Roased Plum Crepe at Rose Water

>>  sarahanalovestasties.tumblr.com

Details are up on the IKEA site

How tempting is it to hear that Regina Spektor is playing Soundfix for free? Very tempting. But I’ve decided not to go. I really want to see the cherries blossom, and I really want to have brunch with friends at Tom’s Diner, I’m not super-stoked about Murakami, but sure I’ll check him out. But I don’t want to wait in the line for hours to see an intimate show. Because then it’s really not intimate anymore. For the experience to be intimate, you need to stroll in with a few friends to buy a record and suddenly realize that a girl is playing on the piano inside, and you decide, let’s pull up a chair guys, let’s get a drink and check this woman out. So for now I’ll just accept Regina’s now a superstar and I’ll try to pay a superstar price to get front row tickets when she plays the next time. How about that.

But now to the point of this post: you will notice it’s being filed under a new category: “Bookish Love”, and if you’re not one of the two readers I mentioned in the beginning, you’ll need an explanation; after being distracted with the setting up of this blog, my other blog, bookishlove.net, obviously suffered serious neglect, so the only decent thing to do is merge the two, with less ambitious goals (I will no longer attempt to provide a comprehensive list of all literary events going about town, or to attend as many of these events as I previously did. From those I do attend, there will be photos, of course, and words if there’s anything to say, and of those that I hope to attend, there will be a mention; and in keeping these goals modest, there won’t be any insightful book reviews). Having said that, Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival is this Saturday, August 18th, from 4 to 7 PM; and, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Borough Public Library are now all open six days a week!

Who sticks out his tongue? After the jump.

It’s Steve Martin, demonstrating an incident from his book, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, at a PEN World Voices reading event at Town Hall in April (where, as luck would have it, I was seated next to Pico Iyer).

A back log of albums worth buying to follow.

*Also during one of my recent strolls through the hood, I noticed that 12th Street Market on 8th Avenue is now open, and other than featuring a nice selection of crackers, chips and herbal mouthwash, you will notice it for being a brightly lit glass box.

One of my favorites was the Main Squeeze Orchestra with its fleet of female accordionists. You can catch them on July 7th at Riverside Park South, where Main Squeeze bandleader Walter Kuhr is co-curating an accordion festival from 2 to 9 pm.

Another favorite was Samba New York. This Brazillian collective is having a boat party on Wed June 27th. Print their Events page to get in for $10.

More photos after the jump.

There’s more in my Flickr set.

Mermaid Parade
Coney Island, June 23 2007

More photos after the jump.

Lymbyc Systym performing at Galapagos Art Space earlier this year.

We love Williamsburg, we were born here in 1995, but we simply can’t afford to remain in Williamsburg and produce the work that we feel is our most valuable contribution to the cultural ecosystem of New York City.

In December 2005 our rent went up by $10,000.00 a month.

Now, in order to extend our lease past November, our landlord requires a 30% increase in rent.

As a venue, our core responsibility is to create audiences for the artists we present and help expand the cultural environment for the benefit of the community we live in.

In DUMBO we’ll be able to present the theater, dance, performance art, music, cinema, lectures / literary events, and the non profit fundraising that we believe is our core mission and the most important contribution we can make to our community.

It must be said that our landlords are lovely people who, way back in 1995, gave us an opportunity that no one else was willing to offer. The rent increases they?ve offered us are, incredibly, still below the market rate.

We’ll be working with them to make sure that 70 North 6 Street remains a venue of cultural significance and doesn?t become the North 6 Street’s next American Apparel or, god forbid, a Starbucks.

We’ll have an interesting announcement about 70 North 6 Street very soon.

Postal regulators have decided to extend special favors to the nation’s largest publishers, like Time Warner and Hearst, while unfairly burdening smaller and independent magazines with much higher postal rates…

Clicking on the stamp will let you send a message to congressmen and chairmen and other such folks, which is dandy if you’ve got the time, all that preparation to land in someone’s Junk folder. But why not just boycott all these useless magazines from Time Warner and refuse to pay for their other products, especially AOL, whenever you can? And if you absolutely must, buy that Sopranos DVD or whatever, rip it off on to your computer, make your friends copies, and sell the original through Amazon or eBay. That’s how you revolt!

Okay, it’s been an entire week since the “secret show” at Union Hall, but the Brooklyn Music Lovers Wanting Their Art Pure was nowhere as severe as this Gawker post makes it sound- there was an assertive keeping-the-music-pure request by the same Lou Dobbs prompter, however, and this one said, “Play more small shows in New York!” to which the whole room applauded and Bird shrugged obediently after finishing to sling his guitar: “Okay.” There was also a spinning, two-faced gramaphone type of a thing, which as it turns out is a gramaphone amp that a man in Chicago makes. Someone asked what that was for, and Bird said it was to throw around the sounds of his violin. Someone asked if there was a pet name for it, Bird welcomed suggestions: one I heard, and thought pretty good, was “Spinderella”.

Bird and Martin Dosh were hanging out by the door when I got there, by the merch table, this merch table happening to feature, in addition to an assortment of t-shirts, a whole 180 gm vinyl for $15, which left me with no excuse to not get it (Other Music has it for $13.99 + shipping, InSound for $14.99 + shipping). Inside it features the back of a bird’s head on the right and the back of Bird’s head on the left, and maybe, maybe, the CD does the same but the vinyl smells better. Anyway, it is a fine healthy-looking record with a nice weight.

Also, going by Gawker and other Andrew Bird Union Hall reviews, it seems the word “hipster” is being cluelessly thrown around these days, at what I consider an increasingly alarming rate! Even if there were hipsters there, what is the joy in repeatedly mentioning the obvious except to condescend? Gawker quotes its source: “Last night [H]ipsters pressed Bird to explain how CNN anchor Lou Dobb’s made it into one of his new songs…” I was standing right next to the guy who brought up Dobbs, and neither his clothes nor his hair prompted anything worth mentioning.

And now that the truth is out, here are some more photos I managed to salvage from the dark depths of Union Hall!, apologies to the guy next to me who suffered from my use of flash: