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arts and culture

Sept 29: Easy Bake Orchestra at Lyceum

Catch Joshua Shneider’s Easy-Bake Orchestra, a 17 piece ensemble comprised of some of NYC’s most illustrious and adventurous improvisors, as they interpret the music and arrangements of Joshua Shneider at the Brooklyn Lyceum on September 29th at 8PM.

I’ve heard them and I loved it: Melodic, grooving, searching and harmonically inventive, the music draws inspiration from a wide variety of musical influences and includes Jazz, R&B, World and American Pop elements.

The Brooklyn Lyceum is located on Fourth Avenue and President Street in Park Slope.

Civics and Urban Life

The Watch List of Worst Landlords

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio today added 109 new buildings to his NYC’s Worst Landlords Watch List. These buildings were identified through submissions to de Blasio’s website. The Watch List now has 269 buildings representing 196 landlords and housing approximately 5,600 tenants.

Among the new landlords added to the Watch List is David Bistricer of Clipper Equity LLC, owner of the Flatbush Gardens complex in Brooklyn. 44 of the complex’s 59 buildings qualify for the Watch List, making him the landlord with the highest cumulative number of violations and buildings on the list. Combined, the buildings in the complex have 6,475 open violations with the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), 827 of which are designated as “immediately hazardous” violations including lack of hot water, broken door locks, and peeling lead paint. There are approximately 10,000 tenants living in Flatbush Gardens.

The Watch List is available online at: advocate.nyc.gov/landlord-watchlist.

Continue reading The Watch List of Worst Landlords →

arts and culture

Next Up at Brooklyn Reading Works: Brooklyn Playwrights, Writing by Vets

The next event at Brooklyn Reading Works, a monthly literary series at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, is on October 21 at 8PM: New Plays by Brooklyn Playwrights. This event, curated by playwright Rosemary Moore, will present unstaged readings of two plays by actors.

I’m also really excited about a reading I’m curating, which falls on Veteran’s Day, November 11 at 8PM, featuring writing by veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Writing War, Voices of Vets,  includes authors Juri Jurjevics, Kevin McPartland, Roy Scranton, Matt Gallagher, Philip Klay and Jacob Siegal.

Click on read more to see the schedule for the rest of the series:

Continue reading Next Up at Brooklyn Reading Works: Brooklyn Playwrights, Writing by Vets →

Civics and Urban Life

A Baby is Born

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My cousin became a grandfather yesterday. What’s more: I was privy to the exact moment of birth via emails, that went out to the extended family.

First came this:

“She is giving birth. Right NOW…”

Then this:

“Push!”

Then this:

“She’s fully dilated.  The baby is +2 (in the birth canal) and ready to push.  Her doc is in the parking lot and hustling upstairs.  IT’S ONNNN.”

Then I received a picture of the baby wrapped in the hospital receiving blanket and a message with her name and some physical details. Named after two beloved great grandmothers, she has strawberry blond hair and blue eyes.

“Can’t wait to introduce her to all of you,” was the final message from my cousin.

arts and culture

The Weekend List: Sept 25-26

Street Fair:

Sunday, Sept. 26: the 36th annual Atlantic Antic on the stretch between Hicks Street and Fourth Avenue, featuring more than 600 food, art and shopping vendors, 14 performance stages and even kid-friendly activities like pony-rides and a magician showcase.

Movies:

Wall Street Money: Never Sleeps, The Town at BAM

Film Festivals:

There are two count ’em two film festivals this weekend. For schedules and information:

Coney Island Film Festival and the Bushwick Film Festival grace the screens of Brooklyn this weekend.

Theater/Performance:

This weekend Laurie Anderson opens the Next Wave Festival at BAM with Delusion, “a phantasmagoric world made up of short plays, her latest work is activated by brooding, deeply affecting music redolent with Tibetan temple horns and Arabic strings, performed by Anderson on electronically enhanced violin with supporting virtuoso musicians. A simultaneously contemplative and whimsical epic about longing, identity, and memory, Delusion invokes both humor and terror, conjuring up elves, mysteries, ghost ships, and dead relatives to spin poetic stories and imagery into gold.”

Art:

The DUMBO Arts Festival will take over the waterfront community of DUMBO – its galleries, storefronts, performance venues, studios, and parks.  More exciting names are expected to be announced over coming weeks.

Saturday, September 25, at the Morgan Fine Arts Building in Greenpoint,  40 Brooklyn artists open their studios to the public.   From 5 to 10 P.M., 40 separate studios on five floors of the building will be open to the public, displaying fine art in every medium – painting, sculpture, silk screening, New Yorker cartooning, abstract photography.

BWAC’s Fall Group Art Show, Lineage, is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 1-6pm, September 25 to October 31. 300 artists will be exhibiting 1200 works in all media, including those of Featured Artist, Anujan Ezhikode.

Muriel Guepin Gallery 47 Bergen Street Brooklyn, NY 11201
Group Show “Return us to Ourselves” Featuring the Artwork of Everett Aison, Matthew Conradt, and Jeanne Verdoux. On view from September 25, 2010 until November 7, 2010. Opening Reception Saturday September 25, 2010 from 6:30 – 9 pm.

Through Dec 12, Brooklyn Utopias Farm City at the Old Stone House curated by Katherine Gressel and Derek Denckla, featuring artwork by: Andrew Casner, Hernani Dias, Kate Glicksberg, Katherine Gressel, Hugh Hayden, Kim Holleman, Christina Kelly, Jess Levey, Mary Mattingly, Eve Mosher, Scott Nyerges, ORPH, Mathilde Roussel-Giraudy , Dan Sagarin, Eric Sanderson, Tattfoo Tan, Work.AC

Music:

Saturday Sept 25 at 8PM Barbes presents Laura Cantrell, the WFMU DJ and country singer. She has been called “the most vital new country voice in decades” by The Independent. She has just released her first album in three years, “Trains and Boats and Planes”, a digital download with songs about travel and the heartache of separation and loss. Laura’s fans include the late BBC DJ John Peel, who described her album “Not the Tremblin’ Kind” as “my favorite record of the last ten years and possibly my life,” and Elvis Costello who claimed that “If Kitty Wells made Rubber Soul, it would sound like Laura Cantrell”.

At the Rock Shop, Park Slope’s newest rock venue: Saturday, Sept 24: Hurricane Bells.

Sunday, Sept 26 at 9PM Barbes presents Stephane Wrembel presents The Django Experiment: French virtuoso Guitarist Stephane Wrembel seems to have channeled both the technique and the fire of Django Reinhardt. He studied for years with the manouche (the French Gypsies) but has also gotten deep into American vernacular musical styles. His weekly sets will mix up the traditional Django repertoire along gypsy swing re-interpretations of standards.

Cooking Demonstrations:

On Sunday, Sept. 26th from 2-2:30 PM at the Park Slope Farmers Market on 5th Avenue between 3rd and 5th Streets in Brooklyn.Farmers Market, Fumiko Akiyama, owner of Park Slope’s Kappa Sake House, will demonstrate how to make two different kinds of miso soup using local produce and seafood at  The event marks the first in a series of weekly cooking demos given by local chefs at the Farmers Market. Each demonstration will be held from 2 to 3:30pm and will feature local, farm-fresh ingredients.

Civics and Urban Life

School Food Rocks? Maybe Some Day Soon in Brooklyn

City Councilmember Brad Lander (Democrat, 39th District) seems to be taking on the issue of healthy food in the public schools. In the following email sent my way, he talks about salad bars in the schools, school gardens, getting rid of Styrofoam and more. And that’ s not all. He and other local school leaders are even planning a local food conference.

As I talk to the parents of public school students, one issue I’ve heard about often is school food – making it more nutritious and sustainable, and getting kids to eat healthy meals (not always at easy thing, I know, as the parent of a 7 year old and a 10 year old).

Many schools in our community have already taken some great steps forward – among other things, they’re putting in salad bars, planting school gardens, working with SchoolFood staff on menus, getting rid of Styrofoam, reducing waste, and planning harvest days. As I educate myself further, I’ve learned that there are many ways for schools to improve the food they serve and that there are many actions we can take, as a city, to do better in feeding our children when they’re not at home.

