Brooklyn Papers has really done it this time with their unbelievable, incisive,
detailed analysis of the Environmental Impact Statement on Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development. It goes up on the web today. Hard copies of the Park Slope paper will be all over the Slope (Key Food, Ozzies, Conn. Muffin, on the street) later today.

Can’t wait to see it. While you’re at it, check out Smartmom.

Friday, July 21 at 7:30pm
BLACKMAIL with ALLOY ORCHESTRA / MORLEY
ALLOY ORCHESTRA performs its gripping score to BLACKMAIL (1929), Alfred Hitchcock’s last and best silent film. Murder, deceit, and live music-a perfect summer evening in the park. Ease into the noir with the seductive charms of MORLEY, a "jazz minded pop chanteuse, soul sister, cosmopolitan home girl from Jamaica Queens." (NY Times)

FREE DAFFODIL BULBS IN THE FALL

500,000 Free Daffodil Bulbs for New Yorkers to Plant Around 5-Year Anniversary of 9/11

New Yorkers for Parks (NY4P) will be in Manhattan’s Bryant Park
Tuesday, July 25, registering New Yorkers for free daffodil bulbs to
plant in the fall. The bulbs—to be distributed in September and
October—are free to anyone who commits to planting them in a park or
public space in any of New York City’s five boroughs. The first 100
people to register will receive a free NY4P limited edition frisbee.

Originally created to commemorate September 11, The Daffodil Project is
now the largest volunteer planting effort in the city, led by NY4P in
cooperation with the Department of Parks and Recreation. Because of the
more than 20,000 volunteers who have planted bulbs every fall since
2001, nearly three million yellow daffodils bloomed throughout New York
City parks and open spaces in the spring of 2006. NY4P’s goal is to
plant a continual ribbon of bright yellow daffodils throughout the five
boroughs.

WHO: New Yorkers for Parks

WHAT: Daffodil Bulb Registration as Part of The Daffodil Project

WHEN: Tuesday, July 25, 8 a.m. – 2 p.m.

WHERE: Bryant Park, 41st Street and Avenue of the Americas, South Side of the Shaw Lowell Memorial Fountain

CONTACT: Emily Farris, Communications Associate, 212/838-9420, ext. 305 or 917/548-8472 or efarris@ny4p.org

Park Slope Parents is once again making news on the web. This story of Mommy Rage is getting around (Curbed carried it today).  Dang. I really need to be more diligent about reading that  list-serve. Look what I missed:

[ParkSlopeParents] traffic from hell
Tue Jul 11, 2006 2:31 pm

I
live on 12th Street just off Fifth. When my son was much smaller I
lived in mortal fear of trips to the supermarket or my bank with my son
in his stroller (I bank at HSBC and shop at the supermarket next to it)
for exactly the same reasons you’ve mentioned. Even now – he’s 7 – I
make him hold my hand while crossing much to his mortification, and
I’ve been known to yank him HARD to get him across the street and out
of the path of maniacs making that same turn. It’s not getting better,
it’s getting much, much worse – the cars are turning faster, and there
are more of them doing the same exact thing.

I saw one woman
struggling across the street with multiple bags of groceries hanging
off her kid’s stroller; when she got cut off, TWICE, she reached into
her grocery bags and hauled out a can of beans which she threw at the
rear window of the second car, cracking it clear across. Several
witnesses clapped and cheered. The jerk driving the car actually had
the nerve to pull over and come after her about the window, but
fortunately, everyone that had seen what happened backed her up. I
didn’t see the ultimate finale, but that’s one of the more extreme
things I’ve seen at that intersection.

Two friends have asked me and OSFO to take care of their pets while they are away.

For a friend who lives in a lovely brownstone, we will be feeding two guinea pigs, playing with them, and cleaning their cage a few times next week. OSFO just loves the guinea pigs; she hugs them close to her chest.

We will probably also sit on their deck,  sip iced water and pretend that we live in a brownstone. We might even listen to her CDs.

