Dumbo Books Denies GOP "Sexist Insult" Charges Regarding Sarah Palin & Book Cover of Richard Grayson's "WHO WILL KISS THE PIG?: SEX STORIES FOR TEENS"

Never get into a wresting match with a pig wearing lipstick; you only get dirty and the pig likes to see its lipstick getting smeared.

So we respectfully ask that anyone who is confused by this phony outrage buy a copy of Richard Grayson's WHO WILL KISS THE PIG?: SEX STORIES FOR TEENS.

Tuesday Evening at Anthology Film Archives: "The Bungalows of Rockaway" Film Screening and Discussion

Tonight we went to Anthology Film Archives to see "The Bungalows of Rockaway," about 25 minutes of a documentary-in-progress about the place where we spent every idyllic summer until we were 16 and Robert Moses destroyed it.

Of course, judging by the standing-room only audience in the large theater for the film screening and panel discussion, many people in New York still remember the bungalows of Rockaway as fondly as we do and are just as passionate about that lost world, the last of which badly needs to be preserved.

Thanks to filmmaker Jennifer Callahan and her co-producer Elizabeth Logan Harris; neighborhood activists and bungalow advocates like Richard George at the Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association; groundbreaking urban history scholars like Caroline C. Pasion; and the sponsor of tonight's event, the Historic Districts Council, the citywide advocate for historic districts and for neighborhoods that merit preservation, more people will know and care about the bungalow culture of Rockaway that flourished for 100 years.

Here's a good summary of "The Bungalows of Rockaway" from promotional material:

Jennifer Callahan and Elizabeth Logan Harris estimate that 7,000 bungalows covered the Rockaway peninsula during its heyday as a summer resort for working-class families.

They believe fewer than 400 remain.

For their documentary about Rockaway bungalows, the pair has more than 40 hours of footage including interviews with former vacationers such as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. They’ve been collecting archival material, maps and rare footage such as the Marx brothers frolicking at a row of bungalows they owned in the 1920s before they moved to Hollywood.

As we got our seats before the film, there was a continuous slide show of old WPA pictures taken of the Rockaway bungalows in 1939 and 1940. Just about that time, both sets of our grandparents decided to get out of hot Brooklyn for the summer and rent bungalows in Edgemere and Arverne along with their siblings, parents, aunts and uncles.

Our mom and dad met there as young teenagers during World War II, and we remember our summers spent in Lincoln Court, with our parents or maternal grandparents. Lincoln Court was one of five bungalow courts on the beach block between Beach 56th Street and Beach 56th Place in a series of blocks of bungalows stretching a hundred blocks across the Rockaway peninsula.

Within a few blocks we had tons of extended family members. Our paternal grandparents had a street bungalow; our step-great-grandmother and two great-aunts (sisters of our mother's father and mother) and our uncle's mother-in-law and their families were just one court north of us. We had relatives of all four of our grandparents living around us, along with their in-laws, and it seems that all our friends were either related to each other or to us. Everyone knew us.

And though we lived in Brooklyn most of the year, for the summers the Rockaway bungalow colonies were our home, filled with the childhood friends we most treasured. Rockaway was the place we lived outdoors, on each other's porches, on the beach and boardwalk, waiting for the Bungalow Bar ice cream truck or the raspy howl "Candy Man here! Candy Man here!" or going to the avenue to eat in kosher delis or pizzerias or to buy "dry ice" or the first issue of Justice League of America or sip malteds or get the Spaldeens we spent hours playing with at boxball, Chinese handball, punchball, roofball and hit-the-penny.

We were kids so we didn't know that this bungalow culture was in decline and would suddenly end. Back in Arizona, we have lots of Kodachrome pics of us and even old herky-jerky movies of us performing in a show that was broadcast on some long-defunct Brooklyn radio station and in a boxing ring with gloves as big as our head fighting our friend Brucie (the old movie even has a "commercial" with the two of us four-year-olds with shaving cream on our faces, smilingly promoting Barbasol). And lots of pics of our parents and their friends from the 1940s too.

Too many boring old-man memories come back to us after seeing "The Bungalows of Rockaway" - like the fireworks every Wednesday night and sleeping on our uncle's Coast Guard hammock on the porch under a yellow light to scare away bugs and sneaking to the boardwalk late at night in the middle of a June weekend with our scientific genius friend Mitchell and our aunt's sister Arlene when we were all 12 and trying to see the Vostok 6 satellite with the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. Stop us now or we'll go on for days...

So here's Marissa Brostoff, writing in the Jewish Daily Forward about the film-in-progress we saw tonight:

One of the first images in Jennifer Callahan’s documentary “The Bungalows of Rockaway” is a close-up of a woman’s wrinkled face wearing an expression of amazement and delight. The face belongs to Maxine Marx, daughter of Chico, and we see that she is watching a black-and-white film reel of a family carousing on the beach. “Is that Daddy?” she exclaims. “Oh, he was so cute.”

Chico and Groucho Marx had seaside bungalows in Far Rockaway, a neighborhood on Queens’s Rockaway Peninsula, as did legions of families who lived for the summer days when they could escape the cramped streets of New York City for the beach. As Callahan explains in her film, Jewish, Irish and black families who couldn’t afford The Rockaways’ tonier hotels first set up camp in tent cities along the shore, which in the 1910s and ’20s gave way to thousands of small but functional bungalows.

After seeing what Callahan has done so far - she and her co-producer Harris said they are almost done, with many hours of interviews already filmed - we're sure "The Bungalows of Rockaway" will be a great feature-length documentary, perfect for Channel 13 and something we'd like to own on DVD. It's got a lot more history than anything we knew about in our little section of a pretty vast bungalow culture.

The panel discussion moderated by the well-known design and architecture writer Eve Kahn with Callahan, Harris, George and Pasion was fascinating, and the audience - many of whom are, like us, Rockaway people, and a few who are lucky enough to live in one of the few hundred remaining bungalows - examples of "vernacular architecture" that will hopefully be preserved through the efforts of the people and groups involved tonight.

For forty years, the summer world we knew on our beachfront blocks in Arverne was reduced to a state of foul nature, turned into nothing but weeds, sand and garbage for miles around. Although both sets of grandparents and other relatives had remained in Rockaway in the new oceanfront highrises in what had been Irishtown in the Seaside area and our first apartment on our own was a studio on the boardwalk for which we paid $240 a month, we never forgot how wonderful those bungalows were.

An hour-long walking tour, "Beauty of the Bungalows," led by Richard George, will take place at noon on Saturday, October 4. You can get information or RSVP by emailing FarRockawayBBPA@aol.com.

The nice woman who handed us a leaflet on our way out told us she lived near Richard, around Beach 25th Street, and we asked if she remembered the Beach 25th Street drugstore owned by our Grandpa Herb's brother, Uncle Jack Sarrett, and she said, "Of course, everyone knew Mr. Sarrett." We last saw Uncle Jack in Peninsula Hospital in 1981, just before he died. He lived in Rockaway for most of his life, and like us, he loved it.

If you are a New Yorker and have never been to the Rockaways, get out there and see this most beautiful part of the city. Our life there was wonderful.

Saturday Night on the Lower East Side: Randa Jarrar & "A Map of Home" at Bluestockings

After teaching our always enjoyable creative writing and short story classes for Borough of Manhattan Community College's weekend program on the Brooklyn College campus (thirty-nine years after we started our own undergrad career there), we were lucky enough to be able to brave Tropical Storm Hanna to see Randa Jarrar at our favorite radical feminist bookstore, Bluestockings, on the Lower East Side, and hear her read from her fabulous new novel, A Map of Home, of which Publishers Weekly said in a starred review:

Jarrar's sparkling debut about an audacious Muslim girl growing up in Kuwait, Egypt and Texas is intimate, perceptive and very, very funny. Nidali Ammar is born in Boston to a Greek-Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father, and moves to Kuwait at a very young age, staying there until she's 13, when Iraq invades. A younger brother is born in Kuwait, rounding out a family of complex citizenships. During the occupation, the family flees to Alexandria in a wacky caravan, bribing soldiers along the way with whiskey and silk ties. But they don't stay long in Egypt, and after the war, Nidali's father finds work in Texas.

At first, Nidali is disappointed to learn that feeling rootless doesn't make her an outsider in the States, and soon it turns out the precocious and endearing Arab chick isn't very different from other American girls, a reality that only her father may find difficult to accept. Jarrar explores familiar adolescent ground—stifling parental expectations, precarious friendships, sensuality and first love—but her exhilarating voice and flawless timing make this a standout.

