MotherSister Brooklyn

The recent report that the long-shuttered Liquors is finally set to morph into a new business reminded me of how much I miss that joint. It was a funky, loose-limbed place with casual, refreshingly reasonably priced good food, characteristics that aren’t in evidence as much as they should be by now in this neighborhood’s restaurants. When Bodegas opened, I expected more of the same but was surprised to find it hit-or-miss, with an increasingly obviously disgruntled staff in the last months it was operating. The restaurants (along with their Bed-Stuy sister Lewis & Ruby’s) shuttered abruptly last year, rumors flew, Dana Rubinstein investigated, and the spaces were rented. Just another small business down in flames — next, right?

But these are also people’s dreams we’re talking about. It’s easy for those of us who’ve never established our own businesses to play armchair quarterbacks, but the challenges and risks — financial, emotional, mental — involved in opening and running a store or restaurant are not for the faint of heart. The fortitude it requires is on full display in If You Succeed, an hour-long documentary about Christian Dennery and Dolores Lagdameo’s effort to build on the promise of Liquors by opening Bodegas — as well as their effort to hold their family together. A tantalizing preview of the film is on view here; Fort Greene-based filmmakers Augusta Palmer and Chris Arnold screened it at the Little Rock Film Festival in May and will present it again at the San Francisco Documentary Festival in October. Augusta and Chris are investigating distribution channels, and I certainly hope that at least one local venue — anyone at BAMcinématek out there? — will make it possible for the FG/CH community to see it.

Little Rock native Augusta very kindly took the time to answer a few questions about the documentary, the aftermath of the restaurants’ failures, and Cultural Animal, her company with co-director and husband Chris. Get the scoop after the jump.

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Friday, August 31
Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art opens at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
$8 suggested donation

Monday, September 3
West Indian American Day Carnival, Eastern Parkway
From 8am to 6pm
Free

Wynton and Willie, live from Jazz at Lincoln Center on WBGO (88.3 FM)
From 6:30pm
Free

Tuesday, September 4
Notable new music: Just Jack’s Overtones and Manu Chao’s La Radiolina

Thursday, September 6
Yoga Inc. screening at Hollenback Community Garden
From 8pm
Free

Saturday, September 8
Salvage Fest at P.S. 11
From 10am to 4pm
Free

Fort Greene Fest feat. Talib Kweli, Claudette Ortiz, and more in Fort Greene Park
From noon to 10pm
Free

Tuesday, September 11
Notable new music: Kanye West’s Graduation

The US Open is in full swing at Flushing Meadows this week, and I want to know: What is it about the Williams sisters that brings out latent racism in spades? People who intensely dislike them cite laughably superficial reasons, like their on-court vocalizations (hello, Monica Seles?) or their perceived arrogance (they’ve earned the right to be confident — they’re champions), or “thug tennis” style (yes, people actually use that term). The photographer Hub — who would drop me like a hot potato if Serena showed up at the door with her tennis racket, asking if he could come out to play and reminding him to bring his balls — is especially incensed at the media’s tendency to depict them as animalistic; note how frequently a photo of Venus or Serena appears with their faces contorted and muscles bulging in the heat of a matchpoint battle to illustrate their wins, while the Maria Sharapovas are shown glowing beautifully and triumphantly hoisting their silver trophies. Sometimes the media isn’t even that subtle: Here’s a typically ugly Daily Mail takedown of Serena’s physique; what the writer calls “broad-shouldered” and “thunder thighs” are, as the comments below the article note, rather enviable to many women (and lust-enhancing to many men).

That black men and women have had a hard slog in the tennis world isn’t news, but that it continues to be so stubbornly snotty is exasperating. My godparents were full-on tennis devotees in the ’70s and ’80s; when they weren’t down at the local courts, they were watching Lendl, McEnroe, Noah, and Navratilova on TV. I took tennis lessons (not that they did me much good) like half of the other kids in my neighborhood. The neighborhood in question, though, was a middle-class black enclave; it was only when we didn’t live in the Old Country that I realized that tennis was some rarefied sport, like golf and hockey and polo, that some people were a little more welcome to play than others. The Hub dreams of making The Scamp into a tennis pro, but that may be a long shot (besides, who’s to say his future isn’t in cricket or soccer or ballroom dancing)?

Luckily, neither Venus nor Serena lets any of this get them down, at least not publicly. They refuse to apologize for their outside interests in fashion or interior design or simply enjoying their lives, keeping tennis in perspective as just one thing that they do stunningly well. Other players on the tour may find it boring, but the MotherSister Posse will be rooting for yet another all-Williams final semifinal.

* It seems appropriate on what would have been Charlie Parker’s 87th birthday to direct your attention to Chris Raschka’s Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, now 15 years old and one of The Scamp’s favorite books. Reviews tend to rate this one for children ages 4 and up, and I don’t know why, as The Scamp has been grooving on it since he was 15 months old. Said to be inspired by Parker’s reading of “A Night in Tunisia,” the text is a jazz poem whose pages barely contain its exuberance. As The Hub noted earlier today (while listening to WBGO’s birthday tribute), Parker’s work sounds like it was recorded just yesterday; likewise, Charlie Parker Played Be Bop never gets old.

* Yeah, yeah, the Langley Schools Music Project is great and all, reminding me of the days when schools had music classes, kids had to learn an instrument, and an hour of the school day could be devoted to singing “Tom Dooley” and “Let the Sun Shine In” instead of memorizing for the next standardized test. The stellar kiddie choral versions of “Space Oddity” and “Desperado” are in my iTunes library. But if you’re ready for the next level — kid musicians tryin’ to go pro — check out Home Schooled: The ABCs of Kid Soul, a compilation of soul classics by would-be Jackson 5ers like Cindy & the Playmates and Little Murray & the Mantics. “You Are a Dream (School Time)” is liquid lovin’, and I suspect that “Don’t Leave Me Mama” is going to haunt me all the way home the first time I leave The Scamp at nursery school. (And while you’re picking up new releases, don’t forget about Madlib.)

In the previous post, I alluded to Karen Durbin’s “On Being a Woman Alone,” an essay that first appeared in The Village Voice on August 30, 1976. I don’t remember how I first heard about the article, since I had just celebrated my first birthday when it was published, but I didn’t track it down in the recent Voice 50th-anniversary retrospective or in a compilation of Durbin’s ’70s essays — no such collection exists, which seems criminal — but rather in The Village Voice Anthology (1956-1980), published in 1982 and now out of print.

The Anthology was edited by Geoffrey Stokes, who calculates that he read “800 pounds” of material before settling on an uneven selection of Voice pieces that are nonetheless very of-their-time. Essays like “Where Have All the Dealers Gone?” (1973) and “Paranoid Notes on the Strange Death of Bruce Lee” (1978) are broken up by Jules Feiffer and Ben Shahn illustrations. The Names you’d expect are included — Norman Mailer, James Wolcott, Robert Christgau — as are pieces that still make entertaining reading, such as “Are Working Women Being Liberated into Slavery?” (1976) and “Rock Death in the ’70s: A Sweepstakes” (Miss Chrissie of the GTOs is at the bottom, while Jimi Hendrix and Ronnie Van Zant tie for first, though Greil Marcus ranks Buddy Holly and Sam Cooke as the all-time winners). But what I really love about this collection are the essays by the women.

From Durbin’s meditation on choosing to move through the world alone to Vivian Gornick’s snapshot of waiting for the IRT in Times Square to Teresa Carpenter’s hair-raising account of the Long Island murder of Ewa Berwid to an anonymous letter to Governor Carey contrasting a personal experience of both an illegal and a legal abortion, the Anthology is a reminder of the degree to which the Voice kept its finger on the pulse of women’s issues and perspectives in the ’70s. Frances FitzGerald, Jamaica Kincaid, Ellen Willis, June Jordan, Thulani Davis, and Susan Brownmiller are a few of the others represented; Stokes laments that he left out Anna Mayo (as well as Nat Hentoff, by his own choice), but I wish the rightsholders and a compatible publisher — The Feminist Press at CUNY? NYU Press? Beacon Press? Seal Press? — would make up for it with another volume of Voice essays by the female journalists of the second-wave era (70s-80s). And, while they’re at it, where’s The Village Voice Anthology (1956-2006) — or even 1980-1995, before the paper ran off the rails?

She was born a wealthy Upper East Sider, pale and plain next to the likes of her contemporaries Pam Grier, Goldie Hawn, and even Diane Keaton. She wasn’t an ass-kicking goddess or a funnyman’s muse. Still, I find myself unable to turn away from a vintage Jill Clayburgh movie. I wish I could simply point you to some authoritative film critic to explain her appeal. But until Cintra Wilson gets around to writing one of her laudatory essays on underappreciated actors about La Clayburgh, you’re going to have to make do with me.

