Seeing Green says, go see Romance and Cigarettes, the new film by Park Slope’s very own and beloved John Turturro.

Brooklyn-born and Park Slope resident John Turturro wrote and directed the film Romance and Cigarettes, currently showing at the Film Forum
in Manhattan. The film was deemed not releasable by Sony Pictures, and
held up almost two years; it is now distributed by Turturro himself.
His previous film, Iluminata, about a playwright struggling
to produce his new play, was no more mainstream than this one, and we
should be grateful for the continued exercise of Turturro’s lively
imagination.

This is an extraordinarily original, highly entertaining and very
funny film featuring a stellar cast (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon,
Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Mary-Louise Parker
among others, many of whom also appear in his previous film) and a
supporting cast of sundry blue-collar-type singer/dancers, having the
time of their lives in a bawdy (is it ever) kind-of-musical with oldie songs you thought you’d forgotten (try Connie Francis’s Scapricciatiello (Do You Love Me Like You Kiss Me).

I love his photographs and his stories about how and where he got them. On August 8th he captured the ornamental frenzy of some Brooklyn stoops. 

And earlier this week: Zen and the art of the laundromat.

Eat, Drink, Memory writes about the treasures in her garden, including the rasberries. She also ventured out of Brooklyn and now knows where to get the best cookies, ices, and mozzarella in Corona, Queens.

What a gal. There are pictures and links, too.

I didn’t know Queen’s Anne’s Lace was wild carrot. DOTS has a pix of one as part of his continuing series on the Weeds of Brooklyn. He’s also got some new links to great Brooklyn blogs.

He took this pix near the Vanderbilt yards. Queen Anne’s Lace, the wild carrot, is one of the most familiar weeds in North America. An ancestor of the domestic carrot, this plant is a native of Europe which was introduced to this country by early European settlers.

In the blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York: AKA The Book of Lamentations: a bitterly nostalgic look at a city in the process of going extinct, the author mentions that Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies (now in paperback everyone) takes place in a small, Park Slope bookstore.

This Park Slope indie may not have been around for eons, but the demise
of any good used bookshop is cause for sorrow. This time it wasn’t rent
issues, but personal reasons. As Brooklyn Paper
reports, the owner was hoping for a buyer. A recent visit to the store
confirmed that no buyer has materialized and the store will be closed
August 31. Brooklyn bloggers like OTBKB, BIB, and Bklyn Stories, mourn the loss.

This after I just finished reading Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies, which takes place in and around a Park Slope used bookshop.

Read the post, Fathers, Friends, and Dreams, on  The Luna Park Gazette. It’s very touching and full of personal insight from a man willing to face painful truths.

I did some time traveling this morning by way of a dream.

This wasn’t a trip to ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire, this was the recent past–my recent past to be exact.

I
dreamed my father was still alive, still elderly and still in need of
care. Seven months after his death, seven months of not having to worry
about him anymore, I was back on the job.

The Bay Ridge Rover , a non-partisan digest of all things Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is working hard to cover the growing Bay Ridge tornado story.

He’s got lots of great pix and news that State Senator Golden wants to get Bay Ridge declared a state of emergency.

Little Fugitive in France is the blog of American rocker, Amy Rigby, who is living in a small village in France. In this post, The Ground and the Fury,  she muses about her first summer without her college-age daughter.

So why do I feel so sad sometimes? Shouldn’t I just be happy and enjoy myself?

And
strangely, sometimes I feel so angry. Where did the time go? Why didn’t
I cherish every single second? Why was I often selfish and distracted
and wanting to be somewhere else?

On top of all that, something
about watching your kid grow up and go off feels like the end of your
own youth. You had your chance to live that perfect summer again, and
it wasn’t perfect, but you did the best you could. And now the
do-over’s over.

This morning our friend Nick loaned us his
strimmer. The garden has gotten way too out of control. I’ve heard that
gardening, in addition to nurturing growing things, can often be more
about knocking things down.

And this strimmer – it roars and
whirls and sends leaves and earth flying. It feels so good to just
destroy every single overgrown plant in my path. And the best part – no
one can hear me scream.

The Brooklyn Nester, who has selected Martha Stewart as this week’s nester of the week, has tips for those endeavoring to clean their bedrooms. For starters, she says, "Don’t expect to finish." Read more at The Brooklyn Nester.