The MTA's weekend advisory told us the F train wouldn't be stopping at 14th Street, so we got off the L train at First Avenue and figured, since the rain had let up, that we could walk the sixteen blocks south to Bluestockings, which is on Allen Street (the continuation of First) near Stanton. Get there if you haven't for lots of cool books you will not find at any other New York bookstore, amazing radical T-shirts and other stuff, and good coffee and a place to hang out.

Unfortunately, it began to rain as we approached 12th Street and by St. Marks Place we were in a downpour. Despite our umbrella, we were kind of drenched when we got to Bluestockings, but luckily, Randa hadn't started reading yet.

We had never met her, but we have emailed after enjoying her work online, starting with her story "You Are a 14-Year-Old Arab Chick Who Has Just Moved to Texas," which won the Million Writers Award, StorySouth's prize for the best online fiction of the year, in 2004. Originally published online at Lee Klein's classic webzine Eyeshot, it's a terrific story, one we've taught to students at a Jewish high school and in a university class in immigrant lit.

(Intrusive and obnoxious local self-promoting aside: our story "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn" was a finalist for the Million Writers Award the next year. It's in a Dumbo Books book. End of commercial interruption.)

Randa also writes the spicy blog Rockslinga. Here's her official bio:

Randa Jarrar was born in Chicago in 1978. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved back to the U.S. at thirteen. She is a writer and translator whose honors include the Million Writers Award, the Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Award and the Geoffrey James Gosling Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares as well as in numerous journals and anthologies. Her translations from the Arabic have appeared in Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers; recently, she translated Hassan Daoud’s novel, The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Lots of other friends and lit-lovers came in out of the rain earlier tonight to see Randa at Bluestockings. She began by thanking her sister and brother and her agent Jin Auh, who were in the front row, and also thanked her publisher, Other Press, for making things happen "beyond my wildest dreams." A Map of Home also just sold paperback rights to Penguin!

Reading an excerpt from near the novel's end, when Nidali, the protagonist, is preparing her statements of purpose for her college applications. Her father forces her to write numerous compositions which he wants to be celebrations of her Arab heritage. Randa then read some of Nidali's essays, which diverge wildly and hilariously from her baba's intentions and expectations. (Maud Newton has the whole excerpt here.) The voice is sharp, funny, refreshingly vulgar and energetic. Frankly, our mind wanders at most readings, but when hearing this -- and the demanded encore, the start of the novel that wryly details the almost-slapstick comic events following Nidali's birth. Randa is a terrific novelist.

If you don't trust us (and we don't trust us either), how about this? Not only did Randa's book get a starred review in PW, but it scored one as well from Kirkus Reviews:

A first-time novelist offers a fictional take on her own complex heritage.

Nidali’s Baba is Palestinian. Her Mama is half-Greek and half-Egyptian. In addition to this mixed-up background, Nidali has an American passport and a precociously peripatetic personal history. Born in Boston, Nidali grows up in Kuwait, but her family flees to Egypt during the 1990 Iraqi invasion. By the time she lands in Texas, Nidali has become a seasoned traveler, and, wherever she goes, she carries with her a keen awareness of her inescapable difference. Nidali’s story is shaped by the harsh realities of ethnic division, political uncertainty and war, but it is also, essentially, a typical coming-of-age story. Jarrar is a funny, incisive writer, and she’s positively heroic in her refusal to employ easy sentimentality or cheap pathos. Nidali is a misfit living through calamitous times, but Jarrar understands that all adolescents feel like misfits living through calamitous times. The political is always personal for Nidali. For her, bombs dropping on Kuwait mean that nobody remembers her 13th birthday. As her family drives across Iraq on their way to Egypt, she writes a letter to Saddam Hussein complaining that his invasion has separated her from her boyfriend. And, ultimately, international crises have less impact on Nidali’s life than ongoing battles between her and her Baba on subjects like curfew and college. . .A coming-of-age story that’s both singular and universal—an outstanding debut.

If these two starred reviews aren't enough, this week's People Magazine gives A Map of Home four stars.

We're know you'll enjoy Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home. And you should feel guilty if you don't.

Thursday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Wondering Why the L Train Announcements Mispronounce Lorimer Street and DeKalb Avenue

Since we moved back to Brooklyn a couple of years ago and started taking the L train at least once nearly every day, we've been wondering why the very helpful announcements at each stop pronounce both Lorimer Street and DeKalb Avenue in a way that sounds funny to our native Brooklyn ears.

Since we both live by Lorimer Street and have written a short story collection with Lorimer Street in the title (the title story, "And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street," has scenes at the subway stop in 2005 and on the LL train in the 1970s), we're interested in hearing from anyone who can tell us how the pronunciation got altered.

To us, it was "LAHR-im-er" street with the vowel sound in the first syllable sounding sort of like Bert Lahr's last name. Our beloved landlady and decades-long friend, who passed away last year (we miss her every day) is the only one we ever asked about this. In 1921 she was born in this house (the top floor of which is Dumbo Books HQ) which her maternal grandfather bought over a century ago from the original German owner who fled when Italian immigrants started coming to the neighborhood. She never lived anywhere else.

"I never heard it pronounced any other way than Lahr-im-er," she told us. Us too, back in the day. Actually, a lot of us pronounce it almost like llama, but not quite.

So why does the L train announcement say "LORE-im-er," with the first syllable sounding like lore as in folklore? (Actually, we pronounce lore exactly the same as we pronounce the word law.)

And we've always pronounced DeKalb Avenue with the vowel in the second syllable pronounced like the A in Hal or Al or pal.

We never heard the subway announcement pronunciation of "DeKalb" spoken by a human being. It sounds snooty to us. The second-syllable A sounds sort of like the O sound in Ollie.

The blogger Mik Awake seems to have another issue with the pronunciation involving the L in DeKalb. But he is from Georgia - the state we kept being forced to change planes at when we lived across the border in Florida, not the former Soviet republic - and so anything he says is suspect. And we actually went to the Brooklyn Paramount on DeKalb and Flatbush in the 1960s and taught there when it became part of Long Island University in the 1970s, so there.

Anyone providing us with definitive information leading to the arrest of the subway announcement pronunciations will receive a free Dumbo Books book. Anyone who gives us incorrect, stupid or obnoxious answers will receive three free Dumbo Books books.

LOR-i-mer or LAHR-i-mer? De-KALB or De-KAWLB/De-KOLB?

Sunday Afternoon in Bushwick: Rebellious Subjects Theatre Presents "Twelfth Night" at Goodbye Blue Monday

Twelfth Night was the first Shakespeare play that we read in school, back in the spring of 1965 in Neil Berger's eighth grade English class at Meyer Levin J.H.S. 285, in preparation for seeing a professional production aimed at New York City students at Grady Technical High School in Sheepshead Bay.

It's still our favorite Shakespeare comedy, and we've taught it the past three springs in a row, the last two years at the fabulous School of Visual Arts and before that at Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School in Phoenix.

We've played excerpts from various versions of Twelfth Night for our classes: an animated 1992 joint Russian/British production for our SVA animation majors; the 1969 BBC-TV classic with Ralph Richardson, Joan Plowright and Alec Guinness; the 1996 film directed by Trevor Nunn, set in Victorian times, with Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Kingsley, and Nigel Hawthorne; and the 2005 high-tech contemporary multicultural BBC-TV production with Parminder Nagra and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

In the summer of 1990 we went to a much-hyped, star-studded New York Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night at Central Park - set in turn-of-the-century Monte Carlo, it featured Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, Gregory Hines, Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, Stephen Collins, Fisher Stevens and John Amos - that was truly awful. Our companions that night, author/literary agent Linda Konner - who was in our eighth grade class - and her boyfriend, the astute longtime Newark Star-Ledger theater critic Peter Felicia, walked out in the middle, but we held on out of cheapness. And we've probably seen half a dozen other productions of the play over the past thirty years.

Few were as memorable as the version we had the privilege of seeing this afternoon: the new Rebellious Subjects Theatre company's bold interactive production of Twelfth Night at Goodbye Blue Monday, Bushwick's own BoHo bar/coffee shop/live music venue on Broadway. It was incredibly good in every respect: acting, pacing, staging, and the wonderful accompanying music written by Jacob Wise, who performed brilliantly on clarinet (through family connections, we know that instrument better than any other) and percussion. He was accompanied onstage by Jessica Chen on piano and Joshua Morris on bass from further back in the space.

