After a summer away, Brooklyn invokes more love than ever.  This weekend has more going on than anyone could handle.  I like:

Art In Odd Places - Cat walk and sculpture taken to the streets.

Open House New York
- Architecture all over, residential to corporate spaces that let you play voyeur to the dandies. http://new.ohny.org/

Until the Quiet Comes

Flying Lotus at Terminal 5 – the composer performs to fanatics in a bunker.  The video/ short film for the title track off his new album, shows a side of LA not seen.  True Street Art!

A perfect line up of bilingual bands at Barbes tonight includes Pistolera and Rana Santa Cruz, two favorites.

Oh Brooklyn, so much

Daniel Horowitz’s exhibit at Invisible Dog was the perfect backdrop to readings from Teju Cole and Jennifer Egan at the Pen Int’l Literature Festival.  Angela Koh made me want to go to another reading with her hip hop inspired poetry and prose at Unsolicited in the rare books room of the Strand.

For Metro I wrote about Har Mar Superstar, Nneka, and Santigold.  I found new images to love at galleries in Chelsea like Jonathan Levine Gallery and Vicky David’s Arne Quinze exhibit and all over Fountain Art Fair where Fab Five Freddy DJed.

Music, cultural offerings, Brooklyn, how can there be too much, you ask?  There’s just a lot to be had, yo.  And when there’s too much you realize there aren’t any brakes.

Theoretically sure, you can just go home and stay there.  But who gives up concert tickets or amazing meals with old friends or sunny day low rider bike cruises after a grueling work week?  Willingly?  If you don’t partake, what’s the sense in enduring the grind?  To stay home in a closet with mold on the bathroom wall, nah, I didn’t think so. 

Actually my apartment is a good little closet but since the apartment next door burst into big orange flames I’ve been reticent to embrace it in all its Boerum glory.  I’ve been feeling awful California lately.  Just saying.

Los Rakas are products of their environment, hailing from a city that is home to everyone from Too Short to Kreayshawn, but they spent their childhood in Panama City where drums, dance and chant are a part of the everyday, paying homage to African and indigenous heritage with colonial Spanish inflection.  Moving to California Los Rakas present a bicultural identity that is becoming standard.  Shifting language and surroundings adds layers to boastful raps, drawing in the diverse community where they live. mas rakas

Outernational is rooted in street rock classics, New York City, and revolution; elements that give the local boys credence with rock fans looking for a new sound in line with the old guard. They recently covered Bob Dylan on Amnesty International’s 50-year anniversary compilation. But they’re truly revolutionary for unorthodox choices as a band that courts the mainstream.

1.  The members of Outernational are gringos who sing in Spanish. A lot. They have questionable accents, they don’t speak the language, but they staunchly stand behind their choice to go bilingual, for a variety of excellent reasons.  read more

Next up, Nneka!

Art Battles  Artists from NYC and Europe have works on tour around the EU and the US.  They  travel with the paintings for live painting shows and treated the LES to a gallery exhibit and an event at Le Poisson Rouge this month.

Snow White – Company XIV made Snow White a sexy beast of a live show with aerial dance, opera, hot costumes and music, and a great script. 

Lola Astanova at Carnegie Hall hosted by Donald Trump and Julie Andrews, a benefit for the American Cancer Society and a tribute to Vladamir Horowitz. “Music and the arts essential, mirror to learn about ourselves and our legacy. Connects us to the world. Heals and nurtures.” – Julie Andrews

Ozomatli at Lincoln Center Jazz – The band celebrated 17 years together with an intimate concert in the room with a massive view, The Allen Room at Columbus Circle.  They presented the show they brought to the TED Conference in San Francisco recently, a spoken word retrospective that tells stories of touring, activism, and being ambassadors abroad.  They’re also on a kids’ album of PBS educational songs, including a track called “Opposable Thumbs.”  Must be fun taking a band into the next generation with horns and bilingual synergy.

I once spent three days in Sicily, in the hilltop city of Taormina, home of an ancient Greek temple.  It remains, in my memory bank, a site of unrivaled beauty, and food.  I went there at 20 and my friend got sick and stayed in the hostel all weekend so I was solo.  And I found it wasn’t easy to walk the small town without being proposed marriage to.  By the street-side rose seller, the fisherman, or the policeman.  I was happy to find a fellow tourist from Sacramento or somewhere less than glamorous, on the second day, and have some sanity during my site-seeing.  But now I am not 20, I live in Brooklyn, and I have no problem with that same male warmth that smothered me in foreign lands.  Some “Ciao Bella” with my bakery goodness on Atlantic?  Not a problem.

This is especially true when the bakery is a divine gift in the form of perfectly balanced almond-flour-meets-butter-and-lemon-zest.  Powdered sugar, fresh cream, rum-soaked buns, oh wow.  I cannot praise Catania enough, I’ll just leave you with this.  I’ve passed on my find to four friends thus far (after another friend promised me heaven in a cake case and introduced me to its holy empire of fresh and fluffy).  Each of those friends wore the same expression upon sampling and went through the identical motions:  head rolls back, gaze pauses and blink, OMG is uttered, then swallow.  “This is ____ (amazing, incredible, exactly like the what my grandma made…).”

Recommended:  almond cookie, rum babba, eclair, sugar donut, cup of joe!  If you get past the sweets to the pizza let me know how it is?

One of Catania’s owners is a Roman reality TV star, formerly of Grande Fratello (Big Brother).  All of the guys who work there make you feel like a traveler, on the road sussing out the freshest baked goods.

November 7…6-9pm…..The Trilby in the Cooper Square Hotel….25 Cooper Square

November 15…..6-9pm…..Sky Room Times Square….The Fairfield Inn, 330 W. 40th

I saw this performance at the Memorial for Hope Reichbach, introducing the scholarship in her name for Brooklyn students working in public service.  The Brooklyn Steppers were cool, like Hope.

It was a scary Saturday, dark and windy.  The hardware stores ran out of flashlights, we stocked up on water.  Bloomberg called off the subway for the day, NYC no subway is weird.  The bridges were closed and there was a curfew.  Brooklyn hid indoors.  Except I had a date with an Aussie firefighter/surfer on bikes.  We rode to Fort Greene and found Moe’s was open for business, threatening storm and curfew and all.  So we hung out at Moe’s and made friends.