Accordion music, knishes, and egg creams, along with our Heather Quinlan, greeted upwards of 100 guests at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema this evening to see a preview of Heather’s work-in-progress film If These Knishes Could Talk. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz was on hand to give a short talk on the Brooklyn accent, which he, naturally, considers the true American speech (never mind those people who say the real McCoy is found in Buffalo). He also described how one of the best kosher delis in Brooklyn has passed from Jewish to Italian to Egyptian Muslim hands, while remaining kosher. Marty was treated to a birthday knish with candles.

During a Q&A session after the screening, Heather was asked what she plans to add to the film. She said she hopes to travel to New Orleans to interview speakers of the Yat dialect, which is similar to “Brooklynese”, and to East London, to interview speakers of the Cockney dialect, which she sees as the closest British analogue to a New York accent.

Brooklyn Heights Cinema owner Kenn Lowy prompted enthusiastic applause at the close of the event when he announced that the Cinema will be around for some time, as the landlord has said he wants to do the right thing.

Brooklyn Heights resident Björk has launched a combination concert & performance art event in support of her new album “Biophilia,” at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. If you missed her opening set Friday, she will encore Monday 2/6, Thursday 2/9, Sunday 2/12 and Wednesday 2/15.

The performance offers Björk accompanied by novel musical instruments, including four 10-foot pendulum-harps and a MIDI-controlled pipe organ, as well as a 24-piece Icelandic female choir and visuals from Biophilia Apps. The new album is a multi-media experience, available in collaboration with Apple here.

Björk will also collaborate with the New York Hall of Science in an upcoming three-week “Biophilia” education series, featuring interactive science and music workshops for middle-school children. Topics include the scientific concepts at the core of “Biophilia’s” songs, including crystalline structures, lunar phases, viruses and more.

The New York Hall of Science is located at 47-01 111th Street, Queens: 718-699-0005. Tickets for the concert, which range from $75 to $150, are available here.

Warbling Icelandic recording artist and Brooklyn Heights neighbor Björk, who bought a pad on Henry Street with filmmaker hubby Matthew Barney in 2009, has released new album “Brooklynphilia.” No, wait, that’s not right: It’s “Biophilia.” She appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” January 31 to rap about the project and perform tracks.

According to USA Today, the recording is—historically—the “first app album,” in collaboration with Apple. Its iTunes link explains that “Biophilia” comprises “a suite of original music and interactive, educational artworks and musical artifacts,” and is released as 10 in-app experiences accessed “as you fly through a three-dimensional galaxy that accompanies the album’s theme song ‘Cosmogony.’” Say what?

Perhaps you can figure out what that means as Björk attempts to explain it to Colbert via clips at USA Today’s Pop Candy blog here.

Molly Smith Metzler, a playwright who lives in the Heights with fellow theater scribe Colin McKenna, is featured in a Sunday Los Angeles Times profile January 22. Her play “Elemeno Pea,” opens Feb. 3 at South Coast Repertory. The Tony-winning professional company in Costa Mesa, Calif., is regarded as one of America’s foremost producers of new works.
“Pea” is based on a woman she met while working at a yacht club on Martha’s Vineyard soon after college. “Everyone hated her. She was so demanding,” Smith Metzler tells the Times about the character of Michaela, the downward-spiraling diva who drives much of the comic action. She got to know the woman and “when I saw her life up close and personal, I felt very sympathetic. I had never seen a sadder person in my life, who had more money than God.”
In “Elemeno Pea,” the 33-year-old Juilliard-trained playwright “dramatizes both the seduction and the repulsion as Simone, personal assistant to the exacting, increasingly needy Michaela,” the Times reports. Other characters include Michaela’s middle-class sister, Devon; Simone’s swaggering, idle-rich boyfriend, Ethan; and a dryly impertinent handyman, Jos-B.
In the piece, Smith Metzler also discusses the disastrous launch of her off-Broadway debut, “Close Up Space,” a comedy-drama starring David Hyde Pierce and Rosie Perez, which runs through Jan. 29 at Manhattan Theatre Club.
Read the Los Angeles Times story here.

Brooklyn Heights-based artist, gardener, musician, author, sculpturist and overall creative guru Ford Rogers is whetting the artistic appetites of visitors at popular Italian eatery Noodle Pudding—at 38 Henry Street—with a dozen of his original paintings on display through February.

Rogers is well known in the neighborhood for designing the one-acre Bridge Harbor Heights Garden on Poplar Street between Hicks and Henry, home to 300+ plant varieties, which he designed nearly 20 years ago. Ford received the Brooklyn Heights Association’s Community Service Award for his horticultural efforts. His work was featured on the Brooklyn Heights Blog in July 2009.

