I picked up a copy of Edible Brooklyn at Tempo Presto on Seventh Avenue. I’d never seen it before although the name was familiar. It’s a seasonal magazine celebrating the borough’s food culture. The winter 2007 issue is the magazine’s fourth. I guess I missed the other three.

I really enjoyed this issue with its article about Al Di La, with a recipe for Winter White Salad and great photographs of Anna, Emiliano, and the staff.

I loved the piece by Dan Zanes about the contents of his refrigerator. It really made me laugh the way he wrote it and it’s filled with great ideas and comments about Cobble Hill Honey, Wilklow Orchard cider, panettone, Marriage Freres tea and more.

Find out what Dan says about the Food Coop (he LOVES it but is no longer a member), where he shops now (Fairway), and his affection for Brooklyn (despite the Atlantic Yards problem).

Also, a great article about the best donuts in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Paper editor, Gersh Kuntzman and his great staff have done it again. Another busy week in Brooklyn — and some great stories from Brooklyn’s real newspaper:

1. Breaking news: City's one-way plan in Park Slope is DEAD!
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12oneway.html
SIDEBAR: The Brooklyn Angle: In defense of the DOT Technocrat:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12bklynangle.html

2. It's still war over Arabic school in Park Slope:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12arabicschool.html

3. Know Dice: The real Andrew Dice Clay Silverstein, a friend of The
Brooklyn Paper from way back:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12diceclay.html

4. Ratner's lobby hobby: Bruce is the state's third-biggest influence
peddler:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12ratnerlobby.html

5. Weird Chinese encounter: If Nixon could go to China, certainly four
Shanghai editors could come to our office:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12chineseeditors.html

LOCAL STORIES:
BAY RIDGE: Another church says it will sell out for condos:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12greenchurch.html

DUMBO: Dumbo is on the map. Which map? The map of neighborhoods where
politicians rename streets after other politicians.
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12streetnames.html

CARROLL GARDENS: Cute kid needs a kidney:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12kidnkeykid.html

FORT GREENE: This messy triangle will soon be a "Grand Plaza":
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12grandplaza.html

PROSPECT HEIGHTS: Local family faces eviction:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12eviction.html

OUR COLUMNISTS:
Brooklyn South: A Vietnamese Sandwich Smackdown!
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12brooklynsouth.html

Greene Acres: The true life saga behind the demise of Liquors:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12greeneacres.html

PS...I Love You: Nica's take on the one-way street plan:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12pslove.html

Yellow Hooker: How Brooklyn has grown beyond the Gottis:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12yellowhooker.html

Heights Lowdown: DUMBO is the city's "Furniture District":
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12heightslowdown.html

Smartmom: Hepcat has been laid off!
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12smartmom.html

All Drawn Out: Our editorial cartoonist's take:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12cartoon.html

Verses & Reverses: Our poet laureate's take on Dine in Brooklyn:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12comedinewithme.html

P
LUS: All of GO Brooklyn at http://www.brooklynpaper.com/sections/go/

INCLUDING:
The Brooklyn Museum's new feminist wing:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12artoffeminism.html
SIDEBAR: Sacklash!:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/12/30_12sacklash.html

Our nightlife calendar
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/sections/go/nightlife/

Our events calendar:
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/sections/go/events/

Good morning!

The Animal Care & Control of NY is holding an adoption event today from 12 – 4pm at Top Dog Shop – 169 Lincoln Place @ 7th Ave.
  They’ll have cats and dogs available for adoption.  I’ve been
fostering two stray kittens that were brought in about a month ago –
abandoned in someone’s backyard in Bensonhurst at only 4 weeks old!  I
was able to care for them, and now they’re ready for adoption!  These
guys are cuties!

All animals are vaccinated, spayed or neutered, microchipped
and temper tested.  There is an adoption fee.  Come out and adopt your
new best friend!

I’ve attached two photos I took of the kittens
that will be available for adoption today, I’ve named them Finn and
Fiona. (Finn, short for Phinneas, is the white & grey tabby, and
the boy of the two.)

http://www.nycacc.org

(The
city animal shelter, AC&C or Animal Care & Control, always
needs help – volunteers, donations, foster families, etc.  They are a
poorly underfunded city agency, but are doing their best to help make NYC a no-kill city.  We’re not there yet, and could use your help.  Calling all true animal lovers!)

Thanks and best wishes,
Claire

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from The Brooklyn Paper:

Whenever Hepcat calls in the middle of a workday, Smartmom gets nervous. That’s because it usually means bad news.