Via the B48 bus down Lorimer Street and the B46 down Broadway to Malcolm X Boulevard, we got to GBM about ten minutes before the starting time of 4 p.m. and found a seat at a front table by the raised stage. But the site-specific production roamed through all parts of the venue as its various subplots unfolded, and at one point Feste, the fool, handed us a kazoo to help make the midnight racket that would rouse the wrath of Malvolio and set the revenge subplot in motion, and we complied.

A young group of energetic performers, the cast included Tiffany Abercrombie, Kyle Dean Reinford, Lauren Ferebee, Ben Friesen, Stacy Jordan, Zak Kostro, Ed Malone, Tommy Nelms, Miguel Pinzon, Kyle Williams and Patrick Woodall. They all were funny, had good timing and moved effortlessly from space to space and between the various strands of the gender-bending comedy.

It's often hard for young American actors to be practiced in the rhythms of Shakespearean speech, but the cast performed admirably. We were a bit puzzled at first when the early part of the play cut out Viola's mourning her presumed drowned brother, but in the end that decision made sense in the highlighted text version that followed.

There are challenges in staging any play in an open space where people are coming in and going out, and yet we saw the actors respond expertly to a fussy toddler, three latecomers who'd clearly just walked in for an early evening drink, and people going to the bathroom. The production was as seamless as possible.

The standout performances came from a playful and seductive Feste (Patrick Woodall) with skillful singing performances, often a tricky thing to pull off; a Malvolio (Ed Malone) who managed to keep the balance between officiousness, silliness, and wronged indignation; a passionate, brave and heartbreaking Antonio (Miguel Pinzon); a lively and surprisingly smart Sir Toby Belch (Kyle Williams); and a Viola (Lauren Beth Ferebee) who seemed weirdly perky at first but whose insouciance proved winning as the play moved so quickly that it was hard to believe that two hours without intermission had elapsed.

Actors playing Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Ben Friesen) and Maria (Stacy K Jordan)were good at doing comic business; Orsino (Tommy Nelms) and Sebastian (Zak Kostro) were played nicely as straight men who are a little slow in getting what's going on inside them and around them; and a first-rate Olivia (Tiffany Abercrombie) was sharper and saucier than the often dull interpretations actors give this role.

Melisa Annis' direction created a triumphant if understated production which bodes great things for the Rebellious Subjects. And Goodbye Blue Monday is always a pleasant place to hang out, whether there's a play, music, film, or nothing but sitting and staring at your glass as you get drunker.

We, of course, are teetotalers, but just because we are virtuous, that doesn't mean we don't expect others to enjoy their cakes and ale. But for us, this wonderful production was food and drink enough - at least till we got a slice of marinara pizza at Sal's on our way back home.

Saturday Night in Greenpoint: "The Legends of Style" Show at Alphabeta

(Exhibit photos courtesy of BH-The Boys; please see his Flickr album of the show plus comments)

We've just walked back to Dumbo Books HQ from The Legends of Style exhibition and opening reception at Alphabeta, Greenpoint's suddenly-famous street gallery. Dawdling around McCarren Park, we managed to hear quite clearly the last 25 minutes of the Sonic Youth show at the pool as we watched a desultory kids' soccer game and Latino families enjoying some Labor Day weekend barbecue and the view of the Empire State Building, tonight done up in blue and white. Goodbye, pool, for now!

We very much enjoyed the time we spent at our first time at Alphabeta and were quite impressed with the store and the artworks. Although Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria), called Alphabeta "the equivalent of creating a criminal supply shop," we can report that strict adherence to government regulations caused them to ask even doddering old men for their ID's before anyone entered.

Luckily, our Arizona driver's license having proven that we were past the legal age to drink and buy spray cans - not that we do either - we got a scarlet "OK 21" graffiti'd on our right hand, allowing us to enter the world of Alphabeta. (When we start tagging in 2014, we plan to be known be known as 3X OK 21.)

Legends of Style, presented by Joshua Ivory, featured the work of old school writers such as STAY HIGH 149, FUZZ ONE, RIFF170, BUTCH2 TFP, PART TDS, PESO 131, KOOL 131, NIC 707, CHAIN 3, NOC 167, MIN ONE, DUSTER UA, TACK FBA, and DEZ who were ubiquitous to all of straphangers who endured the horror that was the subway system back in the bankrupt Beame administration.

