The Times delivers some pessimistic news to New York’s public school parents and kids. We’re bracing to find out how District 15 schools will be affected. This is bad news for schools all over New York City, which are already reeling from earlier budget cuts this year.

Some of New York City’s highest-performing schools could suffer
“painful” budget cuts as high as 6 percent next year, Schools
Chancellor Joel I. Klein said on Wednesday, blaming state rules that restrict how the city can spend state education money.

Calling
on Albany to loosen the rules, Mr. Klein said that if he had more
flexibility, he would cut school budgets uniformly, by 1.4 percent, so
as not to “destabilize” any schools.

“This is an effort to treat schools equitably,” Mr. Klein said at a briefing.

But
state lawmakers, as well as education advocates whose historic 1993
lawsuit is resulting in billions of extra state dollars for the city’s
underfunded schools, instantly attacked the chancellor’s proposal,
suggesting that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
use city money to fill any shortfall from the state. They said the
restrictions were designed to ensure that more money would go to
schools that were labeled by the state as failing or with high student
poverty rates. Under the current rules, some of those schools could see
their budgets grow by as much 4 percent.

As reported on Gowanus Lounge and registered in my brain but not reported, Five Guys Is Coming to Park Slope and they’ve put up a banner to prove it.

Five Guys Burgers and Fries is going to share the space vacated by D’Agostino with Bank of America at Seventh Avenue and 6th Street.

An up and coming brand. A big multinational brand: Five Guys next door to a global Bank of America

As I walked by the other day, I was talking to my dad on my cell phone.

"Hey, Five Guys is coming to Park Slope," I told him as I noticed the banner.

"That’s the place on Montague Street," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"They’re the worst burgers you ever tasted," he said.

But I’ve heard otherwise. I hear they’re the closest thing to In and Out Burger on the East Coast. Try them for yourself.

A family in DUMBO Brooklyn recently designed a website for 24/7/365 news
junkies. Because they are a small business with no advertising budget they are trying 
to get the word out on the Brooklyn blogsphere. It’s called: MostEmailedNews.com

Most news websites have that little box somewhere on the first page
telling you the top stories that people are sending to each other.

MostEmailedNews.com takes those boxes from a bunch of different news
sources (ranging from sites such as The NY Times, BBC, Times of India
and CNN) and puts them all together for you. It gives you a nice cross section of what people are emailing.  The site is refreshed every ten minutes.

It’s not yet finished but I thought I would share it with you. It’s quite addictive since I’m on it all the time now. Check it out and If you like it, please tell your friends!

It’s May 21 and public school parents with kids in fifth grade STILL don’t know where their kids are going to public middle school next year.

This is really stressing out the parents. It’s also stressing out the kids who are dealing with the end of elementary school but still don’t know where they’re going next year.

It’s nail biting time for parents who are hearing all kinds of rumors and getting worried that their kids won’t get into their first or second choice schools.

Some school like the Institute for Collaborative Education (ICE) have their own admission schedules. ICE has a rolling admissions policy with an early decision option. So those who applied heard rather quickly as to whether they got in or not.

They’re the lucky ones.

In District 15 in Park Slope it seems that just about everyone wants to get into the same three or four schools. How are things going to play out?

How did we get into this mess? This year, the DOE did a partial revamping of the admissions system and the application were due two months later than usual.

What we didn’t know is that the DOE wouldn’t be telling us until late May or even June. Will the kids know by the time they attend their fifth grade graduations in late June?

Gail Robinson, the Wonkster at the Gotham Gazette, has a theory as to why people love to hate the Slope. Here’s an excerpt:

Why does everyone hate Park Slope, Lynn Harris  asks in yesterday’s Times. Too many over the top parents? Jealousy on the part of those of us who can’t afford to live there? Gentrification run amok?
Here’s a possibility Harris does not mention. Maybe we’re all just sick of reading about the brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood in the Times.

