Caesar And Cassius With A Satellite Modem

I don't usually talk to people on the subway. Not even if I know them. Not even if I got on the subway with them. But this morning, on the L to Manhattan, I overheard a conversation which combined (in the space of two minutes): Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, a daily videoblog and podcast, and a round-the-world-on-a-trawler trip starting tomorrow. I did the unthinkable and stuck my nose in. And here's what I got: a link to Bill Bowles's website, which kicked off in earnest yesterday and will kick off in a different form tomorrow, when he starts his world voyage (not in the cardboard vessel pictured here, I should clarify). He calls himself an "Interactive World Traveller" and has a background in film and theatre. Equipped with a satellite modem, he's planning to blog every day from tomorrow from wherever it is he ends up. Today, he podcasted from Brooklyn - somewhere in Bushwick, I think - where he and his actress sister gave Shakespeare his turn on the waterfront.

I know that videoblogging (vlogging) and video podcasting are well up and running by now in the blogosphere, but at the risk of sounding like a fogey (well, I am over 25...ancient in blogging terms), I don't know much about this type of blogging, and I don't have any video blogs on my blogroll. So, while it might be old hat by now, I was still really interested by what Bowles had to say about his project and about the ramifications of vlogging for traditional forms of journalism:

It dawned on me a few months ago, that if you had all the right gear, (camera, laptop, sat. phone, solar panels) a person could be a new sort of independent journalist; uploading video stories from anywhere in the world, while maintaining one’s creative freedom. I figure that within a few years, most travelers and bloggers will have this sort of gear, and we’ll have thousands of un-affiliated reporters roaming the globe, sending out news as part of a diverse open-source media network. I don’t really consider myself a journalist, but I’m interested in trying out the concept to see what happens.

I think it was the incredibly casual way his sister dropped into the conversation that he was about to sail around the world with his video camera that really piqued my interest. Even when I'm taking the subway to Manhattan, it feels like a major operation. Maybe that's the difference between the vlogger and the blogger. Or maybe it's just that they don't have wireless signals on the subway. Yet.

Any vlogs or video podcast recommendations out there?

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Welcome to the BQE, Bitch

Sometimes we forget that we live in Brooklyn, and allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that we've been transported into some less crowded version of the Village, except with fewer tourists, fewer strollers, better bars and lower rent. And then some actual CRIMINALS steal a van and set it on fire outside our window! At six o'clock in the evening! On Yom Kippur!! (Ok, ok, the last bit was just overkill.)


Man, we live an edgy life. I'm surprised some gangsta types aren't vying to shoot me in the head even as I write this. It must be the sound of the first ever JK Ensemble, streaming live from the wireless, that's saving me. By tomorrow, I expect to hear a playlist consisting of Bonnie Prince Billy and improvisations on Bach banging through the car windows of all the young men cruising (but not in the Village sense of the word) out there. And then, in a nice piece of symmetry, JK will open Wednesday's show by spinning the current boom-car fave, "You Already Know I Want to Fuck You (Fuck You, Fuck You)". And Ana Leddy will finally realise the enormity of her mistake.

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Photos from Secret Project Robot, Williamsburg

Secret Project Robot is a gallery space located in Monster Island, a converted warehouse building located on what seems to be the only few hundred square feet of ground not earmarked for high-rise development along the Hudson at Kent Avenue, Williamsburg. It houses several art organisations and hosts regular exhibitions and events; last weekend’s art and music festival was one of the best things we’ve been to in Brooklyn. Check out their (strangely antediluvian) website here, and get a sense one of the current shows, a sort of communal art store called cabin comforts, here. The photos below are of some of the other exhibits, including the superb super8 projection at the end of the night, which stretched across three buildings along the waterfront.The striped screen in the second-to-last photo was the result of an artist drawing straight lines of colour on empty super8 reels as they were projected onto the walls; it started as a single wobbly strip of orange and built, within minutes, to what looked like one of the old TV test screens, before turning to a single block of colour; the effect was gorgeous. These pictures don’t do it justice, but they give some idea of the event, I hope.












and lastly (and fittingly)...

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Watching Williamsburg

While I'm passing on my bad habits of watching hilarious stuff online instead of working, have a look at The Burg, a sitcom about Williamsburg (our cooler-than-thou neighbourhood) which hits the hipster nail on the head pretty accurately every time. Very funny. Just as funny is reading the comments on the site from all the disgruntled real-life hipsters who feel they haven't been fairly represented, because they would never drink Coors....

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www.everdiminishingview.blogspot.com?

They're taking it away from us....a little more each day. How tall is that damn building going to be, anyway?

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Photos from McCarren Park Pool

Sonic Youth were amazing; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs weren't worth the hype. Pretty boring, actually. But the venue was what made it for me, with its vast flaking floor and its rusted diving boards...

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Home to Brooklyn, broadband... and blocked views

Flying from Dublin to New York at 10.30 yesterday morning sounds like it should have been a nightmare, but, thanks to the very decent and professional staff at the airport, it wasn't really. Except for a moment when I had to restrain myself from spinning around in the crush at gate 32 to shout "JUST GIVE THEM THE GODDAMN CREAM!!!" at a woman behind me who was refusing to understand that the no liquid/no gel rule applied to her, too, no matter how little she felt like stooping down and opening up her bag (which, incidentally, looked way too big to pass as hand luggage, but anyway).