You see, time was when Jill Clayburgh apparently couldn’t lose. In an era when white chicks were bustin’ out all over — Linda Ronstadt was demanding to know when she would be loved and Karen Durbin was writing about being a woman alone and Gloria Steinem was bringing the sexy to women’s lib — Jill Clayburgh somehow became an everywoman’s icon of intelligent independence in complicated circumstances. She was a pulmonary vein to the pop-culture heart of the 1970s in America. The first seasons of The Rockford Files and Saturday Night Live? Jill was there. Co-starring with Burt Reynolds, Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and Geraldine Page? BTDT. BFFs with Jennifer Salt and Meryl Streep? Jill covered her bases. Pacino’s girlfriend? Check — in his Godfather / Godfather II years, no less. And like many other things that seemed to run off the ramp at the exit for the 1980s — including Lennonesque political engagement, high-quality Ryan’s Hope episodes, flares, and Stevie Nicks’ intact septum — the only traces of Jill Clayburgh’s careening career after 1982 seem to be tire tracks and the faint whiff of burnt rubber.

Shame that. The dame has chops, if not the best taste in scripts recently, though she has guested on high-quality TV shows lately (including Nip/Tuck and Law & Order). A recent showing of It’s My Turn is waiting for me on the DVR — Jill’s caught between Charles Grodin and a young Michael Douglas! — but if you have time for only one Clayburgh movie, make it 1978’s An Unmarried Woman, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA and won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s a time capsule of a tale: A woman dumped by her husband and regrouping in her giant New York City apartment with her teenage daughter and a sexy SoHo artist lover who threatens her delicate newfound freedom. The tagline is classic: “She laughs, she cries, she feels angry, she feels lonely, she feels guilty, she makes breakfast, she makes love, she makes do, she is strong, she is weak, she is brave, she is scared, she is… an unmarried woman.” Spritz on some Enjoli, drape yourself in an oversized “I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing!” t-shirt and bootie socks, pop up some Jiffy Pop popcorn, crash on your couch, and let Jill show you how she did it.

While I was doing my last-minute, pre-vacation shopping, I realized I needed some stylin’ sun protection: a floppy hat and sunglasses. I’m not normally a hat person, but that might all change now that I have a diva-worthy straw number from Malchijah Hats. Besides fly hats (including custom-made ones), also on offer are guayaberas and linen pants, dresses and skirts, and assorted sunglasses and bags. As the personable Joe, one of the business’ partners, put a band in my purchase, we spoke for a MotherSister Minute while he also gave attentive service to everyone who came through the door.

OPENED: We’ve been here about 10 years.

WHY FORT GREENE/CLINTON HILL: Fort Greene is a melting pot of Brooklyn. You find all ethnic diversities here and our hats cater to everyone: black Americans, West Indians, Africans, Jamaicans, Spanish people, Italians….We’re here to accommodate everyone.

BESTSELLING ITEM: The fedora.

MIKE’S COFFEE SHOP OR PRATT COFFEE SHOP: Andy’s Coffee Shop [on DeKalb near Vanderbilt].

TIPS OR SUGGESTIONS ABOUT THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Please come visit Fort Greene. It’s a nice, diverse community — nice restaurants, nice people.

Malchijah Hats is at 225 DeKalb Ave., between Adelphi and Clermont (tel. 718/643-3269). Open Monday through Saturday from noon to 8:30pm, Sunday from 1 to 7pm.

Giggling furiously at this since I saw it in the Brooklynian.com forums:

Now I know I’m home.

Mix together briny ocean breezes, a dash of citronella, and a faceful of The Scamp’s Sweet Pea-scented curls. Add one by one the faint roar of a seaplane, intermittent calls from a seagull standing sentry, and the steady rhythm of Atlantic Ocean waves splashing ashore. Sprinkle with some fine grains of white sand and grass and gravel from the daily nature walks. Wrap it in a corn maze and warm it with the late summer sun; when burnished brown, let it cool, misting it with a rolling night fog. Garnish with a smattering of mosquito bites. Serve with a New York System, freshly harvested and grilled butter-and-sugar corn, iced tea, and homemade apple pie.

MotherSister Matunuck (tm The Hub) is back in Brooklyn, y’all.

