Maybe you can help these people from Vermont identify the name of an artist they bought a painting from in the 1960’s.

I found your blog on Google and wonder if you could steer me in
identifying the artist of a painting we have hanging on our wall here
in VT.

My wife, originally from Brooklyn, bought a very wonderful oil
painting on masonite of jazz musicians back in the 60’s. The artist
never signed the piece but a good clue would be that he had his home and
studio in what had been an old funeral parlor and she thinks it was near
5th Ave.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and any leads would be
much appreciated.

Thanks to Eliot, who sent me this tip about grapes on Third Street. He also took the picture.

I’ve attached a cellphone picture I took this afternoon of  the Third
Street organic grape harvest (south side of the street between 7th and
8th Avenues, closer to 8th).  I’ve seen this harvest for the past few
years.  Yes, I’ve sampled the grapes and they are really good, but they
do have pits.

Here is this week’s Smartmom from the Suburban Newspaper Association’s Newspaper of the Year,  the Brooklyn Paper. 

The start of the school year has been an emotional roller coaster
for Smartmom, what with so many things to worry about. Will Teen Spirit
like his new high school? Will the Oh So Feisty One adjust to her new
teachers and classmates? Will Hepcat ever finish the time-consuming
project he’s been working on for months?

And finally, will Smartmom ever get back to what she was doing before the summer vacation — whatever that was?

For
Teen Spirit, the new school year meant starting 11th grade in a new
high school. Talk about stressful. Smartmom loves the new school and
hopes that Teen Spirit will excel there, but that doesn’t mean she
stops herself from interrogating him every day when he comes home. She
can’t help herself.

“How was it? Do you like it? Do you have any homework?”

Teen Spirit finds all this very irritating and likes to keep his responses to a minimum — at least around his mother.

When
he came home with his arms and shirt splattered with paint, she found
out that he’s been working on a mural as part of a school-wide social
service project. Cool.

New school. New classes. New subway. New
routines. And, boy, is Teen Spirit glad that doesn’t have to wear a tie
and lace-up shoes to this new, more progressive school, which is the
polar opposite of his old prep school. Smartmom has her fingers crossed.

OSFO
is a lot more forthcoming when it comes to talking about school. She
started fifth grade at PS 321 and is now one of the oldest kids in the
school. A senior. A big kid. Not surprisingly, she’s excited.

But
she also misses her teachers from last year. One minute, she hates
fifth grade, the next minute, she loves it. The first night of school
she got 110 multiplication and division problems for homework.

“They have some nerve giving us so many math problems,” she told Smartmom. “I hate fifth grade.”

Smartmom
can tell that OSFO is already stressing about middle school, even
though it’s a full year away. All the kids are talking about it. Some
of them even seem to know where they want to go.

“Where am I going to go?” she’s asked Smartmom more than once. The question gives Smartmom a case of heartburn.

But
fifth grade has its fun moments, too. OSFO and a friend are walking to
school together — without adults. That’s a small step for mankind, but
is it a giant leap for OSFO.

Then there’s Hepcat. He’s been
working all summer on a Web site for a local university. He doesn’t
sleep. He doesn’t eat. And he’s barely had time to learn the names of
OSFO’s teachers or the courses that Teen Spirit is taking.

He
just codes code, talks on the phone, and looks exceedingly agitated.
Most nights, he hops into bed just minutes before Smartmom has to wake
up.

Not surprisingly, Smartmom is dying for the
project to be completed. Then he’ll have time to shave (he’s looking a
little scuzzy), to do some chores around the house (that hallway light
bulb really needs to be changed), and, perhaps most importantly, time
to pay some attention to Smartmom, who’s got her own problems to worry
about. Dumb Editor has been on her case about missing deadlines (Dumb
Editor note: Smartmom’s copy is so pristine and coherent that I have to
have something to complain about, don’t I?). She also needs to work on
her novel and drum up some freelance writing projects.

