A member of the list-serve, Park Slope Parents wrote in to say that the fundamentalist christian groups are back for the season proselytizing to children without parents consent in our playgrounds. The writer added that she is not against fundamentalist Christians, just any form of religious proselytizing in a public playground

Last year the Child Evangelism Fellowship (http://www.cefonline.com/content/category/8/31/75) handed out candy and coloring books but asked the kids first if they accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

This national para-church comes to urban playgrounds through local church sponsorship with the sole purpose of converting children. It is actually very difficult to discern if the
proselyters are CEF because they seem to hide behind their local
sponsorship.

If this practice is offensive to you, I advise you to call the parks department, ask the proseltyzers for their permits and then call the parks officers (they rarely have a permit and they
should not be handing out things to children).

PSST!

I’ll tell you this just once

And then I have to beat it–

I took a solemn vow

And promised not to repeat it.

Movies Al Fresco in JJ Byrne Park: Brooklyn Film Works returns with Democracy in Action, a series of political films on Wednesday nights in July. The show starts at dusk. There will be a short before the feature.

First up: 1776.

Running time: 2 hrs 56 mins

Synopsis: This acclaimed film version of Peter Stone’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, which was one of the last big-budget studio musicals, stars William Daniels (TV’s Saint Elsewhere) as John Adams and Howard Da Silva as Ben Franklin. A rollicking, anachronistic treatment of the creation of the Declaration of Independence. Perfect for the week of the 4th of July.

Genre: Musical & Performing Arts
Starring: William Daniels, David Ford, Howard Da Silva, Donald Madden, Emory Bass
Director: Peter H. Hunt
Story: Peter Stone, Sherman Edwards
Screenwriter: Peter Stone
Composer: Sherman Edwards

Thanks to Leon Freilich who just sent this over. From the Daily News: There’s also a story in the Brooklyn Paper.

By Ayala Falk Daily News
Monday, June 30th 2008, 9:09 PM

Bad news for Park Slope.

Good news for a few other Brooklyn neighborhoods.

The Department of Transportation said Monday a two-month break for motorists in Park Slope will end July 14 when it resumes alternate side parking.

Department officials said it will have successfully posted 2,800 new parking signs on neighborhood streets. Alternate side parking will be reduced from three-hour intervals to 90 minutes and from twice-a-week cleanings to once a week.

It means Park Slope motorists who got comfy leaving their cars parked in one spot will have to move them at least once a week.

Reaction in Park Slope was quick.

“Damn it, it’s going to get me,” said musician Mike Eber, 26, worried about a ticket blitz. “Now I can leave a car for a week and go out of town. I’m the one everyone hates.”

Meanwhile, DOT announced alternate side parking regulations will be temporarily suspended for six to eight weeks, beginning Monday, in parts of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Gowanus in Community Board 6. The department plans to post 2,100 signs.

The changes do not affect 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. parking rules, meters or other parking rules that are not street cleaning regulations.

Dean Street’s Bar Tabac and other New York area hot spots will host the 6th annual Bastille Day Petanque Tournament and celebrate France ’s Independence Day in style.

On Sunday July 13, 2008 from 11:00 a.m. through 8:00 p.m., Bar Tabac and Robin des Bois take over Brooklyn’s popular Smith and Dean Street intersection and surrounding blocks to celebrate France ’s Bastille Day with the countries largest Pétanque tournament. Over 7,000 people and 80 Pétanque teams are expected to participate in the French fête, with all dues donated to the local Brooklyn Community Board. Throughout the day, guests will enjoy French cocktails, including the Classique and Elixir from Ricard, the world’s number one selling pastis, an anise-flavored beverage. Special guests are invited to relax at the Ricard hospitality tent at Bar Tabac where delicious food provided by Cercle Rouge chef and refreshing Ricard cocktails including the Cocorico, French Kiss and French Mojito will be served. Live jazz / swing music by The Baby Blue Orchids will keep the day festive, and Bar Tabac will prepare mouthwatering dishes inspired by South of France, including beef and merguez sandwiches.

