See Teen Spirit’s band, Cool and Unusual Punishment, at the Rockin’ Teens Showcase
34 Van Dyke St.(Corner of Dwight)
Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY, Ph: 718-246-8050
For News and Updates, please visit www.libertyheightstaproom.com

THIS SATURDAY APRIL 29th 1:00PM

Featuring (I’ve highlighted the bands I’ve heard. They’re all great. Haven’t heard Good to Go but am very excited to see/hear Luca Balser in his first performance):

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The Chase Scene, The Floor Is Lava, Chris Cori,Free Feeling, Francesca Perlov, Good To Go,

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Jonathan Edelstein Unplugged, Flamingo, Cool & Unusual Punishment, Public Affair,

Tetsuwan Fireball

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Hosted by: MC & Stand Up Comic: Jake Gilford.

Free AdmissionAmple Street Parking

This obituary of Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban crusader, is by Warren Gerard at the Toronto Star. Thanks to my friend Adam for sending it to me.

Jane Jacobs was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.

Mrs. Jacobs died this morning in Toronto. She was 89.

An American who chose to be Canadian, Mrs. Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.

Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland tunnel on the west ended contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the west side of Greenwich Village.

In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.

Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the “foot people”.

It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times — residential high-rise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances, and desolate downtowns.

She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, low-rise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.

Not everyone agreed. Her arch-critic, Lewis Mumford, called her vision “higgledy-piggledy unplanned casualness.”

Mrs. Jacobs was seen by many of her supporters — mistakenly — as left-wing. Not so.

Her views embraced the marketplace, supported privatization of utilities, frowned on subsidies, and detested the intrusions of government, big or small.

Nor was she right-wing. In fact, she had no time for ideology.

“I think ideologies, no matter what kind, are one of the greatest afflictions because they blind us to seeing what’s going on or what’s being done,’’ she was quoted.

“I’m kind of an atheist,” she said. “As for being a rightist or a leftist, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I think ideologies are blinders.”

Mrs. Jacobs scorned nationalism and argued in her 1980 book, The Question of Separatism, that Quebec would be better off leaving Canada. Moreover, she argued that some cities would be better off as independent economic and political units.

Continue reading JANE JACOBS DIES →

They should start calling New York Magazine Brooklyn Magazine. They seem just smitten with the borough. And this week – they’ve devoted the  whole damn issue to us.  I haven’t seen it yet at the newstand, but I did read a bit of it on-line. Here’s a taste of what’s in the latest issue of Brooklyn, I mean, New York Magazine.  New York, you’re on:

As annoying as this announcement will be to those who live there,
Brooklyn has become an adjective, a shorthand for a certain style of
living. It’s mostly Manhattan’s fault, of course; real-estate
ridiculousness over the past ten years has forced the young, the
creative, and people who want separate bedrooms for their kids to
embrace 718. But what was once a reluctant move has become an
enthusiastic, don’t-look-back migration to a place with more space—and
thus, literally, more open to change, risk, experimentation. Real
communities (the kind where neighbors invite each other over for
dinner) have coalesced, and so has the style we’re calling Brooklynism:
looser and more playful than its Manhattan counterpart, homey and
ironic, comfortable but always conscious of its looks, and often of its
politics (green and recycled are key). It’s not just limited to home
design: In the following pages, you’ll see Brooklynism in all its
manifestations, from the growing new-cuisine movement to the close-knit
fashion-design community to the increasingly potent
product-and-furniture-design gang, who’ve become an international force
in just a few years. Brooklyn, you’re on.

I was checking out Dan Zanes’ web site when I saw this bit of good news. Our friend WARREN ZANES, has a new album out, PEOPLE THAT I’M WRONG FOR. We were blessed to have this incredibly good-humored, interesting person in Park Slope a few years back with his fantastic family. WE MISS THEM. His first album, MEMORY GIRLS, was super and we went to see him a bunch of times at South Paw and Mercury Ballroom. Here’s what Dan Zanes’ has to say about his bro. Both of them were in the Del Fuegos in the 1980’s. Everyone remember that great band? I for one am heading out to Sound Track to see if they have the album because an album by Warren is an EVENT (he can really write LYRICS)!!

back in the 1980s i was in a band called the del fuegos with a bunch of guys who, i’m happy to say, are still my good friends today. one of them is my brother warren zanes. we’ve all gone on to do the things we love, and for warren that has meant some good adventures, but it has also meant playing music along the way. i’m thrilled to report that he has just released his second solo cd, People That I’m Wrong For! i wanted to share this news and recommend the cd to all of you. sometimes he joins me onstage at dz and friends shows, but this new cd is for a grown-up crowd. to find out more (click
  here) and give it a listen!

PICTURE OF WARREN BY HUGH CRAWFORD

 

I wish there had been a book like this for me when I was in my 30’s – ah, that was a long, long time ago. And yet, I still feel like I’m 12 (and I mean that in a good way). Kimberly Askew, the  editor and a contributor,  emailed me this morning to clue me into this event. Looks like a really interesting anthology — even if you’re not in your 30’s. I am so there for the  after-party at Brooklyn Social.

Readings by the contributors to "The
May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling it All Together in
Your 30s" anthology. 8 pm. 163 Court St. (718) 875-3677. Free.

I had such fun at the Perch Cafe last night that I wanted to spread the word that they’re doing readings every Tuesday night. Readings begin at 7 p.m. and are followed by an Open Mic.  Last night, a 12 year-old-girl read an incredible piece of poetry about her grandmother.

P E R C H  L I T E R A R Y  T U E S D A Y S
READINGS BEGIN 7 PM
FOLLOWED BY OPEN MIC
$5 PER PERSON MINIMUM
3 6 5 5 T H A V E N U E P A R K S L O P E
F/R Train to 4th Avenue/9th Street (between 5th and 6th Streets)
W W W. T H E P E R C H C A F E . C O M
7 1 8 – 7 8 8 – 2 8 3 0

April 18 – BEATRIX GATES has published three books of poetry—the most recent, In the Open, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She conceived of and was the librettist for the opera “The Singing Bridge,” and has recent work in The Cream City Review and Poems to Heal the Blues (edited by Marilyn Hacker). She is currently working on a manuscript
called Bonefire.
STEVE TURTELL’s Heroes and Householders will be published this year by Windstorm Creative
Press. His poems appear in Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard and This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys &
Barbarians 2. He is now working on a memoir called Home Address.

April 25 – LOUISE CRAWFORD’s poems have been published online at Poetry Superhighway and Strange Road, and she is at work on a novel called Crossing the River. She has a weekly column in the Brooklyn Papers called “Smartmom,” and runs the web site Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. She lives in Park Slope with her husband, photographer Hugh
Crawford, and their two children.
STEFANIA AMFITHEATROF, a fiction writer, will be reading from Home Schooled, a
work in progress.

May 2 – TRACY K. SMITH is the author of The Body’s Question (Graywolf, 2003), which was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Duende, which will be published by Graywolf in 2007. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe
Writers’Award and a Whiting Writers’Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

May 9 – JANE E. BRODY is the Personal Health columnist and sometimes science writer for The New York Times. She is the author of 11 books, including two best-sellers, Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book and Jane Brody’s Good Food Book. She
lectures often to lay and professional audiences on nutrition and fitness, surviving cancer, heart-healthy living, alternative
medicine, and other health-related topics.

May 16 – MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of two books of poetry, American Linden (Tupelo Press) and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, forthcoming in fall 2006). He lives in New York City, where he is an editor at Wave Books,
and teaches at the New School MFA Program in Creative Writing. EDMUND BERRIGAN is the author of Disarming Matter (Owl Press) and Your Cheatin’ Heart (Furniture Press). He also performs music as I Feel Tractor, with a CD forthcoming
from Goodbye Better records

May 30 – MARY MORRIS is the author of 12 books–six novels, including her most recent, Revenge; three collections of short stories, including The Lifeguard; and three travel memoirs, including Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Travelling Alone and Angels & Aliens: A Journey West(all published by Picador USA). She has also co-edited with her husband, Larry O’Connor, Maiden Voyages, an anthology of the travel literature of women. The Recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of the Arts and Letters, Morris teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. In 2007, she will publish The River Queen (Henry Holt & Co.), about her adventures going down the Mississippi River in a
houseboat.

The reading at Perch went very well. I read some Smartmom and some
poems. The audience seemed to like it. This piece was written last summer when I was thinking about attending my 25th college reunion (not to be confused with my 30th high school reunion in less than a month).

The 25th anniversary of Smartmom’s college graduation is coming up this
June. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since the day the great
I.F. Stone, that iconoclastic journalist and critic of the Cold War,
McCarthyism, and the Vietnam War, spoke to her class of 1980 at SUNY
Binghamton.

She can’t remember a word he said but she does
remember that his commencement speech was quite long and
characteristically controversial, as it elicited boos from some parents
in the audience. Their reaction disgusted and embarassed her.

While Smartmom is not sure if she
will be attending her 25th reunion in October, she took a look at the questionaire, which said something like: "So, what have you been doing since graduation?"

To
Smartmom, it seemed like a horrendous exercise in personal
reductiveness. A friend said she
took one look at that questionaire and knew that she was incapable of
filling it out. "I’m having a mid-life crisis, I wasn’t going to sit
there and do it," she said.

Those kind of reunion
questionaries invite boasting, whether it’s about your spouse,
children, career, or creature comforts. You feel like you’ve really
gotta impress all those people you went to college with: Look how great my life is. Look at my kids. Look where I live. Look at my degrees. Look at my job. Look how much money I make!

But still, it got Smartmom thinking: WHAT
have I been doing since the day I.F. Stone spoke to my class in the
Broome County Arena? What fabulous resume can I whip out to impress my
peers, what personal biographical detail will just wow them all….

Hmmmm.

Well…

Ahhhh….

Seriously,
how does one honestly characterize a quarter century of one’s life? Is
it all really just a list of degrees, courses, jobs, projects,
addresses, and names. Are we nothing more than our resumes?

What
about the interstitial life – the life that goes on between the lines
of all the other stuff. The little discoveries we make about ourselves;
the conversations we have with friends on the phone; the surprising
moments we have with our children on the way to the store; an inside
joke told over and over; the words of a wise therapist; getting
proposed to at Two Boots Restaurant on Avenue A; an ephiphanic walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge; stopping at the National Poultry Museum
while driving through Kansas; hearing Caetano Veloso and Ornette
Coleman in concert and Patti Smith at CBGB’s ; a memorable meal in a
small Tuscan town; Teen Spirit and OSFO’s first words…

What of
the life we live concurrent to the resume life. The life of our hearts,
our minds, our sensations? Our attempts to just be.

Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, the leader of the Satmar Hasidic sect died on Monday. Thousands of observant Jews are in Brooklyn mourning his passing. This from New York 1.

The rebbe, or Grand Rabbi, died Monday at the age of 91.

Teitelbaum had more than 100,000 followers worldwide, most of them in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the upstate village of Kiryas Joel. His Satmar sect is the largest Hassidic Jewish sect in the United States.

Police in Williamsburg began cordoning off streets late Monday afternoon in expectation of the large crowds.

The rebbe died at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he had been treated since late last month for spinal cancer and other health problems.

He leaves behind two daughters and four sons, two of whom have fought over who will succeed their father. In 2004 the pair went to a Brooklyn judge, who ruled it was up to the rebbe himself to choose his spiritual heir.

 

Here’s a big Brooklyn Story from NY1 — Junior’s will be opening a branch in Times Square. Wow. Now tourists won’t have to come out to Brooklyn to try the cheesecake. But they won’t get the real flavor of the place – the ambiance, the attitude. It’ll be the tourist version. Still, cheesecake is cheesecake.

Junior’s Restaurant is bringing its famous cheesecakes to Times Square.

Junior’s will be opening a new restaurant on 45th Street and
Shubert Alley sometime in June. The original Junior’s opened on
Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn in 1950.

The new restaurant will have 200 indoor seats plus an additional 80 for an outdoor cafe. The menu will be the same.

Thanks to mail-orders and online sales, Junior’s sells half a million cheesecakes a year

An article in the  New York Times by Andrew Jacobs about the man who was killed in Prospect Park on Saturday. No suspect yet but ivestigators said they were exploring
whether Mr. Oliver was the victim of a robbery, a random act of
brutality or perhaps an attack motivated by homophobia—the Vale of Cashmere, where the murder took place, has been the site of  gay attacks in the past.

William Oliver was a housecleaner, a gardener, a patient uncle and a
reliable jack-of-all-trades. But more than anything, Mr. Oliver, 61,
was known by those who loved him as a walker.

His
tireless amblings across the city were almost always accompanied by the
music that, wearing oversized headphones, he played on a portable CD
player.

On Saturday afternoon, police officers responding to a
911 call from a passer-by found Mr. Oliver’s rain-drenched body in a
thickly wooded corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Mr. Oliver, who lived with relatives in Brooklyn, was killed by a knife plunged into his chest, the police said.

Yesterday,
the authorities said they had no suspects in Mr. Oliver’s killing,
which took place about 4 p.m. in the Vale of Cashmere, a lush, hilly
swath near Grand Army Plaza, which draws bird-watchers and, in good
weather, gay men looking for sexual encounters.

Reared in rural
Virginia, one of seven children born to a tobacco-farming couple, Mr.
Oliver was a quiet, courtly man who, according to family members, held
a variety of jobs after moving to New York in the 1970’s: as a worker
in a handbag factory, a salesman at a jewelry store and, in recent
years, a housecleaner for affluent clients in Manhattan.

Wilson
Oliver, 67, said he could not imagine why anyone would want to harm his
brother, a pacific soul who mostly kept to himself.

Although he
worked when he could, his brother said, William Oliver did not earn
enough money to rent his own place so he alternated between his older
brother’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant and his sister’s house in
Flatbush. Mr. Oliver would get a bed and home-cooked meals, and his
siblings would enjoy his good-natured company and the benefits of his
industriousness.

In the winter, Mr. Oliver shoveled snow, and
in the spring, he prepared his sister’s backyard vegetable garden. Not
long ago, he painted her living room robin’s-egg blue.

"You didn’t have to ask him to do anything," said the sister, Shirley Puryear, 69. "He just did it."

Walking
and listening to music, family members said, seemed to be his solace.
He would regularly stroll the 3½ miles between his brother’s and
sister’s homes. Sometimes, he would hike all the way into Manhattan.
"He’d just walk and walk and walk," said a niece, Evelyn Puryear.

Prospect
Park is near the route he usually took between the homes of his brother
and his sister. Last night, investigators said they were exploring
whether Mr. Oliver was the victim of a robbery, a random act of
brutality or perhaps an attack motivated by homophobia. When asked, Mr.
Oliver’s brother and sister said they did not know whether he was gay.

Over
the years, the Vale of Cashmere has often been the site of attacks on
gay men. Last October, two men were shot and wounded there; in 2000, a
man dressed as a ninja slashed and beat five men there. No arrests were
made in those attacks.

Clarence Patton, executive director of
the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, said he was
consulted yesterday by an investigator from the Police Department’s
hate crimes unit, who was trying to determine whether the victim was
gay.

Though Mr. Patton said he did not know, he said at least 10
percent of victims of anti-gay violence are not gay, but rather are
targeted in places thought to be gathering spots for gay men or
lesbians. "It’s hard to say whether you hope it was a robbery or an
anti-gay attack," he said. "At the end of the day, a man is dead, and
it doesn’t really matter."

Aaron Naparstak , Brooklyn blogger, urban activist, and author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage," had an interesting piece on his blog about world oil usage and biking.

An editorial in the New York Times on April 20th, "How Dare They Use Our Oil!"
sounds all of the right notes. It lays down a brief but harsh critique
of the Bush administration’s continuing failure to address energy
policy in a serious way. And on the occasion of the Chinese president
Hu Jintao’s visit to the White House, it takes the administration to
task for "asking other countries to lay off the world’s oil supply so
America can continue to support its gas-guzzling Hummers." It almost
sounds like Bill Maher has joined the editorial board.

Then there is this jarring line: "The United States doesn’t have the right to tell a third of humanity to go back to their bicycles because the party’s over."

It’s
just a quick little transition, a throw-away line, probably not
something that anyone put a lot of thought into. And yet this one
sentence highlights a profound set of assumptions about how a city
should be.

It’s a little reminder that a significant segment of
New York City’s decision-making class still views bicycling as
something to be done by children, Lance Armstrong and impoverished
people in Third World countries. Biking isn’t seen as an integral part
of the healthy, sustainable 21st century urban metropolis. Rather, it
is more often perceived as a disruption, an annoyance, and maybe even a
little bit backwards and uncivilized. To the writer of this sentence, a
city filled with bike commuters clearly does not represent progress.

That’s
so different than how I see it. Getting on my bike to drop my son at
day-care, run an errand, or go to a meeting isn’t a sacrifice. It
doesn’t mean "the party’s over." It doesn’t represent some sort of
personal or societal failure. The way I see it, a city filled with bike traffic is the party.

–Aaron Naparstak

Dope on the Slope posts a comment defending  Callalillie on her blog.

As a blogger, I consciously put myself and my words out there and part of that is the risk of being taken out of context. If she had interviewed me, it would be a different story. – Callalillie

I think that’s true, but it takes a lot of class not to take a swipe at the author of that article, which is a sloppy bit of fluff about the future of Red Hook, a subject which I think deserves more serious attention.

I also think it’s trashy for paid journalists to lazily skim the blogosphere for material, and then heap thinly veiled condescension on those same bloggers later. Trashy, but entirely expected. After all, as you point out, we are fair game.

Keep up the good work. You are the best ambivalent embarrassed post-yuppie in the blogosphere.

In the aftermath of the Roosevelt Island tram rescue, the New York Times picked five places you would not want to get stuck and presented them to the Fire and Police Departments to see how they would respond. Thoughts of getting stuck at the top were foremost on my mind when I rode the Wonder Wheel last year. Now that would be awful

Your cousin from Cleveland has persuaded you, against your better judgment, to ride the Wonder Wheel, and, at the 150-foot summit, it comes to a halt.

The power is out. How do you get down?

Step 1, Chief Norman said, is to call in one of the department’s 95-foot-tall tower ladders as a base of operations. Rescue workers would then climb the wheel’s steel skeleton, using ropes, clips and nylon webbing as safeguards.

With the stokes basket or a special seatlike device called a diaper harness, they would then lower riders either to the ladder’s platform or onto the ground.

The Fire Department has actually been itching for a chance to practice on the Wonder Wheel, Chief Norman said, and officials have gone so far as to stand at its base, planning rescues from below.

So far, however, the department has not been allowed to use the wheel for drills because of liability concerns. Chief Norman said its owners asked him, "You want to climb out there for what?" For practice, he told them.

The answer, he said, was no.

In a piece about Red Hook, Village Voice writer Carla Blumenkranz characterizes fellow blogger, Callalillie, as an ambivalent post yuppie. Huh?

Like a prehistoric, three-legged fish crawling out of some slurpy,
subterranean swamp, here is Red Hook in its current state of evolution:
two healthy-looking 30-somethings wearing drugstore sunglasses, using
the backboards at the Harold Ickes playground to practice their tennis
strokes. It’s a real open court, this neighborhood, part-deserted, well
located, and prepared to be made over in the image of its newest and
least-hardy settlers.

Oldish-youngsters aren’t much newer to this area than
gentrification is to certain parts of Brooklyn. What’s changing,
drastically, just this month, is the basic interface of the
neighborhood: One long blink and Red Hook won’t look, sit, taste, or
travel anything like it did before. On April 15, Carnival’s Queen Mary
2 docked, with great fanfare, at the new Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal,
at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Columbia Street. And while Red
Hook might seem bleak to the first few rounds of Carnival-goers, their
ships will soon come in to truckloads of fresh produce: Fairway Market
on Van Brunt Street looks about ready to burst open. Meanwhile, the
Ikea site, also on the waterfront, awaits transformation; developers
float visions of parks, condos, and fish markets; and relatively
long-term residents rest just a little uneasy.

Local blogger Callalillie smartly embodies the embarrassed
post-yuppie ambivalence of future corporate shoppers. On the one hand,
she claims she would gladly trek to Manhattan for vegetables, if it
meant saving the gnarled warehouses she adores. On the other, she write
that when Fairway opens, she’ll be one of the first in line, buying
each and every one of the canisters in the spice section. Looks like
she won’t have to choose….READ MORE

This is from  a Brooklyn Life  Learn how you can get a Brookyn mix tape from DJ Duckcomb.

