There’s a new blog on the block about Kensington. It’s called Kensington (Brooklyn),  dedicated to one of the last affordable (and safe!) areas within reasonable
commuting distance to Manhattan. Currently, seeing a resurgence of
young apartment and home buyers. Residents should use this blog as a
forum to discuss and contribute to local businesses and improvements.

Teen Spirit attended last night’s production of the Wooster Group’s Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse and mostly enjoyed it. He loved the very unusual staging and acting by this very talented, very experimental theater troupe, pioneers in the field of experimental theater.

I found this on Fisherspooner’s blog. They did the music for the production.

The
Wooster Group’s Hamlet is an archaeological excursion into America’s
cultural past, looking for archetypes that shadow forth our identity. The Wooster group has been drawn to Richard Burton’s Hamlet, a 1964 Broadway
production which was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles
and edited into a film that was shown for only two days in 2000 movie
houses across the US. The idea of bringing a live theater experience to
thousands of simultaneous viewers in different cities was trumpeted as
new form called "Theatrofilm", made possible through "the miracle of
Electronicvision". The Wooster Group’s Hamlet attempts to reverse the
process, reconstructing a hypothetical theater piece from the
fragmentary evidence of the edited film, like an archeologist inferring
an improbable temple from a collection of ruins. Channeling the ghost
of the legendary 1964 performance, the Group descends into a kind of
madness, intentionally replacing its own spirit with the spirit of
another.

Show dates are:
Feb. 27-28
March 1-4, 6-11, 13-18, 20-25
All shows are at 8PM, except for Sunday’s which are at 4PM.

In a report released yesterday by the Coalition for the Homeless, the number of
homeless families in NYC climbed to 9,287 in February — a new record.

The total number of homeless New Yorkers grew
by 11 percent in the last year; the number of homeless families and children grew by
around 18 percent each.

These sobering statistics come midway through Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s five-year plan to combat homelessness.

“When something has been implemented and as gone this wrong, what
we need is for Mayor Bloomberg to step up, admit that the mistake has
been made, and to take corrective action immediately,” Mary
Brosnahan Sullivan of the Coalition for the Homeless told New York 1.

The report also says that the number of single
adults entering the shelter system has dropped for the second year in a
row.

READ THE REPORT HERE

This morning Hepcat moved the car. He double parked for a while. Then he found a space on Third Street. But now it’s parked on a big sheet of ice and he can’t move it. The car just spins its wheels.

"The whole thing was stupid," he says. "They didn’t plow the streets anyway so it’s worse than before. At least it is in Park Slope. It’s vastly worse."

Hepcat is convinced that Bloomberg made a big mistake. "They should have let people leave the cars where they are. They forced everyone to drive around which isn’t very safe when the streets are all icy. Now everyone is parked a foot and half away from the sidewalk. The streets are narrower, everyone’s going to get stuck, and they didn’t even plow."

Stupid.

The moment has finally arrived. This from New York 1:

Eminent domain was battled in a
Brooklyn court Wednesday, as 13 property owners tried to save their
homes from the developers of the Atlantic Yards project.

The property owners claim that the state is violating the
Constitution through their use of eminent domain to clear the way for
the project.

The project’s developer, Forest City Ratner, the state, and city want the case be dismissed.

On Wednesday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed his support of the process.

Critics of the project also claim the area cannot handle the development that is planned for the Atlantic Yards.
            
            
       

I met Marty Markowitz in the Green Room at WNBC where both of us were being interviewed by the very nice John Noel for News Forum Now, a Saturday morning show that is also viewable on the WNBC website.

I was surprised that Marty had never heard of "Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn" – being that he’s all things Brooklyn and all.

One of his associates did say that they’d seen my piece about the 11-year-old boy who wrote the letter about the B67 bus.

"We’re still waiting for his second letter," the associate said.

While Marty waited for his time to go into the studio I made chit chat.

"You’re on the Park Slope 100."

Marty didn’t know what I was talking about and he seemed a little suspicious. He said that he’s on a lot of lists, including Develop Don’t Destroy. These are contentious times, indeed. Daniel Goldstein tells me that DDDB never put him on any kind of list. "I’m sure that many of us over here in the footprint indeed are on his list," Goldstein writes in an email.

"No, no. It’s a list of people I like," I said. Marty smiled. "It a very eclectic list. Daniel Goldstein’s on the list, too. So is Gary Pierre-Pierre, editor of the Haitian Times. And the blue haired lady at Shawn’s.

Marty looked relieved. Sort of. And confused. He asked about the blue haired lady. He asked where Shawn’s is located.

I explained. He asked me if I’d seen his newsletter. Apparently they are always looking for interesting neighborhood people to profile.

"Is it blue like old lady blue?" one of his associates asked.

"No, it’s hipster blue. She’s a Park Slope hipster and a real fixture on Seventh Avenue. " I said by way of clarification.

He asked one of his associate to jot down the address of Shawn’s. He made note of it, too. I told him that Lisa Polansky is also on the list. I thought that might reassure him that this was not on some kind of weird "Enemies List"." Y’know, the store that sells everything and it’s crammed in there from floor to ceiling.

He never heard of Lisa Polansky?

Marty wrote her name down, too. I told him the names of other people who are on the list — Catherine Bohne from Community Books, Maxine from Stitch Therapy, Elise Long, Liz Phillips, principal of PS 321, the bartender/hairdresser at The Gate.

I forgot to tell him that Debby Garcia, who is on his staff and organizes the summer concerts at Coney Island, is on the list.

Other names like Debbie Almontasser, Rabbi Andy Bachman, Jonathan Blum, and Alan Berger of the Brooklyn Free School all slipped my mind. And that’s just an A and some B’s.

I wonder if they’ll really get in touch with Hillary (AKA the blue haired lady) at Shawn’s.

MAR 14*—31, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents Edward Scissorhands.
(SEE BELOW FOR SPECIFIC DATES AND TIMES)

BAM HOWARD GILMAN OPERA HOUSE
SUBSCRIPTION TICKETS: $24, 40, 56, 64
FULL PRICE: $30, 50, 70, 80

*SPRING GALA: FOR INFO AND TICKETS CALL BAM PATRON SERVICES AT 718.636.4182

BAMDIALOGUE WITH MATTHEW BOURNE
MAR 15 AT 6PM
BAM ROSE CINEMAS
TICKETS: $8 ($4 FOR FRIENDS OF BAM)

Known for bending the conventions of theater—from his all-male swan corps in Swan Lake to the dance-drama Play Without Words to his edgy choreography for Mary Poppins on Broadway—Matthew Bourne returns to BAM with a witty re-imagining of Tim Burton’s beloved film, Edward Scissorhands (20th Century Fox). A huge hit at its London premiere, the production comes to BAM for a strictly limited three-week run.

Following the death of his young son, a brokenhearted inventor consoles
himself the only way he knows how: by building a new boy, Edward.
Tragedy strikes again when the inventor dies before completing his work
and the bewildered Edward, left with scissors in lieu of hands, flees
to a candy-colored suburban community. It’s not long before the entire
town embraces his unique hair-cutting and topiary talents, and he falls
for the teenaged daughter of the family that takes him in.
Miraculously, she’s smitten as well, and their tenderly realized love
story forms the heart of Bourne’s stage interpretation, told entirely
without dialogue.

Adding to the magic are exquisite sets and costumes, and music based on
themes from the captivating film score. Each element, in concert with
wonderful performances by the 24-member company, propels the story to
an enchanted place where even the hedges—which Edward so lovingly
shapes—spring to joyous life.

• BASED ON THE ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE BY ARRANGEMENT WITH 20TH CENTURY FOX
• ORIGINAL STORY AND MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY TIM BURTON
• ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY STORY AND CO-ADAPTATION BY CAROLINE THOMPSON
• DESIGNED BY LEZ BROTHERSTON
• LIGHTING DESIGNED BY HOWARD HARRISON
• SOUND DESIGNED BY PAUL GROOTHUIS

Park Slope writer Tom Rayfiel isn’t planning on leaving Brooklyn anytime soon. No way. In fact, he’s got a book coming out next week that should be a popular choice for Park Slope book groups and should cause quite the buzz on Park Slope Parents.

Tom is reading from his new book PARALLEL PLAY on January 16th at Barnes and Noble at 7:30 p.m.

The book, which is gathering fantastic reviews, is the third novel he’s written about his very compelling female protagonist, Eve. Here’s Tom (from the Random House website) in an interview with novelist Don Caron.  

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe women think and react in radically different ways than men do?

TOM RAYFIEL: I’ll let Marron,one of the characters in the book, answer: “I don’t believe there’s any difference between male and female. I mean, they’re useful distinctions, for bathrooms in restaurants and stuff like that. But they’re artificial. They’re imposed on us by society. Really we’re this complex mixture of both."

That, it seems to me, with all the problems it presents, is still a more fruitful approach than to regard the opposite sex as some fundamentally unknowable “other” only capable of being depicted from without…My understanding is basically this: Inside every straight middle-aged man is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling to get out. (My female side just happened to emerge in a book and not on Vesey Street at four A.M.) By concentrating on the aspects of my personality that society deems “feminine,” I was able to discern a pattern, and finally a character, a voice, that was myself and yet not myself.

As for special difficulties or sensitivities, yes, I do show my work to my wife and other women and ask, “Is my slip is showing?” I don’t always take their advice, though. There are as many different women as there
are people…

Eve was a great
way to escape the hackneyed concerns of what a man setting out to write is often faced with, that barren, overgrazed field. For me, she was like a scraper, peeling the paint off flaking surfaces, getting down to something more structural and load-bearing. The wood. The wall.

This is Paul Auster’s famous story: "Auggie Wren’s Christmas". Enjoy.

Continue reading A PAUL AUSTER CHRISTMAS →

The Park was a happening place this weekend chock full as it was of Halloweenish activities. We were most impressed with the Boo at the Zoo event particularly the Spooky barn.

Talk about scary. It reminded me of some kind of regional produciton of "Marat Sade." A bunch of actors in frightening costumes and make up acting up a storm inside a dark barn.

An older man dressed as a scarecrow (his arms still on the stick) welcomed the kids in and told them not to be scared. "Hold on to your parents. We lost three parents last year. Hold on to yours." He goes from being Mr. Nice Guy to a Spookmeister real fast.
"Lock the door, don’t let them out. Nobody gets out of here…" A bunch a kids made a bee-line for the exit. "You can’t leave." he said.

All in good fun. The whole experience takes up less than a minute and the kids are back in the bright sun before you know it.