The first time I purchased hair milk from Karen’s Body Beautiful, the helpful saleswoman (who turned out to be Karen’s sister Grace, proprietor of Move With Grace studio) assured me that I would love it. She was right: Karen’s hair milk de-frizzes my kinks without making my hair feel weighed down with product (it’s light enough that I also use it on The Scamp’s finer crunchy curls), and it comes in a variety of great scents. (I’ve worked my way through White Tea, Rose, and Red Currant since this spring.) Karen Tappin Saunderson, the brand’s namesake, started her first business — a care-package delivery service — when she was only 17 years old, but she was working as a schoolteacher (history and economics) when, 4 years ago, she and her husband began making chemical-free versions of the products they were including in their spa baskets. The line was a hit, and a store was born. The couple has recently delivered another big success: Their 2-week-old daughter slept peacefully nearby as I picked up some Sweet Pea-scented conditioner and hair milk and spoke with Karen for a MotherSister Minute.

OPENED: In February 2004.

WHY FORT GREENE/CLINTON HILL: We felt this neighborhood had our demographic, that the people who live here would appreciate the products we make.

BESTSELLING ITEM: Our body scrubs. (Most popular fragrance? “White Tea.”)

MIKE’S COFFEE SHOP OR PRATT COFFEE SHOP: I prefer Pillow Cafe.

TIPS OR SUGGESTIONS ABOUT THE NEIGHBORHOOD: It’s very neighborhoody. People are very friendly and concerned about where they live.

Karen’s Body Beautiful is at 436 Myrtle Ave., between Clinton and Waverly (tel. 718/797-4808). Open Sunday through Friday from noon to 8pm, Saturday from 10am to 8pm.

So in spite of the fact that it’s August and few people are answering their phones or replying to emails — even if they are in their offices — I’ve been juggling four different projects, a nap-striking Scamp, and physical therapy for my wrist (tenosynovitis, y’all — avoid at all costs), which is why I’ve been pokey with the posts for the past couple of weeks. But the MotherSister Posse is about to bail out of Brooklyn to spend a few days on a beach in Rhode Island, and this has me thinking about how and where black folks vacation.

When I was on staff as a travel guidebook editor, one of my obligatory biannual proposals was for a modest series of city guidebooks for black travelers. Such proposals require hard numbers pointing to proven successes; squishy intangibles and gut feelings don’t make a P&L work. But as Dale Grenier puts it in “Homegirl on the Range,” an essay published in Go Girl! The Black Woman’s Book of Travel & Adventure: “White travelers will never understand the complex dynamics that affect the travel experiences of their black brothers and sisters. Why? Because most white people can move about this land freely without anyone batting an eye or questioning (with a look, an action, or a remark) their right to be in any place at any time.” (Rebecca Solnit also touches on the challenges that blacks, women, and other groups have faced in roaming freely in her excellent book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking.) There are a few magazines and websites, but many black travelers I know still work their personal networks in deciding where to vacation and what to see and do while they’re visiting (even if they buy a guidebook as well). It’ll be interesting to see if any mainstream travel guidebook publisher ever ventures to capture this market.

There have been middle-class black vacation resorts like Idlewild, and, for the wealthy, there’s still Martha’s Vineyard and Sag Harbor, but I don’t really know of any beyond that. Movies like Matty Rich’s The Inkwell and books like Dorothy West’s The Wedding, Toni Morrison’s Love, and Jill Nelson’s Finding Martha’s Vineyard all offer windows into these havens, but I’m still waiting for a more contemporary, youthful take on existing communities. Would we buy a vacation home in one (real estate prices willing) and go there every year? I don’t know; I like keeping our options open. In the end, when deciding where to go this summer, we did what millions of other people do these days: started researching online and, on the basis of some alluring photographs, forked over some cash for a promise of a week’s respite in a cottage with a garden on a private beach, where The Scamp could run around naked underneath his superhero cape. There’s always the uncertainty of being a stranger in a strange land wherever you go, but I’m thinking the sand and the sun and the ocean will pay us no never mind.

Friday, August 17 (through the 27th)
The Other Claude Chabrol at MoMA
Screenings usually from 2pm
Tickets $10 (applicable toward the $20 museum admission)

The Warriors / Superfly double feature at Film Forum
Showtimes 2:50, 6:25, 10pm / 1, 4:35, 8:10pm
Tickets $10.50 ($5.50 seniors and Film Forum members)

Saturday, August 18
Grand Avenue Block Party
From noon to 9pm
Free

Summer Literary Fest in Fort Greene Park
From 4:30pm
Free

Perhaps Love (peep: more Takeshi Kaneshiro) at BAM
Showtimes 2, 4:30, 6:50, and 9:15pm
Tickets $11