Just heard from a brand new blogger. Her blog Brklyn Stories is today’s “new blog on the block:”

I started Brklynstories.blogspot.com a week ago from my neighborhood located at the foot of Prospect Park and was wondering if my blog could be cross-listed on yours.

Although I intend my site to be resourceful, I am basically a roving eye that captures cultural and social issues that occur both in Brooklyn- and city-wide, contextualizing these effects upon the area in which I live.

As a writer, I never thought that I would get involved with online publishing. But thanks to a good friend, whose focus is literally underground, I jumped into the blogosphere.

When I moved to Kensington in 2001, the area was bleak – an extreme margin of New York City. The Brooklyn Museum was very run-down and there was no cultural center except for bars and cafes in Park Slope. In addition, friends in Williamsburg either had no idea about the F-train or were too afraid to come this far out. The recent developments in Kensington have been almost unreal.

As the petition for the F-express subway line boomed in early Summer, Fresh Direct expanded its coverage into our area. I waited nearly 3 years for this service, which I have to say is close to white-glove. Granted, I’m not sure if they’re servicing all of Kensington but you might as well key in your address to check. If not, there are two great organic food stores along Cortelyou that deliver anywhere in Brooklyn: the Flatbush Food Co-op and the Natural Frontier Organic Market.

She had a yen to go to Takashimaya, a Japanese department store on 5th Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan. And she wrote about it. I, too, went in there once because it looks so lovely fromoutside. As CT writes, ” There’s a calm, peaceful feeling in that place. The merchandise is minimal, so there’s plenty of room to walk around…”

Read more at Creative Times.

Runs Brooklyn is hanging up his running shoes and ending his ambitious quest to run every street in Brooklyn.

The final tally was 872 unique miles, or just over half of the total. I’ll leave it up to my loyal readers — all three of you — to work out whether the glass is half empty or half full, but I figured it was time to own up to the fact that I’m simply not going to run the other fifty percent.

It certainly was fun while it lasted, though. I got to see just about every neighborhood in the borough (okay, I didn’t actually run in Brooklyn Heights or Dumbo, but I’ve been to those places on other occasions), and ride almost every mile of subway. Along the way I also took over 2000 photos (some of which came out pretty cool, if I do say so myself), and met some great people. When I started this, one of my stated reasons was to “get to know the place a little better.” Well, I think I did. You could probably blindfold me, drop me off anywhere in the borough, and I’d know (well, within a minute or two) where I was and how to get home. I might not have accomplished everything that I set out to do, but I can’t complain, either.

Read the rest at RUNS BROOKLYN.

McBrooklyn knows where to watch the fireworks in Brooklyn…

Gowanus Lounge has the pix of the Floating Lady Pool

Check out DOTS’s song inspired by Brooklyn’s designation as bloggiest place in the USA. Will you sing it at the blogfest. Here’s a verse or two (to the tune of Froggie went a courtin’.

Bloggie went a-postin’,
and he did write, Uh-huh,
Bloggie went a-postin’, and he did write, Uh-huh,
Bloggie went a-postin’, and he did write.
With a mouse and a keyboard by his side, Uh-huh, Uh-huh, Uh-huh.

Well he wrote about the wrecking ball, Uh-huh,
Well he wrote about the wrecking ball, Uh-huh,
Well he wrote about the wrecking ball,
Eminent domain and suburban sprawl
Uh-huh, Uh-huh, Uh-huh.

Mom After-hours had this to say to the woman who asked, “Have I Become a Frump” on Park Slope Parents. “Lose the Lands End catalog. Subscribe to Lucky instead,’ she wrote on her blog. Here’s some more of what she had to say. Read more here.

It drives me up the wall whenever I read about the plight of women like her. Women who are so dedicated to being good mothers, good caregivers, and good partners they end up neglecting who they are. Since when did being a mother come to mean a life of self-denial? Since when did motherhood mean getting rid of stilettos and wearing in their stead, dare I say it, Birkenstocks? As if to be taken seriously as a mom, one has to look, in her words, frumpy. I am not that far in age from this woman; in a year and a half, I too will reach that half-century mark. But I have told my children and husband that if at any time they catch me about to put on a tracksuit (and I don’t jog), they should feel free to shoot me on the spot. This is not about vanity or selfishness. Only about self-love. I don’t buy the argument women frequently make, “I don’t have time”. That’s a lie often said by people who are really too lazy to use their imagination. We all have the time. We can all make the time. That is, if you really want to. Here’s a suggestion: lose the Lands End catalogue. Subscribe to Lucky instead!

