Brooklyn

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community

mandy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

When Tamara Mose Brown had her first child in 2004, she began going to different Brooklyn, New York parks on sunny afternoons. In each, she found dozens of West Indian nannies caring for the babies and toddlers of the largely White middle- and upper-income denizens who lived nearby. Questions about both the nannies' work and the race, class, and gender dynamics of their lives prompted Brown—the Canadian-born daughter of Trinidadian immigrants—to begin spending time with these women. Their conversations were eye-opening. For one, Brown came to realize the centrality of paid childcare to U.S. economic life. For another, she was shocked to find that employers who labor at home often require nannies to work outdoors, or in libraries or community centers, for upwards of ten hours a day.

What’s more, Brown quickly recognized that childcare workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, are routinely exploited—underpaid, and required to do household chores far outside their job description, from picking up dry cleaning, to cooking, to going to the pharmacy or market. Nonetheless, she also discovered that domestic workers have found ways to create social networks to make their work lives easier and more enjoyable. Often predicated on a common ethnic heritage, these networks enable childcare workers to share everything from food to gossip. By pre-arranging meetings in public spaces, they can watch the kids in their care while also socializing and breaking the monotony of their jobs.

But, Brown writes in Raising Brooklyn, as wonderful as these networks can be, there’s a down side. To wit, nannies in public spaces are easily observed. Take the website I Saw Your Nanny. In one incident, Brown reports that people with limited information logged onto the site and reported that a toddler had been lured away by a suspicious man while his caretaker—who was eventually identified as the child’s mother and not a nanny—was obliviously chatting. Turns out that the man was the child’s father, but, of course, the notice was posted before this fact was ascertained.

That said, Brown chronicles the ways nannies support one another, whether meeting on a particular park bench at a particular time each day or gathering for story hour at the local library. Cell phones have been a tremendous boon, she continues, giving otherwise isolated workers a way to connect with one another, an easy way to share news from home or strategize about ways to deal with a difficult child or a demanding employer. They’ve also enabled them to organize, and many of the workers Brown interviews are active participants in Domestic Workers United, an organization that successfully pushed the New York state legislature to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.

Brown has done a masterful job—as a participant observer—of reflecting the everyday world of female domestic laborers. While she, herself, straddles two worlds—belonging to an Afro Caribbean community that is victimized by racism while simultaneously having the financial resources to hire a part-time nanny to care for her two children—her ethnic identity allowed her access to an insular community. The result is both fascinating and compelling. Although Brown occasionally lapses into sociological jargon, Raising Brooklyn is generally accessible and insightful. Her own insider-outsider status is clearly presented; at the same time, her compassion for the twenty-five nannies she interviewed makes Raising Brooklyn a wonderful testament to the valuable contribution working class women of color make to life in the U.S. of A.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, March 7th 2011

His Own Where

admin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By June Jordan

The Feminist Press

June Jordan was the very best kind of revolutionary: someone whose love and fearlessness were boundless, someone who never told anything less than the absolute truth, someone who measured out joyfulness and rage in equal parts. A prolific essayist and poet, Jordan died of breast cancer in 2002, leaving behind her an extraordinary body of work as beautiful as it is impassioned.

His Own Where, first published in 1971 and recently reissued by The Feminist Press, is something of a departure for Jordan, who wrote very little fiction. One of her earliest books, the novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and offered considerable evidence that Jordan would go on to be, as the poet Sapphire notes in the book's new introduction, "a political essayist without peer." But His Own Where is even more remarkable for the purity of its language, its sheer exuberant beauty, and the distinct and brilliantly original craftsmanship in every sentence.

The story itself is deceptively simple: Buddy and Angela, two poor African American teenagers in 1960s Brooklyn, meet, fall in love, and run away (from adults, from Angela's abusive parents, from Buddy's oppressive school) to the temporary sanctuary of each other. But there's not a single wasted word in this skinny book, not a sentence that's less than perfect; every phrase is marked by a poet's ear for the possibility of language. Buddy and Angela "become the heated habit of each other." You can feel each sentence in your mouth, rich and dense and begging to be read aloud. Jordan captures perfectly the intense, manic joyfulness of falling in love for the first time.

