Brooklyn Children's Museum

Planet Brooklyn: Chinese New Year celebration will kick off the Year of the
Boar at Brooklyn Children's Museum on Saturday, February 10, from 12-5pm. Families can create their own lanterns, learn to play shuttlecock and other Chinese games, and meet real "dragons" from the Museum's live animal collection. And don't miss a special performance by the lion dance team from Yee's Hung Ga Kung Fu Association of Brooklyn - including a peek inside the lion's head!

145 Brooklyn Avenue

Brooklyn Museum

Celebrate Heart of Brooklyn's fifth anniversary in Brooklyn Museum's spectacular collection of ancient Egyptian masterpieces. The galleries include more than 1,000 treasures spanning 5,000 years, from pre-dynastic times through the reign of Cleopatra. See beautifully decorated coffins, a mummy, monumental stone statues, jewelry worn by the pharoahs, and a relief with the world's first-known representation of a kiss, all a part of the collection considered to be one of the finest in the world. And be sure to catch the newly opened Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism. This exhibition has over forty superb examples of nineteenth century French and American landscapes by such artists as Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent.

In the current issue of VARIETY, Robert Hofler laments the apparent loss of gay audiences on Broadway. He suggests that changing gay lifestyles and the emergence of gay gay gay on television (Bravo, Here!, Logo, Showtime, HBO and even the networks) has lured gay men from the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd.

Silly girl. How can critics be so wise and yet so blind? Broadway has become a tourist attraction, a sterile land of corporate sponsors and product placements, national brands, family-friendly entertainments, marketing super powers and sure bets.

Gay men were drawn to the risk takers, the pioneers, the innovators, the Fosses and the Sondheims. Today's Broadway rarely sees experimentation, innovation and theatrical art. Today's Broadway is designed for expense accounts, tourists and merchandising opportunities.

Giuliani cleaned up Times Square and Broadway. In fact, Giuliani cleaned out Times Square and Broadway. Soaring rents, chain stores and chain restaurants and theaters with names like American Airlines, Ford, Nokea, Hilton and Disney have driven New York's real theater world and its gay audience off and off off Broadway.

Here are some events going on in Brooklyn:

Brooklyn Children's Museum

Grab your mittens and your magnifying glass, it's time to become a snow scientist at Brooklyn Children's Museum! The Science of Snow, Saturday, January 27 from 1-3pm, gives you an up-close look at this icy winter wonder. Learn how animals survive in the winter, and explore snowy weather strategies used by different cultures. Conduct experiments to see how salt effects ice, and investigate snowflake crystals. Make a snowy decoration to take home. Ages 6+

Please note: Due to the Museum's ongoing expansion, the Totally Tots gallery will be closed January 16, 2007. A special early learner gallery will open February 10, 2007. Please contact (718) 735-4400 x321 for additional information and questions.

145 Brooklyn Avenue

Brooklyn Museum

Come to the Brooklyn Museum to see the newly opened Ancient Egyptian Magic: Manipulating Image, Word, and Reality, a special exhibition in the galleries containing Brooklyn MuseumÂ’s world-famous collection of ancient Egyptian art. Magic presents twenty-one objects that explore how the early Egyptians addressed the unknown forces in the universe. It is also the opening weekend of The Eye of the Artist: The Work of Devorah Sperber. Sperber, a New York artist presents seven works including her eye-catching thread-spool installations recreating Da VinciÂ’s The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa that can only be fully seen by looking through an optical device. This weekend will also be your last chance to see Ron MueckÂ’s amazingly life-like figure sculptures that have been leaving thousands of visitors in awe!

During the 2006 Democratic Primary season in Brooklyn (a hotly contested fight in a place where few Republicans do well leading to the idea that through most of Brooklyn Democrats could run a sponge cake and still beat Republicans) I met a gentleman named Bill Batson.

The very first time I met him, he discussed contriversial issues that my wife and I had skirted, but had yet to publicly discuss. I rapidly became a supporter in his (ultimately unsuccessful) run for Assembly, but I also came to see him as an example of what I call a "community candidate," a political candidate who comes from a background of community activism and participation. Bill's opponents tried to portray him as a lightweight, a nobody. This was grossly unfair to a man who had served his community for years. He was the New York State Senate Democratic Leader David A. Paterson’s Director of Community Relations, the chair and Co-Founder of ACRES, (American Civil Rights Education Services), has worked at The Coalition for the Homeless, 1199 SEIU and the New York Civil Liberties Union, was campaign manager for Norman Siegel's campaign for Public Advocate, served as a mediator between a public sector union and a non-profit health care company, facilitating the end of a nine-month dispute, and has served as a member of Community Planning Board 8, co-chairing the Fire Safety committee and the special sub-committee on the Environmental Impact of Brooklyn Atlantic Yards Development. All of this he brought into politics when he decided to throw his hat into the ring. His failed bid for Assembly came because he ran as a grassroots candidate against big money and development interests. But he has not given up activism.

