red to the other. I looked this up and came across a wikipedia page for Four Ball, or as it's known in Korean, "danggu" (hence the name for Space's website, danggu24.com).

By far, though, the best part of playing at Space was the digital timer near each table. Whenever I rent a table anywhere else I am constantly fishing out my cellphone to keep track of time, especially when I'm approaching the last 10-15 minutes of the hour. But at Space, it's all done for you. It's super convenient to just be able to quickly glance over at the timer. And each table has its own rack of scoring beads as well. I played as well as I could have hoped, scoring 19 points in an hour.

It's a really great place, I am glad I was told about it. The walk from my apartment to the B/D train was longer than the walk from the Herald Square station to Space Billiard Cafe, so it feels especially close to home. It's a tad pricey, my hour cost me $12 (and I think it goes up on weekend nights). However, you can save money by going the BYOB route if you want. Of the 14 tables, three are pool tables. So it's not unlikely that you might have to wait if you want to play pool.

Needless to say, I won't be jonesing to take the 7 train all the way to Flushing, or the F to deep Brooklyn, just to play billiards. I'll still head out there from time to time. But I had long wondered if there were any billiard tables in Manhattan. I thought surely there had to be some tables in residences, private clubs and whatnot. But now I know where I can go that's a lot easier to get to. Oh, and I forgot to mention one other really cool thing. When walking into Space, take a quick left and go to the windows. Then look straight up.

From the Archive: Fat Cat Billiards

From October 2000 to May of 2004 I shot over 700 rolls of film for the Village Voice. I have a very haphazard system for filing all those pictures. I have stacks and stacks of negatives stored in envelopes, plastic bags, manilla folders and notebooks. Fortunately, the photo staff at the Voice took pretty good care of the film, sleeving it in archival Print File negative pages and labeling everying with at least a date and year (unfortunately, many of the sleeves are marked on, X-ed up, numbered, etc. as a result of editing). I've taken the additional step of categorizing everything by subject and year. For example, all my nightlife/bar/music pictures from 2002 are in one stack. So finding a picture isn't too painful. It helps that I have a good memory (and, of course, that I can search the Voice's archive online). Yesterday I wanted to take a look at the outtakes from a burlesque show I shot at the Knitting Factory in 2003, so I hunkered down and started digging. In doing so I came across two rolls of film I shot at Fat Cat Billiards that I had totally forgotten about.

I'd guess that about one out of every fifteen assignments I shoot ends up not getting published, for whatever reason. I still get paid, it's just that stories get killed sometimes. This shoot at Fat Cat was one of those assignments. Up on top of the two pages somebody had written "BTS," which I now remember means it was for the annual back-to-school issue of the Voice. I'm assuming it was part of some roundup of ideas for cheap entertainment, things to do if you're not 21, etc.

There really wasn't anything too great on the film. I got out my digital camera, put the negs on a lightbox and shot some pics of the negs and inverted the image into a negative so that you can see the frames as positives. This is the same technique I used to convert my 4x5 negs to digital files. Anyway, you can see what the place looks like. I'm definitely due for another visit soon. I did make a few scans as well. There was one picture (below) that I liked. It seemed to have the most depth. I really like the little detail of the cube of chalk that's fallen onto the table in the foreground.

More Docs Outtakes

Wow, the title of that last post "Skirting the Edges of Burnout" sounds pretty heavy now. I think I've definitely bounced back the past week or so. I played third this past Tuesday night, beating a SL3 4-0 to stave off the other team from reaching a 3-0 lead in the match. Right from the opening lag I felt great. But I wasn't without some errors. In one game I missed a shot on the 8 by not moving the stance-hindering bar stools on one side of the table. But it all worked out in my favor and I felt calm, focused and totally in control of everything. With the score now at 2-1 we put up our star SL3 player, Grace, who went on to slay yet another SL5 2-3 to tie the match 2-2 and get us to the rubber match. (For those not in the know, you can check out the APA's "games must win" chart that explains all this.) We ended up losing, laughably, 2-3 thanks to one of our senior members who I think has the APA's worst win/loss record when it comes to playing last. In the end, it was good to have Captain Caveman back from the hospital. I could tell he was just happy to be in his usual seat watching everybody play. He played damn well himself, especially for not having played in a month. His match went hill-hill before his opponent won on an 8-on-the-break earlier in the night.