OSFO said she was scared out of her mind. Especially when the Dracula actor was grabbing for kids and tried to grab her from me.

Afterwards she ran into a good friend. "Don’t go in the Spooky Barn. Trust me, it’s really scary."

If you ever considered leaving New York for a better life anywhere, you’ll want to hear Lori Soderland’s book about her adventures in pursuit of a better life out west.

COME TO THE FIRST BROOKLYN READING WORKS OF THE YEAR AND HEAR LORI SODERLAND AND MARY STERNBACH.

At the Old Stone House. 8 p.m.   Go here for a map and directions to the Old Stone House.
The Old stone House is located in JJ Byrne Park on Fifth Avenue between
3rd and 4th Street. Light refreshments and books are sold at all
readings. Scroll down for the complete 2006-2007 Readings Schedule.

September 21, 2006

Lori Soderland, author of CHASING MONTANA (UW Press) will read from her non-fiction work about leaving New York City for Montana.

Park Slope writer, Mary Sternbach will read from her novel, ROBERT FOSTER,
which examine race and artistic expression in 1930’s Hollywood. Mary’s work has been published in Paper Street and she was a contributor of
over 500 film reviews for the movie guide: SEE THAT, NOW WHAT.  She is
currently working on a non-fiction book about interactivity and
experiential experiences. 

HERE’S A BLURB ABOUT LORI’S BOOK, CHASING MONTANA:

Lori, the heroine of this rousing narrative, is attempting to flee the hectic East Coast for a better life in the West. She is a child of the Seventies who feels misled by the rebellious "boomer" generation and disappointed with life in 1980s New Jersey. Spurred by the tale of her pioneering grandparents, who immigrated to Montana, and following her friend Madeleine, who has all the answers, Lori quits her job, loosens her ties, and sets off into a wild frontier.

Lori’s story is one of love for people and for places that are more mythic than real. Her pursuit is as painfully familiar as it is impossible: she seeks meaning in life while working dead-end jobs, falls in love with uninterested partners, and plans a future that seems doomed from the start. Somehow, though, she persists and ultimately finds her place as a twenty-first-century pioneer.

"An understated and moving memoir that feels like a road trip with a really good friend. But more than that, it’s a subtle social commentary, a travel story, a coming out, and an epitaph for the ghost towns of the West. Chasing Montana will be a new road favorite for meandering women across the land."–Mack Friedman, author of Setting the Lawn on Fire

"I rolled down my window. The air rushed in like a flood of invisible cotton, soft and edgeless. It smelled like the earth baked in sun. Oh god: it could all be so beautiful, it could, it could, if we wanted. I yelled above the radio and the wind rushing in: ‘Madeleine, I want to be free as wild horses, I want to live among the buffalo, I want to let my hair grow to my knees and swim naked in cold rivers. I want to live, to live, to live until I die and nothing can stop me now. I WANT TO BE FREEEEEEE!’ "–Excerpt from Chasing Montana

It started at 6 a.m. on Wednesday at the S line at the
Rockaway Park-Beach 116th Street station in Queens. Two men began their quest to traverse the entire subway system, passing through more than 400 stations,
before arriving at the Pelham Bay Park station in the Bronx on the 6
line in less than 25 hours, 11 minutes and 8 seconds, which will set a speed record.

Matthew Green, 26 and Don Badaczewski, 24,
have doen crazy things before including a 2002 taco-eating contest, which ended in a tie at 18, when
they were undergraduates at the University of Virginia. 

You can see their detailed itinerary in a posting
online at blog.myspace.com/subwaychallenge.

Those
who want to track the progress of Green and Badaczewski’s subway sojoun can
call 718-407-4697 and gain access to voicemail messages that the two
men plan to leave frequently by cellphone.

I got this email about the pesticide spraying from an OTBKB reader.

Dear OTBKB,

I read your blog and saw your alert about the Pesticide spraying the
other day.

I followed the spray trucks throughout the streets that night in a friend’s car and I, who have been against this spraying since it started, was beyond astounded at what I witnessed.  Children & families sitting on stoops, teenagers playing basketball, people walking their dogs, people eating in restaurants on Fifth  Avenue, all sprayed by New York City’s spray trucks and doused with pesticides.

I think you should look here (link below) as to what really went on. I think you could do a great job letting others know what New York City is *really* doing when they say they are spraying communities with pesticides.

See link here:

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/74940.html

And also:

http://www.nospray.org

.

OTBKB has one hell of an exclusive. A Park Slope friend and her ten-year-old daughter are enroute to Burning Man and she will be sending me daily diary entries. I’m convinced that there will be some way for her to email me from there although Burning Man is decidedly low tech. Ther’s no electricity, no showers, no stores, no commerce at all. Make art. Barter. Walk around naked, ride a bike, paint your body blue.

We spent a few days with Burning Man Mom and Child in San Francisco and she drove us back to the farm, her mini-van stuffed with camping equipment, lanterns and kites from Chinatown, a Butane stove and two bikes that they picked up from a guy who sells cheap bikes to those, who are goint to Burning Man.

At Burning Man, 40,000 people camp out, create sophisticated temporary dwellings, bring RVs and generators, huge amounts of water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, food, materials for shelter and decorations for your abode and your body.

Burning Man is not for the faint of heart. It’s like Woodstock in the desert without the bands (though there’s lots of homemade music), without the mud. 107 degrees heat and sand.