DJ Kay Slay (formerly DEZ as featured in the 1982 documentary Style Wars and also formerly our cuz Keith Grayson) and The Fearless Four ("Rocking It") deftly provided the beats for a nice-sized diverse crowd, many of whom were taking pics.

It made us quite nostalgic to see the artful stylings of the legendary FUZZ ONE, for example, well-lit and hanging in on an art gallery wall more than thirty years after we first encountered it riding the IRT from the Junction to Manhattan back in the day when the 3 and 4 trains went to Flatbush Avenue/Brooklyn College. In the '70s, when we were both a lot younger, FUZZ ONE did his tagging on the Bronx end of the line with crews like The Ebony Dukes and The Fantastic Partners.

And among the many works of aerosol art hanging in both Alphabeta's roomy back gallery and the pleasant huge outdoor space, was one by our old friend STAY HIGH 149, sometimes called the Godfather of Graffiti, who was singled out by Norman Mailer in his brilliant book The Faith of Graffiti for his top-to-bottom tags.

One writer has called STAY HIGH 149

one of the most famous, influential and admired writers in the history of New York City aerosol art. Most notably admired for his unique tag. He drew a smoking joint as the cross bar for his "H". Each tag was accompanied by a stick figure from the television series The Saint. He also frequently wrote the phrase "Voice of the Ghetto". His logo/name came to define "street cool" for many subsequent generations of writers.

And his work's still cool, even when not in the street.

It was a really nice gathering last night. The music was good, the people were friendly, and the art was exhilarating. Since moving back to New York two years ago we've developed a number of allergies, but thankfully Krylon isn't one of them.

(Photo of Legends of Style courtesy Art Jones; please see his album on Flickr for more)

Alphabeta, Brooklyn’s only spot to buy cans (they are displayed in locked metal cages), is a wonderful addition to the neighborhood, not the menace portrayed by Councilmember Vallone. As Margot Adler's NPR report we heard a while back said about the view that equates aerosol art with vandalism:

But recently, the Tate Modern Museum in London had graffiti artists paint the building.

Andrew Michael Ford, the director of the Ad Hoc Art Gallery in Brooklyn, says he knows street art has come of age when there are art shows like the one at the Tate:

"It sent a wave around the world that it's legitimate, relevant and people need to pay attention to it," says Ford, who adds that he believes graffiti art and other forms of street art will be appearing in more museums in the future.

The people who run Alphabeta want to ensure that the store is a success by riding that wave. Its founders hope that it will be as much an art space and event space as it is a store.

We understand where Councilmember Vallone is coming from (besides Astoria). We're older than he is and remember that the tagging on trains and everywhere back in the bad old days of the '70s seemed to be another sign that New York City was falling apart and in chaos. But it wasn't.

As Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Heights-based genius we had the pleasure of meeting a number of times and whom we read with pleasure from adolescence on, wrote:

. . . we do not know with what instruments we will draw in years to come nor by which materials. Will it be by the laser of a laser up on the canvas of a bubble cloud chamber that gangs of artists will shift the patterns of the atom, and do we have a clue to the beauties of growth and malignancy we will yet create and in which arenas? . . .

Perhaps that is the unheard echo of graffiti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt intent seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apocalypse less and less far away. Graffiti lingers on our subway door as a memento of what it may well have been, our first art of karma, as if indeed all the lives ever lived are sounding now like the bugles of gathering armies across the unseen ridge.

(Storefront photo courtesy of the divine Miss Heather, Greenpoint's premier blogger)

You can see the Legends of Style show at Alphabeta through September 26. Check out the store and see for yourself what Charlie Halsey, Leif McIlwaine and their crew have done with it. And check out the work of some amazing street artists. We're grateful for all of them. Isn't life wonderful!

Tuesday Night at the McCarren Pool: Open Space Alliance Community Bloc Party, Taste of Williamsburg and Summerscreen Presents "Rushmore"

Upon stepping down into McCarren Park pool around 6:30 p.m. this evening, we found a penny. Heads up. We bent down and picked it up.

It was The L Magazine's last Summerscreen Tuesday night show of the summer and supposedly the last free event (Sonic Youth on Saturday will cost you) at the pool for now, as it will be returned to its original state. As Moses (Robert) said, Let there be water.