A search for articles with “Park Slope” over the past 30 days brought 43 matches, far outpacing other well-known New York City neighborhoods. Bedford-Stuyvesant showed up in 17 articles, Washington Heights in 16 and Jackson Heights in 11. Included in the Park Slope total: two lengthy, prominently featured articles on the suspension of alternate side parking in the area’s streets for several weeks.

Brooklyn Optimist interviewed poet Lynn Chandhok, award-winning author of The View from Zero Bridge, on video. Here’s an excerpt from his blog. Go there to see the video.

When the New York Observer weighed in with its top 100 Brooklyn writers
a few weeks ago, one of its most glaring omissions was Park Slope poet
Lynn Aarti Chandhok. Chandhok is not just one of my favorite Brooklyn
poets, she ranks among the most gifted poets of contemporary American
literature.

Perhaps it is presumptuous to make such a grandiose appraisal of a poet’s work with only one book of verse under her belt, The View From Zero Bridge (Anhinga Press),
but as is the case with my beloved Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska,
who has only 250 or so published poems to her credit, it is quality
that defines a writer’s opus, not quantity.

The Love We Make is a blogger, who writes about life, raising children, health, spirituality, eating, sexuality, money, politics and more. Today she was moved to write about Kyung-Sook Woo, the Windsor Terrace woman who was, murdered in her dry cleaning store.

In reference to the murder at the cleaners on 10th Ave. and these discussions about Brooklyn, I will add my two cents…

For today, I feel shitty about where I live. An innocent woman was murdered one block away from my house.

I don’t understand why people feel the need to generalize about Brooklyn or the people that live here. Brooklyn is one of the largest cities in the world- it is not ONE thing; it is many things to many people at different times in their lives. It can be beautiful and vibrant or it can be a hell on earth, it has as many moods as it has people in it.

I moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan, I had never even stepped foot in Brooklyn until I met my then husband’s family in 1990. I didn’t have too many preconceived ideas about it. We moved here after we had our son, mostly for economic reasons, like so many others.

There are things I love about Brooklyn: I love the architecture; I love Prospect Park- I walk it almost everyday; I love what’s left of the real ethnic neighborhoods that I’ve been to; I love seeing familiar faces; I love walking around it; I love trying interesting new restaurants and shops; I love the diversity of people, if they are open hearted, considerate and friendly- I love them. I love some of the parents, shop owners, writers, artists, and teachers… I am lucky enough to know.

There are things I hate about Brooklyn: I hate angry bus drivers and reckless drivers; I hate waiting for buses that never come; I hate waiting for the subway with my 6 year old daughter while 3 feet away rowdy teenagers are screaming obscenities and horsing around trying to throw each other on the tracks; I hate that kids steal iPods and other valuables from younger more vulnerable kids; I hate the fact that my beloved partner got mugged right in front of our house and no one did a thing to help him – as I was screaming my lungs out – he was beaten so badly I thought I almost lost him; I hate that the trauma center of that Brooklyn hospital was understaffed and filthy.

I hate the fact that one block from my home, a place I pass by everyday, across from my son’s bus stop – an innocent women was just murdered; I hate feeling too scared to let my son walk home alone from the bus stop; I hate the fact that our neighbors didn’t want to tell us our septic tank was overflowing in the back of our house because they “didn’t want to get involved”; I hate feeling scared.

I understand that no place is perfect and that where ever you live you will always deal with all kinds of people no matter what their ethnicity, religion or economic background- closed minded, angry people come in all shapes and colors, as do open minded, loving, accepting people. I believe Brooklyn has them all.

Come to Michele Madigan Somerville’s groovy poetry readings on Smith Street. She’s calling them First Wednesday at Ceol and they’re at dinnertime.

Michele makes the readings feel really fun and welcoming; they’re in a cool Irish pub with great food and a cool back room.

