Wednesday Night in Williamsburg: Watching Macy's July 4th Fireworks at East River State Park

(Video courtesy Travel as Life)

Saturday Afternoon in Williamsburg: East River State Park

(Video courtesy Max Palyvoda)

Monday Evening in Williamsburg: Words by the Water presents Vocodors and Bass with Dave Tompkins ("How to Wreck a Nice Beach")

It was one of the most beautiful evenings of the summer, mild and clear and dry, and we had the pleasure of being at Words by the Water, presented by the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn and Greenpoint's wonderful WORD Bookstore, a series of readings with local authors and publishers in Williamsburg's East River State Park.

Tonight was Melville House Night, featuring Dave Tompkins, author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop; The Machine Speaks.

"Magic Hour: Vocoders and Bass" was a fascinating listening party hosted by a talented writer -- "the best hip-hop writer ever born," Jeff Chang (whose work is also pretty amazing) called him -- and a marvelous raconteur.

Riffing on each recording -- reminding us a lot of our days in South Florida in the 1980s, a lot of it was the Miami-style up-tempo robotic electro and mid-tempo drum machine-based rap music -- Dave Tompkins told these delightful stories about names we haven't heard in decades, all with tangential asides that conveyed the author's enthusiasms and obsessions in an effective and infectious way.

More coming . . .

Tuesday Night at the Williamsburg Waterfront: Watching Soccer and Listening to Death Cab for Cutie for Free from Bushwick Inlet Park

We joined our fellow members of the Sneak-a-Peek Freeloader Indie Music Appreciation Society tonight on the fringes of Bushwick Inlet Park's soccer fields at the Williamsburg waterfront to watch some amateur soccer, enjoy the skyline through the mostly covered-over fence,

and loll about as Death Cab for Cutie played a sold-out benefit concert practically next door at East River State Park.

We have four Death Cab CD's, more than any other sexagenarian we know. (That should inspire pathos, not admiration nor envy.) And, yes, we came to them, embarrassingly, through The O.C.'s Seth Cohen character's neurotic patter.

Did you know Ben Gibbard is very polite? Not only was a gentleman when he dated our friend's daughter in Florida, but tonight he said "Thank you very much" after every song. And it was sweet that he dedicated "I Will Follow You into the Dark" to Frightened Rabbit, who opened the night's show.

Anyway, the sound always comes over clearly to the soccer fields and it's sort of contemplative there, without crowds. Christina can lie in the artificial turf in her own little world.

Others can fix their bikes.

And there's always good soccer. We kicked an errant ball back at least fifteen feet to an ardent player. "Soul Meets Body" always sounds good, even when the sun had stopped wrapping its arms around us.

And all we could see were occasional white, blue and red lights blinking or flashing. Yet when Ben asked (twice -- he's really polite), "You guys okay?" -- well, what could we say but yes?

At midnight on December 31, 2003, we were in Apache Junction, Arizona, playing "The New Year" instead of "Auld Lange Syne."

It's always nice to hear, even if it doesn't feel any different when it's live.

According to this photo from Samantha Files on Instagram, this is what it actually looked like onstage for the paying guests:

We're grateful to Death Cab for being on our Chevette's cassette player as we drove around South Florida in 2004, and we're grateful we got to remember those times at Bushwick Inlet Park tonight.

Thursday Night in Williamsburg: SummerStarz presents "Mary Poppins" at East River State Park

We've just walked back from the Williamsburg Waterfront, where thanks to the SummerStarz movie at East River State Park, we spent a delightful evening watching Mary Poppins for the first time in several decades.

Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking, but it was a sentimental journey to see this movie with so many little kids (where do they all come from? they weren't around Williamsburg five years ago!), reminding of us of when we saw it, in the fall of 1964 at Radio City.

We were already 13 and predisposed to like it because we were mad that Julie Andrews was bypassed for the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, but our youngest brother was only 3 and he could really feel the magic of it.

There was a huge turnout at SummerStarz, seemingly ten times the number of people (and kids!) than at the first Thursday night movies presented by Town Square, Inc., a couple of years ago.

Beforehand, the charming Brooklyn kids' rock band The Rockdoves played as lots of little kids danced joyfully and sometimes furiously.




It was a gorgeous evening with a nice cool breeze and only a couple of drops of rain.

Mary Poppins seemed impressive to us at 60, probably more so than it might have when we were a jaded 13-year-old. Despite his awful mock-Cockney accident, Dick Van Dyke was amazing (and amazingly young), and Julie Andrews was just incredibly good (a lot better, we thought then, than she was in The Sound of Music, which seemed more sentimental to at least the teenage boy we were).

For us tonight, the big revelation was David Tomlinson's finely modulated performance as the dour and dogmatic Mr. Banks, the children's father who is the character most transformed by Mary Poppins' entry into their lives. The subtext barely suggests Mary Poppins was once Mr. Banks' own nanny, but we like to think she was.

And for us, the best song is "Feed the Birds," which makes us tear up, perhaps because of the image of the incomparable Jane Darwell, just before she died, as the Bird Woman. (And probably because in the years before she succumbed to Alzheimer's, our own mom's main concern in life, besides her dog, was feeding the passing birds in her backyard.)

It was a wonderful evening for a lot of the kids there. On the way out, we heard one boy ask his parents, of the umbrella-flying Mary, "What if she gets hit by a plane?" Anyway, we're grateful we got to see this picture again before we croak.

Tuesday Night at the Williamsburg Waterfront: Orchestra of St. Luke's plays "Just Add Water" concert of summer favorites at East River State Park

Tonight, as the day's awful heat and humidity subsided slightly, we went over to East River State Park at the Williamsburg Waterfront for a delightful ninety-minute concert, "Just Add Water," with the Orchestra of St. Luke's playing summer favorites from Bach and Mozart to Joplin, Bernstein, Copeland and Lennon & McCartney.

We arrived at the park really early. Although most of these seats never filled up, there was a decent-sized crowd of all different ages, including tons of little kids with their parents.

It's just that most of the audience sitting at the benches on the concrete section in front of the stage or in the VIP section seats off to the side, or as most people were, lying on the grass close to the stage and out by the water.

The music carried. First, members of the Orchestra of St. Luke's Brass Ensemble played the three movements of the Russian composer Victor Ewald's Brass Quintet No. 1 Op. 5 (in B flat, we think).

Next the Brass Ensemble played songs from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess like the obvious "Summertime" and "A Woman Is a Sometime Thing." It was incredibly pleasant to be sitting there as a breeze wafted in from the East River.

The ensemble also played the Bach's 7th Symphony contrapuntal and "When the Saints Go Marching In" as they were joined by some strings.

Then, after a brief intermission, the whole Orchestra of St. Luke's came onstage, with Gary Fagin conducting and doing a wonderful job of putting the evening's program of classics into historical perspective for a general audience.

It was a splendid, easy program for a summer night as the sky darkened and an almost-full moon took the place of the warm sun: from Haydn's Fireworks and Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik to the classic ragtime of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer and Bethena Waltz as well as Tom Turpin's St. Louis Rag.

Then there were favorite selections from Gershwin's An American in Paris, Richard Rodgers' "Bewitched" from Pal Joey, medleys of Beatles songs by Lennon and McCartney and Star Wars by John Williams, West Side Story by Bernstein, and Aaron Copland's Hoedown from Rodeo. And the encore was a lovely movement from Schumann's Kinderszenen.

Friday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Spring Fever in February at East River State Park

We lingered all morning in beautiful Long Beach, and after getting back to Brooklyn and having a late lunch at home, with sunny skies and a temperature of 67, we decided to walk over to the waterfront on this freakishly mild February day. A number of young people with early spring fever also were out there, enjoying East River State Park.










On our way out, we saw a pile of dirty snow, reminding us that tomorrow winter will return and will be here for another five weeks. Sigh.