(Photo courtesy Brownstowner)

Plumb tuckered out after all our running around, we weren't planning on coming to the pool tonight. For us, summer is ending, as tomorrow is the first day of classes at some of the six college campuses where we've taught 25 classes in the past couple of years since moving back to Brooklyn.

But we got a last-minute call from the Swinging Sixties Senior Center on Ainslie Street. The designated Old Brooklyn Native Observer for tonight could not make it - something about an overdose of prune juice and vodka - so could we pinch-hit?

We agreed to be on hand to monitor things at the community bloc party for the Open Space Alliance, the wonderful organization helping to make North Brooklyn the greenest part of the city. OSA has made all the pool events possible, has supported renovating the pool for swimming and ice-skating, and is actively seeking an appropriate venue for future outside events.

Like Emerson, who liked the silent Sunday church before services began, we like the pool best when it's quiet, as it was when we arrived. People were setting up blankets, smiling and laughing, buying the little tickets at the Taste of Williamsburg benefit for OSA.

There were tables for wonderful local food places with mouth-watering cuisine from all over the world: Taco Chulo (our favorite), Fanny, Brooklyn Label, Lodge, Urban Rustic, Falafel Chula (another favorite), Wine Cellar Sorbet and more.

And there were also the usual tables for Brooklyn Brewery, Greenpoint Wines and the other food stands that have been at the pool every Tuesday night since July. Starbucks was handing out (well, actually people had to put their hand in the big cold barrel) frozen caffeine and a man from Ito En came around and gave us a free bottle of blueberry green tea.

The group who sit by the south end of the pool and try their best not to look at the movie, bless their hearts, were getting started getting sloshed on something stronger as The King Left came on to play.

Corey, Mark, Ian, and Graham sang about a little girl who had a little curl guess where, and did covers of a song by The Monkees (forty years ago a boy in Marine Park who wanted to be our boyfriend said we reminded him of Davy Jones, the liar) and The Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon".

After a while, we walked home for a short schoolwork break and got back just after Kent Jones of the Film Society of Lincoln Center introduced the night's screening of Wes Anderson's seminal 1998 film Rushmore.

We first saw it in the winter of 1999 at the AMC Ridge Plaza off I-495/State Road 84 in Davie, Florida, where we were living and teaching fiction writing and organizational communication, whatever that is, at Nova Southeastern University. A couple of years ago we watched it again with our parents on TV in Arizona.

As the FreeNYC capsule of tonight's movie said,

The unrequited love triangle of eccentric teenager Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), rich industrialist Herman Blume (Bill Murray), and their mutual love for elementary school teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), Rushmore put both Anderson and Schwartzean on the map for a lot of viewers and is a true modern classic.

But it's so much more than that. As TotalFilm's review notes:

The joy of Rushmore is that although it rarely goes the way you think it will, it always stays believable. Herman may regard Max as a friend, but at the same time he’s unwilling to bow to some upstart kid. And, while Max appears poised and at ease with the adult world, he’s still just a kid, prone to the temper tantrums and general twattish behaviour all 15 year olds display. It’s in generational inconsistencies – such as when Herman matches Max’s adolescent fury or Max outdoes his peers – that Rushmore excels. . . Filmed on autumnal locations and backed by an oddball soundtrack that’s as eclectic as the story itself, Rushmore is a genuinely one-off comedy.

The age difference between Max Fischer and Herman Blume in Rushmore is about what the age difference is between nearly everyone else watching the movie and us, we think, even as we smile and chuckle. This movie marked the start of Bill Murray's later work in movies like Lost in Translation and The Life Aquatic in which he plays middle-aged men in transition and maybe in crisis.

Like everything else, of course, the movie eventually ends, literally with the closing of a red velvet curtain. We were standing against the back of the pool, way over on the northernmost fringe of the crowd, watching the screen and the crowd from a pleasant vantage point.

People applaud. The MC guy thanks everyone for coming, reminds us to clean up after ourselves, says a few other things, ending with "See you next year!"

And suddenly we're standing up, an old face in a young crowd, one person in an empty poolful of people, not really kicking and only silently screaming as we make our way to the lesser-used Leonard Street back exit, going home to watch Hillary and The Cult of Sincerity.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date. But while it lasted, bitches, wasn't it wonderful?