Saturday Evening in Midtown: The Brooklyn Philharmonic at the Bryant Park Fall Festival

After a quiet Yom Kippur spent reading and reflecting and walking around our neighborhood in Williamsburg, watching our neighbors wash their cars and kids tossing around a football and a young novelist selling some books from his stoop on Graham Avenue, we went over to Bryant Park at 6 p.m. to see the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

It was the sixth day of the third annual Bryant Park Fall Festival, which features performances or talks for eight evenings running from some of New York's cultural treasures: the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Jazz at Linclon Center, the new Five Boroughs Music Festival, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Parsons Dance, and tonight, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, now in its 57th season.

The orchestra should be soon announcing its new artistic director after a well-publicized search. Devoted to bringing music to the entire Brooklyn community, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, presents programs such as Music Off the Walls and Music Off the Shelves in partnership with, respectively, the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Public Library.

The park was really crowded this evening as the sun came out towards the end of the day. Someone saved us a seat near the front by the back of the library. At our last event at Bryant Park, we were around this spot too, but that was for a movie and we were then all the way in the back.

Tonight's musicians were Deborah Buck, violin; Robin Bushman, violin; Deborah Wang, violin; Ah Ling Neu, viola; Chris Finckel, cello; Gregg August, bass; and Paul Garment, clarinet/bass clarinet.

As Sarah Stevens, the Brooklyn Philharmonic's director of operations pointed out in her short introduction, tonight's Bryant Park program featured, in addition to Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581, work by four living composers, all of them younger than we are.

First, Buck, Finckel and August played two selections from Appalachia Waltz (the program mistakenly said "Appalachian"), composers/musicians Mark O'Connor (fiddle) and Edgar Meyer's (double-bass) 1996 best-selling crossover album in collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma (cello, as if you didn't know), a pleasant blend of folk, bluegrass and European classical music that sounds kind of Irishy and medieval and which spawned a fast-moving neoclassical ballet by Miriam Mahdaviani; the musicians played O'Connor's title piece and Chief Sitting in the Rain, a reworking of a traditional bluegrass standard. It was really lovely.

The very smart Evan Ziporyn's Be-In, performed by Garment on bass-clarinet and the string quartet of Bushman, Wong, Neu and Finckel, was really enjoyable; reviewing the Ethel debut CD in The Guardian in 2004, John L. Walters called Be-In "a hypnotic, spiralling nine-minute journey with a tender conclusion that's both intellectually demanding and emotionally satisfying."

The Mozart Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (for this, Buck replaced Bushman on one of the violins) is always a crowd-pleaser (Benny Goodman played it right here in Bryant Park in 1952, and it's famous for being the piece Charles teaches the Chinese POW's just before they're blown up in the last episode of M*A*S*H), and tonight's performance of the first movement was expansive and subtle, the fourth movement enchanting - just as night began to fall.

Finally, the string sextet performed Weather One by Michael Gordon, who like Evan Ziporyn, is connected with "Bang on a Can" (back in 1987, we were at the MacDowell Colony with Bang on a Can's brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning [for the superb Little Match Girl Passion] co-founder David Lang, who was really funny at the dinner table). Weather One has some gorgeously dizzy swirling where the melody played by one instrument is then quickly taken up by another; it had the force of Thursday's Brooklyn tornado but we're happy to say all the trees in Bryant Park were still standing at its conclusion.

It was wonderful to be out in the park to listen to such terrific music played by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Autumn is here, and there won't be many park performances soon, so we will try to savor this one for a long time. The Bryant Park Fall Festival's main sponsor is Bank of America, whose Tower at One Bryant Park made us look back and up several times during the performances; for our money, it's Manhattan's most beautiful skyscraper.

Sunday Afternoon at Floyd Bennett Field: Todd P's Unamplified Acoustic BBQ in the Rain at Raptor Point Beach

If our grandmothers were right, we should be dead by Yom Kippur from a fatal cold we contracted by getting soaked down to our socks today. We were among the adventurous souls who made their way to Todd P's annual Unamplified Acoustic BBQ at the beautiful but rain-soaked Raptor Point Beach at Mill Basin Inlet in our old neighborhood.

But it was probably worth it.

As he told us, Todd P may not be able to control the weather, but he did a great job holding everything together (even literally)

as best as anybody could, and the small but hardy band of performers, audience and those who served nobly holding up the tarp over the musicians

had that kind of Woodstock-mud shared-sacrifice camaraderie right here in Floyd Bennett Field.

We were surpised to find out when we checked around noon, that Todd P said the Acoustic BBQ would go on, as it look like the storm had passed. So, after we had lunch, we took the B48 bus to Fulton Street, the Franklin Avenue shuttle and transferring to the Franklin Avenue stop of the 2 train, we got to the Junction in about 45 minutes.

We just missed the Q35 train going down Flatbush Avenue to Rockaway, but then another one came along. By the time we got on, it was raining enough to need our umbrella, but as we drove through our old neighborhood, it really started to pour. A guy on the bus asked us if we knew how to get off at Aviator Sports and we told him to get off at Floyd Bennett Field with us.