See for yourself:

To the person(s) who stole my birdfeeder. I hope it brings happiness to your drab and small life. Enjoy!

This is the text of the note that I pinned to the spot where my birdfeeder used to hang on the tree, affectionately nicknamed the twig, in my front yard. It was my pleasure to listen to the sparrows, swallows and chickadees squabbling over the millet, cracked corn and sunflower seeds early in the morning as I rushed to get ready for work or in the late afternoon while I sat working at my computer.

Their blissful song was like the tinkling of bells or wind chimes, a joyous affirmation of hope and life.

Thank you, you small minded and craven unfortunates for trying to steal my bliss. I’m delighted to mention here that memory is shifty and cunning, that every time you fill my feeder with bird seed or watch the tiny birds milling about its slender perches, you will likely remember exactly how you acquired said bird feeder. Since you are a petty thief, you might have an itty-bitty bit of conscience, which here means your pleasure will be dampened by the ill-gotten gain of my birdfeeder.

I put a dingy, plastic container with seed next to the twig this morning when I got back to 611. My feathered friends still must eat, birdfeeder or no birdfeeder. Perhaps an old takeout container will be less appealing to you people, my charming, thieving neighbors. Or perhaps you are so needy and so unloved and so empty that you will steal that as well.

Cheers! I wish you nothing but unbridled joy! READ MORE AT MRS. CLEAVAGE’S DIARY

Because she writes stuff about stuff I’m into like Hazel Dickens, a legend in folk/country music, who doesn’t have a My Space page.

You know those moments in life where you read a book or see a film or hear a voice that changes the way you look at things? Hearing Hazel Dickens for the first time did that for me. Her recordings, with Alice Gerrard and then solo, were so honest, so close to reality they brought me to tears. Here was a woman conveying hard truth and beauty in the same notes. If I’d never known anything more about her she would’ve still had that effect on me. But when I learned how she’d grown up in a coal mining family, worked day jobs for most of the time she was writing and singing about working people – well, she was someone to look up to in many ways.

Also, Amy Rigby’s daughter is just a little older than Teen Spirit and I appreciate Rigby’s thoughtful musings on what happens when your child goes to college. She’s living in France and her boyfriend just went away for a few days:

But in the night I started thinking “I should go with him. Even if the UK authorities turn me away at the port like they almost did three weeks ago.”

Because I possibly don’t know how to be alone anymore?

Because I’m happy not being alone anymore?

Because when our kids go off to live their own lives, we don’t know what to do with ourselves, even if we’ve spent 18 years scratching and clawing for something that is our own identity, outside of being a parent, but then we realize in fact it was ALL about being a parent, about having somebody to do it for?

And without that, somehow writing a song seems more like…an artistic choice, rather than an imperative, a means of survival. And that freedom scares me.

Shit.

Come back soon Eric, make me laugh, keep me busy and save me from thinking about this stuff!

This from Seeing Green 

"Well, today is World Shutdown Day, an ominous-sounding moniker that
merely means that you are requested to turn off power-using devices for
the day. Particularly your computer. Since I am writing this on the
morning of the 24th., I am obviously not following the party line…read more at Seeing Green.

Over at the Brooklyn Record, a DUMBO tipster laments that Bubby’s isn’t doing well.

"I am saddened to note what appear to be the early warning signs that
one of DUMBO’s main eateries may be in the early stages of a painful
death," writes in one tipster about Bubby’s, the Brooklyn offshoot of
the successful TriBeCa restaurant of the same name.

More at Brooklyn Record for the six signs that the restaurant may be in dire straits. Don’t panic yet. She could be wrong, y’know.

I had tried.

Believe me, I had tried. I had written Post-It notes to myself. I had
mentioned it several times to my wife and begged her to remind me
(isn’t that what wives are for?) I told my 9-year old who has the
memory of a steel trap and can remember the name of the ship that
7-of-9 (my favorite character) from Star Trek Voyager was abandoned in,
a show that he saw, oh perhaps 2-1/2 years ago. I even threatened him
with severe consequences (ok, cancellation of one Star Trek episode) if
he didn’t remind me. I sent an email to myself (which, under the
circumstances, could’ve been futile.)

To no avail.

