B O O !

S p r i n g t i m e     S u r p r i s e

50 best blocks in Brooklyn.

well,
are they?

City Council to debate idea of Walmart in NYC

Ug.  What's to debate?  Please, kids, write your council person.  Or go knock on their office door in your neighborhood.  It's that storefront on the avenue, currently nestled between the other active small business storefronts.  The one that'll be nestled between the empty storefronts if you don't go knockin' now.  Crain's article.

Reahabilitation Through the Arts

The Unofficial House Band of Sing Sing from Fly's Eye Films on Vimeo.

Lota and I attended a benefit last evening for Rehabilitation Through the Arts - mostly theater, but also some music, dance and poetry readings - and you would have had to have been a stone not to have been moved.  A few of the scenes and monologues written by prisoner members of RTA were just devastating. And lest you think this is a soft heart-on-the-sleeve sort of thing, New York State Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, Brian Fischer, attended and was honored for his support of RTA. 

The proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook.  Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their design, such as the comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.

Instead of people being treated like the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not A Gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

The quote's on pp. 16.  I'm guessing that if you're a youngster you might say, What's this weird old dreadlocked dude talking about? Or, if you're an older fart, maybe in particular you are this older fart, typing this entry, who once concentrated on projects of proud extroversion in an earlier wave of web culture, you think, What am I doing?

Long ago, and far away, in a land before the blog...

And while I'm here...

 

 

 

EFF Takedown Hall of Shame

Ah, near and dear to the old Stumpy, Dante, Jane Thane of Ohio, and Billy Sam Donnelly crowd:  EFF's Takedown hall of shame.

"Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF's Hall Of Shame collects the worst of the worst."

Clearly, the dogs will need to eat the SUVs to survive

Uh... save the planet, eat a dog.  Via /.

Proteus Gowanus

via brooklyn based

Our humble abode's Walk Score is 98. Shiny!

How about yours?

Via WebWorkerDaily.

NYC threatens to rip Garment District

Ah, Lorishki knew her when. The days of sample sales and N. Lapore's sassy jackets & Nick Thatos' jewelery. Nice Marketplace / American Public Media segment featuring Nanette L: NYC threatens to rip Garment District.

What if Stell D'oro left the Bronx? Who would that child I was be?

From our friends at the Working Families Party / Democracy in action. I know our host here has some professional conflicts about this, but I also know that Stella D'oro anisette toasts and a cup of coffee mean the world of memory to him:

It's a story we've heard too many times before. Wall Street firm buys a family owned business, sells its assets and throws the employees onto the street.

Workers at the Stella D'oro cookie company have been fighting for months to keep their Bronx bakery open and save 136 jobs. After an 11 month strike and a court victory, work at the bakery was supposed to resume. Instead, the owners - private equity firm Brynwood Partners - announced their intention to sell the bakery and move the jobs to Ohio.

We're fighting back. Join the WFP and Stella D'oro workers in a rally at City Hall demanding that the bakery stay in New York.

WHAT: Rally in support of Stella D'oro workers & demand that the bakery stay in the Bronx.
WHEN: Thursday, Oct. 8, 1pm
WHERE: City Hall
Subways: A, C, M, R, W, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Stella D'oro received more than $400,000 in tax breaks since 2006, meant to modernize the factory and keep jobs in the city. Goldman Sachs owns a significant chunk of Brynwood Partners, and it too has received millions of dollars from the city. It should be obvious: Companies that receive taxpayer dollars meant to sustain good jobs should not be allowed to destroy them while keeping the money.

Join the Stella D'oro workers and supporters from across the city in a rally at City Hall this Thursday at 1pm.

