Park Slope Reader

Park Slope

Slope Survey: Myrta Echevarria

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The Slope Survey returns for its 10th installment with Myrta Echevarria.

Myrta was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Wanting to leave the island and explore the world…she came to NYC to further her studies in Education. NYC has been her home base, she has lived in South East Asia as well. After a short stay in Puerto Rico, Myrta returned to Brooklyn with her family, she felt her “family rainbow” needed a diverse community, where her adopted Korean daughter, will fit.

Other than her job in Real Estate, Myrta is a Tai Ji practitioner and has a small fortune teller practice.

What brought you to Park Slope? 

In 1982,  I was doing my MA at NYU, living in a tiny studio in the Village. A visit to Park Slope was all I needed…I felt in love with Prospect Park, the cool bars and the amount of living space at affordable prices.

What is your most memorable Park Slope moment?  

I have to many memorable moments…but I do remember landing in JFK, coming from my Homeland, Puerto Rico and feeling so happy to be back in Park Slope. 

Describe your community superpower.  

Over the last 18 years I have mostly worked in Real Estate. I loved what I do, helping people sell their homes and getting a new “nest” for others. 

 If you could change one thing about the neighborhood, what wuld it be?

The thing that worry me the most, is the lack of small stores…especially 7th Avenue has lost many of those great places that I used to enjoyed. The commercial rents drove the smaller business out.

What do you think Park Slope will look like in 10 years?

I think 10 years could make a big difference, if the economy continues to be stable…we will see a lot more bigger buildings and there will be a lost of the tight community feel, which already is dwindling.

What are you reading, would you recommend it?  

 I have gone back to some of my favorite reads,  Metamorphosis by Kafka, The Diaries of Anais Nin…both I found enriching..

 

What is your greatest extravagance?  

I do treat myself to a weekly massage, and a trip to Puerto Rico every few months in search of my Vitamin D…

If you couldn’t live in Park Slope or in Brooklyn, where would you go?  

I have many favorite places, Mexico, Spain and of course Puerto Rico!

Who is your hero, real or fictional?

My fictional hero since I was a girl is Wonder Woman…I loved her energy, her outfit and her plane…my other hero is Barack Obama.

Last Word, What is turning you on these days?

These days I’m going back to my witchery roots, doing a lot of Tarot readings,Yi Ching, my tai ji practice and observing life as it evolves…having lots of fun too.

 

Living Local in The Slope: The Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District

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This coming January will mark the 10-year anniversary of the Park Slope Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District. An outgrowth of the former Fifth Avenue Merchants Association, the BID is a full-fledged, non-profit organization that works year-round to help Fifth Avenue’s businesses thrive.

The BID covers Dean Street to 18th Street, spilling a little into 9th Street and Union Street as well. As are all New York City BIDs, the Park Slope Fifth Avenue BID is largely funded by a special tax assessment billed to property owners inside the district. Additionally, the BID organizes fundraising events to supplement this funding. The BID’s founding and continued development are a result of the meticulous consideration that it gives to several interested parties, including city officials, property owners, merchants and residents who make up its board of directors. The BID’s main focus, however, is to advocate for small businesses located within its district and promote all that these businesses have to offer.

The BID’s advocacy work may involve anything from addressing local laws that affect businesses to educating merchants about how to best navigate New York CIty’s business world. Workshops the BID hosts include topics such as signing and renewing commercial leases and understanding employment law.

Helpful to both merchants and property owners on Fifth Avenue are the BID’s consistent clean-up efforts. It currently hires a cleaning crew to work five days a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Recently, the BID initiated a process through the city to increase funding in order to keep the crew on with an increased minimum wage. These additional resources will also allow the BID to carry out possible beautification efforts in the future, such as flowers or new garbage cans.     

A Taste of Fifth

Another major component of the BID’s work is organizing and coordinating special events. These invite the community to come out and enjoy the avenue and interact with the neighborhood’s small businesses. Summer Strolls takes place several times a year, an event that clears the avenue of cars to allow for a variety of activities, from salsa dancing to pizza eating contests to bouncy castles for children.

In April, the BID coordinates A Taste of Fifth, which invites 40-50 restaurants every year to bring samples and is held inside the Grand Prospect Hall. The BID brings beer and wine sponsors, as well as entertainment to create an event that gathers together businesses and community members and also raises funds for local charities and schools.     

Nunu Chocolates is a regular participant in the BID’s Taste of Fifth event. Says co-owner Justine Pringle Laird, “We do the Taste of Fifth every year with them. … It is a wonderful opportunity, not only to meet the public face-to-face, but it’s an opportunity to see every other small business owner that’s on Fifth Avenue. … There’s a huge camaraderie, and I think that has been instigated by the BID. They create a sense of community, which is really wonderful.” Laird adds that the BID provided important support and advertising for her company’s Indiegogo campaign as well. 

Ann Cantrell, owner of Annie’s Blue Ribbon General Store, speaks of the stark contrast between the Park Slope Fifth Avenue BID and her store’s previous location in Boerum Hill. Says Cantrell, “Previously we were in Boerum Hill for six years without the support of a business improvement district, and the differences are night and day. Not only do we feel constantly supported as merchants, the BID is advocating on our behalf for things like integrating a new postal delivery system for small merchants to provide in-person delivery service. … Also, they are tirelessly drumming up business for Fifth Avenue with inventive ideas that are now classics like Summer Strolls, Dine in Park Slope and festive ideas during holiday times.”   

Ann Cantrell

Coming up November 24 is Small Business Saturday, at the end of which the Park Slope Fifth Avenue BID does the first holiday tree lighting in the city. However, as the BID’s deputy director, Joanna Tallantire, points out, “Shopping small on Small Business Saturday isn’t enough. You got to do it every day, explore your community, see what’s around.” Through its events and other efforts in the community, the BID encourages people to get to know their local storekeepers and see that their businesses are about more than products. An owner may be someone who is giving to a local fundraiser or a parent with a child at a school in the community.

Mark Caserta, executive director of the Park Slope Fifth Avenue BID, also serves as secretary of the board for the New York City BID Association, which assembles representatives from BIDs located across the city. Says Caserta, “We work together for the good of small businesses and the BIDs. … We look out for each other and help each other out. … When the city is doing things that may hurt small businesses or BIDs, we all gather together and fight hard for our interests and the interests of our businesses.”

In New York City’s daunting business climate, the Park Slope Fifth Avenue BID and its partners provide crucial support to small and growing businesses throughout the city. 

The Reader Interview: Back to School – At the Eye of the Storm of Controlled Creative Chaos

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The Reader Interview with Liz Phillips, Principal of PS 321

 

P.S.321, which lays claim to a full city block off Park Slope’s 7th avenue, is — and long has been — one of the hottest tickets around. Desperate parents have been known to rent second apartments, or just fake their address, to enroll their child in what is widely understood to be one of the best public elementary schools in the city. And at the eye of this storm of controlled, creative chaos is the widely admired Liz Phillips, who’s served as principal for, as of this fall, 20 years. Along the way, she’s advocated for teachers, pushed forth policies in her own school as well as others, and seeded the city with an ever-growing network of mentees.

A former editor for Knopf and Pantheon, Phillips began working at the Feminist Press not long after her children were born, and while working on an educational series for high schoolers had her aha moment: she loved producing great books, but, she realized, “a really great teacher could make do with mediocre materials… I wanted to be in that position.” Phillips enrolled in a one-year program at the Bank Street College of Education, and secured a spot student teaching with education titan Carmen Fariña, who would eventually go on to serve as the New York City Schools Chancellor. Phillips had her eye on District 15 because of their “strong leadership and emphasis on the writing process,” but it was somewhere between kismet and calculation that brought her to P.S. 321, where her daughter was currently enrolled, to teach first grade. Soon, she was mentoring other teachers on the writing process, and when an assistant principal transferred out of the school, then principal Peter Heaney tapped Phillips to take her place. She agreed, on the condition she could return to teaching if she didn’t like it. Eight years later, she took over as principal.

Liz’s philosophy, official Parent Coordinator and my ad hoc tour guide, Deb, tells me — with clear awe for the woman who has helmed this hub of progressive, pint-sized learning since well before her own children matriculated — is to always say “yes, if you can.” We snaked through the labyrinthine hallways, passing bulletin boards of welcome greetings; a teacher who taught Deb’s son over a decade ago; a classroom of students on sleek Apple desktop computers, learning not how to use the tech (of course not), but how to be better digital citizens; and a young boy painting determinedly on an easel in what was either reward or engaging punishment. Eventually, we passed the office of the Assistant Principals. I told them about my chat with Liz and joked about her “enough already!” attitude about the retirement question. Seems like she’s not planning on going anywhere any time soon, I remarked. At that, one of the APs, already half way out of the door for a meeting, ran back towards her desk and rapped on it, hard. “I need to knock on something made of real wood.” 

Congratulations on another school year! What do you love the most about back to school? 

Liz Phillips: You know, I think one of the privileges of working in education, in a school, is that every year is a new beginning and you can start fresh, and it’s really exciting. You can build on successes from the previous year but, you know, avoid problems that you figured out. And certainly just everybody’s excitement, getting to know new teachers when we have new teachers and new staff members, and seeing the children coming into school and just really feeling great. There are some kids who have some separation issues in kindergarten, but most of the kids I see in the lobby just so excited about going upstairs, seeing their friends. 

Bye mom!

[Laughs] Right. In fact, it’s funny because we allow our kindergarten parents to bring the kids into the room and today — sometimes the first graders, the beginning of the year, because they’re not used to going up alone, are a little nervous. So I was in the lobby and I saw a kid with their parent, who I didn’t know, crying, and I thought, oh, this must be a first grader who wants to go upstairs with his parent. Turns out it was a kindergartener who didn’t want his mother to go upstairs with him. 

As principal, do you feel far away from your years of being in the classroom and teaching? Is that something that you miss? 

Well, I think one of the reasons that I never left the school and didn’t want to go to work in a district office or work at central [office of the DOE] was because I feel like when you’re based in the school, you can still be connected to the classrooms. I’m clearly not a teacher anymore, but I feel like the best principals think of themselves as teachers in some ways and spend a lot of time in classrooms, and I really enjoy that time. And so I think that’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t have left the school because I think if I had then I would really miss it. 

You said in an interview that having that foundation, having that experience as a teacher, informs the work of the best principals out there. 

Look, the heart of the school — there are a lot of things that make a school great — but the teachers are with the kids all day. Having great teachers and understanding how central that is, that as a principal you have to be able to support the teachers and also, you know, work on helping them improve, whether it’s by setting up collegial relationships and having many opportunities for intervisitation for people working together, providing really high quality professional development. But I think if you haven’t been a teacher, it’s hard to understand how central that is to the success of any school.

I was sifting through all these online comments about the school, and whether it was posted six months ago or 14 years ago, the word “community” came up over and over again. I can see that that’s such an important buzzword as to how you view yourself here. What makes this a distinct community and how do you work to keep it bonded and cohesive and collaborative? 

I think that there are a lot of things and I will say, you know, we’ve had in this school very consistent leadership. The previous two principles each were here 10 years. So in the last 40 years, there have only been three principals in this school, and both of the previous principals who I’ve worked under, both of them were principals who really respected teachers. I think there’s been a sense of this school as a place where teachers can take risks, can grow, want to be part of the community. You know, a lot of what I try to set up in terms of structures, are structures that allow that. We build grade meetings into the school day, last period so that the kids are in a grade recess. So teachers can meet together. I go to all those meetings. Often principals don’t go to grade meetings, but I feel like this school is really big, and that’s another thing. I mean very few elementary schools have over 1400 students and, you know, nine classes in a grade. And so I feel like it’s really important, in terms of building the community, for me to be in tune with what’s going on across every grade. We put a lot of emphasis on professional development that not only teaches certain, you know, pedagogic skills or content areas, but that builds community. For example, Monday professional development. All teachers work an extra 80 minutes on Monday for professional development, and our first one, which is this Monday, given the holidays we’ve had, is a community-building professional development. Really the main goal of it is for people to get to know each other better in smaller groups. We’re always thinking about how can we do that. We also have tremendous parent involvement. So a lot of it is also figuring out ways to work with parents effectively, figuring out ways to balance, you know, all the different needs, needs of teachers, needs of parents, to work collaboratively to do that. We have many “friend-raising” events which, you know, a potluck supper which we have in a week, which is for mainly families, but a lot of teachers come, too. So I mean I just, I think you can set structures into place that, that focus on the importance of community.

I imagine that a lot of these things are ways to combat the issue that the school has had with overcrowding, as you mentioned. 

I will say that it’s more to combat the school being a big school than overcrowding. We actually are not overcrowded… but we’re big. [Laughs] Because we have both our main building and the mini school in the backyard. So we have enough rooms. That’s not the issue. There are some schools that genuinely cannot fit their kids. That’s not our problem. But we a very big school. For both the children and the teachers and also the parents, that means you have to, I think, be more deliberate about community building because you know, you can’t just all be together. There are nine first grades, and nine teachers can’t plan together all the time. So I do think that yes, because of the size, I know principals at schools that are much smaller where it doesn’t have to be quite as deliberate because it happens more naturally. 

I know you’re famous here for your very active parent population, so where is that balance between encouraging them to be involved but then drawing the line so it doesn’t become too much?

Yes. And I am very aware of that part — I’ve been doing this a long time. When parents come to me with ideas, my first thought is always what’s the impact of this on the teachers? This is an example from many years ago. Parents wanted more enrichments, you know, chess, arts, music. We have a lot that are DOE sponsored, but that wanted even more. Teachers felt they had enough enrichments and they didn’t have enough time with their kids. So how do you balance that? So what I did at that point is I brought it to the school leadership team — we have a really effective school leadership teams of eight parents, eight staff members — and I tried to steer it towards doing afterschool programs where parents would feel their kids have an opportunity to have more enrichments, but teachers wouldn’t feel the school day was being taken over. And so we started what’s now called Kid’s Club, where we have all these different kinds of, it could be puppet making, theater, and we have some enrichments during the school day, but to be careful… When I mentor new principals, that’s what I’m always saying. Yes, you want parent involvement, but you do have to sometimes draw limits. And as the principal, think about what’s best for the school as a whole. I will say that we have amazing parents, and I spend a lot of time, probably more time than many principals, meeting with them. But I feel like it pays off because I feel like we’ve established really great relationships, and that the parents are respectful and understand that things have to be run by me, and that there are certain things that aren’t necessarily going to happen, that we’re going to compromise. Even something like volunteering in the classroom, we have very specific times when it works for parents, you know, kindergarten choice time, or helping at lunch recess, or certainly going on trips. But it’s not like, oh you can come and volunteer any time you want in the classroom. So, you know, I think putting structures in place that allow parents to feel welcomed, like Family Fridays, which was something that I started even before, when I was the early childhood coordinator. I went to the principal with this idea which has now taken often is in schools around the city, where the first Friday of every month, we open up the whole school to all parents. So there are thousands of people in the building, and they’re in the kids’ classrooms, and they’re either reading with kids, or playing math games, or doing a project. So it’s an organized way of parents getting to see the classroom. I think parents want to see what their kids are doing, but in a controlled way that isn’t like just, oh, I want to drop in and help out with reading time.