I can’t wait to hear what Burning Man Mom has to say.

For those who still don’t get what Burning Man is, I’ll try to explain: it’s a seven day counter-culture city in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A utopian experiment if you will, where 40,000 people come together and build wild dwellings, create art projects, workshops, parades, art installations, theater and more. There’s music, there’s talk. I imagine there’s sex, drugs, green politics, visionary babbling, profundity a go go; a ‘we have seen the future and this is it…"

Anything you can imagine. On the last night, they burn the man, an effigy of a human, an act of catharsis and cleansing.

For another attempt at an explanation, the Burning Man website is a good place to start.

You’re here to create. Since nobody at Burning Man is a spectator,
you’re here to build your own new world. You’ve built an egg for
shelter, a suit made of light sticks, a car that looks like a shark’s
fin. You’ve covered yourself in silver, you’re wearing a straw hat and
a string of pearls, or maybe a skirt for the first time. You’re
broadcasting Radio Free Burning Man — or another radio station.

You’re here to experience. Ride your bike in the expanse of
nothingness with your eyes closed. Meet the theme camp — enjoy
Irrational Geographic, relax at Bianca’s Smut Shack and eat a grilled
cheese sandwich. Find your love and understand each other as you walk
slowly under a parasol. Wander under the veils of dust at night on the
playa.

You’re here to celebrate. On Saturday night, we’ll burn the Man. As
the procession starts, the circle forms, and the man ignites, you
experience something personal, something new to yourself, something
you’ve never felt before. It’s an epiphany, it’s primal, it’s newborn.
And it’s completely individual.

You’ll leave as you came. When you depart from Burning Man, you
leave no trace. Everything you built, you dismantle. The waste you make
and the objects you consume leave with you. Volunteers will stay for
weeks to return the Black Rock Desert to its pristine condition.

OTBKB: YOUR SOURCE FOR BURNING MAN 2006

Just because I’m in San Francisco, don’t think I’m gonna miss the latest Park Slope news in New York Magazine. Fortunately there’s a top notch newstand nearby and I happened to see this week’s special “What If 9/11 Never Happened?” Issue. So I grabbed it. Buried inside was a piece about Care Bears on Fire, one of the many rock bands in Brooklyn’s underage rock scene (Liberty Heights Tap Room is the epicenter of the scene but they play other clubs, too). Care Bears may be the youngest band on the scene: the members are 10 and 11.

The article came complete with great photos and quotes from other 718 junior rockers. Other bands mentioned in the article were Fiasco and Good to Go. Eating breakfast at a place near here called Polkers, my son devoured the article, as his band Cool and Unusual Punishment is also part of the “scene.”

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: WITH THEIR PARENT’S APPROVAL MEET CARE BEARS ON FIRE
by Jem Aswad

A windblown bar on a desolate corner in deepest Red Hook seems like an ideal place for New York’s next big rock scene to be germinating—until you notice all the Subarus and Volvos parked on the street. Inside, the Liberty Heights Tap Room looks as if it’s half rocker bar, half unaccredited day-care facility. Pint-size kids in pint-size rock T-shirts dart maniacally underfoot. Long-haired teens in vintage rock tees chomp on pizza, while gently graying adults drink beer and worry aloud that they’ll be sorry for it later.

Onstage, a local power trio called Care Bears on Fire is barking out one of its raucous original numbers that perfectly encapsulates the age-old, anti-authoritarian, fuck-off spirit of punk rock.

“Don’t tell me what to do, what to wear, what to say / Don’t wanna follow rules, gonna do it my way / I’ve got a brain, I can think for myself / I don’t wanna be like everybody else / Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na / Don’t wanna be like everybody else … ”

The band members are 10 and 11 years old. And the authority figures in question—their parents—are pumping their fists and singing along.

Welcome to the age of the rocker mom. Kids who might otherwise have their parents ferry them to the soccer field are now being enthusiastically chaperoned to dive bars. Rock, once the realm of outcasts and dangerously attractive miscreants, is practically a curriculum choice. In Park Slope, after-school classes are offered at private and public schools, and Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (an offshoot of Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, Oregon) is in its second year. On the syllabus are the classics: Ramones and Clash and Pixies songs that youngish parents revere, and that their offspring have been hearing since birth.

Rather than being cause for rebellion, grown-ups are rock mentors. Several, in the great tradition of Jack Black, have even become coaches, teaching teens and tweens the rudiments of rocking that normally take several alienated years to fumble through. Nowadays, punk isn’t just sanctioned by parents and school teachers; it’s good, clean fun.

The Care Bears—singer-guitarist Sophie Kasakove, 11, bassist-singer Lucio Westmoreland, 11, and drummer-singer Isadora “Izzy” Schappell-Spillman, 10, all classmates at Park Slope’s Berkeley Carroll School—couldn’t be better poster children for this burgeoning movement if they’d been carefully pre-auditioned for a reality show. They wear standard rocker gear—jeans, Converse All-Stars, Black Sabbath T-shirts—but they’re also polite overachieving kids, cramming in band practice between art class, homework, and Hebrew school.

“Izzy didn’t want to be on the soccer team, didn’t want to play field hockey, didn’t want to be on any team,” her mom, Elissa Schappell, says of the girl who co-wrote the lyrics to “Don’t Wanna Be Like Everybody Else” and who pounds her drums with startling ferocity. “And suddenly, her friends wanted to play music. From the very beginning, all we’ve ever thought is that this is a chance for Izzy to have playdates with kids who share the same interests.”