Thank you,

Bob Master & Sam Williams
WFP Co-Chairs

Help Working Families fight for the little guy: We can't count on Wall Street. We rely on contributions from ordinary people like you to keep the WFP going. If you'd like to support our work, visit: http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/contribute.php

The oldest living things in the world: benefit party

THE OLDEST LIVING THINGS IN THE WORLD:
ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION BENEFIT PARTY

Tickets: $25
Available Here

Come out for an evening of music, trapeze, and entertainment featuring New York's indie-rock vaudevillians The LISPS, Dance performances by Jenny Rocha and her Painted Ladies, an Art Auction featuring works by the MacDowell Colony Felllows plus free Vodka Cocktails, Haircuts and free GRIMALDI'S Pizza. Hosted by Galapago's resident artist Olga of Olga and Bjorn!

Join us for this amazing evening of art and entertainment benefiting The Oldest Living Things in the World project. Internationally acclaimed artist Rachel Sussman has been researching, working with biologists, and traveling all over the world to find and photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older. Sussman, who is fiscally sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts Council, is endeavoring to raise funds for an expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula to photograph 5,000-year-old moss this winter.

Galapagos.

Woody mo

Juju emailed me this link to the astounding Renovo bikes of Portland, OR, which defnitely turned my volume up way past 11. But it also reminded me that we ran into these fine folks in Redhook one day, the Bamboo Bike Studio. Read up. Maybe, if I'm fighting of a large cash splurge and I know I'm going to lose, this is where I should lose it?

New Amsterdam Bike Slam

Be there, or begorrah!

Ultimately, we hope customers will feel an enhanced sense of community and a deeper connection to our coffee heritage

Oi. Starbucks. Thanks, jp. At the Consumerist, via huffpost.

Go North, Object Image, fond good byes.

This summer two galleries we really liked visiting have said good bye. First, Object Image on 5th Ave in the Slope. Bob Weiss' place. (Hey, Bob, you stopped updating the site in 2007?) We bought a number of pieces there over the years, and became particularly fond of Thomas Hagen's work. And now, this is the last weekend for the Go North gallery in Beacon, NY. We drove up there yesterday to say bye. We chatted with Karlos Carcamo there, who said to keep checking the site for happenings. We will.

Thank you, all.

Health care - I'm relaying a message from the Working Families Party

Hi -

Six Democratic Members of Congress from New York are putting the brakes on President Obama’s historic campaign to reform our broken healthcare system.

Healthcare legislation that would expand healthcare coverage for millions of Americans is gaining steam in Congress. But Reps. Michael Arcuri, Scott Murphy, Nita Lowey, Mike McMahon, Eric Massa, and Dan Maffei are stalling the bill because it pays for reform with a modest tax on the rich. Sign the petition here: http://action.workingfamiliesparty.org/t/3865/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=631

This is our best chance for healthcare reform in a generation, but now these five Democratic members of Congress are putting real reform on hold - even though less than 1% of all New Yorkers would be affected by the tax.

We can fight back – but we have to ask fast. I just signed the Working Families Party’s petition calling on the 6 Representatives to put healthcare reform above protecting the wealthy. Will you join me?

http://action.workingfamiliesparty.org/t/3865/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=631

About my little jaunt to the Bronx today...

I had great fun with 40,000 of my closest friends, about 10 blocks from where I was a wee bairn. Before I went up, I thought I'd do some googling of the old block. I knew it might not be good - it went through some hard in-between times - but I didn't have a sense of what was going on there now.

The photo on the left - yeah, I know, snow, xmas lights, tugs at the heartstrings - was taken from one of the windows of our apartment. Gee! look at all the old cars!

Now, take a look at the current views. Go into street view. Swizzle around. The intervening decades have not been beautifying to Nelson Ave. between 168th and 169th.

What would you ask the candidates (for mayor of NYC)

Working Families wants to know - and will carry the water.

Talkin' bout home made mayo

A friend I haven't seen in a bunch of years is in NY today from the Twin Cities, interviewing for a job that will move him back here. We got together for lunch at Mary's Fish Camp in the village, and who did we see there but Laura Comerford, Urban Home Free Range doyenne, who I hadn't seen in two or three years. Laura and her UHFR partner are working on a book. And here's one of her videos - chosen mos' specially because of the ukulele outro (and it's the first one on the site).

Sharecropper

Sharecropper. Via Brooklyn Based. Plant something.