In the tradition of the series that began at Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem eleven years ago, this first presentation of Creatively Speaking
is a forum to present works that convey a realistic, universal
portrayal of people of color to Brooklyn audiences and beyond. The
series includes classic features, works-in-progress, and probing
documentaries. Curated by Michelle Materre. All programs followed by Q&As with filmmakers.

Music is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown, Jr.
(2005) 60min

 
Sun, Apr 1 at 9:30pm*
*Q&A with the filmmakers


› Buy Tickets

Directed by donnie l. betts
In
the beginning there was Oscar Brown Jr.—the high priest of hip. Brown’s
accomplishments as a composer, writer, playwright, and activist
challenged the government and influenced generations. betts focuses on
Brown’s overlooked legacy with an array of historical footage,
performances, and commentary by noted icons such as Al Jarreau, Amiri
Baraka, Al Freeman Jr., Abbey Lincoln, Nichelle Nichols, and Studs
Terkel

Reviewed in today’s book review, The Second Book, poet Deborah Garrison’s new book is about mother hood.

A Working Girl Can’t Win, Garrison’s acclaimed first book of poems chronicled the life of a working girl. Now Garrison, who is the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf, moves into another stage of life as she  starts a family.

In The Second Child,
Garrison explores every facet of motherhood  (“Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness, /
The globe already set aspin, particular / Of a whole new life”).

BLURB: Sometimes sensual, sometimes succinct, always candid, The Second Child
is a meditation on the extraordinariness resident in the
everyday–nursing babies, missing the past, knowing when to lead a child
and knowing when to let go. With a voice sound and wise, Garrison
examines a life fully lived.

About the Author
  Deborah Garrison is the author of A Working Girl Can’t Win: and Other Poems. For fifteen years, she worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker
and is now the poetry editor af Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at
Pantheon Books. She lives with her husband and three children in
Montclair, New Jersey.

“This from NY 1.

It could be a tough few weekends for A and C riders, as track work
that began Saturday is causing major service disruptions on both lines.

Crews will be installing new rails and roadbeds in downtown Brooklyn.

Service will be suspended in both directions between Jay
Street-Borough Hall and Utica Avenue. Free shuttle bus service will be
provided between both stations.

There will be no C service anywhere, and all A trains in Manhattan and Brooklyn will run local.

There will also be more service on the L line.

Transit officials say they are better prepared than they were a few
weeks ago, when number 7 train riders were left confused and angry by a
lack of information about service changes on that line.

"There’s a lot of lessons learned that have been employed here,”
said James Leonard of NYC Transit. “A lot of changes that we made,
enhancements we made to signage, our work with customer service,
customer outreach, and you are going to see the fruits of that labor
this weekend."

A and C commuters say their changes have been tough to sort out.

"Once I got to Utica Avenue I heard that it was going to happen,
but by the time I got onto the Rockaway Avenue I figured it’d be a
rumor,” said one passenger. “Until I got to Utica, and then you started
hearing all the warnings and what to do. After I learned what to do it
was pretty cool.”

Well there’s been a lot of interruptions lately, but that’s what
they’ve got to do to get things fixed,” said another A and C rider.
“That’s what they have to do on the weekends so people just have to
deal with it."

Normal A and C service will return next weekend for Easter.

But the disruptions return for four more weekends after that, through Monday, May 7th.

For more information go to www.mta.info.

Novelist Regina McBride, author of The Nature of Water and Air, The Land of Women, and The Marriage Bed, will offer a special one-day workshop in Park Slope on April 21 from 10:30 until 5 p.m.

Register now to reserve a place in this workshop that is designed for writers of all levels. The cost is $125.

NOTE FRM OTBKB: I have studied with Regina McBride
since 1998 and I recommend her classes to all writers wherever you are
in your process. Using relaxation and sense memory, her technique is
wonderful whether you are just beginning to write, embarking on a novel
or memoir, or very experienced and in the midst of a novel or short
story.

For inspiration, character development and incredible writing
exercises, Regina’s course has been vital to my development as a writer
as it always propels me to my  best writing. Especially great when your
work needs a little jump start.

If you are interested, please email nightsea21@nyc.rr.com

Inner Lives: Developing Characters

An Intensive Workshop with the Focus on the Fictional Character

With Regina McBride

Using relaxation, sense memory, and emotional memory (Stanislavski
acting techniques transformed for the writer) a variety of exercises
will be offered to enable the student to find a deeper, richer
connection to the character he or she is creating.

Exercises will be followed by writing periods, and opportunities for
people to read and share their work. The atmosphere will be safe, with
the focus on exploration. The class is designed to help the student
break into new territory with the character, and with the story itself.

This from New York 1, but Gowanus Lounge has the story and the PICTURES. What a protest! And here’s the slide show from GL.

Costumes and color lined the steps of City Hall Friday in protest of redevelopment plans for Coney Island.

Protesters marched in a "No Condos in Coney" demonstration, to
fight part of real estate developer Thor Equities’ $2 billion plan to
rezone the area for residential use — which they say will take away
from the park’s character.

"What we do not want to have happen is to have condominium
development for the well-to-do to have a great white-sound,
south-facing beach as their own playground,” said Richard Egan, the
co-host of the annual Mermaid Parade on Coney Island.

“It’s an amusement district, it’s for the community, it’s for
people to come to and visit,” said Miss Cyclone 2007 Angie Pontani.
“It’s not a place for luxury condominiums. It really speaks against its
history and I think the real promise of its future."

Thor Equities says the majority of the land they purchased will be
used for an indoor water park and other related entertainment uses

On Wednesday night we made a very good recording of the panel  
discussion, which can be downloaded at  
www.readingsonthefourthfloor.blogspot.com

The download is free, and entirely worth listening to.

If you can link your readers to the site, I would really appreciate  
it. We had a full house, but I think more can benefit from listening  
to what was said.

Thanks again for all your support.

David 

This week’s Brooklyn Paper is chock full of articles about religion in the borough of kings. I especailly enjoyed Gersh Kuntzman’s piece, GOD TO RATNER: DON’T BUILD SO BIG, highlighting Pastor Daniel Meeter’s thoughts on the Atlantic Yards. Check it out

As always, About Brooklyn’s Wendy Zarganis has the Brooklyn scoop. Here she is on the Botanic Garden’s Cherry Blossom festival.  Read more at ABOUT BROOKLYN.

The striking sakura (cherry blossom) is soon to make its appearance in Brooklyn, welcoming a beloved springtime tradition.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s 26th annual cherry blossom festival,
Sakura Matsuri, will celebrated April 28th and 29th. The Brooklyn
Botanic Garden boasts over 200 cherry trees 42 different varieties,
more than anywhere outside of Japan, and that grace the Garden grounds
and enchant guests. The beauty of the delicate sakura make the Cherry
Blossom Festival one of New York’s most anticipated spring events.

This from NY 1:

Big weekend disruptions are coming to the A and C lines in Brooklyn.

According to the MTA, for the next five weekends, A service between
Jay Street-Borough Hall and Utica Avenue will be replaced by free
shuttle bus service.

There will be no C service at all: A trains will be running local.

The MTA says there will be extra L train service on the weekend to help pick up the slack.   

The disruptions don’t include Easter weekend, when normal weekend service is scheduled.

For more information, go to www.mta.info.

Just a thought. Food Coop-ers would be more than willing, I would think, to do without plastic bags. Seeing Green has a piece today abotu San Francisco’s decision to ban non-reclyclable plastic bags.

"At last, my ex-hometown, San Francisco has passed a bill to ban non-recyclable plastic bags.

The
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 this afternoon to make
the city the first in the nation to prohibit petroleum-based plastic
checkout bags in large markets and pharmacies.

On the first of two votes needed for final passage, supervisors
approved legislation sponsored by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi that would
mandate the use of biodegradable plastic bags or recyclable paper bags.
The legislation would take effect in about six months for some 50 large
markets in San Francisco and would apply in about 12 months to large
drugstore chains such as Walgreen’s and Rite-Aid.

"Hopefully, other cities and states will follow suit," said Mirkarimi."

This from the Old First Blog by Pastor Meeter.

The turtles are up. They have wakened from their winter slumber, and they are swimming in the Lake in Prospect Park.

I
don’t know this species yet. This is my first spring at this end of the
Park. They are smaller than our turtles at the lake in Ontario.

