About Me:
Alexander Cavaluzzo is an East Village-based writer and artist. His work has appeared in Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, Newsweek, BlackBook Magazine, the Mellon Foundation, Hyperallergic, Nerve, Defenestration, Travel + Leisure, Baron, Performa Magazine, The Style Con, Gaga Stigmata, and more. His work has also appeared in the New York Times and New York Magazine (although in advertising copy, not editorial features…)
He also sustains an artistic practice that runs the gamut of painting, printmaking, installation and conceptual work.
In 2021, the New York Foundation For the Arts awarded him a $5000 grant and inducted him to the City Artists Corps, part of an initiative to reinvigorate post-pandemic New York City by supporting artists and their practice.
View more of Alexander Cavaluzzo’s below:
Buried Placenta
One of many tales reflecting my experiences and observations about living in New York City.
Most of the time, it’s easier to get a seat at Hamilton (even during a pandemic) than it is to get a viable date in New York City. The end of romance in our fair Gotham was cleverly summed up by sex columnist Candace Bushnell when she wrote, “No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, no one has affairs to remember—instead, we have breakfast at 7 AM and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.”
So why do people still come to a small island off the coast of the continental United States, populated with roughly 4 million men, if 3,999,999 of them are either married, degenerates, or sociopaths? Well, sometimes, even if you don’t find “the one”, you find one that’s worth the hunt.
Even though the L train was nearly at my destination, I was pleading for AT&T service to find out where I was supposed to go when I got off at the Jefferson stop. Some kids doing “showtime”, an impromptu performance that involves swinging from subway poles for spare change, nearly kicking the phone out of my hands, made me realize I was at my stop.
I hadn’t been to this part of Bushwick since maybe 2009 and did not expect to see a mini-Williamsburg when I emerged. Wyckoff was now lined with the generic bars and vintage shops one could find on Bedford, a far cry from the desolate warehouses and eerily peaceful silence that would only be broken by your own footsteps I had recalled a few years earlier. It felt like the tide of the new New York was rising and advancing at a rate I never would have anticipated, but the city’s always changing—why I expected the Hudson to rise due to climate change and not rents to rise in Brooklyn seems ignorant in hindsight.
Ryan’s text instructed me to walk further south from the subway than we ever would have dared the last time I wandered around here to that one bodega in a five-block radius. (It was unseasonably cool for August, but the luxury of taxi-lined streets had yet to come out this
