OTBKB has one hell of an exclusive. A Park Slope friend and her ten-year-old daughter are enroute to Burning Man and she will be sending me daily diary entries. I’m convinced that there will be some way for her to email me from there although Burning Man is decidedly low tech. Ther’s no electricity, no showers, no stores, no commerce at all. Make art. Barter. Walk around naked, ride a bike, paint your body blue.

We spent a few days with Burning Man Mom and Child in San Francisco and she drove us back to the farm, her mini-van stuffed with camping equipment, lanterns and kites from Chinatown, a Butane stove and two bikes that they picked up from a guy who sells cheap bikes to those, who are goint to Burning Man.

At Burning Man, 40,000 people camp out, create sophisticated temporary dwellings, bring RVs and generators, huge amounts of water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, food, materials for shelter and decorations for your abode and your body.

Burning Man is not for the faint of heart. It’s like Woodstock in the desert without the bands (though there’s lots of homemade music), without the mud. 107 degrees heat and sand.

I can’t wait to hear what Burning Man Mom has to say.

For those who still don’t get what Burning Man is, I’ll try to explain: it’s a seven day counter-culture city in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A utopian experiment if you will, where 40,000 people come together and build wild dwellings, create art projects, workshops, parades, art installations, theater and more. There’s music, there’s talk. I imagine there’s sex, drugs, green politics, visionary babbling, profundity a go go; a ‘we have seen the future and this is it…"

Anything you can imagine. On the last night, they burn the man, an effigy of a human, an act of catharsis and cleansing.

For another attempt at an explanation, the Burning Man website is a good place to start.

You’re here to create. Since nobody at Burning Man is a spectator,
you’re here to build your own new world. You’ve built an egg for
shelter, a suit made of light sticks, a car that looks like a shark’s
fin. You’ve covered yourself in silver, you’re wearing a straw hat and
a string of pearls, or maybe a skirt for the first time. You’re
broadcasting Radio Free Burning Man — or another radio station.

You’re here to experience. Ride your bike in the expanse of
nothingness with your eyes closed. Meet the theme camp — enjoy
Irrational Geographic, relax at Bianca’s Smut Shack and eat a grilled
cheese sandwich. Find your love and understand each other as you walk
slowly under a parasol. Wander under the veils of dust at night on the
playa.

You’re here to celebrate. On Saturday night, we’ll burn the Man. As
the procession starts, the circle forms, and the man ignites, you
experience something personal, something new to yourself, something
you’ve never felt before. It’s an epiphany, it’s primal, it’s newborn.
And it’s completely individual.

You’ll leave as you came. When you depart from Burning Man, you
leave no trace. Everything you built, you dismantle. The waste you make
and the objects you consume leave with you. Volunteers will stay for
weeks to return the Black Rock Desert to its pristine condition.

OTBKB: YOUR SOURCE FOR BURNING MAN 2006

Just because I’m in San Francisco, don’t think I’m gonna miss the latest Park Slope news in New York Magazine. Fortunately there’s a top notch newstand nearby and I happened to see this week’s special “What If 9/11 Never Happened?” Issue. So I grabbed it. Buried inside was a piece about Care Bears on Fire, one of the many rock bands in Brooklyn’s underage rock scene (Liberty Heights Tap Room is the epicenter of the scene but they play other clubs, too). Care Bears may be the youngest band on the scene: the members are 10 and 11.

The article came complete with great photos and quotes from other 718 junior rockers. Other bands mentioned in the article were Fiasco and Good to Go. Eating breakfast at a place near here called Polkers, my son devoured the article, as his band Cool and Unusual Punishment is also part of the “scene.”

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: WITH THEIR PARENT’S APPROVAL MEET CARE BEARS ON FIRE
by Jem Aswad

A windblown bar on a desolate corner in deepest Red Hook seems like an ideal place for New York’s next big rock scene to be germinating—until you notice all the Subarus and Volvos parked on the street. Inside, the Liberty Heights Tap Room looks as if it’s half rocker bar, half unaccredited day-care facility. Pint-size kids in pint-size rock T-shirts dart maniacally underfoot. Long-haired teens in vintage rock tees chomp on pizza, while gently graying adults drink beer and worry aloud that they’ll be sorry for it later.

Onstage, a local power trio called Care Bears on Fire is barking out one of its raucous original numbers that perfectly encapsulates the age-old, anti-authoritarian, fuck-off spirit of punk rock.

“Don’t tell me what to do, what to wear, what to say / Don’t wanna follow rules, gonna do it my way / I’ve got a brain, I can think for myself / I don’t wanna be like everybody else / Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na / Don’t wanna be like everybody else … ”

The band members are 10 and 11 years old. And the authority figures in question—their parents—are pumping their fists and singing along.

Welcome to the age of the rocker mom. Kids who might otherwise have their parents ferry them to the soccer field are now being enthusiastically chaperoned to dive bars. Rock, once the realm of outcasts and dangerously attractive miscreants, is practically a curriculum choice. In Park Slope, after-school classes are offered at private and public schools, and Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (an offshoot of Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon) is in its second year. On the syllabus are the classics: Ramones and Clash and Pixies songs that youngish parents revere, and that their offspring have been hearing since birth.

Rather than being cause for rebellion, grown-ups are rock mentors. Several, in the great tradition of Jack Black, have even become coaches, teaching teens and tweens the rudiments of rocking that normally take several alienated years to fumble through. Nowadays, punk isn’t just sanctioned by parents and school teachers; it’s good, clean fun.

The Care Bears—singer-guitarist Sophie Kasakove, 11, bassist-singer Lucio Westmoreland, 11, and drummer-singer Isadora “Izzy” Schappell-Spillman, 10, all classmates at Park Slope’s Berkeley Carroll School—couldn’t be better poster children for this burgeoning movement if they’d been carefully pre-auditioned for a reality show. They wear standard rocker gear—jeans, Converse All-Stars, Black Sabbath T-shirts—but they’re also polite overachieving kids, cramming in band practice between art class, homework, and Hebrew school.

“Izzy didn’t want to be on the soccer team, didn’t want to play field hockey, didn’t want to be on any team,” her mom, Elissa Schappell, says of the girl who co-wrote the lyrics to “Don’t Wanna Be Like Everybody Else” and who pounds her drums with startling ferocity. “And suddenly, her friends wanted to play music. From the very beginning, all we’ve ever thought is that this is a chance for Izzy to have playdates with kids who share the same interests.”

“It’s not like soccer,” Izzy says. “It’s more of a thing kids choose instead of a pushed thing.”

The band began life as Nada Clue in 2004 after Sophie and Lucio had taken a music course at Berkeley Carroll’s creative-arts camp and Izzy had attended Rock Camp for Girls (her family spends a lot of time in Portland, where Tin House, the literary magazine her parents co-founded, is based). One day, Sophie recalls, she and her friend Lyle Kokiko “decided we wanted to be in a band, so we each chose people and he chose Lucio … ”

“And you chose moi,” Izzy finishes. “I met Sophie in third grade, and I got to know Lucio in the band.”

Elissa gently points out that the three were in the same kindergarten class.

“I didn’t really hang out with boys then,” Izzy says. “That was my princess-dress phase.”

After about a year, Lyle left the band over “musical differences” (but they’re all still friends). Since he’d suggested the name Nada Clue, Izzy proposed changing it to Care Bear Death Battle, after a family joke about the nauseatingly adorable toys’ becoming evil. That soon evolved into Care Bears on Fire.

“We wanted something sweet and fuzzy, because that’s what people think when they think of a kid band—and we wanted something super-anti-that, too,” Izzy explains.

As the band’s chops improved—they’re not prodigies, but they rock with impressive skill for their age—their gigging schedule picked up. Last school year, they wowed their peers at two Berkeley Carroll variety shows. Then in April, they played at Southpaw in Park Slope, which like the Tap Room hosts regular teen-rock shows. Fandom was quick to find them. “After the first [Berkeley Carroll] gig, I was like, ‘I need to go play ball,’ ’cuz you get so hyped up for the gig,” Izzy recalls. “And these kids in our grade asked for our autographs and I was like, ‘What do I do?’ It was weird.”

FOR THE REST (and there’s quite a bit more) GO TO NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We’re in San Francisco, staying with the owners of a 1967 totally restored Volkswagon twenty-one windows van (picture tomorrow).

They picked us up at the Embarcadero BART station and we were transported to an earlier, spacious, ‘feelin’ groovy’ style of automotive travel. Perhaps most fun of all, there’s a huge window on top, which is great for viewing the fog roll into the San Francisco sky, the tops of colorfully painted Victorian brownstones, the complicated solar panels on top of a new green Morpheus high rise.

These VW owners, who happen to be my sister and brother-in-law, took us to dinner in the Upper Haight, a pan-South American tapA place called Cha Cha Cha. Along the way, onlookers greeted the van with wide-eyed stares, cameras, and general curiosity and wonder. Just down the street from Cha Cha Cha we stopped in what I think may be one of the coolest record and CD (new and used) stores ever. Amoeba Records, in the site of a former bowling alley, is like a musical universe unto itself, a real record store, not a corporate conglomerate.

Our San Francisco relatives are a dashing couple. They own four cars (three of which are vintage) and a coffee cart business; dart around the world for Formula One races and generally lead an enviably fun life.

Today, San Francisco awaits. We’ll join some Park Slope friends for sight seeing…

Feelin’ Groovy.

After everyone has been asleep for hours, he takes his walks around the farm with his camera. It is his way of taking stock, coming to terms, assuaging his anxiety about everything that is.

Night walking and night pictures. He contemplates through seeing the way he often does on Third Stree at night. But it is so different here. The San Joaquin valley sky is filled with stars — the dipper, the Milky Way, Orion’s Belt, faraway planets are easy to see (not like Brooklyn where a couple of stars are a bounty).

She wakes for a moment and sees that his side of the bed is vacant and she knows that he is out there looking at the night. His physical memory takes him to all the places he has always loved.

While she returns to sleep he walks on cracked earth — steady, it’s easy to fall. He walks through former orchards; on driveways to dairy barns that are no longer a part of this farm (they are someone else’s, not his anymore).

But the sky still belongs. And the land, the house that is theirs begins to feel large enough to contain the memories and the future.

He returns to his childhood bedroom where she is sleeping. "It’s just me," he says. She is used to these gentle wake-ups in the night; and returns to sleep without trouble. He lays in bed, thinking, planning, seeing, hoping the pictures will look just as he saw them through the camera.

Just as they are meant to be.

Fire when it’s a "Burn Day" and the local farmers burn weeds and garbage

Crop dusters overhead spraying nearby farms with insecticides

The lonesome whistle of the Southern Pacific train just a mile from here

Rubbing alcohol for disinfecting the kitchen and dining room

That ‘cows and manure’ farm fragrance as we drive on country roads

iPod  music spilling out of my son’s headphones

Trucks whooshing by

Crickets indoors; loud

The trill of "here kitty kitty kitty, here kitty…"

Dogs barking in the distance

Cats loudly purring for food

Mariah the Goat crying in her pen – less and less now that she’s getting used to her new life

Children splashing in the swimming pool; children fighting; children chasing each other through the yard;  crying.

HC coming into the bedroom late at night after working on pictures. "It’s just me…"

Leon Neyfakh, the Brooklyn beat reporter for the New York Sun, has a story about the Brooklyn Book Fest, a party hosted by the borough president. I have been wondering what this event was about — I’d heard about it a few months ago and meant to call the borough president’s office to find out the details (to see if I was invited).

As usual, I see they’re honoring all the big guns. That’s great:  we’ve got some great published writers here. But what about all the others. What about…

I need to give them a call and find out who is invited and what this is all about. I’m not even sure if I am available on September 16…

The president of Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, is throwing a party at Borough Hall on September 16. Guests will include Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife, Nicole Krauss, who moved to Park Slope last summer; Jonathan Lethem, who was born many years ago in Boerum Hill, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody, and Colson Whitehead, who all live in Brooklyn. The list goes on and the shelves fill up. A lot of them have written articles for the New Yorker, and visitors to the Tea Lounge have probably witnessed them in the act without even knowing it.

The party — quaintly dubbed the Brooklyn Book Fest by Mr. Markowitz and his fellow organizers — will be a day-long celebration of their craft. For all the huffing and puffing the Jonathans have been doing against development in the Atlantic Yards, the borough is proud to host their creativity.

"There’s no question that over the last five years Brooklyn has become the mecca for aspiring authors as well as accomplished authors," Mr. Markowitz, who is expecting between 5,000 and 15,000 people to attend the free event, said. "I think there’s something about the creative juices flowing in Brooklyn. It’s a mix of ethnicities, religions, incomes, and lifestyles that really bring out the creative juices and give people the gift to really have the ability to write. And it is a gift, let’s face it, to be able to write."