You were so outspoken at the time for not evaluating teachers based on test scores, and then to see that move into a moratorium, did that sense of getting involved, successfully in impacting policy ever give you the desire to become more involved in the political angle of the job? outfit or was that just need to step up? 

No, I feel like there have been many times since I’ve been principal that I have been outspoken about things. Many years ago after 9/11, I wrote an article about the pledge of allegiance. And I think there were things, whether it’s about immigration and protecting kids in school, about not having guns in school, you know, armed security guards — forget about teachers, that’s just ludicrous. Those are things that directly affect the school. I am sensitive to the fact that whatever my own personal political beliefs are as a school leader, for things that are outside of education, I might get involved when I’m out of school, but I think all kids need to feel supported in school. Even with standardized testing, that can get tricky because there are parents who are so anti-testing, and talk to their kids. So kids could tease another kid for taking a test. So when we have our testing meeting in March, which we always do, I always start by saying, look, you know, we believe in being a respectful school. We’re a no place for hate school, and that carries over to how we talk about, you know, different political perspectives on something like testing, and we have to respect that different parents and different kids — and kids are mainly reflecting their parents — are going to have different points of view on it. And I feel like it is possible to be outspoken about things that you really feel are detrimental to the school and to children and still maintain an atmosphere where different perspectives are allowed. 

What’s next for you and P.S. 321? It seems like you still feel invigorated and empowered by the work. 

I do, I do. People are like, are you going to retire? [Laughs] I’m not really interested in that right now. I’m having a good time. I’m enjoying this amazing community. I will say that for the last few years, one of the energizing parts of my job has been mentoring others and I’m very proud of the fact that my last maybe five APs [assistant principals] are now principals. One just became a principal a few weeks ago, and that feels really great. Also, Carmen Fariña started a Learning Partners Project. You could apply to be a host school, which is what we were, if you had practices you wanted to share, and then other people could apply to be partners. We were part of this for four years in different configurations, but at one point we had actually eight partner schools in Sunset Park and Brownsville and Park Slope and one year in far Rockaway. And that was an opportunity for not just principals but teachers to do intervisitation and learn from each other. I really enjoy that part of the job. Last year I facilitated a District 15 group of assistant principals who had the potential to be principals. I really feel like, you know, that’s very sustaining to me to feel like, as I’ve been doing this for a long time and some of it is easier than it is for a first year principal, to be able to share best practices. But I also feel like, you know, as I said when we started, each year is a new beginning. Each year has its own challenges and it’s, you know, and I enjoy that. I feel like as a successful school, it’s not like, oh, we have brand new things coming, we take what’s been successful and we modify it and we make it better. So math is an area right now we’re paying a lot of attention to. And so that’s a little new, you know, social emotional learning is something we’ve always been committed to, but now figuring out even better ways. We started a peace path, and it’s just a method of helping kids resolve their own conflicts. That’s new. So every year there are a few new things. I believe as a principal, you have to be growing, you have to do something new, but you can’t like throw in 20 new initiatives. It’s not effective. 

 

Eating Local: Durian Ice Cream is Real

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A Chat with Jonathan Bayer of SKYICE

Here’s a combo you don’t see every day, at least not in the same restaurant: Thai food and ice cream. While you might venture for this creamy dessert after dinner, SkyIce gives you both entities in one sitting. Owned by husband and wife team Jonathan Bayer and Sutheera Denprapa, their spot on 5th Avenue serves savory Thai plates and ice cream flavors inspired by the like, with offerings like durian, white miso almond, green curry, and more. We sat down with co-owner Bayer to talk about the restaurant, his upbringing in the New York culinary world, and why he and Sutheera feel at home in the Park Slope neighborhood.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background in food and how you got interested in Thai cuisine?

Well, I have always been interested in food! I love to eat. Definitely love to eat. Growing up, we used to go out to eat quite a bit. My mother was a fantastic cook, had some amazing home cooked meals but we’d also go out to eat so I was always interested in restaurants and how they functioned. So I was exposed to very good food at an early age, which helped round out the palette. We also traveled a lot so I was eating food across the pond, on the West Coast, so I was exposed to a lot of different cuisines at an early age.

Are you from the West Coast?

No, no. Born and raised in New York. My family’s been here for about 150 years. Actually my great grandmother, when they opened up the tenement museum on the lower east side, she was honored as one of the living remaining original tenants of the actual Tenement building. Like, she was actually born in the museum. Where the museum stands was her apartment when she was a little girl so we date back to then.

So I’ve always had a love for food. I worked as a bus boy in high school at an amazing steakhouse in Huntington, Long Island and I waitered in restaurants and after graduating school I actually went to Wall Street. So finance is my background. And then, after various roles throughout finance I decided to go back into food.

What got you interested in Thai food?

Well my wife is Thai, born and raised in Bangkok. We actually started with ice cream in mind. My wife is a self-taught ice cream maven. She’s an artist by trade so she’s wildly creative and thinks up these flavors. But she’s also a huge ice cream fan so she started wanting to eat ice cream that she could not find on the market and her first flavor was Thai tea. She couldn’t find it anywhere and one day she woke up and was just like, “I’m gonna make Thai tea ice cream.”

So yeah she whipped up a batch, it took her about 6 months to make and perfect the formula and then we had this amazing homemade ice cream. We started to get really positive feed back from family and friends and we decided to just go for it and open up a shop. We weren’t sure how the winters were going to treat us. It turns out ice cream is a 12-month season but in order for us to kind of hedge we said, “Let’s offer some food.” So we offered a very small menu, some curry, some noodles, some appetizers, and we started to get a really great response from the food. So we said, “Alright, let’s expand this!” into what we have today, which is this really large, expansive, authentic, very traditional Thai food menu.

Did you learn the ropes of Thai cooking from your wife?

I would say I can cook. I don’t cook here. I would love to take credit but a lot of the recipes have my influence, my palette, what I like to eat. It’s kind of incorporated that into how we serve, the different flavors I really want to highlight. Thai food is so eclectic, there’s so many different flavors going on. And New York has many many Thai restaurants so I think through the volume, it’s lot some of its cachet. We wanted to kind of bring that back and pick up on the kaffir lime, the lemongrass, the tamarind, really get in touch with those amazing flavors that all kind of mix to make this amazing cuisine. So my influence is more in the recipes rather than doing the cooking.

How did you come to choose the Park Slope neighborhood for the business?

