Williamsburg's answer to Mardi Gras

I am walking down the street in Brooklyn on a softly spitting Ash Wednesday morning and looking down at a sidewalk that greets me with this, an adamant pile of rocks calling out:

So maybe some kid just dumped his fishbowl in the gutter. Or maybe, somehow, the world is woven with invisible threads tying people to cities, to hours.

Somewhere, sometime, Wynton Marsalis said that in New Orleans culture doesn't come down from on high, that it bubbles up from the streets.