Via Left Behinds comes this, on an art show currently running at Bellwether Gallery:

If you get a chance in the next couple of weeks, check out Trevor Paglen's show BLACK WORLD at Bellwether Gallery (10th Ave. between 18th and 19th). Paglen photographs and videotapes secret government bases through telescopes from around 20 miles away; the videos in particular shimmer like the surface of a scrying pool. More recently, Paglen has gotten interested in the CIA's use of shell companies and clandestine flights to transport suspects to unacknowledged prisons in Eastern Europe. [...]

Perhaps my favorite piece is a simple 2-minute video taken at a distance of a mile, showing commuters at McCarran airport in Las Vegas getting on the 737 to either Area 51 or the Tonopah Test Range. They're ordinary fat Americans and they waddle, which tickles me. His photo of the "Salt Pit" CIA interrogation facility outside Kabul is also quite moving, in the hell-looks-like-an-ordinary-building sense.

Maybe not quite what I'd like to have hanging on my dining room wall, but it's interesting to consider out of what unpromising material aesthetics are made.

When you grow up on the periphery of an Empire such as the United States, the kind of consumable culture you are exposed to is not necessarily that which would be considered popular by the Empire's mainstream standards.

So, for example, I grew up watching a lot of what constitutes today's treasure trove of Warner Bros.' banned cartoons. It was so common to see every morning jazz jivin' sambos, looney dwarf-like Hitlers and wascally wabbits dressed in drag on TV that I was actually shocked to learn those cartoons were censored and outright banned here in the U.S.

Over at culturekitchen you can watch GOLDILOCKS AND THE JIVIN' BEARS (1944), part of the now infamous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, Censored Eleven. To give this edition a Gotham flavor, I've decided to include the very choppy Clean Pastures, which is also part of that banned collection. It unfortunately is not a good clip, but I include it here because of it's references to Times Square, Harlem and the Cotton Club.

UK's National Archives describes it as so:

Saint Peter, seeing that sinful Harlem nightlife is attracting more business to 'Hades Inc.' than to his own 'Pair O' Dise', sends down a group of angels to lead souls onto the straight and narrow. This spoof of Green Pastures features numerous stereotypes and an all-black cast with caricatures of Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Stepin Fetchit, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Al Jolson, and the Mills Brothers.

I find it fascinating that the dogs of animation, Harman and Ising, are included in this list, as well as Fritz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Robert Clampett and Tex Avery.

Harman and Ising founded Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes, and became famous for a little sambo-like character called Bosko. They basically translated the minstrel theater of the time into cartoons --and in the process made film and animation history.

I think it is unwise to ban these cultural gems from TV. Forget about the purticanical sensitivities of the political correctness police. I think that contextualized as part of the country's popular culture, they are invaluable tools for the world to understand the development the United State's history.

Welcome to our first ever Blog-In theater.

Thanks to the treasure trove of public domain movies I have found on Video.Google, I am going to make it a point for us to have a saturday matinées at the blog.

This is similar to what I have started at culturekitchen. Over there though, I can run a chat (you need to be a member to participate). Over here what we can do is do a "live-commenting" event Sunday afternoon ... OR ... if you are on AIM, we can do a chat using that and then posting the results on the site.

Back to the movie.

This is the original eco-terrorist and nuclear mutant-freak Godzilla; not the saviour of Japan reinvented in the 1960s. It has a very young Raymond Burr as, Steve Martin (the irony!) the American documentarian of this iguanadonian catastrophe. It oozes post-WW2 cheeziness through each reel hole.

Tonight is the third night of Walkathon Week, leading up to the DDDB Walkathon to raise money for the legal fight against corrupt overdevelopment in the heart of Brooklyn. Here are today's events:

10/18: Wednesday Night is Literary Night II: 7:30 pm

Tillies - 248 DeKalb Ave, corner of Vanderbilt. 718-783-6140

Donation suggested.

* Authors: Jhumpa Lahiri
* Jennifer Egan
* Susan Choi
* Sheri Holman
* Diana Son

10/18: Wednesday Night is Movie Night II: 7:30 pm
Donation suggested.

Soda Bar - 629 Vanderbilt Ave., between Prospect Place and St Marks Avenue

This Land is Your Land with filmmakers
A feature length, 82-minute, documentary film
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND is a startling and often hilarious exploration of the overwhelming corporate takeover of American life. Over the course of three years, the filmmakers traveled across the U.S., interviewing award-winning authors, historians, media commentators and ordinary citizens about the wide range of ways individuals and society at large experience this impact. More...

Post Film DJ Motormouth Performs

Tonight is the second night of Walkathon Week, leading up to the DDDB Walkathon to raise money for the legal fight against corrupt overdevelopment in the heart of Brooklyn. Here are today's events:

10/17: Tuesday Night is Literary Night I:
7:30 pm

Shakespeare's Sister - 270 Court St, between Butler & Douglas

Donation suggested.

* Authors: Nava Renek
* Ayun Halliday
* Martha Southgate
* Odd Todd (animator)
* John B. Schwartz (author, screenwriter)