Dumbo Books of Brooklyn

Sunday Afternoon in Clinton Hill: The Afro-Punk Block Party

2009-07-12T17:56:00.012-04:00

Everyone loves an Afro-Punk Block Party.

And we are no exception.

Despite a sinus infection and Eustachian tube dysfunction, we made our way to Clinton Avenue between Willoughby and Myrtle Avenues via the B48 and B54 buses and enjoyed today's closing event in this year's fabulous Afro-Punk Festival.

We got there about 2:15 p.m. and stayed over two hours.

It was a beautiful afternoon and many people came out to enjoy the block party. The crowds got bigger and bigger during the time we were there.

There were a lot of booths from local vendors, most of them Brooklynites.

The Census has been at all the Afro-Punk Festival events, urging that everyone be counted in the spring of 2010 so Brooklyn and New York can get its fair share of federal funds and representation.

Shinobi Ninja was playing when we got up to the stage.

Shinobi Ninja is a cool local band consisting of singers Dave Aaron and Baby Girl, guitarists Maniac Mike and Adriano Morez, drummer Terminator Dave, and DJ Axis.

At the last song of their set, people came onstage to dance.
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Here they are at the Blender Theater last month.

There were people on skateboards (mostly younger) and bikes (mostly older, not the BMX crowd) and in wheelchairs and strollers. These people are listening to one of the day's great DJ's, Hard Hitting Harry.

There were all kinds of stuff for sale.

Coup d'Etat Brooklyn has some great designs. Their motto: Live to Change Something.

A lot of people came specifically to see Maiyesha and hear her music, and after seeing her perform, we know why.

One of her best songs is "Wanna Be." It's up for a 2009 Grammy in the Best Urban/Alternative category.

The audience during "Wanna Be."

Minneapolis-born Maiysha now lives in Park Slope. Her album This Much Is True will be in stores August 26.

The Afro-Punk Festival booth sold music, T-shirts, posters and more.

We loved Tamar-kali last weekend at Afro-Punk Skate Park.

Lots of good food, and some decent face-painting, too, we guess.

Sandflower Dyson, a goddess from Brownsville (there are more than you think), was really good at introducing the acts and getting the crowd excited.

Some public service announcements about responding to the Census and taking care of your body, along with tossed free T-shirts.

We were going to leave, but then Joya Bravo came onstage. She was worth staying for a while longer, even with a low-grade fever.

In addition to singing, she can really play the violin.

Listen to her performing at the Pulse Magazine party two months ago:

We scored a Joya Bravo CD sampler.

If we didn't have to go home to use our neti pot and take our antibiotic, we would have stayed longer.

But we're glad we got out to today's wonderful Afro-Punk Block Party. It was a special day at the end of a really great Afro-Punk Festival. Lots of people worked really hard and we thank them for their herculean efforts.

If you missed it, there is always next year. Meanwhile, check out the Afro-Punk website. And for the block party, you can find mo' better pics and commentary, plus a video, at the blog of the wonderful Brooklyn Born.

Friday Night in Park Slope: The Piper Theatre's "Hamlet" in Washington Park

2009-07-11T07:01:00.004-04:00

Last evening, we went over to Washington Park (it's hard for those of us who grew up with J.J. Byrne Park to get used to the new name, but at least it's not called Washington Mutual Park) for this summer's production by the Piper Theatre of Hamlet.

Last year we enjoyed their A Midsummer's Night Dream, a comedy just perfect for warm-weather outdoor performances, as are most of Shakespeare's comedies. Pretty much everyone knows that Hamlet ends with the stage crawling with corpses, so we were wondering how this would play in the park.

The crowd seemed somewhat smaller than last year. It was an extraordinarily cool night, yet the wind seemed to add to the drama as the sky, and the plot, darkened. The staging under director John P. McEneny was fairly ingenious, accommodating the less-than-perfect conditions for theater at the park.

The actors have to compete with screaming kids in the playground not that far from the stage, passersby with no interest in the show who go on talking, not infrequent ambulance sirens, more occasional police sirens, motorcycles revving, car alarms going off, etc. It ain't the secluded location of the Delacorte Theatre or the Prospect Park Bandshell; at Washington Park, the city in all its energy and messiness surrounds you.

Anyway, the actors, wearing what looked to us like mid-19th-century garb, did a great job. The production gathered strength as the night wore on, and by Act IV, the pace became fast and the momentum unstoppable. We don't have a cast list, but the actor playing Hamlet did a good job, with some interesting business at points. The "to be or not to be" soliloquy was played atop a ladder in the middle of the audience, and it worked, as did some really strong scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia and Hamlet and his mother. Some bits, like Ophelia's use of yarn both before and after madness strikes, were wonderful.

The cast seemed uniformly more than competent, with especially nice turns by the actors playing Polonius, Horatio (a female), Laertes and others. Even small parts, like Osric and a woman playing what seemed like a lady in waiting to Gertrude, who mostly had to stand in the background and react, were handled with skill.

Because of the setup of the small stage in the park, the actors are often seen walking around offstage, and yet that was less distracting than enlightened as they stayed in character and were unobtrusive. The cuts made in the play were judicious, particularly in getting rid of Fortinbras, and ending the play in innovative fashion.

The time flew by for us, so we were surprised to see how late it was when we checked our cell phone as we walked down Fourth Avenue to get the G train home. The Piper Theatre production of Hamlet was a great summer night of Shakespeare.

Thursday Night in Prospect Park: Celebrate Brooklyn! presents STREB: "Invisible Forces" dance/action/movement

2009-07-09T23:50:00.006-04:00

We very much enjoyed tonight's STREB performance, "Invisible Forces," at the Prospect Park bandshell, another great evening of Celebrate Brooklyn!

We got there at 8 p.m., wearing a jacket because the night was nicely cool for July, and managed to find an end seat.

Our primitive cell phone pics make the dancers look really small. Here's a good video, though:

As the publicity about "Invisible Forces" said,

STREB, the seminal, Williamsburg-based acrobatic company, celebrates 30 years with Invisible Forces, which combines the thrills of the circus and the velocity of the Indy 500 in one event. The show features STREB’s new Action Platform, a 20-foot, rotating floor; the España Whizzing Gizmo; and the two-dimensional vertical pipe grid, Airlines. The result is a singular spectacle in which finely tuned bodies engage with hardware, exemplifying what The Village Voice recently said of the company: “Streb’s unique movement art—kin to sport, circus, physics experiment, and hard labor—has reached a peak of theatricality and dare-all virtuosity."

MacArthur Fellowship winner Elizabeth Streb doesn't just test the boundaries of physical motion, she redefines them. From nail-biting mid-air suspension to glorious 20-foot swan dives, Streb and her dancers present a strikingly original American art form, one that captures the imagination, triggers the adrenaline and catapults audiences into a new century of dance."

Deborah Jowitt wrote a few months ago in the Village Voice:

From the start, Streb made you aware of human risk, the potential for error, the effects of momentum. Gradually she upped the ante. Her works became more complex and ambitious, until her company members were walking on walls, slamming their bodies onto mic’d surfaces, and rebounding off trampolines. But these people weren’t—and still aren’t—circus acrobats, aiming for per-stunt applause; the weave of her pieces is too dense and too variegated for that. Nourishing her wit and imagination on math and physics, aiming to push the limits of human endeavor, she refers to her dancers as “action heroes.”

There was a big crowd, and a good number of kids, like the two behind us who were screaming like they were at the circus. Which is what the man who introduced the show wanted, for the audience to really make noise. He warmed us up with shouts of 1-2-3 BROOKLYN!

As Jowitt wrote,

There’s a sort of visual din too. Aaron Henderson’s vivid projection design shows us some numbers from overhead, occasionally multiplying images into kaleidoscopic patterns. Shapes swim in and out of focus. The short sentences in Laura Flanders’s libretto are projected kookily in addition to being heard on tape. You might want to memorize them for your next science test, as well as for a clue to the impending action (sample: “There is no stasis, only a sequence of situations”).

A New York Times review said

If dancers are the athletes of God, Streb's members are the gladiators. Flipping, tumbling, leaping marvels, they perform one arduous feat after another, putting their brawny bodies through punishing routines that leave their audiences grimacing and shielding their eyes.

But "Invisible Forces" doesn't necessarily add up to art. It's more like rowdy spectacle, with many of the popcorn-eating viewers cheering and whooping their way through almost two hours of action. How much you enjoy it depends largely on your tolerance for thrills and spills.

We have a lot of tolerance for pieces like "WallRun Turn," "Falling" and "Artificial Gravity." It was exciting to watch the movements, and the possibility of injury (a Streb dancer once broke her back during a performance) makes it a little scary. The body slams, St. Vitus dance-like virtuosity, the outrunning of an I-beam capable of doing great injury: well, as the five-year-old behind us gasped, "They're fearless!"

STREB put on a great show tonight.

John W. Kneller, RIP

2009-07-09T15:08:00.009-04:00

We were sorry to learn in an obituary notice in the New York Times today of the death of John W. Kneller, who was the president of Brooklyn College during the turbulent decade of the 1970s.

Dr. Kneller, a French scholar who'd previously served as president of Oberlin, came to BC pretty much when we did, forty years ago this fall - we attended his formal investiture - and served during our whole undergraduate and graduate career there.

We got to know him pretty well. Somewhere is a pic of us together with Stella Albo, at a summer 1970 party to commemorate the first day care center at Brooklyn College, which Stella and others fought for on behalf of the growing number of students who were parents.

Our student government friend Gary Hayden was on the search committee that recommended Dr. Kneller's appointment. He told the New York Times on August 13, 1969, that Dr. Kneller "just stood out" among the 100 candidates that were considered for the job. "Suddenly we knew this was it," Gary is quoted as saying. adding that Dr. Kneller was "very, very good on issues that were relevant to college life."

Mostly we met Dr. Kneller when we were protesting something or other, often some of his own actions that we students thought were wrong-headed. When we both first arrived at BC, the new President was interviewed by the editor-in-chief of the day student government newspaper The Ol' Spigot, Paul Schickler, who titled his column "Nervous Knelly," because Dr. Kneller struck him as someone afraid to take definite stands. Among us students, and perhaps the wider academic community, he had the reputation of being wishy-washy if well-meaning.

On the Tuesday after the Kent State killings in May 1970, a sympathetic Dr. Kneller joined us in protest at a memorial service, but his support seemed less than an adequate response to us, and later that afternoon, we students took over his office and commandeered the college during the nationwide student strike that ended the semester abruptly at City University of New York and across the U.S.

A New York Times article from May 10, 1970, noted:

At Brooklyn College, 100 students continued to remain in the office of the president, John W. Kneller, in Boylan Hall, where they have been since the beginning of a student strike last Tuesday.

John W. Kneller, the president of Brooklyn College, issued a statement last night "terminating all classes for the remainder of the semester." College buildings will remain open, he said, to provide student and faculty groups with office space so that they can work for peace.

We remember other occasions when we were across the table and on opposite sides from President Kneller, like the time SO FED UP (we can't recall what the acronym stood for), the first activist group of what we then called 'handicapped' students sat in in his office, demanding access ramps on college buildings.

At firt Dr. Kneller seemed unreasonable in his opposition to such accommodations, but in the end we knew that if we pressured him enough, he'd give in. He did, and of course access for the disabled was, nearly twenty years later, mandated by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

A New York Times article on October 26, 1974, about the protests over the choosing of a chairman for the new Puerto Rican Studies Department is illustrated with a photo of students, some of whom are seen carrying signs that say PAPA KNELLER MUST GO. The article says that student supporters of Prof. Maria Sanchez, who had been passed over for the position despite being recommended by a faculty/student search committee, "a group of students occupied the office of the president, John W. Kneller, last Friday demanding her appointment."

It was a difficult time to be a college president, the 1970s, and by the end of the decade and his tenure at Brooklyn College, the faculty council (we served for two years as a student representative on the faculty council's curriculum committee and so attended more contentious meetings than we would have liked) had passed a "no confidence" resolution regarding Dr. Kneller's administration, and he was eventually replaced by a more hard-line but much less well-liked college president.

After his resignation, Dr. Kneller, in an interview with the New York Times on December 3, 1978, acknowledged shortcomings in his administration, but said many of its problems were caused by vindictive faculty members who were unable to obtain special favors:

"We've proven by the record of our students and the record of our faculty that we were able to perform our function in the City of New York and maintain our excellence under the most adverse conditions," he said, referring to the city's fiscal crisis and its devastating impact on the City University. . .

"We've had our successes but we've also had our failures". . . Turning to his accomplishments, Dr. Kneller pointed to the fine reputation of many departments, including art, chemistry, psychology and the School of Performing Arts, as well as the creation of new ones, such as women's studies, computer science and Puerto Rican studies.

He noted with pride that Brooklyn College students had among the highest acceptance rates to medical school and law school and that they had achieved the highest score in the nation on the Dental Admission Test last spring.

Looking ahead, Dr. Kneller approached his return to teaching with enthusiasm. "I think it's a marvelous opportunity, and it's the way I'd like to spend the rest of my career."

"It's never been a question of whether I'd leave the presidency, but when."

Jack Kneller was basically a nice guy. We were invited to his house on Marlborough Road on a few occasions. He was a great father to his daughter, an acquaintance of ours, and he loved horses and was a great rider.

He was a kindly, friendly man who had a long and distinguished career as professor of French literature, first at Oberlin College and then at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He served as associate editor of Yale French Studies and editor-in-chief of The French Review. He wrote seminal criticism of the authors Gérard de Nerval and Henri Peyre, but for us, Dr. Kneller's insights into Marcel Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time were particularly brilliant.

We asked Borough President Marty Markowitz for a comment and he wrote us:

I graduated Brooklyn College in 1970 and Dr Kneller's service began in 1969. My memories of him while I was President of Evening Student government took place on campus during the height of the anti Vietnam and Black Empowerment movement. His passing saddens all of us.

Dr. Kneller dedicated a decade of his life to Brooklyn College, and he and his family were great supporters of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and other Brooklyn cultural institutions. We will miss him.

Wednesday Night in Williamsburg: The L Magazine's Summerscreen presents "Reality Bites" at the McCarren Park Ball Fields

2009-07-08T23:49:00.004-04:00

This evening we walked over to McCarren Park for the start of The L Magazine's annual Summerscreen series of movies for hipsters (and a few regular people like us).

It's not quite the same as the last few years at the pool. The McCarren pool, of course, will be shuttered for some time, until the city can decide what multinational corporation they can name it after.

The movies have been moved to the ball fields that we've never actually considered part of McCarren Park proper. They're facing Bedford Avenue, on N. 12th Street, just to the west of Automotive High School.

The movie screen and the the booths of the sponsors selling food and drink (plus the ice cream truck) and the crowds with their blankets now fill the big ball field at the very western part, next to the tennis courts closer to the school.

We were last there in the summer for a Dominican Day event. As we said, it's a big open space, not closed in like the pool.

That made the acoustics worse, if not for the film itself, then for the local band playing beforehand, Wild Yaks,

who were actually quite good, as we know from seeing them perform last year - we think their "Wish I Had a Whip" is the band at its best - but you really had to get up from where you were sitting to stand in front of them to appreciate their skills and their sound.

