Birthday Picnic

Last weekend, we had a picnic to celebrate Julia's and Yasaman's birthdays at the newly opened Pier 1 (not the furniture store) at Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was a beautiful day, though a bit chilly there on the water. It felt like coming out of hibernation!





I'm not sure who took these beautiful shots of Rowena and Amyjoy playing on the grass (Angelique?), but I love them!


After it got too chilly, we repaired to a local bar to keep the birthday fun going for a couple more hours!



We don't need much to have fun. Just a hat!

Flâneur

From Wikipedia

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. (Cornelia Otis Skinner Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York)

77 Drums and Beyond!

On 7/7/07, Japanese noise band the Boredoms had a concert with 77 drums. There was a huge line and we felt lucky to get into Brooklyn Bridge Park. They set up the drum kits in a spiral at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge with the Boredoms, or more specifically their frontman Eye, at the center. He led the drums with a big stick and a biiiig head o'hair. Just look at all those drum kits!
And those drummers!


That guy in the striped shirt and baseball cap in the outermost row is none other than Andrew W.K. Even better, when he stood up, he was wearing high-waisted jean shorts. Nice.

Besides the usual contingent of hipsters, there was a surprisingly diverse crowd that also included a girl in stilts and gold spandex.

Not all of us made it into the park; Eric and a friend of his with a rowboat hung out in the East River - a rowboat!! Eric claimed they could hear everything just fine, and I guess I wouldn't be surprised if people could hear it in Manhattan - they did have seventy-seven drums, after all. There were plenty of people crowded up on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway too. After the show, we went down to the "beach" to meet up.

After that, it was just a long night of drinking and being silly.

Eric shows off his iphone.

Fast forward about six hours for these pictures coming up. It's almost morning, but I must've had a lot to drink, 'cause I have what Greg calls "that drunk fishy look." And while Julia looks much more coherent, does she actually remember these pictures being taken?

Why are we cracking up? Is it because we couldn't figure out the timer? Or because we were trying to not all be smushed into a corner of the picture like in the one on the left?


I'm ending this picture series of Newtown Creek with me and Eric because we were the last two left that night! That's right, everyone else punked out on breakfast, but it's not as if I could get home without catching a ride on Eric's handlebars, so maybe it wasn't so much due to my diehard party spirit.

We ran into a few people eating some post-club fried chicken in Greenpoint. I took a pass, but Eric downed it - and threw the bones over his shoulder when he thought no one was looking.


Does this picture really need an explanation?

Bike Share and Brooklyn Bridge Park Floating Pool

One early July afternoon, Julia, James and I went over to the Storefront for Art and Architecture to check out the Bike Share experiment. We were the only people there at the moment except for an AP photographer who proceeded to take shot after shot of us on the bikes. So I don't know how long this link'll work, but here's the New York Times blog article on it and (drum roll, please) a picture of me! In the New York Times!! Well, in the Times blog anyway. There's an article in the Washington Post as well, and the caption says it's the three of us, but the picture's not coming up. I think we made New York magazine as well. And since we're on the topic of bike-related fame, here's our own J-li on StreetBeat doing the Tour de Brooklyn!

Later on, we picked up Bichthu, Eric, Mina, and Francis and went to the Brooklyn Bridge Park Floating Pool. We didn't actually make it to the floating pool that day - it turned out to be the day of aborted plans - but we did make it to their sandy "beach" to lounge around and play scrabble. And wear ladies' sunglasses.