We got out just at the worst point of the downpour, a drenching rain, and as we got soaked - he didn't have an umbrella - crossing Flatbush Avenue, we decided just to find shelter and maybe the storm would pass. Under the cover of an outdoor bar (closed), we met members of the band Night Manager and they didn't know what was going on, either. It was 2:30 p.m., when they were scheduled to perform.

After walking around the Aviator Sports complex for awhile - we'd last been there on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, for the Kings County Fair, but for everyone else, it was a new experience, and the place was crowded with people playing hockey, in from playing soccer, playing basketball, rock climbing, going on the flight simulator, eating in the food court, etc.

When the rain seemed to lighten up a bit, we decided to make our way out to Raptor Point, guided by our somewhat water-soaked map of Floyd Bennett Field. We didn't know what happened to Night Manager and are not sure they ever made it to play. The walk was really, really long on a runway to the north end of the airport. We weren't sure we were going the right way, but after a long time we spotted some people coming out of a car.

They were going to a little shack that had a men's and women's compost toilet, and they were the band Starring - vocalist/guitarist Clara Latham, Mike Gallope (farfisa), Sam Kulik (bass), Matt Marlin (drums) - and at least for the first time we knew there were actually some people at the Acoustic BBQ at Raptor Point.

Finally we saw the crowd. Someone we saw leaving had told us it was really muddy, so we were prepared for the last walk through the wetlands grass. But there were people and there were music and there were umbrellas.

The Brooklyn-based band Starring, who did a beautiful job with their delicious song "Wife of God, is above, and Yellow Ostrich, featuring the hypnotic vocals of Alex Schaaf, is below.

Anyway, we hung around about an hour; it never stopped raining. The beach was really nice, and totally unexpected even to someone who grew up around here. We could look across to Mill Basin Inlet and see our old neighborhood somewhere behind there, and we think we could vaguely make out the Mill Basin Bridge (soon to be replaced).

Floyd Bennett was a working airfield in our childhood in the 50s and 60s, with the city police helicopters, air force and naval reserve, national guard, etc., all having planes here. Sometimes we'd see Blue Angels-types flying in formation, and then in the early 1970s, after it became part of the National Park Service, it wasn't open that much, or we never thought to go here, except for that one weird Avant-Garde Festival in the mid-70s. People flew model airplanes (the remote controlled kind - we saw one on our walk over here) mostly.

Then things changed in the last ten years, especially with the introduction of the private Aviator Sports Complex. So now people come here. But not to Raptor Point. We had no idea it existed. This would have been great for an Unamplified Acoustic BBQ on a beatiful day like last year's was at Fort Tilden Beach. But it was sort of cool today.

We made our way back - in the nicest gesture imaginable, one of the women holding up the tarp gave our walking companion, who'd gotten even more drenched than us on our long way in, her umbrella. She said she was so wet already, it wouldn't help.

We were 18 the summer of Woodstock and remember hearing from friends about things like this. No one offered us a car ride back, though. The walk seemed shorter anyway, and the rain was steady but not too bad. We saw the woman in a Zappos poncho who bicycled back and forth bringing food (and also did haircuts); at one point, she sold empanadas (a little soggy but OK, a guy holding the tarp said) for two dollars.

Back at Aviator Sports, we had a slice of pizza (it was hell finding someone to wait on us, as everyone disappeared) and got to the Q35 bus stop just as the bus to the Junction pulled up, the 2 train came right away, and we sat down and took a breath and only then realized just how wet, how wet, how totally wet we were.

Still, for someone of our advanced age, today was the kind of day that reminded us what it felt like to be young.

We were, we guess, hippies in the age of hippies, and you'd be walking around and run into a friend of a friend you'd met at a party weeks before and she'd tell you about some cool event somewhere and other people would join you and you'd go to some basement or park or bar in Staten Island or Red Hook or Woodhaven and you'd follow some drunken girl from Vermont with a sheepdog and license plates that said BOGIE and giggle with your friends and totally sober as always, you'd bang your car into a pole at a Jack-in-the-Box in Long Island City or something, and it would seem to be a disaster but you'd always remember it as great fun with great people. (Totally unrelated pic of Clara Latham from Starring below:)

It's Monday afternoon now and we just discovered a professional writer's take on this, Georgia Kral's in the Village Voice. She explained for us who some of the people in the pics we took are, the two shirtless guys playing when we got there - they had their shirts half-on when we saw them, although she didn't know the name of the girl who did a Beyonce cover while we were there, either. We hope they don't mind us reprinting Georgia's piece, but the Voice used for a blog our pic of Mayor Bloomberg at the McCarren Pool dedication and we worked for the Voice as a messenger in display advertising in 1974-75 for $2 an hour so we're family.

This is from Georgia Kral, who got there after we left:

Todd P's 2010 Unamplified Acoustic BBQ
Raptor Point
Sunday, September 12

Better Than: Being dry.