Meanwhile, his artwork and sculptures have been displayed in NYC, Orlando, Nashville and Providence, R.I., while the New York Salmagundi Club honored Rogers for his acrylic-on-wood sculptures. Add to that his series of voodoo-inspired dolls and decorative items, including furniture, lamps and computer equipment. His works are heralded in private collections throughout North America and Europe.

As if that’s not enough, Rogers has also published three cookbooks: on citrus, nuts and olives. And overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, he has a studio where he produces music, which has been used in a Dutch film and in a number of gallery installations.

Among Rogers’ works on display at Noodle Pudding are internationally inspired “Lima Fruit Vendor,” “Iceland Kirkja,” “Iceland Farm” and images of Svartifoss and Reykjavik in Iceland.

The NY Observer reports that actress Amy Ryan (The Office, The Wire) and her former SNL writer husband Eric Slovin are moving to Brooklyn Heights.

Slovin is the writing partner of former Pierrepont Street resident, now Cobble Hillbilly, Simon Rich. So when they’re not crossing the Atlantic Avenue DMZ to visit him, perhaps Ryan and Slovin will be dropping in to see her Win Win co-star Paul Giamatti who lives a mere stone’s throw away from their new Hicks Street digs.

NY Observer: As a Queens native, Ms. Ryan knows her way around a New York block. In an interview with The New York Times last year, the Gone Baby Gone actress explained that the city has a singular vitality. “I need the pulse of New York City,” she said, admitting that she draws inspiration from the people she encounters in the subway and on the street. We have the feeling that there will be plenty of material for you to work with in Brooklyn, Ms. Ryan. Only time will tell how the new environs will shape her acting career, however. Perhaps we’ll see her in Requiem for Dream Part II?

Chabad.edu: Welcome to “Extreme Sports: Jewish Style.” I’ll leave the suicidal skateboarding to the kids. Being a rabbi, I’m more of a dreidel blackbelt!

While they aren’t as transformative as the Kabbalah or as lucrative as a lottery win, I’m uniquely qualified to reveal to you another very powerful secret of the universe: the Upside Down Dreidel Spin.

This is the bubbie of all spins, but in the spirit of Chanukah, remember: just as the oil in the temple burned for eight days, a great dreidel player must cultivate patience and perseverance in order to master this move.

Brooklyn Heights resident/ playwright Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space opens tonight on Broadway at New York City Center Stage I [131 W. 55th Street Manhattan] (buy tickets). The play, recently in previews, stars David Hyde Pierce as Paul Barrow “an obsessive book editor on a major deadline.”

Playbill: Molly Smith Metzler is the author of Elemeno Pea, which recently premiered at the 2011 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre in Louisville. Her plays — which include Training Wisteria and Carve — have been developed by Manhattan Theatre Club 7@7, Playwrights Horizons, The O’Neill Theater Center, Ars Nova, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Chautauqua Theater Company, Summer Play Festival (SPF), Cherry Lane Mentor Project, hotINK, London’s Tristan Bates Theatre, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and the Kennedy Center, where she was the recipient of three KCACTF Awards (The Kennedy Center National Student Playwriting Award, The Mark Twain Comedy Award and The David Mark Cohen Award).

Wall Street Journal Online: It took three hours to create the gourd, which weighed 125 pounds and stood three-and-a-half feet tall. “I did Heidi Klum a little quicker,” said Mr. McMahon, a Brooklyn Heights resident who this year alone has carved Anderson Cooper into a pumpkin and Susan Sarandon into a watermelon. “In [Kim's] case, it’s getting the eyebrows right. They’re very pronounced. I hope it’s voluptuous. I think it is.”

As a few commenters have noted, Norton Juster’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth is celebrating its 50th birthday this week. Juster and illustrator Jules Feiffer shared an apartment in Brooklyn Heights where the book was written:

WSJ: I was living in Brooklyn Heights with Jules in a big old decrepit duplex apartment. I had been looking for a place to live and he just happened to be living above [what became] my basement room. That was in the 1950s and it was a very different place. I went back recently to Montague Street and I couldn’t remember a single store or restaurant or anything. Things do change.

But wait… there’s more! The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth is edited by Brooklyn Heights resident Leonard S. Marcus:

Educating Alice: Tracing the publication history of The Phantom Tollbooth led me back to the book’s editor, Jason Epstein, whom I interviewed in his lower Manhattan apartment. Epstein is one of the great innovators of modern American publishing: the creator of Anchor Books and the Library of America, and a co-founder of the New York Review of Books, among other ventures. No wonder he found an adventurous book like The Phantom Tollbooth well worth publishing, even though he was not in the business of publishing contemporary children’s books at the time.