Another thing that's different from the pool is that passersby can look in easily, which proved to be a boon to those who decided to enjoy the movie from the outside and to one elderly man with a cane who seemed to get a kick out of Reality Bites, as he cackled along with audience, seemingly getting references made by then-23yo screenwriter Helen Childress that you wouldn't think someone pushing 80 or more would get.

Sitting in the crowd of people, nearly all of whom were half our age, we're kind of an outside observer and so maybe can see things young hipsters can't. (Or maybe not.)

It seemed like we detected a change in the crowd at Summerscreen. They seemed older than a few years ago, for one thing. Maybe the average age was 27, 28, 29 as opposed to 23, 24, 25.

But it could just be that they're the same people who've been coming to these movies for years. Are newer college graduates not coming to Williamsburg and Greenpoint because of the bad economy? Is it too expensive? Are they in other neighborhoods or still living home with parents.

Also, the crowd seemed more subdued, less raucous than they were at the pool the last couple of years. We overheard two people say, the hour or so before the film began running, while it was still pretty bright out, that they weren't planning to sit through more than a little of the film. Both of them, a young man and young woman talking to different friends 20 minutes apart, said basically that at this point in their lives they absolutely could not bear to see reality biting.

There's a scene in the film when the character played by Winona Ryder comes home with news for her roommates: "Guys, I've just been fired." "So have I!" someone behind us shouted out. "Me too!" shouted a voice from the other side.

We first saw Reality Bites in a decrepit triplex theater near our apartment on Newberry Road in Gainesville, Florida. At the time we were finishing our last semester at UF law school, but we were approaching 43, already 20 years older than the twentysomethings depicted in the movie. However, we'd just spent much of the previous few years living with people their age, and the film struck as exactly right.

It's hard for us to know what a completely different generation, the audience tonight, thought of this movie. Millennials aren't Gen Xers, and there weren't hipsters in the same sense 15 years ago, although there are a lot of similarities:

the vaguely conflicted artistic ambitions of Lelaina, the would-be documentary filmmaker; the perpetually stoned-looking Troy (Ethan Hawke), the sarcastic irony of Gap manager Vickie (Janeane Garafolo), their shared disgust at the "yuppie" played by director Ben Stiller, and the endless stream of references from TV shows like The Brady Bunch and Good Times and from advertising and consumer products.

We did overhear a number of people saying how many times they'd seen this film before. Around three or four times seemed the average; "I've seen this eight times," one young woman drinking craft ale confessed to her friends.

There were no portable toilets in the park, and we were afraid we were going to have to leave for home when we needed a bathroom, but the men's room across the street in the park was still open.

Going back to the ball fields, however, we discovered something weird: the film was being played so that you could also see it from the tennis court - albeit divided into quadrants with the bottom of the screen slightly more obstructed by tennis netting.

Still, there were only a couple of souls - regular people talking Polish, not hipsters - who'd discovered this. We sat down at a comfortable wooden bench we had all to ourselves, watched the rest of Reality Bites from this solo venue (the Polish people soon left) and avoided the crowd on the way home.

We don't know why or how Summerscreen is showing the film so that you can see it on blanketed cement with a crowd of, we don't know, 800 hipsters, or all by yourself on a cozy park bench, but we're grateful for that.

Also we're grateful that, starting around age 55, reality doesn't bite so hard. Actually, for us, reality probably needs dentures.

Monday Night at BAM's Afro-Punk Skate Park: The Fifth Annual Afro-Punk Festival's Finale with Janelle Monae, Saul Williams and more

2009-07-06T21:49:00.020-04:00

We've just come back from the spectacular finale of three wonderful days of the Afro-Punk Festival's annual stay at the BAM parking lot, aka Afro-Punk Skate Park. We had the high privilege of watching two dynamic, engergetic performances by faves Saul Williams and the goddess Janelle Monáe. There was an incredible spirit in the last few hours of the Afro-Punk Festival that's left us feeling exhilarated and energized even while our 58yo body not used to standing for so long is wiped out.

We came in sometinme after 6 p.m. via the Flatbush Avenue side and got a peek backstage, where the performers, staffers and VIPs were.

The Afro-Punk Festival is beloved by the weather gods, especially in this rainy summer. This was another day with a nearly cloudless sky, and not too hot.

We made our way to a spot where we could at least see a little of what was going on. This was the most crowded day. DJs were playing The Fugees and "One Love" when we arrived.

In the crowd, we spotted a man conversing with a human boombox.

The festival's chief sponsor, Mountain Dew, kept everyone hydrated and caffeinated.

Although the majority of the crowds at the Afro-Punk Festival were, clearly, properly, members of the African diaspora, during our three days in attendance we saw people of every conceivable race and hairstyle. We spotted hijabs, yarmulkes, dastaars and a patka along with do-rags, baseball caps, fedoras, several berets, a straw boater, a snood, and other head coverings. But then we spent a lot of time looking at the backs of folks' heads.

The fashion sense on display was incredible (said the alter kocker in the $13.99 Medgar Evers College T-shirt),

Also, the work of our fellow members of the legal profession was in evidence:

"How did you hear about Janelle?" the woman next to us asked. She said someone had sent her an email, that she'd never heard of Afro-punk before. Later, after her set, a young white guy with good gaydar asked us if Janelle had already gone on. He was sad to learn he'd missed her, but he stayed for Saul Williams. So clearly tonight was getting a crossover audience.

As we waited through what seemed like interminable sound checks, a skinny guy in a do-rag saying "one, two, one two, hey hey..." into the mike, you could feel the anticipation.

Finally "the most phenomenal performer of all time" was introduced, and the crowd roared as Janelle made a very slow and very dramatic (what else?) appearance onstage.

Since we were standing behind the tallest people in the audience, we got good glimpses of Janelle, but mostly through the spaces between other people's heads. We were pretty much hemmed in, but we saw her through most of her wonderful set, although sometimes we lost sight. At a couple of points, she moved so energetically that her signature hairstyle became undone. Magically, it reappeared as perfect, one time after she went offstage as the guitarist riffed maniacally. So we couldn't always see Janelle. But that counted was that we could always hear her! As of Monday morning, we could actually get a view of her crowd-surfing here, but it didn't beat being there!

Any pics we have of Janelle or Saul Williams are so bad and distant and small that they're likely to inadvertantly demean what were two amazingly intimate and dynamic performances, so we'll just post stock photos or steal from the people who were using actual digital cameras with zoom lenses. There's probably better print coverage on other blogs, but maybe not by anyone older!

We're ancient enough to have grown up with pre-rock "standards," and we heard "Smile" throughout our childhood in the '50s and '60s, but nobody but nobody does a version like Janelle Monáe. It brings tears to our eyes and goosebumps to our wrinkled skin. The audience at the Afro-Punk Festival, as it did last year, was absolutely transfixed by this song. She got up really high so everyone could see her.

At the end of "Smile," Janelle said, "Thanks, God. Dedicated...to...Michael...Jackson!"

Someone shouted out, "That's the best!"

But there was a lot more. We first saw Janelle at last year's Afro-Punk Festival and were blown away.

Her staging, her moves, all are impeccable. But it's not just her vogueing, mugging and vamping, because she has a voice of tremendous power, sweet and commanding. And, yes, the dry-ice-created smoke helps the air of drama, as does the way Janelle can move her fingers, but it's all done sincerely, and that's what the audience relates to. Speaking of "sincerely," here's "Sincerely Jane":

During that song, a couple of people yelled out, "Get out of the way!" - meaning the videographer who was getting in front of Janelle. You can't blame them. At some points we mostly had to watch her by looking up at the screens of other people's cameras, held high above their heads.

She was still amazing. We'd love to see her in a Broadway show, if there's one that can contain her.

These two somehow climbed the fence or whatever and were dancing to Janelle's songs from Flatbush Avenue.

After Janelle got off to terrific applause, we got treated to the high-flying spectacular tricks of Brooklyn-based Jimmy Mac's Bulldog Bikes riders. We got a nosebleed just watching. Also that sick sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach.

The skill and practice to do that kind of stuff, not to mention the leg and upper-body muscles, are really impressive. Some of the younger, littler kids were pretty cool, but the older veteran riders made some astonishing moves. They were just killing it.

That's our lame-ass cell phone effort. Now check out the pics from a really good still photographer in a whole different universe from we pathetic amateurs, New Joisey's pcimprezzive, on YouTube:

The crowd got fired up too: "When I say 'Afro,' you say 'punk'!"
"Get your Brooklyn on! . . . Get your Obama on!"
"This is a movement. . . Peace and love!"

We were getting a little claustrophobic and afraid if we didn't move our feet, we'd be planted in the BAM parking lot for eternity, so we gingerly made our way through a crowd of - we don't know, thousands? - for a little more space in the area between the skate park and the bike track.

That gave us a pretty unobstructed, if distant, view of Saul Williams' vigorous, fast-paced yet thoughtful performance. He's an incredible showman. And like Janelle, whom he gave his love to, at one point, he dove into the crowd, mosh-pit style.

Saul came on in a Revolutionary War-style red military jacket with a long proclamation of names, including: Hughes, Baldwin, Ginsberg, Coltrane, Siddharta, Medusa, Robinson, Shakespeare, Rachmaninoff, Dickinson, Tesla, Fellini, Nostradamus, four little girls, Hiroshima, Marley, Shakur and more... ending with Michael Jackson.

Saul Williams' "Black Stacey" always takes our breath away. The crowd tonight went wild. It's both a powerful statement and first-rate entertainment.

During Saul Williams' performance, as night fell, some nimble kids climbed onto the skateboarding platform to get a better view.

We found his cover of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" amazing from our distant perch, but you can see it here close up:

" . . . Now is the essence of my domain/ but it contains all that was and will be/ and i am as i was and will be/ because i am and always will be/ that nigga/ i am that nigga . . . "
"the future is you . . . "

Saul said it was good to be back in Brooklyn, "so many familiar faces, hello" and he introduced his son and gave a shout-out to his beautiful 80yo aunt on Euclid Avenue.

He thanked his band, whom we think were Davin Givahn, Kwame Brandt Pierce, Tchak Diallo. . . Our ears are 58 yo and we've been going to hear live music for over 40 years.

There was a call and response: Be somebody! Be somebody!

The energy in the crowd just grew stronger and stronger as Saul sang, did spoken-word, riffed. Before his finale, a really good rapper came on, someone we should know, whose name shamefully we couldn't catch. We were sort of blissing out anyway, even as festival-goers trying to get an early start filed out past us.

Blessings to everyone who made the fifth annual Afro-Punk Festival such a joy and such a community.

Hey, wife of Lot, don't look back. Tomorrow it turns back into a parking lot.

As Saul Williams said tonight, "Even death is a part of life . . even death is a part of life . . thank you, Michael."

Monday Morning in Brighton Beach: Breakfast on the Boardwalk

2009-07-06T16:40:00.009-04:00

We were at the Brighton Beach boardwalk around 9 a.m. today, when the day seemed fresh and pristine.

Our early breakfast on the High Line on Friday made us decide to go out early again, to one of the spots we love - admittedly, more in summer than in any other season.

The B train got us to Brighton Beach Station pretty quick from Atlantic Avenue. We started taking the Brighton Beach line in the mid-1960s when the express was the Q and the locals were the QB (bridge to Manhattan) and the QT (tunnel to Manhattan). The express eventually became the D, with the local the M and sometimes the QJ. Now the express terminating at Brighton Beach is the B, and the local, going on to Coney Island, is the Q. We miss the double-letter locals.

Back around 1971 at a Brooklyn College peace rally, one of our friends carried a sign that said ESCALATE THE BRIGHTON STATION, NOT THE VIETNAM WAR. There actually is an escalator today, though going down you have to take the stairs.

We got our oatmeal, banana and iced tea at the Starbucks on Brighton Beach Avenue, which is one of those owned by Magic Johnson's Urban Development Corporation, one of the only ones we've been in around the country that's not in a largely African-American neighborhood. Brighton Beach, of course, is very, very Russian and has been since the '70s.

The neighborhood was more mixed (though quite Jewish) thirty years ago when our first book With Hitler in New York came out in hardcover. The title story, originally published at Washington & Lee University's literary magazine Shenandoah in 1978, features a scene in which his American friends take Hitler here on a summer evening:

After our eggcreams, we go on the boardwalk. Ellen tells Hitler that there are many old people and Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach and cautions him not to talk German. Hitler nods.

We join a circle surrounding a fiftyish woman in shorts. She is very animatedly singing a Yiddish folk song. All of the old people are enjoying it. It seems like it’s supposed to be funny, or maybe dirty. Hitler is listening intently.

“Farshteit?” I ask Hitler.

“Ja, ja,” he says. “She is telling about how not to have children.”

An old lady next to us smiles. She seems glad that Hitler understands the song. We walk away before she can recognize him.

Libby and Mike are sitting on a boardwalk bench, talking about old times.

Hitler and I are leaning against the rail, watching the dark ocean, the dark sand, talking about this and that.

“Giscard d’Estaing is so funny,” Hitler says. “The things he does to make himself popular.”

I nod.

I tell Hitler I can name all ten states of West Germany. He counts on his fingers as I name them. I can only name nine. I know the other one has a hyphenated name, but it is difficult.

“It’s where Stuttgart is,” Hitler gives me a hint.

Now I remember. “Baden-Württemberg,” I tell him, and Hitler smiles.

I wonder if I am beginning to fall in love with him.

This story has been reprinted in I Hate All of You on This L Train, our new little book from Canarsie House.

Brighton Beach wasn't our beach. That was always Rockaway, where we grew up in the summers. Later, when we went to the beach with friends in junior high while school was still in session in June or after the bungalows were torn down, we headed for Manhattan Beach, closer to the neighborhoods we lived in and seemingly more teen-friendly and remote.

We'd come here in April and May, on cool but sunny days, to a place off the boardwalk called Sun City, where other tan-freak degenerates like us sat in chaise lounges that were metallic reflectors. To make it worse, we used face reflectors. No wonder we have wrinkles.

But we did go to Brighton Beach with friends sometimes in college, as this diary passage, dated Wednesday, June 11, 1975, in our book Summer in Brooklyn: 1969-1975 shows:

After hanging up with [Vito], I dialed Mavis's phone number; she was just on her way out, to meet Helen & Grace at Brighton Beach. I told her to stay up & I'd be right over to pick her up. Mavis went to Washington over the weekend to visit Phyllis, who's working there over the summer, & she saw the Univ. of Maryland & was favorably impressed, as that about makes her mind up about grad school. She said graduation was one big bore, & as we drove she took photos of me with Bob's camera.

We finally found a parking space & then met Helen & Grace on the beach; they were sitting with Grace's grandmother, who only speaks Spanish. It was great to see Helen again; she's gotten thinner & I noticed she bleached the hairs on her chin. Helen also seems very mellow, as befits a Californian; she was very interested in my MFA program. From her conversation, I gathered she was seeing a great deal of Mason -- she & Grace were planning to go to his house this weekend. I know that Mason's always been terribly fond of her, & that's understandable. Grace was her usual sprightly & quirky self; she's going to summer school at BC. Her abuela is funny too. We sat out on the beach for an hour or so, then Mavis & I left, as she had to meet Bob in the city at 4:30.

