After searching for Aeroplane Pageant all night at Brooklyn The Party last week at Public Assembly, I found them at the table furthest from the stage, where they had been sitting for quite some time. The members, all six of them, towered over this diminutive reporter as they simultaneously answered questions, shared moments of deep insight and rarely gave a straight answer. Read ’em after the jump!
Category: Video
Last night Amy Sohn crossed Brooklyn’s psychic divider – Flatbush Avenue – into Crown Heights. At Franklin Park’s Reading Series, the Park Slope maven read from her book Prospect Park West, which has caused a stir among the swanky slope set.
After reading a passage from her novel that takes place at Southpaw – whose investors also own Franklin Park – she read a passage that references a character’s fixation on Roman Polanski, which was written and released before the 76 year-old director was jailed recently on a 30 year old charge of statutory rape. Sohn made sure the crowd knew she doesn’t share that fixation with her character. Watch the video after the jump.
The unofficial present-day Bard of Brooklyn stopped by Greenlight Bookstore last night to christen the borough’s newest independent bookshop. Jonathan Lethem, author of such notable Brooklyn titles as Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, read a portion of his new Manhattan-based novel, Chronic City, to a packed house as latecomers squeezed through the door like rush-hour riders on the 4 train. Watch our exclusive video from the event after the jump.
“Great reporting and great journalism have always been the exception to the rule,” Carl Bernstein said after a screening of All The President’s Men at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Saturday night. For more of the discussion, click through to watch a short video clip.
The description for the Independent Media Voices panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival was slightly more in depth than the subsequent discussion between Amy Goodman (host, Democracy Now!), Pamela Newkirk (author of Letters From Black America), and Richard Nash (publisher, Soft Skull Press), moderated by Dennis Loy Johnson (publisher, Melville House Press). Though the speakers were a little bit disjointed after a last minute change that replaced zine guru Jessica Hopper with Mr. Nash, Ms. Goodman stayed on her point that the corporate media is in bed with war profiteers. Video after the jump.
The Brooklyn Book Festival set up shop in our literary left bank utopia on Sunday, and it was a typical day in Brooklyn: David Cross yelled about Jews, Amy Goodman yelled about war profiteers and then things got a little gay. Video after the jump.
Dollar Van Demos, a YouTube upstart founded by Brooklynite Joe Revitte, seeks out and promotes local singers by filming them in the most local form of transportation: the dollar van. Brooklyn’s next generation of talent could be belting it out next to you on your way to work.
Thirty years later, on our Independence Day Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech is still apt. The televised warning to Americans was given just shy of 30 years ago on July 15, 1979 and quickly derided by republicans for attacking American values, government and way of life.
The Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg hosted a meet and greet with WNYC’s Soterios Johnson. The popular local Morning Edition host evidently sports a cult following, notably inspiring a musical score entitled Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance. Brooklyn The Borough asked Mr. Johnson about his Brooklyn listenership.