They
swim just under the surface. But they stick their heads out of the
water in that peculiar turtle way, shy and subdued, their eyes and
nostrils showing. Once you spot them you can make out their shells
behind them, right beneath the boundary of water and air.

I
wonder where these turtles lay their eggs. It’s wonderful to me that
they survive against the odds. Our Canadian turtles are larger than
these, and when they lay their eggs, they make their laborious journey
up hill to a patch of gravel behind our cottage, dig their holes with
their hind feet, and lay them their. More labor. Turtles in labor.

And
then every night, the raccoons come and dig out the eggs. How any
survive to hatch and return to the lake is a mystery to me. For a
couple weeks after laying their eggs, the turtles keep station just off
shore, swimming back and forth in front of the cottage. Are they
sending signals to their eggs? Are they willing them to hatch and find
their way to the lake? Don’t they know what the raccoons have done? Are
there any eggs still left? How is it possible that there still are
turtles in our lake?

There are turtles in Prospect Park. And
there are certainly raccoons. You can hear them at night, chuttering in
the trees just inside the fence. They feast on the garbage left in the
cans along Prospect Park Southwest. If I thought this food was enough,
and that they didn’t need to go after turtle eggs, I would be showing
an ignorance of raccoons.

And yet the turtles survive. They seem
to have worked out a plan that works for them, against our better
judgment. And they have stuck to it."

This from 1010 Wins.

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) — A leading mathematician who grew up in Brooklyn and won several of the world’s most prestigious math awards has died.

Paul Joseph Cohen died Friday of a rare lung disease, according to
Stanford University, where he taught for four decades. He was 72.

Cohen’s honors were astonishing feats, considering that two prizes were from completely different branches of mathematics.

In 1964 he won the American Mathematical Society’s Bocher Prize for
analysis, and in 1966 he won the Fields Medal, the math world’s
equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for logic. Cohen also won the 1967
National Medal of Science for his work in logic, and he was an honorary
foreign member of the London Mathematical Society.

Cohen’s passion was studying extremely difficult, long-standing
mathematical problems, such as the continuum hypothesis, which is
considered central to set theory, the idea that sets of items are the
fundamental objects defining all ideas in mathematics.

He shocked the math establishment by proving that the continuum
hypothesis could not be decided. The notion that conventional
mathematics couldn’t prove or disprove concrete and well-known
assertions caused an uproar among academics.

Cohen was born April 2, 1934, in Long Branch, N.J., the fourth and
youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His sister checked out
a library book on calculus for him when he was 9.

He grew up in New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in
1950. He attended Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1953 but left before
receiving a bachelor’s degree, going directly to graduate school at the
University of Chicago, where he received a master’s degree in 1954 and
a doctorate in 1958.

Cohen joined Stanford in 1961 as an assistant professor of
mathematics. He became a full professor in 1964. He retired in 2004 but
continued teaching until this quarter.

Cohen played piano and violin and sang in a Stanford chorus and
Swedish folk group. He spoke English, Swedish, French, Spanish, German
and Yiddish.

Photoblogger, Brit in Brooklyn, was up last night shooting images of a big fire on Fifth Avenue at Baltic Street in Park Slope. No details on injuries, but it was a BIG ONE.

Walmart CEO spoke to editors and reporters at the New York Times.

Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive — and exasperating — that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Scott’s remarks, delivered at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times, amounted to a surprising admission of defeat, given the company’s vigorous efforts to crack into urban markets and expand beyond its suburban base in much of the country. In recent years, Wal-Mart has encountered stout resistance to its plans to enter America’s bigger cities, which stand as its last domestic fronti

er.

This from Red Eft’s blog Oswegatchie.

“So what?” my husband said. “My mother’s refrigerator is like that.”

“So what what?” was my clever rejoinder. “That doesn’t change the fact that this is a left-handed fridge. You open it with your left hand.”

It wasn’t the only reason I bought it. The other reason was that at 432 kwh/year, our new Frigidaire was the most energy-efficient model in the showroom we visited for a weekend sale guarateeing the lowest prices in town. (We went for a low-water Fisher & Paykel clothes washer, too.)

So far I’m happy with the new fridge. It’s technically smaller than our old one, but I still have trouble filling it, and because it’s new, and no one has spilled raspberry jam or soymilk in it, or covered it with magnets and flyers for things that have already happened or lists of fish we can’t eat or Jewish holidays we fail to observe, it’s neat and shiny.

And it’s a leftie fridge! I am the only leftie in a family of righties, and I like the head game they must have to play ha ha every time they go toward it with their right arm held out and have to switch! I’m going to get me some more energy-efficient left-handed stuff!

Because I like her writing and her choice of things to write about. Here she is on the family bed.

I don’t get it. In the Home section of the New York Times just recently, there was an article about children and parents sharing the same bed, otherwise known as the Family Bed. I thought we were so over that already. What is the big deal about the Family Bed? Why is it a deal at all?

I shared a bed with my parents until I was well into puberty, together with my brother who was born some years later. My parents didn’t have a king-size bed, only two twins put together.

There is nothing more comforting and secure than sleeping next to a human body, more so when there are two of them. Sleeping between my parents was simply sublime. I had no need for nightlights, I didn’t need to be read to, and I certainly didn’t need disgusting battery-operated music to put me to sleep. Instead, I was lulled by the sound of their voices in quiet conversation with each other or the pages of Newsweek and Life magazines being turned when they continued to read long after I had dozed off. I particularly loved falling asleep in my father’s armpit, my legs stretched across his in a diagonal line. I had no need for pillows or stuffed animals. I had my parents…READ MORE AT HER BLOG, MOM AFTER-HOURS

See a workshop performance of CHURCH, a theater piece developed at BAX that is having its world premiere at PS 122.

Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company

Friday & Saturday, March 30-31, 2007 at BAX. 421 Fifth Avenue, 718-832-0018

“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest.” Singing, dancing, and preaching create a joyous and
breathtakingly beautiful experience in Young Jean Lee?s CHURCH. Lee is a Theater
Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. With CHURCH, her
signature unpredictability puts the religious and non-religious alike under
the spell in a way that defies and tests the beliefs of both. The
performance marshals the power of a religious service in order to shake up
complacent notions of what religion is and expose the roiling questions
and exhilarating possibilities underneath.

CHURCH is being developed through a residency at Park Slope’s BAX/Brooklyn Arts
Exchange with public funding from various sources.

The world premiere of CHURCH takes place at Performance Space 122, from April 26-May 13, 2007. For more information, visit www.ps122.org.

Surfing around the The Celebrate Brooklyn website I discovered that the Opening Event and Gala Whoopdeedo will be on Thursday, June 14th at 8 p.m. with THE NEVILLE BROTHERS.

The concert is free but
Gala tickets start at $300. and Gala packages from $5000. Neither are
in my league. But hey. The concert is FREE: it’s the party that costs ya
(and is a great fundraiser for a great summer event series if you can afford to participate…what goes around comes around.

The Celebrate Brooklyn website is a great case study for putting the year on calendar events. Last year’s schedule is still up but the year isn’t. It’s hard to tell that these events already happened. They should revise their site a little — because people are going to start checking about this summer. Not to be a whiner…

For info
on gala: sgiannelli@briconline.org

My friend Ed Velandria has been sketching people on the F-train for a long time now. It’s his yoga, his meditation, his way of relaxing while riding the subway.

That time on the subway is his "in-between"; the limbo time between his busy life at home with two kids and a wife and his busy life running a web development company.

With his tablet and his pen, Ed gets to zone out and focus on the shapes, colors, textures, patterns expressions of people’s faces.

Not thinking, just drawing, the ride from Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn to Broadway Lafayette in SoHo just whizzes by.

He used to do it with pen and paper. Then he tried using his pocket P.C. Even off the subway, Ed draws incessantly wherever he is on scrap paper, a

napkin, a Post-It note. Now on the subway he uses a HP tablet called a TC1100 with a Wacom pen, which he bought off of a high school student on Craig’s List. The tablet has been discontinued and is only available on Craig’s List or maybe ebay.  The tablet is
touch-sensitive and capable of different kinds of strokes. He uses a paint program he bought for $20. called Art Rage.

