Girls (2012)

 

30 Day Song Challenge - Day 14

A song that you'd love to be played at your wedding.

You can have music at a wedding? Brooklyn Town Hall didn't tell us that.

 I will, however, throw in this track from a great album:

Billy Bragg 'Mother of the Bride' (1991)

"There was a cyclone in Brooklyn last year. It destroyed two vintage T-shirt shops and a banjo."

103/50

New Year's Darts Resolutions (Updated)

Second New Year's Darts Resolution achieved. 'To hit a 180 in a bar or pub'. 

It's the bar I go to when I'm doing laundry and/or picking up the kids from school. I threw for a 180 four times last night whilst the socks and undies were drying but I finally achieved it today, before picking up the kids. No one to witness it but that don't matter:

Only four more Darts Resolutions to go:

• Hit two 180s in one day.
• Hit fifty 180s in 2020.
• Hit a high of 41 - as the lowest score - in a round.
• Hit 60 sixties in a round.
• Hit a 180 in a bar.
• Towards the end of the year, join a pub team and, naturally, go down in flames in ignominious defeat.

P.S. That's my 9th 180 of 2020. I didn't hit my 9th 180 last year until the middle of July.

9/50

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good: Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm by Josh Levine (ECW Press 2010)

 

An Unfunny Kid

“I never thought I would be involved in anything successful,” Larry David once said. “My plan was to try and get by. Maybe at some point I’d get involved in a bank robbery or something.”

Born on July 2, 1947, he was the second son of Morty David, a Brooklyn clothier who would later retire and become president of his condo association, like Jerry’s dad on Seinfeld. Larry’s mother went to work for the Bureau of Child Guidance. Later she wanted Larry to take the civil service test, figuring that he better get himself a secure job — postal worker, teacher — with good benefits. (On Seinfeld, when George moves back into his parents’ house, his mother has the same idea.) His parents were both Democrats, sharing their values and eventually turning Larry into one too.

Larry shared a room with his older brother, Ken, who would later move to Oregon and give advice on computers and investments. Larry went to P.S. 52 and then Sheepshead Bay High School where his report card was filled with average marks because he didn’t much care. (Later an obnoxious comic in a Seinfeld episode would come from Sheepshead Bay. “We were right on the water. The whole atmosphere stank of fish.”) There was always a lot of yelling — between his aunts and uncles, the families of his friends, and in the apartments next to their own. In just the same way, yelling would be a major form of communication on Curb. Larry liked sports and was considered a good athlete by other kids. His parents also forced him to go to Hebrew school, which he detested. He didn’t much hide his feelings and got kicked out for laughing at the rabbi who was telling him off for some infraction. (Even now, when someone is yelling at Larry on Curb he can barely keep himself from laughing.) But his parents, horrified that he wouldn’t be able to have a bar mitzvah, talked him back in.

“We’re both from kind of middle-earth Brooklyn,” said Larry Charles, who would become a producer, writer, and director on both Seinfeld and Curb. “You know, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, lower middle class, under the train tracks. We both understand that sort of Lord of the Flies sensibility that requires you to be very aware as you grow up. It’s a very savage environment, in a lot of ways a very cruel and sadistic environment.”

He was never known as funny, not by his family and not by his friends. But he liked to laugh, and he was a fan of Abbott and Costello, Bob and Ray, and especially the Jewish comic actor Phil Silvers.

Round 317: Brooklyn Calling!

Darts Thrown: June 26th-29th 2019
Blog Written: June 30th 2019

Highest Score: 100
Lowest Score: 3
Sixties: 22
100+: 8


Blogger's Note: Written in haste, so there will be spelling mistakes and slapdash grammar.

Just trying to catch up. Comments and observations will be spasmodic. Why 'Brooklyn Calling!'? Well, that's the dialing code, and we never did change our numbers when we moved to Indy. Go figure. Maybe it's a sign . . . probably not. Nothing to read into the Dart stats. Still mediocre at best, though it is a saving grace that despite 100 being a disappointingly high score, at least I hit 8 of them during the drawn out session.

Anyway, here's a music video to break up the bitty text. Why XTC? Because YouTube told me  . . . and because I'm half-rereading their biography on archive.com at the moment. Why Mayor of Simpleton? Again, 'cos YouTube's algothingy told me. Not one of my favourites but it does hold up:

Living in America

♪Take it to the bridge.♪ Take it from the bridge . . . Brooklyn Bridge, I hardly knew ye.

10 years to the day. Wow!

I never did find a decent Cornish Pasty in 9 years 11 months of living in Brooklyn. Will Indianapolis also break my heart? It's not an occasion for such maudlin thoughts.

Have a classic from Brooklyn's finest, Neil Diamond, instead:

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (Vintage Contemporaries 2008)

We traveled the length of Coney Island Avenue, that low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto-body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistan-run lumberyard. This miscellany was initially undetectable by me. It was Chuck, over the course of subsequent instructional drives, who pointed everything out to me and made me see something of the real Brooklyn, as he called it.

Snow Day

On the QT Q train

File under 'Good to Know'.

The episode of Futurama dates from March 2001 and, of course, the series itself is set in the 31st century but at either end of the dateline, the message of the grabbed screenshot below is loud and clear: the renovation of our local subway station is never going to be completed.

God bless you Matt Groenig and Rupert Murdoch.

I wonder if our local neighborhood blog will accept this post as breaking news?

To An Early Grave by Wallace Markfield (Dalkey Archive Press 1964)

And then off, off to the boardwalk, to hang around and watch the kids. Honest, you never saw such kids. Brown and round and mother-loved, fed on dove's milk and Good Humors. At night they pair off under the pavilions - Milton and Sharon, Seymour and Sandra, Heshie and Deborah. They sing stupid songs, an original word doesn't leave their lips and, clearly, not one will ever stand up for beauty or truth or goodness. Yet - do me something! I could stay and watch them for hours. I feel such love, I chuckle and I beam, and if it was in my power I'd walk in their midst, pat their heads and bless them, each and every one. So they don't join YPSL and they never heard of Hound and Horn and they'll end up in garden apartments, with wall-to-wall carpeting. What does it matter? Let them be happy, only be happy. And such is my state that I will remit all sins . . .

Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005)

The wolf was at the door

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 137

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 137th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1565 friends!

Recent blogs:

The market versus cooperation

Who needs money?

Who bailed out the bankers?

Coming Events:

Discussion on the Labour Party

Monday 22 February, 8.30pm

Unicorn, Church Street, Manchester City Centre

Sunday Evening Film Programme
6pm at 52 Clapham High St, SW4, London

14 February - Why We Fight

28 February - Comrades (part 1)

14 March - Comrades (part 2)

Norwich Radical Film Forum

2pm at The Workshop,

53 Earlham Road, Norwich NR1 3SP

27 February - The Story of Stuff + Manufacturing Consent

20 March - Zeitgeist III

Quote for the week:

"The rich require an abundant supply of the poor."

Voltaire.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

'You woke up my neighborhood'

'Bad hipster art' (is there any other kind?) or sinister political vandalism? Whatever the case, there are strange goings on in our neighbourhood at the moment

Here's the background to the story, and Ditmas Park blog has heaps more on the incident.

Brooklyn, Georgia

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (94)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 94th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1487 friends!

Recent blogs:

Food: commodity or need?

The Grimethorpe Miners

Do We Need Money?

Quote for the week:

"In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself - a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others." William Morris, Useful Work vs Useless Toil, 1884.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

In Ditmas (2009)

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (93)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 93rd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1484 friends!

Recent blogs:

Capitalismís reserve army of labour

The health of wage slaves

Guess who's not getting that rose garden?

Quote for the week:

"This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser." Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Hungry in Midwood

Gourmet Peasant Maddy recounts her recent visit to the world famous Di Fara Pizza in Midwood, Brooklyn with Kara.

Yes, you really do have to wait two to three hours for your pizza but if it tastes half as good hot out the oven as it did when I ate the left overs the next day, then it's worth the wait.

And for those of you who click on the link and read the post, yes, Kara is pregnant. She's at the twenty weeks stage and we're both very happy.

I wasn't going to mention the matter on the blog until little Henry or Henrietta started community college.

"I've been expecting you."

Winter grows in Brooklyn.

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

The New York Times reports on the impact of the murder of Benazir Bhutto on the Pakistani population in Brooklyn.

I just want to clarify one thing

According to the Manchester Guardian, there's a 'Brooklyn Scene'.

Not round our way, there isn't