LINKS TO SYRACUSE 

I was born in Syracuse, and my Dad grew up there, and his Dad, who was
an obstetrician and family doctor, and worked at Syracuse General
Hospital. Though we moved when I was five, I went back for a year in
college, to study at Syracuse University, and I’ve always been kind of
attached to the place.

NO WORDS_Daily Pix by Hugh Crawford

POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE_by Louise Crawford

SCOOP DU JOUR_Weather. News. Stuff to Do.
Power Struggles with Kids, Winners of the Design Sponge DIY Contest, A Poem by Emily Dickinson.

NO WORDS_Daily Pix by Hugh Crawford

POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE_Afterimage by Louise G. Crawford

SCOOP DU JOUR_Weather. News. Stuff to Do.
Learn how to win: Power Struggles with Kids, Running with Jack Rabbit, Controversy at MS 51, Horror Movies at BAM

BROOKLYN THINKERS_Points of Light or Why I Want an Oscar by Oswegatchie, Last Night at the Oscars by Louise Crawford

SIDE PANELS_Everything you want to know about Brooklyn but didn’t know where to find it. Scroll around.

Last Night at the Oscars 

It was a mostly uninspired night at the Oscars. Perhaps it had something to do with the new staging. Instead of having the presenters walk out on stage, many were filmed in the audience. It was like something out of "Lets Make a Deal." The winners walked up to a microphone-stand in the aisles, where they made their acceptance speeches. This definitely sped up the proceedings but, as Chris Rock said, what’s next, "the drive-thru Oscars, get your statue, your McFlurry and keep going."

There were a few high points and one or two surprises. Clint Eastwood winning over Martin Scorcese elicited major gasps in this apartment. Let’s not get started on that one. We were, however, pleased to see Morgan Freeman get his.

Robin Williams’ zany imitation of Marlon Brando as Bugs Bunny was probably the funniest bit of the night. The best acceptance speech belonged to the composer of the song from the "Motorcycle Diaries" who sang in Spanish into the mike.

The best moment of moral indignation was Sean Penn’s pissed off rebuttal to Chris Rock’s joke about Jude Law.

There were some moving moments: Sidney Lumet thanked "the movies" for his Lifetime Achievement Award, and listed a wonderfully eclectic group of inspiring filmmakers, including Jean Vigo. Nice cutaways to his daughters holding hands in the audience crying. 

Robert Richardson, who won for best cinematography for "The Aviator" dispensed with the usual thanks and dedicated his Oscar to "my mother whose been in the hospital for 45 day This is for her caregivers and friends who have been watching over her."   What a nice son.

We were all relieved when Hilary Swank thanked her husband Chad. And we kvelled over Jaime Foxx’s multi-layered acceptance speech, which included a Ray Charles moment, a nod to his young daughter who told him "Don’t worry Dad even if you don’t win you’re still good." And a choked-up mention of his grandmother, who he now speaks to in his dreams. "I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight because we’ve got a lot to talk about. I love you." Nice.

I missed most of Chris Rock’s introduction doing dinner dishes in the kitchen, but his final line was a pitch perfect send off. "Good night, Brooklyn," he said, and off we went to our bedrooms. The new high-speed Oscars were over before mid-night and boy were we tired.

–

POINTS OF LIGHT or Why I Want an Oscar

One morning I sat across from my energy healer and confessed to
fantasizing about getting an Oscar. It felt like a horrible cliche, and
I always feel like I jinx my life by mentioning it. She mentioned that
a friend of hers really, really wants a Grammy.

"Really?
A Grammy?" I said. "I don’t want a Grammy at all." It was a revelation.
People really do fantasize about different things! Wow! "I mean, the
Grammy awards are full of music that’s just awful, yuck. They’re
infuriating." I saw immediately this applied just as well to the
Oscars. But the Oscars are not about quality, necessarily, and that’s
where different people’s fantasies come in. What are they about? I
remember when it finally became clear what they represent for me.

When
I was young I watched them every year. As a teenager I kept a
three-ring binder and typed up my notes of the winners each year and
kept it on my bookshelf. (Ha! Imagine feeling you had to do that now.)
I looked up the technical people in copies of American Cinematographer
and American Film that my dad had given me as gifts. I studied the
gowns and found them all wanting, reasoning that a tux would be much
more comfortable and allow me to stride confidently to the microphone
to receive my award. My favorite speeches became models of how to avoid
saying a simple "thank you," my favorites being Vanessa Redgrave
accepting for Julia (standing for principles despite the booing, life
is bigger than Oscar, people matter, people’s rights matter
dammit!), and Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs. Kramer, because he’d always
boycotted awards and used his time to praise the other nominees and
bless the community of actors, who race to auditions from their taxi
shifts, and none of whom, really, are losers, which makes the whole
idea of awards suspect (but not too suspect to show up, accept your
award, and point all this out very eloquently).