I woke up in a cold sweat this morning.  I had forgotten! I
dreaded the trek up the fifteen steps to my office. What would I find
there? Could I even open the door? The room was dark, I having
remembered to close the darkening drapes the night before. Ominous and
still. I opened the door slowly and glanced fearfully inside, prepared
for the worst. What would I be faced with on my desk? A smoking hulk? A
dead lump of plastic and silicon? A sullen monster prepared to bite the
hand that had lovingly keystroked it all these years? All my files
destroyed, my memories erased, my pictures fragmented?

READ WHAT HAPPENED AT SEEING GREEN!

 Here’s the press release:

NEW YORK, NY
(January 23) – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s
largest bookseller, today announced the next event in its new series,
“Upstairs at the Square,” held at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in Manhattan
(33 East 17th Street at Union Square).  On Tuesday, February 6th, at
7PM, Paul Auster, acclaimed novelist, poet and translator whose latest
work is a new novel entitled Travels in the Scriptorium (Henry Holt
& Company, January 23), and Sophie Auster, whose eponymous debut
album has won her a growing fan base in the U.S. and Europe,
discuss and perform their work. Journalist Katherine Lanpher will again
host the program.  Admission is free, and no tickets are required.
Seating is available on a first-come, first-serve basis. 

Paul Auster is the Brooklyn-based bestselling author of 12 previous novels, including The Brooklyn
Follies, Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, and Timbuktu.  His work
has been translated into more than 30 languages.  Both chilling and
poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is described as vintage Auster:
mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an
obscure tormentor.  And yet, as we discover during one day in the life
of Mr. Blank, his world is not so different from our own.  A man pieces
together clues to his past—and the identity of his captors—in this
fantastic, labyrinthine novel.

Recently featured on the cover of Rolling Stone in Spain,
in a French Elle spread entitled “Brooklyn Baby,” and as one of Paper
magazine’s “Beautiful People,” singer, actress, model and college
student Sophie Auster (www.sophieauster.com) can confidently be called
one to watch.  In her self-titled CD, Sophie Auster, she sings the
translated poetry of Robert Desnos, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard,
Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, and of course, a few works by her
father, Paul Auster, to the accompaniment of original music by Michael
Hearst and Joshua Camp of cult-favorite musical duo One Ring Zero. 

Katherine
Lanpher is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist.
Springboard Press recently published her first book, Leap Days:
Chronicle of a Midlife Move.The rest of the Upstairs at the Square is in the continuation below.

Continue reading TWO AUSTERS AT UPSTAIRS AT THE SQUARE →

Creative Times has an interview with legendary glassware designer, Eve Ziesel. Here’s a short excerpt. Read the rest at Creative Times, Eleanor Taubman’s cool blog.

I first learned about Eva Zeisel during a June 2006 episode of CBS News Sunday Morning.
She was born in 1938 to a Jewish family in Hungary, and, over the
course of her life, has designed roughly 100,000 glass and ceramic
objects. As a young adult, she was made Director of Glass and China for
the USSR. A year later, she was arrested and imprisoned for 16 months
in Moscow on suspicion of plotting to assassinate Stalin (!). Twelve of
those months she spent in solitary confinement. She was released for
reasons unknown to her.

The Brooklyn Record discovered an interesting blog by two residents of Windsor Terrace who are traveling in Uganda.

It’s called A&K in Uganda and it’s really interesting. Here’s an excerpt from their Christmas eve post.

I will be following their travels for sure. It would be neat if thousands of Brooklynites followed their blog and learned about life in Uganda, as well as Aimee and Kevin.

"It is December 24th and it is 9am and we are chugging down the choked
highways of Kampala toward the bus park. We are determined to get to
Gulu. We have been communicating with the organization, “Invisible
Children”, for some months, ever since our friend introduced the
documentary of the same name to us. The film tells the story of the
children who have been displaced by the civil war in northern Uganda…

"Anyway, our initial movement toward Uganda came as a result of the
film. Last Spring we started planning. Kevin has a friend at NYU who
works for Invisible Children, now an NGO (non-government organization),
and over the course of the last several months we have been speaking
with her and also e-mailing the Ugandan staff. Aimee, who has been
working as a doula for over two years, hoped to assist in some way.
Kevin, who has been working in educational theater, was curious to see
if there was a place for him to work with children or prisoners. Our
plan was to arrive in Kampala, settle for a day, then meet up with a
group from Invisible Children and take a bus with them to Gulu – 360
kilometers (1 k = 2/3 mile) to the North; just 80 kilometers from the
Sudanese border.

