Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: Subway Lines Rated

August 2, 2012 admin

Seems that the C is considered the worst (and dirtiest) train line in NYC. And the Q train? It gets top honors for cleanliness and audible announcements. These are the conclusions of the 2012 State of the Subways Report conducted by the Straphanger’s Campaign released yesterday. So what do subway riders want when it comes to the subway riding experience? Here from the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign:

They want short waits, trains that arrive regularly, a chance for a seat, a clean car and understandable announcements that tell them what they need to know. That’s what MTA New York City Transit’s own polling of rider satisfaction measures.

My most frequently used train, the F train, ranked 7th out of 19 subway lines.

According to the survey, The Q ranked highest because “it tied for best in the system on announcements — and also performed above average on three measures: delays caused by mechanical breakdowns, seat availability at the most crowded point during rush hour, and subway car cleanliness.”

And for the fourth year in a row, the C was ranked the worst subway line. “The C line performed worst or next to worst in the system on four measures: amount of scheduled service, delays caused by mechanical breakdowns, subway car cleanliness and announcements.”

arts and culture

Video: Why John Hodgman Did Not Invest in Talde (Skip the Ad)

August 2, 2012 admin 1 Comment

In this hilarious interview with Park Slope’s John Hodgman, the resident expert on The Daily Show, the PC in Apple commercials and the author of The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require, Hodman explains that Justin Long, who plays the Mac in the Apple ads, suggested that he invest in Dale Talde’s restaurant in Park Slope but he decided not to.

The hosts of this interview show ask him why and he confesses that he thought it might be a sham (despite Talde being a Top Chef contestant) and because 80% of restaurants fail. He lives around the corner from the restaurant and can never get in because “it’s a huge deal.”

Oh well. So much for a regular table at a crowded restaurant and the cash rewards of a good investment.

L Magazine Presents Annual Best of Brooklyn Feature

Once again L Magazine, that free little magazine you see in cafes and shops around the neighborhood, pulls together a great list of the best in music, film, food, retail, art and media in the “hipper” parts of the Borough of Kings. Here were a few of the Park Slope related entries. Actually they were the only Park Slope entries.

1 of 3 Best Bars for a First Date

2. Barbes
Gypsy jazz to get dealbreaking dance moves out in the open early.

Best New Lit Mag

One Teen Story

We love One Story, a magazine that mails out a single short story every three weeks. But we’re especially excited about its soon-to-launch sister One Teen Story, which is roughly the same thing but for YA fiction. And it only publishes during the school year! How cute!

Best Local Blog

Here’s Park Slope

Editor Dan Meyers tracks local businesses doggedly—and we mean doggedly: every opening, closing, renovation, relocation, or change of signage gets reported, from O’Connor’s to Bar 718. But it’s not just a list of which restaurants are up and which are down; it’s complemented by historical context, interviews with bartenders, and other forms of reportage that together create a fully formed portrait of a neighborhood through its storefronts.

Aspects of Affordable Health Care Act Begin Today

On the Huffington Post today, Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, had this to say about the Affordable Care Act, aspects of which begin today.

“Under the Affordable Care Act, for the first time ever, women will now have access to life-saving preventive care, such as mammograms and contraception, without paying any more out of their own pockets.

“Today, we move yet another step closer to giving women control over their health care. In addition to the benefits for women already included in the Affordable Care Act, beginning the first plan year after August 1, 2012, most private health insurance plans will cover additional women’s preventive services without requiring women to pay an extra penny out of their pockets.”

Zimride: Non-Creepy Hitchhiking for Brooklynites

http://youtu.be/pYVuYcfaP5Q

This video made me laugh, so I thought you might enjoy it, too. It’s basically an unpaid ad for a new start-up called Zimride, which provides “non-creepy hitchhiking for New York residents.”

Do you know I once hitchhiked to Binghamton, New York from somewhere in New Jersey. I was utterly terrified but we did get picked up by a nice truck driver. Luckily. I had some wild experiences hitchhiking in England but I will save that story for another time.

Well, with Zimride, you don’t have to stick your thumb out while standing on the side of the road like we used to do on Martha’s Vineyard in the seventies. It’s way too social media savvy for that. They’re billing themselves as the hipster way to travel and they’re saying it’s the cheapest way to travel directly from Brooklyn to DC and other East Coast cities.

I hope they realize that the word hipster is verboten in Brooklyn now.

Interesting, if you’re a driver, Zimride is a way to make money driving your own car. You can sell seats. What a concept.