Most Wednesdays I try to take a night off from pool, which is exactly what I did last night. But then Thursday rolls around and I'm getting the itch to play again. My usual Thursday night pool circuit would be getting underway right about now. Invariably I would head out in the direction of Doc Holliday's but poke my head into a few places along the way. Eventually I'd get to Doc's, take a few moments to acclimate my nostrils to the strong doghair-esque odor, and work my way toward the bar during the last hour of happy hour. The fun part about Doc's is seeing who I know and who all I don't: there always seems to be a good mix of knowns and unknowns there. I am itching to get back to Doc's but I'll save my cash tonight and do Pitt Street instead. Here are a few more outtakes from Doc's. The couple in the top photo you may recognize from a post I wrote a couple months ago here. Below is a woman I've played before at Doc's and at Sophie's, her name is Marian.

Skirting the Edges of Burnout

I haven't been very prolific on the blog the past few weeks. The "glory" of becoming a SL5 has been somewhat faded by hardships in my professional life. Indeed, it's been very slow for me in the photography world lately. And so there I was in my doldrums a couple weeks ago, sitting in the undergound bar that is Josie Woods, waiting to play in my first-ever APA singles qualifier, worrying about missing phone calls due to the poor signal reception and wondering what reason on Earth did I have for coughing up the $15 entry fee. I guilted myself into thinking, "Do I really need to be here? Couldn't this $15 be spent on something more important?" Long story short, I got whupped 0-4 by another SL5. I just couldn't find my tempo on the table. I played what I thought was a pretty good first game, repeatedly finding my way out of the safeties my opponent had thrown at me and my one remaining ball (the 5). But the adrenaline only took me so far before my opponent finally got ball in hand on me. I lost my momentum and my grip on the crucial first game. Conveniently, I was able to shrug it off as "Colorado Rockies Syndrome." But what made it sting more is some players I know had shown up specifically to watch me play.

It was somewhat of an uphill slog getting my confidence back. I wasn't able to make it to league night the following Tuesday, so it was four or five days before I ended up playing again. What I had really wanted to do was play a couple times in total silence and solitude. But I had to settle for the rec center over on Pitt Street. Now, at the rec center there are two tables. I am more than happy to play on what I call the "junior table." But the other table, I'll call it the "main table," is where all the big machismo action takes place. The thing with playing on the main table is that if you lose you can spend as long as a half hour waiting to get back on. That's because many of the players over on the main table insist on playing last pocket (aka "purgatory pool"). And they just love it when there are four or five people watching, all waiting to take on the winner. I, on the other hand, relish playing on the junior table, where even if you lose there's nobody waiting to play next so you get to keep playing. Even if it means taking on weaker players, I'll stay on the junior table simply for the amount of uninterrupted practice time I get to put in. I was there on Saturday and played an old man who appears to be just learning the game. I played him easily 10-12 games of 8ball, and I won them all. I also played some teenagers I had never seen before. Part of the machismo of playing at the rec is the number of "continuous breaks" you get. But with this man I played, I insisted every few games that I rack the balls and let him take a turn breaking. After playing for three hours straight, I felt I had gotten back into stroke. My arms felt good and sore.

L.E.S. Nights

I wanted to share with everybody some recent photographs I came across taken by photographer Chris Bickford. Chris was in town in October participating in an eight-day photography workshop hosted by Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey. His project was simply titled "In The Night." When I first saw the photos (posted on Harvey's blog here) I knew exactly where three of them were taken: Welcome to the Johnson's, Whiskey Ward and THOR. Considering these three places are all near Essex and Rivington, I initially thought Chris hadn't "worked it" very hard. Still, though, he had a real nice shot of a couple having an intimate moment near the jukebox at WTTJ. "There's a blog post somewhere here," I thought. So I did some digging.