Today we sat and walked on the boardwalk for about 90 minutes. It started to get busy around 10:30 a.m. We like it best when it's early and almost empty.

Sunday Evening at BAM Afro-Punk Skate Park: Back at the Afro-Punk Festival w/ The Echo Jinx, The London Souls and Tamar-kali

2009-07-05T20:57:00.015-04:00

We were lucky enough to catch another couple of hours of the Fifth Annual Afro-Punk Festival this evening and enjoyed more DIY fashion, BMX, URBANX Battle For The Streets - and today was the tribute to Spike Lee at BAM Cinematek, DJs and live music with The Echo Jinx and The London Souls and a stellar performance by the stunning
Tamar-kali.

After a late afternoon call that we were needed to represent Baby Boomers Born in Brownsville, we should have rushed right over to the BAM parking lot's Afro-Punk Skate Park. But hey, we're from the 'Ville - never ran, never will. Well, actually, we needed a nap. But we got there shortly after 6 p.m. with the newly extended G train.

Sunday's crowd was a bit larger than Saturday's. Again, it was a gorgeous day.

We made our way - gingerly - where the skateboarders were to the little stage where the announcers do their stuff. Nothing was going on at the main stage by Flatbush Avenue except setting up, and The Echo Jinx were performing on the smaller stage.

Guitarist Everton Armstrong and drummer Ivan Gonzalez have an interesting sound, an amalgam of semi-cartoonish pissed-off punk and arty experimentation with hints of Delta blues. We have no idea what we just said.

Anyway, we were impressed and took one of the drop cards at the end of the duo's spirited performance. Here's The Echo Jinx doing "Fast Sneakers":

We joined the growing crowd at the main stage where the MC introduced The London Souls by saying they reminded her of her days "with Janis and Jimi." (She also reminded the crowd to "keep it green and keep it clean.")

The Deli magazine said of them, "Few bands so young have any business brandishing the mighty musical chops that The London Souls do." The group, all from the city, consists of Tom Cumming (guitar, singer), Kiyoshi Matsuyama (bass, singer), Tash Neal (guitar, singer), and Chris St.Hillaire (drums, singer).

The crowd really loved them, and it's no wonder.

Here are The London Echoes performing "I Think I Like It" last fall at that wonderful venue, The Bowery Poetry Club:

After that, we watched the ups and downs and upside-downs of the bikers for a while.

There was growing excitement as Tamar-kali was introduced. If you've seen the Afro-Punk movie, you know her from there.

She's a truly extraordinary singer, with a powerful band to back her up. Her vocals are deep, raw and almost stentorian. Here she is performing the devastating "Warrior Bones" at last year's Afro-Punk Festival. The song begins with the stunning "I killed a man today. . ." and just never lets up.

Wow. We were really spellbound by her performance, which quickened our pulse to where we were ready for our Inderal.

If you can catch her in person someday, we think she's thrilling to watch as well as listen to. She has this thing where she looks skyward, her eyes seemingly calling down the wrath of God or Whoever. No surprise that she's a native of BK.

NPR said of Tamar-kali, "In her lyrics and her own personal style, she blends feminist politics and afrocentricity in a way that gives her hard rock sound a soulful edge." If you don't know Tamar-kali's work, what you don't know will hurt you.

At the end of her set, Tamar-kali asked the people seeing her for the first time to raise their hands. "Are you all right?" she asked us. "Do you feel violated?"

We were definitely all right. The only violation was that she had to get offstage.

Before we left, we watched more of the skaters and talked to a couple of them, who tried to explain the nature of various tricks and how good a sk8r like "Pretzel" is. He said something really profound: "You can't appreciate it like we do because you don't understand the skill it takes to make something so difficult look effortless."

We suspect that's true of the Afro-Punk Festival itself. The operation seems to go off perfectly, without a hitch, with great pleasure for every one of the attendees, but hours and hours of planning and just plain hard work must go into producing an amazing event like this every year. So we're very grateful for those who made the Afro-Punk Festival possible.

Saturday Afternoon in Fort Greene: The Fifth Annual Afro-Punk Festival at BAM Afro-Punk Skate Park

2009-07-04T20:14:00.018-04:00

The annual Afro-Punk Festival here in Brooklyn is the center of the global Afro-punk community.

It's the definitive destination for audiences looking to experience true Afro-punk culture.

Last year 30,000 people attended, and this year even more will probably attend, if our too-short time at the festival this afternoon are any indication.

The 2009 festival, which was kicked off on June 27 and is still continuing for days (and nights) to come - we hope very much to get back - features 40 bands, 24 films, a visual art exhibit and a custom-built skate park at the BAM parking lot bounded by Flatbush and Lafayette Avenues and Ashland Place.

There you can check out pro riders and skaters from around the country, as we did late this afternoon on our way from one Independence Day destination to another.

We're really glad to have stopped by, even briefly, because we were so excited by last year's festival that we joined the Afro-Punk community and have been getting regular email updates to keep in touch.

As a news story at MTV late last year said, "Afro-Punk has gone from the name of a message board to a movement in less than five years — and the scene just keeps growing."

Summer's lease hath all too short a date, and we were just subletting at the skate park. Here are some pics we took today from our limited time at the festival.

The New York Times music review of last year's Afro-Punk Festival said

the skateboarders made the most noise. Mostly small and sinewy, of varying races, unhelmeted and riding uniformly weathered boards, they moved in a swarm around the skate park in the parking lot across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performing the occasional trick, but mostly scooting around aimlessly, grateful for a place to while away the evening.

American Fangs is a Houston-based pop-punk band making their first visit to New York. They keep getting lost in the subway, singer Gabriel “Gus” Cavazos said.

The other band members are guitarists Shelby Hohl and Kenyon Puntenny, bassist Kyle Shimek, and drummer Micah Miller.

American Fangs's songs are energetic and sweaty and fun.

We really like their song "Le Kick." Here's the vid:

Although there were no female sk8rs, a couple of girls were on bikes. It amazes us that given the spills we saw, nobody seemed seriously or even annoyingly hurt.

The Afro-Punk message boards have a lot of posts that give you insight into this - what do we call it: community? movement? You don't get much of the viewpoints expressed in the MSM unless maybe you think zines and blogs are mainstream.

The crowd was extraordinarily good-natured. The sun was beating down but not too oppressively. July 4 is actually an important date in New York African-American history: slavery was officially abolished in New York State on July 4, 1827.

Not long before that, one out of every three white families in Brooklyn had owned slaves. The freed slaves were warned not to celebrate on Independence Day 182 years ago, so they had a parade in lower Manhattan on July 5 instead.

That MTV report on Afro-Punk also said

The fundamental contradiction of black kids feeling left out of rock — which from its very beginning was based on black music — has played a large role in the creation of Afro-Punk. And while there have been many black artists who have been embraced by white rock fans, from Little Richard to Sly and the Family Stone to the Bad Brains, the Afro-Punk movement has found fans bonding and creating communities, organizing shows and shooting films in a whole new way.

We didn't understand a lot of terms the skateboarding announcer used, but it's always interesting to watch sk8rs. They were all boys, as far as we could see, ranging in age from about 12 to maybe 30.

Another reason why July 4 is important to Afro-punks could be that 99 years ago, on July 4, 1910, Jack Johnson - an Afro-punk in spirit, anyway - retained the heavyweight championship in Reno against "the Great White Hope," Jim Jeffries, by knocking him out.

Many African Americans were killed in the nationwide riots started by racists, and the government got back at Johnson by convicting him of a trumped-up violation of the Mann Act because he traveled interstate with his white lady friend.

Tell your member of Congress to support the resolution introduced by Senator John McCain and Long Island's lowlife Rep. Peter King calling for President Obama to pardon Jack Johnson and undo the injustice perpetrated by racism.

The street art (parking lot art?) was of high quality, but when we get too close, the fumes of the spray paint get to us.

Last year's Times review said the BMX bikers were "executing frightening tricks — an X-up here, a 360 tail-whip there."

As we headed toward the G train, we saw this young Afro-punk being interviewed on the steps of BAM.

We wish we could have stayed longer at the Afro-Punk Festival today. But we still have time to catch more of it.

Friday Night in Cobble Hill: Launch Party for Adam Suerte's "Aprendiz" #4 graphic novel at Rocketship comic shop

2009-07-03T22:17:00.021-04:00

Thanks to our friends at Brooklyn Heights Blog, we were alerted to attend tonight's release party for volume 4 of Aprendiz, Brooklyn Tattoo owner and all-around great artist Adam Suerte's graphic memoir of his apprenticeship in the tattoo biz. The party was at the unparalleled Cobble Hill comic book store, Rocketship, where we get all our Justice League of America T-shirts and mo' better stuff too.

We got there via the G train from Dumbo Books HQ in Williamsburg. We were excited to see about the extension of the line starting on Sunday.

This Sunday the G train can take us to Church - Avenue, that is. One seat for us now to Park Slope and Kensington and every place in between.

To get to Rocketship, of course, we take the G to Bergen Street, making sure to stay at the front of the train so we can set out at the north Warren-Smith Streets corner (where's Septimus?)

As we said, Adam is the head honcho at Brooklyn Tattoo at 99 Smith Street.

But he's a total artist, with more than the body as his canvas.

He makes paintings.

Here's Cobble Hill Park:

Adam designed this wonderful Grand Army Plaza arch glass

and this glass with the Williamburgh Savings Bank clock tower.

And he's achieved incredible success, justifiably, as a graphic novelist. Here's a review of Aprendiz #1 at Midnight Fiction:

Aprendiz follows Suerte's artistic journey on his path to becoming a tattoo artist in NYC. The first issue chronicles his early days as a evolving cartoonist, tracing his development from art school in late '80's through a 7-year stint as part of an artist's collective called Urban Folk Art. The group struggled to stay afloat printing T-shirts and indie comics; and painting murals. At times, they supplemented their income working retail or production day jobs to pay the rent. About this time Suerte met a couple of tattoo artists who eventually gave him a shot at an apprenticeship at their shop.

Suerte is a wonderful cartoonist and storyteller. Aprendiz provides a fascinating glimpse into the development of a tattoo artist set in the rich countercultural streets of South Brooklyn.

Here's a short version of his bio:

Adam Suerte grew up in South Brooklyn where the streets were his canvas long before he was putting the streets on his canvas. He went to Music and Art High school where his graffiti flourished, and his love of underground comics psychadelic art and illustration began to bloom. At Rhode Island School of Design, he studied illustration, even though he is more of a painter. Dutch masters, Impressionism, Op Art, Pop Art, Hudson River Valley School , and the art of ancient Mexico were a few things that caught his eye. Upon moving back to Brooklyn he founded the artist cooperative Urban Folk Art© where the group ran a silkscreen studio, published their own comics, curated openings, participated in murals projects, guerrilla art projects, and taught art to kids. As they shut down the Printing aspect of the group 8 years later. Adam apprenticed at a tattoo shop in the late 90's, and opened and operates Brooklyn Tattoo, the first ever tattoo studio gallery in Cobble Hill Brooklyn, where he still resides. He is also continually painting makking comics, murals , and teaching art to kids.

There was a good-sized crowd at Rocketship early in the evening.

Adam was patiently talking to fans and friends and signing books.

He let us take a pic with our crappy cell phone camera,

and then he signed our copy of Aprendiz, book four.

Just a few panels from the latest issue to show you what a terrific graphic artist/writer Adam Suerte is:

The four volumes of Aprendiz deal with Adam's apprenticeship as a tattoo artist. In the last volume he tells of his final years toiling for and learning from the temperamental partners Myke and Jeff.

Badly in need of just a little iced tea, we devoured Adam's new book a couple of blocks north of Rocketship at the Smith Street Starbucks. To give you an idea of critical reception of Adam's work, here's a review of the intial volume at the Comics Journal:

Being a tattoo artist, it is not surprising that Adam Suerte can draw. What is surprising is that Suerte knows his way around a comics page the way your dad knows his way around the liquor store.

The most prominent trend in Aprendiz is the integration of elements typical to tattoo design into Suerte's compositions; Skulls, daggers and 40-ounce beer bottles are recurring images. The most impressive application of such imagery is the use of a flowing banner to display narrative captions. The banner serves dual purposes: Being a tattoo-related image, it strengthens the bond between art and subject. It also fills the more practical role of visual traffic controller. Banners overlap from panel to panel, directing the eye and creating a smooth visual flow. The result is a seamless page. The effect provides for as graceful a visual reading experience as one could ever want.

Hey, we got one of the lucky copies and won a free T-shirt!

At the end of the latest volume, Adam and his former bosses, Jeff Ortega and Myke Maldonado, who until recently were estranged, each discuss his memoir and the real-life events behind it.

It's a nice peek behind the curtain of the themes and plot of the opus. Jeff writes that

the one thing that Adam can claim in this industry is being the master of true Brooklyn tattooing ince there is no one within the borough (or on the planet for that matter) that can lay out a better homage to the County of Kings and New York City on skin than Adam.

It was a great evening, and we wish Adam Suerte ¡Mucha suerte! with the new book. Drop by Rocketship and you can get a copy and see for yourself how good he is.

Friday Morning in Chelsea: Breakfast on the High Line

2009-07-03T10:39:00.001-04:00

This morning we got up early and took our breakfast up to the High Line to enjoy a rare non-rainy start to a great day.

Because of the holiday, or quasi-holiday, the L train was running slow.

On such days, one should always have something sensational to read in the train. Lacking Oscar Wilde's diary, we did the best we could.

But once in that beautiful park above Chelsea, who could read?

Starbucks oatmeal tastes better the higher up you are.

It was a delicious morning. We love the High Line.

It opens at 7 a.m., so if you get there early, you can beat the crowds.

Wednesday Night in Williamsburg: Opening Party for "Indigenous" NYC art show at The City Reliquary

2009-07-01T21:05:00.013-04:00

One of the joys of having Dumbo HQ at its present location in Williamsburg is an easy walk to truly amazing places like The City Reliquary, the community museum that's so amazing that something like the above pic should be in the dictionary illustrating the word "amazing."

While our T-shirts, socks, shorts, boxers and towels were spinning around one of the dryers at Metropolitan Laundry early this evening, we cruised down the avenue, crossing under the BQE, to the City Reliquary to catch some of the indigenous art on display at the opening reception for the show "Indigenous," featuring the work of a collective called M.A.M.A.L., a group of artists raised in New York City.

The exhibition seeks to celebrate both past and present landmarks of New York.
As Ming Lin, one of the artists, said in Time Out New York, “We want to give an alternative perspective on what New York is like, commemorating places that are gone and those that are still here.”

We're indigenous to New York, but we think everyone who's spent any amount of time and feels like a New Yorker would appreciate it.

It's got the little things and places of everyday life here that we treasure but don't always we realize we do until they are, suddenly, not there any more, sometimes seemingly overnight.

Since our time was laundry-limited, we plan to go back to get a closer look, maybe more than once.

This delightful art show features the unsigned work (in this age of self-promotion, we liked that collegiality a lot) of Dixie Appel, Laila Caron, Ming Lin, Victor Kerlow, Anny Oberlink, Anna Delavin, Maggie Prendergast, Betty Roytburd, Samantha Silverman and Alex Tatarsky.