We’ve also been asked to water her plants. My friend has many, many plants all over her brownstone—and she wants all of them watered. Including the four on the stoop.

No-one wants to come home to dead plants. Or dead pets for that matter. So it’s an important job this care and feeding of our friends plants and pets.

Inside the house, it’s a treasure hunt finding all the plants. Don’t miss the spider plants hanging in a fourth floor window of the laundry folding room upstairs. Don’t miss the large built-in planter on the second floor landing or the hanging plants in every window of the playroom.

It’s a big house and there are a lot of plants.

For friends in our own building, we are feeding two large swimming turtles everyday. We fed these turtles last year but back then they were the size of a quarter. Now each one is the size of two bagels. Our friends never expected them to get so big. "I’m scared," she said to me jokingly. "I wonder how big they’ll be when we get back."

Tonight she gave us instructions. Morning and night. A smidgen of this, a smidgen of that.

DDDB said there were 4000, the New York Times called it "over 2000." Hard to say exactly how many people were there but they were THERE for the largest public demonstration so far by opponents of the Atlantic Yards project.

Norman Oder on his blog, Atlantic Yards Report, writes, The Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) rally yesterday at Grand Army Plaza was no watershed moment, neither a massive show of resistance nor an easily-dismissable handful of diehards, as Forest City Ratner’s Jim Stuckey describes the opposition."

Still, the demonstration made a strong impression and shows that there is a large and loud opposition willing to come out on a sweltering hot day to protest Ratner’s controversial development designed by Frank Gehry, which will include a sports arena and numerous high rise condo buildings.

Dan Zanes sang, Rosie Perez spoke, and there were politicians a-plenty
but perhaps most memorable was Steve Buscemi, who wrote a poem, which included the line: I’ve played a lot of crazies but this is INSANE.

Over the course of the weekend, nearly 1000 people watched the Piper Theater production of "Much Ado About Nothing" in JJ Byrne Park. Not only was it a fabulous and dynamic interpretation of Shakespeare’s great screwball comedy, but it was a historic event, too: the first play ever performed in that park.

Until this year, there were no cultural events in the park or at the Old Stone House.  But since Kim Maier took over as Executive Director of the Old Stone House, the house and the park are fast becoming a cultural center in Park Slope.

This production and Piper Theater’s residency at the Old Stone House is all part of summer event series that the Old Stone House is presenting, which includes movies on Tuesday nights, music on Thursdays, and a Shakespeare program for 52 neighborhood kids, which meets daily at the house and will result in a public performance next weekend.

"I hope you will  have the thrill of seeing the kids perform in their own productions of Midsummer Nights Dream: and Winter’s Tale. If ;make love not war’  is the rallying cry of Much Ado, Piper Theater’s mission is ‘make theater, forge community," writes Cecilia Rubino, the director of Piper’s Much Ado.

This is Piper Theater’s first summer in Brooklyn. But they’ve been around for a few years. The group was established in 2001 by John and Rachel McEneny to develop arts and culture in the City of Yonkers as a way to foster economic development and tourism. John is also the acclaimed drama teacher at Middle School 51, one block away from JJ Byrne Park, where he has directed dozens of circuses, playwrighting celebrations, and Shakespeare festivals.

The hallmark of the Piper Shakespeare style is energetic performances by actors with plenty of music, dance, stage acrobatics and circus arts. Shakespeare purists won’t feel slighted and kids can follow the narrative, even the language because the performers are so spirited and expressive.

Two of his MS 51 circus students displayed their juggling and fire eating skills in scenes of Much Ado.

The Park Slope Courier verified the story, my story, about who was responsible for the bomb scare. But not a word about OTBKB. Wonder how they got the story?  I’m guessing they read it on OTBKB and talked to the police. I knew the story was true; fact is often stranger than fiction. That was my scoop, Courier. Hands off.  This from the Park Slope Courier:

The person responsible for putting cops on full alert by leaving nearly a dozen unattended luggage bags along 8th Avenue has been found.

