It is a busy week, even with DOT as a no-show. Tomorrow night, Act Local is putting on a concert to benefit the drama department of Automotive High School. Automotive High’s music and drama departments were cut this year and they were considering cancelling their school play but now the creative community of Williamsburg and Greenpoint is coming together to support them.
As seen above, the main attractions are Japanther, Ninjasonik and the Automotive High Hip Hop Jazz Band. If that’s not enough excitement for you, there is also a raffle (Spiewak, Teddy’s, the Mark, Beehive and more). The concert is organized by Act Local, the same group that put together the Don’t Demo Domino concert a couple of years back.
This is another great show for another great cause.
Where: Automotive High Auditorium (Bedford, across from McCarren Park)
When: Thursday, April 30 – doors at 7:00 pm (show at 8:00 pm).
Aaron Short says so.
Possibly related – the joint Transportation/Waterfront Committee scheduled for this evening has been cancelled (replaced by Transportation only). Reason for the cancellation? DOT was supposed to attend to talk about Kent Avenue, but backed out.
Design Glut, which is two young Bushwick designers, contend that there is a “gluttony” of design out there – “so many objects… and so little of it [has] a reason to exist”.
My first reaction was to was to say “No” and show a snarky photo. But on second thought, they might have a point:
Surely not news, but GM today confirmed that it is shutting down its Pontiac division.
Putting aside for the moment that GM’s entire lineup has been crap for a couple of decades, why Pontiac? Its a youth-oriented marque that has produced some of the most storied vehicles from GM’s past. Look around Williamsburg – a statistically significant percentage of the hot vintage cars you see are probably Pontiacs. Put another way, why not add Buick to the ash heap of history (along with Oldsmobile) – neither bring anything to the table that isn’t already covered the rest of the GM line up (and yeah, both made great cars in the past, but does an aging boomer demographic really need Caddy, Olds and Buick?). Drop the old-folks cars, make Pontiac the performance division, keep Chevy (which will no longer be siphoned off by Pontiac, Buick and Olds), and keep Caddy as the luxury division (but lose the Karl Fischer designs).
GM is also looking to sell Saturn. Brand-wise it was never that well defined, but its the only GM line that doesn’t make typical GM cars. And considering where “typical GM cars” have led the company, maybe they want to be keeping Saturn.
Saab, on the other hand, makes sense to sell off. It was a good company with a distinctive product. GM has only managed to homogenize all the character out of Saab.
Recession or not, things are not looking good for the daily print media in this country. Journalism, I suspect, will survive. But in what form is not clear. Newspapers need to figure out how to make money off journalism, as they’ve lost the market for just about everything else. Paying for content is an option, but it has to be done in a way that recognizes how the Internet works – not in a way that fights the Internet. Erecting walls, trying to dam up the flow of information and fighting content sharing (as in my link above) will fail for all but those with the most exclusive content.
(For what its worth, I have no idea why national weekly magazines (Time, Newsweek, USNews) are still in business.)
Local newspaper Williamsburg Greenpoint News+Arts is (finally) online, with both their offline (paper) content and a blog.
WG is a great paper, and has done some good reporting over the past few years, so its great to see their content online. And the website looks really good.
Seven students from a Baptist church in Topeka, Kansas traveled all the way to Bethesda, Maryland to launch a protest at Walt Whitman High School. Why? Because Whitman was maybe gay. The kids from Bethesda did a good job standing up for Brooklyn’s original literary hero:
At the 2:10 p.m. dismissal, 500 students issued forth from the campus and lined up, several students deep, along the police tape, across Whittier Boulevard from the congregants. They alternately chanted the school name and “Go home!” — drowning out voices from across the street.
Next week is going to be a busy one. On Tuesday, the North Brooklyn Story Project will be holding a fundraiser at Union Pool. The project (which is part of NAG’s town hall initiative, is an oral history project for North Brooklyn. Why the fundraiser? Ask the Driggs:
We need recording equipment so we can enlist volunteers to gather stories from Williamsburgers of all ages, ethnicities and levels of pants-tightness. We’ll then share those stories with you, the Brooklyn community, and it’ll also help us understand some of the concerns residents have so NAG can better address them. Also, future Brooklynites will get to look back at this particularly chaotic time in North Brooklyn’s development. Hello future Brooklyn!
If that’s not enough to convince you to come out, maybe the Blue Album Group, Rebecca Schiffman and the Roulettes will be.
When: Tuesday, April 28, 8:00
Where: Union Pool (Union & Meeker)
We mentioned before that Williamsburg Walks is coming back for another year – this time around it will be organized by L Magazine and NAG(g) and will run for eight weeks in June and July. This Monday, there will be an informational meeting on the event. Recently, there has been press about some merchants whose business was hurt by last year’s event, so hopefully this is a time for those businesses (and the many businesses that benefitted) to sit down with the new hosts and figure out ways to make the even work better.
When:Monday, April 27, 7:00pm
Where:Swinging Sixties Senior Center, 211 Ainslie
Street @ Manhattan Ave
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
10 am-4:30 pm
Boricua College, Northside Campus
186 North 6th Street (between Bedford & Driggs)
Facing eviction? Rent too high? No Heat?
Come hear community leaders speak about the future of your neighborhood (and the history too!)
Highlights:
Affordable Housing, Community Preservation, and our Neighborhood. Featuring Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez
Affordable Housing Opportunities in NYC
Neighborhood Project: Community Mapping.
How to get repairs in your apartment.
Community in Action: Screening of “Metropolitan Avenue” Documentary
Rent Regulation Primer
Loft Tenants, Housing Rights, and Community Displacement
Guide to Housing Court (English with Polish translation)
What Co-op Shareholders need to Know By Rolando Guzman of St Nicks
Sponsored by the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Tenant Anti-Displacement Collaborative:
Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (NAG); People’s Firehouse; Los Sures; St Nicholas NPC; Churches United; Brooklyn Legal Services Corp A; North Brooklyn Development Corp