Toward that end, my office and parent leaders from local schools have been working together with the New York City Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood, the Brooklyn Food Coalition, GrowNYC, the District 15 Community Education Council and other organizations on the “School Food Rocks” conference, to be held Saturday, October 23rd.

“School Food Rocks” will bring together parents, educators, students, SchoolFood staff, and food activists to discuss how we can work together to achieve healthier and more sustainable school food throughout District 15. The conference will help schools get started or take next steps in improving their food programs, and strengthen the network of parents and school leaders working on food issues.

The conference will take place on Saturday, October 23rd, from 10am-3pm, at MS 51 (350 5th Avenue). You can register through our website. The day-long event will include an expo fair of sustainable school food programs; workshops on a range of topics; and keynote speeches from Chef Jorge (the first executive chef of the New York City schools) and celebrated author and “Renegade Lunch Lady” Chef Ann Cooper.

Topics covered at the conference will include:

* starting a school garden
* working with SchoolFood on implementing salad bars and healthy menus
* improving your schools’ recycling program

Whether your school already has an active sustainable food program, or is just getting started, this conference will be a chance for you to share best practices and collect new information.

arts and culture

Sat: Historic Baseball in Park Slope

You’ve heard of Revolutionary and Civil War re-enactors. There are also baseball re-enactors, who play the game the way it used to be played. Two teams will compete in historic baseball in Washington Park Third Street near Fourth Avenue  (also known as the turf field behind the Old Stone House is Park Slope) where, the Brooklyn Dodgers, long long ago, used to play (or practice or…

Watch the Flemington Neshanooks and the New York Gothams face off in Washington Park playing by 1864 rules! Games at 11 am and 1 pm. Vintage snacks prepared by historic gastronomist Sarah Lohman will be available at the Old Stone House!

Food and Drink

Schedule of Food Demos at Park Slope Farmers Market (on Fifth Ave)

The Fifth Avenue BID and Community Markets are launching a weekly cooking demo series with local chefs at the Park Slope Farmers Market on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 5th Streets (not to be confused with the one at Grand Army Plaza). Starting Sunday, Sept 15 from 2-3:30, local farm ingredients will be used to make specialties from some of your favorite nearby eateries. The schedule, so far, is as follows:

–September 26: Fumiko Akiyama of Kappa Sake House will use local produce and seafood to make two kinds of miso soup.
–October 3: a chef from Belleville will demonstrate how to make some of their Parisian Bistro fare.
–October 10: Irene Lo Re of Aunt Suzie’s will use farm-fresh ingredients to make her famous Southern Italian/Brooklyn specialties.

Additional demos are being planned. Stay tuned to the blog: All About Fifth for more details or go to communitymarkets.biz.

arts and culture

New Hamadryas Baboons at the Prospect Park Zoo Have Names!

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If you were WONDERING what they finally named the baboons at the Prospect Park Zoo, here’s the latest. If, like me, you didn’t know that there was even a contest to name those baboons, here’s the story. And the names.

After three weeks of online polling and more than a thousand name submissions, the wo Hamadryas baboon babies are officially named. And the names are – Jabari and Azizi.

After giving careful consideration to all of the names submitted online, the staff of WCS’s Prospect Park Zoo chose a pair of Egyptian names to represent the area from which the Hamadryas baboons are found in the wild.  Jabari means brave in Egyptian, and Azizi means precious.  Besides Egypt , Hamadryas baboons are found in Eritrea , Ethiopia , Somalia , and on the Arabian Peninsula .

If you’d like to meet the baboons, their next big event is the annual Boo at the Zoo celebration Saturday October 30 and Sunday, October 31.  The troop will receive pumpkins in the spirit of the holiday – surely a sight to see.

The Hamadryas baboon exhibit is located in the zoo’s Animal Lifestyles Building along with tamarin monkeys, piranhas, and Pallas cats.  Jabari and Azizi are on exhibit with their family from 10am-2pm daily until November 1st when their exhibit time will change.  Hours will be posted at www.prospectparkzoo.com.

arts and culture

OTBKB Music: A Great Song from The Baseball Project with Craig Finn and Music Around the Clock on Sunday

My friends The Baseball Project have teamed up with Minnesota ex-pat and Brooklyn resident  Craig Finn, the lead singer of The Hold Steady, to come up with a song about The Minnesota Twins.  Craig does the lead vocals and wrote the lyrics, the music is by Steve Wynn.  It will be on the next Baseball Project album, which is due out sometime in 2011.  But it’s already being played at Target Field and on Minneapolis/St. Paul radio.  But if you’d like to hear it now (and you should because it’s flat out great), go to Now I’ve Heard Everything and get the details.