Surrounding the pieces are neat little poems or, more often, little tributes to the places - stores, restaurant, objects (religious candles) and places (Socrates Sculpture Park, the Brighton Beach boardwalk that we were strolling this very morning thanks to the Q train) that the artists love.

Or have loved, because some of them - Ralph's Discount City on Chambers Street, Avenue A flea market) are gone.

As M.A.M.A.L. states in the exhibition booklet,

New York may be on the most expensive cities to live in but it can also be a poor man's paradise. Gourmet dumpster diving! World-class musicians playing free on street corners! Tai Chi with old Chinese ladies in Tompkins! Free medical care from a magical Jewish healer in Washington Square! . . .

Poets, gamblers, thieves, ballers, babes, hustlers, homies, statues, swingers . . . The best thing to do is throw your cell phone into the East River (just kidding, recycle it) and wander the streets with no plan and no inhibitions. The city will deliver its soul to the tongue of your Jordans.

M.A.M.A.L.'s artists/writers get NYC the way few people do.

There was a nice-sized crowd, and we saw some of the artists or their friends pointing out the work of individuals.

We were also able to enjoy the City Reliquary's pretty backyard and get some refreshments.

Too bad we couldn't stay for the special performance by Lucky Chops Brass Band later.

Visitors are invited to record their stories and add to a growing archive of memories.

The exhibit is at The City Reliquary till August 15, and while you're loving it, don't forget to look at the other (here's that word again, which we haven't used so much since the pennant race 40 years ago) amazing objects and stuff at this wonderful museum.

As a woman who'd never been to The City Reliquary before tonight told us, the place is a hidden treasure.

We'll leave you with just a couple more of our blurry cell phone pics that don't do justice to the work.

There's lots more worth seeing at The City Reliquary.

Monday Night in Williamsburg: "A Stoop-ID Tale" with Kimber VanRy at Pete's Candy Store

2009-06-29T21:53:00.006-04:00

We are big stoop-sitters, having grown up in houses with stoops in East Flatbush, Gravesend, and Old Mill Basin. This week we've sat on our stoop in Williamsburg every nice day. But we don't drink anything stronger than iced tea or Diet Pepsi and haven't endured the tsuris that Kimber VanRy engagingly discussed tonight a few blocks from our stoop at Pete's Candy Store in "A Stoop-ID Tale," part of Pete's O.C.D. (Open City Dialogue) bi-monthly lecture series.

There were about a dozen or so of in the audience to hear Kimber's story that is probably well-known, giving all the blogosphere and newspaper coverage garnered by his citation last August for drinking a Sierra Nevada beer on the stoop of his Prospect Heights co-op.

Here are links to just a little of the digital and real media ink that he got (OK, this is partially so that we don't have to repeat the story):

"Fighting for the Right to Drink Beer on His Stoop" (The New York Times, September 7, 2008):

In Brooklyn, the borough of the brownstone, few spaces are more sacred than the stoop, the place where the city goes to watch the city go by. Mr. VanRy’s summons, news of which has spread on Brooklyn blogs, message boards and in a community newspaper, The Brooklyn Paper, has stirred debate about the legal status of stoops and stoop drinkers.

New Yorkers who enjoy drinking wine or beer on their stoops are indeed violating the law, according to the police.

The city’s open-container law prohibits anyone from drinking an alcoholic beverage, or possessing and intending to drink from an open container containing an alcoholic beverage, “in any public place.” The law defines a public place as one “to which the public or a substantial group of persons has access, including, but not limited to,” a sidewalk, street or park.

Exceptions include drinking at a block party or “similar function for which a permit has been obtained” as well as premises licensed for the sale and consumption of alcohol. The punishment for violations is a fine of no more than $25 or imprisonment of up to five days, or both.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said in statement about Mr. VanRy’s summons: “The officer observed a violation. The subject has a right to dispute it.”

"Prospect Heights man gets cited for drinking a beer...on his stoop" (Daily News, November 20, 2008:

VanRy got a $25 ticket for drinking a cool brewsky on his stoop in August, and he's taking his case straight to Brooklyn Criminal Court next month.

"If it was a dollar, I wasn't going to pay it ... I hadn't done anything wrong," he said. "My private property shouldn't be construed as public space."

VanRy, 39, was nursing a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and checking his BlackBerry messages on the stoop of the Sterling St. condo building where he owns one unit when a police car pulled up.

"At first I thought maybe [the cop] was asking for an address, said VanRy. "They didn't get out of the car or anything. There was nothing in my mind thinking [they were] stopping because I was doing something wrong."

VanRy said that as one of the cops played a video game on a cell phone, the other wrote him a $25 summons for drinking on the stoop - and allegedly told him not to worry because the ticket would likely be dismissed.

"I was a little confused, because my stoop is well set back," from the street, said VanRy, whose last brush with the law was a speeding ticket 14 years ago.

"I could see if somebody is becoming a public nuisance, walking around and endangering other people; but someone sitting there quietly on their own property is not worth [the NYPD's] time," he said.

"Well, recuuuuuuse me! Judge takes himself off stoop-drinking case" (The Brooklyn Paper [editor Gersh Kuntzman], February 9, 2009)

The long-awaited trial of a man accused of drinking beer on his own stoop will have to wait a few more days, thanks to the stunning recusal of a judge who took himself off the case on Monday because — his words, not ours — my coverage of the trial of the century has been “too good.”

“I read about the case in your paper,” Judge Jerome Kay said, minutes after he stunned a packed Downtown Brooklyn courtroom and made the extremely rare decision to take himself off the summons case against Prospect Heights resident Kimber VanRy, the man who was hit with a violation over the summer for drinking a Sierra Nevada beer on his Sterling Place stoop.

Judge Kay, who lives in Park Slope, said he not only followed the coverage in The Brooklyn Angle, but later walked past VanRy’s building.

“I know that building, I know that stoop, so remaining on the case would give the appearance that I could not be fair, pro or con,” the judge said.

And the judicial finale of Kimber VanRy's long battle against the bureaucracy, reported again by Gersh Kuntzman at The Brooklyn Paper, "Stoop drinker wins his case — but on a technicality!" (February 17, 2009):

Yes, Kimber VanRy is no longer facing a $25 fine for the public drinking summons he received on Aug. 27 for gulping a Sierra Nevada on his front stoop, but Judge Eugene Schwartzwald dismissed the case on Tuesday morning only because it “took too long” to get the case to trial.

“I’m dismissing this on ‘speedy trial’ grounds,” said the judge, using shorthand to refer to plantiffs’ constitutional right to a prompt trial. “This has been going on too long.”

Though he did not reveal how he might have ruled on the merits of the case, Schwartzwald did tell VanRy’s lawyer, Tina Kansas, “You did a nice job on the motion.”

That motion conveyed the substance of VanRy’s challenge to the portion of the city’s open-container law that allows cops to write summonses for any drinking that is done in view of the public, even if the drinking itself is done on private property, such as a front stoop.

VanRy said he was drinking his Sierra Nevada on his Sterling Place front steps, far from the public sidewalk. His summons set off a wide debate over that most iconic of Brooklyn public spaces: the stoop. . .

VanRy hoped that winning the case on the merits would forever prevent cops from ticketing people for a quiet beer on their private steps, so Tuesday’s dismissal was a little unsatisfying.

“It feels a little hollow,” VanRy said. “This dismissal doesn’t allow us to drink on the stoop, which was the purpose of this case.”In the end, Brooklynites should not take VanRy’s “win” as evidence that stoop drinking will be officially condoned by the NYPD, the successful Sierra Nevada lover said. . .

“I’m not sure I’ll drink on my stoop,” he said.

After being introduced by O.C.D. host Jamie Hook (who's close to opening The Cassandra, a triplex art house cinema here in Williamsburg), Kimber told this story in much more detail, with more humor and insight - and yes, he came in clutching a Sierra Nevada beer. (The company got so excited by the free publicity that the CEO and founder contacted the defendant and even got their legal staff to research the law.)

Although Kimber told the story much more funnily than we could describe here - his descriptions of the cops, his attorney, and the scenes during multiple trips to Manhattan and Brooklyn Criminal Court were hysterical - his tale of fighting the system raised some serious issues. Kimber read from the city regulation, and the rule seems overly broad and confusingly vague - and more importantly, the selective enforcement brings up the usual questions of class and race in NYPD dealings with the public on the streets.

(Photo by the great Che Kothari)

Or is the stoop "a public place"? Kimber noted that courts have ruled that valid citations were given to people who drank alcohol in their apartments with the door open on a hot night or were just standing in a public place next to a liquor bottle that they never drank from.

Also important is something we learned early on in law school: never, never, never say anything to the police without an attorney. Kimber didn't have his ID with him so he had to go back to the house to get it - and he could probably avoided the summons if only he hadn't voluntarily returned, because the cops would need a warrant to come into his apartment.

Anyway, it was a fascinating talk - Kimber related the times Mayor Bloomberg's been caught drinking wine in public parks; he discussed the weirdness of the spotlight in both traditional and new media (one blog named him the ninth of "90 Brooklynites to watch in '09; a Queens blog named him one of the year' biggest doofuses) - and the Q&A period afterwards was lively, raising all kind of issues. (What about a gated stoop? Does the gate have to be locked? etc.)

The next OCD lecture, on Monday (the most erudite night of the week, according to host Jamie Hook), July 13 at 7:30pm will feature David Rees, creator of the famous comic “Get Your War On” giving a one-of-a-kind tutorial in how to win at games of chance.

When we got home, we found some evidence that the usual undesirables had been sitting on our very own stoop: a can of Hawaiian Punch. Much as we get nervous when gang members or hipsters sit on our own steps, we figure this individual or bunch must have read about Kimber VanRy's story and so had been keeping their refreshments nonalcoholic to keep one step - or stoop - ahead of the law.

Sunday Evening in the West Village: Sabrina Johnston in Pridefest's final hour

2009-06-28T20:31:00.015-04:00

We're glad we were able to get away to at least the final hour of Pridefest, the annual LGBT street fair that's now in its seventeenth year. Although we saw a few of the Gay Pride Day parades in the 1970s, and more in the mid- to late-1980s when we spent our summers on the Upper West Side, we'd never been to Pridefest before.

Of course, this day and week consist of the parade, the rally, the dance on the pier (still going on as we write this), last night's Rapture on the River, and dozens of official Pride and unofficial events, many of which draw tourists from all over the country and world. But this year we just caught the end of Pridefest and a great performance by our much-loved Sabrina Johnston.

Hudson Street between 14th and Abington Square was closed to traffic, and there were lots of vendors and the usual street fair food and other businesses with tables aqnd booths lining the street. We were there at the tail end, since it had started at 11 a.m., and we went right to the performance space at the north end, finding a seat at the back of the crowd. Most people were going in the opposite direction from us as we walked from the subway, but the remaining group were enthusiastic and the wildly diverse sea of humanity you always see at New York gay pride events.

Forty years ago, in June 1969, we'd just turned 18 and registered with our draft board at 44 Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. We were taking our first class at Brooklyn College that summer, Poli Sci 1 in our major, but it wasn't till August that we began keeping a daily diary we've kept every day since. Like on August 3, 1969, we wrote in our childish way

I went to Kings Highway to get the Village Voice. It seems there was a real big gay power demonstration in Sheridan Square.

That was about five weeks after Stonewall, which we learned about largely through the Voice - we'd have to go to the newsstands at either the Junction or the Kings Highway (Brighton line) station to get it.

Fred W. McDarrah for The Village Voice

It was pretty much the only media outlet that had decent coverage of what happened 40 years ago tonight and in the days that followed.

From New York Times coverage:

The Voice was a lifeline, probably, for more than one messed-up outer-borough teen who didn't realize the articles themselves were homophobic (a word that didn't exist) enough to cause angry Stonewall rioters to march on the Voice office itself.

Later, we'd spend the much of the winter of '74-'75 working at the Voice as a $2-an-hour messenger in the display advertising department, and ten summers after Stonewall, pioneering gay Voice columnist Arthur Bell would say nice things about our first book.

But 40 years ago we were just one of those hippie-ish kids hanging out by the fountain in Washington Square Park. Here's a pic we took that summer of Stonewall, in August 1969:

Anyway, that was then, this is now. One of the co-hosts, Tyra Allure, is asking for all lesbians to raise their hands and shout out. The couple next to us, and lots of others do so.

Then she asks all gay boys to raise their hands and shout out, and a lot of people do. Then Tyra asks for bisxuals to do the same. More hands up and shouts. "You know they all lyin'," Tyra say. She asks for police officers to raise their hands and shout out, and a young white guy in a T-shirt blocking our view and others do. "I love a man in uniform," Tyra says.

Then she and her co-host, Vanessa Veltre, say this is when, traditionally, they call for a moment of silence for all of those we've lost, "but we're not gonna do that this year."

Instead, "I want all of you cops and everyone else to shout out . . . Hey, I'm just a little black girl from Trinidad, but I want, for all the the people you lost and sometimes didn't tell anyone . . . I want you to scream so loud that they hear you!"

We scream as loud as we can.

Then Sabrina Johnston is introduced, with of course a nod to her 1991 hit "Peace in the Valley," and to much applause, Sabrina comes onstage with two women dancers in bright red wigs and red outfits come on. They play around, Sabrina mocks being upset at the dancers, and she sings "I'm Free."

She's really great, and the dancers are too. It's buoyant and exuberant and appropriately celebratory. We hear bouncy standards like "Dancing in the Street" and "Respect." The teen girls near us and the thirtyish gay male couple are dancing around, as are many others. At a poignant moment, Sabrina shouts out, "Michael Jackson, can you hear me?"

Sabrina Johnston has a new album coming out this September, and she did a couple of new songs:
Free Free Free, by Sabrina Johnston

She starts to wrap things up with "Peace in the Valley":

Peace in the valley, peace in the city
Peace in your soul yeah-eh

Peace in the valley, peace in the city
Peace in your soul yeah-eh . . .

Yeah I'm talking about a love (love)
It's deep in your heart, I know it's there
The love was giving so you can't survive
It's the part of us that keeps us all alive . . .

Now's the time, look in your soul (your soul)
Are you happy with the thing that you were born
It gets better, that's for sure
Look to God and he will bless you with more . . .

"New York, thank you," Sabrina Johnston says. "I promise you one thing . . . I'll be only positive . . . we'll have peace in the valley, peace in the city, peace in your soul!"

There's a terrific segment with the two dancers, doing all sorts of amazing splits, somersaults, breakdancing. One's red wig falls off, and she's got nice real natural reddish hair; she tosses the wig into the audience where a big man catches it and eventually the other dancer rips off her wig too. The crowd seems giddy with a mixture of weariness and buoyancy.

Then Sabrina Johnston comes out again for her finale and exits to lots of shouts and applause. The co-hosts come out, Vanessa says they've been told they shouldn't be polticial but that's bullshit. New York State Senators need to stopping messing around. "Hey, Barack Obama, if you can hear this, we're going to get married whatever you say!" Pridefest co-chair Fran Rolan is introduced.

