Shams M. Tarek, a reader of OTBKB and a freelance photographer, invites everyone to check out his great photos of Bensonhurst after Italy won the World Cup Final.
Category Archives: Other Bloggers
THE DOPE ON THE BKLYN BLOGS: HOW MANY, HOW DIVERSE?
You must check out Dope on the Slope ‘s quasi-scientific and fascinating post about Brooklyn blogging and issues of diversity. He’s trying to figure out how many blogs there are in Brooklyn. He’s even got charts.
Two questions that came up regularly at the recent Brooklyn Blogfest were:
- Just how many Brooklyn blogs are there?
- How diverse is the blogosphere in our borough?
- Does anyone care? Should they care?
WHO’S RIGHT: A NEW BLOG ON THE BLOCK
There’s a new blog on the block. And it looks like fun. Check it out. It’s called Who’s Right and the blogger’s girlfriend wrote to tell me about it. Apparently, her boyfriend is oh so-good at telling her who’s right and wrong
(with a lengthy, funny, sarcasm-laden description). Now, he wants to start a
blog called "Who’s Right".
Whenever, they get in an argument, she always says,
"I wish we had a third party here to tell us who’s right and who’s
WRONG!".
So her boyfriend thought it would be fun to give his opinionated
third party thoughts on other people’s arguments. But he’s just getting
started and desperately needs your stories to get the ball rolling. So,
if you have issues, you’ll be able to send them in.
Do you have a fight with your
boyfriend/girlfriend/roommate/parent/complete stranger you want settled
once and for all?
He’s still building the site (
whosright.typepad.com), but once it’s up you can see
your side of the story vindicated on the web (anon if you want, of course).
BRAIN TERRAIN’S GUIDE TO SUMMER IN THE CITY
Michelle, who sent me the info about the Trash show has a great and informative post on her own blog, BRAIN TERRAIN, a blog for or New Yorkers interested in more than just drinking, clubbing, and networking, about summer in the city. I include some of it here and urge you to check it out. She will be updating this list frequently. Thanks, Michelle.
New York Summer Street Fair Schedule.
What’s New York without a dozen street fairs each weekend? Stroll down
the avenue, pick up a falafel sandwich and a lemonade, buy unique
jewelry you won’t find anywhere else. All at bargain prices!
Shakespeare in the Park is back with Macbeth!
Runs until June 9th. You can pick up your free ticket on the day of the
performance (two free tickets per person), but be sure to arrive early
to brave the long lines. I’d recommend getting there at 9 am. Is it
worth it? You decide.
In the winter, Bryant Park is an ice rink. In the summer, Bryant Park becomes a mecca for all sorts of events, including the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival, the Good Morning America Concert Series, the Broadway snippets, and the noontime Word for Word reading series. Oh, and don’t forget Piano in the Park, everyday from 12-2 pm.
There’s never a dull moment at Central Park Summerstage,
which features readings and concerts every summer. Next up: on Friday,
a documentary about six musicians who fled the violence of their native
Sierra Leone and started playing together in the refugee camps of
Guinea.
Celebrate Brooklyn! Performing Arts Festival at Prospect Park. Once again, the bandshell is open to jazz, rock, reggae, classical concerts and much more!
Madison Square Park reads, sponsored by the National Book Foundation, starts Thursday with authors Susannah Lessard, Paula Uruburu, and Miriam Berman reading. 6:30 pm.
The Naumburg Concerts
start on Tuesday, June 27 at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park
(mid-park at the 72nd St entrance). The Imani Winds, the genre-busting
African–American/Latino woodwind quintet, will be playing. The
ensemble’s repertoire merges classical European and Pan-African music,
providing a unique blend of classical, world and jazz music. 7:30 pm.
The River to River Festival. Don’t know about you, but I’m saving the dates for Hot Chip and Belle and Sebastian.
And there’s always the trusty NYC litscape calendar.
This
will be constantly updated and referred to during the summer. If you
know of any other ongoing free events, please let me kno
CREATIVE TIMES DOES JUNE BIRTHDAYS
Creative Times is one cool site. She’s got a great list of June birthdays. Be sure to check out her blog, which is a terrific art and creativity site. Can’t wait to see July. Hepcat’s day = Diego Valazquez, Teen Spirit = Anne Frank, Manhattan Granny = Judy Garland.
- Marilyn Monroe, actress
- Dana Carvey, actor and comedian
- Josephine Baker, dancer and actress
- Bruce Dern, actor
- Bill Moyers, TV journalist
- Diego Velazquez, artist
- The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, singer and songwriter
- Frank Lloyd Wright, architect
- Johnny Depp, actor
- Judy Garland, actress and singer
- Jacques Yves Cousteau, oceanographer
- Anne Frank, diarist
- William Butler Yeats, poet
- Margaret Bourke-White, photographer
- Helen Hunt, actress
- Tupak Shakur, rapper
- Venus Williams, tennis champ
- Isabella Rossellini, actress
- Paula Abdul, singer and dancer
- Lionel Richie, singer, songwriter, musician
- Juliette Lewis, actress
- Cyndi Lauper, songwriter, singer, actress
- Wilma Rudolph, Olympic runner
- Fred Hoyle, astrophysic and astronomer
- Carly Simon, singer and songwriter
- Pearl S. Buck, writer
- Hellen Keller, radical educator and writer
- John Cusack, actor
- Claude Montana, fashion designer
- Lena Horne, actress and singer
ODETTA TO PERFORM AT METRO TECH
A Brooklyn Life got the scoop on BAM’s outdoor concert series at Metro Tech with Odetta on Thursday June 22nd – hey that’s this Thursday at noon.
Following up on last week’s post
about free summer music fests (which got bizarrely off-topic in the
comments section…who knew the mere mention of Laurie Anderson could
rile people up so much?!), there’s yet another festival which I had
hadn’t heard about until, well, about two minutes ago. Thursdays at
noon this summer, BAM is hosting a free concert series, starting this week with folk-blues grand dame Odetta.
Well into her 70s, she more than merits blowing off work for a day (or
at the very least a lunch break).
Canaries in the Goldmine: The Emerging Arts in New York City
Got this in my inbox today from my good friend in Kingston, NY. Funny because it was written in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by the director of the Galapagos Art Space.
Recently
two developers walked into the Brooklyn apartment of my friend and told
him he had nothing to worry about – they weren’t going to tear down the
building he was living in for at least another year. My friend, a
filmmaker, thinks he can’t possibly afford to stay in New York, and
he’s not alone.The canaries in New
York City’s real estate gold mine – the emerging arts – are no longer
talking about the next show they hope to land, they’re talking about
the next city they think they can land in once their current lease runs
out.But for many that lease on life
has already run out. Affordable habitat in the cultural ecosystem is
becoming hard to find. For everyone.Within the next few months, ten off-Broadway theaters will permanently close *.
The
price of real estate has risen so far that, from a cultural point of
view, in three to five years we’ll be experiencing a fundamentally
different idea of what it means to live in New York City and be a New
Yorker. City Hall must find ways to incentivize rebuilding the emerging
arts infrastructure that’s evaporating in our white-hot real estate
market, or it won’t be built.
The past:
For the last fifty years the emerging arts in New York City have attracted the one smartest kid from everywhere.
These young cultural migrants scratched out a two or three-day-a-week
freelance career, lived cheaply and brazenly and learned the street
smarts that would one day transform their art or adopted industry. Not
everyone who begins as an artist ends up with a career as an artist,
and the result for New York City has been a significant contribution
from the arts to the culture of aggressive and intelligent management
that helped make New York the leader in the arts, finance and media
industries.The present:
In
a New York too expensive to incubate young artists many of these best
young minds will fly right past our exploding real-estate market and
rezoned artistic neighborhoods to cultivate and grow cultural and
economic opportunities in other, less expensive cities. It’s important
to remember that these young artists have no loyalty to New York;
they’re from places like Des Moines after all.Many
in New York City believe that the vital underground of emerging
artists’ environments is here to stay ‘just because’. This is wrong. New York doesn’t have to be
the cultural capital of the emerging arts, or of the financial or the
media industries for that matter, New York needs to continue to earn
its place and it can easily price itself out of that role **. London is
only one of many capable cities who are very busy trying to beat us at
our best industries.
