ProHo resident Rian fondly remembers Christmas 1979.
Lava: Le Tigre
Lava is
a six-woman dance/acrobatics troupe that now teaches dance/acrobatics at Lava Studio in Prospect Heights. The crew appear in a recent music video from Le Tigre. The song is TKO, and you can watch it in streaming or Real Player format. [PICTURED: Le Tigre.]
LAVA |
524 Bergen St.,
Brooklyn, NY 11217; 718-399-3161; email: LAVA
The Power of Targeted Advertising
A selection of dubious Ratner-related products, courtesy of Ads by Google.
Bob Law: Of Radio, Restaurants and Retail
Check out this profile of Bob Law, 65, the former music director of WWRL and host of the "Night Talk" radio show, who owns both the Namaskar health food store Bob Law’s Seafood Cafe: "Both establishments are on the same block of Vanderbilt Ave. near Prospect Place in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood. Namaskar has been there for almost 14 years, the Seafood Cafe for three … (Law) doesn’t see his move from radio to retail as such a stretch. ‘I’ve been preaching entrepreneurship to African-Americans for years…’"
"…he and his wife, Muntu, opened the Seafood Cafe … ‘I wanted it to be in between a fish-and-chips place and a sit-down restaurant … The idea was to create another city dining experience by offering people a little something different.’"
Go read the rest of Clem Richardson’s profile in the Daily News.
BREAKING: Development Gone Mad on Vanderbilt
All the new development around here is getting overwhelming… Staceyjoy has pumped her insider real estate contacts for the following information:
"we’re getting a bakery
on St. Marks and Vanderbilt, in the building on the corner, the big
one that recently underwent a gut reno … I
know it’s not Blue Sky (from 5th Ave.), unfortunately. Also found out the Sweetpea Lounge, on the
corner of Dean and Vanderbilt, is due to open very soon … Very exciting, eh? Especially the bakery … BTW, Saturday marked the opening of Cato Photography right across the
street from me. The guy who owns it, John, is quite nice, and their
sign is lovely at night."
Something to do, Tonight: Reading Series at Barbes in Park Slope
Black Table writer, Gothamist interviewer and comedy series host Nichelle gave us a heads up on the Barbes Reading Series. Tonight.
Trader Joe in the ProHo
Victoria writes: "… my husband and I read your site all the time. We’d love for a Trader Joes to move into Prospect or Crown Heights. There are all those warehouses on Dean, Bergen, and Sterling (past Washington). Any ideas about how to bring Trader Joe’s to our neighborhood?"
The story is that Trader Joe’s is looking for a storefront somewhere in Brooklyn but, a spokeswoman says, "we need to find a deal that makes sense for us."
According to the Daily News article, "Trader Joe’s is still considering how much parking it will need … ‘We’re trying to be open-minded’ …"
Wine Tasting Tonight: Costieres de Nimes, Gaillac
Tonight from 6-8 PM at Fermented Grapes (651 Vanderbilt Av,
Brooklyn,
NY 11238; 718-230-3216): "Laurent, from Baron Francois,
will be pouring three French wines. A white and a red from Costieres de Nimes (both
Grenache-based blends) and a delicious red blend from Gaillac
(southwest France)."
CONFESSION TIME
I already told you this site is for
your benefit. It turns out that I also had a selfish motive.
It all started
in 1998, when I discovered Slashdot and
convinced myself that every urban neighborhood needed a grassroots news site of
its own.
Then recently, the Newspaper
Association of America asked me to write an article about how “citizen
journalists” are starting to create “hyper-local” news for ridiculously small
readerships. I started playing around with a trial account with Typepad. Now, Prospect Heights has is own
“hyper-local” news outlet.
Why is this important now? For starters, those fancy
Inter-net “web-sites” that cost tens-of-thousands to develop back in the
dot-com days are now pretty much free for anybody to build, thanks largely to
bloghosts. So you can imagine what career newspaper people must be thinking.
And in terms of getting the word out, Google’s near-proletarian
indifference to the P/E ratio of your publisher’s stock must have some
chilling effect.
So, go take a look at my article, “My Neighborhood News”
and the sidebar, “Who
Says You Can’t Get Micro-Local News in Print?” in which I was able to give
shout-outs to some of your blogs, LiveJournal accounts, and other Internet
distractions (but not all, I’m afraid).
Record 12,000 Crowd at First Saturday
In this photo, a small subset of the record crowd of 12,000 attendees gets samba lessons. From Feb. 5. The New York Times interviewed Reginald Paul, 34, of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, "who described his ritual journey through the museum on Saturdays as starting at the top floor, then working down to the music. He said that early on in his four years of attending the event, he had one romantic experience: ‘I kinda went on a date… It was the first, and last.’ … His friend, Charles Faxton, explained that the event was so popular because it was the sole gathering spot in Brooklyn for the creatively inclined … ‘This is just a precursor to Basquiat…’"