Posts from Seward Park Library

Permanent Vacation opens with a moving crowd of New Yorkers, still dressed '70s groovy. It might be a camera trick, but no one appears to be rushing. The music is slow, diffuse horn and bells. We meet 16-year-old Aloysious Christopher Parker, already dressed '80s rockabilly cool. His body is like a marionette's — all long limbs and loose joints. His voice is like an oboe, and his delivery is like slow air out of a tire. He dances to Earl Bostic's Up There in Orbit, on a toy phonograph, on the floor, in a narrow Lower East Side tenement room painted thickly yellow-white.

Visit NYPL's BiblioCommons for these lists and many more. You can also create your own and share them with us in the comments! See below for some interesting staff picks from the past month, on topics both timely and timeless:

Don't Shhhh me!.... NOT this time.

We are about to conclude the second season of our Lower East Side Heritage Film Series and for the closer we are ALL TALK.

I went to high school in the East Village from 1983 to 1987. This might sound kind of punk rock. Unfortunately, I totally missed out on CBGB in the late Seventies (see also: Punking Out) and early Eighties. And let's face it, I didn't go inside any real club for most of the Eighties either — I was underage, and too busy studying for the SATs. But I remember how the outsides looked. The streets and lines. The cars, still squared off boats from the Seventies. Of course, three-card monte. And lots and lots of vacant lots. Dirty, over-painted apartment facades with broken front doorknobs. Vinyl miniskirts. Wanting to look like Debbie Harry, not Madonna.

Guilty pleasure: something you like, but feel guilty about liking, because you are aware that your fondness for said thing is a little embarrassing or not so great. Reasons for feeling guilty include: enjoying a silly pop song, liking a band for their hotness and not necessarily for their music, the genre of music is considered uncool, liking the artist makes you one of them — and you are sooo much cooler than that! But SO WHAT? WHO CARES? You like what you like. Let your cheesy, pop-song lovin', freak flag fly! Have long discussions about your favorite member(s) of One Direction! Just know that you are not ALONE!

Shhhh.... this one is silent.

One of the great things about silent film is the fact that it is, well, silent.

While this attribute certainly draws attention to body language and visual storytelling, it also provides a blank canvas. As someone who composes and arranges music, this proves a great opportunity to sharpen my skills and have a bit of fun, dropping different types of music into a set of scenes. The fun happens when music intended for one purpose magically enhances another. It is proved to be a much more laborious a task, as I am not able to rely on the timings (and ease of scrolling) as one would with a digital version.

Visit NYPL's BiblioCommons for these lists and many more. You can also create your own and share them with us in the comments! See below for some interesting staff picks from the past month, on topics both timely and timeless:

You have not crossed the bridges I have crossed.
You have not listened to the music I have listened to.
You have not been in the top of the World Trade Center the way I have been there.
You have not seen the waves I have seen.
You have not fallen from horses the way I have fallen.
You have not felt the guns on your neck the way I have felt them.
You have not been in the sea with a big storm in a little boat the way I have been.

—Excerpt from "Don’t Give Me Advice," by Luis Marin, Tompkins Square CRW

This month is National Poetry Month, and here at the Center for Reading and Writing (CRW) some 

In the late hours of April 14th, 1912 and the early morning hours of April 15th, about 85 years before a dying Leo DiCaprio urged a freezing Kate Winslet to live, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In a matter of hours this “unsinkable” ship was on the bottom of the ocean and only 712 out of its 2,208 passengers would survive.  Since the news of the sinking first got out up to the present day, on the100th anniversary of the tragedy, there have been hundreds of stories about those who died, those who survived and what really happened on board that ship — real and imagined. What trick of fate 

Happy birthday to Charles Mingus, who would have officially become a nonagenarian this coming April 22, 2012 — a word I am certain he could have cleverly crafted into a title. And to celebrate one of the most unique and gifted voices in not just the jazz world, but, in my opinion, the whole of 20th century music, we are projecting on 16mm this wonderfully insightful film capturing Mingus at a very specific period in his life. A must see for all fans of Charles Mingus.

Visit NYPL's BiblioCommons for these lists and many more. You can also create your own and share them with us in the comments! See below for some interesting staff picks from the past month, on topics both timely and timeless:

A woman came into the Library's Center for Reading and Writing, where she was enrolled in a basic literacy class. Visibly shaken, she pulled a staff member aside and confided that she wasn’t sure if she would be able to continue in the class. She had felt some pain in her breast, and her doctor had recommended that she have a mammogram. Not having any idea what a mammogram was, she understood it to mean that she had cancer. The staff member showed her how to find information about mammograms in library books and online. After consulting these resources, she went to her next doctor's appointment knowing what to expect and what questions to ask.

Martin Scorsese has had a quite a run these past two months, with 11 Oscar nominations (four wins) for his film Hugo and a Golden Globe win for the Best Director category, to name just a few. So let's raise another toast (in the spirit of the Bridesmaids' SAG award presentation) to the man who gave us so much great Lower East Side imagery by screening one of his earliest films, Italianamerican. This 1974 documentary, made between Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and his landmark film Taxi Driver, finds Scorsese interviewing his parents in their Elizabeth Street apartment about their 

Updated February 2012! Do the names Lord Grantham, Mr. Carson, and Lady Violet mean anything to you? Can you discuss at length the love story of Mary and Matthew? Does the word week-end, bring to mind Maggie Smith’s impeccably-timed line delivery? If so, then you are a Downton-ite... or is it Downton-head? Whatever the case may be, it means that you are a fan of the ITV/Masterpiece Theater drama Downton Abbey. First airing on PBS in January 2011, this British series depicts life (upstairs and downstairs) in an English manor house belonging to Lord Grantham and his family, from 1912 to 1920. It was a surprise hit in the U.K. and in 

Well, Yudie is not exactly a Bubbie, but I simply could not resist the alliteration. (Although, Tante and the Beats would make an excellent band name, don't you think?)

This month's Lower East Side Heritage Film Series (LESHFS) pairs the seemingly improvised storytelling of the Beat Generation with the candid and (seemingly) unrehearsed historytelling of a first generation American to Russian-Jewish parents that landed in the Lower East Side.

Last year, Victoria joined a basic reading and writing class at Tompkins Square Library's Center for Reading and Writing. She agreed to speak with me about her experience so far and what brought her here.

So it’s been a mild winter and maybe snow has only just fallen, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still imagine ourselves in a tropical paradise: sipping fruity drinks and dancing our faces off! But what thump, thump, techno beats would we be dancing to underneath the stars? Luckily, I have just returned from Mexico where I was doing just that, and here’s what the DJs were spinning:

It is the beginning of a new calendar year.
A time for reflection.
A time for resolution.
A time for hope.

In this next installment of the Lower East Side Heritage Film Series, we celebrate and reflect on the rebirth of a derelict East Sixth Street tenement building in Alphabet City. Producer and director Josephine Hayes Dean documents the toils and tribulations of its future residents into something that would become a home for their hopes and dreams.

The fairytale of New York City is just as strong for New Yorkers as it is for those who don’t live here: the glittering world of who’s in or out, swanky hotel bars and Hamptons summer houses. It is a world of movers and shakers and large, beautiful apartments that is longingly aspired to as we go about our daily drudgery. The narrative of the fairytale is learned in childhood, from movies and TV, like some Grimm or Charles Perrault story: ambitious nobody moves to Manhattan, meets the right people, makes the right connections and boom, enters the world of New York insiders.