Other Pridefest workers come onstage. "We all stand here together!"

Tyra Allure says the transgender community gets misunderstood: "To me, it's really not your concern. Look at us and see us as we are. Don't question me: I'm a woman. Don't question her - oh wait [laughter]. . . When you talk to friends, go to your Bible - as I do - no one taught you to hate. . ."

Fran says it takes a community to put on Pridefest, "and it takes a village to clean up." She asks us all to take our chairs and put them on the side, at the designated places and to help clean up.

As the Pridefest staff goes offstage to applause, someone says, "We are proud, we are here to stay, make some noise!"

We walk down Hudson Street and lots of people are still buying food and walking around even though things are staring to close down.

The diversity of the crowd is remarkable when you compare it to pride events 25 and 30 and 35 years ago.

After we take this pic below of the rainbow balloon arch at the end of the street fair, we walk back to the L train via Eighth Avenue.

As on our subway trip out, a lot of the people in our car are GLBT. We all have to get off at Lorimer Street; for us, at least, it is home.

Saturday Afternoon in the East Village: Pride Meets the Street, with New York Neo-Futurists' Twitter Plays, on East 4th Street

2009-06-27T19:59:00.005-04:00

From Tompkins Square Park we strolled over to East Fourth Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery for "Pride Meets the Street," a Gay Pride Week event that's part of this summer's weekly Meet the Street programs on this wonderfully block, home to various vibrant cultural venues.

Behind Meet the Street is FAB, Fourth Arts Block, leading the development of the East 4th Street Cultural District and looking to build a permanent home for cultural facilities.

Pride Meets the Street was also an event of Pride Goes East, this week's celebration of Gay Pride on the East Side. The Stonewall rebellion and much gay history, of course, took place in the West Village, but as someone who sometimes hung out on St. Marks Place in the summer of '69 (though we were mostly out West) and after, we know there's a lot of gay history here, too.

Coming to the traffic-free block, we heard "Beat It" coming loudly from the speakers when we approached the block. Next they played "Billie Jean," then a lot more Michael Jackson songs we all love now whether or not we hated them in the 70s or 80s.

In addition to no thru traffic, there was no free parking with pride.

This banner was on the Bowery side. There was a table of Cooper Square neighbors nearby.

Like every Saturday weekend in June, it was B.Y.O.L.C. (Bring Your Own Lawn Chair). But we had too much pride to schlep ours around.

Who would pay to get an ice cream cone from the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck when a free one was available in the gutter, chalked by one of the big kids using the free chalk for all?

This family was figuring out how to play bocce. We'd never before seen it done in this kind of enclosed square.

There was also a volleyball net, but bocce was drawing more players.

This nice woman with the bullhorn was going up and down the block saying that the New York Neo-Futurists' Twitter plays would begin soon. She also said other stuff, like when two cute teenage boys holding hand walked by, she said, "They are gay. See how they walk with pride." They ignored her.

We didn't, though, and sat like all of the other lawn-chair-less audience, in the gutter (we're from Brooklyn, that's what we call it), in front of KGB, our old friend Denis Woychuk's cultural empire.

The Twitter plays all contained 140 characters. If you ask us, that is too many characters for a play. We couldn't keep them straight. Luckily the plays mostly had gay pride as a theme. Here two gay men, helpfully name-tagged "Papa" and "Daddy" adopt a child. Child hugs them. Short but tweet.

In 140 characters, what happens in this Twitter Twister play? "Right foot on yellow." Then one of the actors runs into the audience and kicks in the chest a young man fortuitously wearing a yellow T-shirt. He was surprised but unhurt.

There seems to a be fake itty-bitty bird (prop) in the little birdcage (another prop) the actor here is holding in her hand. Play: "If it's this size, get the hell out." There's still room for more characters, we guess, so maybe the climax should have been delayed.

When the audience came out of a real play (uh, we mean a non-Twitter production) in the Kraine Theatre inside, they got to be part of the show. Various innocent people were referred to as animals such as a snow leopard (man with white hair), a jackrabbit (man with ears), a field mouse (a middle-aged brownhaired lady), a swordfish (no, actually that was a swordfish coming out of the theater).

OK, we don't quite remember which Twitter play this was. We liked the one that was this exchange between two girls:
"Did you hear about that kid that got beat up for being different?"
"No."
"Neither did I."
The dénouement is a passionate kiss.

"I'm Henry the Eighth I am."
"No, you're jut a silly man who needs a shave and a new coat."
(Our only comment: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown have a lovely daughter.)

We think this was the play - there were about two dozen of them, so we got our no-money's worth - where all antigay bigots have to come to the public square to be chastised or something.

The final play featured Marissa coming out and telling the audience she was giving out "poison cupcakes." We tasted ours and it was good and we didn't die. So we had a much better theater experience with the Twitter plays than Abe Lincoln did at "Our American Cousin."

New York Neo-Futurists rule. Here is a video about their benefit performances of "30 Gay Plays in 60 Gay Minutes" for a great group, Marriage Equality New York. You can still catch the last show if you hurry!

As we left, we saw more people coming to Meet the Street. By now some of them are old friends.

Pride Meets the Street was a fab event. Did we tell you we love East 4th Street? If you haven't met it yet, we hope this serves as an introduction.

Saturday Afternoon in Tompkins Square Park: Alpha Women Attack the Lower East Side!

2009-06-27T18:34:00.006-04:00

This afternoon we caught about 90 minutes of "Alpha Women Invade the Lower East Side!" - a four-hour concert and political rally uniting women and their comrades (we fall into the latter category) of different art backgrounds and music genres including: rock, punk, perverse poetry, alt-performances, and musical comedy.

It was co-emceed by the subversive yet comically musical Killer Killy and the fetching yet powerful Our Lady of Perpetual PMS of the Gorgeous Ladies of Bloodwrestling (GLOB)

and featured the following performers:

JENNIFER BLOWDRYER: (LES writer w/Tales from The Lower East Side)
RACHEL CLEARY: (political storyteller)
MICHELLE LEONA: (haunting and horny accordian songs)
ROSIE REBEL: (showcases her bra inventions...on roller skates!)
SARAH B.: (punk teen poet sensation)
NEOANGIN: (one man electronics-gone-mad-art band from Berlin w/paintings & masks
www.neoangin.info)
JESSICA DELFINO: (raunchy, insurgent rock & folk)
RACHEL TRACHTENBURG AND THE OH MY GOD GIRLS:
(debut of the Teen Girl Indie Pop-Rock Players!)
LONE VEIN: (Day of The Dead-inspired "gloom tunes" www.lonevein.com)
RUBBER ROOM RATS: (Female-fronted freaky post-punk www.myspace.com/rubberroomrats)
DETHRACE: (a theatrical art rock experience...10 ft. tall fiberglass super-robots,
playing 666 volts of metal! www.myspace.com/dethracemf)

plus some surprise guests. Here are some of our lousy cellphone pics:

There was a clothing swap. Actually, you could just take what you wanted to wear. Unfortunately nothing was in our size.

A table for Brooklyn-Queens NOW, the National Organization for Women, whose national political action committee - seriously - endorsed us twice when we ran for Congress in Florida, 1994 and then in 2004. NOW is still necessary.

A table for Fertility Awareness, which we didn't spend too much time at, being 58 and post-menopausal.

Michelle Leona performing one of her haunting and horny accordion songs. "Lady of Spain" was not among them :(

Punk teen poet sensation Sarah B hawked her chapbook like mad (she needs to finance her wine-and-baguettes-in-Paris habit) and filled in the time between musical acts with her poems. Like a limerick titled "My Encounter with the Man from Nantucket." Or her ode to "Beer," which detailed the various ways she imbibes that beverage ("with red meat/not on the street"). She read that ditty twice because Justin, to whom the poem was dedicated, showed up late. Sarah B, who's starting NYU next year and really really really deires a cute punk boyfriend, said she appreciated the fake applause from the crowd. Later there was a fake raffle "won" by Harry Krishna.

Rachel Cleary was both funny and interesting as she told some politically charged stories.

The versatile Rosie B. highlighted her many bra inventions in a frenetic routine. But first she needed to remove the scarfs from her bosom. It reminded us of a scene in "Alien."

We were recruited to hold some art paper (we do teach at the School of Visual Arts, after all) while Rosie Rebel poured red, yellow and blue paint on it. Then she started using one of her bra inventions. But we think Mary Cassatt patented something like this like a century ago.

Breast paintbrushes + apple = driving heterosexual men wild. OK, wilder. (As we were leaving the park later, some NYU frat boy-type was telling a long story with the final line, "So in the morning I bagged her." Where are alpha women when you need them?) We can't remember if this pic was taken when Rosie Rebel was on roller skates.

This was so hot. The "Bloomberg - Worst Mayor Ever" sign was a big turn-on, even though it saddens us that no one remembers William O'Dwyer anymore.

Rosie Rebel's invention for the harried homemaker who needs serve citrus juice to her family. While on roller skates. This got a bit sticky but was also hot. Also clever. Rosie and her numerous inventions are keeping the Patent Office up late at nights. Well, one worker there, anyway.

Here Rosie is showing off a set of terrific guns. And bubbles come out! Lawrence Welk would have killed for this.

And she can ride a non-mechanical bull too. What an alpha woman! Go, Rosie Rebel! A great performance loved by all, including Rosie's mom and dad. Who wouldn't be proud of a daughter so versatile?

The co-hosts Our Lady of Perpetual PMS and Killer Killy handled their emcee chores adeptly, introducing acts with aplomb. Also, at one point, with a plum. In addition, they debated the merits of armpit-shaving.

Jennifer Blowdryer read her work, sang a little, and observed that a year ago all the girls were wearing Faster! Faster! Pussycat! T-shirts and now it's all tuxedo hot pants and bondage boots. Either way, East Village girls are hot. She read a poem, "She's Hot." When a girl, like us, started taking pics of the crowd, Jennifer Blowdryer asked her, "Are you a little Diane Arbus Jr. or what?"

Another Jennifer Blowdryer classic was a poem in the voice of a male lawyer she met in a bar who went on and on about some court case. The audience ate it up. Fortunately, before she had finished.

Jennifer Blowdryer's performance spurred us to contribute to the tip box so the performer can maybe take their instruments home in a taxi or so Sarah B can buy some baguettes and wine in Paris. It was at this point we realized both co-hosts were wearing polka-dot outfits. Also, it gave us a chance to reflect on Rosie Rebel's boobie bubbles (her term, kids).

This alpha woman was a man, Jim, who was German and had actually flown in from Berlin. Well, maybe not just for this event, but he's here only for a limited time, so it was a rare treat for us North Americans to see him perform. As Neoangin, he's a electronics-gone-mad-art one-man band. He did the painting in the back too. It fell down a couple of times, but that's show biz.

Here Neoangin (Jim) is performing his song "The Happy Hobo" maybe, who lives a more pleasant life than "people who sit at computers."

Maybe this is him singing "I Didn't Want to Make All These Friends," about the perils of social networking, a song in which the title is repeated about 46 times with minor variations. Sort of like reading Facebook updates.

Neoangin had many haunting lyrics, like this from "I'd Like to Be Somebody Else": "I'd like to fuck someone/I've never fucked before." His autobiographical "A Friendly Dog in an Unfriendly World" was touching, and his song about Berlin surprisingly informed all of us that the German capital (sorry, Bonn) is not a 24/7 party town.

These people are stars! And the mom taking the pic is famous, too.

If you haven't heard Rachel Trachtenberg, singing and playing her ukelele, alone or with the OMG Girls, here she is with Syd Barrett's "Bike." Enjoy!

And here they are with Kate Nash doing "Brand New Key":

A table for The Shadow, "NYC's ONLY Underground Newspaper (since 1989)!"

Who can forget The Shadow's classic headline:

The crowd grew to several hundred, a very varied group. Some teen boys in yarmulkes and tsitsis were ogling the Oh My God Girls. Or maybe Tina Piña Trachtenburg.

Our Lady of Perpetual PMS laments the expenses engendered by needing an endless supply of fake blood. Did you know that premenstrual syndrome was actually a hindrance, not an edge, in the wrestling ring?

A serious moment about a serious subject: sexual assault among college students. Jerin Alam of the Young Feminist Task Force discusses the proposed CUNY sexual assault policy that students at the city university are trying to implement. One out of four women and one out of six men are sexually assaulted in colleges nationwide. For information and help, go to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network or call 800-621-HOPE.

At this point the sleeve of our Brooklyn College T-shirt was being tugged on by a companion with shpilkes, reminding us we were due elsewhere. But we wanted to stay to see Jessica Delfino. She went to art school so she can wear whatever she wants. Sometimes called "a dirty folk singer," Jessica told the audience that perhaps this would be a good time to take little kids to get ice cream. Most of the parents in the crowd stood their ground, an encouraging sign that they were contributing to their children's growth as human beings.

We love her "Lullaby" and were glad to see her perform it.:

Children should learn about disappointment and frutration and boredom every night, if you ask us. Jessica's friend made her guitar out of garbage. Here she sings a poem she wrote on a beautiful day in this very park, totally conducive to her sitting on a bench, relaxing and writing songs about how much she hates everybody. Maybe before Jessica goes on tour, she would enjoy our new book from Canarsie House publishers, I Hate All of You on This L Train.

We had to leave Tompkins Square Park and Alpha Women Attack the Lower East Side with regret - it was a wonderful event we're grateful for - and we also left with Jessica Delfino's "A Message to All Men" ringing in our ears, reminding us of the important things in life:

We're sorry we missed the rest of the show and are sure it was great, too.

Friday Night in Prospect Park: Blonde Redhead at Celebrate Brooklyn!

2009-06-27T05:54:00.009-04:00

Despite a severe thunderstorm as hundreds of hipsters and regular people lined up to get into tonight's Blonde Redhead concert at Celebrate Brooklyn!, it stopped raining before the show began and it ended up being a really nice night listening to the dreamlike sounds of the band.

Blonde Redhead two summers ago at the McCarren Park Pool:

There was a severe thunderstom in effect as we left Dumbo Books HQ in Williamburg, and when the G train stopped at Myrtle-Willoughby, we saw this Hershey's ad and wondered if we'd be better off staying dry at home reading Chompsky.

Than, when we got out of the G train at Smith-9th Street to change for the F, the clouds looked ominous and it soon began raining.

By the time we got out at the Eighth Avenue exit of the Seventh Avenue stop, it was raining - heavily. At the park entrance, someone gave us a free sample of an energy drink so vile we tossed it after one sip and got on a long line.

We actually ended up deciding to go back to the subway entrance by Dizzy's and wait until the storm passed over. It didn't take that long. The seats were soaked, but we had the remains of the day's paper and sat on Michelle Pfeiffer's face (in a review of Cheri), which was more satisfying than the last summer park experience we had with her twenty years ago when she played Olivia in a Twelfth Night vastly inferior to the current production.

The women in front of us, though all wet, were having fun. When they began smoking heavily, they took down the umbrella. Some Celebrate Brooklyn! staff in their plastic rain ponchos were smoking like chimneys. (Blogger Ines Kuusik said there was weed in the air at last night's Femi Kuti show, but she's Estonian and we can't tell if she meant marijuana or some allergen.)