The “bag man” turned out to be…a bag man. Or, should we say, a homeless person who spent his day trying to let go of his surplus of suitcases, backpacks and duffel bags that he had collected over the years.

Police confirmed that an area homeless man was responsible for dropping the bags along 8th Avenue between Union and Carroll streets and along Montgomery Place the afternoon of July 3, a move that led some anti-terrorist-savvy residents to wonder if a mad bomber was targeting the area.

Concerned neighbors called 911. Each time one of the bags was found cops requested the bomb squad to X-ray the bag to see if anything dangerous was inside.

Eleven abandoned bags were found in total, said cops from the 78th Precinct, adding that three bags were found at one location.

As the Bomb Squad scurried from spot to spot making sure that the bags were free of explosives, nerve toxins or body parts, cops were beginning to wonder if they were being tested.

Luckily, most of the bags were empty. A few were stuffed with newspaper.

As more and more bags were cleared, cops began wondering if they were being toyed with by an area prankster with nothing better to do with his Independence Day weekend than to watch area cops break a sweat.

That’s when a woman came forward claiming that she knew who was responsible.

Police were told that the woman’s neighbor was boarding a homeless man. The two got into an argument that morning over all of the pieces of luggage that the man had accumulated over the years.

The tipster believed that the homeless man ultimately agreed to get rid of some of the bags, which he did that afternoon during a walk through the neighborhood.

Investigators later confirmed the woman’s suspicions, although it was unclear if the man responsible for raising everyone’s blood pressure was questioned or charged, although the only thing he could really be charged with was littering.

Captain John Scolara, the commanding officer of the 78th Precinct, said he was glad that the entire ordeal ultimately turned out to be an innocent misunderstanding rather than something more sinister.

“We went through all of the paces,” he said. “It was quite an exercise."

Continue reading HEY, THAT WAS MY STORY: THE BAG MAN COMETH →

For those of you, like me, who listen to WNYC almost constantly (at home), news that they are getting new digs was exciting. And I read it in the New York Times:

It’s time, at last, to bid farewell to the carpets paisleyed with primordial coffee stains. To say sayonara to the unpredictable floods that have engulfed corner offices. And to liberate long-suffering talk-show guests from the limbo of a security line choked with wedding parties schlepping to the Marriage License Bureau.

Its new space, on Varick Street, will give staff members both breathing room and better facilities.

After broadcasting since 1924 from the marble-and-mosaic corridors of the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street in Manhattan, WNYC is going from drab to fab. WNYC, which has the largest audience of any public radio station in the United States, will finally sever its umbilical cord to the bureaucracy that gave it life and sheltered it so persistently. Escaping its 51,400 square feet of tired but rent-free space scattered on eight floors of the Municipal Building, the station will make a $45 million move northwest to two and a half floors of a 12-story former printing building at 160 Varick Street.

A 26-year old woman was brutally attacked and raped in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Police are asking for the public’s help in finding the attacker. This from NY1.

Police say the man was armed with a box cutter when he forced a woman into a black vehicle in Flatbush and sexually attacked her.

The suspect is described as a dark skinned man, between 25 and 35 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 150 pounds.

Police say he has a pock marked face with a scar along the side of it.

Anyone with any information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.

THE RALLY AGAINST RATNER’S SKYSCRAPER CITY AND ARENA OVER-DEVELOPMENT  is planned for July 16th at 2 p.m. (gather at 1:30 p.m.) at Grand Army Plaza.

There will be music by Dan Zanes, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, Beat Boxer Entertainment and jugglers and acrobats from Lava and Circus Amok.

There will, of course, be speakers including:
• Councilwoman LETITIA JAMES
• Councilman CHARLES BARRON
• BOB LAW – Activist, Entrepreneur
• REVEREND DENNIS DILLON – Chief Executive Minister, The Brooklyn Christian Center
• STEVE BUSCEMI – Actor, Director
• NELLIE HESTER BAILEY – Harlem Tenants Council
• BRENDA STOKELY – New York Solidarity Coalition With Katrina/Rita Survivors
• ED CARTER – Fort Greene activist
• DANIEL GOLDSTEIN – DDDB Spokesman

Reorganization of the Brooklyn Museum has the Assoication of Art Museume Curators up in arms. This from the NY Times.