“It’s not like soccer,” Izzy says. “It’s more of a thing kids choose instead of a pushed thing.”

The band began life as Nada Clue in 2004 after Sophie and Lucio had taken a music course at Berkeley Carroll’s creative-arts camp and Izzy had attended Rock Camp for Girls (her family spends a lot of time in Portland, where Tin House, the literary magazine her parents co-founded, is based). One day, Sophie recalls, she and her friend Lyle Kokiko “decided we wanted to be in a band, so we each chose people and he chose Lucio … ”

“And you chose moi,” Izzy finishes. “I met Sophie in third grade, and I got to know Lucio in the band.”

Elissa gently points out that the three were in the same kindergarten class.

“I didn’t really hang out with boys then,” Izzy says. “That was my princess-dress phase.”

After about a year, Lyle left the band over “musical differences” (but they’re all still friends). Since he’d suggested the name Nada Clue, Izzy proposed changing it to Care Bear Death Battle, after a family joke about the nauseatingly adorable toys’ becoming evil. That soon evolved into Care Bears on Fire.

“We wanted something sweet and fuzzy, because that’s what people think when they think of a kid band—and we wanted something super-anti-that, too,” Izzy explains.

As the band’s chops improved—they’re not prodigies, but they rock with impressive skill for their age—their gigging schedule picked up. Last school year, they wowed their peers at two Berkeley Carroll variety shows. Then in April, they played at Southpaw in Park Slope, which like the Tap Room hosts regular teen-rock shows. Fandom was quick to find them. “After the first [Berkeley Carroll] gig, I was like, ‘I need to go play ball,’ ’cuz you get so hyped up for the gig,” Izzy recalls. “And these kids in our grade asked for our autographs and I was like, ‘What do I do?’ It was weird.”

FOR THE REST (and there’s quite a bit more) GO TO NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We’re in San Francisco, staying with the owners of a 1967 totally restored Volkswagon twenty-one windows van (picture tomorrow).

They picked us up at the Embarcadero BART station and we were transported to an earlier, spacious, ‘feelin’ groovy’ style of automotive travel. Perhaps most fun of all, there’s a huge window on top, which is great for viewing the fog roll into the San Francisco sky, the tops of colorfully painted Victorian brownstones, the complicated solar panels on top of a new green Morpheus high rise.

These VW owners, who happen to be my sister and brother-in-law, took us to dinner in the Upper Haight, a pan-South American tapA place called Cha Cha Cha. Along the way, onlookers greeted the van with wide-eyed stares, cameras, and general curiosity and wonder. Just down the street from Cha Cha Cha we stopped in what I think may be one of the coolest record and CD (new and used) stores ever. Amoeba Records, in the site of a former bowling alley, is like a musical universe unto itself, a real record store, not a corporate conglomerate.

Our San Francisco relatives are a dashing couple. They own four cars (three of which are vintage) and a coffee cart business; dart around the world for Formula One races and generally lead an enviably fun life.

Today, San Francisco awaits. We’ll join some Park Slope friends for sight seeing…

Feelin’ Groovy.

After everyone has been asleep for hours, he takes his walks around the farm with his camera. It is his way of taking stock, coming to terms, assuaging his anxiety about everything that is.

Night walking and night pictures. He contemplates through seeing the way he often does on Third Stree at night. But it is so different here. The San Joaquin valley sky is filled with stars — the dipper, the Milky Way, Orion’s Belt, faraway planets are easy to see (not like Brooklyn where a couple of stars are a bounty).

She wakes for a moment and sees that his side of the bed is vacant and she knows that he is out there looking at the night. His physical memory takes him to all the places he has always loved.

While she returns to sleep he walks on cracked earth — steady, it’s easy to fall. He walks through former orchards; on driveways to dairy barns that are no longer a part of this farm (they are someone else’s, not his anymore).

But the sky still belongs. And the land, the house that is theirs begins to feel large enough to contain the memories and the future.

He returns to his childhood bedroom where she is sleeping. "It’s just me," he says. She is used to these gentle wake-ups in the night; and returns to sleep without trouble. He lays in bed, thinking, planning, seeing, hoping the pictures will look just as he saw them through the camera.

Just as they are meant to be.

Fire when it’s a "Burn Day" and the local farmers burn weeds and garbage

Crop dusters overhead spraying nearby farms with insecticides

The lonesome whistle of the Southern Pacific train just a mile from here

Rubbing alcohol for disinfecting the kitchen and dining room

That ‘cows and manure’ farm fragrance as we drive on country roads

iPod  music spilling out of my son’s headphones

Trucks whooshing by

Crickets indoors; loud

The trill of "here kitty kitty kitty, here kitty…"

Dogs barking in the distance

Cats loudly purring for food

Mariah the Goat crying in her pen – less and less now that she’s getting used to her new life

Children splashing in the swimming pool; children fighting; children chasing each other through the yard;  crying.

HC coming into the bedroom late at night after working on pictures. "It’s just me…"

Leon Neyfakh, the Brooklyn beat reporter for the New York Sun, has a story about the Brooklyn Book Fest, a party hosted by the borough president. I have been wondering what this event was about — I’d heard about it a few months ago and meant to call the borough president’s office to find out the details (to see if I was invited).