At first, Ed was very low key about the pictures.  Just some drawings I did on the subway he might say. But overtime, it was obvious that he was quite serious about making these pictures — at least once a day. It’s a habit now, or more precisely, a practice — a ritual to capture the time.

Ed catches his subjects during their in-between time, too. Eyes down, reading, sleeping, iPod listening, they are either going to work or going home.

I love the titles of the sketches: Long Day, Not Really Listening, Goatee Guy, Red Hoody, Intense, Kind of a Mohawk:

It is life lived on the subway — day in, day out. The artist looking, noticing, sketching…honoring the faces before his eyes.

See more of Ed’s pictures on his Flickr website.

Thanks to Brooklyn Vegan: Ani DiFranco is performing at Celebrate Brooklyn this summer. The date is July 18th tickets were selling March 20th – March 22nd (so that’s old news, sorry. I don’t even think  The Celebrate Brooklyn website has this summer’s schedule yet. The info is on Ani DiFranco’s website.

The Celebrate Brooklyn website does have this bit of info: the opening night gala and fundraising event  is THE NEVILLE BROTHERS ON THURSDAY JUNE 14th at 8 p.m. The concert is free but the gala is a big whoopdeedo. Gala tickets start at $300. and Gala packages from $5000. Neither are in my league. But hey. The concert is FREE: it’s the party that costs (and is a great fundraiser for a great summer event series). For info on gala: sgiannelli@briconline.org

This Wednesday, the show Landmark and Legacy: Brooklyn Heights and the Preservation Movement in America, opens at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
 
March 28 – September 9, 2007
This exhibit will highlight the social and political history that led
to the designation of Brooklyn Heights as New York City ‘s first
historic district. This six month exhibit will take visitors from the
1950s and the establishment of the Brooklyn Heights Association, one of
the first neighborhood associations in the country, through the
struggle with Robert Moses from building the BQE in the middle of
Brooklyn Heights to the implications of the national landmark and
preservation movement in the present day. Landmark and Legacy has been made possible by American Express.

Location
                    128 Pierrepont Street
                    at Clinton Street
                    Brooklyn, New York 11201
                    View map
                  

General Information                 

Phone: 718-222-4111

Fax: 718-222-3794

Brooklyn Paper editor, Gersh Kuntzman and his great staff have done it again. Another busy week in Brooklyn — and some great stories from Brooklyn’s real newspaper:

1. Breaking news: City's one-way plan in Park Slope is DEAD!
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12oneway.html
SIDEBAR: The Brooklyn Angle: In defense of the DOT Technocrat:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12bklynangle.html

2. It's still war over Arabic school in Park Slope:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12arabicschool.html

3. Know Dice: The real Andrew Dice Clay Silverstein, a friend of The
Brooklyn Paper from way back:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12diceclay.html

4. Ratner's lobby hobby: Bruce is the state's third-biggest influence
peddler:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12ratnerlobby.html

5. Weird Chinese encounter: If Nixon could go to China, certainly four
Shanghai editors could come to our office:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12chineseeditors.html

LOCAL STORIES:
BAY RIDGE: Another church says it will sell out for condos:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12greenchurch.html

DUMBO: Dumbo is on the map. Which map? The map of neighborhoods where
politicians rename streets after other politicians.
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12streetnames.html

CARROLL GARDENS: Cute kid needs a kidney:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12kidnkeykid.html

FORT GREENE: This messy triangle will soon be a "Grand Plaza":
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12grandplaza.html

PROSPECT HEIGHTS: Local family faces eviction:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12eviction.html

OUR COLUMNISTS:
Brooklyn South: A Vietnamese Sandwich Smackdown!
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12brooklynsouth.html

Greene Acres: The true life saga behind the demise of Liquors:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12greeneacres.html

PS...I Love You: Nica's take on the one-way street plan:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12pslove.html

Yellow Hooker: How Brooklyn has grown beyond the Gottis:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12yellowhooker.html

Heights Lowdown: DUMBO is the city's "Furniture District":
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12heightslowdown.html

Smartmom: Hepcat has been laid off!
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12smartmom.html

All Drawn Out: Our editorial cartoonist's take:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12cartoon.html

Verses & Reverses: Our poet laureate's take on Dine in Brooklyn:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12comedinewithme.html

P
LUS: All of GO Brooklyn at http://www.brooklynpaper.com/sections/go/

INCLUDING:
The Brooklyn Museum's new feminist wing:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12artoffeminism.html
SIDEBAR: Sacklash!:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12sacklash.html

Our nightlife calendar
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/sections/go/nightlife/

Our events calendar:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/sections/go/events/

I picked up a copy of Edible Brooklyn at Tempo Presto on Seventh Avenue. I’d never seen it before although the name was familiar. It’s a seasonal magazine celebrating the borough’s food culture. The winter 2007 issue is the magazine’s fourth. I guess I missed the other three.