So we just celebrated seven years here. It didn’t look like this eight years ago when we first moved in so the neighborhood here in the North Slope. South slope was always very strong but over the last 7 to 8 years it’s really grown up around us. We looked all over. We hit it with this one. We knew we wanted to be in a family neighborhood because we had ice cream and we wanted something that was definitely family-friendly so we knew we wanted to be in that type of neighborhood. Trial and error found this location.

What would you say is one of your highlight ice cream flavors?

You know we get this question all the time and it’s such a hard question to answer because there are literally 15 flavors. We’ll have groups of people that come in just for durian ice cream. It’s popular, durian is a great flavor. There’s Thai tea, there’s the raspberry cilantro, the cucumber lime, white miso with almonds, the banana Nutella, the Belgian chocolate brownie, the roasted Thai coconut, Thai coffee. These are all really popular flavors.

 

 

The Slope Survey: Daniella Stromberg

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The Slope Survey returns for its 8th installment with Daniella Stromberg, a native New Yorker, born and raised in the West Village and owner of d’mai Urban Spa on Fifth Avenue. Daniella opened the spa in 2004. Working with her team to provide a neighborhood sanctuary has been both a thrilling learning experience and a true honor as well.

What brought you to Park Slope? 

I moved back to NYC in 1994. I had been living in Amsterdam and somehow returning to Manhattan just felt wrong. Park Slope was beautiful, progressive, had a great Park and seemed close to “the city” (as we called it then).

What is your most memorable Park Slope moment?  

Before opening d’mai, friends and I celebrated my new lease by drinking champagne in the old fish market before construction. It was basically just all cement – a blank canvas filled with possibility.

Describe your community superpower.  

Kindness.

 If you could change one thing about the neighborhood, what wuld it be?

I wish more of our restaurants stayed open later.

What do you think Park Slope will look like in 10 years?

Things are always changing! It’s so hard to know what this next wave will look like…I imagine even more skyscrapers. To be honest, I find them jarring right now. In 10 years, I think the waterfront and canal restoration will bring the new and old together beautifully.

What are you reading, would you recommend it?  

I’m actually re-reading “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, by David Sedaris. I love it just as much as the first 4 or 5 reads.

 What is your greatest extravagance?  

Full length cashmere bathrobe; I’ve had it for many years and it still looks and feel amazing.

If you couldn’t live in Park Slope or in Brooklyn, where would you go?  

Easy—the North Fork of Long Island!

Who is your hero, real or fictional?

I’m blown away by the student activists. They’ve given us hope that our nation really will get through this.

Last Word, What is turning you on these days?

The fact that winter is over and SPRING IS HERE.

Memory & The Yoga Mat

By Filed Under: Bending Towards Brooklyn (Yoga) Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

In the late 1930’s and 1940’s in New York, the city used funding to do a project on housing and commercial properties. They sent employees out to take photos of almost every home or building. The result was an archive of over 700,000 photos. I suppose the city wanted a record of what things looked like in what seems now like a simpler time of drab black and white. Were there things they could change? Improve? Eliminate? The photos were forgotten; stored away in the city’s archives. Since this was a borough-wide project, and the vaults have been open to the public since the late 1980’s, anyone is now able to glimpse a Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Windsor Terrace frozen in time. These photos can be acquired from the city and bought for a small fee. These are visions of our Brooklyn that make us think of what remains. They are snapshots of longing.

The tin ceilings in our realm of Brooklyn turn the world a sepia tone. As we sip our cappuccinos’ in coffee shops that have kept their original architecture, perhaps we can hear a movie reel and recall that a quiet revolution was something that began in our neighborhoods with our own foreign voices. We remember this even though some of us weren’t even alive. So what is memory, really?

The vision of 1940’s Brooklyn does not evoke illusions of a yoga mat. Instead it brings to mind the cinched waists of young women in floral dresses, stoop ball, cigars, and baseball cards flapping in the spoke wheels of bicycles flying down Court Street. And although Yoga did exist in New York in the 1940’s, it was a hidden phenomenon. But how would our Brooklyn have looked if instead of biting our nails waiting for our boys to come home, we had sat on the floor without shoes or socks and said “Namaste”, the divine in me bows to the divine in you. What would those poses have taught us? What would our history books have looked like?

Buddha had an interesting take on love and memory. He said, “Love in the past – is only a memory. Love in the future – is only a fantasy. True love lives in the here and now.” Can this be right? Buddha’s words from 528 B.C. are a memory. They are just memory written down. Does that mean they are still alive? Does this mean Buddha is walking down Atlantic Avenue looking for a good vegan restaurant? Does it mean the 1940’s never died and if this is true then maybe the Brooklyn Dodgers are still playing baseball somewhere, maybe we never really went to war, maybe everything happens simultaneously and it depends on what scene we are taking place in at the moment. But no, that can’t be right. It isn’t right. Memory is the place that exists in our minds and if we can get a hold of our minds we can revisit memory anytime we want to.

Enter the yoga mat, the tin ceiling studio and the breath of not the past or the future, but of the here and now. Yoga requires one thing of us: to show up. We show up for many reasons. Most of the time we show up so that the nostalgia of our past Brooklyn’s won’t choke us. We show up so that we can relive those silent film memories while still letting them go. Shavasana is a good place for this kind of meditation. The end of every yoga class ends with Shavasana, also known as the “corpse position”. This title seems fitting for an idea of something like memory. After all, even our brief day-to-day moments are memories. Yet, what does lying on the ground still breathing teach us about recollecting our past? What can it enable us to do by learning from it?

My favorite thing to do during Shavasana is to visit the dead. And maybe lying on my back allows me a kind of closeness to the deceased that I may not encounter while standing up. Some yoga teachers, at the finality of their two-hour classes, offer a rare and valuable gem when they say, “during this resting pose you may choose to visit whoever you want or you may choose only to relax.” Who knows where some souls decide travel during the dreamlike wakefulness of Shavasana? What does Brooklyn begin to look like in these moments? Are the churches of Park Slope transformed slowly from red brick to a grey film? Do the old Italian bakeries in Carroll Gardens delicately fade into an illusory space on the avenue? What changes and what stays the same in the present moment?

In the 1940’s Yoga would have taught us patience, forgiveness and the art of letting go. Our history books would have stated as much. In some meditations the Brooklyn Dodgers are still playing baseball, the world never really went to war and yes the Buddha is walking down Atlantic Avenue, in search of fried chickpeas. Other visits to the yoga mat inform us that all of this is nonsense, nothing can be erased, and reality is reality. But then sometimes, as we close our eyes, perhaps the teacher passes by and puts her hands on our heads. Perhaps we are reminded of our grandparents, our parents, a child, a sister we lost, a brother we don’t speak to, or a stranger we once loved.  The dead teach us to honor these memories, to hold them in our present hearts where we feel them. And it is in these moments when our realm of Brooklyn really does change. It transforms from a photograph to a live theatre production, from a silent film to a noisy one. The remnants of the past collide with the present. On our yoga mats we can see color, as if for the first time.