Let’s face it, too, the same juices are not flowing through all of the Brooklyn literati.

Mr. Foer’s fiction is nothing like Mr. Moody’s; the essays of former congressional candidate Kevin Powell are nothing like the books of the Russian-born Gary Shteyngart. They are not really friends, and they will not be leaving the Book Fest in one bus.

But the Book Fest will bring them all together whether they like it or not. The Beats had the Village; McSweeney’s has San Francisco. The Brooklynites will have the Book Fest. For at least one day, they will be a literary scene, even though local magazines can’t even sell enough ads because the readers are too provincial. Standing beneath the same banner, the Brooklyn writers will show some geographic solidarity even if they have little else in common.

"We’re trying to focus on how diverse Brooklyn authors are," the head organizer, an independent publisher who chairs the Brooklyn Literacy Council, Johnny Temple, says.

According to a preliminary schedule, some of the "top authors" will chair a panel during which they will read 10-minute passages written by literary figures who inspired their writing. Elsewhere, some writers will discuss Brooklyn hip-hop as a literary influence. Fans of the culinary arts, meanwhile, will get a chance to hear Brooklyn chefs and food writers discuss the borough’s tradition of eating.

During "The Streets Are Talking," authors will discuss how their writing relates to Brooklyn and read excerpts from their Brooklyn-based work.

According to a noted Brooklyn writer who currently serves as the editor of the Brooklyn Papers, Gersh Kuntzman, some of the authors might even make friends.

"What brings them together, I think, is a commitment to the neighborhood that they live in. I don’t mean politically or socially, but these people, if you ask them where they live, they’re not going to say New York City, they’re going to say Brooklyn."

Swimming pool water. It is iconic. Los Angeles. David Hockney. Cool blue pool water undulates and creates seductive patterns.

This summer of heat was all about liquid: cold showers, ice water, the Atlantic Ocean, public swimming pools, kiddie pools in Third Street yards, Corona Beer, lemonade.

In other ways too: we learned that liquids can create explosive cocktails on-board jet liners. We are forced to expand our notion of evil: those who want to end life at any cost. Unthinkable, unfathomable.

Here in rural California (lush roses, eucalyptus trees, blossoms abounding), we are seemingly far from the world (though we listen constantly to NPR, check the Internet hourly).

The new swimming pool beckons and gives us time for refreshment, frivolity, exercise, water fights, naked swimming, even calm moments for staring at its bewitching patterns; floating.

For two summers in the heat of this hot valley, we went without a pool. The old pool changed hands with the house. There are new owners and the old pool doesn’t belong to us anymore. The are going to turn it into  basketball court (a basketball court?) Now an empty hull, its floor is cracked, paint peeling and filled with putrid green water.

The formely great: not in such good shape anymore.

He can barely walk over there without feeling pain (a house, a pool, old cars, objects: they are people, memories, more than just things.

At night, there’s an underwater light in the new, modern lap pool. Water illumination. Fifty feet long, twelve feet wide.

Sometimes change brings…

We swim in the new pool: splashing around, floating underwater through the past in order to discover something new.

I may be on the farm, but I still have the news from Seventh Avenue. Ah, the beauty of cell phones.

Standing in the lush garden on the farm, I get a call from Park Slope. My freelance blog reporter, Wendy, who gives me lots of stories, called to say that Cinemateque on Seventh Avenue above Union is going out of business and has been selling off all their inventory. It’s just about gone and then c’est tout. That’s all. The shop will be closed forever. The owners of Cinemateque own Black Pearl Restaurant on Union Street. Anyone know the status of that restuarant, an OTBKB fave.

Then Wendy confirmed that Soundtrack is closing. She said they too are selling off all their inventory. She had the impression that they are closing for good. I asked her to ask the owner to log onto OTBKB and tell the real story. WE WANT TO KNOW.

I asked Wendy what is going on. She said rising rents, of course, rising rents. Yeesh, will there only be real estate office on  Seventh Avenue? Come on now.

Is it iTunes and Netflix that threatened the viability of these businesses? Good chance of it. That combined with crazy rents…

While Wendy and I were talking he saw Mrs. Kravitz on the Street. She handed the phone to her and we talked for a minute or two.

Talk about connected. Standing by the pool in California talking to friends in front of Tarzian.
Funny.