With two street fairs, a benefit and some inspired booking by The Rockwood Music Hall, it seems like every band in the world is playing on Sunday.  Of course there’s The Atlantic Antic with 10 stages; The Dumbo Arts Festival also has many bands playing.  If you’d like to stay closer to home, The first The Tinderbox Music Festival is at Southpaw.  And if none of that appeals to you, you can make the jaunt into Manhattan and check out Jon Graboff, Poundcake, Sasha Dobson and Kristin Diable all at Rockwood Music Hall.  You find the details here at Now I’ve Heard Everything.

–Eliot Wagner

arts and culture

The Weekend List: Sept 24-26

Street Fair:

Sunday, Sept. 26: the 36th annual Atlantic Antic on the stretch between Hicks Street and Fourth Avenue, featuring more than 600 food, art and shopping vendors, 14 performance stages and even kid-friendly activities like pony-rides and a magician showcase.

Movies:

Wall Street Money: Never Sleeps, The Town at BAM

Friday, Sept 14: Life Lessons, a program of shorts at BAM explores the often difficult process of growing up is explored in this shorts program that chronicles the hard-won lessons learned by children and young adults of color inside and outside the classroom. A Departure From a Love  (2009, 8min) Directed by Ishmael Islam: A young man takes a walk through his beloved Brooklyn while reciting his spoken word poetry to an unknown lover. His journey takes us on a visual “lovefest” throughout the borough, connecting the people, places, and emotions that inspire his poetry. Sticks and Stones (2006, 9min) Directed by Rehema Imani Trimiew The Lesson Plan (2009, 30min) Directed by Eddy Dura, Premature (2008, 14min) Directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green.

Film Festivals:

There are two count ’em two film festivals this weekend:

Coney Island Film Festival and the Bushwick Film Festival grace the screens of Brooklyn this weekend.

Theater/Performance:

This weekend Laurie Anderson opens the Next Wave Festival at BAM with Delusion, “a phantasmagoric world made up of short plays, her latest work is activated by brooding, deeply affecting music redolent with Tibetan temple horns and Arabic strings, performed by Anderson on electronically enhanced violin with supporting virtuoso musicians. A simultaneously contemplative and whimsical epic about longing, identity, and memory, Delusion invokes both humor and terror, conjuring up elves, mysteries, ghost ships, and dead relatives to spin poetic stories and imagery into gold.”

Art:

The DUMBO Arts Festival will take over the waterfront community of DUMBO – its galleries, storefronts, performance venues, studios, and parks.  More exciting names are expected to be announced over coming weeks.

Saturday, September 25, at the Morgan Fine Arts Building in Greenpoint,  40 Brooklyn artists open their studios to the public.   From 5 to 10 P.M., 40 separate studios on five floors of the building will be open to the public, displaying fine art in every medium – painting, sculpture, silk screening, New Yorker cartooning, abstract photography.

BWAC’s Fall Group Art Show, Lineage, is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 1-6pm, September 25 to October 31. 300 artists will be exhibiting 1200 works in all media, including those of Featured Artist, Anujan Ezhikode.

Muriel Guepin Gallery 47 Bergen Street Brooklyn, NY 11201
Group Show “Return us to Ourselves” Featuring the Artwork of Everett Aison, Matthew Conradt, and Jeanne Verdoux. On view from September 25, 2010 until November 7, 2010. Opening Reception Saturday September 25, 2010 from 6:30 – 9 pm.

Through Dec 12, Brooklyn Utopias Farm City at the Old Stone House curated by Katherine Gressel and Derek Denckla, curators featuring artwork by: Andrew Casner, Hernani Dias, Kate Glicksberg, Katherine Gressel, Hugh Hayden, Kim Holleman, Christina Kelly, Jess Levey, Mary Mattingly, Eve Mosher, Scott Nyerges, ORPH, Mathilde Roussel-Giraudy , Dan Sagarin, Eric Sanderson, Tattfoo Tan, Work.AC

Music:

On Friday, Sept 24 at 8PM at Issue Project Room: A celebration of Laurie Spiegel’s 65th Birthday ISSUE Project Room is pleased to host a reception and piano concert of her work.  The evening will begin with a 45-minute informal gallery show featuring slideshows of photographic documentation of Spiegel’s computer-generated art created at Bell Labs, personal photographs, hand made art and other selected visuals while we hear selected music from the greatly expanded double-cd re-release of her seminal 1980 LP “The Expanding Universe” forthcoming on Unseen Worlds Records. Following the exhibition, Spiegel will give a brief comments on her work and the evening will conclude with a rare performance of some of Spiegel’s rarely-heard very personal solo piano pieces performed by Joseph Kubera.

Saturday Sept 25 at 8PM Barbes presents Laura Cantrell, the WFMU DJ and country singer. She has been called “the most vital new country voice in decades” by The Independent. She has just released her first album in three years, “Trains and Boats and Planes”, a digital download with songs about travel and the heartache of separation and loss. Laura’s fans include the late BBC DJ John Peel, who described her album “Not the Tremblin’ Kind” as “my favorite record of the last ten years and possibly my life,” and Elvis Costello who claimed that “If Kitty Wells made Rubber Soul, it would sound like Laura Cantrell”.

At the Rock Shop, Park Slope’s newest rock venue: The Dig on Friday, Sept 24 and on Saturday, Sept 24: Hurricane Bells.

Sunday, Sept 26 at 9PM Barbes presents Stephane Wrembel presents The Django Experiment: French virtuoso Guitarist Stephane Wrembel seems to have channeled both the technique and the fire of Django Reinhardt. He studied for years with the manouche (the French Gypsies) but has also gotten deep into American vernacular musical styles. His weekly sets will mix up the traditional Django repertoire along gypsy swing re-interpretations of standards.

Cooking Demonstrations:

On Sunday, Sept. 26th from 2-2:30 PM at the Park Slope Farmers Market on 5th Avenue between 3rd and 5th Streets in Brooklyn.Farmers Market, Fumiko Akiyama, owner of Park Slope’s Kappa Sake House, will demonstrate how to make two different kinds of miso soup using local produce and seafood at  The event marks the first in a series of weekly cooking demos given by local chefs at the Farmers Market. Each demonstration will be held from 2 to 3:30pm and will feature local, farm-fresh ingredients.

arts and culture

Bklyn Bloggage: arts & ideas

Brooklyn super art weekend: Art in Brooklyn

Birthday smoke: Brooklymometry

Healing Songs: Music For Masabumi Kikuchi: Do the Math

My life with Robert Bolano: Truth and Rocket Science

Going Away Party by Marshall Chapman: Self-Absorbed Boomer

Set list of Pavement’s 4th NYC reunion show: Bklyn Vegan

Build/Inhabit: Water Over Rocks

The ordeal of the sermon by Daniel Meeter:  A Journal of Reformed Thought

Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk: Greenlight Bookstore

arts and culture

What Would A Brooklyn Utopia Look Like? Art Exhibit at Park Slope’s Stone House

Now through December 12, 2010, a new art exhibition at the Old Stone House in Park Slope poses the question: what is the role of artists in shaping an ideal Brooklyn?

At Brooklyn Utopias: Farm City, curated by Katherine Gressel and Derek Denckla, artists respond to the idea of urban agriculture, and the practice of farming in or around a city, as a “utopian” solution for Brooklyn.

Multi-media artist, Andrew Casner, Hernani Dias, Kate Glicksberg, Katherine Gressel, Hugh Hayden, Kim Holleman, Christina Kelly, Jess Levey, Mary Mattingly, Eve Mosher, Scott Nyerges, ORPH, Mathilde Roussel-Giraudy , Dan Sagarin, Eric Sanderson, Tattfoo Tan, Work.AC have created works that explore Brooklyn’s existing urban farming attempts and explore what additional innovations and collaborations are possible.

Walking through the show one ponders the borough’s rich agrarian past and wonders if it can inform a greener future. Issues of scale, universal access, diversity and feasibility for urban farming are also in the mix.

Finally, how can the past, present and future of Brooklyn farming inform future “farm cities?”

Civics and Urban Life

Some Provisions of Health Care Reform Law Begin Today

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Six months ago, President Obama signed into law the historic health care reform law. Starting today some provisions go into effect, including the provision that all plan must allow young people to remain on their parents’ plan up to their 26th birthday (this protection is limited to young people who do not have access to their own employer-sponsored coverage.)

These reforms will hopefully improve the coverage people get through their employers and individual health insurance policies, that they buy from insurance companies. That’s the idea anyway. The following information is from My Word: Patients’ Bill of Rights Starts Today by Representative Pete Stark in the Oakland Tribune

–All insurance plans must stop the practice of “rescissions” — dropping people’s coverage when they get sick.

–All employer plans and new individual plans are prohibited from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.

—All plans must allow young people to remain on their parents’ plan up to their 26th birthday (this protection is limited to young people who do not have access to their own employer-sponsored coverage).

–Other reforms will prevent consumers from getting stuck with sky-high medical bills, and improve the quality of insurance:

–All insurance plans are prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on coverage — so people with costly diseases won’t see their coverage evaporate when they hit a certain spending cap.

–All employer plans and new individual plans are restricted from setting low annual limits on coverage.

–ll new plans must have an effective internal and external appeals process — so that if you want to appeal a decision your insurance company makes, your appeal isn’t lost in corporate bureaucracy.

All of these provisions take effect for the next plan year starting on or after today. That means that they’ll be in effect the next time you purchase a new plan or during your next open season.

Civics and Urban Life

Assemblyman Vito Lopez Subject of Three Investigations

Assemblyman Vito Lopez, considered by some to be the Darth Vader of Brooklyn politics, is really under fire. He is the subject of two federal investigations and one by the city’s Department of investigation. Here’s an excerpt from an article by William K. Rashbaum in the New York Times:

Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, a long-serving Brooklyn Democratic leader who is widely viewed as the borough’s patronage king, is at the center of two separate federal investigations, according to several people briefed on the matter. A third inquiry, by the city’s Department of Investigation, those people said, is focused on a network of nonprofit groups Mr. Lopez controls.

All three investigations focus to some extent on the nexus of politics, nonprofit groups and real estate developers in Brooklyn, the people familiar with the inquiries said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

In more Vito news, the Brooklyn Paper takes on the Brooklyn pol in a recent editorial, Vito Power Play Crosses the Line.

Food and Drink

Tonight: Park Slope Restaurant Tour

No tricks, all treats.

I once said of the Park Slope Restaurant Tour that it looked like trick or treating for adults because there were so many people on Seventh Avenue lined up at various restaurants to sample free food. Although they weren’t wearing costumes and carrying bags of candy, they looked like they were having a lot of fun.

Don’t miss the 3rd Annual Park Slope Restaurant Tour tonight. You get to sample food from more than 30 area restaurants in one night! Stroll along 7th, 6th & 8th Avenues for delicious freebies from participating restaurants. Collect “Return Visit” coupons and get a discount when you visit the next time.  Thursday September 23rd 6:00pm to 9:00pm.

Go to the Buy in Brooklyn website for a full list of participants.

Civics and Urban Life

Tonight at 7PM: Young Writers Night, An All Ages Event

On September 23rd at 7PM, Brooklyn Reading Works presents the second annual Young Writers Night, fiction, poetry and song by New York City teenagers. “In planning this event, I looked for artists with fresh insight, candor and guts.” writes curator Jill Eisenstadt, author of From Rockaway and Kiss Out. Young Writers should be an exciting night and a preview into the next generation of published writers.

Young Writers is an all ages event at the Old Stone House. Third Street and Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. Suggested donation of $5 includes refreshments.

Readers include Hananh Frishberg, Maria Robins-Somerville, Noah Miller, Julia Banks Harris, Lily Konigsberg, Gussie Roc, Luca Balser, Charlie Dore-Young and MORE.