As usual, I see they’re honoring all the big guns. That’s great:  we’ve got some great published writers here. But what about all the others. What about…

I need to give them a call and find out who is invited and what this is all about. I’m not even sure if I am available on September 16…

The president of Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, is throwing a party at Borough Hall on September 16. Guests will include Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife, Nicole Krauss, who moved to Park Slope last summer; Jonathan Lethem, who was born many years ago in Boerum Hill, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody, and Colson Whitehead, who all live in Brooklyn. The list goes on and the shelves fill up. A lot of them have written articles for the New Yorker, and visitors to the Tea Lounge have probably witnessed them in the act without even knowing it.

The party — quaintly dubbed the Brooklyn Book Fest by Mr. Markowitz and his fellow organizers — will be a day-long celebration of their craft. For all the huffing and puffing the Jonathans have been doing against development in the Atlantic Yards, the borough is proud to host their creativity.

"There’s no question that over the last five years Brooklyn has become the mecca for aspiring authors as well as accomplished authors," Mr. Markowitz, who is expecting between 5,000 and 15,000 people to attend the free event, said. "I think there’s something about the creative juices flowing in Brooklyn. It’s a mix of ethnicities, religions, incomes, and lifestyles that really bring out the creative juices and give people the gift to really have the ability to write. And it is a gift, let’s face it, to be able to write."

Let’s face it, too, the same juices are not flowing through all of the Brooklyn literati.

Mr. Foer’s fiction is nothing like Mr. Moody’s; the essays of former congressional candidate Kevin Powell are nothing like the books of the Russian-born Gary Shteyngart. They are not really friends, and they will not be leaving the Book Fest in one bus.

But the Book Fest will bring them all together whether they like it or not. The Beats had the Village; McSweeney’s has San Francisco. The Brooklynites will have the Book Fest. For at least one day, they will be a literary scene, even though local magazines can’t even sell enough ads because the readers are too provincial. Standing beneath the same banner, the Brooklyn writers will show some geographic solidarity even if they have little else in common.

"We’re trying to focus on how diverse Brooklyn authors are," the head organizer, an independent publisher who chairs the Brooklyn Literacy Council, Johnny Temple, says.

According to a preliminary schedule, some of the "top authors" will chair a panel during which they will read 10-minute passages written by literary figures who inspired their writing. Elsewhere, some writers will discuss Brooklyn hip-hop as a literary influence. Fans of the culinary arts, meanwhile, will get a chance to hear Brooklyn chefs and food writers discuss the borough’s tradition of eating.

During "The Streets Are Talking," authors will discuss how their writing relates to Brooklyn and read excerpts from their Brooklyn-based work.

According to a noted Brooklyn writer who currently serves as the editor of the Brooklyn Papers, Gersh Kuntzman, some of the authors might even make friends.

"What brings them together, I think, is a commitment to the neighborhood that they live in. I don’t mean politically or socially, but these people, if you ask them where they live, they’re not going to say New York City, they’re going to say Brooklyn."

Swimming pool water. It is iconic. Los Angeles. David Hockney. Cool blue pool water undulates and creates seductive patterns.

This summer of heat was all about liquid: cold showers, ice water, the Atlantic Ocean, public swimming pools, kiddie pools in Third Street yards, Corona Beer, lemonade.

In other ways too: we learned that liquids can create explosive cocktails on-board jet liners. We are forced to expand our notion of evil: those who want to end life at any cost. Unthinkable, unfathomable.

Here in rural California (lush roses, eucalyptus trees, blossoms abounding), we are seemingly far from the world (though we listen constantly to NPR, check the Internet hourly).

The new swimming pool beckons and gives us time for refreshment, frivolity, exercise, water fights, naked swimming, even calm moments for staring at its bewitching patterns; floating.

For two summers in the heat of this hot valley, we went without a pool. The old pool changed hands with the house. There are new owners and the old pool doesn’t belong to us anymore. The are going to turn it into  basketball court (a basketball court?) Now an empty hull, its floor is cracked, paint peeling and filled with putrid green water.

The formely great: not in such good shape anymore.

He can barely walk over there without feeling pain (a house, a pool, old cars, objects: they are people, memories, more than just things.

At night, there’s an underwater light in the new, modern lap pool. Water illumination. Fifty feet long, twelve feet wide.

Sometimes change brings…

We swim in the new pool: splashing around, floating underwater through the past in order to discover something new.

I may be on the farm, but I still have the news from Seventh Avenue. Ah, the beauty of cell phones.

Standing in the lush garden on the farm, I get a call from Park Slope. My freelance blog reporter, Wendy, who gives me lots of stories, called to say that Cinemateque on Seventh Avenue above Union is going out of business and has been selling off all their inventory. It’s just about gone and then c’est tout. That’s all. The shop will be closed forever. The owners of Cinemateque own Black Pearl Restaurant on Union Street. Anyone know the status of that restuarant, an OTBKB fave.

Then Wendy confirmed that Soundtrack is closing. She said they too are selling off all their inventory. She had the impression that they are closing for good. I asked her to ask the owner to log onto OTBKB and tell the real story. WE WANT TO KNOW.

I asked Wendy what is going on. She said rising rents, of course, rising rents. Yeesh, will there only be real estate office on  Seventh Avenue? Come on now.

Is it iTunes and Netflix that threatened the viability of these businesses? Good chance of it. That combined with crazy rents…

While Wendy and I were talking he saw Mrs. Kravitz on the Street. She handed the phone to her and we talked for a minute or two.