Like last summer, when he called at noon to say that he’d been laid off from his job as a Solutions Architect at the Edgy Start-Up. Smartmom felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach.

Dizzy. Anxious. It was like her head — and her life — were spinning out of control. How would they survive? How would they pay Teen Spirit’s college tuition? What, in Buddha’s name, were they going to do without health insurance and his salary?

A couple of months later, the Edgy Start-up re-hired Hepcat. Smartmom was thrilled. She felt safe and secure. Sort of.

She was also slightly suspicious. Why had they’d laid him off in the first place if they were just going to rehire him two months later?

While she rejoiced that she and her family were back on the escalator of upward mobility, she worried that they might soon find themselves in the bargain basement.

Smartmom figured, if it can happen once, it can happen again. Even when Hepcat received an excellent annual evaluation from his manager last month, Smartmom felt those familiar pulsations of anxiety.

She just couldn’t trust a company that would lay off her husband on whim because its was having a bad quarter and needed to lighten its salary load for a while.

Smartmom knew it was a sign of the times. As Richard Sennett says in his 2006 book, “The Culture of the New Capitalism,” corporations have become unstable and diffuse. Everyone faces the possibility of obsolescence. Gone are the days of the corporate job for life.

Employees must constantly adapt and prove themselves to be indispensable. And if you’re not “useful enough,” the company changes the locks and your password.

While you can’t depend on the security of a job, you can depend on the almighty bottom line.

With the dread from last summer’s layoff still hovering over her, Smartmom got a call last Monday. From Hepcat. In the middle of the day. Smartmom saw “husband” on the screen of her cellphone and her heart took a nosedive.

“Did you just get laid off?” she asked because somehow she knew.

“Yup,” he said.

How can they do this to us? Again. Lay me off once, shame on you. Lay me off twice, DOUBLE shame on you!

Smartmom felt the anger rise in her like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer. She wanted to call that Edgy Start-up and give the well-paid CEO a piece of her mind. Doesn’t he know the yo-yo Smartmom’s family is riding?

But first she channeled Tammy Wynette, standing by her man. She told Hepcat she loved him and that even if the Edgy Start-up gave him the heave ho, she would be his. Forever. No matter what. Through richer or poorer. The whole bit (but did they really need to do the “poorer” part?)

When Hepcat got home, he told Teen Spirit and the Oh So Feisty One what was going on.

“Not again,” Teen Spirit exclaimed. “Can’t they make up their minds?” He moved tentatively toward his dad and put his arms around his shoulders — it was a Teen Spirit/Hepcat moment for the record books.

If it’s not completely obvious, Smartmom and Hepcat are cock-eyed optimists. Within hours, Hepcat was touching up his resume, and Smartmom was posting about his layoff on her blog. They didn’t even argue about who should load up the dishwasher that night.

A week or so later, the family is adjusting to the vagaries of the new capitalism. They’re starting to accept the instability of their lives. Smartmom has even upped her dose of Zoloft.

No one can say that they don’t have the right to be angry at the inhumanity of it all. Nor can anyone deny that Hepcat, a brilliant “Solutions Architect” with skills, brains and know-how up the wazoo, needs a job. He has worn many IT hats, including, systems analyst, computer software developer, software architect, and programmer.

Hepcat has always been a think-outside-the-box/big-picture/expect-the-unexpected/analytical kind of guy, due, no doubt, to growing up on a farm where all problems must be solved, usually with bailing wire.

And let’s not forget what a great photographer he is. Hepcat has experience in editorial and advertising photography, an MFA from CalArts, and extensive knowledge of photo retouching and Photoshop. (Wow. Hire that man!)

Experienced, resourceful, and generally great to have around, farmboy Hepcat can fix computers, sports cars and John Deere tractors, weld orchard equipment, harvest walnuts, and herd cows. He makes a delicious risotto and a mean roast leg of lamb.

And if that’s not enough, Teen Spirit is going to college in just under three years and how are they going to pay for it?

References available on request.

This week’s Brouhaha on Park Slope Parents is about opening birthday presents at children’s birthday parents. Pro or Con? Discuss. I thought this post from Lorenzo Tijerina was really interesting. He gave his permission for me to reprint this. I loved the picture of life in San Antonio, Texas that he paints. He now lives in Park Slope.

My son is having a birthday party on Saturday and I’ve got to say this
whole discussion is starting to freak me out just a little bit.

For his last six birthday parties this wasn’t even an issue. Every year
he opened his presents at the party and if he didn’t act excited enough
then it was understood to be my job to act excited for him. I looked at
it as a manners test for him. Every year I told him beforehand that if
he should say thank you for every present and save any criticism for
later. It never even occurred to me that we had the option of not opening
the presents.