The opening act was Icelandic troubadour Ólöf Arnalds (her debut album is Við Og Við - and don't you wish English alphabet still had the eth too?). When she said she would try to be brief because they were trying to get in the whole concert between thunderstorms, the crowd laughed. "I'm not joking," she said.

She was pretty good and charmingly disarming in her self-consciousness. She kept telling us every time she messed up a lyric, though we doubt many in the audience had a good enough working knowledge of Icelandic to have caught the error.

The highlight of her opening act - she seemed aware of the absurdity of trying to win over fans anxiously waiting for Blonde Redhead - was a quirky, oddly affecting Michael Jackson tribute when she sang "Billie Jean" with that little guitar or whatever it is. It started raining again.

But not too much. During the intermission we filled out a survey for a chance to win free JetBlue tickets and had 3 free samples of Honest Tea, which is honestly good, and then had to make one trip to the most disgusting part of any Celebrate Brooklyn! performance, the men's room. To do the survey on the computer, we had to switch from our distance glasses to our mid-range glasses and then forgot to switch back so the crowd looked blurry.

It was dark when the Blonde Redhead show began. We watched it standing up, from the left side of the stage, near where all the rich people and Peter Cherches sit.

We don't need to say much about Blonde Redhead, since if you are reading this, you know all about them. As an old man, we heard about them maybe 4 or 5 years ago when we were living in Florida and saw the lineup for that year's Siren Festival and decided to sample all the bands in a continuing effort to deny we were born in the Truman administration.

We like Blonde Redhead a lot, but in addition to taking lousy pics with our Alltel cell phone, we don't know enough about music criticism to say anything intelligent, so we'll just wait until other, younger, brighter people get up today and decide to post something about Blonde Redhead or non-blurry pics and we'll link to them.

Here's their most popular YouTube vid, the title track of the album 23. If you don't find it haunting, you must have given up the ghost.

We're grateful to our Lord for abating the thunderstorms so we had a pleasant night in Prospect Park. Actually, the dampness of the after-rain fit the mood of Blonde Redhead perfectly.

UPDATE: For first-rate pics, go to the indispensible Brooklyn Vegan.

Thursday Night in Prospect Park: Femi Kuti and the Positive Force at Celebrate Brooklyn! with Melvin Gibbs' Elevated Entity

2009-06-25T22:54:00.014-04:00

After leaving the LIU campus, we got the R at DeKalb Avenue and, thanks to a kindly bus driver who waited for us to cross 9th Street, got the B-75 (saved!) bus to the entrance nearest the Prospect Park Bandshell,

past Mayor Mike's paid campaign workers, in time for the return of Femi Kuti, heir to his famous father Fela's superfunky Afrobeat throne, to Celebrate Brooklyn!

As we got into the very crowded event (another kindly person, one we kissed hello, had saved us a seat), Brooklyn native Melvin Gibbs, whom Time Out NY has called "the best bassist in the world," and his Elevated Entity project had started things off with his delicious, addictive "exploration of African-diaspora music with a fusion of Afro-Brazilian rhythms, funk and rap." (OK, we are cheating a bit here by quoting the publicity materials, but we're so musically ignorant - like Ike on art, we know what we like is all - we need some help.)

It was a great evening, the first real summer day we've experienced since our return from Phoenix over two weeks ago. The sky was cloudless all night, the temperatures were warm but not hot and humid, and a pretty right-crescent moon made itself known as the sky darkened and we - along with a humongous crowd of people having fun - enjoyed another great night of music in Prospect Park.

Since we're so inept at describing or criticizing music, we're always happy to defer to better, more knowledgeable correspondents. Luckily, a very good blogger with press credentials, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, was present and wrote on Infinitebody, whose delightful commentary (you've got to see it in full) began with mention of a seatmate more annoying than our friend:

She had a little camera with her, boasted of chatting up Angelique Kidjo, who I adore, and who was circulating in the crowd. She much prefers Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Baba Maal and Femi Kuti, of course, saxophonist/vocalist son of Afrobeat's illustrious warrior, the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti. I love 'em all.

Mostly, though, she worships Femi Kuti's trio of dancers, whose ebullient shimmying is a truly a cause for wonder. "Can you guess which is my favorite?" she later asked me during a brief moment of rest at her seat. I guessed correctly, and she trotted back to one corner at the edge of the stage, leaving me to enjoy the show. At last!

Melvin Gibbs' Elevated Entity (which included Vernon Reid on guitar, Bernie Worrell on keyboards, and vocalist Amayo from Antibalas) opened the evening with some chugging Afro-Brazilian-funk-rap, which I liked well enough. Kuti's set, though, was a marvel of discipline, swing and energy--and not just because of all that powerful shimmying. Kuti follows his father's example in not merely playing for you but enlisting you in his army, and I happily signed up.

Kuti lyric quote of the night: "You better ask yourself why the richest countries have the poorest people." Yeah.

Yeah is right. Thanks to Eva Yaa Asantewaa. For mo' better pics and commentary on tonight's concert, check out the always-great Brit in Brooklyn, Devorah Klein at Big Apple Music Scene, and our talented Estonian friend Ines Kuusik at All the Things...New York Jazz and More.

You could tell Melvin Gibbs is a Brooklyn boy because he asked for shout-outs for various blocks - Beverly (or Beverley) Road [his stop on the B-41), Ocean Avenue (specifically 708 Ocean Avenue), Empire Boulevard, Brooklyn Avenue, Decatur Street, etc.

And he ended by thanking our ancestors (including that African woman who's all our great-great-great-etc.-granny) "who taught us to survive" before getting off at 8 p.m. In between, we heard some superb sounds.

This video clip is from the debut performance of Melvin Gibbs' Elevated Entity here in New York on January 10, 2009. It features John Medeski on keyboards, Amayo of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra on lead vocals and Kid Lucky on rap and beatbox. The rest of the band is: Vernon Reid on guitar, JT Lewis on drums, Kunle Ade on percussion and of course bandleader Melvin Gibbs on bass and computer triggered by a MIDI Organ pedal.

As soon as Femi Kuti and his troupe came on, everyone stood up, so we had to stand up. We couldn't see much anyway, though we were better off than the very old, very little (maybe 4'10") white lady in front of us who did her best and then finally just started swaying to the beat with her cane.

Eventually, most people sat down for most of the time, so we could too.

We're really glad Femi Kuti came, as he said, all the way from Lagos to return to Prospect Park. It was a great concert, even if we left a little early (even then the line at the men's room was so long, we walked to Barnes & Noble on Seventh Avenue and from there all the way up Seventh to Flatbush and to the subway in Fort Greene. There were lots of people out enjoying themselves at sidewalk cafes, restaurants, bars, and other venues.

So it was a beautiful night even if our tendinitis tibialis posterior has started to kick in. Thanks again to everyone at Celebrate Brooklyn! We pay our measly three dollars at the gate to "make it great" and they provide us who are without income for three months a lot of pleasure.

Thursday Evening in Downtown Brooklyn: Opening Reception for "We’ve Gotta Have It!: Art Inspired by Spike Lee" at Long Island University

2009-06-25T22:17:00.007-04:00

We started off a beautiful evening by returning to our old haunt of Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn, where we taught from the winter of '75 to the summer of '78 and have only the fondest of memories for our early days in the academia racket.

Thanks to our friends at Afro-Punk, we got word about today's 6 p.m. opening reception at LIU's Salena Gallery for "We’ve Gotta Have It!: Art Inspired by Spike Lee," a showcase of

art from participants worldwide in honor of legendary filmmaker Spike Lee. Although Lee is known for his prolific moving images, his work has also influenced a multitude of visuals artists across genre, language and borders. This juried exhibit is an opportunity to showcase artwork and offer a public thank you for his inspiration.

It was the first event of this weekend's tribute to native son Spike Lee, "Where's Mars?: Brooklyn Honors Spike Lee," orchestrated by PlanIt Brooklyn (the filmmaker and his production company are not involved), and a great beginning. It drew a large and enthusiastic crowd, us among them, for a look at some really excellent art.

After getting off the G train at Fulton Street, we walked over to the familiar LIU campus (in all our time working there, we always drove from the other end of Flatbush Avenue and parked either at street meters or at the then-public lot north of Junior's), but when we saw this ghost sign as we walked on Rockwell Place, we couldn't recall rates that low. . .

Nelson George, in his wonderful memoir City Kid (our hold on the book from the Brooklyn Public Library finally brought it to us on Monday and we devoured it by Tuesday), knew Spike Lee before he was Spike Lee back in Fort Greene in the early 1980s. An investor in She's Gotta Have It, writes in his chapter on Spike:

In most successful public careers there are defining moments when that person enters the cultural consciousness. For Spike that was the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. He'd already sold She's to Island Films, after a successful screening at the San Francisco festival, so much of the pressure was off. He came into 19 Willoughby [Nelson's house] with six mock-ups of the poster, including the one that ended up in movie houses around the country. I threw in my two cents on which one I liked (the one he used!), and then gave Spike a couple of hundred dollars to spend in France on himself. It was probably the last time Spike Lee ever needed a loan.

By the time Spike came back from Europe, the game had changed forever. As "the black Woody Allen," he was a media sensation, and was smart enough to use that initial acclaim to build a massive career. Suddenly black nerds were chic. No longer were the only black Amerian role models athletes, musicians, hustlers, or activists. The bookish gal, the scholarly teen, the wannabe historian, the dedicated cinephile, while praised during black history month, had rarely been icons. Spike's visibility changed that. . .

We recall the incredible excitement we felt when we saw She's Gotta Have It at a suburban movie theater in Lauderhill, Florida. It was unlike any movie we'd ever seen, true to a part of Brooklyn and the African-American community we knew but had never been represented in mainstream films.

Obviously a whole generation grew up under Spike Lee's influence and some of the wonderful artists in this show (curated by an eminent panel) owe some debt to Spike for inspiration. Working in varied media and with different sensibilities, they nevertheless showed things in common in this show. It's easy to dismiss an exhibition like this one as a gimmick, but it's not. The work is good, and you should get down to LIU to see it.

Untitled by Jennifer Drinkwater

Our puny cell phone didn't get very good pics of these artworks, and many are unavailable on the web for obvious copyright reasons. And we couldn't post some that we really liked, like the one by Che Kothari (a favorite of ours, we appropriated one of his pic when we ran for Congress in Arizona) called k-os - Do The Right Thing - Love/Hate - Radio Raheem or an untitled photo by Alzo Slade or triple-threat-man Ka-Son Reeves' terrific Block Party painting or Sylvia Maier's haunting Portait of Spencer (Spencer Richards?). But we're posting a few others. . .

Our Story by Layla Sola

Martin Loves Coretta by Paul DEO

Crown Heights' Jen One

Mo Better by Ron Ackins

Joker Sambo by Nelson Caban

View Into A New World by Musa

A Prayer for Red-A Prayer for Malik by Marcus Anderson

We definitely enjoyed this show and are grateful to the artists, the curators Coup d'etat Arts & Raquel Wilson, the jurors, LIU and everyone behind it. And, like everyone, we're especially grateful for Spike.

You can catch We've Gotta Have It! till July 10 at Long Island University's Salena Gallery.

Canarsie House publishes Richard Grayson's new book "I Hate All of You on This L Train"

2009-06-24T17:13:00.004-04:00

The Brooklyn-based indie publisher Canarsie House has announced the publication of a new book of selected stories by Richard Grayson, I Hate All of You on This L Train.

It features some of the best stories from five previously published Richard Grayson books from the '70s, '80s, '90s and 21st century.

This 94-page collection of selected stories is available online for $7.00 plus shipping and handling.

Or, for those who don't want to carry it on the subway, the book is available for free downloads and online reading at Scribd.

Saturday Afternoon in Bushwick: Stefanie Joshua's Award-Winning Documentary "Bushwick Homecomings" at the DeKalb Branch Library

2009-06-20T19:21:00.012-04:00

Well, I guess this year we have already had our summer sun and warmth during our three-plus weeks in Phoenix. We're totally bummed out by the constant rain we've had since we got back from the desert Southwest and today we scuttled plans to attend anything outdoors, instead sticking to the indoors close to home.

But that didn't stop us from a really interesting and thought-provoking event nearby, in Bushwick, at the DeKalb branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where there was a screening of Bushwick native Stefanie Joshua's award-winning documentary, Bushwick Homecomings.

With no formal background in film production or editing, Stefanie initiated this documentary project while researching and writing her Master's thesis on delinquency and social disorganization theory at CCNY. Growing up in Bushwick and then returning home after years away at college, she ahd questions about the area, which of course was home to drugs and crime. (You can hear a great interview with Stefani from last fall on WNYC's Leonard Lopate show.)

Our only contact with the neighborhood growing up in the southern end of Brooklyn was going with our dad (Happy Father's Day!) to see his pants manufacturing firm's customers on what he always called "Broadway-Brooklyn." By the late '60s, by the time we could go to Bushwick on our own, we knew enough not to go there. And we remember during the summer of '77 blaackout listening to the transistor radio and hearing that Bushwick was burning with looting. So we never had any reason to go there on our visits from Florida as things seemed to get worse in the '80s and '90s with the crack epidemic.

Of course, now we live in East Williamsburg, really close by. It took us about 20 minutes on the G and J trains to Kosciusko Street.

It was out first time in the DeKalb branch library on the corner of DeKalb and Bushwick Avenues.

It's a handsome Carnegie Classical Revival building over 100 years old and has this beautiful fireplace in the adult reading room.

Downstairs, there were four rows of chairs, and eventually about 35 people came out on a rainy afternoon to watch Bushwick Homecomings. Most were from the neighborhood and it was a diverse crowd: black, white, Latino of all ages from senior citizens to a baby a few months old. There were also refreshments at the back of the room: water, sodas, and individual bags of snacks (we grabbed 100 calories of chocolate chip cookies).

Due to the usual technical difficulties - at one point Stefanie asked, "Are there any A/V people in the audience - the start of the DVD was delayed. Eventually, with the speakers not working, we listened to the sound on the laptop computer and it was fine.

The 37-minute film begins on the L train as it goes out of the subway tunnel into the exhilirating and surprisingly beautiful light of day around the cemeteries just before the Wilson Avenue stop. This is a trip Stefanie made all the time, and it's a nice introduction.

The heart of the film are interviews with five guys from the neighborhood, two of whom were in the audience today during the film's Bushwick premiere. The project was inspired by the death of a close friend, Mister "Pooh Bear" Smith, in a drive-by shooting in August 2005. He wasn't involved in the drug or crime scene but was standing near the target. As the Times article the morning after the shooting stated,

In the Bushwick attack, the 15-year-old, David Cromartie of Brooklyn, and one of the men, who was critically wounded, were both shot in the head, the police said. The police identified the critically wounded man as Mister Smith, 23. Investigators believe they were shot because they were standing with Mr. Fair and another man, both of whom suffered less serious injuries, a police official said. Mr. Fair was shot in the leg and arm.

The other man, Jermain Saunders, 19, was shot twice in the leg, the police said.