There's not a moment in the book that feels dated (with the possible exception of a scene where Buddy purchases multiple cups of coffee and chocolate bars with $1.75), and even now, forty years after its original publication, His Own Where feels like something that's never been done before. His Own Where does more than just talk about love; Buddy and Angela deal with the often menacing and oppressive forces of the adult world, the constraints of prejudice and oppression, and the difficulty of surviving in a difficult and sometimes unsurvivable city.

But there's nothing bleak or hopeless about this book. Love and hope abound on every page, and there's plenty of gleeful humor—most notably, a scene where Buddy organizes the boys at his school to campaign for comprehensive sex education (luckily that sort of thing would never have to happen today, now that all young adults have totally unrestricted access to information about safe sex and contraceptives). Buddy "be worrying about old people when they think that love be dangerous."

Start here, if you've never read Jordan, and then dive right in to her magnificent, searing, and gorgeous essays; and if you're not burning down the master's house when you've finished, you're dead to the world.

Written by: The Rejectionist, July 2nd 2010

Holy Rollers

admin — Tue, 18 May 2010 05:43:00 +0000

Directed by Kevin Asch

First Independent Pictures

Holy Rollers is a story of sex, drugs, and Orthodox Judaism. In the late 1990s, a group of drug dealers used young Orthodox kids from Brooklyn as mules to carry ecstasy back from Amsterdam to New York City. On the surface, this fictionalized account of these real events seems so simple: the sinful preying on the innocent. The viewer is drawn in by the intrigue and deceit, yet is left thinking about religion and culture.

We are never told exactly which Orthodox community in Brooklyn Holy Rollers’ main character (and real life person) Sam Gold lives in, but I think that merely speaks to the fact that it could have been any of them. (Post-viewing research proves it to have been Williamsburg.) Sam is a prototypical, ideal Orthodox boy who is studying to be a rabbi, comes from a good family, and works in his father’s shop. Sam's only problem is that he dreams of something beyond his immediate surroundings, and sees money as the means to get him there. His material desire leads him to blindly follow his neighbor into the "easy money" job of bringing "medicine for rich people" back to the U.S. from Europe.

Playing with the inconsistencies of reality is what changes a good story into a great movie. Who would ever believe it was a Jew who instituted and ran such a scheme? Who used a shared faith to exploit young people? And who would think that so many lies could create a positive space from which to question one’s beliefs? I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat, praying that Sam and his compatriots wouldn’t get caught while simultaneously questioning prayer.

Watching Sam’s crisis of conscience made me see so much more than a bizarre news clip in an insular faction of American society. His is a life almost too close to my own, and, really, Sam’s story could be anyone’s coming of age: moving away from the world of your youth, finding who you truly are, and deciding if you want to stay in the place you’re from or choose another fate. Sometimes when we choose to leave, there is no space in our new predicament for who we used to be.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, May 18th 2010

Superstition

admin — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Christy and Emily

Big Print

Anyone who follows music press would agree that Brooklyn has been a hotbed of indie creativity during the past decade. The styles run the gamut from freak-folk to experimental noise, to sugarcoated pop, to singer-songwriter confessionals, to good old fashioned rock and roll. From this creative vortex emerge the duo Christy and Emily with a sound that is a pastiche of all of the above.

Christy Edwards and Emily Manzo have created a sweetly drone-y and sharply melodic record with Superstition. The vocal harmonies are pitch perfect and the songwriting, which could be classified as quietly psychedelic, is well developed. The songs, like fog, seem to creep in with plenty of reverb and quietly distorted guitar. On the title track and the lovely “Nightingale,” the mellow haze clears enough to reveal classic folk melodies. On others, such as “105 & Rising,” the buzzing thump of layered guitars and improvised instruments becomes distinctly sinister. The album’s closing track, “Tigers,” showcases the band at their more upbeat and successfully invokes folk rock vocal patterns. The track also features guest drums by Brooklyn drone master Oneida’s drummer, Kid Millions.