One year, it must have been last year, we ran out of time and we had to
rush through the opening of the presents. But I just took this as a
result of bad party planning on my part.

But we lived in San Antonio, Texas surrounded by family and our
etiquette was more nuanced. You had to make sure a certain tia’s (aunt’s)
pasta salad was completely eaten and you had to make sure the bigger kids
knew to save some of the pinata candy for the little ones. There were
matters of paying respects to the elder relatives and acting like that
$10 check from great grandma was redeemable for a million bucks.

But now we live here.

Obviously, for the "opening presents issue" to make it this far, it
must be a somewhat important trivial matter. Personally, I would be a
little disappointed not seeing the reaction to a gift I brought to a
birthday party. To me it seems silly to deny the whole present opening ritual
out of political correctness, but I don’t want to appear to be some
southern rube who doesn’t know ya’lls fancy ways of doing thing here up on
the Slope.

I guess my question is this: From the party’s you’ve been to and
hosted, has opening presents at the party become some kind of embarrassing faux pas that’s going to hurt my and my child’s already marginal social standing within Brooklyn’s brownstone elite?

Busily rethinking everything,
Lorenzo (father of now-seven Marcello)

In addition to The Dinner Party, and Global Feminisms, this is another exhibit in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center. Her’s the blurb from the Musuem.

This exhibition is dedicated to powerful female
pharaohs, queens, and goddesses from Egyptian history. The central
object of the exhibition is an important granite head from the Brooklyn
Museum collection of Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth
Dynasty (1539–1292 b.c.), and one of the 39 women represented with a plate at The Dinner Party.
Hatshepsut is featured alongside other women and goddesses from
Egyptian history, including queens Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Tiye and
the goddesses Sakhmet, Mut, Neith, Wadjet, Bastet, Satis, and
Nephthys—many of whom are featured on The Dinner Party’s tiles.
By incorporating multiple objects from the Museum’s extraordinary
Egyptian collection, the exhibition encourages viewers to make visual
and historical connections with the Museum’s long-term installation Egypt Reborn, which has additional objects on view pertaining to Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses.

It was a gift from her Dad and he’s been teaching her all about it in the last few days. Suffice it to say, OSFO already has an excellent eye. She is also very capable when it comes to mechanical and electron objects. She really is her daddy’s girl.

And she’s already posting pictures of her American Girl Doll, Nikki, and Nikki’s horse, on Alice Crawford dot com.

Hepcat has made sure that all of us have our own dot coms. It’s so very important around here.

The camera is a Panasonic Lumix with "Intelligent ISO Control". It’s easy to use and it takes great pictures.

Here’s one Park Slopers response to the recent One Way No Way controversy. I was just waiting for charges of NIMBYism (NOT IN MY BACK YARD). Yes, it’s true. Most Park Slopers stood on the sidelines for the Atlantic Yards debate.  This is in today’s Brooklyn Paper:

To the editor,

The proposal to convert Sixth and Seventh avenues to one way, has made me furious (“7th Avenue Express,” March 17).

My
anger, though, is not directed at the Department of Transportation or
Bruce Ratner, but instead at my fellow Park Slopers. Had the Slope
mobilized in 2004, when Atlantic Yards was in its infancy, we might
never have been at this point.

How clearly I remember the
reaction to those passing out brochures against Atlantic Yards at the
St. Patrick’s Day Parade in 2004. The comments I heard, consistently,
were “It’s so far away from here”; “It’ll be great for our
neighborhood,” and “We don’t live in that part of the Slope.” Instead,
the response in those critical first few months was anemic at best —
“negligence” and “apathy” are more apt terms.

Now that traffic
pattern changes are coming for the arena — as we all knew they would —
people are getting off their arses and starting to notice that Atlantic
Yards is going to destroy our quality of life. Did it need to take
three years to figure that out?

Shame on Park Slope — a place full of smart, vocal and active citizens — for letting it get this far.

Rob Underwood, Park Slope

I just saw The Dinner Party, the landmark 1970’s feminist art piece, at the Brooklyn Museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It was a press viewing with a walk-through with artist,  Judy Chicago.

I am, suffice it to say, blown away.

The piece depicts place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women throughout history. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 by a collaboration of many individual women and first exhibited in 1979.

"The Dinner Party was meant to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record," Chicago is quoted as saying. 

The table sits in a large, dark room with large canting glass walls and dramatic lighting. The table is triangular. Each place setting features a placemat / tablecloth with the woman’s name and artworks relating to the woman’s life, along with a napkin, utensils, glass / goblet, and a plate.