En route to the airport, the friends we'd stayed with called to tell us that there was a major security alert, and that if we needed to stay another night or two, there was no problem. It wasn't much fun turning to the severely-hungover and not-too-flight-happy-in-normal-circumstances A to relay this news (the security alert bit, not the staying another night with our very fun and now very pregnant friends). It was even less fun reading the texts that miglior started sending me at five minute intervals, each one carrying a greater air of foreboding than the last. When you're standing in the check in area for US flights, the last words you want to read are "Critical Terrorist Alert" or "liquid device expected/sought". Any minute the frantic calls from our mothers were bound to start coming, and they did. But check-in went smoothly, as did screening, as did immigration, and though the boarding gate was a bit of a cattle mart, it would have been chaotic on any day, given the number of very small kids travelling with their self-righteous parents (of COURSE you can push past me because you've been "separated" from your husband. What is this, a mercy flight? Look, he's just over there. He's not being bundled into a flight going in another direction to you. You don't have to step on everyone's heads to get to him).

I don't think the ban on liquids, medicines aside, will have that terrible an effect on the experience of long-haul travel; it depends on whether the airlines decide to use it as an opportunity to make more money by charging for water and other non-alcoholic drinks. On the flight I took yesterday, you could have as much water as you needed after the seatbelt lights were switched off. The other liquids I gave up - moisturiser, foundation, lip gloss - are hardly essential for hand luggage. True, the skin on my face felt like an armadillo's arse afterwards, but...well...plus ca change. But I was emotionally reunited with pretty much everything I'd given up at the baggage carousel in JFK, where a pretty surly crew worked to match the plastic bags of duty-free and other liquids with their red-faced, impatient Irish owners. Any flight from Dublin to New York, after all, will have its fair share of women on shopping trips, and it's dangerous for them to be separated from their bottles of bronzer for too long. Mild panic had definitely set in.

Favourite moment of the whole experience, though, was when the young male flight attendant did his last whirl round the cabin with a huge bin bag looking for "shampoos, gels, anything like that". "Still looking?" someone asked him cheerily. "Yeah, and I'll be selling this lot up the front in half an hour," he said, to loud, prolonged laughter from our end of the plane. It was a huge release of tension. He continued on his search. "Any shampoos, gels, ipods...."

Thankfully, the New York in which we found ourselves was not the New York of last week, when temperatures hit 117 farenheit; yesterday was a bearable 78 degrees. Thunderstorms last night ensured that today is manageable, too. We're going to see Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the amazing, surreal venue that is the disused pool at McCarren Park later today, and tomorrow we're going to a wedding of two friends who've recently moved back here (well, the groom has moved back, the bride has just moved here, full stop) up in Connecticut. So it's good to be back. But there is some bad news. I don't know whether I can call this blog by its current name for much longer. Why? Because yesterday, when we walked into the apartment, and when we looked out the kitchen window where our lovely view used to be, we saw this monstrosity.
This is how it used to look:
And it's only going to get taller. Even a Sashimi and Sushi Platter (that's 23 pieces of raw fish, folks! YUM) on Bedford Avenue couldn't make me feel better. Well, not much better.

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Brooklyn Blogs

As I mentioned before, I love living in Brooklyn. I don't blog about it enough, though - probably because too many of my reference points are still in Ireland, work-wise at least. But there are some great Brooklyn-based blogs around, which give an idea of what it's like to be here at this (finally) lovely time of year. See, for example, this Brooklyn Life and the Brooklyn Record. Now I have to do some work...

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Renegades

This was on in our local park in Brooklyn this weekend, which made me want to spend all my savings on jewellery, handbags and notebooks. And on very cute baby clothes for babies I don't even know yet. It also reintroduced me to Bust, the magazine to which I subscribed a few years ago after reading an article about it in one of the Irish Sunday newspapers - written, unsurprisingly (given that it was actually about something interesting...) by Stellanova. My flatmates were a bit bewildered by this bastion of tough girliness which came through the letterbox every couple of months, and my then-newly-acquired boyfriend, A, confessed that, having seen it where it was stocked in Tower Records, he'd wondered if it was a lesbian porn magazine. Well!
Bust had a stall at the craft fair, as did Venus, as did zillions of amazing craftsters. I picked up business cards from the best ones and will post links to their websites as soon as I get out of this bar where I came to 'work'. Air-conditioned, y'know? And, um, Corona. Ahem. Look, it's Sunday night, ok?

• Notebooks made from old hardbacks – Nancy Drew included: Scraps of Paper

• Robots crafted from computer innards: Burrowburrow

• Cute ceramics: Perch design

• Bags & stuff. Drool-inducing: Kristen Aronsson

• Odd self-portraiture: Enid Crow

• Hand-forged belt buckles: Steel Toe Studios

• Jewellery made from silver-cast twigs and acorns: Twigs and Heather

• Wallets, bags, etc, in colourful leather: Miss Alison

• Gorgeous prints and lithographs: Cinqunquatre

• More bags and t-shirts: Slaughterhead Design

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The Heat...

...has come. 90 degrees out there. And I love it. When it's like this, I could walk around Brooklyn forever. And even if my Brooklyn is more Bedford Avenue than Bedford-Stuyvesant, I'm still using this pic from Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

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