The world of Christy & Emily is layered and ethereal. Trying to pin them to one sound is difficult and, ultimately, fruitless. Those grasping for a comparison might point to Damon and Naomi, or perhaps Coco Rosie without the trust fund and fake, white girl rap. As its title implies, Superstition is best captured by an emotion. It is dreaming, reaching, and searching for a feeling that could be a false lead, but could a new revelation and understanding, for better or worse. The reverb drenched guitar and sunny to stormy vocals enable listeners to stretch and reach to touch with their finger tips—but not quite grasp—one strong feeling.

Written by: Eleanor Whitney, March 12th 2010

Heart of the Old Country

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Tim McLoughlin

Akashic Books

Mike’s life isn’t going anywhere quickly. A townie car service driver who lives with his widower father, he barely tolerates his girlfriend of four years, Gina, and spends most of his time contemplating an escape from his South Brooklyn stomping grounds. After a friend is brutally murdered with Mike driving the assailants’ getaway car, Mike doesn’t flee. Instead, he accepts a coveted job working for one of the local mob bosses running packages—contents unknown—between an Ethiopian hustler and a house full of Hasidic Jews.

His tough guise doesn’t last long, though. While some of the guys on the block take his avoidance and silence for stoicism and strength, Mike has never been so unsure of himself. But if there’s a feminist lesson hidden in this novel about macho neighborhood alliances and the strains of father-son relationships, it is that being uncomfortably pushed to understand the essence of your place in this messy world can yield a breakthrough in personal consciousness—and maybe a bit of happiness in the end.

Writer Tim McLoughlin, a Brooklyn native, has a keen eye for detail and balances romanticizing class stasis, mid-20s existential dilemmas of upward mobility, and being true to one's past. His writing is engaging without extraneous detail, and his fiction is so wholly believable that it almost reads as memoir.

Heart of the Old Country is a thoroughly enjoyable novel that kept me up reading into the night on several occasions. It’s easy for a writer to slack off at the end of a book—after all, your audience is either still with you or long gone. But a final plot twist mere pages from the story’s end was such a perfect, genuine surprise that I nearly clapped my hands in glee. Rather than being depressed by the novel’s potentially disheartening themes, I could barely put this book down and was genuinely disappointed when it ended. I highly recommend this page-turner to anyone looking for a tale of youthful angst, unfulfilling work, and complicated relationships.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 24th 2010

Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Ayala Fader

Princeton University Press

A “mitzvah” is colloquially translated as “a good deed,” but this Hebrew word actually means “commandment,” and observant Jews believe in 613 “mitzvot.” The commandments structure daily life and religious rituals, such as prayer, dietary habits, and romantic and sexual relationships. When a young woman becomes a Bat Mitzvah she is responsible for practicing and adhering to commandments outlined in the Torah.

Mitzvah Girls is Ayala Fader’s ethnographic study of young Hasidic girls becoming adults in a deeply structured religious community in Brooklyn, New York. There’s been almost no scholarship on this particular demographic, although as an anthropologist Fader understands that women are often responsible for bearing and reproducing culture. By studying children and young adults becoming women, Fader in effect presses the pause button and allows the reader to observe the moment girls become Jewish women.

Fader’s rich ethnographic research takes her into the homes, synagogues, and schools of Boro Park, a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. She is especially interested in the history, structure, and use of Yiddish, and in how linguistics shape and reflect everyday Jewish life. Fader explores words themselves to illustrate how meaning shifts in relationship to religion and gender.

Hasidic Jews are stereotypically right wing, one of the guaranteed Republican voting blocs in New York City, and gender roles are rigidly defined in Hasidic communities. Women are expected to raise large families, keep kosher households, and visit the Mivkah—or ritual bath—after menstruation. Looking into the Hasidic world from the outside, I confess that it’s quite easy to judge, to assume that these women are victims. Mitzvah Girls challenges that assumption, and Fader’s in-depth study foregrounds Hasidic women’s agency. She demonstrates how young women and girls negotiate the secular world, its modern temptations, and even feminism. Mitzvah Girls is an extraordinarily fascinating read.

