Sure, she’s got big shoes to fill but I’m sure she’s got big feet (figuratively) to fill them. I met Stephane at Blogfest and I couldn’t be happier that she’s taking over the page I occupied for six years.

Good luck Steph  and you get “a gold star for trying” as you begin your reign at the Brooklyn Paper.

As for me, I am excited to be moving on. I will be doing a new column at the Brooklyn Paper as well as a bi-weekly arts and culture feature that will include interviews with notable figures in the Brooklyn cultural scene. Stay tuned for more about that in the coming weeks.

Sure, I miss Smartmom. I’ve been channeling her voice for 6 years and it’s hard to get her syntax out of my head. Rest assured, she (and Crazy Lady) have been texting, Tweeting and emailing so I’m keeping up to date on what’s been going on with the Smartmom clan now that Teen Spirit is cloistered away at a college. No doubt you’ll be hearing from her in the not so distant future on OTBKB.

In fact, if you’d like Twitter updates on Smartmom’s life sign on here.

Stay tuned.

The event is making a name for itself as a hip and diverse gathering, that attracts thousands of those who love books. The festival is organized around themed readings and devoted to timely and lively panel discussions with top national and international authors.

This year the Book Festival is adding what they’re calling Bookend Events all weekend, all over the borough of kings.  It now includes three days of parties, music, film screenings, children’s theatre, literary games and author appearances that “bookend” the festival—September 10th, 11th and 12th with partners like BAM Rose Cinemas, Bell House, Brooklyn Bridge Park, The Brooklyn Kitchen, Brooklyn Public Library, CoCo 66, Freebird Books & Goods, Greenlight Bookstore, Irondale Center, Light Industry, Littlefield, Pizza D’Amore, powerHouse Books, and St. Ann’s Warehouse!

Here is a list of what’s going on at 10AM on Sunday morning just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this thing.

It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It). Musically inspired readings by three chart-topping American fiction writers: Steve Almond (Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life), Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad), and Colson Whitehead (Sag Harbor). Followed by Q&A.
ST. FRANCIS AUDITORIUM

Youth Is a Foreign Country. To an adult, looking back on adolescence and young adulthood often seems like a nostalgia of liberation. But what if youth and its traumas continue to haunt you into adulthood? Readings by novelists Farai Chideya (Kiss the Sky), Myla Goldberg (The False Friend), and Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet), followed by Q&A.
BOROUGH HALL COURTROOM

Brooklyn Poet Laureate Presents. Brooklyn’s new poet laureate, Tina Chang, introduces some of her favorite poets to read from their work. Featuring Mark Doty, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, and Tracy K. Smith. Moderated by Tina Chang.
MAIN STAGE

How Things Shake Out. Stewart O’Nan (Songs For the Missing), Siri Hustvedt (The Shaking Woman) and T Cooper, The Beaufort Diaries read from their new books and discuss the intersection of reality and fiction.

ST. FRANCIS MARONEY SCREENING ROOM

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose: Sports and Power in America. Michael Weinreb (Bigger Than the Game), Dave Zirin (Bad Sports), and Will Leitch (Are We Winning?) show us the money, unmask the juiced-up, ego-fueled game of professional sports, and salvage what’s left to love.
ST. FRANCIS READING ROOM

Exposing a Difficult Past. Presented by Housing Works Bookstore Café. A panel exploring the motivations for, and process behind, writing for the general public about life events most people would keep secret. With Piper Kerman (Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison), Darin Strauss (Half a Life), Kathryn Harrison (The Kiss), and Nelson George (City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success), moderated by Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation). Presented by Housing Works Bookstore Cafe.
ST. FRANCIS MCARDLE HALL

Brooklyn Remix Lit Match Awards.  Come hear the finalists of the Brooklyn Remix borough-wide writing contest, some of the most talented students writing in the borough.  Author Aimee Friedman (Sea Change) will emcee.
NORTH STAGE