Mr. Cromartie and Mr. Smith were taken to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, the authorities said. Mr. Cromartie was shot in the face and leg and died later in the morning, and Mr. Smith, who was shot once in the head, was said to be in extremely grave condition, the police said. A nursing supervisor at the hospital declined to discuss the two patients and refused to contact the hospital's administrator on duty.

Mr. Saunders and Mr. Fair were in stable condition at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, the police said.

The Bushwick shootings left Decatur Street between Wilson and Central Avenues littered with spent shell casings and splotches of the victims' blood. The block was closed off for several hours while detectives mapped out the crime scene after the victims were taken to the hospitals.

Detectives believe that Mr. Fair was targeted by a man who lives on nearby Chauncy Street, the police said.

These shootings were not uncommon in those days. As the five neighborhood men in the film relate, most of them were involved in some way with guns, drugs and violence and most spent some time in prison. Bushwick was saturated with drugs from heroin to crack as well as guns, and even guys not involved carried guns just to avoid being robbed.

The neighborhood men in the film report being robbed of money, jewelry, electronic equipment and even a newly-purchased lunch from Crown Fried Chicken. Most of their assailants had guns. Stefanie had a chain snatched from her neck, a common occurrence. In the early '80s we once shared an end seat on the subway with a young lady whose chain was snatched off her neck so quickly by a man who timed it so well that he got off the train immediately as we just sat there dumbfounded.

Anyway, the litany of sad stories of violent deaths and lives wasted by crack and other drugs, as a review on The African-American Book Club stated, "leaves the viewer with the feeling that it’s a miracle that any of them could have survived such a dysfunctional and dangerous concrete jungle."

To us, it appeared that given the environment of Bushwick at the time and their own limited resources, the young men were making rational economic decisions. All left the scene as the crack epidemic abated, they became fathers and more mature, and endured jail and prison. The neighborhood got increased police presence and a crackdown (following a series of New York Times articles) and crack lost its allure.

Recently, of course, Bushwick has gentrified, and while it was once home to numerous vacant lots, most of them have been filled with new housing, much or all of it unaffordable to longtime residents like the men in the film and others.

A good part of the film is devoted to the death of Pooh, a friend to Stefanie and some of the men in the film. Because he lived in Manhattan and was just visiting his old friends in Bushwick and because he was a gentle soul who didn't carry a gun and wasn't involved with drugs, his killing seems especially senseless, but it's hard to consider that any of the many shootings of friends (one man estimates that more than 20 of his friends were killed) made much sense.

The interviews with the articulate, thoughtful and funny Bushwick men are interspersed with headlines and clippings from the New York Times and other papers, many of which we recalled reading:

From 1989, "In Silence of Bushwick, Residents' Fear is Heard"

Mary Tabor's 1992 articles, including "Where the Drug Culture Rules" and "The World of a Drug Bazaar, Where Hope Has Burned Out"

From the Sunday Magazine in 2000, "The Two Faces of Bushwick; A Troubled Brooklyn Neighborhood Is Mending. But Its Leaders Are Feuding Over the Size of the Gains and What to Do Next." and in 2003, "The Darkest Night"

Also from 2000, "Teacher, 31, Fatally Stabbed in Bushwick"

From 2002, "Drugs in the Blood"

Sigh. The documentary, which was the winner of awards at the 2008 Swansea (UK) Life Film Fetival and the 2007 Motor City International Film Festival, is remarkable for its coverage of the human stories behind the press coverage.

Ric Curtis, the chair of the Anthopology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (where we taught in the SEEK program in the fall of '80, '84 and '85), provides the perspective of a longtime researcher in Bushwick and sheds some light on not just the crime and drugs epidemic of the time but the health problems (HIV, STDs, TB, rampant asthma).

We pretty much agree with this review from DVD Verdict:

My only complaint about Bushwick Homecomings is really a backhanded compliment: I wish it were longer. While touching on a complex series of economic, sociological, socioeconomic, and racial topics, Joshua mostly maintains a detached objectivity that allows the men to tell their stories with a minimum of directorial commentary. Her framing material as well as an interview with Ric Curtis, the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, whose research on the spread of AIDS among drug users in Bushwick has given him a keen understanding of both the history of the neighborhood and the lives of its residents, provide a modicum of sociological analysis. But Bushwick Homecomings is less interested in offering answers to the difficult questions that it poses, than giving voice to the neighborhood's residents. That's a strength, not a weakness, but the movie left me wanting to hear more of the what the men had to say. . .

Cinephiles and fans of documentaries should make it their mission to seek out Bushwick Homecomings. It's well worth 37 minutes of your time.

It was certainly worth seeing this afternoon for those of us in the audience.

There was an interesting discussion after the screening among people in the community, including some of the guys who were interviewed, often about the recent changing face of the neighborhood as artists and young people priced out of other neighborhoods move to Bushwick. Gentrification, as always, is a mixed bag.

Councilwoman Diana Reyna came up after the movie to present Stefani with a proclamation from the City Council honoring her for her fine work on the documentary. Ms. Reyna spoke movingly about her own upbringing in the neighborhood and how inspired she was by Stefani's work. Her talk was pretty inspiring itself.

Finally, the library was closing at 5 p.m. so we all got ready to leave after a hearty round of applause for the filmmaker. For a project that was created as a corollary to a master's thesis in sociology, Bushwick Homecomings is a remarkable product and an amazing accomplishment.

Friday Night in Prospect Park: Almost Like Being in Trinidad with David Rudder / Samantha Thornhill at Celebrate Brooklyn!

2009-06-19T22:54:00.012-04:00

The skies had cleared (momentarily, we hear), the night was almost like the summer promised for this weekend, and there's no place where we'd rather have been tonight than than Prospect Park with Celebrate Brooklyn!

Well, maybe Trinidad, but this evening came pretty close with a rousing show with David Rudder, one of the top calypsonians ever, called "the Bob Marley of soca" by the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner. Opening for him was Trinidad native but longtime Brooklynite, our Williamsburg neighbor Samantha Thornhill, a spoken word artist, slam poet and rising star of kiddie lit.

It was a great night of words and music featuring two superb performers.

Of course, most people there - many of them West Indians, and the majority of them Trinidadians - were there to see David Rudder. For those not in the know, here's his bio from the All Music Guide:

One of the few calypso singers to write his own songs, David Rudder helped to usher in a new era for calypso music. His many hits include "Bahia Girl," "Bacchanal Lady," "Panama," "Engine Room," "Rally 'Round the West Indies," "Knock Them Down," and "The Ballad of Hulsie X." The title track of his 1988 album Calypso Music remains one of the best selling songs in calypso history. The title track of his 1986 album The Hammer was covered by steel drummer Andy Narrell as the title track of his own album. Rudder's 1990 album, 1990, was named "best calypso album of the year" at the first Caribbean Music Awards at the Apollo Theater in New York while the title track was named "song of the year" at the Nefeita Awards. The following year, his album Rough and Ready received three Sunshine Awards. According to the Village Voice, Rudder is "the first of a new generation of calypsonians and he's opening up a whole new way to write, sing, feel and see the thing. His music transcends culture, race, and class. You don't have to be from Trinidad to feel the power and integrity of it. Things will never be the same again."

One of nine children, Rudder hails from Belmont, Trinidad. Much of his early life was spent with his grandmother, a devout Baptist. The chanting of Shango Baptists remains the foundation of his music. Rudder's talents as a vocalist were evident from a young age. By the time that he reached his 12th birthday, he had already begun singing with a calypso band, the Solutions. Throughout his teens, he sang backup vocals in a calypso tent run by Lord Kitchener. He supplemented his income as a singer by working as an accountant for the Trinidad Bus Company. Recruited as a substitute for Christopher "Tambu" Herbert, lead singer of the popular Charlie's Roots, in 1977, Rudder impressed the group so much that he was invited to remain as a co-lead singer following Herberts recuperation. Together with the group, he continues to perform for the Carnival productions of Peter Minshall.

But even those who came mostly for the music seemed to appreciate the exciting, vibrant poetry of Samantha Thornhill. This is from her own website:

Long story short...

Trinidadian-born Samantha Thornhill started writing poetry at age eleven and edited her high school literary magazine. She attended Florida State University, where she earned her B.A. in Creative Writing, then later graduated from the University of Virginia with her Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry. Aside from coaching the Virginia Slam team for two years, Samantha was and still is an eternal member of Black on Black Rhyme and Cave Canem, two organizations keen on promoting poetry in general, Black poetry in particular. For several years, Samantha served as a program director at the Children’s Aid Society in East Harlem, where she built and nurtured youth development programs. Samantha currently teaches poetry to first year acting students in the Drama division at the Juilliard School. She is the author of the young adult novel, Seventeen Seasons, which is forthcoming from Penguin Books. She lives in Brooklyn.

If you want the longer version (fascinating to us, anyway), you can find it here.

For us, the journey to Prospect Park began with the G train to its Smith-9th Street terminus.

On the way we sat and watched the Hershey food-pun advice ads at every station. You know the ones:

--LEARN TO SPEAK SNACKLISH
--SCHEDULE A CONSULTATION WITH DOCTOR FEEDZMORE
--ENROLL AT CITY CHOCOLLEGE
--READ CHOMPSKY

Hmm, we think some leftist artists were at work at Myrtle-Willoughby. Anyway, then it was the F to 15th Street/Prospect Park and we surface for a second time.

We got there a bit early, but already there was a crowd.

There were some good seats left, though.

Eventually Celebrate Brooklyn!'s executive producer Jack Walsh (how does he look so young after thirty years of this?) and artistic director Rachel Chanoff came onstage and gave the usual annnouncements. They also said that there were two winners of airline tix from sponsor JetBlue hidden under two seats in the audience.

Well, we didn't win but glad that Joan, the nice lady above, did.

Assemblymember Jim Brennan and Councilmember Kendall Stewart, who said his district has more Trinidadians than any constituency in the U.S. were introduced. Mr. Stewart asked all those with a Trinidadian heritage to raise their hands. Lots of hands went up.

Eventually Samantha Thornhill was introduced, and she began a set of wonderful spoken word performances. She's got great stage presence and varied poems. The first one, about a preacher who's called to say goodbye to his wife, who was fatally pinned between a truck and a tree, was a rich evocation of the paradox of human strength, illustrating that the things that kill us are exactly what keep us alive.

She did a couple of Trinidad-based poems, using a distinctive accent (normally Sandra sounds like she came from Florida) in "West Indian Woman Speaks from the Dead," describing a ghost coming to dance with her widowed husband at a New Year's Eve celebration, and in a poem for her own mother, who apparently had the same dismayed reaction to her daughter's first boyfriend's dreadlocks as the woman in the poem -- but when the mom locked herself out of her car, the guy used his dreads to pop open the lock. So her poems run from very poignant to very, very funny.

We loved the odes to her breasts, a wonderful celebration of the well-endowed woman; a moving poem called "Why Sandra Can't Pray," about the mother of a young man who died in a prison rape; and finally her magical, magisterial longpoem/performance at the close of her set, about the childhood and career of someone people our age and a little older all revered, the unparalleled queen of folk music, Odetta.

We can't wait to see the forthcoming picture book for kids and adults from Scholastic Press. Samantha got an appreciative round of applause as she left the stage.

Then, after intermission, changing of the set, as it got dark and real quiet and then really loud, David Rudder came on. The crowd went totally wild, and no wonder.

We're here to tell you it ain't just a Trini thing. We were up on our feet - okay, partly because everyone else was and we couldn't see - but if you don't want to start moving when you hear a song like this, you need to see Dr. Feedzmore.

We'd rather be in Trinidad every February too, especially when, as David Rudder said, it's below zero with mounds of snow on the streets of Brooklyn.

Every song was great, but some of the best ones are from his latest (2009) album, Trinidad Stories. Like "Oil and Water" and the tribute to his hometown, "Belmont."
The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian review said

Trinidad Stories is a return to roots. . . it’s lyrically powerful and musically delightful. Colours, Children of the flag, Oil and Music, Belmont Carnival Tuesday, Trini Prance are my favourites; that’s not to say the other songs on the 13-track CD aren’t great. Far from it!

Trinidad Stories is a amalgam of some of the best song writing and musical talents T&T has; names like Ian Wiltshire, Kernel Roberts, Machel Montano, Pelham Goddard, Jeremy Ledbetter and Daryl Braxton. Musicians on the various tracks read like a who’s who in soca. It would take a whole newspapers to give them credit, plus supporting acts. Trinidad Stories is soca at its brilliant best, but more than that it is a return to self... a true turn to the Rudder we love. He hasn’t lost his touch. What are you waiting for? Go buy his CD!

It's hard to recall a more appreciative audience at a concert. Rudder's fans love him to pieces, and no wonder. There was a joy and verve to the entire evening.

As we made our way across Ninth Street to the Seventh Avenue subway stop, we could still hear "T-T-TND, T-T-TND" and other David Rudder songs in our head. We're grateful to have witnessed his performance, and Samantha Thornhill's tonight - another great summer evening in Prospect Park. And they brought a respite to the constant rain. . .

Thursday Night in DUMBO: The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival Photo Exhibit at Galapagos Art Space

2009-06-18T22:47:00.004-04:00

The Fifth Annual Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival is this weekend. Saturday at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park between noon and 8 p.m., there'll be a great show with some really big names: Pharoahe Monch, DJ Premier, Styles P, dead prez, Smif N Wessun, Grand Puba, J Period, Torae and Marco Polo, Tiye Phoenix, Keys N Krates, Brown Bag All Stars, DJ Parler, DJ Misbehaviour, Metermaids and lots more. For the full event schedule, go to the Brooklyn Bodega website.

Tonight there was a photo exhibit retrospective of the first four years of the festival at the wonderful Galapagos Art Space, which we don't get to enough since it located out of its smaller, older quarters which were near us in Williamsburg and moved to its postmodern, nicer digs in DUMBO.

We had a dinner appointment on Montague Street in the Heights and were pressed for time, but we dropped in to the photo exhibit at Galapagos, making a detour from the High Street station to represent our destination as the oldest, least cool-looking person in the poster for BHF, top (the befuddled presbyopic guy on the lower right).

Yep, we were the oldest, least cool person there, either in Galapagos or certainly in the photos of the 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Hip-Hop Festivals all around. But even at speed-through pace (at least as speed-through as a 58yo with orthotics can manage), the pics were worth the $10 donation. We hope to get to hear the music on Saturday, but for now here are some of the images from the festival's last couple of years we got from Brooklyn Bodega's Facebook albums.

Here's 2008, looking great:

And 2007, starting with the amazing Ghostface Killah:

And here's the poster for the second annual BHF, held at the current location, by the Tobacco Warehouse:

Their posters are so excellent. Here's the one for the first festival in June 2005:

And here's the set times for this Saturday:

12-1:30 DJ Misbehaviour
1:30-1:55 DJ Brina Payne
2:00-2:10 COTN
2:14-2:25 Eagle Nebula
2:30-2:40 Brokn.Englsh
2:40-2:50 Nyle
2:55-3:10 Donny Goines
3:15-3:25 Meter Maids
3:25-3:30 Kel Spencer
3:30-3:45 Brown Bag All Stars
3:50-4:00 Keys N Krates/DJ Parler
4:00-4:10 Tiye Phoenix
4:15-4:20 Chip Fu
4:25-4:35 Keys N Krates/DJ Parler
4:35-4:45 Marco Polo & Torae
4:45-4:55 Tanya Morgan
4:55-5:00 Homeboy Sandman and Shawn J Period
5:005:20 Smif-n-Wessun
5:25-5:55 J Period with Grand Puba
6:00-6:30 DJ Premier
6:30-7:00 Dead Prez
7:00-7:30 Styles
7:30-8:00 Monch

Again, for the full event schedule, go to the Brooklyn Bodega website. Up to six or seven thousand are expected. This borough is thorough!