I really enjoyed this issue with its article about Al Di La, with a recipe for Winter White Salad and great photographs of Anna, Emiliano, and the staff.

I loved the piece by Dan Zanes about the contents of his refrigerator. It really made me laugh the way he wrote it and it’s filled with great ideas and comments about Cobble Hill Honey, Wilklow Orchard cider, panettone, Marriage Freres tea and more.

Find out what Dan says about the Food Coop (he LOVES it but is no longer a member), where he shops now (Fairway), and his affection for Brooklyn (despite the Atlantic Yards problem).

Also, a great article about the best donuts in Brooklyn.

Good morning!

The Animal Care & Control of NY is holding an adoption event today from 12 – 4pm at Top Dog Shop – 169 Lincoln Place @ 7th Ave.
  They’ll have cats and dogs available for adoption.  I’ve been
fostering two stray kittens that were brought in about a month ago –
abandoned in someone’s backyard in Bensonhurst at only 4 weeks old!  I
was able to care for them, and now they’re ready for adoption!  These
guys are cuties!

All animals are vaccinated, spayed or neutered, microchipped
and temper tested.  There is an adoption fee.  Come out and adopt your
new best friend!

I’ve attached two photos I took of the kittens
that will be available for adoption today, I’ve named them Finn and
Fiona. (Finn, short for Phinneas, is the white & grey tabby, and
the boy of the two.)

http://www.nycacc.org

(The
city animal shelter, AC&C or Animal Care & Control, always
needs help – volunteers, donations, foster families, etc.  They are a
poorly underfunded city agency, but are doing their best to help make NYC a no-kill city.  We’re not there yet, and could use your help.  Calling all true animal lovers!)

Thanks and best wishes,
Claire

This week’s Brouhaha on Park Slope Parents is about opening birthday presents at children’s birthday parents. Pro or Con? Discuss. I thought this post from Lorenzo Tijerina was really interesting. He gave his permission for me to reprint this. I loved the picture of life in San Antonio, Texas that he paints. He now lives in Park Slope.

My son is having a birthday party on Saturday and I’ve got to say this
whole discussion is starting to freak me out just a little bit.

For his last six birthday parties this wasn’t even an issue. Every year
he opened his presents at the party and if he didn’t act excited enough
then it was understood to be my job to act excited for him. I looked at
it as a manners test for him. Every year I told him beforehand that if
he should say thank you for every present and save any criticism for
later. It never even occurred to me that we had the option of not opening
the presents.

One year, it must have been last year, we ran out of time and we had to
rush through the opening of the presents. But I just took this as a
result of bad party planning on my part.

But we lived in San Antonio, Texas surrounded by family and our
etiquette was more nuanced. You had to make sure a certain tia’s (aunt’s)
pasta salad was completely eaten and you had to make sure the bigger kids
knew to save some of the pinata candy for the little ones. There were
matters of paying respects to the elder relatives and acting like that
$10 check from great grandma was redeemable for a million bucks.

But now we live here.

Obviously, for the "opening presents issue" to make it this far, it
must be a somewhat important trivial matter. Personally, I would be a
little disappointed not seeing the reaction to a gift I brought to a
birthday party. To me it seems silly to deny the whole present opening ritual
out of political correctness, but I don’t want to appear to be some
southern rube who doesn’t know ya’lls fancy ways of doing thing here up on
the Slope.

I guess my question is this: From the party’s you’ve been to and
hosted, has opening presents at the party become some kind of embarrassing faux pas that’s going to hurt my and my child’s already marginal social standing within Brooklyn’s brownstone elite?