I loved finding out the derivation of expressions like “short shrift” and “to make ends meet.” Almost as a bonus, Jules Feiffer and Norton Juster were both living in the neighborhood where I now live—Brooklyn Heights, New York—at the time they collaborated on The Phantom Tollbooth. So I got to do some historical time travel and learn quite a lot about what life in the Heights was like a half century ago.

Anyone know where Feiffer and Juster’s apartment was in the Heights? The pair are recently seen in front of the brownstone in the video above – can you figure out the address?

Brooklyn Eagle: An uncanny likeness of celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse — with the addition of an eerie orange glow — emerged from the X-acto knife held by “pumpkin carver to the stars,” Hugh McMahon. The pumpkin was destined for a tribute to Lagasse at the New York City Food & Wine Festival at the Chelsea Market.

“I’ve been on his program four or five times,” McMahon nonchalantly told the Brooklyn Eagle. “It gets very busy this time of year — the orders are pouring in. Last year I carved for Heidi Klum’s Halloween party. This year it’s Red Bull and something for the Nets. They’re talking about a logo.”

Ephemeral New York: Struggling young poet Hart Crane (below), an Ohio transplant living just a short walk away at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, regularly visited Sands Street in the 1920s.

“With Emil away at sea a lot and their relationship intermittent, Crane walked down to Sands Street searching for sex to share in a rendezvous meant not to last,” writes Evan Hughes in his wonderful book Literary Brooklyn.

“Cruising was a dangerous pursuit for Crane in a time of rampant homophobia. More than once he came home beaten and bloodied.”

The New York Times reports today on a lawsuit over the sale of the late Norman Mailer’s 142 Columbia Heights co-op:

NY Times: In July, Wesley Golby, a hedge fund manager, signed a contract to purchase the apartment for $2.08 million, and he put down a deposit of $208,750.

For Mr. Golby, the appeal was not just the apartment’s sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline and its storied history, but also the highly unusual layout that resulted from a renovation performed in the early 1960s, according to Mr. Golby’s lawyer, William Fried.

Mailer, seeking to conquer a lifelong fear of heights, essentially had the roof lifted up to create a tri-level crow’s nest of sorts. A series of ladders lead up several flights, with landings and small rooms resembling tiny ship galleys on each level.

But after Mr. Golby signed the contract, he contends, the Mailer estate failed to provide evidence to back up assurances that the work had been done legally and in accordance with zoning laws and building codes.

He wants to be released from his contract and get his deposit back, according to a civil complaint to be filed in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

“This is not about money,” Mr. Fried said. “Wes loved the apartment. His problem is he loved that apartment as it is and he does not want to go in and find out he can’t have the apartment he wants.”

Brooklyn Eagle: During his time in Brooklyn Heights, Miller “never gravitated toward a society of writers.” He was far more likely to explore the livelier neighborhoods just beyond the Heights. “I loved walking along the waterfront,” he recalled. “When I got interested in the longshoremen, I spent a lot of time in Red Hook around Columbia Street. There was a movement at the time to rid the union of racketeers … I knew a newly graduated lawyer involved in that struggle. There were lots of murders, bodies dropping into the river in concrete slabs. He called me. He thought I could get some publicity in the papers. Then I became a supernumerary of that movement.” Miller’s experience in Red Hook gave him the background for A View from the Bridge and the young lawyer furnished part of the characterization of Alfieri.

NYCurbed: So, it looks like Norman Mailer’s $2.5M apartment in Brooklyn Heights is off the market after a 6 month run with Corcoran. The Post reports that a serious buyer emerged in August, and the family even had a final dinner to say farewell to the apartment in preparation for the move. They even go on to say “They had also begun moving out the legendary author’s belongings.” Well, get the boxes back in the apartment ’cause that deal is dead!

The Atlantic Avenue Local Development Corporation has named as its first “Ambassador of Atlantic Avenue” Charlie Sahadi, proprietor of Sahadi’s, the gourmet and Middle Eastern food market at 187 Atlantic Avenue, between Clinton and Court streets.

“A true ‘ambassador’ of the Borough of Brooklyn, Charlie has helped to make Brooklyn an international destination and represented our community as both a cultural and business leader. Through Charlie’s vision and hard work, Sahadi’s has become not only a major wholesaler with international influence but also top retail hub for other local businesses to build off of and create a unique retail district where so many cultures and neighborhoods merge,” said Christian Haag, Atlantic Avenue LDC President.