You know how it goes. You wake up underneath your Georgia O’Keeffe Brooklyn Bridge poster and stumble into the kitchen to pour some Gorilla brand coffee into your Brooklyn parrots coffee mug. A quick shower and you’re on the way out the door, but not before grabbing your Brooklyn sweatshirt
in case it’s chilly. Still, the day is missing something, and you can’t
figure out what. And THEN it hits you, what you need is an iTunes mix
entirely devoted to the great place that is Brooklyn, because you can
never have enough Brooklyn…

READ MORE AT A BROOKLYN LIFE

Callalillie, one of my favorite bloggers, was quoted out of context in a Village Voice column (see above). Here is her post in response, as well as some comments she made to commenters on her comments page:

According to the Village Voice,
I have finally reached the status of ambivalent, embarrassed
post-yuppie. I always thought that I veered more closely toward
neurotic, not embarrassed, and I’m not quite sure what a post-yuppie is
(though I don’t doubt that I probably am one), but with that over with,
I can now die in peace.

Context is always key, especially when dealing with metaphor.

More comments from Callalillie:

I am still trying to find some of the context. I can’t remember when I
said that I would gladly trek to Manhattan for my groceries in order to
save a warehouse. The warehouse where Fairway is wasn’t in danger of
being knocked down. I’ll have to go through my archives. I would
definitely gladly trek to Manhattan to buy crappy furniture in order to
save the shipyard, though.

More comments from Callalillie:

As a blogger, I consciously put myself and my words out there and
part of that is the risk of being taken out of context. If she had
interviewed me, it would be a different story.

A marvelous recollection from Richard Grayson of the first earth day in Prospect Park. Grayson, the author of, "TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORMER STREET," copied a page out of his diary from the very first Earth Day in Union Square in 1970. I remember that day – vividly and vaguely if that’s possible – I was in Union Square with I don’t remember who. That was a long, long time ago. Another time.

I don’t know what I will be doing for Earth Day in Prospect Park this
year, Louise, but this post made me get out my 1970 diary. If this is
not too cheesy, here’s an excerpt from the entry for Wednesday, April
22, 1970, the first Earth Day:

A warm & sunny Earth Day. Mark called & asked me to come
with him to the Union Square rally. Mayor Lindsay closed off 5th Ave.
& 14th St. to traffic & the crowds were enormous. But I didn’t
feel like getting into so big a crowd & went by myself to the
smaller Prospect Park rally.

I parked the car on 8th Ave. & walked to the meadow. A singing
group called the Smubbs, dressed as pigs, sang about pollution. They
also sang a song to the tune of "Give My Regards to Broadway" that was
"Give my regards to Brooklyn / Remember me to Bartel Pritchard Square."

Then Gov. Rockefeller made a speech saying, "If you’re not part of
the solution, you’re part of the pollution." He had a lot of trouble
with hecklers…

Walking back to the car when the rally ended ended, I was stunned to
see Rocky waving to me from a bicycle! Too bad I’d used up all my film.

Dad came home and said he was booed by the crowd as he drove through
the streets near Union Square and people banged on his Cadillac. The TV
reports said the crowds were disappointing. It remains to be seen what
will be done about our environment.
–Richard Grayson

PHOTO FROM 1970 EARTH DAY

Continue reading APRIL 22, 1970: THE FIRST EARTH DAY →

So the whole Shopsin’s story was an urban myth. A rumor. A lie. Gawker has the real story – or so they say. A freelance writer named
Kayleen Schaefer from the City section tipped me off on Tuesday  because she wanted to interview me.

I’m a freelance writer with the City section of The New York Times and I’m working on a story about Shopsin’s. It’s not moving to Brooklyn—it was just a rumor—so I’m writing about the press coverage and panicked customers that resulted from the rumor. I saw that you wrote about it on your blog and wanted to talk to you about it. I imagine you must be disappointed it’s not moving to Brooklyn. Please give me a call or email me back by Wednesday. Thanks very much.  Kayleen Schaefer

First the Daily News said that Kenny was considering a move. Now Gawker says it was never true. Ever. This from Gawker:

A few weeks ago, as you might recall, New York
mag announced that Shopsin’s, the West Village institution with an
interminable menu and a cantankerously charming — charmingly
cantankerous? — owner, was up and moving to Brooklyn, looking for
cheaper rent. Then the Daily News followed up on the story, downgrading the move from fait accompli
to something Kenny Shopsin was considering. But now we’re hearing it’s
not true at all. A source who lives across the street from the
restaurant emails:

Shopsin’s is NOT moving to Brooklyn. I was in there last
weekend and the Zack Shopsin (owner’s son) assured me they are not
moving. What happened was: a journalist was sitting in there and
overheard Kenny Shopsin say something to someone about how Brooklyn was
cheaper. And the journalist then asked Kenny if they were moving, and
Kenny told him to write whatever he wanted to write. (They hate
publicity).

It’s sounds crazy, yes; but then so is Shopsin’s. Plus, we ran this
version past one of the city’s foremost experts on the establishment,
who insisted on complete anonymity but said, “My impression is that
your e-mail informant has it right.” That’s good enough for us.

Well, no matter what Kayleen, Gawker, and the Daily News say, I think Shopsin’s is moving to Brooklyn. And I still stand by my story that the Gap is moving into that Salvation Army space on Fifth Avenue…

Found this on Callalillie’s blog – it’s from the fairway website.

I guess Fairway really is coming to Red Hook.

An old friend sent word of the birth of his daughter on April 6th.

Congratulations to father, mother, and child. Her name is Safira. Check out the  downy hair on her forehead.