(To read about our need to expand Galapagos Art Space click here)
Continue reading Canaries in the Goldmine: The Emerging Arts in New York City
BROOKLYN VEGAN HAS THE SHOTS
Noel Mendez took the pictures and Brooklyn Vegan has them on his site in all their glory. Prince at Celebrate Brooklyn Thursday night.
DON’T READ THIS, IT’S MEAN
I was just checking out a site I’d never seen called The Slope Via The Lake and I came across this:
Annoying Lady: Apparently I am not the only one who finds Smartmom (local Park Slope columnist and blogger) incredibly annoying…
Nice.
ON MEMORIAL DAY
This from on-line columnist, John Nichols, on The Nation’s blog.
The wisdom of wars can be debated on any day, and this column has not hesitated to question the thinking — or, to be more precise, the lack of thinking — that has led the United States to the current quagmire in Iraq.
But on Memorial Day, it is well to pause from the debate to remember those whose lives have been lost, not merely to the fool’s mission of the contemporary moment but to all those battles – noble and ignoble – that have claimed the sons and daughters of this and every land.
After the bloodiest and most divisive of America’s wars, the poet Walt Whitman offered a dirge for two soldiers of the opposing armies — Civil War veterans, buried side by side. His poem is an apt reminder that, when the fighting is done, those who warred against one another often find themselves in the same place. It is appropriate that we should garland each grave, understanding on this day above all others that wars are conceived by presidents and prime ministers, not soldiers.
It is appropriate, as well, and perhaps a bit soothing, to recall Whitman’s wise words:
The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.
Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.
I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they are flooding,
As with voices and with tears.
I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.
For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.)
And nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.
In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d,
(‘Tis some mother’s large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)
O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
Blogger B61 on the New Red Hook Fairway
This from B61 productions, Red Hook’s premiere blogger:
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Shoppers began streaming to the new Fairway last Wednesday by car, bike "It’s a good opportunity. Everybody’s
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LITTLE LIGHT ON SPINSTERHOOD
Another excerpt from Little Light, whose blog, Laments of the Unfinished, is an OTBKB fave.
See, I told you I’d get back to this feeling. (This is how I generally
feel when my medication isn’t going awry.) Anyway, it’s funny when
people you’ve known for awhile start wondering about your spinsterhood
status. Funny looks, questions about your background, unsolicited
advice, even a little eye rolling here and there – oh and lots of
commentary. There are times when I think it bothers other people more
than it bothers me.I’ve given up trying to figure out why I’m
single or more specifically, what could be wrong. Nothing’s wrong! I
may live to be 95 and be single my entire life and there still wouldn’t
be anything wrong with me. No one gets everything they want out of
life. All of us have disappointment in one form or another and whether
or not I like it, I will have to accept it. (I’ve certainly dated
people, but to say that my relationships have gotten anywhere close to
marriage would be an out and out lie.)I guess it seems weird
because it sounds like someone who says they’re looking for a job, but
can’t find one. You know that if they really wanted a job (in this
economy, anyway) they would find one, so evidently they’re not doing
something crucial like sending out a resume. It’s really easy to find a
job in which you’re overqualified, but it can be more difficult to find
a job that suits you.We’re also trained to believe there is
something wrong if we don’t have some mad passionate romantic love at
every stage in our life (high school, college, young adulthood – and
then finally you can get married). Well maybe that’s a New York thing.
When I start believing this, I find myself unhappier.There’s no
formula or rule to finding love – you can "put yourself out there,"
"open your heart," "smile," stop looking, go online, go to parties, go
on blind dates, make yourself vulnerable, shop in the right stores, go
on the right vacations, wear the right make-up, read the right books,
watch Dr. Phil and go on some learn-how-to-date show and it still
may not happen. Then what are you supposed to do? Wonder what the hell
is wrong with you and begin a downward spiral of self-recrimination
because you’re not married or in serial relationships like everyone
else you know?This is one of the reasons I liked the 40-year-old Virgin.
Yes, it was incredibly vulgar – unbelievably so actually, but he went
from being embarrassed about his status and trying to cover it up to
being honest and validated. He didn’t have to be the way his friends
were in order to be acceptable and he gained respect for it.This
is what I consider acceptance. It just is. No one says you have to like
something, but you can be at peace with it and that’s where I am in
this moment in time.