NO WORDS_DAILY PIX BY HUGH CRAWFORD
DANNY PERASA FUNERAL TODAY
Those who have been following the love story of Danny and Annie Perasas on Morning Edition, will be sad to hear that Danny died on February 24, 2006. His funeral is in Bay Ridge today.
- Funeral: Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 10:00 a.m. Visitation Monastery 8901 Ridge Boulevard, Brooklyn
The story of Danny and Annie Perasa — how they met, and how they’ve
stayed in love — inspires many who hear it. Their joy in life, and in
one another, was celebrated recently in New York, where a crowd
gathered to honor Danny and Annie.The Perasas are a
memorable couple. In person, they come off like a pair of favorite
grandparents, with thoughtful wisecracks and stories that take
unpredictable turns. They say their affinity for one another was always
obvious — Danny proposed marriage on their first date.When
the Perasas launch into a story, their joy in telling it is obvious.
Married since 1978, they have a sweetness about them that makes
everyday items — like notes left around the house — seem exciting. On
the radio and in person, Annie and Danny’s infectious enthusiasm draws
listeners in, making them strain to hear what the couple have to say.Their
enthusiasm has now been honored in a tangible way. The StoryCorps oral
history project has dedicated its booth in Grand Central Terminal to
the Perasas. On Friday, Feb. 10, a plaque was unveiled that dedicated
the booth to the Perasas.The plaque reads: "This booth
is dedicated to Danny and Annie Perasa, who recorded their story here
on January 6, 2004. Their humor, heart, eloquence and love will never
be forgotten."The couple made the trip to the ceremony
despite Danny’s illness: Suffering from pancreatic cancer, he is
currently in hospice care. Their visit was a treat for those present,
as the Perasas revisited the conversation they had that day in 2004,
and the life they’ve shared since 1978.In addition to
its New York booths, StoryCorps is traveling the country to give people
the chance to discuss their lives and preserve stories for future
generations. Each interview is archived at the Library of Congress. And
excerpts are aired Fridays on Morning Edition.
POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE: KUBLA KAHN AND JEWELRY TOO
I just visited Rare Device’s on-line shop and I plan to make a trip up to the South Slope store (open Wednesday through Sunday) at 453 Seventh Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets. The web site looks fantabulous and I saw just the thing for a friend’s 40th birthday present: a gorgeous necklace designed by the shop’s owner, Rena Tom.
A razor blade necklace by Brooklyn-based Analogous Jewelry also jumped out at me. Here are some details about Rena and her very cool shop. And don’t forget to check out Rena’s blog. That’s how I found the shop in the first place.
What is Rare Device?If you are an English major or an English teacher, you know that ‘Rare
Device’ is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. (If you are
a true bookworm, you know that Ray Bradbury took a stab at that phrase
too.)Rare Device is, simply, good stuff for you and your home. Rena
Tom, the proprietress, has been designing jewelry on the West and East
coast for a couple of years, selling to stores and directly to happy
customers at shows. She was so inspired by all of the fabulous,
creative designers she met along the way, both in person and online,
that she decided she had to share her discoveries, and she opened Rare
Device in October 2005.The studio/storefront is a place to promote these designers as well as
her own work. Every object in the store has its own story, and has been
chosen because it is either handmade, well-designed, useful, beautiful
or all of the above. The aesthetic is modern and quirky while remaining
warm and inviting.Who’s in charge here?
Rena Tom has lived her entire life
in California until very recently. She has a background in both liberal
arts and engineering, not being put to very good use these days.
