Friday Night in Rose Hill: Mike Farris at The Cutting Room

(Video courtesy FretsmanRFS)

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Monday Evening in Midtown: Contemporary Opera NYC - Talks with Artists and Producers at the CUNY Graduate Center's Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

(Video courtesy HowlRound)

Thursday Evening in NoMad: Todd Lewis Kramer on the Rooftop of Wind-Up Records on Madison Avenue

(Video courtesy shutterhound)

Tuesday Night in Midtown East: Carmine Appice Book Release Party for Stick It: My Life Inside Sex, Drums and Rock n' Roll at The Cutting Room

(Video courtesy Paulieflix)

Monday Night in Midtown: Italian Playwrights Project Reading with Daria Deflorian & Antonio Tagliarini, Fausto Paravidino, and Lucia Calamaro at the Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center

(Video courtesy Howl Round)

Sunday Afternoon in Murray Hill: India Day Parade on Madison Avenue

(Videos courtesy 799jmartin)

Thursday Evening in Midtown: Senator Elizabeth Warren and Paul Krugman in Conversation in Proshansky Auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center

Saturday Afternoon in Midtown South: 27th Annual Vaisakhi Sikh Day Parade on Madison Avenue

(Video courtesy Jasbir sethi)

A 21-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Mid-December, 1972 | Thought Catalog

A 21-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Mid-December, 1972 | Thought Catalog

Wednesday Afternoon in Midtown: The Sixth Annual Leon Levy Conference - "Biography in its Time" at Elebash Recital Hall of the CUNY Graduate Center

(Videos courtesy of the CUNY Graduate Center)

Thursday Evening in Midtown: "Crisis and Opportunity: The Future of Publishing" in Proshansky Auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center

(Video courtesy CUNY Graduate Center)

Friday Night in Kips Bay: Parks Outdoor Summer Movies presents "How to Train Your Dragon" at Bellevue South Park

Tonight we didn't feel like going too far, so we took the L train two stops to First Avenue and walked up the dozen blocks to East 26th Street and halfway up the block to Bellevue South Park to see the animated film, How to Train Your Dragon, which some of the animation majors we teach writing and literature at the fabulous School of Visual Arts recommended we watch. They were right.

We got to the little park, stretching mid-block between 26th and 28th, just after 8 p.m. They had chairs set up, and we found seats in the second row just as they were putting up the screen. Soon after things were set up, Lisa, the park groundskeeper and greeter, introduced what was the last Friday night movie of the summer.

There were kids and adults, probably mostly from the neighborhood. We enjoyed the film a great deal. It's got a plot we've seen in different forms in countless films, and in some ways it's pretty ordinary, but it's also sweet and simple and excels in its exhilarating airborne sequences and its use of silence between the protagonist and the dragon he forms a bond with.

Writing in the New York Times, A.O. Scott called the film "a shrewd blend of conventional pop-culture pandering and exalted cinematic artistry. . .

The way the dragons look, the way they move, the way they catch the light, dissolve in the mist, somersault through the air and dive toward the ground — all of this is likely to make you forget the uninspired plot and the shopworn lessons, even as you are reminded of some of the basic, ecstatic reasons you go to the movies in the first place."

Bellevue South Park was a nice setting with a real small-town feel in the middle of Manhattan, just west (not south) of Bellevue Hospital Center.

As the Parks Department website explains:

The misleading name stems from the fact that the original Bellevue Urban Renewal Area was located at Kips Bay Plaza on East 30th Street, and this park lies just to the south of that site. The Bellevue South Urban Renewal Project, which began in 1959, dramatically changed the face of a 17-block area on Manhattan’s East Side, running from 23rd to 30th Streets between First and Second Avenues. This project was a source of much controversy among area residents, some of whom desired rehabilitation of older structures, rather than complete razing and rebuilding. Ultimately, tenements and old factory buildings gave way to a new, vibrant community centered on a complex of eight mixed-income apartment buildings known as Phipps Plaza.

Bellevue South Park was mapped in 1966, a welcomed green space for the increasingly residential neighborhood. The park fell victim to New York City’s severe fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and was left undeveloped for some time. In the late 1970s, the city agreed to pay for the construction of the park after Community Board Six and residents of the neighborhood promised to cover all of the expenses needed for its maintenance. The park opened in November 1979, and the Better Bellevue Association saw to its maintenance for the next seven years. . .

The city took control of the park after the worst of the fiscal crisis had passed, and Parks assumed jurisdiction over Bellevue South Park in 1986. A $2 million renovation sponsored by Councilman Antonio Pagan was completed in 1997, transforming the park into its current shape.

It's a really nice little oasis. For the past few years, we've been working just five blocks south on Second Avenue and before tonight, we never knew this park existed. We're grateful we finally got to enjoy it and How to Train Your Dragon.

Thursday Evening in Midtown: Gabriel Thompson and "Working in the Shadows" at the Mid-Manhattan Library

Gabriel Thompson is one of America's finest progressive journalists, and this evening at the Mid-Manhattan Library, we got to hear him discuss his most recent book, Working in the Shadows.

Time Magazine's review lays its premise out pretty well:

Whether or not they choose to acknowledge it, most people know that immigrant and migrant workers are paid poorly in the U.S. What they may not know is how hard these laborers toil for their earnings. That's why Gabriel Thompson, a journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y., spent months undercover working alongside mostly Guatemalans and Mexicans in the lettuce fields of Yuma, Ariz., at a chicken plant in rural Alabama and as a delivery guy for a restaurant in New York City. His goal was not to survive on his income, which he quickly realized was nearly impossible even at the lowest standard of living, but to remain at each job for two full months, no matter how bad the back pain, how sickening the smell of raw meat or how crippling the fatigue. Thompson succeeds--mostly. He gets found out and fired from the chicken plant a week before his self-imposed deadline and hangs up his delivery bike after seven weeks of risking his life in New York City traffic. Therein lies perhaps the only blemish on the book's premise: Thompson has the luxury to quit.

Over three years ago, after seeing Gabriel Thompson at Bluestockings, we read his book There's No José Here, a masterly study of Mexican immigrants in Brooklyn which let their stories speak for themselves in an eloquent way that made it so much more effective than the typical rhetoric on the subject of immigration, even from pro-immigrant politicians.

Tonight at the Mid-Manhattan Library, Gabriel spoke to a fairly large crowd, most of whom were, uh, weren't born yesterday (although his own three-month-old son came close) about his year in these low-wage jobs that, after hearing him read his excerpts (we're definitely going to read the whole book), sound so horrific that we wouldn't take them if they paid the income of a hedge fund manager.

Gabriel Thompson is a wonderful journalist: he's eloquent and doesn't get in the way of his reportage; he cares a lot for ordinary people and their struggles; and he can see the larger picture and make it clear for his readers. He was as thoughtful in answering questions (for a really long time) as he is in his writing. We're going to try to find Working in the Shadows tomorrow.

HAPPY features Richard Grayson's story "Suspicious Caucasians"

Richard Grayson's story "Suspicious Caucasians" appears in the current issue (#4, Winter 1996) of Bayard's New York-based literary journal Happy.