Busily rethinking everything,
Lorenzo (father of now-seven Marcello)

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from The Brooklyn Paper:

Whenever Hepcat calls in the middle of a workday, Smartmom gets nervous. That’s because it usually means bad news.

Like last summer, when he called at noon to say that he’d been laid off from his job as a Solutions Architect at the Edgy Start-Up. Smartmom felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach.

Dizzy. Anxious. It was like her head — and her life — were spinning out of control. How would they survive? How would they pay Teen Spirit’s college tuition? What, in Buddha’s name, were they going to do without health insurance and his salary?

A couple of months later, the Edgy Start-up re-hired Hepcat. Smartmom was thrilled. She felt safe and secure. Sort of.

She was also slightly suspicious. Why had they’d laid him off in the first place if they were just going to rehire him two months later?

While she rejoiced that she and her family were back on the escalator of upward mobility, she worried that they might soon find themselves in the bargain basement.

Smartmom figured, if it can happen once, it can happen again. Even when Hepcat received an excellent annual evaluation from his manager last month, Smartmom felt those familiar pulsations of anxiety.

She just couldn’t trust a company that would lay off her husband on whim because its was having a bad quarter and needed to lighten its salary load for a while.

Smartmom knew it was a sign of the times. As Richard Sennett says in his 2006 book, “The Culture of the New Capitalism,” corporations have become unstable and diffuse. Everyone faces the possibility of obsolescence. Gone are the days of the corporate job for life.

Employees must constantly adapt and prove themselves to be indispensable. And if you’re not “useful enough,” the company changes the locks and your password.

While you can’t depend on the security of a job, you can depend on the almighty bottom line.

With the dread from last summer’s layoff still hovering over her, Smartmom got a call last Monday. From Hepcat. In the middle of the day. Smartmom saw “husband” on the screen of her cellphone and her heart took a nosedive.

“Did you just get laid off?” she asked because somehow she knew.

“Yup,” he said.

How can they do this to us? Again. Lay me off once, shame on you. Lay me off twice, DOUBLE shame on you!

Smartmom felt the anger rise in her like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer. She wanted to call that Edgy Start-up and give the well-paid CEO a piece of her mind. Doesn’t he know the yo-yo Smartmom’s family is riding?

But first she channeled Tammy Wynette, standing by her man. She told Hepcat she loved him and that even if the Edgy Start-up gave him the heave ho, she would be his. Forever. No matter what. Through richer or poorer. The whole bit (but did they really need to do the “poorer” part?)

When Hepcat got home, he told Teen Spirit and the Oh So Feisty One what was going on.

“Not again,” Teen Spirit exclaimed. “Can’t they make up their minds?” He moved tentatively toward his dad and put his arms around his shoulders — it was a Teen Spirit/Hepcat moment for the record books.

If it’s not completely obvious, Smartmom and Hepcat are cock-eyed optimists. Within hours, Hepcat was touching up his resume, and Smartmom was posting about his layoff on her blog. They didn’t even argue about who should load up the dishwasher that night.

A week or so later, the family is adjusting to the vagaries of the new capitalism. They’re starting to accept the instability of their lives. Smartmom has even upped her dose of Zoloft.

No one can say that they don’t have the right to be angry at the inhumanity of it all. Nor can anyone deny that Hepcat, a brilliant “Solutions Architect” with skills, brains and know-how up the wazoo, needs a job. He has worn many IT hats, including, systems analyst, computer software developer, software architect, and programmer.

Hepcat has always been a think-outside-the-box/big-picture/expect-the-unexpected/analytical kind of guy, due, no doubt, to growing up on a farm where all problems must be solved, usually with bailing wire.

And let’s not forget what a great photographer he is. Hepcat has experience in editorial and advertising photography, an MFA from CalArts, and extensive knowledge of photo retouching and Photoshop. (Wow. Hire that man!)

Experienced, resourceful, and generally great to have around, farmboy Hepcat can fix computers, sports cars and John Deere tractors, weld orchard equipment, harvest walnuts, and herd cows. He makes a delicious risotto and a mean roast leg of lamb.

And if that’s not enough, Teen Spirit is going to college in just under three years and how are they going to pay for it?

References available on request.