A national organization that represents American museum curators yesterday criticized a reorganization plan under which the Brooklyn Museum recently did away with traditional departments like Egyptian art, African art and European painting and replaced them with two separate teams for its vast collection and for special exhibitions.

The group, the Association of Art Museum Curators, said in a statement that the new structure “undermines the traditional vocation of the curator-as-scholar whose commitment to a particular collection renders him or her uniquely qualified to make recommendations regarding its care and interpretation.” The plan, which has been criticized by some curators at other museums and within the Brooklyn Museum itself, “raises issues that are central to the health of art museums in North America, and in fact, throughout the world,” said the association, which represents about 600 curators. The group was formed in 2002, soon after the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, dismissed 18 curators and staff members in a day.

In its statement the association said that the Brooklyn Museum’s “long-term viability” will “rest on the foundation of its superb, world-famous, collections.”

“Knowledgeable curators are needed to preserve and interpret them,” it said. “To think otherwise is penny wise and pound foolish.”    

SIREN FESTIVAL: SATURDAY JULY 15 AT CONEY ISLAND.

Piper Theater and the Old Stone House present MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING  on July 14, 15, 16 in JJ Byrne Park on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets in Park Slope.

The play is directed by Cecilia Rubino. See what that new stage in JJ Byrne Park is all about. Sit on the grass and watch a great production of Shakespeare.

7 pm.  Free.

Concession by Stone Park Cafe

Williamsburg’s Elizabeth Streb is in the big city Friday and Saturday night as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Streb’s work combines gymnastics,
acrobatics, athletics and dance. The company performs regularly at “Streb
Slams,” held in her workshop space, the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics,
in Williamsburg. John Rockwell in the New York Times thinks big things may be in store for Streb and her dancers.

It could be a success there, but only with some tweaking. Its blend of
cheerful stunts and (one hopes) tongue-in-cheek pomposity could lure
the same audience that flocks now to Pilobolus, Momix and even Cirque
du Soleil.

He did make a distinction between what works in Brookyn and what is required for the rest of the world.

In Brooklyn, such carryings-on can be charming, with a relaxed
informality of presentation: children squealing as the performers smash
their faces and bodies into the clear wall right in front of where
they’re sitting, and families wandering about as if at a ball game,
snacking on popcorn and soda pop.

New York 1 has the latest on the feud betwee two Hassidic brother in Brooklyn who each want to be the grand rebbe of the Satmar Sect, which was headed by their late father. An appeals court said on Wednesday: IT DOES NOT WANT TO GET INVOLVED.

In its ruling, the judges say they have no place interfering with administrative matters of religious organizations.

The decision benefits the younger brother, Zalmen Teitelbaum. His
late father named him successor of the Satmar Sect, setting off a legal
challenge by the older brother Aaron Teitelbaum, who refused to accept
the decision.

At times, the feud even turned violent, with fights breaking out among supporters.

Their father, Grand Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, died in April at the age of 91. He had led the Satmars for more than 30 years.

The Satmars’ $1 billion empire includes social service organizations, yeshivas and real estate in Brooklyn and around the world.
            
            
       

Slope summer is in full swing. Or should I say: in slow down mode.  There are less people around; it’s a little easier to park. Seventh Avenue isn’t swarming with parents and kids at 8:30 in the morning, at 3 p.m. The Mr. Softee truck doesn’t park outside of PS 321 anymore. The ices guy and the man who sells cotton candy hanging from a stick
don’t show up either.

Therapists are on vacation. Friends are in Europe, on Long Island. The girl next door went to Barcelona. The kid across the street went to sleep-away. Summer is a time for travel, for transitions.

Teen Spirit is counting the days until his best friend gets back from his three-week stint at sleep-away.

OSFO goes off to day camp every morning, her backpack packed with swim suit, pink beach towel, rain gear, water bottles. She came home after an action-packed day at a swimming pool with pink lines under her eyes. First sunburn of the season. And these day camps are religious about lathering the kids with sunscreen.

Tonight, Mrs. Kravitz and I didn’t feel like cooking (I could just skip eating this time of year) so for the kids, we ordered dinner from Grand Canyon: waffles for OSFO, a club sandwich for Teen Spirit. Mrs. Kravitz ordered franks and beans for her son, a waffle for her daughter.

Grand Canyon has it all.

A man on a bike delivered our dinner and the kids ate outside on the green plastic table. I’m starting to feel self-conscious about spending so much time in the front yard. A friend walk by, "You’re always out here," she said.

It does seem that way. Is it very obvious that we don’t have country homes to escape to on Friday nights; that our idea of summer is sitting out on the street.

Mrs. Kravitz cut out the article in the City Section (of the New York Times) about the panini stand and put it on our front door.  Our Ravi, the building’s resident sitarist, is famous now. So is the kid across the street.

Slow, lazy days. It takes effort just to walk around. There is still much to do and it gets done but more slowly than usual. Over at JJ Byrne Park, the Piper Theater is going full tilt getting ready for their production of Much Ado About Nothing this weekend.

Energy.

On Tuesday night (July 11) we’re putting the big screen up and showing a movie; if it doesn’t rain, that is. We’re showing "Coney Island: The American Experience" the documentary by Ric Burns and Buster Keaton shorts. 

Should be a fun night. I don’t think it’ll rain.

BREAKING NEWS FROM NEW YORK 1:

Firefighters are on the scene of a major explosion on 62nd Street
between Park and Madison Avenues on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which
is sending white plumes of smoke across the island.

The Fire Department was flooded with calls as far north as 66th
Street about a loud explosion followed by a building collapse just
before 9 a.m. Monday. The fire has since gone to five alarms and 138
firefighters have responded to the call.

It’s unclear if there are any victims trapped inside, but
firefighters appear to be searching the rubble for survivors. There are
reports there was a doctor’s office on the first floor of the three
story building and residences on the other two floors.

So far, four people are reportedly injured, two of whom were
treated at the scene and two of whom were transported to an area
hospital.

Con Edison is also on the scene and has turned off the gas and
electric service to the area, as is normal procedure and is conducting
an investigation to determine the source of the explosion. Witnesses
are reporting a strong odor of gas in the area, indicating that it
could have been a natural gas explosion.

Certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn were the place to be last night when Italy won the World Cup for the fourth year in a row.

I am going to miss the television tuned to the games in the back room of Joe’s Pizza on Seventh Avenue. All over the city, there was the sense that we truly were an international city.

Carroll Gardens may have been the place to be. Check out A Brooklyn Life. And Gowanus Lounge got the shots, too.

I saw the signs on the Fifth Avenue: Did anyone eat a panini from the panini stand on Third Street? Please call JOANNA EBENSTEIN. Turns out she, a freelance writer, needed a quote for her New York Times City section article. I called her because I have tasted Matthew’s paninis. But she already had a quote from the  Boing Boing shop owner. The photograph of Zach, playing sitar and Matthew manning the stand is a really great photo. Here’s an excerpt from the story.

MATTHEW GLASER, 12, and Zachary Fine, 13, have a lot in common — if not with seventh graders around the country, at least with each other, and certainly with the spirit of their neighborhood, Park Slope, long the stamping ground of the spiritually curious, the upwardly mobile and the gastronomically advanced.

So it is not surprising that on a recent Saturday afternoon, the two were doing their share to keep up the neighborhood’s reputation. They had set up shop on Third Street, a few blocks from both the Park Slope Co-op and the bustle of hipper-than-thou boutiques and restaurants on Fifth Avenue, to sell their homemade panini to passers-by.

Matthew stood behind a table next to a cardboard sign reading "Panini $3," while Zachary stretched out on the sidewalk, lazily plucking his sitar.

"This is an up-and-coming neighborhood," Matthew said by way of explaining why the pair were selling panini rather than a more mundane item like, say, lemonade. "And it’s only getting fancier."

Apparently there was a market, albeit a modest one, for their offerings.

I don’t really know what it is but I’m still excited that that space on Union just up from Fifth Avenue is finally something. (It’s been vacant for soooo long).

UNION HALL – a bar, restaurant, and music space (a la Magnetic Field) I’m guessing. But that’s just a guess.

Check it out. It opens tonight!

Lighting the Coney Island Parachute Jump may have been the job of a lifetime for light artist, Leni Schwendinger, who put 17 lamps and 150 lighting fixtures on the Parachute Jump. However she has done many large scale projects. The new lighting was revealed on Friday night after a $5 million overhaul.

And Robert Guskind got the shot. More are on his blog: Gowanus Lounge.

“Giving light to something that’s completely dark at night and can’t be seen, if you have ever been here at night, when the lower tower is unlit it melds right into the sky. You really can’t see it," Schwendinger, of Light Projects Ltd. told New York 1.

Schwindinger is a light artist and her company, Light Projects Ltd, creates multi-disciplinary collaborations – with design teams staffed by architects, engineers, and
graphic designers "committed to her vision and perfectionistic mandate." The Light Projects has worked with clients ranging from state and municipal agencies and
architectural and engineering firms to museums and events planners.

The Parachute Jump tower will have six different lighting schemes for various seasons, holidays, and even lunar cycles.

“The night before the full moon you’ll see a white sequence,” said Schwendinger. “On the full moon you’ll see a super white sequence, and the waning moon, another sort of opalescent white sequence."

Daniel Tremain, editor of The Brooklynite asked me to spread the word
about the magazines's final issue. 

Due to insufficient advertising revenues, it will be no more.
Many in the Brooklyn community are very sad to see it go. 

Enjoy, and PRETTY PLEASE forward the above link to
anyone who lives in, hails from, or is otherwise
interested in our fair borough. (Since this is an
online-only issue, we need your help to make sure it
gets read.)The Brooklynite magazine is now online.
 
http://thebrooklynite.com/
 

IN THIS ISSUE:

* THE PONTIFICATOR raps David Yassky’s opponents,
David Yassky, Chuck Schumer, The New York Times, Frank
Gehry, Brooklyn Brewery, Make the Road By Walking,
Imam Abdul Ghani Radwan, BKLYN magazine, and Joseph
McCarthy.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/pontificator.php

* THE SHUTTERBUG meets some Brooklyn beauties.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/shutterbug.php

* THE INQUIRER queries political thinker Paul Berman.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/inquirer.php

* THE GUIDE explores Brooklyn's Native American
heritage.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/guide.php

* THE HISTORIAN looks back at a bloody day on the
Brooklyn Bridge.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/historian.php

* THE SHOPPER reveals where to find love and get
lucky--in Bushwick.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/shopper.php

* THE THRILL-SEEKER canoes the Gowanus.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/thrillseeker.php

* THE EATER traces a kosher bakery's history back to
Cairo.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/eater.php

* THE DRINKER, who drank in 1,000 different bars last
year, divulges his local favorite.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/drinker.php

* THE SCENESTER finds a coven of witches in a Bay
Ridge bar.
http://thebrooklynite.com/summer2006/scenester.php

AND OUR COMPLETE ARCHIVES ARE NOW ONLINE:

Instead of trekking to the 10 p.m. show to see our man  Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest at the Pavilion, I returned four DVDs to Hollywood on Fifth Avenue.

FYI: great interview with Depp in this week’s Rolling Stone.

<>

Fifth Avenue was lively. Belleville was packed, people sitting outside like some cosmopolitan Parisean cafe. Walking by Perch, customers were grooving to some live jazz. It was Alessandro Ricciarelli  guitars, Jerome Harris   bass, Mark Ferber drums, Pete Rende  keyboards and accordion. (On Saturday Night, July 8th Akiko Pavolka. On Sunday night, July 9th, it’ll be the Mike Petrosino Trio.)

