Celebrating Community
Recycling Show at BWAC Through June 17, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition exhibits over 60 artists who have found some really creative ways to restore value into “trash.” Some, it must be said, do look like the substance they’re made of, but others like Natalya Aikens’s “Sunset” and Michael Rejner’s poignant “MRO1-S4” are very memorable. Juror John Cloud Kaiser wrote “Whether […]
If “Death of a Salesman” deals with economic whiplash and “The Crucible” warns of religious frenzy, Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” reckons with the tidal force of sexuality. Brave New World Repertory Theater in Flatbush does memorable justice to the classic, now running through June 24 and directed by Alex Dmitriev. It’s mid-1950s Red Hook, and according to […]
Hidden from passerby on Van Brunt Street is a mobile library of motley images and bizarre archival knowledge. It’s called Reanimation Library, and its towering shelves have over 2,000 discarded books published from the 1930s to the 1970s with titles likes “Procedural Advertising”; “Space Age Fight Fighters”; “The Mystic Art of the Ninja”; “A Study of Splashes”; “Inkblot Perception […]
When the Queen Mary 2 was docked at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, on May 17, Red Hook took notice. Mark’s Pizzeria put out a sign welcoming the ocean liner that temporarily reconverted the skyline. “I have noticed the QM2 a few times,” Christina Daniels at Pioneer Works wrote in an email. “It always takes me a minute to realize it’s there because it’s […]
By Lorraine Duffy Merkl “A cocktail of excess” is the lyrical way Mandy Stadtmiller describes her train wreck existence in the new memoir, Unwifeable (Simon & Schuster.) The prosaic term is: a compound of explosives. The comedian and journalist, whose writing has appeared most famously in the New York Post, New York Magazine and xojane, is currently (and ironically) a […]
Even if you have zero interest in writing, you’ve probably seen a cab-yellow newsstand of catalogs for Gotham Writers Workshop, or the lime green advertisements for Sackett Street Writers Workshop. Since 2002, Sackett Street has worked with over 3,500 writers, and Gotham Writers (founded in 1993) currently averages 2,800 New Yorkers a year with their in-person classes. But trumping […]
Spring at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden An essay by Ramaa Reddy Raghavan It is Spring, but where is the sun? As I write this piece in mid-April, the temperature outside is a frigid 47 degrees and everyone around me is fed-up with this downright, depressing weather. After the long winter, filled with nor’easters, rain and snow, I find that I am ready for a change. So, with a spring […]
The queen of literary memoir releases an exquisite collection of poems on May 8. Best known for the memoirs “Lit” and “The Liars Club,” Karr displays her formal mastery and heartfelt innovations in this collection that looks at the commingling of ribald humanity and the potentialities of God. The first half collects poems on Karr’s usual themes—Texas memories, comic carnage, […]
The long windows pull you in from far away to the petite space about the size of a food cart. Red Hook’s only bookstore is small but mighty; with impeccable curation worthy of its name, it’s the sort of place where smart books can easily find you. It’s also a space where you’ll frequently find people mingling with authors of […]
A version of this story first appeared in the Star-Revue’s August 2017 print edition. A burnt out bulb. A busted car. A broken knee. Future biographers might note a theme laced through Vander Carter’s culinary career: things keep breaking. But Carter — a Carroll Gardens entrepreneur behind the food startup JestGreen — only sees crisis as a chance for growth. […]