Written by: Jeanne Vaccaro, December 31st 2009

Prospect Park West

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:07:00 +0000

By Amy Sohn

Simon & Schuster

Brooklyn’s famously high-end and yuppie Park Slope neighborhood is nearly a character itself in Amy Sohn’s Prospect Park West. The book follows the lives of four women living in the neighborhood. There is Melora Leigh, a troubled actress, who joins the neighborhood co-op for good PR. Her time there ties her to Karen Shapiro, an overly protective mother and social climber desperate for a new apartment in the best school district. Lizzie O’Donnell is a “former lesbian” living with her husband and child, but still drawn to women. Her attention focuses on Rebecca Rose, another mom, who hasn’t been touched by her husband in the year and a half since she gave birth.

The book seems aimed at subtly making fun and illuminating the foibles of stereotypical yuppie mothers as well as the new hipster mother. It’s like a filled out gossip column or blog on the lives of overly privileged women. The struggles of being a mother are mentioned, but it is incidental to the women’s sex lives and neuroses. The stories weave together fairly well, though the plot line that connects Karen and Melora seems overly fanciful. At times, I found myself forgetting the connections between the characters and having to flip back to figure out who was being discussed.

Occasionally throughout the text are small chapters written in italics and from the perspective of a few of the male characters in the book. They don’t seem to add much to the book, as they don’t flesh out the male characters enough.

The book ends a bit anti-climactically. I didn’t feel let-down, but more "oh, now it’s done." I suppose Prospect Park West is simply giving a snapshot (in this case a 400 page snapshot) of the women’s lives. There is no grand climax in the action, because the women’s lives simply carry on, much like in real life.

For fans of chick lit and lighter fare, pick this book up. Otherwise, you can give it a miss.

Written by: Kristin Conard, November 16th 2009

Secret Cog

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:40:00 +0000

By Talk Normal

Talk Normal’s Secret Cog, a five song EP, begins with a noise sample that is not quickly placed—a curious noise that immediately demands attention and perks the listener’s ear. This theme lasts throughout the album as the Brooklyn duo plays dissonant and provocative songs that defy any one genre.

At times they are clearly noisy with Sarah Register’s distorted and wandering guitar; at other times they border on a mathematical sound with Andrya Ambro’s drumming and the call and response timing of the guitar and bass in the song “33,” and they ultimately fit into the no-wave category, which is a description they receive often. The guitar playing is reminiscent of early Erase Errata and even a bit of Fugazi, like the bright lead riff in “Lemonade.”

The five songs weave into each other so that the album becomes something of a larger whole. True, the songs can most definitely be enjoyed by themselves, but it is a different experience to listen to the album in its entirety. Talk Normal are successful at simultaneously creating songs that can hold a careful ear but also allow the listener to unfocus and feel the effects that the songs generate.

I always appreciate a lyrics sheet, but one is not supplied with the album. I suspect it is because the words are not as important of a contribution to the record as are the sounds that the singing makes, which adds to the music like its own instrument. The singing waxes and wanes much like the music, and the drums are carefully aligned to build the crescendos of the songs. While listening to Secret Cog I imagine that these songs would have yet another powerful effect while played live, which is something I’m very curious to see. Being able to pull off a variety of effects with five songs is quite admirable, and these women do it well.

Written by: Krista Ciminera, June 23rd 2009

A Hole In A Fence

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:44:00 +0000

Directed by D.W. Young

First Run Features

For most films under an hour long, the first ten minutes are critical. In this short window, the story’s framework is established, point of view is explained, and the viewer basically gets to decide if they’re half as committed to following the plot as the film’s director was to sharing his or her vision.

During the first few minutes in A Hole In A Fence, I had no idea what I was watching. Several seemingly unrelated characters were introduced lacking title or affiliation, and some B roll and a clumsy voice-over made me question when the actual narrative would begin. I felt as if I was watching a film school class project, and as a somewhat recent graduate of such a program, I grimaced, long ago ready to put such screenings behind me. Thankfully, I stayed on my sofa, watching closely, and ended up being drawn into a captivating tale of a neglected neighborhood and a big box home goods supplier.