From Sardinia to South Brooklyn: A Conversation with Convivium Osteria’s Carlo and Michelle Pulixi

By Filed Under: Eat Local Tagged With: , , , , , ,

In a sea of new restaurants that rapidly open and close at a one-year-or-less pace, Park Slope’s Convivium Osteria has kept things going on 5th Avenue since 2000. Co-owner Carlo Pulixi notes, “This part of the neighborhood, I would say we were the very first. There were Spanish bodegas but nothing of what you see today. It was totally different.” The rustic, Southern Italian restaurant brings a little slice of Carlo’s Sardinia roots to Park Slope, a menu filled with fresh Mediterranean pasta and meat dishes. “It wasn’t really that I invented anything, more re-created. We brought it back to its origins,” Pulixi says. Co-owner and wife Michelle Pulixi met Carlo while working at Il Buco in the East Village, and the two decided that her Park Slope neighborhood would be the second home to showcase Carlo’s own home roots, along with Michelle’s Latin American family background. Today, you can still find many of the same menu items from when Convivium Osteria first opened nearly 20 years ago. We chatted with the owners about their experiences in the food industry and what they each love about Park Slope. 

Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved in the food industry?

Michelle: I’ve been in the food restaurant industry since I was 12, where I worked on weekends at my best friend’s moms apple pie shop, sometimes at the counter, sometimes making pies. Since then I have always just been working my way up at different restaurants until I ended up in NYC and within 6 months of moving here I met Carlo at a restaurant I was working at and 1 year later we started looking for a place to open up together. 2 years later we had Convivium. I worked along side him all the way through, he is the main brain behind it all, and I am good a supporting and giving fresh ideas and adding artistic touches. We raised our kids in our apartment above the restaurant and it is really a family thing. Our son is just about ready to start working at Convivium in about 1 year, but they have always helped in setting up and doing little chores.

Carlo: Well I’m from Italy. Sardinia. I spend half of my teens to half of them in Roma before coming to the United States. And since I’ve been in the United States I’ve always worked in restaurants. And it’s not that hard for me, came kind of natural. With a number of partners, I opened a restaurant in the city before coming here to Brooklyn, which that’s the time that I met my wife Michelle. I don’t know, it just comes naturally to me, the restaurant business. 

 

How did you help decide to move Convivium to Park Slope?

Carlo: When I met Michelle, she used to live here in Park Slope. I had never set foot in Brooklyn till then. Came to this neighborhood, got off at Grand Army Plaza, and fell in love with it. It was spring, the trees were green and all that. The neighborhood and the tree-lined streets, the sloping streets, the beautiful townhouses, and then, after almost 10 years in New York City, the kind of quietness. We lived very close to the park. It felt very great. We were planning on moving to Europe then really fell in love with it so we decided to open the restaurant here.

Michelle: We ended up in Park Slope because I lived here since 1998 and we both loved the neighborhood. Also, it had become impossible for little guys to open anything in Manhattan. Rents were reasonable back then in Park Slope, haha! We had very little money and had to squeeze everything in order to open up shop. Park Slope had a very cozy neighborhood feel, we felt at home here.

What do you think makes Convivium stand out from other restaurants in the neighborhood?

Michelle: What I think makes Convivium stand out is how when you enter the front door of our restaurant, you leave the hustle bustle of the city outside and, like a time portal, enter into a very rustic and cozy embracing atmosphere, at least I hope people do, that was our goal. A place where people can feel loved and appreciated, from the love we put into the food, to the setting and the service. Carlo is very keen to details and consistency at every level, from the wines he chooses to offer, to where he places a copper pot to shine just right, to quality and freshness of the produce and meat we offer, to the very rare and special wild fennel pollen that he chooses to spice a special pasta with. He was raised by farmers and chefs in Italy, so he has a lot of knowledge of the old world to bring to us.

 

 

Spirituality, Social Activism and Spare Time

By Filed Under: The Reader Interview Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

A RABBI’S SEARCH FOR BALANCE

In 2015, Timoner relocated her family from Los Angeles, where she served as associate rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple, to take a position as senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation that traces its roots to the late 19th century and, since 1910, has gathered on the corner of Garfield Place and Eighth Avenue. In her brief time in Brooklyn, the long-time progressive activist and grassroots organizer has become a central force in not only the spiritual but political life of Park Slope, making headlines for her arrest protesting President Trump’s travel ban in February of 2017 and kindling the resistance movement #GetOrganizedBrooklyn with councilmember Brad Lander, among many other actions both within the congregation and in the wider community. 

As we sat in her cozy, book-filled office tucked behind CBE’s sanctuary, the rabbi engaged with off the cuff eloquence about relocating from the west coast, following the teachings of the Torah, and what to do about millennials. A theme of our conversation was the complexity of the human experience, and how challenging it can be to not only live with but try to embrace contradiction.

Perhaps we can look to Timoner as a model for such duality. She is commanding yet compassionate, emotional and intellectual. She is endlessly active, yet — this struck me most of all — she listens, carefully, thoughtfully. When you speak with Rabbi Timoner, you feel heard. Understood. Though this writer’s spiritual search continues, I left my conversation with the rabbi — as I did last time we spoke about her work — emboldened by another dialectic: spurred on to action and anchored by the great wisdom that exists in our own backyard. 

 

What makes your congregation such a unique and special place, one that would draw you to Park Slope all the way from California?

There’s a question right now in the Jewish world about what the future of the synagogue is going to look like. A lot of a lot of young Jews think about the synagogue as something that their parents or their grandparents were part of, and there’s a question of like, can and will the synagogue reinvent itself? And how? This congregation has been engaged in that for some time and really is open to experimentation. To engaging the larger neighborhood, not just the Jewish community. To being right there and relevant on whatever the pressing questions are at the time. And that’s the kind of congregation that I most wanted to serve. One where we could be talking about what’s most important in our society and in our lives. And one where we are having a really open boundary, like just really open to the rest of the community and looking actively for partnerships across lines of race, across lines of faith. And also one that is willing to be bold, and willing to try new things and willing even to fail in the pursuit of the kind of change that meets people where they are. 

It seems that a huge part of your life is defined by your commitment to social justice. Do you ever feel that there’s tension between that role and your role as a rabbi? Or does anyone from the congregation ever give you the idea that there might be tension there? 

In any congregation this big, we have like 900-something households, there’s diversity there. And there are a lot of people who really prize the role that we’re playing around social justice. It’s one of their primary points of connection. And there are other people who don’t want to see that here. Who feel like a synagogue should be mostly a place that feels calm and peaceful, where we don’t really talk about political questions. Where we don’t talk about things that are upsetting. There are people who feel that way. Or who feel like the direction our country is going in is OK, there are those. It’s a very small minority of people here, but there are some people who feel that way. So, the way that I feel about that is when I am aware of somebody being uncomfortable with the direction we’re taking, I really want them to know that I want to hear from them and I want to sit with them. I want to hear what’s been uncomfortable and want to hear, you know, I want to hear their perspective. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not going to do what I’m doing or that I’m not going to lead the way I’m leading because I do feel like this moment requires that of us. I actually feel, beyond this moment, I feel that Torah and Judaism requires of us that we take a stand on the moral questions of our time. And then we take the political questions. Torah is actually a political text. It’s about society. It’s about how to create a just society. That’s what Torah is. So in my eyes, if I were to be silent or inactive on the injustices of our time, I would be betraying Torah. In order to fulfill Torah and be true to it, I have to speak. I don’t have a choice. 