Talk about connected. Standing by the pool in California talking to friends in front of Tarzian.
Funny.

Yup. The flower girl at our wedding (our niece) turned 22 yesterday. And she’s a gorgeous, accomplished, and talented young woman. Interestingly, she has the same birthday as Ducky (my sister’s daughter).

Our flower girl just graduated from college and she’s gonna be a marine biologist; we always knew whatever she did, she’d be a success. She was the most adorable four-year-old on our wedding day in July 1989.

And she took her job very seriously. The woman who did the flowers gave her a white basket full of white rose petals and told her to throw the petals up in the air with abandon. She even demonstrated.

So our flower girl walked down the aisle (while my opera singer friend sang Schumann accompanied by her pianist husband) and threw the white petals up in the air with great enthusiasm just like the flower lady had told her to do.

The crowd went wild—they loved it. And maybe they laughed, too. But our little flower girl thought she’d done something wrong and she cried and cried. She cried through the ceremony until her mother felt compelled to take her out. I remember trying to listen to the rabbi while listening to our flower girl cry.

I think she still has that white basket with the dried white petals in it, a reminder of that big day.

She cheered up later and we have pictures of her dancing with relatives and having great fun during the reception. But there are a few shots of her sad, sad face during the ceremony. We tried to explain to her that the guests were laughing with her not at her. But that’s a hard concept to explain to a four year old (even a super, super smart one like she).

I wonder if she still has that basket in her childhood bedroom. I remember seeing it once on a high shelf; a poignant reminder of that July day in 1989.

But she’s on to bigger things now. Our flower girl is now an underwater scientist, who is  compassionate and smart with a great sense of humor and leadership qualities up the wazoo. We always knew whatever she did she’d be a great success. And we were right.

I’m a Vanity Fair junkie. And it’s not a guilty pleasure because it’s a damn good magazine. But its mix of high and low culture, of important reporting and silly gossip and celeb stuff could be construed as a guilty pleasure. I look at it this way: Some people like crappy television shows, others read bestsellers to relax. But me, when my Vanity Fair arrives it’s my time for myself. I take to my bedroom (with the VF) and read…

(This revelation of myself as a Vanity Fair junkie is yet something else for  people to make fun of about me. Groan).

So the new Vanity Fair is out — the one with Kate Moss on the cover posing as Marlene Dietrich (as Catherine the  II). And I wasn’t going to wait two weeks to fish it out of  our big pile of mail that’ll be waiting for us.

I wanted it. NOW. So I bought it at the mall (at the Barnes and Noble) and started reading it as soon as we got into the car.

And then I SQUEALED. Omigod: there’s an adorable picture of our neighbor, a hair stylist, on page 170. I gather that VF has a new fashion and style director and our friend and neighbor is obviously on the new team (for all I know he’s been there for years).

That means that at least three Vanity Fair contributors live between Third and Ninth Streets.

Our neighbor is pictured giving New York Red Bulls midfielder Seth Stammler a Mohawk hairdo.
For years I’ve seen him go off to work with a rolling suitcase.

I knew he was a hair stylist. But I never knew exactly what he does and for whom. I still don’t.

But I know this: there’s a picture of him on page 170 of Vanity Fair. And to a VF junkie like me, that’s big news. In last year’s September issue, my friend Marian Fontana had a long excerpt from her book and great photographs. Now this.

Stuff to like about the September Vanity Fair
–the photo of our neighbor
–Elissa Schappell’s Hot Type column (she’s a Park Slope literary luminary)
–Graydon Carter’s anti-war and anti-Bush Editor’s Letter
–Dominick Dunne’s column
–The 2006 InternationalBest-Dressed List
–Baghdadh is Burning
–The Enigma of Sofia Coppola (with pictures)
–Dubya vs. Dad: What really goes on between the Bush Presidents
–Confessions of a plastic surgery addict
–Great photography
–and more more more

Rumor has it that Sound Track, a CD shop on Seventh Avenue that has been there for umpteen years, is moving to Fifth Avenue. Is this undeniable proof that iTunes is pushing CD shops out of business OR is Brooklyn real estate becoming untenable for anything other than Real Estate offices?

Probably a little of both. I am guessing that Sound Track’s landlord is raising the rent to something ridiculous. I’m under the impression that Sound Track does a good business. But no business can succeed with an enormous overhead.

Now there’s only one CD shop on Seventh Avenue: Music Matters up near 14th Street.

Fifth Avenue has a couple of CD shops. There’s Somethin’ Else, a used CD and clothing shop and another used CD and record store, the one that has boxes and boxes of old LPs on the street, on Fifth near 9th. Still, Fifth Avenue needs a conventional CD place where music lovers of all kinds can get what they need. And the great thing about Sound Track is that they can order just about anything (in any genre) and have it the next day. The shop is very happy to do that for their customers.

Sound Track has been in Park Slope FOREVER. At one time they had a shop on 9th Street and Sixth Avenue, as well as a shop in Brooklyn Heights. Their’s is clearly a business that is prepared to change with the times.

The good news is Sound Track will still be around. On Fifth. Long live the local record (CD) shop.

Today we bought a goat to replace my mother-in-law’s (MIL) beloved goat, Flora, who died of old age a few months ago. MIL was ready to have a new goat in the fenced-in yard and shed that has hand-painted windows and big letters that say: Flora.

