DILLA! or last night a DJ saved my life

we’ve been lucky to get the last couple of Saturdays free. this time, we split up. he went to a conference on community gardens at the New School. i spent the day doing application assistance for Haitians seeking Temporary Protected Status. we met up in BK to head to the Bell House EARLY.  i don’t think i’d ever been to a club that early in my life.

i can’t remember the last time i made it out to hear anyone spin anything, much less at an event i really, really, really wanted to go to. it was probably some time, somewhere before that whole getting pregnant and having a baby thing happened.

it’d obviously been a long time because i forgot my ID.  luckily i didn’t have to stand outside while he went back for it. we danced and had a grand ole time until the morning. absolutely loved both brainchild & Questo’s sets. Great pics and more pics from the event: here and here.

*if i’d gone to this event in Berlin, it would have been me,  5 other black americans and two drug dealers making up the people of color population… so this felt unbelievably just like home. it’s good to be back. i feel brand new.

won’t you be my neighbor? [FREE MCNY PASSES]

We planned to use the free admission passes to the Museum of the City of New York on our family date. It was a little regalo we received at the Three Kings Day earlier in January.

Trying to be on the first at the museum that Saturday (knowing it’s not the most almost-3-year-old friendly place), I checked the opening times. On the MCNY website, I found out that if you happen to live or work above 103rd street you’re a neighbor! Most importantly, neighbor, in this instance, means free.

So I have two free admission passes that I no longer need. Is there anyone in NYC who actually reads this blog? (other than Crain’s journalists doing google searches?) If you want the passes, drop a line at poisson.rouge.nyc [at] gmail.com, tell me your favorite insider NYC place to be and the passes are yours.

Chiapas mural

Since Costco’s November opening, I see new visitors to the neighborhood every day, with their carts and Trader Joe’s bags. Intrepid and hardy enough to find a sale anywhere, they converse in pairs trying to figure out which M116 bus stop is the closest. The people taking 117th street over to the megastore will get a nice peek at the community gardens but most will miss this mural just a block away.

Costco conquering El Barrio, resident workers on chopping block

I’m not surprised that Costco did its little dance to get the community board approval to run its delivery trucks all up and down the neighborhood, 24 hours a day. Costco agreed to hire workers from the community and accept food stamps in exchange for the transport and delivery permissions. Now the Costco workers from the East Harlem community are being laid off just two months after the store opened, reports DNAinfo.

Costco Tells East Harlem That It’s Laying Off 160 Workers

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20100121/manhattan/costco-tells-east-harlem-that-its-laying-off-160-workers#ixzz0dUqtFFUt

on naming: paddington and our inner neocolonialist

Over the past few days, I’ve been revisiting the power of words, specifically names. Three separate events reminded me about names, how we represent ourselves, and how others perceive us.

1. At my Red Cross (pic above – guess that’s where all the money goes – into nice buildings?) training, the Sikh instructor made a joke about his name. He mentioned that we could call him by the first half of his name or the 2nd half of his name, if we wanted.

2. Yesterday during my Spanish class, my instructor asked me if she could call me by the Spanish variant of my name. After I said no, she then pronounced my two syllable name correctly but added that it was difficult.

3. We stopped by Strand and picked up an anniversary edition of Paddington. In the first chapter, the little bear with an Anglophile aunt back in Darkest Peru replies to the Browns that he only has a Peruvian name that “no one can understand.” The Browns rename him after a train station. How distinguished!

I take this issue to heart. I have acquaintances that I’ve known for over 10 years who still get my relatively simple name wrong. I see it as problematic when we (with “foreign” sounding names, within or outside of our native cultures) allow others to rename us. It irks me even more when the foreign sounding name is completely pronounceable in English. If someone can say “Man” and “Preet” then how hard is it to say Manpreet?

I bristle at the idea of letting an other retool and remake one of our first moments of self-identification. I remember clearly the first time my daughter turned to the sound of her own name. Her adverse reaction to variants of her first name amuse me but I’m glad that even at a young age she is developing a sense of linguistic power.

As for Paddington, I just hope I’m raising enough of a critical thinker to see beyond the crap – I mean -floppy hat.

And speaking of critical thinkers, see Avatar through a lens other than 3D glasses by Restructure, my favorite Canadian blog.

kwanzaa

one winter break in college, i glanced over a diatribe in the NY Post about kwanzaa. the editorial used the same “socialist as slur” rhetoric revisited in the healthcare debates. i think the editorial was inspired by a decision by the Clinton administration to add Happy Kwanzaa to the official White House holiday cards. i wrote a letter to the editor which was published in the paper.

with mausi, i’ve been forced to think more about traditions. although i haven’t celebrated kwanzaa at home anytime in the recent past, it is still plays a large part in my memory of panafricanism in the eighties: from mandela to budweiser black history month posters on the wall.

this year we went to kwanzaa celebrations at the natural history museum and the dana discovery center in central park. djembe drummer michael wimberly, in conjunction with the museum of african art (opening across the street in 2011), was wonderful with the kids.

the best thing about new york city is being able to expose mausi to it all by just stepping out of the door.

ghost dog in el barrio

i saw this boat in between lexington and third avenues on about 108th street.

i’m a converted jim jarmusch fan. the boat on a rooftop scene was my favorite part of that movie. coming across this tableau in the middle of east harlem made that scene seem a bit less outlandish.

isaac de bankole was awesome too. *adds to netflix queue*

Three Kings Day

my first time ever at the three kings day parade in east harlem. i was a bit surprised that third avenue bus traffic was allowed to continue during the parade, with the avenue filled with children in the streets and on the sidewalk. other than that, it was a blast (the figurative kind and the arctic kind)!

we even scored two free passes to the museum of the city of new york and a cool coupon book from el museo del barrio for shops and restaurants in the neighborhood.

feliz dia de reyes!

NYC Charter Schools … where’s the debate?

After the United Federation of Teachers recently released its proposal to change the New York State Charter School laws, there has been a flurry of reporting about the “helpfulness” of the suggestions in local papers.

With all the publicity, I thought that I would catch a spirited debate at the public hearing on a new charter school application in School District 4. The only problem… I was the public.

The only person basically not required to be there who showed up – me.

Yay for public input?

race, beauty and healthcare

we ended up in this park avenue doctor’s office as a referral from the pediatric ER. an unlucky trip and fall sent us rushing to the hospital at mausi’s usual bedtime. after the pediatric nurse and three different doctors examined her, the second resident returned to let us know they were calling the plastic surgeon. i’d asked about scarring.

the resident said something to this effect: she’s a beautiful girl and we want her to stay that way. we don’t want to mess it up.

i wondered what that meant in our “post-racial” world. it’s possible the resident was just trying to be complimentary but it’s worrisome to think that medical care could be rationed on a subjective standard of beauty. i was relieved to have such a skillful doctor stitch up my little one but wondered whether the little girl with a head injury with my skin tone who went in before us received the same treatment.