Previously, Rena was involved in the Internet world before deciding to
be crafty for a living. She used to own a ‘67 Mustang Fastback and a
Kelsey printing press but has traded them in for snow boots and a
Metrocard. She loves fonts, ice cream, balls of yarn, broadband
wireless, grainy Holga photos, fancy chocolate bars, rickety
rollercoasters and abundant sunshine.453 7th Avenue (between 15th and 16th Street)
Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York 11215
Hours: Wed – Sat, noon to 7pm; Sun, noon to 6pm
BROKLYN UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL #4
Brooklyn Underground Film Festival Celebrates 4th Season
Announces Musical Lineup for Festival Events
BROOKLYN, NY –
(MARKET WIRE)
– 02/27/2006 – The Brooklyn Underground Film Festival proudly
continues its tradition of being New York’s premier festival for new and
emerging filmmakers to showcase their films. Celebrating its fourth
season, the festival will be held April 19 – 23 at the Brooklyn Lyceum in
Park Slope.
More than 3,000 patrons attended last year’s festival and this year will be
unlike any other. In January, the Brooklyn Brewery hosted the Last Call
for Submissions party, which drew in hundreds of guests and last-minute
film submissions. Having received more than 1,000 film submissions, the
fourth annual festival will showcase the freshest, most innovative voices
in underground film including comedies, dramas, documentaries, and
experimental work. In addition, screenings will be accompanied by Q&A
sessions with filmmakers, and our first-ever panel discussions with members
of the artistic community and film industry. The Brooklyn Underground Film
Festival also hosts an art exhibit, which will be on display at the
Brooklyn Lyceum for three months.
Confirmed recording artists performing at the festival’s after-parties are
Har Mar Superstar and the Hunting Party, with more to be announced.
What began five years ago as a largely do-it-yourself project, which
screened dozens of local and international films in a makeshift theater in
DUMBO, has now become the premier film festival for exhibiting independent
film and art outside the mainstream arena.
Tickets are $8 and can be purchased through the Brooklyn Underground Film
Festival’s website beginning in April 2006.
For more information please visit the website at
www.brooklynunderground.org.
The Brooklyn Underground Film Festival is an outlet for emerging and
radical new voices from around the globe. Its mission is to create a fresh
arena for discussion between artists, filmmakers and audiences, with a
focus on personal cinema and work driven by new processes.
POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE_THE GATES REDUX
Last February Central Park was awash in orange curtains. Remember? I wrote this back then.
What was it about The Gates that kept bringing 9/11 to mind?
The color for one thing. Christo and Jeanne Claude’s choice of hue
was both an acknowledgement and a joyful defiance of the city’s
perpetual orange alert.
One friend said the plastic orange structures reminded her of the
twin towers. And the way everyone kept looking up at the fabric
recalled those nightmare September days when everyone was looking up at
the sky.
Someone else said that when The Gates are dismantled, it will be
like life after September 11th. The way we still see the twin towers in
their absence; ghost images in the skyline of what once was and will
always be.
The Gates united our city in much the same way that 9/11 did. But
this time we weren’t joined in grief, fear, and confusion. The Gates
were about joy, about the meaning of art, about being alive.
It was a carefree walk in the park for our neighbors and friends.
And for that The Gates was worth every penny Christo and Jeanne-Claude
spent on them.
POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE: DESIGN SPONGE
Did I mention that Grace of the blog Design Sponge (d*s) made it into NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S list of peopel to watch in 2006? I thought that was pretty cool (Who says blogging isn’t the happening thing?) also learned on Rare Device, that Grace has a piece in NEW YORK HOME MAGAZINE about Park Slope style. Check it out if you can find the mag (details to come).
I just visited D*S for the first time in a while and I see that she’s done a total rehab/redesign of her site and she’s really moving and shaking. I really like her new logo.
If you’re interested in decor, design, furniture, and all that kind of stuff, you’ve got to know about Design Sponge. Here’s her news on what’s been going on over there.