Despite its slow, awkward start, A Hole In A Fence quickly becomes an engaging story of gentrification, homelessness, a community split by poverty, and the loss of a historic Brooklyn waterfront area to a new Ikea and its behemoth parking lot. Having lived in Boston when a similar situation arose—in Beantown’s case, a waterfront Ikea likely to pollute the river it bordered, creating traffic jams, and also forcing out residents and a community arcade out of the low-income neighborhood—Red Hook’s dilemma did not surprise me, despite the sadness it caused.

Red Hook, like any other neighborhood split down the middle by a population of artists and folks in public housing, has as many problems as community-based solutions. While the neighborhood has homeless squatters, wild dogs, and illegal sex work, it also contains historic graffiti, a rare public graving dock, and a youth gardening project and farmer’s market. Throughout the film, you meet several groups campaigning for various neighborhood causes, usually related to sustainable resources or organizations that work with youth. Worried that their efforts will be squashed or at least rendered obsolete when the Swedes roll in, they spoke candidly about their work and their fears for their community’s future.

While mostly thorough in their research, the film’s team neglected one critical element of their story. They did not speak to any city or community officials in support of Ikea, nor did they speak to Ikea representatives. Whether or not the crew attempted such an interview is not mentioned. It is clear the filmmaker’s intention is to tell the story of a neighborhood being torn apart by commerce, but to not offer even a token appearance to the government or retailer makes the arguments against commercialism appear unbalanced and somewhat unfounded. When the question of partnering with Ikea is posed to members of community organizations, they seem open to the idea but lack factual information to support such a proposal.

Anyone familiar with the current state of Red Hook will know in addition to the waterfront Ikea’s arrival last June, MTV’s Real World, now in their seventeenth season, have set up shop in the borough as well. Nothing says gentrification like camera crews and Scandinavian furniture imports.

While Red Hook residents lost their battle, A Hole In A Fence is nevertheless an engaging forty-five minutes, an important historical document and a learning tool for anyone who cares about issues concerning urban planning, gentrification, the rapidly decreasingly public waterfront, architecture, green space, community revival and survival, and “development at the cost of identity.”

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 23rd 2009

Guide to Brooklyn: 2007

admin — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:44:00 +0000

Not for Tourists

Has the ganglial network that is today's Internet annulled the need for books, especially guidebooks? Printed matter tickles my aesthetic funny bone when it contains unique, antiquey fonts or luscious photographs, but when was the last time an urbanite rifled through the Yellow Pages to choose the perfect dark hideaway to romance her lover in, the price-is-right shop for a colorful spring dress or the school to send her children to?

The Not For Tourists (NFT) Guide to Brooklyn is an expanded Yellow Pages geared toward the hip, youngish city dweller. Attractions are grouped by neighborhood, with accompanying maps. My main complaint with the book is that the reader has to flip to the back of the book for descriptions of businesses, as if referencing footnotes. Although I’m sure the editors thought this would ensure the brevity of the neighborhood sections, it’s a pesky task to have to look to the back of the book for the category of Park Slope, then the subcategory Shopping, just to find a one-liner on a store I was looking for - Bird.

The one-liners zing and miss in equal doses. This may be because NFT employs a dozen or so writers to scope out and review these spots, so the feel is a bit inconsistent. The Williamsburg bar Larry Lawrence is merely described as "Smokers." What kind of smokers? What kind of décor? Most importantly, what kind of drinks and atmosphere? Also, the word "hip" (which begs the pertinent question: hip in what way? Is it gutter punk divey, mod fashionista or stylish Williamsburg momma with papoose sling sort of hip?) is used to describe many businesses, including Supreme Trading, a bar that as of recently, especially on weekends, is more filled with Bridge and Tunnelers from other boroughs than local "hipsters" of any kind.