I came across this by accident on ye olde Internet. It’s on Sunday night and fits in with my 30th high school reunion, 1970’s mood:

The Storefront has announced the song list for its second production of 2006. Tales of Joni: The Storefront Sings Mitchell will be presented on Sundays, April 23rd and 30th at 7pm at The Duplex Cabaret Theatre (61 Christopher St., in the heart of New York’s West Village).

A stellar array of theatre and cabaret performers will present Mitchell’s work over the course of the two evenings.

The song list is as follows:

Ensemble – "The Circle Game"
Michael Holland – "A Strange Boy"
Sarajean Devenport – "All I Want"
Jeff Blumenkrantz – "My Old Man"
Suzanne Fiore – "A Case of You"
Baby Jane Dexter – "Be Cool"
Tim DiPasqua – "Woodstock"
Kate Pazakis – "River"
Rachel Ulanet – "California"
Nick Cearley – "Big Yellow Taxi"
Gabrielle Stravelli – "Woman of Heart & Mind"
Brandon Cutrell – "The Priest Song"
Liz McCartney – "Night Ride Home"
Jarrod Cafaro – "He Played Real Good For Free"
Ensemble – "Both Sides Now"

There is a $12 cover charge ($10 for members of MAC and Cabaret Hotline Online), as well as a two-drink minimum.

My first cousin’s oldest daughter is getting married on June 4th and we’re already in a tizzy about what to wear.

Yesterday was the Oh So Feisty One’s turn to tiz over her outfit. OSFO, Diaper Diva and I subwayed into Manhattan, 34th Street to be exact, to look for a dress at Macy’s.

We three determined shoppers made our way to the 8th floor, quickly averting the make-up department where swarms of women converged on us like bees with small bottles of perfume.

Once on the children’s floor, it was clear that 9-year-old OSFO had an extremely clear vision of what she wanted. She scanned all the girl’s party dresses in an instant.   "Most of these are too princessy," she said as she quickly walked dismissively from one display area to the next.

And she was right. Too frilly, too frothy, too fro frou, most of the dresses were more suited for  Easter service at church than a sophisticated Baltimore wedding. As far as OSFO was concerned, they were way, way off base

But then we found the tween prom dress department (that seems the best way to describe it). "How about this one?" I said holding a yellow and green patterned dress. "Too fruity," she said. And this one? "Not right for a wedding." she said with an assurance way past her years.

"What about these?" I asked holding up two or three perfectly acceptable choices. "I like them. But not for this wedding."

This wedding? I wondered.

Then she made a bee-line for a dress—a cross between a ballet tutu and something a tad more burlesque. Tight black elasticized top, light pink, tulle skirt with an uneven hem. Diaper Diva looked a little skeptical.

I knew it would be either really great or completely tacky.

OSFO and I crowded into the small dressing room with a thicket of hangered dresses. Diaper Diva was dispatched to the shoe department to search for appropriate shoes. The sexy tutu was the first thing OSFO wanted to try. Tight on the top, frilly on the bottom, it actually looked pretty terrific. We pinned up her hair and she was a vision to behold. "I think this might be it." I thought to myself. But OSFO looked at herself quizzically.

"What does slutty mean?" she asked staring at herself in the 3-way mirror. Ah. Ah. Ah. I stalled not sure what to say. "Why do you ask?" I stammered.

"Because I heard Diaper Diva whisper that the dress might be slutty," she said.

"Oh. She meant…sexy," I said nervously, OSFO continue to stare at herself in the mirror and then  pulled the dress over he head and reached for another hanger. And so it went, dress after dress.

"Nope," she said pulling off a pink dress that looked utterly beautiful. Finally, a white chiffon dress with faded flowers met her approval. "I’ll need the right shoes," she said.

But still she persevered. A half hour later, the room was awash in inside-out dresses as a  half-naked girl surveyed the mess.

"I like these two," she said picking two out of the pile. "One for the wedding. One for the dinner party the night before." she said decisively. Where she got the idea that there might be a dinner party the night before I don’t know. She’s probably right.

Truth is,  she selected the two most perfect dresses – and the sexy tutu wasn’t even in the running.

No big fights, no fits, no yelling matches. It wasn’t what I expected at all. A trip to a department store was usually pretty traumatic for me as a child. My mother always had strong ideas about what I could and could not wear. And trips to the dressing room were always a self-referendum on what I mostly didn’t like about the way I looked.

I’ve always given OSFO more choice than I ever had. Consequently, she’s much more comfortable with her own sense of style and the way that she looks.

She tried on every pink shoe in the shoe department and settled on a pair of jeweled pink slides. My girl. She does know what she likes and she’s damn good at finding it.

Last night’s BROOKLYN READING WORKS was pretty incredible.

Rachel Vigier’s stark and wise poems grapple with the ghosts of Lower Manhattan after 9/11. With a hyper awareness of the body – the way in which we are all just flesh and bones, Rachel reveals how vulnerable we are to destruction and sudden disappearance. No experience – her daughter’s bath, a trip to Florence, an emergency room hours after Vigier’s escape from a downtown building on  9/11 – is without a pensive awareness of the body – the bones of who we are both mentally and physically. Ghosts are everywhere in Vigier’s poetry as is the idea that history touches all that we do and every place that we are.

Kim Larsen’s gripping essay, "When the Middle is the End," deals unflinchingly with the death of her friend,  Laurel, three years ago. Everyone looked stunned when it was over and it left the crowd feeling pretty raw. In her masterful prose, Kim evoked her friendship with Laurel with humor, honesty, surprising language and sharp details about her friends pain and suffering, and her own inability to accept the inevitable even within days of the end.

