On my trip down the Newtown Creek aboard Captain John Lipscomb’s ship – before the city’s bout of winter madness – we grazed through a putrid-smelling “rotting mud,” described by the captain as the result of a century of contaminants being poured, dumped, or leaked into the creek by polluters. But, he told me, “in one hundred years this could be prime real estate.”
Brooklyn The Borough Posts
And now, a follow up. BrooklynTheBorough.com noted a Lou and Laurie sighting in December when local duo Buke & Gass played a homecoming show at Mercury Lounge. We had no idea the evening would end with the couple asking the band out for slices of pizza – or a full blown collaboration.
From pie weights to Pyrex, each of us considers a different set of elements to be crucial to our cooking, and we often have strong opinions as to why. In this column, I will ask chefs, foodies, and restaurateurs from across the borough for the top ten necessities—both edible and utensil—that they keep stocked in their home kitchens. In this installment, Working Class Foodies producer Rebecca Lando gives us her top ten must-haves.
The Buke & Gass duo, featuring Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez, highlights precisely what’s frustrating about small scene independent sound these days from New York to Portland – they always leave us wanting more.
LaunchPad is an arts-based community center in Crown Heights. Started by Mike Kunitzky last winter, the space transforms depending on what neighborhood groups want to use it for. “I wanted a place where people could exchange ideas and make things happen,” says Kunitzky, a constantly smiling 35-year-old. “There’s potential for magic in those unexpected talents and interactions.”
We’ve heard all the jokes before: The sidewalks are so clogged with strollers that they’ve become impassible. Bars are about as hip as a windbreaker, are perpetually overrun by the under-5 contingent, and you’ll be shushed if you curse in public. There are no restaurants other than high-chair strewn pizza parlors, making it ludicrous for North Brooklynites to bother leaving their adult environs and subject themselves to the mercurial whims of the F train. Wary travelers take note – there’s a lot more to Park Slope than Gerber Organic.
The past decade for New York-based independent labels has either been rough going or a coming out party that no one saw coming. It is not easy to trace how every tiny label arrived at this point, right down to the micro-trends littering Brooklyn’s past decade in music, but there are two labels in particular that might offer the perfect snapshot of Brooklyn 2001 and Brooklyn 2010.
For the last nine years, artist Trevor Wentworth has made work at studios in Bushwick, Williamsburg, and most recently Carroll Gardens. His third floor studio on Bergen Street is eight feet wide and twelve feet long, just enough room for the bare essentials. It’s here that Wentworth creates his bracingly complex paper sculptures and miniature tabletop installations, which form at the intersection of the physical and metaphorical definitions of the lens.
Ever fantasize about a baby-headed Karl Rove cuddling a duchess Ronald Reagan or perhaps a handsome Jesus-Reagan cradling a little Glenn Beck lamb? Greenpoint artist, Michael Caines has dedicated the past year to doing just that.