As a society, we want to move beyond this idea of, “as a Democrat, I could never be friends with a Republican” and vice versa, but it sometimes feels like we’re creating divisions that are insurmountable. But we have to be able to reach across and have a dialogue…

Because we have more in common than we realize. One of the things that we’ve been doing this year, actually for the last two years, is creating a dialogue series here specifically hoping that people will come who don’t agree with each other. This year our focus is Israel. Within the Jewish community, there’s a really big range of feelings about Israel, and within this congregation there are. So we have a 12-part series we’ve been doing this year in which each time we meet, one of the hours is study, where we actually learn some history about Israel and Palestine and Jewish history and get grounded in some knowledge. And then the other hour is dialogues. So we have trained a group of congregants to be facilitators, and we have small groups and people come together and really are encouraged to open up and talk about how they feel and what they think and to disagree with each other. And to grow our capacity to be uncomfortable, to grow our capacity to listen to views we don’t agree with, to take a deep breath, to stay open, to stay curious, to see if there’s something we might learn. None of us has the answers. To develop a humility that, I need you and you need me and we need each other to be able to create a society together. And so I think that what that requires is two parts of the whole. One part is being able to speak and act with clarity on the things we are clear about. You were asking about social justice. So there’s a lot of things that are very clear from Torah about what should happen in a just society. When we see injustice, we must speak about it, we need to protest it, we need to stand for what’s right. Meanwhile, we also have to have the ability to listen to people who don’t agree and to be humble in that conversation and to be open and to be curious and to expect that we might have something we don’t know. And that’s a very challenging combination. Two different modes of being. But I’m trying to make both those modes of being happen here, both myself and my own leadership and for the congregation to have opportunities to do both things at the same time.  

It wasn’t that long ago that you joined the rabbinate, receiving s’micha from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2009. Since then, how have you grown in your spirituality? In your idea of what it means to be a rabbi?

I feel like my growing edge, the part that I’m always learning about is the relationship between spirituality and social justice, between having an active relationship with God, the source of life. Having an active relationship with the aspects of being alive that are more subtle and internal and with the part of my leadership that has to do with crying out for the role that should be. And those in some ways really obviously dovetail with one another and other ways can sometimes feel far apart from each other. Sometimes the work we do, when we are advocating for policies or doing community organizing or protesting things, can feel really secular. Really, really secular. I think that the integration of those two things, always remembering where the motivation comes from. I don’t just care about this as an American. I care about this as a Jew. I care about this as a rabbi. Where does that come from? It comes from Torah. Where in Torah does it come from? And where does Torah come from? Where does that feeling in us that pulls us to say, wait, I believe in us as, as human beings, I believe that we can do better than this. I must speak about this thing that’s wrong. Where does that pull come from deep within us? My feeling is that that comes from something beyond us. It’s also in us, and so just always connecting those two pieces. I feel like it’s possible to be praying and not thinking about the world or be in the world and not be thinking about God, and I’m always wanting to reconnect those two things to each other and integrate them. That is, for me, it has always been a very present challenge for me, and it continues to be. 

You also aren’t afraid to put yourself on the front lines of social justice. I know you’ve engaged in civil disobedience and written and spoken about that work. I was struck by something in a piece you wrote about the Muslim ban. You said that civil disobedience is what privilege should be used for. Could you take me back to that moment and elaborate on that sentiment? 

There were a group of rabbis, 19 of us, who blocked the road by Trump Tower in Manhattan, the Trump hotel on Central Park West and Columbus Circle. I was aware that night about how safe I felt, sitting in the dark in the middle of the road. I knew that the cars weren’t going to hit me because there were police there blocking them. I knew that the police weren’t going to beat me up. I knew that I wasn’t going to get locked up for days with no one coming to help me. I knew that if there was bail I could pay it. I knew that I wasn’t going to get put in Rikers Island. Given that I was doing something risky, I felt remarkably safe. And that is because of a lot of things. I have white skin. I have lots of contacts, lawyers who could help me. We organized this in a way where we made sure that we had what we needed to be safe. I think one of the interesting dynamics as white people become more and more aware of our privilege and more and more aware of systemic racism is to think about what to do with it. Because it’s not useful to sit around feeling guilty that you’ve gotten a leg up on everyone, all people of color around you, that you’ve gotten advantages that other people haven’t gotten. It doesn’t do anything to feel guilty about that. So, ok, instead, I’ve got this privilege, I’ve benefited from this privilege. I would like to dismantle this system, but in the meantime, what do I do with this privilege and the power that it gives me? If I can put my body on the line in a visible way that gets media attention for people who might be behind bars or might be in detention, or might be at risk of deportation or are being barred from this country because of their religion, et cetera. If I can do that, that is a great way to use my privilege. Whereas if I didn’t have these privileges, taking that risk is something that I still might do, but it would be much riskier. And so I do feel like for those who have privilege, I think one of the questions we ought to ask ourselves is: what is this privilege good for? What can I use it for, given that I have it, and how do I use it with tremendous humility? How do I make sure that I am acting in a way that supports the leadership of people who are targeted and oppressed that never brings attention to myself at their cost or expense, but that is strategic and makes that privilege useful.

Given all that you do and these different roles you play, how do you not only find time for yourself, but also for your family?

I think that people who aren’t involved in synagogues or churches often don’t have any idea how clergy schedules are. 

And I imagine in many cases, people need you, they don’t just want to chat. 

Yeah. So my schedule, like I tend to be completely booked, you know, 10 to 12 hours a day without a break. I’m booked six weeks out, for six weeks solid. And then if you go six weeks ahead, you can find that opening. I right now have kind of found my groove. When I started in this job, it was overwhelming to me. When I started in my last job, it was overwhelming to me, but in time you kind of get to know the rhythm, the game of Tetris that is the calendar [laughs]. And in terms of time with my family, I don’t have enough time with my family. I don’t. I just was away with them this weekend and really, really soaked up that time and enjoyed it. But in general, I don’t have as much time with my family as I would like. We make sure to have Shabbat dinner together every Friday night and make sure to have, you know, little snippets here and there late at night and sometimes on the weekends. But it’s part of what I agreed to when I decided to be a rabbi. I took that on, and I hope, I think that my children and my family are getting what they need. But yeah, it’s definitely a lot to balance. In terms of not going crazy or not getting too exhausted, I do keep my eye on that. Like I definitely work hard to find ways that I’m going to get enough rest, have some time when I’m not here, have some time when I have some days off. Because I would love to be doing this work for a really long time.

To make it sustainable. Well, to come full circle, there are various reports that say millennials are less inclined to believe in organized religion. What you make of that? Do you notice that in your own congregation? 

Well, one thing that’s incredible here at CBE is that we have this thing called Brooklyn Jews, which is for millennials, and it is thriving. There are hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of people in their twenties and thirties who are coming to things and who are connected to each other and making community. I think the issue is, if it looks like the older generation’s thing, like, who wants to be part of that? If it looks like it’s willing to adapt to meet you where you are, then it starts to become intriguing. Brooklyn Jews has Shabbat services, it has Shabbat dinners, it has holiday parties. It has all kinds of different things out and about in Brooklyn and at CBE. Increasingly we are combining things, with Brooklyn Jews and the general congregation doing things together. And it turns out that a lot of the 

people in their twenties and thirties, they really want to be an intergenerational environment, as long as it’s not just that they’re supposed to fit into what the older generation wants. It should be about them also. And we’re ready to do that. And we do that. And it’s really incredible. I would say that the polling data about millennials, I am not seeing that. I think that it’s overstated. 

