MotherSister Brooklyn

There’s something incredibly sweet about this storefront at 741 Fulton Street, which used to house the high-end children’s clothing shop Hot Toddie.

Perhaps it’s the dreamy blue exterior or the exposed brick wall inside, but I almost want to pull together a business plan and find the funding to open something myself here. Can’t you just imagine a yarn/fabric shop or a chocolate shop? Maybe even another kids’ shop, like Area or the Green Onion in Cobble Hill?

Another space that I hope is snapped up soon by a retailer in touch with the Fort Greene community’s needs and desires is the former (useless to most) Chase Home Loans center (at 57-59 Lafayette Avenue), which famously lacked an ATM, like the Washington Mutual further up Fulton Avenue in Clinton Hill:

This is a pretty big space apparently (3,800 square feet), and I’ve heard it’s dividable, but it’s a great opportunity for a business that needs a lot of room to set up shop in the heart of Fort Greene. Maybe a general-interest bookstore or a place like Grey Dog or Tea Lounge? Or something like Willy Bee’s (now no longer) — the neighborhood could use a truly child-friendly (and even child-oriented) cafe-ish space….

At not quite 2 years of age, The Scamp has an awesome t-shirt collection, including robots, squirrels, and turntables, all emblems of this Brooklyn boy’s life. I feel a little twinge of sadness every time I cull his closet for outgrown clothes. I’ve been setting aside the most memorable of the t-shirts, though, to make into a quilt.

T-shirt blankets and quilts are popular practical keepsake items; sports and band t-shirts seem to be especially common material. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn to quilt from my grandmother before she died, so I’m going to have to figure out how to put it together myself. There are instructions online, as well as classes in the area for quiltmaking. I suppose if I feel truly at a loss, I could always outsource it, but it feels important to me to attempt to do it myself. I know how special I feel when I curl up in a quilt made by my grandma’s own hands, and I hope The Scamp will feel the same way about his t-shirt quilt, even if he becomes a surly teenager.

Photo above of one of the better t-shirt quilts I’ve seen, by Beverly St. Clair at Genome Quilts. If I were to commission a quilt, it’d likely be by her.

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?

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.

Being environmentally correct seems to be all the rage here lately, from a neighborhood level (with the new Green Greene initiative) to an individual consumer level. On the local parents’ listserv, there was a spate of postings a couple of weeks ago about green products; someone is apparently thinking of opening a shop with that focus. The replies were generally name-checks of existing places nearby, but one person went directly to the point: She would definitely shop at this hypothetical new store, she said, if the products weren’t “outrageously expensive.”

The new luxury sector? Products that purport to be organic and environmentally friendly. No news that — everyone knows that organic foods are pricier than conventional (they don’t call it Whole Paycheck for nothing). But as recent articles in The Indypendent and the New York Times point out, green consumerism offers a way to feel morally correct about your egregious shopping. Don’t get me wrong: I had a frisson of joy when I discovered Ecover in the mid-’90s while living in the U.K. And if you need to buy paint, why not try to get the low- or no-VOC kind? But if you think you need that $240 Reware Bag (pictured above) from 3R Living so that you can recharge your disposable electronics on the beach, well, you know what they say about fools and money…Or, at least, don’t kid yourself about the overall impact of what you’re buying. (A point well made by Alex Steffan, in his rebuttal to the NYTimes trendpiece.)

Retailers are obviously in love with the premiums they can charge for organic and green products, and there are clear socioeconomic differences in who’s buying this stuff and who’s not. I took for granted how relatively affordable a variety of healthy foods were when I lived in California; here, The Hub’s eyes pop at our weekly grocery tally. Looks like these tips for buying organic on the cheap will come in handy; I’m also checking out this “Organic Thrifty Food Plan Challenge.”

I swear I’ll blog about something besides books again soon, but I couldn’t resist mentioning The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, due to be released on July 10. (Yes, I linked to an online bookseller based in Oregon, but try to buy it from your local, OK?) With all the new interest in carbon footprints, I’ve idly wondered what would happen if humanity just went “pouf” — how would the earth repair itself, and what life forms would flourish and evolve in our place? I’m really excited that someone with a keener scientific mind than mine has addressed this question. There’s an interview with Weisman at ScientificAmerican.com; be sure to check out the accompanying sidebar articles and video.

Speaking of toys, The Scamp’s current favorite is his Fisher-Price turntable.

Babble has a semi-interesting piece on Gen-X parents’ susceptibility to toy marketing (especially nostalgia toys), and considering that I’ve already bought The Scamp the aforementioned turntable, given him my Little Professor (for when, y’know, he can actually count), and am searching on The Hub’s behalf for a Speak ‘n’ Spell (which are going for $40+ these days), we might seem to fit the marketing data to a tee. But the acquisition of the FP turntable was a little more organic than that: At barely more than 1 year old, The Scamp took a great interest in our fancy adult version, and around the same time, Grammy reminisced about the old “See…Hear…Read” 45s I used to have. (”I thought those were really great,” she sighed wistfully.) And so I scored a vintage FP turntable from a Williamsburg hipster who was moving back to Cali, and started buying the most interesting records I could find. The Scamp has a nice little collection going:

I’ve lost out on a couple of records I really wanted for him, like “Muhammad Ali & His Gang Vs. Mr. Tooth Decay,” but I reckon we’ll be crate digging together well into the future.

A few days ago I took The Scamp to a toy store; I try to stay a step or two ahead of his development, and it was time for a couple of new fun things to strew around his bedroom. I set him free to play with a train table, and I idly browsed some nearby Playmobil figure sets. Ninety-nine percent of the figures on the shelves were white, so I was surprised to spot a brown-faced veterinarian, complete with a doctor’s bag, an alligator, a lion, and a camel. I snatched it up immediately, and figured that when I got home, I could find more online at Playmobil’s website. (After all, if they have a black veterinarian, surely they have a couple of black children, a mom, a dad, a Moorish king, something.)

But no, actually, they don’t. Besides skeletons, Rebel and Union soldiers, and a HAZMAT crew, they have…American Indians in tribal dress. (I guess to go with the cowboys.) Disappointed, I emailed the German company and received a swift reply: “At this time we have not many multi-cultural figures. Thank you for your suggestion, we will pass it along.” I didn’t think it would be a novel concept to a German company that manufactures figures to play to American touchstones like the Civil War, Wild West standoffs, and HAZMAT personnel to also make some contemporary figures in a few shades of brown. Crazy me.

I can either build a wild-animal scene around our lone brown veterinarian, or I can give up on Playmobil for now and try Plan Toys or Ryan’s Room, both smart enough to make “ethnic” (black and Asian) family figures. There’s something about Playmobil’s style I really like, though, and I hate to abandon them; on the other hand, I think it’s important for my brown baby boy to see people like him represented in fantasyland.

(ETA: I found another one — a biker boy! Also settled on a zoo and a safari van. So we have a nice multiculti starter set after all. If there’s demand, maybe Playmobil will introduce more colored figures in its larger 4+ line. If not, we’ll have to settle for this tan surfer.)