Smartmom
knows she isn’t the only one having a tough time this week. Mrs.
Kravitz is running herself ragged now that her full-time job is back in
full swing. Diaper Diva is about to begin Ducky’s prolonged phase-in to
pre-school and many of Smartmom’s friends and neighbors are busy making
appointments for middle school tours.

This week, worry seems to
be the name of the game. Smartmom hopes that Teen Spirit will put his
best foot forward at the new high school and really enjoy learning
there. She hopes OSFO will stop missing her fourth-grade teachers and
be more “in the moment” about fifth grade.

And Hepcat.

Maybe
he’ll stop working so hard, so he’ll have some time to worry, too. It’s
not much fun doing it alone. And there’s so much to worry about, isn’t
there?

Thanks to Second Avenue Sagas for sending me this story about Apple’s search for a spot in Brooklyn. It’s beig news.

From Racked: Apple is scouring Brooklyn, seeking a home in the 718 area code for a flagship Brooklyn Apple Store, sources tell Racked. While Apple’s urge to hawk iPhones to Brooklynites is all but a certainty, what’s not known at this time is which neighborhood the computer maker is targeting for its first Brooklyn foray.

Check out the new exhibition at the Municipal Arts Center about the legendary urban activist, Jane Jacobs.

The Municipal Art Society of New York is delighted to present an interactive exhibit that highlights the relevance of activist and author Jane Jacobs and the urban-design principles introduced in her classic text The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which had an immediate impact on how cities are designed and used. Though raised in a small town and lacking the credentials of a trained planner, Jacobs quickly became one of the century’s most influential writers on urban planning. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Jacobs described a “ballet of the sidewalks,” an unrehearsed choreography of urban dwellers going about their business that, in her view, created the vitality of city life.

The exhibit highlights the context in which Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, while also illustrating the role of Jane Jacobs’s ideas in today’s New York. The exhibit is designed to prompt visitors to view the city through Jane Jacobs’s eyes and to empower them to take a more active role in advocating for a more livable city.

The exhibit will be on view at the Municipal Art Society’s Urban Center galleries at 457 Madison Avenue (at 51st Street) in New York City, from Sept. 25, 2007, through January 5, 2008.

During the exhibit, gallery hours will be extended to 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, and 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Sunday

I was on Fifth Avenue above 9th Street yesterday wasting some time before an appointment so I walked up to Prospect Avenue just to see what’s going on. And I saw a whole lot of construction.

At 162 16th Street west of Fifth Avenue there’s The Vue, an 8-story building the advertising sign boasts views, parking, a fitness center, lush gardens and balconies.

At 560 Fifth Avenue (between 15th and 16th) there’s a nice-looking new restaurant called Sidecar Bar & Grille. From John W. on Yelp, I learned that it is owned by one of the owners of Blue Ribbon and is a bar with a great juke box and American food.

On Fifth between 11th and 12th Street there’s a new restaurant serving contemporary Mexican food. They opened yesterday. I didn’t get the name.

There’s at least one new building per block between 12th Street and Prospect Avenue. But that’s a guess. I will be up there again and take better notes.

Oddly, it took a gloomy, rainy day for September 11th to feel almost normal again.

That bright blue sky, five anniversaries in a row, was a cruel reminder of that terrible Tuesday morning six years ago.

It felt impossible to move on faced by the menace of that blue sky.

Yesterday with its rain and thunder, its umbrellas, rain slickers and galoshes felt like any other day. I tried to connect to my pain and I wanted to cry — because I’d said I’d never feel normal on September 11th.

But I didn’t cry.

Maybe it was a choice and it wasn’t the weather at all. I didn’t listen to the names, I didn’t attend a ceremony or sit in Old First Church as I’d done before. I consciously thought about my friend who died many times and wondered what the family members, who I write the FDNY newsletter for, were doing.

But I didn’t cry.

Yesterday the grief of September 11 belonged to the family and friends who lost loved ones. It is and always was a private grief.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a public ache because there is. As New Yorkers we ache for what happened to our city and to our friends and neighbors. We also feel exasperation and rage about the  mid-guided and calamitous war that is being waged erroneously in the name of September 11th.