Things
have been crazy at d*s lately and i wanted to thank all of you for your
support, emails and tolerance of the numerous coding snags we’ve had
trying to get the new site up (my coder and designer are saints for
putting up with me through this). i’m talking with another coder
tomorrow morning to try and get this thing up and running, so in the
meantime, i wanted to give you a sneak peek into what’s coming on
monday (new look or not):
- d*s mini trends!:
this little sponge likes to window shop new trends, so why not share my
finds with everyone? this column will be a weekly look into micro
trends cropping up in the industry and examples (with links!) of how to
bring each look into your home. the first trend article will set sail next monday…- sponged!:
links to the latest and greatest on the design world (including
magazine, newspaper and design articles that are must reads for the
week)- ask d*s!: i get so many emails during
the day asking for shopping suggestions, so i’m going to share the
results with readers twice a week so we can all benefit from a little
spongey research- d*s reader recs!: you guys
know your stuff so now d*s readers can take advantage of our design
savvy audience by sending in a picture of their own home for advice on
paint colors, furniture arranging, furniture, etc. send in YOUR photo now for next week (subject: reader rec)! once or twice a week depending on demand)
POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE: MARK MORRIS AT BAMCAFE
This month is THE MONTH OF MARK (Mark Morris) at the BAMCAFE. This event among many sounds interesting.
The Month of Mark: Karaoke with Mark Morris
Sat, Mar 4 at 9pm
Have you ever dreamt of singing a tune at BAMcafé? Tonight you can do it! Mark Morris himself is hosting this karaoke extravaganza.
There’s also this the night before:
The Month of Mark: The Western Caravan
Fri, Mar 3 at 9pm
"Hootin’ and hollerin’ and holdin’ back the tears…"—The New York TimesThe
Western Caravan, New York’s premier western swing orchestra, has been
serving up classic country, western swing, and honky-tonk standards as
well as their own lively originals since 1995. Its rollicking
performance at BAMcafé will feature fiddle, vocals, steel guitar,
trumpet, and piano, and will include some of the music they will be
playing with Mark Morris Dance Group later in March.
A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO MEASURE
As a psychotherapy groupie, I’ve always enjoyed the essays of Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of "Going Sane: Maps of Happiness." His earlier work: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; Essays on the Unexamined Life" is worth a read. This piece appeared on Sunday’s OpEd page. needless to say, it caught my eye.
PSYCHOTHERAPY is having yet another identity crisis. It has manifested
itself in two recent trends in the profession in America: the first
involves trying to make therapy into more of a "hard science" by
putting a new emphasis on measurable factors; the other is a growing
belief among therapists that the standard practice of using talk
therapy to discover traumas in a patient’s past is not only unnecessary
but can be injurious.That psychotherapists of various
orientations find themselves under pressure to prove to themselves and
to society that they are doing a hard-core science — which was a
leading theme of the landmark Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in
California in December — is not really surprising. Given the prestige
and trust the modern world gives to scientific standards,
psychotherapists, who always have to measure themselves against the
medical profession, are going to want to demonstrate that they, too,
deal in the predictable; that they, too, can provide evidence for the
value of what they do.And, obviously, if psychotherapy is going
to attain scientific credibility, it won’t do to involve such
wishy-washy practices as "going back to childhood" or "reconstructing
the past" — terms that when used with appropriate scorn can sound as
though a person’s past was akin to the past lives New Agers like to
talk about.Since at least the middle of the 19th century,
Western societies have been divided between religious truth and
scientific truth, but none of the new psychotherapies are trying to
prove they are genuine religions. Nor is there much talk, outside of
university literature departments, of psychotherapy trying to inhabit
the middle ground of arts, in which truth and usefulness have
traditionally been allowed a certain latitude (nobody measures
Shakespeare or tries to prove his value).It is, so to speak,
symptomatic that psychotherapists are so keen to legitimize themselves
as scientists: they want to fit in rather than create the taste by
which they might be judged. One of the good things psychotherapy can