Click on read more for the bios of the young writers:

Continue reading Tonight at 7PM: Young Writers Night, An All Ages Event →

Civics and Urban Life

Lincoln Restler Declared Winner in State Committee Primary Race in 50th AD

The most contested race in the recent primary elections has been decided. Finally.

Lincoln Restler of New Kings Democrats is the declared winner in the race for State Committee in the 50th Assembly District in North Brooklyn. After leading with 50.2% on primary night, Restler fell behind in the initial recount. But the final recount found him leading by 120 votes.

FYI: His new job as District leader is a part-time, unpaid position. It is powerful nonetheless. Here are some of the District Leaders’ responsibilities as I understand them:

–They hire poll workers and election inspectors for the primary and general elections.

–They help pick judges and the party chairman.

–They attend party meetings and events on behalf of the district

–They organize meetings and events in the district.

–They work closely with the district’s city, state, and federal elected officials.

–They help elect party members to public office in the district.

–They provide  info to the district’s voters about poll site locations, election results, and general information about party candidates.

Read more about the importance of District Leaders at the Brooklyn Heights Blog.

This win is being viewed as a blow to Vito Lopez’s Democratic Party machine. Lincoln Restler had this to say: “For the first time in 28 years the voters of the 50th Assembly District have had the chance to elect an independent, reform-minded State Committee member, and I am proud to represent their voice. We, the growing reform movement in Brooklyn, intend to hold accountable the corrupt party machine and deliver a better brand of politics. Brooklyn deserves no less.”

Restler beat his opponent, Warren Cohn, 3,639 to 3,519.

Restler joins newly elected State Committee member, Chris Owens (AD 52) and long time reformers Jo Anne Simon (AD 52), and Joanne Seminara (AD 60) in the fight for the reform of Brooklyn politics.

arts and culture

Sept 23: Young Writers at Brooklyn Reading Works Begins at 7PM

On September 23rd at 7PM, Brooklyn Reading Works presents the second annual Young Writers Night, fiction, poetry and song by New York City teenagers. “In planning this event, I looked for artists with fresh insight, candor and guts.” writes curator Jill Eisenstadt, author of From Rockaway and Kiss Out. Young Writers should be an exciting night and a preview into the next generation of published writers.

Did I tell you it starts at 7PM?

Young Writers is an all ages event at the Old Stone House. Third Street and Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. Suggested donation of $5 includes refreshments.

Did I mention that it starts at 7PM?

Readers include Hananh Frishberg, Maria Robins-Somerville, Noah Miller, Julia Banks Harris Lily Konigsberg, Gussie Roc, Luca Balser, Charlie Dore-Young and MORE.

It’s at 7PM everyone!

Food and Drink

Sept 23: Park Slope Restaurant Tour

Yet another thing to do on Thursday night! But this is so fun, so easy and so tasty I recommend it to all:

The 3rd Annual Park Slope Restaurant Tour. Sample food from more than 30 area restaurants in one night! Stroll along 7th, 6th & 8th Avenues for delicious freebies from participating restaurants. Collect “Return Visit” coupons and get a discount when you visit the next time.  Thursday September 23rd 6:00pm to 9:00pm.

Go to the Buy in Brooklyn website for a full list of participants.

arts and culture

Leon Freilich, Verse Responder: Kidverse

Kidverse: Is This Your Teacher?

The most abominable creature

Must be the woman who’s a screecher.

My ears would love to banish her.

It’d make the world much quieter.

The screecher can’t imagine what

The devil of an effect she’s got.

As far as she knows, the sounds she makes

Are tastier than banana cakes,

More treasured than the platinum

That makes a miser worry some,

More tuneful than the sweetest song,

Though actually resembling a gong.

Each word that drops from the mouth of the screecher

Reminds me of a monster feature,

A movie with a heroine

Who’s out of touch and quite all-in;

She likes to think of herself as a funster,

When others view her as a munster.

Not a cheese and not a treat,

Nothing anyone would eat.

And yet she certainly means no harm.

She can’t help sounding like an alarm.

Poor woman!  Let’s give her an award:

A piece of chalk to scrape on the board.

Still–this teacher’s sorta mellow

Compared to the men who kinda bellow.