I’m someone who is still figuring out my own path, but we all need community. There also are statistics that people are lonelier than ever and more addicted to substances than ever.

Yes. Yes, I think that millennials are very much looking for community.

And in real time. 

Yes, with other people, laughing, talking, eating, singing, being together. You know, I think millennials very much are spiritual. They might not think of themselves as religious, but they’re spiritual. They’re curious about, they’re wanting to engage with questions of meaning and questions of life purpose. I think I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel that they kind of are connected to something larger than themselves, and it’s mysterious, and they don’t know what that is, but they want to be able to pursue that and explore it. And so I don’t think really fundamentally millennials are different than everybody else. 

We just have a lot more confusing content to sort through. 

Yeah. And our world is… looking at our world right now could lead one to despair. And I think coming of age in this time is harrowing. So having other people to do that with, having people to do that with who will also be willing to talk and think about what makes you hopeful and what we could do together and where we could come together and are willing to laugh. I think everybody needs that.

 

Synchronous Art: His Lifeblood, His Being

By Filed Under: Personal Essay, The Arts Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

The light that shines through the translucent plastic is viciously sensual. The sun permeates the material and projects a candy colored pink shadow onto the wooden floor, met with varying shades of effervescent lime, intrepid orange, and delicate violet. The radiant shadows dance with one another, shifting in hue and intensity as the outside light moves from dawn to dusk.

A ten foot by four foot patchwork of pellucid materials sewn together hangs from the bay window of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. This is the work of Marc Lafia, an artist that has made his studio the bottom floor of his family home. 

It is a quiet Thursday afternoon and the studio is vacant: not of the art, but of the artist. It is rare to experience the space without the emanating presence of Marc, who spends most days working, writing, and creating art in the various rooms of his atelier. As he innovates, he unearths himself. 

Marc’s art practice is iterative and perpetually blossoming. He’s like a conductor of a massive orchestra that he is constantly recasting, refining, and expanding. His musicians take the form of any and every material that one could imagine: sheets of silicon, latex, silk, diaphanous plastic, giant gauze, organza, metallic mylar, wooden cubes, cardboard, sheer cloth, tissue paper, textiles, zippers, pliable string, potato sacks, felt, zip lock bags, and more. The list is infinite. Marc decides how these materials will come together to form works of art, sometimes in duets, sometimes in quartets, and most often in symphonies.

A few days each week, Marc roams the aisles of Canal Plastics and Mood Fabrics, two of his go-to stores in Lower Manhattan. He can spend hours observing the highly industrialized and refined products that line the shelves of these emporiums, touching every piece of neoprene or acrylic he comes across. He examines the materials by feeling them, touching them, scrutinizing their various sizes, weights, shapes, and textures. Sometimes he knows what he is looking for, but often what he brings home is different from what he set out to buy.

Perhaps that is an apt parallel for Marc’s style as an artist. That is not to say that his work is random: not at all. It is deliberately eclectic. He knows, but he doesn’t know. He is perceptive and reflective, thinking deeply about his ideas, claims, and desires, but he often translates these preconceptions into tangible realities via of-the-moment discoveries. His work ethic is deeply in touch with the present, with his surroundings and his environment, with the materials he has at hand, with the weather of the day, with the light of the hour. 

Marc’s ever expanding toolkit of raw materials are more than just a response to his artistic visions. In fact, for him, that link is actually reversed: it is the materials themselves that garner his vision. His work certainly requires cavernous rumination, but not without the help of a physical substrate laying before his eyes to help propel his thinking forward. He will admit, and proudly so, that his materials often dictate his ideas. 

______

The next morning, a brisk December Friday, he embarks on his daily routine of waking up with the sun and walking downstairs to retrieve hot coffee with steamed milk in a mossy green mug. He then returns to his bedroom, sinks into his mattress as he leans against the blue-gray colored wall, and opens the “Notes” application on his computer. Here he keeps hundreds of documents of essays, moodboards, and nuggets of thought about his current body of work, which has yet to have a definite title. It oscillates between “In What Language to Come,” “Forms, Appearances, and Representations,” and “Experience of the Pleasant, of Reward, and of the Beautiful.” 

 

 

He spends the next few hours writing away, perhaps energized by his eccentric dream from the previous night. Marc is an avid and vivid dreamer, each night bringing a new discovery, terror, realization, or experience for him. He likes to stress that he dreams in intense color. In his last slumber, his escapade began by him walking down a hill of lusciously green grass. He says he came across a deep, dark, bottomless, aquamarine, reflective blue lake. A crisp white convertible car was dripping water in slow motion as it was pulled up by a bright orange crane. A massive crowd of people gathered to watch, and they were all wearing glossy yellow raincoats.

Though he tries not to take the content of his dreams too seriously, it is the arresting colors that stick with him throughout the day. Around 10am, he dresses in one of three typical outfits: an all white ensemble, a blue pinstripe button down shirt coupled with black trousers, or a fabulously patterned shirt paired with hazelnut colored corduroys. The constants of each day’s attire include a bedazzled black belt and a dainty neck scarf. He also always wears two beaded bracelets, one blue and one black, that were made and gifted to him in Japan two summers ago by the mother of a good friend of his, a fellow artist herself. The mother passed away a few months following Marc’s visit to her home in Tokyo, and he has worn the bracelets daily ever since.

Marc descends the two flights of stairs from his bedroom to the bottom floor, stopping briefly in the kitchen for a handful of salted nuts. He slips on his caramel brown Turkish slippers–that are so worn they need orange duct-tape to keep them from falling apart–as he crosses the threshold of his studio. The room is freezing–he calls it his “winter palace”–but he is immune to this arctic cold since he spends nearly every day in it. Sometimes he lights a fire in the backroom fireplace, which adds to the natural, earthy feeling of his space. Still, his resistance to the cold isn’t strong enough to stop him from putting on a thin black jacket for imperative warmth.

The particular brownstone inside which he has built his studio is a unique space because it is a corner house, and thus has sixteen windows on the parlor floor alone. “To me it’s like an amazing, massive camera,” Marc describes. “You’re getting almost four sides of light.”

His sensitivity to light is deeply ingrained within him, likely formed by his background in photography and film. Although his career path shifted to fine art fifteen years ago, his time in film school and utter love of photography have been integral in forming how he experiences the world, and in turn how he experiences and thus creates art. Marc’s mind is always thinking of different “shots,” constantly constructing a story and a documenting a narrative as he goes about his day, just as he was trained to do as a filmmaker. He does not passively standby and watch reality unfold, but rather actively experiences thing with an eye trained to preserve content that might be perfect material for a later project. In this vein, Marc is the epitome of a metacognitive person and thinker: in fact, one could say that he is a metacognitive connoisseur. He is always stepping back to think about how he is thinking, how he is doing what he is doing, how he is responding to the things that he feeling. His cinematic mind has become intrinsic, morphing into a philosophical locomotive that critically thinks and makes in tandem.

Marc’s current work is perhaps the culmination of years and years of retaliation against photography as it is most typically known. As someone who lived through the transition from the analog to the digital, he has become acutely attune to form. He is obsessed with the how of things, anything, more so than the what or the why. He grew up with the restriction of 35 shots on a roll of film that would take days to get developed, and fifty years later he has an iPhone with 64 gigabytes of storage that allows him to take thousands upon thousands of pictures that he can view instantly. Having witnessed such a rapid transition and expansion of the capabilities of a camera, Marc is fascinated by what a picture was, what a picture is, and what a picture can be. Evidence of this interest is clear in the titles of his last and current books: “Image Photograph,” and “The Event of Art,” respectively. 

“One of the things that interested me when I was doing a lot of photography was the physical act of printing the photographs,” Marc recollects. He goes onto describe how he’d go to galleries and play close attention to the frame that a photograph was placed in, the size of the image, the paper it was printed on, and so on. This led him to the profound realization that a photograph is also an object, a claim that he has since been working on for years on end.

“I wanted to make an image with a new kind of substrate,” he declares. That desire transpired a few years ago when Marc began to print photographs onto paper lampshades from Ikea. He found interesting ties between this new work and the traditional medium of photography when he happily remembered that all negatives are plastic–analog film is plastic, so the physical existence of a “photograph” is enabled by a palpable material.

That was the beginning of a very organic progression of zealous work for Marc, all budding and building and growing from an underlying desire to discover and create a new form of photography. He started venturing to fabric stores, on a mission to discover the possibilities that materials of all kinds would lead him to.

He started with sewing the Ikea lamp shades to a piece of colored plastic, and hung it up in his studio as a kind of experiment. He waited for the afternoon light to hit, and all of a sudden the newly made sculpture began to glow. This was his first iteration of a new kind of material “photograph.”

It’s no wonder that Marc has been making work that encompasses light, because the way that the sun gushes and blushes and bursts through the windows of his studio would fill anyone with exuberance. The late afternoon light in particular, which hits the front, western side of the room, is sure to galvanize a visceral reaction. Each hour of the day fills his studio with a different sensitivity of ambient light

Marc walks up to the pink, sheer cloth that hangs from a clothesline-like structure in the center of the room, examining it by way of touching it. He picks up a larger piece of fabric, composed of several smaller pieces sewn together, and fastens it to an opening further down the clothesline. 

It is a day in which the sun’s desire to shine is constantly wavering. One moment the sky is overcast, and the next the sun is beaming. It is during the latter that the art in the room is at its peak. A leisurely, observant meander throughout the studio reveals a myriad of shadows in every nook and cranny. Fabric pieces are hung all around the room, creating projections of light that are variable, fluctuating, mercurial, volatile, fluid, shifting.

After his first fabric experiment, he coined the term “light-sculpture,” and began making a multitude of them. “These fabrics are light sculptures in the sense that they are light sensitive, made with various kinds of plastic and polyesters,” he explains. “Each material has a different kind of opacity, transparency, and color that emits light; that lets light moves forward; that lets shards of sun ripple through.” With each new piece, he continues to explore his fascination with what happens when light is enclosed, enraptured, and held within itself. “It’s kind of like an adventure that gets very obsessive. You just keep going with it, you follow it, and it takes you where it wants to go. That’s the whole point, and that’s what I love about it.”

His studio is now full of light sculptures of all shapes and sizes and colors, all of which refract and transpose light in different ways. The way that the fabrics fold and mold into each other feels organic and animate, as if the sculptures themselves are living and breathing just like we are. “They are very alive.” 

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His work reminds the viewer of something, but they are not sure exactly what it is. “It’s very oblique in a way.” The viewer wants to touch them, or at least imagine what the various materials feel like. “I want to step back from depiction, representation, and imitation, and present things as phenomena itself. From there, I can open up a space to give view to materiality and form as an object itself.” 

Marc’s work fluid, ephemeral, and ever changing. He says that he’s been trying to make something that changes as you move about it, something that sees you more than you see it. He wants to evoke a relationship between “the perceiver, and the embodied perception.” At the same time, his new work is very much about fragility, a kind of “frozen calamity physics,” as he describes. To him, it’s all about the things that are about to fall apart, and yet precariously stay together. He adamantly disagrees with the common perception that art is permanent, that it defeats time and can exist forever. For Marc, art is an experience of the moment. He is inspired by painter Marcelle Duchamp and musician John Cage, who were both interested in the idea of variability and chance. One of Marc’s essential mantras is from a Mallarmé poem: “a throw of the dice does not abolish chance.” He says that he still doesn’t quite understand what the phrase means, but he loves it nonetheless. Marc seems to be increasingly interested in dichotomies: how we as people are both so strong and so frail. He tries to echo this paradox in his work.

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Evening comes, and Marc sits on his red reef couch in the back room of the studio reading an article called “Art and Its Surrogates.” Morrissey, his favorite musician, is blasting on speakers. He listens to “Mountjoy” over and over and over again, singing along to the lyric, “The joy brings many things, but it cannot bring you joy.”

He looks up towards his sculptures, which hang about the space without the presence of light. They are resting, sleeping, unwinding. Getting ready for tomorrow, for another day of luminescent variability. 

“You can make art with your family, in your house, on an airplane, at the beach. You can make art, do art, be art, act art. You ARE art. Art has a fullness and a robustness that is everbecoming. It’s really fun.”

His orchestra tunes its instruments, and their conductor falls into a colorful dream.

Eating a Tuesday Night Away at “Taste of Fifth”

By Filed Under: Eat Local Tagged With: ,

If there’s one New York neighborhood you’d expect to be getting down on a Tuesday night, it certainly wouldn’t be Park Slope. However, if you throw in unlimited tastings of both food and alcohol, the residents can and will make an exception. This past Tuesday’s Taste of Fifth proved to be a massive hit, with hoards of people eating and dancing their way through the swanky yet funky event space of The Grand Prospect Hall. If Jay Gatsby were to have hosted his own food festival, he would’ve definitely put this venue on his list. 

[pullquote]Taste of Fifth continues to be a festive and filling gathering of neighborhood foodies, families, and New Yorkers looking for a good time and a good bite, of course.[/pullquote]With three full banquet rooms of 40+ businesses, Park Slope’s varied dining scene was truly showcased; Vendors served everything from Thai street food and ice cream (Sky Ice) to miniature tacos (Calexico). With an ever increasing amount of cafes and restaurants stepping up to the challenge of conquering the Fifth Avenue dining scene, the yearly Taste of 5th is easily the most fun, cost efficient, and timely way of deciding where your next go-to spot in town will be…and reversibly, which ones you may want to avoid! While Park Slope boasts an overwhelming amount of taco joints, both fusion and traditionally presented, not all vendors managed to match the savory flavors and fires of your true, authentic street taco. Similarly, the vast number of dessert providers had great ideas in concept, but in flavor may have fallen short in texture and quality. Regardless, Taste of 5th easily displayed just how diverse Park Slope can really be in its food scene, as I myself walked away with double samples and my own mental list of places I’ll be sure to grab full meals from later on.

 

A speakeasy serving up Tito’s Vodka cocktails provided a true getaway for folks seeking alcoholic provisions, while live jazz band Hot Club of Flatbush fueled both foodies and drinkers with an excess of strong energy and plenty of high-tempo jams to dance off the calories. Plenty of wine and beer vendors also managed create “warm spirits” throughout the evening. Not to mention, this was an altruistic occasion. 33% of the cost for every ticket went to a local charity of the buyer’s choice. Thanks to a myriad of humble and local sponsors, Taste of Fifth continues to be a festive and filling gathering of neighborhood foodies, families, and New Yorkers looking for a good time and a good bite, of course.