I easily found Chris's website and his travelogue, in which he writes rather eloquently about his workshop experience and the Lower East Side. I emailed him to find out more. Turns out, Chris actually lived at Norfolk and Rivington from 1997 to 1999 (he's now based in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina). Knowing that, and of course seeing the finished project and outtakes, gave me a whole different context. His writing struck a note with me and my own thinking about the Lower East Side. It definitely changed my initial thinking that he hadn't worked the story hard enough, or that he was simply photographing his friends having a good time. He's got a very strong eye for color and mood. The work speaks for itself.
Considering Chris lived in the Lower East Side ten years ago, I respect his opinion on how the neighborhood has changed. But it's more than a one-time Lower East Sider coming back to visit the neighborhood. He could have taken a holier-than-thou "What happened to my neighborhood" or "I was here before all of this" attitude. But he is fair and balanced, if not a bit nostalgic even. Reading him muse over modern day Lower East Side hip-dom is quite interesting. He describes the project as...

...a somewhat lyrical exploration of the New York night, focusing on the hip Lower East Side. From a visual standpoint, I was attracted to all the colors of artifical night light: neon, blue stage lights, red-gelled interiors, halogen street lights. From a thematic viewpoint, I was looking to capture what I saw to be the prevailing mood of the nightlife on the Lower East Side: a world of people searching for something, sometimes finding fleeting hints of it, but generally lost in the darkness of a place that is ultimately apathetic to whether or not their band makes it, or whether they find love, or how cool they look. The Lower East Side is one of the great bastions of the “Tragically Hip”, and to me there is some poignant irony about it all; so many people who yearn to be different, to rise above, to express themselves as artists, to escape the conformity of their upbringing…and all of them drowning in a sea of sameness: tattoos, pork pie hats, rock bands, wallets on chains, cigarettes outside the bar…I don’t think I really scratched the surface of that theme in my piece, but it was there with me the whole time. There were moments when I saw it all in a more positive light, when I thought of this great teeming world of art and music and young people out doing their thing, hooking up and breaking up and living out the dramas that are the stuff of rock and roll songs…but mostly it struck me as a sad, lonely kind of scene, with a retro-upon-retro style that no longer seemed to have much substance to it…kind of a Foucault’s paradise of endlessly circular self-references.

I think he nails it. I'm sure there's somebody reading this who endured harsh winters squatting in abandoned buildings in the 1980s who would scoff at all this, and what I'm about to say. But I moved to New York in 2000 and lived in a tenement building on Stanton that had closet-sized hallway bathrooms still in use. Drunks from Bowery would urinate and deficate on my building's front door. There was a homeless couple living on my roof. The superintendent's helper slept in the cellar. But then I'd walk a few blocks over and some elegant woman in high heels would be exiting a taxi, shouting into her cellphone trying to meet up with a friend who she can't see is standing right across the street. The clueless woman, the four men dressed identically, all standing in a line to get into the newest nightclub: it's all won out over the homelessness and the begging for change (or perhaps fueled it). And the madness hasn't stopped. In the emails I had with Chris, it was easy to tell he had some of the same thoughts I did. The funniest description he gave of the Lower East Side is one that I'll think of every time I walk past Piano's on Ludlow Street on a weekend: ironic, retro, trust-fund rocker purgatory.
I'm sorry this has turned into a rant about gentrification. But it all started when I saw some pictures taken at some places I like to play pool. I came across this work two days after playing at Lucky Jacks with Steve Tseng, who is pictured above at the red pool table.

Chris isn't sure what's in store for this project. "I’m thinking maybe I could take pieces of this idea south, to small towns and regional music scenes, where I might find a little more soul, a little more humanity. I think maybe I’d like to add a stronger element of 'Americana' to it. Maybe make it a piece about the 'American' night. Or hell, maybe I’ll just suck it up and head back to the LES for another dose of postmodern blues, New York style."