When two shirtless men playing bongos tell you to clap, you clap--even when the sky is pouring rain, even when you're all the way out in Jamaica Bay, even when you're one of only 25 or so people at the show. Yes, Todd P's second annual unamplified, acoustic BBQ took place in the rain. We all know that Brooklyn's most prolific promoter likes a challenge (MtyMx, anyone?), so his decision yesterday to forge ahead--and say to hell with what was forecast to be a 30 percent chance of rain--was not hugely surprising. But the earth does what it wants: It rained a ton, pretty much all day long.

We arrived at Floyd Bennett Field just as the downpour was letting up, and after getting lost in the maze of abandoned army barracks and defunct runways, we finally came upon a small group of young people. They were hanging around, and not minding the rain at all. A couple of bands had already played, including Gobble Gobble and Skeletons. Just beyond the large parking lot was a small clearing, and beyond that a rocky beach on Jamaica Bay. In the clearing were the shirtless bongo players:

Etienne Pierre Duguay, who plays drums in Real Estate, and Sasha Winn from the band Blissed Out, who was also barefoot. They were drenched, but drumming. A female singer joined them for one song, adding that they had "written" it just a few days prior. (Duguay announced the band was called, at this point, "anonymous.")

The two are part of an increasingly popular school that's popping up in parts of DIY Bushwick, largely surrounding the Market Hotel and its inhabitants. Let's call it "urban hippiedom." Adherents aren't interested in food and farming but rather psychedelia, visceral experiences, yoga and the like. This was their kind of scene. The aptly named Blissed Out played next, under a tarp. They had small electronics that could not get wet. Go figure. Their first song was a "cover," if you could call it that, of Jay-Z's monster hit, "Empire State of Mind." A sample of the song played quietly in the background while the band employed keyboards and Tibetan prayer bells to alter it and make it their own. We were in New York City, but the whole experience felt very far, far away.

Later, both 9/11 Thesaurus and The Blow showed up, the latter closing out the show. No one really seemed to mind the rain too much. One woman said, "I'm too drunk to notice!" Still, afterward Todd P tweeted that the show would continue next weekend-- a literal rain check.

The Scene: Wet, underdressed hipsters reveling in "nature."

Notebook Dump: Ever noticed that once everyone around you has to deal with the same pain, or annoyance, (i.e, rain and cold), the pain is easier to deal with?

Overheard: "These keyboards, if they get wet, might electrocute and kill us all."

Thank you, Georgia. The shitty pics here are all ours. Our cellphone got wet, and now it turns off after fifteen minutes, but we probably really should get a one with a keyboard anyway. Yesterday was like that.

(Video courtesy KrissyRubbles) We actually had a lot more fun at this year's Unamplified Acoustic BBQ than we did at the dry and pretty one at the beach last year. We're totally grateful to Todd P and all the musicians for today's event and to nature for the downpour. For the only sixtyish person there, it was perfect.

Sunday Morning in Downtown Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Book Festival at Borough Hall and Columbus Park

We shook off the complacencies of the peignoir to get to Borough Hall on time for the 10 a.m. opening of the Brooklyn Book Festival.
It started to rain presently, and not everyone was as prepared as this young booklover.

Here are our friends from Poets & Writers, in whose magazine we published stuff like a report on the South Florida literary scene and how we publicized our first book, which came out in 1979 before these people were born.

We love the Brooklyn Public Library and have written a love note to it in the form of a short story.

We also love The Authors Guild, which we joined in November 1978. We were so excited that we were eligible when we got the contract for our first book. We've taken advantage of many Authors Guild benefits, like its Backinprint.com program for out-of-print books and their reduced prices for authors' websites. We paid our dues last week!

In 1982, after our second book "of literary merit" was published, we were so excited to be asked to join PEN. We served in the 1980s on the Committee for the PEN Fund for Writers and Editors with AIDS headed by its founder, our friend Gregory Kolovakos and have often gone to PEN events like the annual PEN World Voices Festival - and this year, even to the formal annual membership meeting.

The classy famous blogger and book-biz reporter Ed Champion was interviewing a distinguished literary personage as we passed by.

We love the Novel-T literary baseball T-shirts. They asked us to do a reading at an event last May
at the powerHouse Arena, a great bookstore and space on Front Street in the heart of Dumbo.

Other great Brooklyn indie bookstores were at the fair, like the Greenlight Bookstore on Fort Greene's Fulton Street

and Greenpoint's Word Bookstore, our favorite Franklin Street haunt.

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, CLMP, used to be the CCLM, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines back in the day when we spent hours in their little-mag library on Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street and were a preliminary judge in their 1977 college literary magazine contest.

One of those literary magazines which started publishing us in the mid-1970s was Brooklyn's Hanging Loose, which spawned one of the best small presses we know. We're proud the magazine printed four of our stories over the years.

These nice people at The Avery Anthology published one of our stories in their first issue in 2006, and they managed to keep going strong despite that.

BOMB Magazine is one of the great literary magazines we know from the old days. They always were smart enough to reject our submissions and accept those of our more talented friends.

We like Tablet and Nextbook even though they don't recognize us as a Jewish writer. These are, after all, the Days of Awe.

And awe is basically the only reaction you can have to the Brooklyn Book Festival, right?