The night Laurel cooked us dinner, a week or two earlier, after she
ladled the soup and cut the bread and tossed the salad and poured the
wine, then toted her nutrition contraption over to the table and
hoisted up her blouse and plugged in the hose to the slot in her
midriff; after she shrugged wryly and jotted on her pad: Bon appetit!
After I excused myself as casually as I could and fled to the bathroom
to reason with my reflection in the mirror that if Laurel could do this
then so could I; after I checked on Abe and Anya, who had eaten their
dinner earlier and were now curled up together on Josh and Laurel’s
bed, mesmerized, watching “The Parent Trap;” after I returned to the
table and tasted my soup, which was delicious, and seemed to blaze a
trail for more soup to follow; after Jim and Laurel discussed some of
the things he’d investigated for her about text-to-voice technology;
after Laurel mused on her notepad about the possibility of taking the
kids back to Tuscany and renting another villa, as we’d done when they
were three; after we cleared the plates and lapsed into silence and
said goodnight because we were tired; after we got home and I flung
myself into bed, I wondered aloud to Jim:

   “What will become of her?”

   In a matter of days, we knew

An excerpt from this essay will appear in May’s Parenting Magazine. It will also be included in an anthology about middle age that is coming out from the University of Arizona Press next year.

Rachel Vigier’s book, The Book of Skeletons, is forthcoming from Pedlar Press in Canada.

PHOTO BY GLUOMA

THIS IS FROM MY FRIEND LITTLE LIGHT.

I think her Yahoo Avatar is soooo cute. I can attest to the fact that in real life Little Light is  very tall (at least 5’10), has an afro, and is quite stunning.

I
love that little thing, the little cartoon me. It’s like playing with
paper dolls again, switching around the outfits, backgrounds and facial
expressions depending on my mood or the weather or both (it’s a normal
day for LittleLight when she’s standing in the rain wearing black – but
she’s perfectly comfortable there). I look forward to every week when
Yahoo offers a new wardrobe selection.

Yesterday,
LargerThanLifeVIP’s assistant in New Jersey called me because she
wanted to know what I looked like. She said she thought I was "little."
I told her that I’m 5’10 and she said I didn’t sound like I was 5’10.
She wanted me to email her a picture, so I emailed my little avatar.
"This is me," the message said.

After telling me that I was full
of sh-t, she said she didn’t believe me – especially the afro part
(because having an afro is unheard of), so I told her to ask LTLVIP if
it was an accurate likeness. He said it was.

8 p.m. tonight at the Old Stone House,  Brooklyn Reading Works presents two writers,  Essayist Kim Larsen and Poet Rachel Vigier, who explore the suddeness of loss, the fragility of life. The Old Stone House is located on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets in Park Slope. Free. Refreshments. 

From Kim Larsen’s "When the Middle is the End:"

Laurel put a meal together for my family and me a couple of weeks before she died. The main dish was a Tuscan soup — beans, pasta, tomatoes. Delicious. There was bread and a salad and wine. I saw a note she’d jotted to her husband, the word “wine” followed by an exclamation point. The apartment was littered with such notes, not all of them concise. Pen to paper was her mode of communication now that she no longer possessed a tongue — it had been surgically removed six weeks earlier in what would shortly prove a vain attempt to root out the cancer encamped at the base of the organ. Laurel’s handwriting was nearly illegible, a forward-slanting scrawl, and we all marveled to see how expertly her seven-year-old daughter Anya deciphered it. More remarkably, sometimes Anya could blithely interpret her mother’s attempts at speech. To anyone else Laurel’s words were unintelligible — guttural starts followed by featureless nasal incantation. The will to speak still drove her, but it was useless. Anya’s uncanny ability to understand her mother even occasionally represented some kind of umbilical magic. That they both took it in stride increased the dazzle of the little girl’s feat.

A poem by Rachel Vigier:

Remnants

It’s what I have left to offer you —
    the ripple of a flax field in flower
the flow of a river slipping to sea
    the weight of a whale flipping over.
Say it’s images from a life left over
    or the lust of memory
wanting its place of origin
    before the blue fades, before
the heft and swiftness disappear

Finally got to the Museum of Modern Art to see Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul. A survey of the Norwegian painter’s career, the exhibiton reveals that Munch was clearly a very soulful guy who lived a life of passion and pain.

"We do not want to paint pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls," Munch said. "We want to create, or at least lay the foundations of, an art that gives something to humanity. An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one’s innermost heart."

Innermost heart. You got me at hello. I love a guy who can really express what’s going on in his head. And, oy, Munch lays it all out – in paintings that reek of mania and despair. With swirling landscapes and dark scenes in illicit rooms, the paintings convey a life lived in a heightened state of emotional drama and turmoil: love affairs, drinking, illness, angst.

Conspicuously missing from the show is Munch’s most iconic work. "The Scream" has been reproduced and parodied to death. It’s absence prevented the show from feeling like a greatest hits parade — one of those super shows where people crowd around the most famous work and ignore everything else.

Perhaps the most moving works were the last self-portraits on display. Munch painted himself at every stage of his life. The final one, "Standing Between the Clock and the Bed," shows the artist looking bedraggled and frail. On the precipice of death, he seems ready to let go of a life spent passionately painting the world from within.