Bastille Day (July 14th) celebrates French independence, and the day French citizens stormed the Bastille (a prison) in 1789, starting the French Revolution and bringing an end to the French monarchy. In honor of this holiday, Francophiles in New York play Pétanque (pronounced “pay-tonk”), a game similar to lawn bowling that originated in Provence in the early 1900s and is one of Europe ’s most popular outdoor activities. This year makes the 101st anniversary of the game. Players take turns rolling small steel balls (called boules) as close as possible to a small wooden aim ball (called a but or cochonnet). Brooklyn ’s Smith Street will provide the sanded arena for the competition.

If it’s very, very hot and everything else you want to see at the Pavilion is sold out, go with Kung Fu Panda. I saw it last night with Diaper Diva, Ducky and OSFO and we loved it. Even if we had to sit in the front row of the tiny theater on the top that has a bunch of messed up chairs no one can sit on.

Jack Black is the voice of Po, the Panda. Dustin Hoffman is the voice of the Master Shifu. Even Manhola Dargis at the New York Times’ enjoyed the film not expecting to.

Visually, this animated film from Dreamworks is actually quite gorgeous. Here’s Dargis in her New York Times review:

That outsider is even more irresistible when nestled amid so much lovingly created animation, both computer generated and hand drawn. The main story, executed via 3-D animation (all done on computers) and directed by John Stevenson and Mark Osborne, fluidly integrates gorgeous, impressionistic flourishes with the kind of hyper-real details one has come to expect from computer-generated imagery: photorealistically textured stone steps, for instance, and fur so invitingly tactile you want to run your fingers through it. One of the pleasures of “Kung Fu Panda” is that instead of trying to mimic the entirety of the world as it exists, it uses the touch of the real. The character designs may be anatomically correct, but they’re cartoons from whisker to tail

  Crazy headline from A Year in the Park; but she’s not kidding. The tour of the Quaker Cemetery in Prospect Park drew a really big crowd!

It figures. I cycle over in the sticky heat to one of the rare tours of Prospect Park’s Quaker Cemetery, and by the time I get there, there’s a 40-minute estimated wait on line. At the 10-acre cemetery, which predates the park and contains some 2,000 Friends’ graves, living Quakers were offering re-enactments of some of the interred residents, but I couldn’t tarry that long with dinner guests on the way.

Just got this enthusiastic note from the folks at Rosewater about a Crab Fest on July 10th at 7 p.m.

    In the Spring of  2007 we announced our first-ever Crab Feast. Our Maryland-born Chef then promptly decided to decamp to greener Connecticut pastures and suddenly the Boil was reduced to a slow simmer on the back burner. It’s a year later and, happily, another talented Maryland boy is manning the stove at RW – Chef Marcellus Coleman is champing at the bit to boil us up some Maryland Crab!

    We’re gonna cover the tables with tabloid newsprint, cover the upholstery, bust out the wooden mallets and dump some Old Bay Blues right there on the table – Chesapeake family style. Add pink wine, cold beer, cole slaw, fries and corn (if it’s good enough). You get the idea. Hard-shell Heaven. We’re expecting this to be so much fun that it will become an annual event!

    $68, all inclusive of tax and service. 718 783 3800. Tickets will likely go fast, so reserve asap.

I walked by with my mother and told her that Carmen’s, the new Seventh Avenue children’s stores, has handmade dresses with smocking. I used to wear hand made dresses with smocking when I was a girl.

At this shop, which is in the dripping cyclops/octopus building owned by Mark Ravitz Art and Design, you can buy seersucker shorts for a young boy in this store and all manner of formal looking clothing your grandmother would have loved. I know my grandmother bought me underwear at Best and Co. on Fifth Avenue

It’s the storefront that used to be Seventh Avenue Books (or was it Park Slope Books).

If variety is the spice of life: this kind of shop is a refreshing antidote to Lolli and Area if you like the sort of styles they feature.

Carmen’s Exclusives for Children on Seventh Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets, has clothing for children birth to five years old. Go this week while they still have cookies and beverages.