do, like the arts, is show us the limits of what science can do for our
welfare. The scientific method alone is never going to be enough,
especially when we are working out how to live and who we can be.In
the so-called arts it has always been acknowledged that many of the
things we value most — the gods and God, love and sexuality, mourning
and amusement, character and inspiration, the past and the future — are
neither measurable or predictable. Indeed, this may be one of the
reasons they are so abidingly important to us. The things we value
most, just like the things we most fear, tend to be those we have least
control over.This is not a reason to stop trying to control
things — we should, for example, be doing everything we can to control
pain — but it is a reason to work out in which areas of our lives
control is both possible and beneficial. Trying to predict the
unpredictable, like trying to will what cannot be willed, drives people
crazy.Just as we cannot know beforehand the effect on us of
reading a book or of listening to music, every psychotherapy treatment,
indeed every session, is unpredictable. Indeed, if it is not, it is a
form of bullying, it is indoctrination. It is not news that most
symptoms of so-called mental illness are efforts to control the
environment, just like the science that claims to study them.It
would clearly be naïve for psychotherapists to turn a blind eye to
science, or to be "against" scientific methodology. But the attempt to
present psychotherapy as a hard science is merely an attempt to make it
a convincing competitor in the marketplace. It is a sign, in other
words, of a misguided wish to make psychotherapy both respectable and
servile to the very consumerism it is supposed to help people deal
with. (Psychotherapy turns up historically at the point at which
traditional societies begin to break down and consumer capitalism
begins to take hold.)If psychotherapy has anything to offer —
and this should always be in question — it should be something aside
from the dominant trends in the culture. And this means now that its
practitioners should not be committed either to making money or to
trivializing the past or to finding a science of the soul.
NO WORDS_DAILY PIX
DAILY AUCTION FOR NO WORDS
Bid on today’s No Words_Daily Pix by Hugh Crawford.
"Skyline Graffiti"
Minimum bid: $40.
Make your bids as a comment or e-mail louisecrawford@gmail.com
You can also bid on Saturday’s pix: "Treeee"
The pictures are framed. Shipping is not included in price of print
but we’re happy to mail it to you. Just sent a print off to New Jersey
and it cost $8.00. Not sure about Stuttgart. If you’re in Park Slope or
nearby come and pick it up or we’ll figure something out.
POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE:OPEN THAT BOTTLE NIGHT
On February 25th, Wall Street Journal wine columnists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher invited anyone who’s been holding on to a special bottle of wine to uncork it and report on their experiences, for the seventh annual “Open That Bottle Night.
Well, we did it. We’ve had a 1997 bottle in our wine rack for the last nine years. A bottle of wine from the year that OSFO was born. It was a special gift from Hepcat’s sister and brother-in-law.
We imagined that one day we would drink it. But we also liked having this really special bottle of wine in our little wine rack.
Last Wednesday, I heard Gaiter and Breacher on The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC. I felt like they gave us license to open the bottle, to stop feeling like our lives weren’t good enough for that bottle. It tunred a simple dinner gathering father, stepmother, and Hepcat’s mother into something really special.
The wine was incredibly good. So was the food: a chicken curry with almonds and dried cranberries prepared by Hepcat. We were relieved because we’ve heard stories about people who’ve waited years to enjoy a great bottle of wine. No occassion seemed good enough for the wine: not a wedding, a birthday, an anniversary, a special dinner party. But when they finally got around to it, the wine had gone bad.
That happened to my Dad who had a really famous bottle of wine. When he finally opened it he had to spit it out. "This is awful," he screamed. "It tastes like vinegar."
But that didn’t happen tonight. Tonight’s wine was great.
I don’t really know how to write about wine. But this wine was wonderfully smooth and delicious.
The label reads:
Niebaum-Coppola Estate Wines Napa Valley
Varietal: Merlot
Vintage: 1997
Bottles Produced: 25,271
Bottle No: 705
Alcohol: 14.1%
Grown, produced and bottled in Rutherford, California.
ANNUAL HOMELESS COUNT TONIGHT
Thousands of volunteers are expected to hit the streets Monday night for the annual count of the city’s homeless.
