Celebrating Community
It was a beautiful New York early summer day, not too hot with a refreshing light breeze. You know, the kind we have before it gets unbearably hot and sticky. Having finished a quick bite with a friend, we decided to take the long way from Wall Street to check out a new gallery opening in Brooklyn. Crossing the Brooklyn […]
If one could go back in time and visit Red Hook in the 1940s, one would, at about 4:30 am, find a scene of desperation on its crowded waterfront. Days began with “longshoremen huddling in doorways in rain and snow on Columbia Street facing the piers, waiting for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and formed up […]
Great TV shows not only reflect the current culture, but also offers a subtle critique of it — avoiding heavy-handed, simplistic moralism in favor of deeply comic and profound reflections on the nuanced power structures and characters that create what issues the show critiques. Others are wholesome depictions of society as we wish it would be. There is not a […]
Almost a Century Later, the Allure of the Roaring 20s Lives On: 14th Annual Jazz Age Lawn Party If you, like Daisy Buchanan, find large parties intimate, consider the 14th Annual Jazz Age Lawn Party. Celebrate the zeitgeist of the 1920s in all its glistening grandeur on Governors Island June 15-16 and August 24-25. The event is escapism twice over: […]
Hook Arts Media, the nonprofit formerly known as Dance Theatre Etcetera, is working to train a new generation of filmmakers in Red Hook. On May 18, a screening of short films directed by high-schoolers and young adults took place at the organization’s Van Brunt Street loft, concluding a seven-week afterschool filmmaking program, “In Transition: Media,” led by Jordan Campbell. The […]
Filmmaker Matty Rich was a 19-year-old kid from the Red Hook Houses when Straight Out of Brooklyn won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. Without Hollywood connections or rich relatives, he’d gathered enough money from donations, investments, and maxed-out credit cards to make a feature film, for which he served as writer, director, producer, and […]
There was a time when Brooklyn was an artist’s bedroom community: many musicians only moved here to flee the oppressive Manhattan rents. In the ’80s and ’90s, you and your significant other would tell everyone you were moving out to Brooklyn to a great place with a huge backyard. Friends would come to your first party, agree how cool it […]
At Pioneer Works, the Germantown-based artist Sally Saul shares whimsical objects of clay and glaze that create a mythos around subjects that are by turns precious and nefarious. The name of the exhibit, “Blue Hills, Yellow Tree,” captures the sort of winding up and down these 34 works curate. It’s a pleasant ride, whose occasionally puzzling pieces remain amusing and […]
In 1978, on the 25th anniversary of the CIA coup that re-installed the Shah of Iran, four men doused the Cinema Rex theater in the city of Abadan with jet fuel, and burned the building down. As many as 800 people died. Prior to 9/11, it was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the planet. Even 40 […]
The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC – be cool and pronounce it Bee-Whack) opened its sprawling warehouses in the middle of May. Don’t miss your chance to absorb works from Brooklyn’s largest artist-run gallery. I recently strolled through and passed several gems: Unlike just about every gallery in Manhattan, the works here are reasonably priced. You’ll find spectacularly composed street […]