Friday, August 24
Lee Scratch Perry aboard the Temptress
Boarding 8pm, departure 9pm
Tickets $35 advance, $40 day of

Saturday, August 25
Beezu’s Back Yard Party
From 3 to 6:30pm
Admission $10 adults, $5 kids

Welcome to Nollywood screening + DJ Rich Medina at Fort Greene Park
From 5pm
Free

Sunday, August 26
Revenge of the Bookeaters at the Beacon Theatre
From 7pm
Tickets $35-$50 (826NYC benefit)

Wednesday, August 29
Midnight Cowboy / Panic in Needle Park double feature at Film Forum
Showtimes 3:15, 7:30pm / 1:10, 5:25, 9:40pm
Tickets $10.50 ($5.50 seniors and Film Forum members)

Thursday, August 30
Darfur: 20 Years of War & Genocide in Sudan exhibit opens at the powerHouse Arena
’til Sept 30
Free

Kid Koala aboard the Temptress
Boarding 6pm, departure 7pm
Tickets $25 advance, $30 day of

The Hub has a new fixation: high-fructose corn syrup. “Once you start looking for it, you realize it’s in everything!” Indeed. He doesn’t always look, though, assuming that foods he thinks of as junky (like Eggos) have it (they don’t), while foods he considers healthy (like Special K Red Berries) don’t (it does). I’ve been assisting in vanquishing his waistline’s foe by buying stuff like Polaner’s fruit spread instead of jam and locally made, preservative-free wheat bread.

At the same time, I’ve become fixated on the ingredients in our soaps, lotions, shampoos, and other cosmetics. I came across Skin Deep several months ago, and I’ve been scandalized to discover that brands I thought of as unimpeachable (Aveeno and Burt’s Bees, for example) are sometimes made with questionable chemicals. A couple of days ago, I decided to commit to avoiding anything with ingredients that I couldn’t pronounce or identify a good reason for slathering on my or The Scamp’s skin. I’ve been using Dr. Bronner’s soap and Vaseline as a moisturizer, as well as Fort Greene-based Carol’s Daughter and Karen’s Body Beautiful hair products, and I must say, my skin is happier already. I don’t have any illusions of purity, but whether I’m reducing my exposure to cancer-causing chemicals or simply giving my skin and hair less of an excuse to be as schizo as they can be, I reckon every little bit helps.

A sunny Saturday morning in late spring. Fort Greene Park is abuzz with patrons at the weekly greenmarket, tennis players, people walking their dogs. I’m idly watching the scene while The Scamp sleeps next to me on a blanket. My eye is caught by a couple with a small baby — maybe a 3-monther — who claim a patch under a big tree near the very edge of the lawn. They park the chairs that they’ve brought along facing away from the center of the park, and after settling their infant between them, they whip out their coffees and newspapers and bury their faces in them. Their body language seems to say, “We’re in the park, but we’re not of the park, dahlings.” I realize I’m staring at them. Why am I staring at them? Because the way they occupied a piece of a very public space seems a little hostile, somehow.

A windy, cold, gray afternoon in late winter. I’ve just left Choice Market with one of their delicious salmon burgers in a bag hanging off the handle of The Scamp’s stroller. A few feet away from the entrance, standing against a low wall in front of a brownstone, is an older black woman who looks a little worse for the wear and possibly light of pocket. “Is the food there good?” she asks me as I pass. “Yes, very,” I reply. She nods, but something about her expression suggests to me that she won’t be stepping in to find out for herself. I get the distinct impression she doesn’t believe it’s her kind of place.

Why am I nattering on about this now? Well, it came to mind when I read “Is Gentrification Transforming the City’s Public Spaces?” in the New York Times today. Sewell Chan reports on an ASA panel that I wish I could’ve attended; they’re articulating questions that I’ve found myself feeling unsettled by but unable to fully unpack. It’s not news to anyone here that there’s a quiet tug-of-war going on in this neighborhood, but it’s still somewhat jarring when what seem like macro-level concepts elbow you in the ribs in small, everyday moments.

Lance Freeman is quoted in Chan’s article, which reminds me that I want to read his book on gentrification in Clinton Hill and Harlem, There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up. Despite what the comments below Chan’s article might suggest, it’s not simply a racial issue (though, as with everything in America, it’s definitely a part of it), and Freeman’s book avoids reducing it to that, which makes me more interested in checking it out. The Atlantic Yards Report’s review is worth an eyeball if you’d like a quick summary.