Mr. Sahadi is the inaugural recipient of the Ambassador award, which will be presented annually. He will be honored at a ceremony to be held at Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, at Third Avenue. Tickets are $50, and may be purchased here. Proceeds benefit the Atlantic Avenue LDC, a not-for-profit organization that “promote[s] economic growth and vitality, enhancing the preservation and development of downtown Brooklyn and neighboring communities. [It] sponsors the Atlantic Avenue ArtWalk each spring, the Atlantic Antic in the fall and a Holiday Promotion each year.”

Photo: Brooklyn Community Foundation.

Karl gives us scenes from, and commentary about, two parks designed by award winning landscape architect and Brooklyn Heights resident Michael Van Valkenburgh. One of these, of course, is Brooklyn Bridge Park. The other is Teardrop Park (see photo) in Battery Park City, which is part of your correspondent’s morning walk (long version) that starts on the Promenade, continues across Brooklyn Bridge, then across lower Manhattan to Battery Park City, traversing Teardrop Park and continuing to the World Financial Center, then back through City Hall Park to the Bridge. Video after the jump.

We started this site a mere 26 days before Scales took the plunge and it was soon thereafter that we began collaborating. Claude’s observations and punditry at SAB have always been entertaining and informative. His contributions to BHB have helped us keep things going and moving forward. Congrats on six years, Mr. Scales and many many more.

Don’t be surprised if you see a scene similar to this picture tomorrow. The HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” will be filming in Borough Hall from early morning on. The hit show is no stranger to the area, having shot scenes at the former Gage & Tollner restaurant, as well as in the rotunda of Borough Hall, which is featured prominently in the first season’s finale. The new season premieres on September 25th. Your intrepid correspondent is among the snappily dressed faces in the crowd (who says the entertainment industry doesn’t provide jobs for locals?) and understands the action will take place in the magnificent ceremonial courtroom. About 100 extras will be seen heading between the set and the holding area reserved in Sts. Constantine and Helen Cathedral on Schermerhorn Street. No word on whether Brooklynite (and vocal supporter of Engine 205) Steve Buscemi, who stars as Nucky Thompson, will be there.

UPDATE below the break…

The ceremonial courtroom was done up to represent the U.S. District Court in Camden, NJ.  Steve Buscemi (Nucky Thompson), Shea Whigham (Sheriff Eli Thompson), Anthony Laciura (Eddie Kessler), and Adam Mucci (Deputy Halloran) were among the principals working today. The scene will be part of the second season finale, tentatively titled “To The Lost.”

Wall Street Journal Photo

BHB contributor/Brooklyn Heights resident/FILMMAKER Heather Quinlan is featured in the Wall Street Journal today. A 20 minute version of her If These Knishes Could Talk makes its debut next Saturday at the Art of Brooklyn Festival. Check out the video after the jump.

WSJ: Filmmaker Heather Quinlan began the project as a tribute to her recently deceased father, and quickly realized that hers wasn’t the only nostalgic fondness for linguistic curveballs like “terlet,” “cawfee” and “fuhgeddaboudit.”

“Obviously New Yorkers are very interested in the New York accent,” said Ms. Quinlan in her Bronx-Irish-Italian accent. “But it’s something that captures a lot of people’s imagination, whether they’re New Yorkers or not.”

To make “Knishes,” she solicited participants in busy pedestrian areas with a sign asking, “Do you have a New York accent?” (The answer, most of the time: “I dunno, do I have an accent? You tell me.”) Her 30-plus subjects include man-on-the-street encounters and formal interviews with New Yorkers including writer Pete Hamill (Brooklyn) and filmmaker Amy Heckerling (Bronx).

WNYC has posted a feature about The Wooden Birds, who recorded their entire debut album in a Brooklyn Heights apartment. They’ll be appearing at Rock Shop tonight.

WNYC: Kenny wrote the songs for The Wooden Bird’s debut record Magnolia over several years living in Brooklyn. The album was recorded in a Brooklyn Heights apartment. On the record, Kenny is joined by drummer Sean Haskins, former AmAnSet collaborator Leslie Sisson, and guitarist and singer Matt Pond (of Matt Pond PA).

Karl takes his cam to the residence of Phillip Wilentz, known to all of us as “nabeguy” (and to Homer as our uber-poster) who, with his wife and daughter, will soon be moving to the further reaches of Long Island. Along with nabeguy’s reflections on his 54 years of life in Brooklyn Heights, and some conversation with fellow long-time Heights residents Martin and Rona Schneider, we also see some historic Heights photos. Video after the jump.