Kind of disconcerting to learn that the Roosevelt Island tram’s emergency backup system has been out of service for months. Nice going, NYC. This from the New York Times:

A day after the Roosevelt Island Tramway stalled in midair, trapping dozens of passengers for as long as 11 hours, officials said that a backup power system designed to restart the two tram cars in seconds had been out of service for months

That disclosure came as the tram remained shut down yesterday, after an improvised rescue effort that freed the last of 20 passengers stranded in a tram car 200 feet above the East Side of Manhattan. By then, after 4 a.m., 48 other passengers trapped in a tram car above the East River had already been evacuated, bringing to an end to a late-afternoon tram ride that had turned into a nightlong ordeal.

As relieved passengers recounted how they had passed the hours — chatting, telling jokes and calling family and friends on cellphones — officials began investigating why the incident had forced the police and emergency teams to devise an evacuation plan on the spot.

And as the state-appointed official who oversees Roosevelt Island defended the tram as "an intimate part of the Roosevelt Island mystique," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gave it a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement: The subway, he said, was a faster way to travel to and from the island. It was not clear yesterday how long the tram would be closed.

The Swiss-made tramway, which went into operation in 1976, stalled when a power surge knocked out three giant fuses that control the flow of power to the tram cars. It was not clear why the fuses could not simply be replaced and the tramway restarted. But the tramway also has a diesel-powered system that can run the gears and cables and make the cars go.

Herbert E. Berman, the president of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, the state agency that manages the 147-acre island, said the backup system was removed for repairs last fall on orders of the State Department of Labor, the agency responsible for inspecting the tramway. He also said the system was not required, but inspectors said that if it was going to be used, it had to work.

But he said the surge that knocked out the main system could have disabled the secondary power system as well. He said it was expected to be returned and re-installed in a matter of weeks.

So rescuers assembled a cagelike rescue basket that had been stored on Roosevelt Island, but never used in a real emergency, to carry the passengers to safety from the tram car over the East River. But the rescuers improvised a way to carry the people in the second tram car to safety after realizing that otherwise they would have to wait until the first evacuation had been completed.

Mr. Berman said that in the tramway’s 30 years, emergency procedures had never been needed before. "That’s a pretty good record," he said. The rescue, he added, "was a tedious process, but it was a safe process."

The mayor said the rescue effort had "worked perfectly."

"It was a classic operation of this city," he told reporters at Fire Department headquarters in Brooklyn, "and it showed that all of these people worked together. We did what we had to do; we got everybody down safely."

Mr. Bloomberg said it took so long to evacuate the two tram cars "because our emergency response people did exactly what they should do."

"They didn’t rush to do anything just to satisfy a beat-the-clock kind of exercise," he said.

And, as other officials noted yesterday, when the tram stopped about 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Fire Department workers who arrived at the scene believed that the power would go back on quickly. For that reason, department personnel who had been trained to rescue passengers from the tram were sent to other duties.

In fact, the power did come on again, at about 8:15. The two tram cars moved about 75 feet, only to grind to a halt again.

That was when the Police Department’s emergency service unit took over. Officers from that unit had been working on a rescue plan just in case, and at 8:30 they decided to go ahead with it.

They started with the tram car on the Roosevelt Island side because it was carrying more passengers. After the basket was assembled at the end of the tramway, about a dozen officers and firefighters — who by then had returned to the scene — climbed in to test how much it could hold.

By then it was almost 11 p.m., and the passengers had been stuck for six hours. Four officers, all trained as emergency medical technicians, rode out in the cage…

I’d been smelling gas off and on in the kitchen for a few days. But when my friend walked into the apartment yesterday morning saying, "Oooh you better call Keyspan." I decided I better call Keyspan.

Within an hour, the Keyspan emergency technician showed up and went to work. She moved our stove – revealing years of behind the stove grease and lost utensils. "You’ve got mouse droppings back there," she said handing me a flashlight. "You wanna look?"

The Gas Lady discovered a gas leak in the oven. "Probably caused by one of those mice biting a hole in one of these pipes." she said. "It’s an appliance problem."

I called Ed, the local appliance repair guy. "I’m in a meeting, I can’t talk," he said. "Will call you back." The Keyspan woman said she’d have to turn off the gas. "I’ll come back after the stove is fixed."

When she wasn’t kneeling on the floor investigating behind the stove or sticking her head in the oven, the Gas Lady seemed intrigued by our things. She liked our globes – we have more than 50 – which are displayed prominently throughout the apartment.

"You make that?" she said pointing at my friend’s huge painting of an owl. "No, my friend did that?" I didn’t explain that it’s a huge portrait of Hedwig, Harry Potter’s owl, which we used for "Pin the Tail on Hedwig" at  Teen Spirit’s Harry Potter birthday party when he was  turning 8.

The Gas Lady commented on a huge photo portrait of a man and child in the foyer. "That’s big. Is it your husband?" I explained that it was not. "We don’t even know them. My husband took that picture."

Since she was interested in all the large pictures, I showed her the photograph in the living room – a 3 x 3 foot portrait of a street person on Ludlow Street. "That’s nice," she said as she lifted up her equipment and headed downstairs.

Ed, the appliance guy, called at 8 p.m. "Did you call earlier about a stove?" He said he’d try to get here tomorrow or the next day. "I’ll see what I can do."

Stove Photo by Phrenophile