Here’s how Zimride works: You pick up rides online or using mobile. The average seat from NY to DC is $25 on Zimride.com, so a driver picking up extra passengers can make $150 on a round trip.

Zimride, which is the largest ridesharing company in the U.S. (how many are there, really?) launches in New York City today. With the launch in New York, it’s the first time this new form of transportation is available for NY and DC residents.

From the video, you can see that Zimride is a fun loving start-up from San Francisco. But they’re serious, too, about this new way of thinking about travel from city to city. What do you think?

Cobble Hill’s William Bryant Logan Writes About the Air

William Bryant Logan, an author who lives and breathes the air of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has a new book coming out in August called Air: The Restless Shaper of the World from WW Norton.

The author’s fascinating focus is music and how sound is the product of vibrations that travel through the air. In the book, which I haven’t read but sounds quite interesting, Logan discusses everything from radio stations to parrots’ language to Beethoven to Aeolian harps.

Air. You barely think about it yet it sustains each of us and every living creature. The book is rife with mind boggling factoids like this: “Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air.”

The book sounds at once scientific and poetic. Air. It’s one of those simply named books that touches on so many things. “The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn’s awareness of its mother’s breast—all take place in the medium of air.”

There is danger in the air, too. I didn’t know this but the artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly “safe” air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts.

AIR. Learn more about the most ubiquitous thing of all by an author who is a certified arborist and the author of two other books: Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth and Oak: The Frame of Civilization.

Food and Drink

Talde’s Bacon Pad Thai Reviewed by Donna Minkowitz

Donna Minkowitz, who lives in Park Slope, writes exceedingly well about food on her blog, which isn’t surprising because she’s an excellent writer and the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award for her memoir Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God and Fury.

A former feature writer and columnist for the Village Voice, she has also written for the New York Times Book Review, Salon, The Nation, New York magazine and Newsday.

But food. Food seems to be a passionate subject for Minkowitz. On her blog she writes sensuously of eating a McDonald’s hot apple pie as a 10-year old. “I was moved deeply by something about the burning liquid inside the pastry package, the near-searing of my lips when I took a bite, the mystery of the musky, tangy ooze cut with cinnamon. I wanted that pie in a way I have never wanted any other food. (I think I was literally in love with it.).”

Because I recently sat at the bar at Talde and enjoyed an appetizer called Pretzel Pork & Chive Dumplings, which was delicious (if a bit greasy), I was interested in her review. Here’s Minkowitz on their Bacon Pad Thai – Fried Egg, which sells for $14 at brunch. I assume it’s a variation on their Crispy Oyster & Bacon Pad Thai that they serve at dinner.

…Talde was so good that it made me want to communicate minutely about every aspect of the food I could, as though it were a piece of poetry or a weird white flower growing on the moon.

Talde is an Asian-American restaurant (that’s what its owners call it) in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York. I ate the bacon pad Thai, which is an oyster-and-bacon pad Thai at dinner, and was stirred to a degree that bordered on emotion by its sour, complicated, enlivening flavors. With fat chunks of bacon, it tasted of lime, of fish funk from the great sauce called nam pla, of salt, and an almost indescribable tanginess. I wanted more fat and even more of that funky fishiness – probably the addition of oysters at dinner helps it. There were some peanuts, but I wanted more, and some more minced herbs for contrast. Even so, I loved it so much that its peculiar sour mix of flavors has stayed with me a month later. I ate the entire bowl, even though it was huge and mostly noodles.

arts and culture

Park Slope’s Race Imboden Loses to Italy’s Baldini in Fencing Semi-Finals

US fencer Race Imboden (L) fences against Italy's Baldini. — US fencer Race Imboden (L) fences against Italy’s Andrea Baldini during their Men’s foil bout as part of the fencing event of London 2012 Olympic games, on July 31, 2012 at the ExCel centre in London. AFP PHOTO / ALBERTO PIZZOLI

Park Slope’s Olympic fencing hopeful Race Imboden is hopeful no more (at least in the men’s individual foil). He was defeated in the quarterfinals of this event on Tuesday by Italy’s Andrea Baldini. Imboden was unhappy with his performance.

“I fenced really badly and he fenced excellently,” Imboden told the Associated Press. “He did what he always does and he drew me in. He fences at a really good distance and he was too good for me. He is definitely one of the best.”

According to the Associated Press, Fencer Lei Sheng of China won the gold medal in men’s individual foil at the Olympics, beating Alaaeldin Abouelkassem of Egypt 15-13 in Tuesday’s final. Abouelkassem, who won the silver medal, is first fencer from the African continent to win an Olympic medal. Choi Byung-chul of South Korea won bronze after beating Andrea Baldini 15-14.

arts and culture, Civics and Urban Life

August 18: Fort Greene Park Summer Lit Festival

This Fort Greene event has become an important annual rite of summer in Brooklyn

A culmination of the New York Writers Coalition’s free summer-long series of creative writing workshops in the Park, the Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival will, for the 8th year in a row grace Fort Greene Park on August 18th. These workshops provide a safe space for young neighborhood writers to find their voices and explore all genres of creative writing.

“Once again, many of the young people that have appeared in past festivals will read again,” said Aaron Zimmerman, founder and executive director of the NY Writers Coalition. “It’s extraordinary to see a 10-year-old reading his poems in front of hundreds of people for the fourth year in a row.”

At the festival, the young writers will read alongside three acclaimed authors, including American Book Award winner Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeater, Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow and journalist Earl Lovelace. The Master of Ceremonies is Laurie Cumbo, director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA).

Should it rain, the event will move to the nearby Greenlight Bookstore (located on 686 Fulton Street), the location of the after-party where people can mingle and meet the readers.

The Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival is presented by NY Writers Coalition, Akashic Books, Greenlight Bookstore and the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, with additional support from Amazon.com and The Walt Whitman Project.

arts and culture

Fort Greene Swimmer Lia Neal Wins a Bronze Medal at London Olympics

Brooklyn has a winner! And she lives in Fort Greene.

17-year-old swimmer Lia Neal (pictured left) won the Olympic bronze medal after her freestyle relay team took third place in the women’s 4×100-meter race.

She is only the second U.S. female swimmer of African-American descent to win a medal.

For the other four breakfasts go to Stream of Life Yoga.

Brooklyn Mudra: Five Healthy Breakfasts in Less Than 15 minutes.

July 31, 2012 admin

by Anna Sheinman of Stream of Life Yoga

If the first food of your day is a box of sugary cereal, a greasy doughnut, or a bagel, you are doing more harm to your body than good. Instead, eating protein-rich food for your first meal will give you a morning energy boost.

Jump-start your day with this quick-minutes recipes and enjoy the benefits

Quinoa Merry-Berry

¼ cup of Quinoa

Raspberries

1 table spoon of raw almond butter (substitute with any raw nuts)

2 table spoon of raw unsweetened cacao powder

Cinnamon

Spices

Prepare: bring 1 cup of water to boil, then lower the heat and continue simmering over the medium heat for 10 minutes. Mix with cacao powder and berries.

Continue reading Two Marriages, Two Birthdays and a Tale of August 28th in Park Slope Copy →

Windsor Terrace Says No to Walgreens!

July 31, 2012 admin

A community group calling itself Green Beans Not Walgreens is organizing a protest on Wednesday as tensions rise because Walgreens will be replacing Windsor Terrace’s just departed Key Food supermarket.

The closure of Windsor Terrace’s Key Food leaves the neighborhood without a single full service grocery store.

Windsor Terrace is generally a quiet place. A neighborhood known for its civil servants, police and firefighters, in the last decade has gentrified to include Park Slope type families (whatever I mean by that).

Clearly, this issue has radicalized locals and three hundred residents filled a local church for an anti-Walgreens meeting. Support your Windsor Terrace neighbors with their great slogan: Green Beans Not Walgreens. A bunch of local pols will be in attendance, including Assemblyman James Brennan, Borough President Marty Markowitz, Councilman Brad Lander, and Windsor Terrace Alliance.

Gotta love it.

Who: Green Beans Not Walgreens (community group), Assemblyman James Brennan, Borough President Marty Markowitz, Councilman Brad Lander, and Windsor Terrace Alliance.

When: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 at 10 am.

Where: Site of soon-to-open Walgreens, 589 Prospect Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11218

arts and culture

Two Marriages, Two Birthdays and a Tale of August 28th in Park Slope Copy

July 31, 2012 admin 4 Comments

Standing behind artist Simon Dinnerstein in line at the Park Slope Copy Shop, we fell into a conversation about the fact that he’d been married twice.

“Oh?” I said.

“Twice to the same woman,” he told me.

“Ah,” I said with obvious interest. I added that I knew the date of one of his anniversaries because I’d once run into Simon and his wife Renee at Belleville Bistro. It was on August 28, 2005 when they were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary and my twin sister and I were celebrating our 47th birthday.

