Honoring Dr. King in Crown Heights

There are several excellent ways to honor King's legacy right here in Crown Heights this weekend. I've copied the announcement from the Crow Hill Community Association about their community clean-up on Monday, which ILFA will be attending, in full below. If you've got little ones underfoot, the Brooklyn Children's Museum has events on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and if you'd like a stimulating discussion of Dr. King's legacy, check out or tune in to WNYC's annual MLK Day Event at the Brooklyn Museum, "In MLK'S Footsteps: Education as a Civil Right" (last year's event was truly fantastic, and this year's, with a timely topic and a killer lineup of panelists, should be just as good).

From CHCA:

WE INVITE YOU TO JOIN USAS WE CELEBRATE MARTIN LUTHER KING’S LEGACYWITH A CLEAN UP OF OUR COMMUNITY

Come to the Crow Hill Community Garden
(730 Franklin between Park & Sterling)
on MLK Day Observed: Monday January 16th, 10-12
Bring gloves, outdoor brooms/dustpans, garbage bags, etc.
Bring your family, friends & neighbors
and please tell any HS students who might need to do community service

Midweek Links: Safe in This Place Tomorrow (Thursday), Ideas for the Bedford-Union Armory

- Safe in This Place, a community-based theater and dialogue project, hosts its first session tomorrow at Georgia's Place (691 Prospect, at Bedford) from 7-9:30pm. Check the Crow Hill Community Association site (they're helping to sponsor the project) or get in touch with them at safeinthisplace@gmail.com for more information.

- NY1 ran a report on Monday's Town Hall Meeting about possible uses for the Bedford-Union Armory (including a video walkthrough of the site), which will be retired as an active National Guard training facility later this year and handed over to the state. Proposals from local residents included a track-and-field center, an archive for local and civil rights history, an after-school center, a food pantry, and an events space/arena (this last proposed by the folks from Gotham Girls Roller Derby). Ideas are being complied by students in Urban Planning at NYU for a study to be released in the spring (the enormous space could probably accommodate several uses). If you've got an inspiration, send it along to them at bkarmoryproject@gmail.com.

- The Times reports that Hakeem Jeffries, after much preparation and speculation, will announce his bid to replace incumbent Ed Towns in New York's 10th Congressional District this Sunday. 

Secondary Sound Jam Night at Breukelen Coffee House, Tonight at 9pm

Sorry for the short notice on this one - thankfully, they happen every two weeks, so if you miss tonight's jam at the Breukelen Coffee House, mark your calendar for Tuesday, January 24. The basic info's on the flyer, and they're on FB and Twitter, too.

Great Franklin Park Reading Series Tonight Featuring Sam Lipsyte and Gary Lutz

The first Franklin Park Reading Series of 2012 promises to be a great show, with literary luminaries Sam Lipsyte and Gary Lutz joining up-and-coming writers Catherine Lacey, Mitch Levenberg, and Christine Vines (a Crown Heightster) for the third annual short fiction night. To give you an idea of what a rare treat it is to have these writers in the neighborhood, leading literary blog The Rumpus calls Lipsyte today's "greatest comic novelist" and BOMB Magazine says "his sentences burn with the reckless and gaudy flame of homemade pyrotechnics," while writer Ben Marcus says Lutz "is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention." As usual, the drinks will be cheap and the show starts at 8pm (though given how much buzz this event has generated on blogs, events roundups, and twitter, ILFA recommends getting there early).

More from their FB page:


We're super excited about our January 9 reading, which is our third annual short fiction night! Two of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and influential authors, SAM LIPSYTE (The Ask, Home Land) and GARY LUTZ (Divorcer, Stories in the Worst Way), will be joined by new... stars CATHERINE LACEY (Fifty-Two Stories, The Believer), MITCH LEVENBERG (Fiction, The Saint Ann's Review) and CHRISTINE VINES, the curator of the Fiction Addiction reading series.

As a sponsor of this special event, the literary magazine The Coffin Factory will be giving away copies of its latest issue to the first 50 attendees.

FREE! $4 PINTS!

SUBWAY: 2/3/4/5 to Franklin Avenue

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Franklin-Park-Reading-Series/136238993071415

Featuring:

SAM LIPSYTE (The Ask, Home Land)
GARY LUTZ (Divorcer, Stories in the Worst Way)
CATHERINE LACEY (Fifty-Two Stories, The Believer)
MITCH LEVENBERG (Fiction, The Saint Ann’s Review)
CHRISTINE VINES (Fiction Addiction)

SAM LIPSYTE is the author of the novels The Ask, The Subject Steve and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award. He is also the author of the story collection Venus Drive, named one of the 25 Best Books of 2000 by The Village Voice Literary Supplement. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, Tin House, Noon, N+1, McSweeney's, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, among other places. In 2008 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York and is a professor of fiction at Columbia University.

GARY LUTZ is the author of the short story collections Stories in the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, Partial List of People to Bleach and, most recently, Divorcer. His work has appeared in Noon, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, StoryQuarterly, The Believer, Cimarron Review, Slate and other publications. His story “People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You” was featured in the anthology The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. A recipient of a literature grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is currently a professor of English and composition at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.

CATHERINE LACEY has published fiction and nonfiction in Fifty-Two Stories, Cousin Corinne's Reminder, The Believer, elimae and other places. She co-owns and operates a B&B in downtown Brooklyn called 3B.

MITCH LEVENBERG has published essays and short fiction in journals such as The New Delta Review, Fiction, The Assisi Journal and The Saint Ann’s Review and is the author of a story collection, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants. Two of his essays about his father’s experiences in the Philippines during the Second World War were included in the anthologies Pain and Memory and Common Boundary. Currently, he is working on a book of poetry, Transformational Love, and teaches at St. Francis College and New York University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

CHRISTINE VINES is a fiction writer and the curator of Fiction Addiction, a reading series in the East Village. She received a BA in English from Vassar College and lives in Crown Heights.