After dropping the DVDs in the Drop Box at Hollywood Video, I remembered that The Moonlighters were playing at Barbes so I dropped in there. (The cover of their new album to the left.)

The small back room was packed and sweaty. What is it with their air conditioner? People were standing against the back wall to hear this unusual quartet: two female vocalist who also play guitar and ukulele, an upright bassist and a slide guitar player.  The group performs their own compositions, as well as Hawaiian steel guitar swing.  The music evokes old movies from the 1930’s, the depression, a Dorothea Lange photo, the beach at Honolulu, the Boswell Sisters, with some hula/country sprinkled in.

Oooh. I liked it a lot. I had to leave because after buying a glass of wine I didn’t have money to put in the jar that got passed around. The waitress said to put in eight dollars and the ukulele player said, "We usually ask for ten. But give what you can."

I split. Up on Seventh Avenue crowds from a reggae concert at Celebrate Brooklyn were streaming into the subway, onto the Avenue.

At ten minutes before closing, Barnes and Noble was full of people. They didn’t turn me away when I went in to buy "On The Road" for Teen Spirit.

Next stop the Cocoa Bar, which was quiet up front but lively in back. They also had the new issue of the Park Slope Reader. I ordered one of those coffee/toffee frosty drinks.

When I returned to the apartment, Hepcat, Teen Spirit and OSFO were there. The movie was sold out. OSFO was already asleep.

She really woulda been too tired to see a 10 p.m. show. But she was dying to see Johnny Depp as Keith Richards/pirate.

There’s always tomorrow.

P.S.  The Moonlighters will be at Celebrate Brooklyn opening for Bill Frisell on
Thursday, August 3, 8pm. Free to the public. They will be at Barbes on August 4th from 10 p.m. until midnight.

Union Hall, the new bar/restaurant/music space on Union Street just up from Fifth Avenue, is slated to open on Sunday July 9th. I found the poster (left) on Gowanus Lounge, he’s got more info. A reader had this to say:

There will be will be live music at UNION HALL. William (of Magnetic Field) helped the management outfit the space for sound. if you’ve seen the evolution of Magnetic Field, you know he takes it very seriously.

Last night he invited us to test out the sound system for them. Full success. The music room is much smaller than the main bar floor upstairs, but in a good intimate way; it’s very cozy and sounds great. They really did a nice job shaping and treating the room to sound crisp and clear. I think this will be a nice addition to the neighborhood.

There will be wireless access by the end of August in our Prospect Park. This was in today’s New York TImes:

By the end of August, wireless networks will be established at 18 locations in 10 of New York City’s most prominent parks — including Central, Prospect and Riverside Parks — in a major citywide expansion of free Internet access, according to city officials.

The development, to be announced today, would end months of delay for a city project that has faced considerable logistical and technical hurdles since it was announced in June 2003. Wi-Fi Salon, a small start-up company that won the contract for the work in October 2004, said yesterday that Nokia, a Finnish manufacturer of telecommunications devices, had signed on as a sponsor, giving it a well-financed partner that could finally turn the plan into reality.

Wi-Fi Salon intends to activate 18 wireless "hot spots" by the end of next month at Battery, Central and Riverside Parks and in Washington and Union Squares in Manhattan; at Prospect Park in Brooklyn; at the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens; and at Pelham Bay and Van Cortlandt Parks and Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

Eight of the hot spots will be in Central Park and two in Prospect Park. The first of the 18 locations — a stretch of Battery Park, from the Battery Gardens restaurant to the Castle Clinton National Monument — is to be activated today, with the other 17 to follow, in stages, through the end of next month.

Just heard from an OTBKB reader that Union Hall will be opening on July 9th. 
It's the new place on Union Street just up from Fifth Avenue. I peeked inside and it
looks quite elaborate in there -- like an old library or something. Lots of books, 
shelves, etc. 

I think there's going to be music there as well.