My second complaint about the organization of the book (this is starting to sound like a list of union grievances) is that after flipping back and finally finding the Park Slope/Prospect Heights section again, I couldn’t determine the cross streets of the soul food restaurant I was looking for on the map because the various businesses were not numbered! They were just denoted as stores, restaurants or bars. This was more than I could handle from a supposed resident guidebook. My friend and I ended up taking a recommendation from the bartender instead.

One caveat: Brooklyn is, and always has been, its own ethnic, mini-United States (more so than uber-gentrified Manhattan), and it isn’t as encapsulated as Manhattan, so it’s not as easy to describe. Some parts of Brooklyn are so far removed from Manhattan that they’re hardly recognizable as being part of New York City. Other parts, like Williamsburg or Park Slope, resemble the Lower East Side or West Village. In either case, it’s a much larger area dominated by small businesses and dozens of different immigrant communities with events and services that can be quite private or off the radar, so it may be more impenetrable.

This book would be so much more exciting if there were lengthier descriptions of neighborhood histories, what kind of signs identify a Turkish bath, how and where to bargain, contact info for active community groups, or what kind of Chinese vegetables to look for in Sunset Park, rather than just listings of businesses that may soon close (NFT itself puts a disclaimer in the front of the book, saying that it can’t guarantee that these businesses will still be open and takes no responsibility if they aren’t). The guide also covered only the Western and Southern Brooklyn neighborhoods, which was a disappointment. These are mostly the neighborhoods that residents already know. I was looking for some new information.

I think this is a better choice for someone who has just arrived in Brooklyn, or someone who doesn't have access to the Internet (the whole guide is, after all, published in PDF on their website), but at $9.95, it won't eat holes into your credit card, and even if you don't consult it frequently, you might learn a thing or two. Editor Rob Tallia has the fervent love that a New Yorker needs to survive here for decades (see his article “City Life” on the NFT website), and through his good intentions, I’m sure that future versions will improve (last year’s Brooklyn book was even skimpier), though never with the speed of Citysearch via a Sidekick, nor with the relevancy that a good local bartender could provide.

Written by: Onya Lamoureux, May 17th 2007

Life Support

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:00:00 +0000

Directed by Nelson George

HBO Films

HIV isn't the death sentence that it used to be, but that doesn't mean it isn't affecting people's lives in enormous ways. Life Support is a new film starring Queen Latifah, inspired by a true story, that tackles the complexities of living with the virus, particularly as low-income, women of color. This film couldn't come at a better time, as infection rates continue to grow among young, African American girls. It is said that the disease is getting younger, darker, and more female, and Life Support shows the importance of prevention and of letting people see the human side of those living with HIV.

Queen Latifah plays the part of Ana, an HIV+ mother of two and sex education outreach worker, who comes from a background of drug addiction and other "high risk" behavior. Her oldest daughter, Kelly (Rachel Nicks) lives with Ana's mother (Anna Deavere Smith) and harbors much anger and resentment toward Ana for her past mistakes. Ana wants nothing more than to rekindle a love bond with her daughter before Kelly leaves the city to start her own life. Both struggle to combine their own self-interest with their relationships with loved ones in a tumultuous journey. Life Support is an emotional tribute to the thousands of people touched by HIV and props to HBO for making this film available.

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, April 21st 2007

Divorce Songs

admin — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 04:03:00 +0000

By United States

Iron Pier

With a title like Divorce Songs, I expected the music on this album to represent feelings of separation or disunion, and United States did not disappoint. The Brooklyn post-punk band, which is likened to Fugazi, Cursive and Sonic Youth, presents eight jagged anthems about struggling and surviving in the city. Most tracks on the album are hard and rough in a punk kind of way, but the music slows down a bit for "Grand Stand." This song has an extended instrumental intro and softer vocals.

Speaking of vocals, they’re pretty good—strong, masculine and exuding the kind of force one might expect from a dissonant-type group. At the same time, the vocals push just above angst so that they teeter towards maturity. As far as lyrics and any messages the band is trying to send, some are admittedly beyond my comprehension. However, my favorite lines are these: “I want to save the union from this state of disrepair. And I’ll sing it like I mean it until I really care.”

Written by: Sharon R. Cole, March 25th 2007