Last night I looked for the Tribute in Lights in the foggy night sky above Key Food but there was only the vaguest hint of a beam. Around ten, I noticed a blurry blob of white where the lights hit the clouds. It looked like a moon.

A new moon, I said to myself. At the end of a gloomy, wet September 11th, there was a blurry moon in the sky created by the lights that I could barely see.

On that harrowing day, my father and stepmother watched the towers fall from the 27th floor windows of their Brooklyn Heights apartment with its stunning views of New York Harbor, the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan.

What had once been the most beautiful urban view imaginable became the most horrifying.

I was over there today.   

"The lights aren’t in the right place," he told me. He’d seen them the night before when they were testing them.

"What do you mean?"

"They’re south of where the towers were," he said.

He was talking about the Tribute in Lights, the two blue lights that shoot up into the sky every September 11th now, a perfect memorial to the devastating loss that our city experienced on that day six years ago.

Nothing can describe that day. I spent the evening of September 11th, 2001 with a friend who’s  firefighter husband died at Ground Zero.

We were calling area hospitals looking for her husband. At midnight, a group of firefighters from Squad 1 in Park Slope showed up at the door. They were covered in dirt and dust and looked unbelivably tired. But they still held out hope that their fellow firefighters were alive. 

"There are voids down there," they told the group of us sitting in my friend’s Park Slope living room. "There are voids. The guys could be in one of those voids."

Voids. That’s what 9/11 created in this city. Friends, family and neighbors are missing. There’s a hole in the skyline where two towers used to be. A sense of "it can’t happen here" has left us forever.

We’re older now. If not wiser, at least we’ve come to understand that there are no exceptions to the violence that this world knows.

OTBKB fave, Deborah Ager, has declared September to be "Memorize Poetry Month.

It’s a cool idea. A great way to really get inside a poem. Deborah is the publisher of the highly respected 32 Poems. She also has a great blog, which I’ve been reading for a long time.

Since there’s April Poetry Month, I hereby declare September to be “Memorize Poetry” month. You don’t even have to memorize all the poems in the world — only four.

One poem per week…how difficult can that be? Here are rules:

1. One poem can be shorter than 10 lines. Ideally, the others should be longer than 10 lines.

Only one rule and four poems in month…easy, aye?

Go to her site for more details and ideas for poems to memorize.

I wrote this last year:

I listened to the incantation of names; watched the spouses and
partners on television. Later, caught a few minutes of Bush using the
day as an opportunity to justify his war; watched ABC’s  fictionmentary
about real events, real people,

It was already 12:15 a.m. on September 12th when I took a walk down Seventh Avenue to see the lights.

The light was shooting up from the top of PS 321 in the midnight
blue sky. Above Key Food, Old First Church. The light walked with me
down the Avenue (shopping list:  Spoon size Shredded Wheat, Raisin
Bran, ballpoint pens for TC, orange juice).

The beam of light was sharp, beautiful (there may be two, but out
here in Park Slope it looks like a single beam).  I wish it was here
every night and of course I do not.

Presence. Absence. It speaks of loss, while introducing something dramatic and new to the city night.

The shop lights were on at Sweet Melissa’s, where a crew was busy
getting the shop ready for  its grand opening on Wednesday. Paper
covering counters, tools everywhere, the name being stenciled onto the
front window. Something new.

Except for the Korean Market on Garfield, Key Food, Pino’s, nothing
was open on Seventh Avenue; it was desserted. I saw a few stragglers at
Snooky’s (for a moment I thought I might go in and order a scotch, it
seemed like the appropriate thing to do). Workers standing outside of
Starbucks waiting for a car; voices inside the playground; a dog walker
or two.

Back on Third Street the light comes out from behind the limestone
buildings. Blue television light illuminates a checkerboard of
windows;  time to go upstairs. Wanting: to stand outside; to be the
only one there at that moment; quiet, alone.