Here’s one Park Slopers response to the recent One Way No Way controversy. I was just waiting for charges of NIMBYism (NOT IN MY BACK YARD). Yes, it’s true. Most Park Slopers stood on the sidelines for the Atlantic Yards debate.  This is in today’s Brooklyn Paper:

To the editor,

The proposal to convert Sixth and Seventh avenues to one way, has made me furious (“7th Avenue Express,” March 17).

My
anger, though, is not directed at the Department of Transportation or
Bruce Ratner, but instead at my fellow Park Slopers. Had the Slope
mobilized in 2004, when Atlantic Yards was in its infancy, we might
never have been at this point.

How clearly I remember the
reaction to those passing out brochures against Atlantic Yards at the
St. Patrick’s Day Parade in 2004. The comments I heard, consistently,
were “It’s so far away from here”; “It’ll be great for our
neighborhood,” and “We don’t live in that part of the Slope.” Instead,
the response in those critical first few months was anemic at best —
“negligence” and “apathy” are more apt terms.

Now that traffic
pattern changes are coming for the arena — as we all knew they would —
people are getting off their arses and starting to notice that Atlantic
Yards is going to destroy our quality of life. Did it need to take
three years to figure that out?

Shame on Park Slope — a place full of smart, vocal and active citizens — for letting it get this far.

Rob Underwood, Park Slope

It was a gift from her Dad and he’s been teaching her all about it in the last few days. Suffice it to say, OSFO already has an excellent eye. She is also very capable when it comes to mechanical and electron objects. She really is her daddy’s girl.

And she’s already posting pictures of her American Girl Doll, Nikki, and Nikki’s horse, on Alice Crawford dot com.

Hepcat has made sure that all of us have our own dot coms. It’s so very important around here.

The camera is a Panasonic Lumix with "Intelligent ISO Control". It’s easy to use and it takes great pictures.

In addition to The Dinner Party, and Global Feminisms, this is another exhibit in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center. Her’s the blurb from the Musuem.

This exhibition is dedicated to powerful female
pharaohs, queens, and goddesses from Egyptian history. The central
object of the exhibition is an important granite head from the Brooklyn
Museum collection of Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth
Dynasty (1539–1292 b.c.), and one of the 39 women represented with a plate at The Dinner Party.
Hatshepsut is featured alongside other women and goddesses from
Egyptian history, including queens Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Tiye and
the goddesses Sakhmet, Mut, Neith, Wadjet, Bastet, Satis, and
Nephthys—many of whom are featured on The Dinner Party’s tiles.
By incorporating multiple objects from the Museum’s extraordinary
Egyptian collection, the exhibition encourages viewers to make visual
and historical connections with the Museum’s long-term installation Egypt Reborn, which has additional objects on view pertaining to Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses.

Thank you, Elizabeth Sackler, for giving the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art to Brooklyn.

An exhibition
and education facility dedicated to feminist art, the Center’s mission is "to raise awareness of feminism’s cultural
contributions; to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist
art; to maintain a dynamic and welcoming learning facility; and to
present feminism in an approachable and relevant way."

Sackler, who is a historian and philanthropist, was born in Brooklyn. Speaking at the press preview Thursday morning, she told the overflow crowd of artists, critics, curators, press and photographers that she was told by her parents that the  Brooklyn Museum "was where you went to learn about ancient cultures." She talked about art as a democratic form that was capable of being a tool for change.

She said she looked forward to a time when there would be"equal rights for women artists, as well as equal pay, equal sales prices and equal wall space."

The crowd cheered. 

At the press conference, Judy Chicago spoke of taking the bus to the Chicago Art Institute to visit her childhood friends, Monet, Matisse and Degas. But, she wondered, "Where were the women?"

"It was an art world only men were allowed to populate." From an early age, she believed that women had a history that should be told. That’s why she created what she called "a fitting and sumptuous vast, symbolic history of half of our world’s contribution."

"It’s been a long arduous journey."

The Center’s 8,300-square-foot space encompasses a gallery devoted to The Dinner Party; a biographical gallery to present exhibitions highlighting the women represented in The Dinner Party;
a gallery space for a regular exhibition schedule of feminist art; a
computerized study area; and additional space for the presentation of
related public and educational programs.