"In many ways we are so glad that our luggage
never arrived. Kevin has been wearing the same jeans for eight days.
Aimee has managed, somehow, to find the perfect African style. She has
her African dress (see: mu-mu) and a wrap, which she manages to finagle
into several strikingly different looking outfits. She’s getting a lot
of compliments from Ugandan and muzungu alike."

Seeing Green today shows student alternatives to AY. Here are excerpts.

Architecture  students at the University of Miami envision the Atlantic yards project thus,
under the direction of Professor John Massengale. He notes that there
is almost as much housing in this version as in the Ratner build-out.

You will note that this rendering displays a project that is considerably more in scale with the surrounding brownstone neighborhoods (above) as compared to the  Ratner mega-lith (right):

Seeing Green urges all to get on over to the Brooklyn Museum to see a not to be missed trio of artists at the Liebovitz’s "to-die-for
portrait of the glowering Cheney with the rest of the Bush cabinet." Now
thru Jan 28/Feb 11, 11-6, 200 Eastern Parkway.

Walton Ford’s hyper-realistic watercolors of animals and flora are "wry
and subversive comments on society,"… Ron Mueck’s

ultra-hyper-realistic sculptures of
brooding/angry/explicit men and women are extraordinary, if not as much
for their fine-artistic merit as for their level of detail and imagery.  [images:

For pictures of the Revere Sugar Plant in Red Hook go to Gowanus Lounge. Here’s an excerpt from his photo/post.

The Revere Sugar Plant in Red Hook
is being taken apart piece by piece, packed into huge dumpsters and
driven away, as a prelude to a much more dramatic tear down. The iconic
dome that defined Red Hook’s waterfront for generations, has already
had a half-dozen square holes cut in it. We will have more tomorrow,
but for today, here are a few photos from Death Row the site that developer Joe Sitt is clearing. The truck scene (above), the executioners demolition workers and some onlookers.

Gowanus Lounge has word via the Park Slope Courier that Coney Island’s ulitmate icon and most illustrious ride may be sold next. Check out his story.

While you’re over at the Lounge, read GL’s story about the status of  Revere Sugar Factory, which did not get demolished yesterday. "Thor’s
spokesperson, who usually speaks to reporters, refused to confirm or
deny the impending demolition or to say when it would occur," writes GL.

Check out Seeing Green’s regular Monday feature: Green News of the Week.

Eat Smog but don’t Die! A while ago a friend of mine,
admittedly a Volvo fanatic, told me that Volvo radiators "eat smog."
Unlikely as this may sound, since 2000, Volvo radiators have had a
coating of "PremAir" which is a catalyst which, applied on hot
surfaces, destroys ozone as it flows over it. Comes now a whole
building, the euphoniously named Dives in Misericordia Church, that may do the same thing…

Today Gowanus Lounge is running a gift guide. But he’s got an interesting theme. Give the gift of good karma, support an organization that you believe in that’s doing good things in Brooklyn or the world.

Our focus in today’s first installment will be memberships in or donations to Brooklyn organizations or Brooklyn-based groups that would make cool holiday gifts. The guide is very selective and we’ve probably left out obvious choices or favorites, but here goes…

Added Value. You can’t become a member of Added Value–the
good people that run programs for young people in Red Hook and operate
a community farm and farmers markets–but you can certainly make a
contribution to the cause in someone’s name. They do good work. Helping
them would make a cool gift. Check out their donation page here.

Slope Street Cats. No membership here, but you can donate to Slope Street Cats,
a Park Slope group that works to control the population of feral cats
and links a lot of people to adoptions of cats. They run educational
programs and do a lot of good work and you can make a donation here in someone’s name as a gift and get a big deposit of Good Kitty Karma to boot.

Check in on Gowanus Lounge all week to see what other gift ideas he has.

Dope on the Slope has a post about the newish book, Brooklyn By Name, which he thinks makes an ideal gift for those who are Brooklyn obsessed. H

Here’s an excerpt from the entry about  Charles Carroll (1737-1832) for whom a number of places in South Brooklyn are named:

When
he died at the age of ninety-five, he was the final surviving signer of
the Declaration of Independence. (Daniel Webster referred to him as the
"venerable old relic.") The naming of Carroll Street and Carroll Gardens
was likely influenced by the many Irish Americans who settled in the
area, as well as Carroll’s association with the heroic Marylanders who
defended the Old Stone House.