Time for a new goat. Maybe two.

Five of us went to a ranch where they sell goats. A thin older woman with short hair and bright orange framed sun glasses wearing a Treasure Island Las Vegas T-shirt showed us our new friend: a five-month-old black goat with white stripes on her ears. She doesn’t have horns.

Our new goat was all alone in a small pen: an effort to get her used to being separated from the other goats. We put a green collar on her and a leash. The woman told us to feed her hay, alfalfa, fruit, dried leaves. "Just about anything. She’s your new garbage dump," she said in the kindest possible way.

She also showed us the brown baby goat that will be MIL’s in October. "She’s too young to take home now because she’s being bottle fed," the goat seller told us. "And I didn’t think you wanted to bottle feed three times a day." MIL agreed

MIL gave the goat-seller a check for forty dollars and she wished us well. "Go home, put her in the back yard and let her lounge around with the family. It’ll be a good way for her to get to know all of you."

With some effort, Teen Spirit carried the squirmy new goat into MIL’s pick up and rode home with the goat on his lap. Apparently, the goat was calm as could be in Teen Spirit’s arms (see No Words_Daily Pix) during the ten minute drive.

Once home, we let the goat run loose in the backyard She didn’t seem  very uncomfortable with the idea and looked kind of sad. Then she bolted and ran out of the backyard past the swimming pool over by the driveway. "Don’t let her run into the road," Hepcat screamed. "Or fall into the swimming pool," I added.

Everyone ran after her; she was still wearing a leash. It was comic scene; something out of a silent movie. Teen Spirit finally grabbed her leash and carried her to her spacious pen.

"Why don’t you feed her some roses. Goats love roses," MIL told OSFO, who found one of MIL’s big red rose and offered it to the goat. No go. Apparently, the goat hasn’t developed a taste for roses yet. She did take a few nibbles of the dried grass and hay that are in her pen.

Then she went into her pen and whined a bit. Watching her, we tried to come up with a name. I was thinking French authors like Colette or Simone. OSFO liked Luna. Teen Spirit said, "How about black Maria?" We can call her Mariah for short." It took a minute for him to remember what a black Maria was. "It’s a van that carries prisoners or something," he said finally. "I looked it up on Wikipedia once."

MIL liked the name. "Isn’t there a song called, "They Call the Wind Mariah. It’s from Paint Your Wagon I think,"

So the goat’s got a name. Mariah. As I write this I hear her whining like a baby off in the distance; it’s her first night in a new pen. She’s never been away from home before.

Don’t worry, Mariah. You’re going to like your new home a lot. MIL will take good very care of you here.

So we’re sitting in the big living room of Hepcat’s mother’s lovely house and he shouts out, "You won’t believe what we’re missing in Brooklyn?"

We couldn’t be in a nicer spot: voluptous rose bushes outside the stained glass bay window, a pool nearby, the bluest sky imaginable, mountains in the distance…

So HC, what are we missing in Brooklyn?

The appearance of the Corpse Plant, a plant that hasn’t bloomed in 70 years. It’s been locked away in a  special room at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens for years. But now, they’ve cleared out the Bonsai room for the Corpse Plant and its taking visitors.

And it’s not called a Corpse Plant for nothing. Supposedly it smells like rotten meat or worse. It’s about five feet tall and it resembles a squash plant. Here’s what the New York Times had to say about the last time a Corpse Plant bloomed:

In 1937 and again in 1939, thousands turned out to watch bloomings
in the Bronx. According to The New York Times, the odor “almost downed”
newspaper reporters, and was described by an assistant curator at the
botanical garden there as “a cross between ammonia fumes and hydrogen
sulphide, suggestive of spoiled meat or rotting fish.” It became the
official flower of the Bronx, until 2000, and it seems the bizarre
specimen — why the heck does a flower smell like bad meat? — can still
draw a crowd. More than 10,000 people visited a blooming corpse flower
at the University of Connecticut in Storrs in 2004.

The BBG expects lots of visitors for this stinky plant. And HC is soooooooo sad he’s going to miss it.

No kidding.

My mother-in-law (MIL) is known in these parts as a cat lover. People frequently call to ask if she wants to take in a stray. She has a hard time saying ‘no.’ Recently, two white kittens showed up in her driveway. She has no idea where they came from but suspects someone just left them there.

A few weeks ago, one of my MIL’s cats was killed by a car. Pinklepurr was a very special cat; smart like no other cat she’s ever known. She mourned the loss of Pinklepurr and was thinking about getting another cat from the pound.

Then these white kittens showed up; they were very hungry and dirty. They lapped up the homemade chicken puree she makes every day for her cats. One of the kittens, the female, has a blue eye and a brown eye. The other has a large scratch on its neck. One is fluffy, one is short haired. They were very much in need of tender loving care when they got here.

They are a very active pair and love to climb trees and be around people. Since our arrival, OSFO and Teen Spirit have grown very fond of this brother and sister pair.

So there’s only one problem: we haven’t figured out what we want to name them. We want to give them the name of a famous duo or a pair of items that belong together. There’s already a Fred and Ginger here. Here’s what’s been suggested so far: Peanut Butter and Jelly, Butch Cassidy and Sundance, Frida and Diego, Queer Eye and The Straight Guy. But no name yet.

Can you help us name these adorable white kittens?