“August 28th,” I said.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said.

He went on to tell an interesting story about what happened on August 26th in 1965. But first a little history…

arts and culture

Sunday Number 3: Breaking Bad at The Gate

The Gate was quite crowded last night for its weekly showing of Breaking Bad.

This week I went with my son, who is officially 21. We sat at the bar. He had a PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon, I learned) and I had a glass of white wine.

The sound worked perfectly and everyone quieted down when the show came on. The episode was excellent. No spoilers here except to say that Marie is getting wackier, Skyler is going off the rails, Walt is inscrutable, Jesse is as tragic as ever and Mike is fascinating.

arts and culture

Must See Doc Film: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

File this under: A must-see documentary that will resonate with those who are passionate about art, freedom, blogging and social media.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Alison Klayman’s new documentary now playing at the IFC and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in Manhattan, is an intimate and powerful portrait of a very interesting contemporary Chinese artist who was recently detained by the Chinese for 81 days because of his so-called anti-government activities. He was a design consultant for Bejing’s Olympic Stadium called “The Bird’s Nest.”

Ai Weiwei is a large, gentle man born during the Cultural Revolution. In his twenties, he lived in New York City and was inspired by the free atmosphere of the 1980’s East Village art scene.

He returned to China after Tiananmen Square, which radicalized him and motivated him to create a dissident Chinese art scene. In the film, Ai Weiwei blogs and uses Twitter constantly as a way to inform the world about the repressive and corrupt tactics of the Chinese government. In a sense Twitter is one of his mediums and he uses it brilliantly.

Among other things, we watch as Ai Weiwei creates a 2010 exhibition at the Tate Modern in London called “Sunflower Seeds.” In the film, we watch as he and his assistants arrange 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds on an enormous gallery floor.

I found his use of Twitter fascinating and it made me further appreciate the power of that social media form

Food and Drink

Have You Been to Greenwood Park?

It sounds like quite the extravaganza.

Greenwood Park is a 13,000-square-foot beer garden, bar and restaurant, which opened recently at the foot of Green-Wood Cemetery (555 Seventh Avenue). Open noon until 2AM, they’ve got 60 tap lines, an indoor bar as well as an outdoor cargo bar, 3 bocce ball courts a menu that will be serving from noon to midnight

Quite the extravaganza.

I love the fence made of shipping containers. That’s all I’ve seen. I might just go and take a look and get a, um, a beer. Have you been?

Bungalow Colony for Free Range Families in Upstate NY

July 30, 2012 admin 1 Comment

I just heard from Lenore Skenazy, an old friend of Smartmom and OTBKB. She’s the Free Range Mom, who made news when she let her son ride the subway when he was only 11-years-old. I wrote an article for Newsweek.com (now The Daily Beast) about it and Skenazy wrote a book and started a blog called, Free Range Kids: Giving our Kids the Freedom we Had Without Going Nuts with Worry.

Well, today she told me about a great place to vacation with free range kids. It’s called Rosmarins Cottages and it’s a bungalow colony. There are no Park Slopers there at the moment but hey, you can be the first. Skenazy says it’s a wonderful, hidden treasure.

One of the most important aspects is that your child can go to camp, run free in the sprawling grounds, all the while the adults have their own version of summer camp– they can relax and kick back, safe in the knowledge that their child is having the summer of their lives, whilst they fire up the grill for their friends and bungalow neighbors.

And the location of Rosmarins couldn’t be more ideal: It’s only an hour outside of New York, which makes it easy to commute back and forth if need be.

If you are interested, you can spend the day with your family at Rosmarins on Saturday, August 4th or 5th (that’s this weekend) or the following weekend August 11th or 12th.

Alternatively, if you would like to speak to Scott Rosmarin about what the bungalow experience entails and the history of this bungalow colony you can email melmyers6(at)gmail(dot)com.

arts and culture

Race Imboden in Men’s Individual Foil on July 31

Race Imboden, our Park Slope Olympic hopeful, will be competing in the Men’s Individual Foil on Tuesday July 31. I can’t quite figure out when and where it will be televised. You can stream it from the NBC Olympics 2012 website.

arts and culture

Gina Barreca: Why Indie Bookstores Matter

I just love Gina Barreca’s funny and smart take on the world.

On Huffington Post today, Gina Barreca writes a love letter to independent bookstores.