The plates all feature a butterfly- or flower-like sculpture, that looks like a vulva.

A collaborative effort of many female artists, The Dinner Party celebrates traditional female accomplishments such as weaving, china painting, embroidery, and sewing which have historically been thought of as craft or domestic work.

The white floor of triangular porcelain tiles is inscribed with the names of 999 other notable women.

1038 women in all. We are blessed in Brooklyn to have this incredibly inspiring, scholarly and artistic work on view. This means a lot to the children of Brooklyn, who will walk past these 39 places settings (and read the names on the tile floor) and begin to learn about the who these women are — diminished and/or erased no more.

I know I can wait to take OSFO.

Thank you, Elizabeth Sackler, for giving the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art to Brooklyn.

An exhibition
and education facility dedicated to feminist art, the Center’s mission is "to raise awareness of feminism’s cultural
contributions; to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist
art; to maintain a dynamic and welcoming learning facility; and to
present feminism in an approachable and relevant way."

Sackler, who is a historian and philanthropist, was born in Brooklyn. Speaking at the press preview Thursday morning, she told the overflow crowd of artists, critics, curators, press and photographers that she was told by her parents that the  Brooklyn Museum "was where you went to learn about ancient cultures." She talked about art as a democratic form that was capable of being a tool for change.

She said she looked forward to a time when there would be"equal rights for women artists, as well as equal pay, equal sales prices and equal wall space."

The crowd cheered. 

At the press conference, Judy Chicago spoke of taking the bus to the Chicago Art Institute to visit her childhood friends, Monet, Matisse and Degas. But, she wondered, "Where were the women?"

"It was an art world only men were allowed to populate." From an early age, she believed that women had a history that should be told. That’s why she created what she called "a fitting and sumptuous vast, symbolic history of half of our world’s contribution."

"It’s been a long arduous journey."

The Center’s 8,300-square-foot space encompasses a gallery devoted to The Dinner Party; a biographical gallery to present exhibitions highlighting the women represented in The Dinner Party;
a gallery space for a regular exhibition schedule of feminist art; a
computerized study area; and additional space for the presentation of
related public and educational programs.

I am impressed with the media blitz that has accompanied NO IMPACT MAN DOT COM in the last couple of days. Wooo. Buzz. Buzz.

I heard him this morning on NPR and saw the article in the Home section of the New York Times.

This guy, Colin Beavan, has a good story at the right time (global warming has reached the tipping point). A writer of historical fiction, he is, of course, writing a book about his year doing without. His wife is a writer at Business Week. He’s also blogging about the experience.

What he is doing is quite fascinating. Inspiring. My friend Red Eft is doing something like this a couple of days a week. Sunday is Power Off Day and Tuesday is No Driving Day.

Here’s what in and out at their West Village apartment a reported in the New York Times:

WHAT’S IN AND WHAT’S OUT

IN: Straight-edge razors, charades, scooters, bikes, string bags, worms, hand-me-downs.

OUT: Toilet paper, spices, olive oil, incandescent bulbs, disposable razors, newspapers, magazines, television, planes, trains, automobiles, elevators, plastic bags, anything new.

No Impact Man describes his project thusly: "A guilty liberal finally snaps, swears off plastic, goes organic, becomes a bicycle Nazi, turns off his power, composts his poop and, while living in NYC, generally turns into a tree-hugging lunatic who tries to save the polar bears and the rest of the planet from environmental catatrophe while dragging his baby daughter and Prada-wearing, Four-Seasons-loving wife along for the ride."

From his blog:

First, I’m going to be on WYNC’s The Brian Lehrer Show live at 10:06 AM EST today, March 21, 2007 (you can also listen to the recorded show if
you missed it live). We’ll be taking calls (212-433-9692), so please phone in! I
will not be nervous…I will not be nervous…Well, that’s not working.

Second, there’s a New York Times story about the No Impact
project on the front page of today’s House and Home Section. It’s the result of
reporter Penelope Green following us around for a few days asking all manner of
personal questions about our No Impact lifestyle. 

(One thing I wish I could change in the story is
this idea that we are doing this project  because it "was the only one
of four [book ideas] his agent thought would sell." If I could change
that bit, it would read, "Mr. Beavan had decided that with so many
urgent problems in the world, writing more history books felt
irrelevant. He decided to change the course of his career. When he
presented ten ideas about the environment to his agent, Beavan was
surprised that his agent most liked Beavan’s personal favorite–the No
Impact Man idea.")