Richard Grayson, author of Who Will Kiss the Pig: Sex Stories for Teens, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, and With Hitler in New York, is back in town and he went to Celebrate Brooklyn Presents The Crooklyn Dodgers Reunion last night and filed this report, which is also on his blog.

It was raining very hard at 6 p.m. last evening, and things didn’t look good as we finished our Boca burger and batata coreano, intending to leave Dumbo HQ in Williamsburg for the next hour’s starting time at the Prospect Park Bandshell for Celebrate Brooklyn’s presentation of The Crooklyn Dodgers Reunion.

By 6:30 p.m., things had brightened up a bit and we made our way to the park to represent BK’s old white people at what sounded like it was going to be a history-making night in the annals of Brooklyn hip-hop with the return of the classic super-group.

As Wikipedia notes,
They appeared in three separate incarnations since 1994. The first two incarnations recorded for the soundtracks for Spike Lee films, Crooklyn and Clockers, respectively. The theme connecting The Crooklyn Dodgers songs, aside from the Spike Lee films which they were made for, is the topic matter, which tends to comment on the state of affairs in and around urban New York, as well as other issues affecting everyday life; as Jeru spouses “Chips that power nuclear bombs power my Sega.”

Probably due to the heavy rain, the crowd wasn’t big at the start of the night, but it really grew. We managed to find a close seat, thanks to the tiny blonde 7-year-old girl who took it upon herself to sponge off the water from all the folding chairs in our area.

It was an incredible show, hosted by Buckhshot and Special Ed, who showed off some of their own freestyling skills. The evening was a collage-montage of Brooklyn hip-hop, with continual shout-outs to the neighborhoods: “Flatbush!” “Crown Heights!” “Canarsie!” (When the incredibly talented Chip Fu yelled out “East 56th Street between Church & Snyder!” we shouted back, since we spent our first 28 years on East 54th between Snyder & Tilden and East 56th between O & Fillmore.)

The classic original veteran Masta Ace came on with his group EMC featuring amazing talent – Wordsworth, Punchline & Stricklin, and Chip Fu – with their rollicking signature opening. It just got better from there. As the crowds grew, arms waved, fists pumped, everyone swayed, and to us, the event seemed both Dionysian and intimate, as when Wordsworth jumped off the stage and began rapping in the crowd.

It was like being at a greatest Brooklyn house party ever. O.C., after doing some amazing stuff, sat down at the edge of the stage and began to talk to the borough’s young rappers just coming up about the perils of artistic compromise and hypocrisy. “The last of my kind,” O.C. didn’t name names, but said “some people ain’t doin’ what they supposed to.” Around me, audience members did name the names of some stars he was referring to.

The whole evening was curated by Danny Castro and Anthony Marshall, creators of the pioneering they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done open-mic night Lyricist Lounge, who deserve much credit for putting together this defining event. And props to their majesties DJ Premier and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, whose historic work with A Tribe Called Quest brightened our days back in the day (and made early morning workouts bearable).

The night featured great freestyling and amazing rapping, some of it BK-centric. “Why do we gotta live in this environment?/Your grandpa done drank up his retirement” reminded us that we were really, really tired and maybe the second-oldest human we spotted in the by-now humongous (we’re bad at estimates, everyone who took our 30,000 at the Met Opera seriously!) peaced-out crowd.

Blaming our fatigue on not old age but severe jet lag (we were campaigning in Arizona all week), we left a bit after 9 p.m. for the return trip home (the F was running funny, taking over the G route to Queens, causing confusion but making this a one-train trip back to the Burg), so we missed most of the show after intermission: Chubb Rock, the incredible Jeru the Damaja, etc. But we’ve got Kevin’s report:
One highlight of this evening was going out with a post-party crew of stoners (Jon Good, Jesse, other Jesse, and Daniela) to dew-damp Prospect Park to catch the tail end of a fucking huge (and completely free) hip-hop concert, featuring the reunion of a moderately successful ’90s rap group called the Crooklyn Dodgers.