For those who don’t know, Gina blogs for the Chronicle for Higher Education, Huff Post and Psychology Today. She is also a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books, which have been translated into seven languages, include They Used to Call Me Snow White But I Drifted, Babes in Boyland, and It’s Not That I’m Bitter. Her latest book, Make Mine a Double, was published in September 2011 and includes an essay of mine in there called the Park Slope Stroller Wars.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece called Why Independent Bookstores Matter, which will resonate with Park Slopers, great supporters of indie bookstores like the Community Bookstore. Read the rest on Huff Post.

“Independent bookstores do everything big corporate bookstores do, with only one significant difference: Independents do it better.

“Without independent bookstores — meaning those places not owned by huge corporate chains or multinational conglomerates –there would be three, maybe four, books published a year.

“There would be a blockbuster thriller, a densely detailed romance, a pseudo-science exploration of a catchy phenomena, and a celebrity bio.

“And a diet book — there would be a diet book.

“So eventually, there would be one book issued per year: a densely detailed autobiographical and pseudo-scientific celebrity thriller containing recipes. Denzel Washington meets Stephen J. Gould meets Don Delillo meets The Naked Chef. Yum.”

Stats on Park Slope’s Olympic Fencing Hopeful: Race Imboden

July 28, 2012 admin

I’m so jazzed up after seeing the Opening Ceremonies last night that I wanted to check in on Park Slope’s Race Imboden. I found these stats on Race at the US Fencing website.Home: Brooklyn, N.Y.Birth Year: 1993
Event: Foil

Height: 6′ 1″

Weight: 155 lbs.

Birthplace: Tampa, Fla.

Current Residence: Brooklyn, N.Y.

Club: Empire United Fencing

Coach: Jed Dupree

Most People Don’t Know That… I used to be a BMX racing champion.

Current U.S. Ranking: #1 (Junior), #1 (Senior)

Current World Ranking: #13 (Junior), #5 (Senior)

Olympic Teams: 2012

Senior World Championship Teams: 2011 (Eighth)

Junior World Championship Teams: 2012 (Gold – Team), 2011 (Gold – Team)

Cadet World Championship Teams: 2010 (Bronze)

Personal: Imboden took up fencing when, as a child, a stranger saw him playing with swords in a park and suggested he take up fencing. By 16, Imboden had qualified for his first major international team and had earned a bronze medal at the Cadet World Championships in 2010. On the junior level, Imboden won back-to-back gold medals in the team event at the Junior World Championships. Imboden says his coach, 2004 Olympian Jed Dupree, opened his eyes to the mental aspects of fencing which have allowed him to acheive the success he has had in recent years, but he still says one of his biggest challenges is controlling his emotions on the strip.

The above was found on the US Fencing website. You can read more about Race, his teammates and Olympic fencing there.

arts and culture

John Cage’s 12-Hour Empty Words at Roulette on August 3rd

July 28, 2012 admin

File this under: I went with my family to see John Cage perform Empty Words at the Hunter College Auditorium when I was a kid. I was bored out of my mind but somehow I understood that we were seeing something amazing

On August 3, at 8PM at Roulette I will have the chance to experience all 12 hours of Empty Words again.

Varispeed, a group of composer-performers, will perform Part I of their 12-hour arrangement of John Cage’s Empty Words, a landmark text-based work from the mid-70s that transforms speech into music and brings to light the beauty and power of the human voice.

Performing this piece is quite an undertaking.

In Part I, Cage’s text “establishes a distinctly non-syntactical speech rhythm with words and phrases arranged through chance operations from Thoreau’s journals.” The vocalist-performer-arrangers of Varispeed (Aliza Simons, Dave Ruder, Paul Pinto, Brian McCorkle, & Gelsey Bell) and special guests augment their voices with a bevvy of electronics, “while spatializing sound and action into a Cagean feast for the senses.”

Varispeed is a newly formed collective of composer-performers from experimental theatre group Panoply Performance Laboratory, ensemble thingNY, and Why Lie? that creates site-specific, sometimes-participatory, oftentimes-durational, forevermore-experimental events. Their new arrangements in Perfect Lives Manhattan made Time Out New York and New York Times’ critic Steve Smith’s “Best of 2011” list.

Empty Words will continue in three more installments during the evening. Parts II & III will be performed at nearby Exapno (33 Flatbush Ave, 5th floor) at 11 PM and 2 AM, respectively.

And the final installment occurs at 5AM in the morning on the Brooklyn Bridge:

Part IV will be a sound walk across the Bridge at 5 AM. All parts are free and open to the public.