Get the Fuck Out of My Pool!

Via

Bradford Cox’s music is the stuff of an obsessive and unquiet mind. Everything about the singer’s approach to music — whether he’s dumping four discs’ worth of home recordings onto the Internet with little fanfare or smearing fake blood onto his spindly, dress-clad body onstage — has a chaotic, haunted quality to it, even in painstakingly crafted recordings that layer his sound with atmospheric psychedelia.

All of which makes Monomania a perfect title for an album by Cox’s band Deerhunter: A single-minded obsession with music is so clearly what’s kept him intact and whole throughout his adult life. But this particular collection, the sound of which he describes as “nocturnal garage,” has a dirtier, wirier, looser and less fussed-over feel than he’s often cultivated in recent years. Five studio albums into Deerhunter’s existence, Monomania (out May 7) captures Cox’s gift for self-laceration and unpredictability, but it moves in a less studio-bound direction, closer to the raw and unhinged spirit of his live shows.

Monomania’s gnarly dissonance leaves a bit less room than usual for glimmers of beauty — though they shine through in a few haunting tracks like “The Missing” — as Deerhunter opts more often for the raw, noisy, slurred and basement-friendly feel of “Pensacola.” Elsewhere, “Blue Agent” meets somewhere on Deerhunter’s continuum between sideways prettiness and the sort of thorniness that ensures arm’s-length distance. Even as its sound continues to shift unpredictably, Deerhunter has maintained that balance throughout its fruitful run — no small task, coming from a man whose entire artistic persona is rooted in an understanding that balance doesn’t come easy, even on the best days.

You can stream the whole dang thing below: (more…)

Set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Joe’s trinket shop symbolizes a fusion of two worlds: where traditional American-Italian ideals meet a new wave of hipsters.

U R Not Alone depicts the evolution of an unlikely friendship between this controversial man and two young women and continues with their dilemma once he is arrested. As they delve deeper into investigating Joe’’ crimes and past, they bring audiences on their moral roller coaster ride – questioning the intrinsic societal predicaments he stands for.

More information here on the U R Not Alone Kickstarter page.

This weekend, don’t miss this great event at The Bell House!

Down Home Radio Show and The Jalopy Theatre are proud to announce the 5th Annual Brooklyn Folk Festival taking place Friday, April 19th through Sunday, April 21st! The 3-day festival includes 30 bands, vocal and instrumental workshops, a family-friendly square dance, film screenings, the return of the Banjo Toss contest and more!

The Brooklyn Folk Festival will feature the best in old-time string-band music, folk, blues, song writers, bluegrass, traditional Mexican, Irish and Balkan music, songwriters and much more!

Here’s the full schedule: (more…)

Their show at Mercury Lounge on June 20 is already sold out but tickets are still on sale for June 21 at Brooklyn Bowl.

Check out their great new single “Disintegrate”:

Evidently there’s a meet-up group in Greenpoint that encourages “elimination communication” – aka letting your kid go diaperless and shit on the sidewalk, the subway, a Tupperware container, or in a restaurant. Clearly this needs to end now:

Pardis Partow decided to give her year-old son, Parker, some diaper-free time at home — much to the consternation of her Yorkshire terrier.
Because of Parker’s terrible diaper rash, the Bedford-Stuyvesant lawyer-turned-Reiki healer became interested in “elimination communication” — or EC, as it’s called— responding to her son’s cues for when to go to the bathroom instead of having to rely on a diaper.

The hope is for the parent to “catch” pees and poops — whether atop open-cloth diapers, toilets, sinks or behind the multitude of parked cars on city streets.
But as Partow learned, often there are “misses.”

Partow shared her experience with a group of nearly a dozen moms sitting with their babies last month at an EC meet-up at Greenpoint’s Caribou Baby.

The boutique, which recently began hosting the meet-up regularly on the second Tuesday afternoon of each month, advised participants to come prepared. “Please bring your own potty (if you’d like) and a towel or blanket to catch any spills. There will also be access to a restroom.” [...]

“The other day we accidentally left the house without putting her in a diaper before going to a restaurant,” Longwell-Stevens said. “We peed her on the sidewalk, but she wouldn’t go. Then we tucked a pre-fold [cloth diaper] under her [at the restaurant table]. We were in a place where we didn’t want her to go and we didn’t want people talking about it.” [...]

“Sometimes the thrill of being able to go outside and pee is just what [babies] need,” Longwell-Stevens said. “In the suburbs people set up potties in the trunk of their cars. That made me jealous. But in New York no one cares what you are doing. You can hold your baby to pee pretty much anywhere. Especially since few people would have any idea what you are doing.” [...]

Mikolajczak, who recently moved to Connecticut from Astoria and has a Brooklyn factory making her EC goods, did elimination communication everywhere she went with her son, now 6.

“We would get off the subway, I would take him into the toilet,” she said. “Sometimes there were times it was hard to find a public bathroom in New York. Asking to use bathrooms helped me get over shyness.” At parks and playgrounds, “finding a little area of grass or some bushes was good. I’ve not owned a dog in the city, but I can relate.

“I would try not to have him pee on the sidewalk,” she added. “I would try to find a drain pipe… on the corner of streets.”

via Gothamist:

The mall will be located at 82 Bogart St., only a few blocks from famed pizza joint/internship magnate Roberta’s off the Morgan L stop, and is tentatively slated to open sometime at the end of this year or in early 2014; it’s been marketed as a “grittier Chelsea Market,” but renderings in a marketing flyer [pdf] distributed by Massey Knakal, the brokerage firm responsible for the building’s sale make it look more like The Standard Brooklyn than anything else.

Not surprisingly, many are upset about the prospect of Urban Outfitters and other chains invading their hood:

The shopping center — which the Observer recently reported would open in the 80,000-square-foot warehouse across from the Morgan L train station at 82 Bogart St. — should favor “smaller, independent, locally based businesses,” bookstore owner Matthew Winn wrote on his Facebook page.

Winn has written to the realtor handling the deal, and is urging others to do the same to “respectfully suggest he avoid these homogenous national chains.”

“I think there is a sort of unanimous feeling of revulsion at the idea of an Urban Outfitters moving in,” said Winn, owner of Molasses Books, in reference to the Observer article’s mention of Urban Outfitters and the Guitar Center as possible tenants.

Winn said Andrew Clemens, a realtor with Massey Knakal who is handling all marketing for the mall’s developer, North Development Corp., responded to his letter and claimed that “those two chains are nothing but talk.” [...] Meanwhile, Nyssa Frank, who runs the Living Gallery in the Loom, took a more diplomatic approach.
“It’s ironic…one of my friends said she didn’t want Urban Outfitters here, but she was wearing Urban Outfitters pants,” Frank said. “I think people want to keep it local not because they’re anti big business, but because that’s what’s charming about Bushwick.”

New Yorker has a cool new interactive graph — check it out here. Here’s a screen grab of the L line: