Of Ministers and Merchants, Sinners and Saints. The writer moved from Manhattan to same street in Brooklyn where his grandmother grew up. This prompts him to delve into his family history, where he discovers a cast of characters that includes Ulpianus Van Sinderen, a Dutch Reformed Minister who came to Brooklyn in 1747, prosperous merchants, tenant housing reformer Alfred Tredway White, and an embezzler. Brief appearances by Jacob Riis and Truman Capote.
posted by marxchivist
on Feb 28, 2013 -
3 comments
Once the home of the
Weckquaesgeek tribe, and more recently,
William Shatner, Hastings-on-Hudson might sound like the next village over from Downton Abbey, but according to the New York Times, it's "
a village, in a Wittgensteinian sort of way" seeing an influx of ex-Brooklynites fleeing to the suburbs in the face of creeping real estate prices. Sure, these new hipsturbanites may miss the creative density of urban New York, but at least the river setting matches their
Filson/woolrich heritage-brand aesthetic.
Read on if you set your cultural compass to the Brooklyn Flea, or your NYT Style section appreciation to ironic twee.
posted by deludingmyself
on Feb 18, 2013 -
28 comments
In an article titled "So You're From Brooklyn," Brooklyn is declared a "bourgeois borough" full of "baby carriages, rubber plants, gold fish and green grocers.” The author warns that "Your average Manhattanite's conception of that great unexplored area beyond the three bridges is at once as naive as a child's idea of Alice's mythical Wonderland and as weird as a futurist artist's impression of Heaven."
The Brooklynite magazine (1926-1930)
rediscovered and
reviewed.
posted by griphus
on Feb 14, 2013 -
12 comments
[Joseph] McElroy's sense of original and authentic contemporaneity makes him the most important novelist now writing in America, the artist who has most consistently combined the mastering capabilities of systems perspectives and an art of excess. Women and Men is the capstone of his career and, I believe, the most significant American novel published since Gravity's Rainbow. -
Tom LeClair [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Dec 4, 2012 -
18 comments
The Jumper Squad. "Each year, the New York City Police Department receives hundreds of 911 calls for so-called jumper jobs, or reports of people on bridges and rooftops threatening to jump. The department’s Emergency Service Unit responds to those calls. Roughly 300 officers in the unit are specially trained in suicide rescue, the delicate art of saving people from themselves; they know just what to say and, perhaps more important, what not to say."
posted by zarq
on Oct 9, 2012 -
39 comments
The female bandmembers of
Chairlift,
Au Revoir Simone,
Class Actress, and
This Frontier Needs Heroes get together with "
an essentially revolving cast of indie Brooklyn sirens, twice a year in a living room in Greenpoint to cover a single, classic song that they learn and arrange right before they perform. Calling themselves
Girl Crisis, the group covers a classic (mostly
a capella) from a male artist each Winter and a female artist each Summer. The performances are are filmed with a Super 8 camera, are not open to the public and exist only online. Their latest: Leonard Cohen's
"Dance Me To The End of Love".
(Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 22, 2012 -
44 comments
On a recent Monday night, a gaggle of 20-somethings crammed into a former Curves fitness center along the industrial edge of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The storefront gym had been carved into two classrooms... It was just another school night at [Metafilter's* own] Brooklyn Brainery, a hipster schoolhouse started by a pair of underemployed polymaths, where students can learn abstruse subjects like the secret lives of bacteria, taught by teachers with few teaching credentials. Tuition is $5 to $30, enrollment takes place online and PayPal is accepted. [more inside]
posted by dersins
on Apr 5, 2012 -
57 comments
Hiya Freddie baby, give me a dozen...my life's blood, without bagels what is a day? Yah make it a dozen assorted. Dat's it, give me the garlic, the sesame, the onion, give me them all baby, that's it! They're still handmade eh?
Hot Bagels! Wait a second let me PAY yah! Here you are, kid. Thank you. Have a good day.
posted by timshel
on Feb 9, 2012 -
71 comments
In Do the Right Thing, the subject is not simply a race riot, but the tragic dynamic of racism, racial tension, and miscommunication, seen in microcosm. The film is a virtuoso act of creation, a movie at once realistic and symbolic, lighthearted and tragic, funny and savage... I have written here more about Lee’s ideas than about his style. To an unusual degree, you could not have one without the other: style is the magician’s left hand, distracting and entertaining us while the right hand produces the rabbit from the hat. It’s not what Lee does that makes his film so devastating, but how he does it. Do the Right Thing is one of the best-directed, best-made films of our time, a film in which the technical credits, the acting, and Lee’s brazenly fresh visual style all work together to make a statement about race in America that is all the more powerful because it blindsides us. -
Roger Ebert (SPOILER) [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 20, 2011 -
74 comments
Yet by 1944 the IRS named Barbara Stanwyck the highest-paid woman in America. From 1930-57, she did a minimum of two pictures a year, sometimes even four or five. Yet it wasn't workaholism, according to the actress: "I was afraid they'd get somebody better, frankly. I never really thought I had any clout. For a lot of years I was free-lancing, by choice, but I think discipline stays with you. It's this fear that maybe somebody can come in and take over. Maybe a Redford or a Streep can take the luxury of a year off, but I never thought I could. Of course, we were more workable in those days. And they make more money now. Anyway, I never had self-assurance about leaving."
posted by Trurl
on Nov 27, 2011 -
41 comments
8 Hours in Brooklyn - Fantastic little compilation of slo-mo footage taken over the course of eight hours in BKLN. Extra good watched in fullscreen.
posted by dobbs
on Aug 14, 2011 -
12 comments
Black and White and Hebrew All Over. The Village Voice profiles the
Hebrew Language Academy, a dual-language charter school in Brooklyn. Is it a rare success story for the big-city ideal of educational innovation simultaneously serving rich and poor communities? A clever way for Jewish New Yorkers to get their kids Hebrew instruction on the states's dime? A little of both?
posted by escabeche
on Aug 8, 2011 -
54 comments