And she’s booking top notch poets like Sharon Mesmer, author of the recently issued collections Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books 2008) and The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose 2008), and poet Michael Sweeney, author of In Memory of the Fast Break. It’s on June 4th so be there. I know I will

First Wednesdays at Ceol
Poetry Reading

6:30p–8p, Wednesday, June 4th

Ceol
191 Smith Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
347 643  9911
www.ceolpub.com

The bar is located on Smith Street between Baltic and Warren Streets in Cobble hill.

Nasty, nasty. NY Intel disses the Times’ article. That’s like the pot calling the kettle trite and silly. And it’s funny because New York Magazine, originally commissioned the article by freelancer Lynn Harris.

That’s right. Harris emailed all the usual suspects for interviews and even posted a journalist request on the Brooklynian. So everyone knew that the piece was for New York Magazine before it was actually in a Word doc on her computer.

According to yesterday’s Times, we are among the very few
people who do not have a highly charged opinion on the Brooklyn
neighborhood Park Slope. Writer (and resident) Lynn Harris explained in "Sunday Styles"
that you either love the neighborhood or you really, really hate it. If
you are part of the first group, you enjoy the place for its safety,
proximity to the park, and family-friendly vibe. If you hate it, it’s
because you don’t like mothers and you are an envious hippie.

New York Magazine has done it’s share of hating Park Slope articles. They kind of invented the genre, I’d say. Maybe that’s why they didn’t want Lynn’s story: it had a been there, done that vibe. Especially after it was on all the blogs and the Brooklynian.

I got this email from someone, who may or may not be connected with the Brooklyn Cyclones. I’m pretty sure it’s a joke. But it’s pretty funny;  would make a great Saturday Night Live skit. If it’s not a joke, it’s a cool and very over-the-top idea. In the age of irony, it’s hard to know what’s what anymore.

According to an email I just got, there’s finally an alternative to U-haul for space-challenged Brooklynites. It’s Hall Street Storage and it’s calling itself Brooklyn’s first green storage space using renewable energy for 100% of its electricity.

Hall Street has self-storage and warehouse storage and is located near the Brooklyn Navy Yards and the Steiner Studios.
So what else makes them green?
According to an email that I got: they used the wood beams that were removed during renovation of its building and made them into wood shavings as a green alternative to bubble wrap for packing material.

Located in a 1918 historic building, Hall Street Storage has restored and renovated the space make it environmentally viable. They’ve re-purposed as much as possible and are using the antique wood from the remodeling of the building used by local artisans and carpenters for flooring and furniture.
To top that: This company has also formed a foundation for the further greening of Brooklyn. The owner is a Brooklyn native and, according to the email, "he’s enthusiastic about the neighborhood and about being green within it."

The great thing is that this is a company doing the right thing for the right reasons. In addition to an extensive employee education program on environmental issues, they are  giving or buying at cost things like CFL bulbs and environmental cleaners to help employees go green at home;

They are using only green cleaners itself and other environmental details that add up big when talking about a facility of this size.

About their renewable energy: it is certified by Green-E, the strictest certification for environmental standards in the country; that differs from just any renewable energy program and elevates its use quite considerably.

Apparently, the owners have become obsessed with green things, like many do when they start taking green action.  They are putting out money in a big way with their green efforts at this point (renewable energy for a building that does things like cold storage adds up to 3,200 MWh.

This is a committed green business that’s doing their business in a sincere, smart, and green way.

One night only. Special jazz performance by Ravi Coltrane to benefit PS 107. 13th Street and
8th Avenue. Fourth Floor. 20 bucks.

You can purchase tickets here:
www.ps107.org.

Ravi Coltrane, the acclaimed saxophonist, is the second son of the legendary tenor saxophonist John Coltraine and jazz pianist, Alice Coltrane and brother of Robbie Coltrane. He was named after the great sitarist Ravi Shanker.

Wow. Park Slope painter, Emily Berger, has a solo exhibition at the Painting Center opening on Thursday May 22nd.

Props to Emily Berger. I happen to LOVE her works on paper; dark expressive drawings that evoke architectural structures that are abstract and emotional drawn.