ILFA Gets Inked

There's been a dearth of posts this weekend because the lady and I were celebrating a birthday and six months of marriage back-to-back. In honor of this modest achievement (but hey, you've gotta get to six months before you get to sixty years, right?), ILFA wants to extend long-overdue gratitude to the fine folks at the Brooklyn Ink Spot Tattoo Parlor on Franklin at St. Johns for helping us tie the knot with some Franklin Avenue flavor (Lily & Fig also provided our wedding favors). 

Having plotted complimentary tattoos for us for quite some time, the lady drew the original designs, and Kevin at the Ink Spot made them permanent with ease (ten nerd points for those who caught the obscure Ovid reference in the leaf designs). The experience was quick, fun, and professional, and we left satisfied (based on the high marks Ink Spot receives from the Brooklynians and the recommendations we got from the guys at Breukelen Coffee House, that seems to be the norm there). All of which is to say that if you're thinking of getting creative with your skin, there's a great place to do it locally (plus, the owners just opened Bella Greens in their former spot down by Park Place).

Weekend Links: Art and Armories

Lotsa links, in three categories:

This weekend, check out the first Target First Saturday of the year at the Brooklyn Museum, celebrating the achievements of the LGBTQ community in NYC and beyond. Monday brings a double bill, with an open house and town hall meeting on the future of the Bedford-Union Armory with Borough Prez Marty Markowitz at Medgar Evers College (see above) followed by the first Franklin Park Reading Series of 2012 (nice write-up in New York Magazine). 

Thinking ahead to next weekend, WNYC's annual MLK Day Event (on Sunday, not Monday) at the Brooklyn Museum is free and looks great. This year's theme is "Education as a Civil Right." The Brooklyn Children's Museum will also have a slate of kid-friendly events going all weekend to celebrate Dr. King. 

In other news, the new year brings death and rebirth - Roti 'N Dumplings on Union at Franklin closed its doors, while Bella's opened to rave reviews in the old Brooklyn Inkspot place on Franklin at Park. If you like old maps as much as ILFA does, check out the BHS "Map of the Month" for January (you can always spot our little corner of Brooklyn - it's just south of the village of Bedford). Finally, SOS Crown Heights is hiring, and a local tattoo artist is trying to become the "Ink Master" on Spike TV. 

Safe in This Place Seeking Participants

Safe in This Place, a theater-based workshop series exploring what it means to be safe along the Avenue, is seeking participants from the neighborhood to take part in ten Thursday night sessions starting one week from today on January 12 (complete information is copied below from the Crow Hill Community Association). ILFA caught up with the organizers - three students in CUNY's innovative Applied Theater program who live nearby - earlier today to hear more about how the project was developed and what the workshops will be like. 

"Applied theater," as the organizers of Safe in This Place practice it, is built on the traditions of community-based theater and political theater in the United States and drama-in-education in the UK, and has an ongoing relationship with Theater of the Oppressed as developed in Brazil by Augusto Boal. As they put it, "we believe in engagement and reciprocal learning rather than coming into a neighborhood and telling people what the answer is to their problems." Examples of their work and the work of their colleagues include the Bar None Theater Project, which created original theater in a women's prison, and the St. Vincent's Theater Project, which addressed the closing of St. Vincent's in the Village. To develop a project like Safe in This Place, they conduct significant background research into the history and current state of the neighborhood (in this case, the space in which they live), including meeting with community groups, surveying local residents, and generally engaging with what's written and spoken about the area. 

As for the project itself, the goals are to "ask questions and open up dialogue" by "trying to crack open assumptions and the narratives that we're told about safety and figure out what it means for who is in the room and for this neighborhood." There won't be a "typical" workshop or a set format, but participants can expect a lot of games, small group work, and exercises ranging from the silly to the serious, and from familiar formats like story circles and improvisational exercises to more specific and directed work on the issues at hand. (While they warn that such workshops don't translate well to video, there are some examples online from the Creative Arts Team, including this one from Project Change).

If this all sounds interesting and illuminating, considering committing to their Thursday night workshops. It's a great way to continue talking and thinking about these issues in Crown Heights.

For 10 weeks this winter, join your neighbors in using theater activities
to explore what it means to be safe in the neighborhood along Franklin Avenue.

 Free. All are welcome. No theater experience necessary.

“Safe in This Place” is a theater-based workshop series that will engage residents of northern Crown Heights – specifically the neighborhood around Franklin Avenue – in exploring the question: “What does it mean to be safe in this neighborhood?” It will culminate in a public event in March that will be designed by participants to share what we’ve discovered and extend the dialogue to more people in our neighborhood.

The workshops will be facilitated by three local artists who are trained in using theater and drama to engage groups in creative reflection and dialogue.  The workshops will be offered free of charge to adult residents who live, work, and/or socialize on or near Franklin Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and Eastern Parkway.

Dates: Every Thursday from January 12 through March 15, 2012 (Participants are asked to attend all 10 sessions.)
Time: 7:00-9:30pm
Location: Georgia’s Place, 691 Prospect Pl., Brooklyn, NY 11216 (corner of Prospect Pl. and Bedford Ave.)

There will be light refreshments at all the sessions.

No theater experience is necessary. Any interested adults (18 and over) are encouraged to attend. Join us!

For more information, please contact Julia at safeinthisplace@gmail.com or 708-408-2004.

Safe in This Place is a research project of the M.A. in Applied Theatre program at the CUNY School of Professional Studies.