I usually go to small underground shows, so this enormous outdoor bandshell venue, with thousands of screaming fans, backup dancers, stage lighting, the whole shebang. And the artists, though icons of the hip-hop underground, were more professional than anyone else I’ve ever heard. That’s the great thing about Brooklyn–a local concert, with local artists celebrating the history and culture of the neighborhood, is going to have world-class talent. Some of the lyrics were a little blingy and whut-whut for my tastes, but for the most part the rhymes were tight, the beats were solid, and the Scene was Real.

And their lyrical talent was astounding. The distinction between rap and poetry is usually pretty controversial but there is no questioning that what I saw and heard tonight was poetry. These guys know their neighborhood, they know their culture, and they know life in Crown Heights, and they managed to tap that zeitgeist like a keg of ass.

Isn’t life wonderful!

My friend, Jezra Kaye, sent me this review of a recent concert of a band that includes Prospect Heights bassist, Jerome Harris. Harris has played with so many jazz musicians I don’t know where to begin. For starters, Jack DeJohnette, Bill Frisell, Ray Anderson, Don Byron, Bobby Previte, Oliver Lake, Amina Claudine Myers, Bob Stewart, George Russell, Julius Hemphill, and Bob Moses. The excerpt from Jazz Times, describes a wonderful new band that brings together klezmer, funk and hip-hop.

Hopefully a CD will be out in the not-too-distant future, and OTBKB will let you know when they’re coming to Brooklyn. As Jezra said, “In the meantime, we can all just enjoy that such a thing exists!J Happy Almost-4th of July, and much love to all.”

This endlessly surprising yet highly successful hybrid of klezmer, funk and hip-hop had the enthusiastic crowd—young and old, Jews and gentiles, whites and blacks—dancing ecstatically in the aisles like it was a Jewish wedding. Wesley brought the funk while virtuoso clarinetist David Krakauer delivered the passionate intensity and deep Jewish soul that ties him to the lineage of klezmer clarinet kings like Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras. Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist and visionary beat architect Josh Dolgin, aka Socalled, provided a bridge between the klezmer and hip-hop worlds with his audacious Hebraic rapping while the Bronx-bred emcee C-Rayz Walz brought street cred to this unlikeliest of collaborations with his remarkable freestyling facility and stark urban imagery.

PARKING CIRCLES

They came from outer non-spaces

Having heard of Park Slope’s parking places–

A wide-open neighborhood for cars

Where once the attractions were churches and bars.

To Slopers, told that parking regs

Were gone for the summer like hated dregs

It seemed the end to spots you fish for;

Oh yeah? Be careful what you wish for.

A man and a woman talking on a train stream of consciousness about Black Pearl, the recently closed restaurant on Union Street between 6th and 7th Avenues:

Do you think it’s closed?

There was a sign that it was reopening on June something but I think it’s closed for good

I liked it.

I really like Black Pearl.

Do you think it was too big?

But it was such a good restaurant.

If it had been on Seventh Avenue maybe it would have done better

It had a Bay Ridge vibe

I loved the arugula pizza

The food was good

I’m really going to miss the arugula pizza

Do you think it closed?
Why do you think it closed…

I really liked Black Pearl

I wonder why it closed…

On First Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, I happened on a stoop sale with lots of LPs, found super-8 movies, Criterion Collection DVD’s, art books, and film equipment. My dad collects classical and jazz LP’s here’ what I got for him:

The Art Tatum Buddy DeFranco Quartet on Verve

Bird and Diz on Verve

In a Mellow toe by Johnny Hodges on Verve

Die Dreigroschenoper: The original cast recording of The Three Penny Opera on Telefunken

Victoria De Los Angeles on Seraphim

Bach: The Two and Three Park Inventions Gleenn Gould on Columbia

Elizabeth Schwarzkoph singing Mozart and Bach

But the real find was this, a book, copyright 1958:

The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men: Revealing stories and pieces by the most damned and praised writers of our day, including Jack Kerouac, Colin Wilson, Joh Wain, John Osborne, Kingsely Amis, Allen Ginsberg and many others…