Both her abstract paintings and drawings are layered and formed and
disrupted by color, gesture, and sometimes a looping line that
introduces organic form to vertical and horizontal structure.

She was also invited to participate in the 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art. National Academy Museum. 1083 Fifth Avenue. New York, NY.

May 29 – September 7, 2008
www.nationalacademy.org

Emily Berger lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate
of Brown University, she received a MFA from Columbia and attended the
Skowhegan School. She has been a resident at the Millay Art Colony,
among others. She is a member of American Abstract Artists and curated
the exhibit “Nature Abstracted” at The Painting Center. She also takes
photographs, and considers her black and white photographs as source
material for painting and drawing as well as works in their own right.
Her work has been included in exhibits in the Northeast and in New
York, most recently at the Metaphor and Sideshow Galleries, as well as
at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, Colombia. She is participating
in The National Academy Museum’s Annual Invitational Exhibition of
Contemporary American Art on view concurrently with this show.

All morning it was sunny.

But when we got to the Fabulous Fifth Avenue Fair at 1:15 p.m. it started to rain. OSFO was impressed with the huge slide on Third Street. But the rain was annoying and cold and we wanted to go home. I did see Gowanus Lounge walking past the Gate on Fifth. Maybe he has some pictures over there.

We barely looked at any booths; we back hom on Third Street, where there were loads of stoop sales between 5th and 6th Avenues.

Phyllis Bobb of Reclaimed Home hates Park Slope, or at least that’s what she told Lynn Harris, a freelance writer for the Times. Now Robb says she’ll never do an interview again. With the Times’ or anyone. That’s because she’s pissed off about her quotes in yesterday’s Where’s the Love?  article in the Style section about Park Slope haters, which she says, with humor (I think) were coerced out of her.

I didn’t lie so much as I was coerced into confession and creative editing was used. My whole paragraph from the article: “Many
locals, and ex-locals, I talked to swore that something else has also
changed. Phyllis Bobb, 42, lived here from 1990 to 2002, when she moved
to Bed-Stuy because, she said, “there were too many yuppies moving in.”
People on her block stopped sitting on stoops; a guy in the park kicked
her dog. “It wasn’t a community anymore,” she said, and she’s still
steamed. “I feel like a jilted lover.”

She adds that the jilted lover comment is meant to describe the way she and Park Slope have changed and grown apart.

We’ve both moved on and
we’re in different relationships now. There was a time I loved Park
Slope, that was probably mid 80’s-2000. But I look at it now and I
can’t believe I lived there for so long.

Now Phyllis, did someone really kick your dog? Bobb says that it’s 100% true:

That happened ages ago, so I
don’t know how she got that out of me when I was talking about the
recent changes in the Slope. But it happened and I hope the guy read
the article and knows he will go down in eternity as “the dog kicker of
Park Slope”. The incident occured in Prospect Park one morning during
off leash hours. This schmuck walks right through the “doggy circle”
and gets knocked down by a running pack of dogs. Ok, gets knocked down
by MY dog. I tried to help him up, apologized, etc….and then he kicks
my dog! That would never happen in Bed Stuy! Because people are
terrified of my dogs there.

In a post on her blog today she really goes to town on Park Slope:

Not everyone wants to live in a suburbanized, homogenized
community overrun with kiddies. It’s not because we can’t afford to,
it’s because we simply don’t want to!

Nasty, nasty. But she’s got a point. She moved on. It’s not about jealousy at all. She moved to greener pastures—a house in Upstate New York and a nice house in Bed Stuy. You can find her Reclaimed Home shop at the Brooklyn Flea every Sunday.

WNYC reports this morning that the Department of Buildings is hiring 63 new building inspectors at a time when construction accidents are at an all time high.

According to New York 1, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Acting Buildings Commissioner Robert
LiMandri said that $5 million was added to the
Department of Buildings’s budget to fund 63 new positions.

These new workers will implement the DOB’s Special
Enforcement Plan. Teams will monitor construction
programs, re-inspect sites with prior violations and check for sidewalk
shed electrical safety.