Wednesday Evening in SoHo: Masha Tupitsyn, Lynne Tillman, Wayne Koestenbaum and "Life As We Show It: Writing on Film" at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe

2009-06-17T20:45:00.010-04:00

This evening we took along an umbrella as the L and 6 trains brought us to SoHo for a very enjoyable reading at the great Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. As we noted in earlier posts, City Lights has just brought out Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, co-edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn.

Two stellar contributors to the anthology, Lynne Tillman and Wayne Koestenbaum, read tonight from cinema-related early pieces, both tours de force that prefigured later books that we consider masterpieces. We'd enjoyed both immensely in our reading of the book last week, but it was a special pleasure to see the authors and hear their words in their own voices.

There was a crowd of 35 to 40 in chairs in the back of the store, next to the cafe. We've spent a number of interesing afternoons and evenings here (for example, these September 2007 panels on the future of book reviewing and on literary magazines online, and we know they're well worth the occasional distraction of the sound of food and drink being made.

First, as usual, someone thanked us for coming and told us about Housing Works. If you've been living on Uranus, you know about them, but they're a now vulnerable New York-based non-profit fighting the twin crisis of AIDS and homelessness.

Housing Works runs a chain of nine thrift shops, this bookstore and cafe, a catering company and a screen-printing business as social enterprises to support their work and lower their dependence on grants and donations. All the books and periodicals in the booktore are donated, so if you live in the city and have some books you think they could use for a great cause, take them to the store at 126 Crosby Street and stop to buy some new books and get something good to eat and drink.

Anyway, then there was an introduction of Masha Tupitsyn, co-editor of Life As We Show It (along with our good friend, the brilliantly original filmmaker, novelist and critic Brian Pera).

Masha is an amazing writer and an astute cultural critic. Her book Beauty Talk & Monsters from Semiotext(e) Press, is a collection of film-based stories, and she's currently working on Star Notes, a new book about our favorite actor, John Cusack and the identity politics of the actor. Her fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in Animal Shelter, Fanzine, Creative Aggression, the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century and the Encyclopedia Project Volume II, F-K (Encyclomedia Press, 2009), Make/Shift, Bookforum, Fence, Five Fingers Review, and San Francisco's KQED’s The Writer’s Block.

Masha read a little of her terrific introduction to the anthology, which begins with a meditation on the movie theater scene in The Blob. The passage she read begins:

When the great comedian Gene Wilder got his first big movie break, he ran around Lincoln Center ecstatically proclaiming, "I want everything I've ever seen in the movies!" With Reality TV currently reigning supreme, the symbiotic bonds that we have with screen fantasies and screen idols -- that is, the way we contain, portray, and pursue images, rather than the way images portray us -- have largely gone on to erode any kind of real civic alliance, making images the ties that bind. . .

Her reading gave a look at what Life As We Show It is all about. As the book's publicity stuff says, it's

a dynamic cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. In these innovative writings, the movie-viewer relationship is positioned as protagonist, theme and plot, and most importantly, as a new genre in its own right. The texts play with the trope that life imitates art by asking: If movie-watching has become a primary way of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?

Then Masha introduced Lynne Tillman, giving Lynne's bio note from the book. Here let's just plagiarize ourselves, from the last Lynne Tillman reading we reported on, an event for BOMB Magazine in Tompkins Square Park on August 1, 2007:

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two nonfiction books. Lynne’s No Lease on Life was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel, American Genius: A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press last year. Other novels are Motion Sickness, Haunted Houses and Cast In Doubt. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The New Gothic, New York Writes After 9/11, The Show I’ll Never Forget, The Penguin Book of New York Stories, and This Is Not Chick Lit. She’s a professor and writer-in-residence at the University at Albany, and last year she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lynne said she'd been thrilled that Brian and Masha wanted to use her story "Other Movies" to lead off the anthology because it's one of her works that "no one had ever mentioned" but it's precious to her because, as is obvious to all of us who love her masterwork No Lease on Life, its themes and styles prefigure that book's.

The story takes place on Tenth Street in the East Village in the 1980s and the block in those pre-gentrification days was more quirky and vibrant, if somewhat more dicey, than it is today. The narrator describes the block's residents and their eccentricities and reimagines them as (or casts them as) characters in one of the movies or TV shows that are frequently shot in the picturesque neighborhood.

Here's a short excerpt of a scene in a bar that's "Cheers or Archie's Place except the ethnic groups are different. For the regulars, it's a home away from home" and two of them, Kay and Harvey are talking:

Kay's wearing a cut-up T-shirt with a Bruce Springsteen logo on the back. She reminds me of Sally Fields. . . Then she drinks a shot of vodka and rolls her blue eyes at him, as if she were Demi Moore in St. Elmo's Fire. They talk about disease. His heart. Her breasts. AIDS. Kay's good friend Richard died two months ago, and she still can't believe it. Life, she tells Harvey, wasn't supposed to be like this. Kay slides off the barstool, goes to the jukebox, and plays "Born in the USA" and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

Joe the bartender is nothing like Archie or Ted Danson, the guy from Cheers. He's a tall black guy, sort of like the lead in The Brother from Another Planet. . .

A longer excerpt would show how good this piece really is, but we're a little slow on typing tonight.

After Lynne stepped down to a round of applause, Masha introduced Wayne Koestenbaum and we realized we've mispronounced his name in our head all these years we've been reading his work and about him. His bio, which we've stolen from the indispensible Soft Skull Press:

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of several works of cultural criticism including The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics; the Penguin Lives biography of Andy Warhol; and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. He is also the author of a novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes and five collections of poetry, Best-selling Jewish Porn Films, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, The Milk of Inquiry, and Model Homes.

Wayne's piece from Life As We Show It, "The Elizabeth Taylor Puzzle," prefigures his book-length studies on the role of divadom and gay male culture, The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin. Film Comment said the Taylor essay is one of the highlights of the anthology, and Wayne's reading of much of it tonight had the Housing Works audience enraptured after he said how great it was to read with one of his idols (and ours), Lynne Tillman.

Koestenbaum's take on Liz Taylor is a wonder. Perhaps you can get a feel for the tour de force Wayne Koestenbaum pulls off in this essay from this excerpt:

Elizabeth Taylor and masturbation: recall the marvelous scene in National Velvet when she plays invisible horsie in bed, pretending to ride a horse, making it go faster and faster, panting as it accelerates and she guides it over hurdles, her screen sister Angela Lansbury in bed dreaming of boys but Elizabeth Taylor as Velvet hot for a horse named Pie, as in mincemeat pie.

References to eating, hunger, and gluttony mark most of Taylor's films. In A Place in the Sun, she enters the pool room where Montgomery Clift is playing and she nibbles. In BUtterfield 8, she says, "Waitress, could you bring us some french fries?" In the first scene of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? she eats cold meat straight out of the fridge. . .

The elephantine giantism of such vehicles as Giant and Elephant Walk signify that she's a star, that the emotions she inspires are huge, and that her figure is large. (Is it really? The allegedly "large" Liz often seems tiny. Liz is a matter of perspective.) It has alway been considered acceptable to comment on her size. . . She was called plump long before she was actually plump. Fluids and solids that pass through Elizabeth Taylor' body, or that stay in her body, are part of the public record.

After Wayne read, Masha thanked the audience and after the applause died down, people got up to talk with the authors, get books signed, etc. (We found a little room where we could pass fluids out of our body first.)

Masha will be reading from her own contribution to Life As We Show It, along with the wonderful Tisa Bryant, next Friday, June 26, at Bluestockings.

Sunday Evening at Fort Tilden Beach: Hipsters Invade the Rockaways for Todd P's Acoustic BBQ 2009

2009-06-14T21:44:00.031-04:00

After spending much of yesterday in Rockaway for the Rockstock & Barrels fest, this evening we went back over the Gil Hodges Memorial Marine Parkway Bridge to secluded, gorgeous Fort Tilden Beach for Todd P's annual unamplified Acoustic BBQ.

You probably know about the famous music promoter Todd P. We got regular email updates from him. Here's what he said on his website:

As beautiful and innocuous as the Acoustic BBQ is, it’s easy to forget that there’s a small political statement involved in what we’re doing out there. The Acoustic BBQ was envisioned as an artistic musical event stripped of every element that could be threatening or dangerous. Here’s what I mean: It’s not amplified so it’s so quiet no-one could complain that we’re disturbing their peace. It’s out in the open air so there can be no fingerpointing about “fire safety.” We don’t charge admission & we won’t be selling anything, so there’s no commerce to regulate. It’s in a public place so we’re not trespassing. We vigorously clean up and pack out our trash afterwards, so we’re not littering.

The reason for reciting all of the above is this: the Acoustic BBQ is always an experiment. We’ve reduced a show to its basest parts, just great music and an audience, with no amplification & no money changing hands, in a beautiful open air setting.

Todd P's 2008 Acoustic BBQ on Roosevelt Island

We spent the afternoon in our old 'hood, variously called Flatlands, Old Mill Basin, and Kings Plaza after the shopping center whose opening day in September 1970 we attended.

(Our family's women's clothing store The Pants Set, had a branch here, occupying a space now rented to Frederick's of Hollywood.)

We fortified ourselves for the Acoustic BBQ with dinner at the Kings Plaza Diner, just like in days of yore - and, yes, we know, our yore is probably not your yore.

Then we cut through the now-vacant-except-for-Capital-One-branch little shopping/office plaza to the Q35 bus stop on Flatbush Avenue. There once was a Bowery Savings Bank branch here, along with other stores and our first girlfriend's orthodontist. She wore full metal braces, and so did our first boyfriend, leading us to forever think that 18yo's with their teeth wired up look adorable.

Down Flatbush Avenue the Q35 went, past Toys R Us, the Marine Parkway golf course, the traffic-clogged Belt Parkway and Floyd Bennett Field - where a guy got off, mistakenly thinking there was some kind of ethnic festival going on - and over the bridge and offa da bus. Although we practically grew up in the Rockaways and know from Far Rock to Neponsit troo and troo, we don't head this far west so much.

We once were in Fort Tilden in the early '70s when our pal's National Guard unit had weekend maneuvers there. We drove out with a girlfriend to meet them, and Mark told us later a buddy had said after we left, "Wow, those two girls were cute," leading us to think he could have found a better way to avoid Vietnam than joining the Guard.

A few years later, one of our fellow Brooklyn College MFA students decided one night to ditch his old car by driving it on the deserted beach and into the water. It wouldn't go in and sink, so we set it afire and ran. An hour later, he got a call from the police: "Do you know your car is on fire on the beach at Breezy Point?" He feigned being shocked, but the attempt at insurance fraud failed. (Our own family, a bit smarter, had more success, like when our dad moved to Florida and didn't want to take his green Cadillac. Ya gotta know the right people.)

We walked down Beach 169th Street with two girls from Elmhurst who didn't realize that they should have taken the quick Q53 Limited bus to Rockaway and so went into Manhattan to get the A train and then the shuttle to Beach 116th, stretching a 45-minute trip into three hours.

Todd P's directions: "walk down Beach 169th St to the ocean, turn right at the 'Unsupervised Beach - no lifeguards' sign, walk along the beach past 5 breakwaters. We will either be there or will have a sign posted there saying where to go from there."

The other way is Riis Park, or Grease Park as we locals call it. Ask any gay man who grew up in Brooklyn before, say, 1970, and he can tell you about Bay One. Although that beach was not unprotected, our friends did a lot of unprotected stuff there back in the pre-AIDS years.

Walking down the five breakwaters, we stuck near the smooth dark sand close to the water. The two girls from Elmhurst said, "Wow, this is far."

Finally, we were there, in a crowd of several hundred hipsters, each and every one of them younger than us by at least 20 years. But, hey, all you need is a guitar, a drum, a human voice . . . and an audience not deafened by going to forty years of concerts like us.

A very beautiful topless woman walked over to the Acoustic BBQ with us but we didn't want to invade her privacy and objectify her, so we missed a nice pic. Some other girl sarcastically yelled out at her, "Take off your shirt!"

Everyone was having a good time, and we got that peace/love/Woodstock/flowers sentimental feeling. You can see better pics by more adept photographers at work 'n' progress, at Wasting Time and at bajapuntos' Flickr stream.

Our vote for best dressed goes to The Trashicist:

The bands started moving down to the water as the day waned. As far as we could hear, nobody introduced anyone, and when bands alternated, they sometimes passed on their instruments (we saw one exchange of prescription drugs, too). Anyway, here was the schedule for the time we were there:

–8:00pm :: Ninjasonik
–7:50pm :: Hospitality
–7:40pm :: Extra Life
–7:30pm :: Kurt Vile ———— from Philadelphia, PA
–7:20pm :: Aa aka BIG A little a
–7:10pm :: Talk Normal
–7:00pm :: Dinowalrus

This year's event was dedicated to the family of Kill Rock Stars artist Jeff Hanson.

Towards the ocean, once in the middle of a charmed circle, these three musicians used their heads and placed their audio over them.

These guys were particularly excellent. The maracas were a great touch, but castanets could have made their sound even better.

It's getting late, and people are starting to head home. Some take the beach route. . .

We noticed what we think was Todd P talking to the park rangers back by the rise where the beach begins (or ends). On our way out via the concrete path, we asked the park rangers if we could take their photos. No dice, not even for an alter kocker wearing a blue Rockaway Beach Surf Shop t-shirt. But the rangers, who tolerated the nude beach back in our day at least, said they enjoyed the day and had no trouble.

Thanks to Todd P, many people made new friends today. And some still hope to make friends with those spotted there, like this young lady posting on Craigslist's Missed Connections:

Todd P. Beach Show - Guy With Sunglasses, Boner - w4m - 23 (rockaway)

Below is the hipster remake of Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. No, we're just heading home, taking the non-beach route. We spotted some guys taking a whizz in the cattails, but we found a porta-potty at the end of the road.

We're not sure what these cats we saw on the way out were up to, but some guy was filming them . . .

Brooklyn hipsters waiting for the Q35 bus, this pair used as beach mats the yellow ones from last year's McCarren Pool concerts, courtesy of TopShop. Is there McCarren Pool party nostalgia already? Were these guys spending the day sitting on what will one day be expensive collectors' items?

As you can see, the bus stop is just down from where near the cover of our book was shot. Sorry about the plug about this furshlugginer volume about when we were the age of most of the people at Acoustic BBQ, but you can read it at Google Books or Scribd without paying us a cent.

Whatever. The bus came on time, with the same woman standing next to the driver as our way over to the beach. We eventually got back to Dumbo Books HQ in Williamsburg, tired but grateful for our weekend in Rockaway. Muchas gracias for today to Todd P!