Troupe Classics. Performs classic children’s books.
TARGET CHILDREN’S AREA

You’ve Got to Be Kidding. Former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jon Scieszka (Spaceheadz), National Book Award finalist E. Lockhart (The Treasure Map of Boys), and Mac Barnett (The Brixton Brothers) take on the absurdity of life in books and writing, and talk about their ways of making us laugh, including hamster space aliens and panicky smart alecks. Moderated by Betsy Bird.
THE YOUTH STOOP

Librarian Reception. The Brooklyn Book Festival invites librarians to a special morning event hosted by the Brooklyn Historical Society. Join us from 10:00am to noon for a TARGET sponsored continental breakfast. Special guest appearance by The Quotables, presenting an interactive quotes game with prizes! Speaker: Marilyn Johnson, author of This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All.  RSVP REQUIRED: RSVP www.brooklynhistory.org
BROOKLYN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Also at Now I’ve Heard Everything is a video of singer-songwriter Amy Speace performing The Real Thing solo acoustic.  I’m probably posting this more for Amy’s monologue before the song, which is part diary and part stand up.  And the song itself ain’t bad either.  Click here to view the video.

–Eliot Wagner

This little red headed girl truly looks forward to this weekly class and runs from the PS 321 playground all the way to Ms. Rudolph’s on Third Street.  Alright, she walks after she’s gotten an ices or something from Mr. Softee. And when class is over, she is always very proud of her creative art project (fit to be hung on a wall or displayed in the family’s living room).

A talented Park Slope artist, Rudolph has been an art teacher and art therapist for over forty years. She offers wonderful small art classes for children ages five and up. Classes follow the school calendar and there are only five children to each class.

Basic mediums and skills are explored through varied art materials.

The class meets on Tuesdays 3:30 to 4:30 (Bernette says she will add a Wednesday class if the Tuesday class fills up). Class fee is $25 per class, which must be paid one month in advance. There is a $35 material fee paid once for the term paid the first month.

Your child is invited to a trial class for $25.  
If the child joins the class the fee will be added on to your first month. Classes meet in the Art Studio/Gallery of Bernette Rudolph in central Park Slope (very convenient).

For information and to sign up email: Bernette(at)earthlink(dot)net

Full disclosure: That is my niece Sonya pictured. But I am writing this post because I truly admire Ms. Rudolph and know that her classes are wonderful and inspiring for children!!!

And who knew there was such a cool gallery in Park Slope?

Ensor, the author of Cinderella, As if You Didn’t Already Know the Story and Thumbelina, Tiny Runaway Bride is well known for her paper silhouettes. But this show takes her work to another level with brief narrative captions that are at once funny, strange, spooky and fanciful.

The above picture is from another show of Ensor’s work.

Just back froma trip to South Africa, the artist has been “feverishly” putting the finishing touches on this exhibition. Here is a note from Ensor inviting the public to this must-see show:

I was a very long way away in Africa for two weeks and now I am home and getting ready to put up pictures for my upcoming exhibit.   The mud houses in Africa  reminded me of the houses inside each of our heads when we were very young—the ones that didn’t have any straight lines and were just made up somehow of  hardened dirt.  And then of course there was  that amazing African light, not to mention the  giraffes and elephants and monkeys. But I digress.

Take Me Home, an exhibit of  paper silhouettes with handcarved frames and furtive inky inscriptions by myself, opens on September 9th at

Phyllis Stigliano Gallery (62 Eight Ave, in Park Slope, Brooklyn.) The gallery is a hop and a skip from Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza subway station. Near the Montauk Club. On your way to somewhere.

There are so many country songs about going home.   I want my pictures to be like good songs— rhyming reminders that we are all part of the same story.

COME TO THE OPENING!  on Sunday September 12th from 3 to 5. THERE WILL BE COOKIES. There will be wine. I will have copies of my books, because if you are a fan of silhouette images you are going to like those too. Yes the art is for sale.

Or come and check it out some other time—on your way home maybe.

When your number’s up, that’s it;

When you’re crossing my avenue?

Richard Barone and his band, The Bongos, were a mainstay of the Hoboken scene in the 1980s.  Since The Bongos split in 1987, Richard has put out a few solo albums and produced other musicians, but there has been no new music from Richard for the past 15 years or so.  That changes in a bit more than a week, when Richard’s new album, Glow is issued.  A video (really just a pic of the album cover) of the first song from Glow, Gravity’s Pull is up here at Now I’ve Heard Everything.