13 people have died this year construction accidents,
seven of whom were killed when a crane smashed into several buildings
in Turtle Bay in March.

Photographer Richard Gin has great photos of The Mighty Handful and has helpfully put up a direct link for buying tickets for their next show, which is a battle of the bands at the Knitting Factory and could mean a trip to Ireland for an International battle of the bands.

Gin, who takes pictures of the band every chance he gets, thinks these kids are the next big thing. He’s urging all his grown up friends to go to this  show. Here’s an excerpt from his blog. For more pictures go to his Flickr page linked below or his site.

"Greetings to those of you visiting through the Flickr back door. As part of my value-added content, I would like to point out that the additional photos of The Mighty Handful
from the 17th of May, 2008 are below. However I encourage you to read
the following notice to discover how you, the reader, might be able to
impact the life of a misguided youth for the better.

"With the
possible exceptions of cash paydays and booty calls, there’s very
little pleasure in finding something out on short notice, and with that
in mind I am happy to report to you (a week in advance!) that The Mighty Handful (my favoritest) are playing The Big Stage at the Knitting Factory
on Sunday the 25th. Now, the Knitting Factory — shitty lighting aside
— is a brand-name venue which leads to its own level of fun-ness.
Amplifying the fun-ness further is the fact that this show is a Battle
of the Bands. Great. Boosting the signal to tsunami-like levels is the
promise of a trip to Ireland for the winning group and an invitation to
an international battle of the bands.

SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU?

If
you care at all about the fate of these young turks (and you should at
this point, especially seeing as how I won’t shut up about them), then
you will purchase tickets, go to the show and support them with all
your might. For just ten (10) United States Dollars — that’s just
$1.68 USD a day from now until Sunday — you could change the life of a
poor, Park Slope youth whose debaucherous promise is held back by a
sensible Park Slope upbringing. If you have any questions regarding
this matter it is in your best interest to contact the band directly as my details are sketchy at best.

Tickets are available through Ticketmaster, which is no longer an issue because the 90’s are over and Pearl Jam lost.

My stepmother told me that Thursday May 22 is the 125th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge; there are going to be fireworks!

I got quite excited. The Bridge’s 100th birthday in 1983 was quite a celebration. And the fireworks were amazing.

In ’83, we watched from my father’s 27th floor apartment in the Heights. He has windows on New York Harbour and a great view of the bridge and lower Manhattan. We still talk about the waterfall- like effect of the fireworks streaming off the bridge; I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

This birthday bash will begin on May 22 with a performance by the Brooklyn Philharmonic at the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn, and a Grucci fireworks display.

An added bonus: the bridge will be lit up in an array of colored lights from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. from May 22 through Memorial Day.

Photo by Lab2112L www.flickr.com/photos/lab2112/

Richard Grayson, author of "Who Will Kiss the Pig: Sex Stories for Teens," "I Brake for Delmore Schwartz" and more was none too pleased by Peter Loffredo’s description on OTBKB of ethnic neighborhoods as "a bastion for clannish, homogeneous, xenophobic collections of
ethnic tribes holding onto their frozen identities…"

Whoa that was a mouthful and one I also found offensive (but published anyway). Here’s what Richard Grayson had to say:

Um, so Brooklyn neighborhoods filled with "Jamaicans" and "Russians" and "Polish" are xenophobic?

This is the kind of stuff that makes us native Brooklynites from the
non-brownstone neighborhoods quite annoyed. The writer needs to get out
more. Go to Bensonhurst or Canarsie or Sheepshead Bay or Homecrest or
Marine Park and you will see plenty of diversity and heterogenity.

Pete, you have my permission to go on living…but you need to get out more…

On Park Slope Parents this morning:

We are looking for a couple with twins, who we met at Bash Bish Falls up in the Berkshires this weekend. They said they live in Park Slope on Third Street. We were supposed to leave our contact info on their car windshield after our hike and forgot. Thought this was the best hope we had for reaching them.

