NEW YORK STREETS----
"No one has any idea who Ralph Bakshi is," insists the man himself, rattled by all the myths about his upbringing in Brownsville, New York.
The so-called pit of central Brooklyn sure had a nasty reputation - mean as hell, bloodier than a butcher shop on Friday morning, a slum as derelict as the hookers working the corner. It's those switchblade tales,
the gangster riffs, the jive about pushers and pimps that knots Ralph up.
Market
"Brownsville could teach you a lot if you knew where to look," he says, filtering through all the lies and exaggerations found in over 40 years of press that pegged Ralph as a boy born of ghetto pain, an artist who survived the agony of an impoverished cesspool. He came up fighting, the rags said - a common thug that learned to draw.
It's all nonsense - but it makes for a hell of a headline.
"Ghettos for other people are prisons, places to be embarrassed of, places to escape from - but that wasn't it for me. There were so many beautiful things in Brownsville. It was how you looked at it - the freedom of the streets.
The fact that no one knew what the fuck you were doin' or cared. How 'bout walkin' down streets with thousands of pushcarts with guys hawking their wares? How 'bout walkin' into a kosher deli where butchers are killing chickens and women are pluckin' them - the feathers floating in the air?
Flatbush Ave
It was a wonderful, wonderful bazaar."
These are the boyhood visuals of a land long gone - streets that hosted a constant collision of worlds old and new. The sounds were sweet, too - the beats of bebop and rock 'n' roll were joined by a chorus of "babushkas" jockeying for pushcart meats in a hundred diff
erent languages.
It was a pure American experience, and decidedly New York. It was a place that people try to recreate in movies, music, photos, paintings, and books just like this, but no one ever truly
succeeds.
For Ralph - and for everyone that lived it - it's a place best described with a special, very personal kind of rhythm, a soundtrack that's unique to one life, independent to each
thought, particular to every footstep.
You had to be there.
Like all great things, that America - so majestic, so grand, so damn beautiful - came and went.
Great Jones Street
"We were immigrants, but I never felt poor," Ralph says. "You're not poor if you've got things you want to do in your head. You didn't have the time to worry whether you were eatin' or not. You don't have a car, you can't take the girl to the best restaurant, you don't go - big fuckin' deal. I never felt poor a day in Brownsville, even though I was dirt poor. There was always something to do - and the same thing is true in animation. There's
always somethin' to draw, there's always somethin' to animate, there's always somethin' new to think about."
Brownsville kept Ralph's mind churning, and it was the texture that astonished him. Its buildings were tattered and rickety. Every tenement, synagogue, grocery, bar, candy store, and hospital had their own stories to tell. It was like the whole neighborhood had been firebombed, but refused to burn down to ash. And Ralph was more than eager to finger its scars.
South Street
"Brownsville is all about wood,"he says."Toys were made from wood,
we burned wood for fuel, wood stuck out from under the snow during
the winter." For Ralph, wood is character. It wasn't the shiny veneers that were interesting - that was for chumps. The cracks, the grit, the bruised, broken, bloodied up bits of building - yeah, that's what he dug. It was the flaws - the indication that something damn near died twelve times over, but kept on kicking - that got him off. " -from UNFILTERED - The Complete Ralph Bakshi
by Jon Gibson and Chris McDonnell