Finally, read about the end of Paste Magazine, the music related programs at the upcoming Brooklyn Book Festival, Rosanne Cash, Steve Wynn and The Miracle 3 and Chuck Prophet and The Mission Express in News and Notes at Now I’ve Heard Everything.

–Eliot Wagner

Coney Island Rockabilly Festival

Friday September 3, Saturday September 4th on Coney Island: The 2010 Coney Island Rockabilly Festival features, “…the trashiest, dirtiest rock and roll, the most mind-bending and bizarre sideshow and the most sultry and seductive burlesque that Coney Island has to offer.” The traveling roadshow will play clubs and bars across the United States, concluding over Labor Day Weekend on the boardwalk.

Movies:

Soul Kitchen, The Kids are All Right, Inception, The American at BAM

The Switch, Eat Pray Love, Avatar 3D, The American, Last Exorcism at the Pavilion.

Music:

Sept 3-4, 9-10 Help Save Puppets Jazz Bar Fundraisers 5PM until 3AM at Puppets Jazz bar 481 Fifth Avenue in Park Slope.

Friday, Sept 3 at 8PM at Barbes: Oran Ektin has been described as a “great clarinet player” and “excellent improviser” by the New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff and a “woodwind maestro” by PRI’s internationally syndicated show, Afropop Worldwide.

Saturday, Sept 4 at 8PM: New Model Army at the Bell House

Art

Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864 at the Brooklyn Museum. This exhibition presents a selection of artworks and historical objects celebrating the contributions of women to the mid-nineteenth-century Sanitary Movement, particularly the highly important Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair of 1864. The genesis of the exhibition was a rare doll from the Museum’s collection featuring an elaborate trousseau made by a woman named Eliza Lefferts and sold at the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair. During the Civil War, sanitary fairs were held to raise money for the war effort in major cities in the Northeast.

Through September 30 at the Skylight Gallery in Bed-Stuy: Eyewitness to: Beautiful Black Brooklyn Photography exhibit at the featuring dozens of rare images from the 1960s to the 1980s Tues. – Fri., 11:00am – 6:00pm; Sat., 1:00pm – 6:00pm.

Through October 15th at The Pratt Institute School of Architecture and the Pratt Library: “Le Corbusier – Miracle Boxes,” a multidisciplinary, three-part exhibition on the work of renowned Swiss-French architect, urbanist, designer, writer, and painter Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), who is considered by many to be the most important architect of the 20th century, starting August 30, 2010. “Miracle Boxes,” the first New York exhibition dedicated entirely to the work of Le Corbusier, is curated by Ivan R. Shumkov, Ph.D., adjunct associate professor of architecture at Pratt Institute. Shumkov will deliver an opening lecture that will be followed by a reception on September 13, 2010 at 6 p.m in Higgins Hall Auditorium located at 61 St. James Place in Brooklyn. The exhibition, opening lecture, reception, and an upcoming related symposium will be free and open to the public.

More to come…

Join us one Thursday a month at Park Slope’s  The Old Stone House come to a themed reading by authors of absorbing fiction, poetry, memoir and drama curated by talented writers and editors. All readings are at 8PM. $5 donation includes wine, snacks, great writers and good company.

2010-2011 BROOKLYN READING WORKS SEASON

All readings at 8PM

September 23: Young Writers curated by Jill Eisenstadt

October 21: New Plays by Brooklyn Playwrights curated by Rosemary Moore

November 11: Writing War Fiction by Vets of Vietnam and Iraq curated by Louise Crawford

December 16: TBA

January 20: The Truth and Oral History (the double life of the interview) curated by John Guidry

February 17: Memoirathon curated by Branka Ruzak

March 17: Blarneypalooza curated by Michele Madigan Somerville

April 14: In the Year of the Rabbit: Voices from the East curated by Sophia Romero

May 19: Fifth Annual Edgy Mother’s Day curated by Louise Crawford and Sophia Romero

June 16: Fiction in a Blender curated by Martha Southhgate