If you know this family leave a message here.

A man has been charged in the murder of a woman who owned a dry cleaning store in Windsor Terrace.

As reported in NY 1 the police charged a Brooklyn man Sunday night with the murder and robbery of a Queens woman in her dry cleaning store. Two days earlier, Kyung-Sook Woo, 52, was found dead in the bathroom of the Eden Dry Cleaners by her son. She was strangled.

I saw something about this in the New York Sun on Friday but forgot to post it. From Windsor Terrace Brooklyn, a blog dedicated to life between the big green spots on the Brooklyn map, comes this story about the dry cleaner in Windsor Terrace who was found dead last week. Here’s an excerpt.

Yes, it is true that our dear dry cleaner at Eden on 10th Avenue and
Windsor was found dead this morning. Most neighbors knew her as Linda;
she and her husband used to run their shop where the glass store is now
on Windsor before moving to the former toy store on 10th Avenue. She
has been robbed before, at both locations, and the store vandalized.

Don’t miss Bernette Rudolph’s open studio today!

Rudolph, a master wood sculptor, lives and works in a Third Street apartment at 357 Third Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. You’ll have the distinct pleasure of meeting her goddesses, wood wall sculptures celebrating the rich stories of women’s strength, power and perseverance.

Her apartment is filled with these sculptures, as well as her bold, graphic, and colorful prints. As a special treat, behold the power of Asphalta, the goddess of parking.

I think she is responsible for the gift of no alternate-side-of-the-street parking for the summer. Some said it was an act of God. Well, it was the work of a Third Street goddess.

All hail Asphalta! And Bernette Rudolph. She is a Park Slope treasure.

Able Danger, a film directed by Paul Kirk, will be opening the Brooklyn International
Film Festival on Friday May 30th @ 8 pm at the Brooklyn Lyceum. A second showing will be on Friday June 6 @ 8 pm. The Brooklyn Lyceum is located at 227 Fourth Avenue at President Street just steps from the R train’s Union Street station.  

Charles Libin, who was director of photography on Able Danger, wanted to share his thoughts about the film, which was shot in Victorian Flatbush.

I fell in love with Paul Krik’s screenplay for Able Danger, as it evokes
and sends-up the feverish tone of post-war noirs from the 1950’s such as
Aldrich’s "Kiss Me Deadly", Kubrick’s "Killer’s Kiss", Fuller’s "Pickup
on South Street", Lewis’ "Big Combo", and Ray’s "In a Lonely Place".

Difference being that we are currently in a post-9/11 world with a
never-ending war we declared against "terror". The  anti-communist
hysteria of the 50’s exposed similar ugly behavior among our politicians
and citizens. When Americans are (mis)led by fear-mongers, we tolerate
very Un-American activities.

We have stood by like deer-in-the-headlights, allowing our government to set aside civil liberties and privatize our spy agencies. I felt simpatico with the
outraged indignation of Paul’s script. The Able Danger program did exist
and our government’s destruction of the mined data was ignored by the
9/11 Commission.  Paul’s story is not much less plausible as that which
our leaders have put forth… RE: Project for the New American Century.

Paul wanted to evoke the style of a classic noir, yet with an awareness
of the technological world in which we now live. Able Danger is in B&W,
with color seen only in several instances. We shot most of the film in
Victorian Flatbush, so I could ride my bike to the set.

Some of the shots I did one-handed while riding alongside Adam Nee who plays a
bike-riding, left leaning owner of the Vox Pop Coffee bar on Cortelyou
Road. Elina Löwensohn as the dreamy femme-fatale has a timeless beauty
of the great faces of noir. Able tackles serious subjects of our time without taking itself too seriously…

Finally. They’ve had some wet Sundays thus far. But today is a gorgeous day—and there’s ton to do in Brooklyn. Sunshine at the Flea: what a concept. As expected, the Fleameisters are constantly tweaking and improving the mix of vendors. For those flea market afficionados, who didn’t think the Brooklyn flea enough on the first few weekends, it looks  they may be getting it right.