The count – now in its fourth year – is an effort to help the city track its progress in getting New Yorkers off the streets.
For the first time last year, all five boroughs were included in the count.
More than 2500 volunteers will scour areas like parks, streets and subway stations and record the number of homeless New Yorkers they find.
"We want to come out on a cold winter night to make sure that we’re counting the chronic homeless people who are living on our streets and to find out how many there are and where they are," said the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services
Once again this year volunteers will also run into some decoys, posing as homeless people to help test the accuracy of the count.
Critics, however, say the count itself is inaccurate, because it doesn’t include people living in cars, abandoned buildings, or other hidden places.
MOONSTRUCK REAL ESTATE
What is going on in Carroll Gardens? Curbed seems to know
A mere 18 years after the movie’s release, Moonstruck mania continues apace in Brooklyn. By now you probably know that the famed Moonstruck house is on the market in Brooklyn Heights for $5 million. A Curbed correspondent in Carroll Gardens reports on another Cher connection:
So this bakery on Court Street near Union is closed for renovations and apparently they’re reopening in conjunction of the Cammareri Brothers, whose bakery was used in the movie "Moonstruck" (the bakery was later the Red something or other brunch spot and now it’s Naidre’s). And I’m assuming were the inspiration for Nic Cage’s last name in the movie.
ARSON IN PROSPECT HEIGHTS?
Authorities are probing whether the fire ignited in the stairwell of
1033 Pacific St. is linked to three other arsons on the same
Bedford-Stuyvesant block since December.A reward is now being offered in connection with the deadly fire.
Four people – including a woman and her two young children – were killed in Friday morning’s fire.
The group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement is offering a $1000 reward for
information leading to the arrest of what could be a serial arsonist.The group says it’s possible the tragedy could have been prevented if
police and fire investigators were better equipped to look into earlier
incidents on the same street, but the group says budget cuts are taking
their toll.
Authorities are probing whether the fire ignited in the stairwell of
1033 Pacific St. is linked to three other arsons on the same
Bedford-Stuyvesant block since December.A reward is now being offered in connection with the deadly fire.
Four people – including a woman and her two young children – were killed in Friday morning’s fire.
The group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement is offering a $1000 reward for
information leading to the arrest of what could be a serial arsonist.The group says it’s possible the tragedy could have been prevented if
police and fire investigators were better equipped to look into earlier
incidents on the same street, but the group says budget cuts are taking
their toll.
Authorities are probing whether the fire ignited in the stairwell of
1033 Pacific St. is linked to three other arsons on the same
Bedford-Stuyvesant block since December.A reward is now being offered in connection with the deadly fire.
Four people – including a woman and her two young children – were killed in Friday morning’s fire.
The group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement is offering a $1000 reward for
information leading to the arrest of what could be a serial arsonist.The group says it’s possible the tragedy could have been prevented if
police and fire investigators were better equipped to look into earlier
incidents on the same street, but the group says budget cuts are taking
their toll.
Authorities are probing whether the fire ignited in the stairwell of
1033 Pacific St. is linked to three other arsons on the same
Bedford-Stuyvesant block since December.A reward is now being offered in connection with the deadly fire.
Four people – including a woman and her two young children – were killed in Friday morning’s fire.
The group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement is offering a $1000 reward for
information leading to the arrest of what could be a serial arsonist.The group says it’s possible the tragedy could have been prevented if
police and fire investigators were better equipped to look into earlier
incidents on the same street, but the group says budget cuts are taking
their toll.
JetBlue to Portland Maine Now
A report about my favorite airline from Lockhart Steele.
Life just got a a whole lot better: JetBlue Airways Corp. said Thursday that it would begin service to Portland, Maine,
the latest expansion from its hub at John F. Kennedy International
Airport. The Queens-based airline plans to offer four flights daily
beginning May 23, with fares ranging from $59 to $129 each way.