Brooklyn Heights resident/actor Paul Giamatti played many parts in a lot of movies before his breakthrough role as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (2003). We thought it would be fun to make a list of 10 of his notable pre-Splendor screen appearances. Our list of Giamatti’s 10 Most Memorable Supporting Roles after the jump.

10. Singles(1992) – Billed as “Kissing Man”, Giamatti is part of the world’s most annoying Generation X movie ever made for less than a minute. While the movie was a steaming steaming hunk of crap, it was young Paul’s third role (according to IMDB), so it served humanity since the job likely encouraged him to continue acting. No Singles, no Sideways!

9. The Negotiator(1998): There’s not much oxygen left in the room when appearing in a movie with two giants like Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey. But Giamatti, as the Rosencrantz and/or Gildensternesque “Rudy” provides some comic relief in an otherwise routine Hollywood thriller.

8. Big Momma’s House: For your humble publisher being in a Martin Lawrence movie is totally amazing. There’s nothing funnier than Mr. Lawrence at his best. Giamatti, who played FBI agent John Maxwell in this brilliant tour de farce apparently agrees. Earlier this year he told reporters, “I actively wanted to do that movie. It was funny…Now they’re doing a third one? Holy s**t. I’m amazed. I’m amazed that thing has gone so far.”

6. Dr. Doolittle (1998): Giamatti goes uncredited as Blaine the psychiatrist in this Eddie Murphy flick.

5. Man on the Moon (1999): Giamatti has the plum role of Bob Zmuda in this Andy Kaufman biopic. Zmuda was the comic’s friend and sidekick and both of them took turns playing Andy’s alter-ego Tony Clifton. After the release of the film, Zmuda admitted that he, posing as Clifton/Kaufman, appeared on the David Letterman Show and that the host was totally unaware of the ruse.

3. Private Parts (1997): Giamatti plays the infamous “Pig Virus” (aka Kenny and known as Pig Vomit in the movie) in this Howard Stern biopic. Love or hate the shock jock, this film put Giamatti on the radar of Stern’s rabid fans – no doubt an asset when American Splendor hit the screen in 2003.

Brooklyn Heights resident/financial guru James Grant addressed the 64th CFA Institute Annual Conference today and called for a return to a “true gold standard (that) favors no one nation, but synchronizes the balance of payments between all.”

CFA: Grant suggested that the dollar might experience upside movement if faith in the euro continues to deteriorate due to Europe’s sovereign debt problems, but that in his opinion neither currency is a reliable long-term store of value — and that a return to a gold standard would “restore the price mechanism to its proper place.”

While acknowledging that a new gold standard may not be a realistic or popular proposition at this point in time — “if a tomato was thrown, it missed me completely,” he quipped — Grant suggested that a gold standard might indeed be seriously considered “when the full cost of the paper dollar standard is tallied.”

NYT: One of the least pretentious people circulating in the literary world, Orsos is determined to show, with this festival, that literature is an everyday occurrence. (Guests at the Standard this week, for example, will find a great American classic in their nightstand, donated by Housing Works, instead of a Bible.) Before taking the reins at PEN, Orsos was the director of the Hungarian Cultural Center, and he currently sits on the Open Society Institute’s arts and culture board, overseeing projects in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Of Gypsy descent (“I don’t understand why we need this P.C. term, ‘Roma,’” he says), he’s now settled in Brooklyn Heights.

The New York Times “City Room” Blog reports that Michael Mailer, son of the late novelist Norman Mailer, has put his father’s apartment, at 142 Columbia Heights, up for sale with an asking price of $2.5 million. For that you get a two bedroom, one bath (but with a separate small guest apartment with its own bath) fourth floor walkup, with roof access, that’s described as “resembl[ing] a jungle gym at sea,” as well as the cachet of inhabiting the same space as one of the most celebrated and controversial literary figures of the past century, and possibly (Mr. Mailer said “furniture and other artifacts” may be for sale) dining at the same table at which Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Hunter S. Thompson once sat. (Photo: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)

I recently met Cheryl Tan, Brooklyn Heights resident, author of A Tiger in the Kitchen, and all-around great gal. Cheryl’s work is part memoir and part cookbook, and details her travels to Singapore, where she reconnected with her family through cooking. More information about the book is on her site, and also in the above video. Enjoy!

Author Austin Ratner has purchased 96 Joralemon Street for $3 million. Ratner, who is also a physician, has written medical books as well as a novel, The Jump Artist. The New York Observer adds that he is a cousin of Atlantic Yard developer Bruce Ratner.

The former home of author Karla Kuskin was put on the market last year for $3.6 million and reduced twice before selling. The home features 5 bedroom triplex, a 2 bedroom apartment and a ground floor doctor’s office.