In my 30s,
long after passing by film classes for English lit and circling back
through cinema studies and dropping out of museum studies and being
unclear and working at nonprofits devoted to alternative media
exhibition, education, history, and criticism (the "little people" of
the film world), I was still watching the Oscars every year. In 1998,
my son was less than a year old and we still had television reception.
There were two things besides watching movies that H & I still used
the TV for: The X-Files and the Oscars, our baby a sleeping lump
between us. As usual, that year the awards dragged on with nothing very
interesting going on, except for any time the film Gods and Monsters
was nominated. There sat Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave
in a cluster, two of them behind the other so that they could hold
hands in a circle whenever their film was nominated. They radiated
intimacy, love and good feeling; they had made of their film set a functional family,
you could feel it. When Bill Condon won for his screenplay they hugged
and beamed, and showed real unselfconscious joy

NO WORDS_Daily Pix by Hugh Crawford

POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE_by Louise G. Crawford

SCOOP DU JOUR_Weather. News. Stuff to Do.
Slope kids under fire for letters to American soldier, Park Slope Food Co-op scammed by scam artists, Big Navy Yard Fire and more. 

BROOKLYN THINKERS_Points of Light or Why I Want an Oscar by Oswegatchie

SIDE PANELS_Links to everything you need to know about Brooklyn but didn’t know where to find it. Scroll up, scroll down.

NO WORDS_Daily Pix by Hugh Crawford

POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE_Recycling The Gates by Louise G. Crawford

SCOOP DU JOUR_Weather. News. Stuff to Do.
Book sale, Show of Graffiti Art, Oscar Party at Cocotte, Soul Music at the Brooklyn Conservatory, Native American Storytelling at the Green-Wood Cemetery, Laurie Anderson at BAM, The Wooster Group in Dumbo, Klezmer master at Barbes

BROOKLYN THINKERS_We’ve Got Oranges by Oswegatchie, Bullets in the Hood: a documentary by Terence Fisher

SIDE PANELS_An ever-expanding list of links to Brooklyn essentials: meals, music, museums, theater, schools, services, stores, and much more. Scroll up, scroll down.

NO WORDS_Daily Pix by Hugh Crawford

POSTCARD FROM THE SLOPE_Snow

SCOOP DU JOUR_Weather. News. Stuff to Do.

BROOKLYN THINKERS_We’ve Got the Oranges by Oswegatchie, Bullets in the Hood: a film by Terence Fisher,
Remembering Malcolm X, Fitness in the Slope

SIDE PANELS_An expanding list of links to Brooklyn essentials, food, movies, schools, museums, government, services, stores, blogs, and more. Scroll up, scroll down.

We’ve Got the Oranges by Oswegatchie

You can buy it on ebay for ten bucks: a swatch of fabric from The
Gates by Christo. They’re handing them out in Central Park, the people
in the gray suits with tennis balls on poles, the docents, or whatever
they call them.

It was "a good day for viewing," as they say.
Forty degrees, sunny, snow setting off the brillant
orange/tangerine/saffron/traffic cone color. The swatch doesn’t do it
justice, of course.

If I had been alone, or with my husband, we
might have made a day of it and kept walking. Gates draw you on, you
don’t want to step off course or abort the journey. Coming to a fork,
there’s a desire to go on both paths and not miss a single Gate. But we
were with R & A, and by the third time they asked if we were nearly
at the Natural History Museum, I knew we would see only ten blocks or
so of the whole.

I wish I could stop thinking of Bill Gates when I write this.

Like
you, I’ve gotten a lot of email from friends with their photos and
their comments. "It leaves me cold." "It’s beautiful, you have to see
it!" "Stunning." "There’s not much to it." "I wish they’d picked a deep
red."

I wished the color were a bit more yellow, but with the
sun behind the drapes, firing them up, it is one of the happiest
colors. But the festive atmosphere is the key to a public art project,
and I did feel it with this one. Everyone becomes a little more
present. Usually it takes a public emergency to do this for a city; how
much healthier when it is art. People look into each other’s faces and
smile at the shared experience, attention focuses on a thing, these
things

Bullets in the Hood a film by Terence Fisher

The following is an excerpt from a web-site for the new Brooklyn documentary "Bullets in the Hood."  Go here for more information.

Terrence Fisher, a teen living in a housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant,
      Brooklyn, had seven of his friends shot and killed by a gun. Terrence is
      not a gang member or a drug dealer

Remembering Malcolm X by Laments of the Unfinished

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. Of
the four American leaders assassinated in the 60s, for some reason,
Malcolm X