Despite Friday’s downpours, the weather
is looking decent for Sunday’s Flea (knock on wood). As we continue to
cull and curate the mix, you should recognize a good number of regular
vendors as well as some exciting new blood–some of which is discusssed on the Flea Blog
today. In case you’re just tuning in, the Flea runs from 10 a.m. to 5
p.m. on Sunday and is located at 176 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn.
Closest trains are the C and G to Washington/Clinton. Or you can take
any of the number of trains that go to Atlantic Station and make the
10-minute stroll up Lafayette Avenue from there. This Sunday, consider
combining your visit to the Flea with the annual SONYA Studio Stroll; this year, over 100 artists throughout Clinton Hill and Wallabout will be opening their studios to the public. Fun, fun!

There’s an article in today’s New York Times Style section called, "Where is The Love?" about Park Slope hating as blood sport. No surprise, our pal Pete of Full Permission Living has some controversial thoughts on the topic.

As a regular interviewee of Lynn Harris’ articles on why people hate Park Slope, I have to make clear that one reason for any antipathy I might have for Park Slope is NOT that “Brooklyn was supposed to be different," according to some quoted in Lynn’s article. It continues: "Park Slope, to some, now represents everything that Brooklyn was not supposed to be. And if we lose Brooklyn, we lose everything."

Let me shout this out – Brooklyn, in many of its long-established neighborhoods outside of Park Slope and the surrounding "Heights", is still a bastion for clannish, homogeneous, xenophobic collections of ethnic tribes holding onto their frozen identities as Italians, Irish, Polish, Hasidic, Russian, Jamaican, etc., hold-outs who believe that surrendering to the melting pot that is New York City at its best is tantamount to selling their soul to the devil.

I do not hate Park Slope because it is ruining what the rest of Brooklyn is. If I hate Park Slope, it is because of what Park Slope pretends to be and isn’t – an enlightened enclave of modern parenting.

Hop on over to Fifth Avenue this Sunday for the Fabulous Fifth Avenue Fair.
That’s right, the action is on Fifth Avenue from Sterling to 12th St. 11 am – 7pm.

And what a day for this always fun event that still has a  neighborhood vibe even if it has plenty of the generic street fair stuff (zeppole trucks, socks, weird brooms, etc).

But hey, that’s a NYC street fair.
I wouldn’t miss it for the world (and never have).

There’s lots of local character; and all the Fifth Avenue shops and restaurants we love. Best of all, it’s a great day for running into friends. You can imagine that I like that part of it.

Nancy Nancy, which will be closing on May 23rd will be sharing her wares in front of her shop (near Carroll Street) on Fifth. Say good bye to Mary, owner of Nancy Nancy and find out what she’s up to next. Or you can read her blog.

Thanks to Bob and Judi of Bob and Judi’s Coolectibles, those cool boosters and pioneers of Fifth Avenue.

The Park Slope Open Studio tour is this weekend from 12-6 today. You can go in
and out of working artists’ studios and see what they’re up to.

Mad Arts Studios on 18th between 5th and 6th has a  show up in their group gallery. You can also tour artist work spaces there, which is fun.

Visit my friend Bernette Rudolph at 357 Third Street between 6th and 7th Avenue in Park Slope. She’s having an open studio today and Sunday (May 18 and 19) and you should make a point of checking her work out and even writing a check to buy some.

What a gorgeous day to explore the work of local artists.

She works in an apartment just like mine. She’s taken over the entire living room and dining room for her studio. Hepcat is so jealous. He’s only taken over half of our living room for his photo/computer studio. She’s got half the apartment (Hepcat’s dream).

It’s a creative wonderland.

Her artworks are on display all over the apartment.

She’s a wonderful artist, who makes prints and constructions of goddesses, as well as New York City related artwork. Colorful, graphic, FUN, stuff.

An inspiring woman, she’s eve older than me and she’s been a working artist her entire life. She inspires me with her approach life.