Queens Library at Sunnyside regularly hosts toddlers and their caregivers for story time and eco-craft activities. During a recent session, patrons read Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and created owl creatures by re-purposing old toilet paper rolls for the bodies and scrap paper for the wings.
Queens Library at Steinway invited toddlers and their caregivers to celebrate World Environment Day, observed on June 5. Together, we read The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister and used old discarded scrap paper, CDs and ribbon to make our own fish creations.
June 7 marks 38 years since the introduction of the VCR. What’s so important about the launch of a now-completely obsolete device that now sells for a few bucks on craigslist? Well, that old, dusty box under your grandmother’s television sped up the relocation of film culture from the cinema to the living room, and let people preserve sports games, sitcoms and other televised events that once were one-time-only experiences.
The result? Convenience, but a more isolated culture. The modern consumer no longer feels the peril of missing out on a movie if he doesn’t catch it at a theater. Films are no longer rarefied creations appearing for only a limited time at locations outside the home. The VCR was also one of the first nails in the notion of “appointment television” – a time for families nationwide to gather around the set.
Once the VCR became commonplace in households, people could buy or rent their favorite movies to watch whenever they wanted. The VCR enabled the rise of the video store and the Blockbuster Video empire, which crowded out smaller, non-franchise stores before facing its own digital obsolescence.
But even back in 1975, when Sony introduced the first consumer VCR (a $2,500 model with an integrated television, one of which is viewable at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria), technology evolved rapidly and format battles claimed their victims. Betamax, the first format, had its first challenger, VHS as quickly as a year after its introduction. Betamax lost the battle with VHS in the mid-to-late 1980s. VHS had a solid, decade-long run at the top, even defeating the Laserdisc format before finally giving way to the DVD in the early 2000s. The DVD was of course supplanted by Blu-Ray.
And now we reach the most drastic shift yet: the emergence of streaming content. Now our televised entertainment doesn’t require us to own a specialized player. We can enjoy our films streamed directly into our televisions, or we can even forgo the television and watch content on our computers, smartphones or tablets.
Each shift affects the way we view ourselves and our relationship to motion-picture entertainment. The devices capture our imagination in strange ways. Sometimes, it becomes an essential part of the stories we tell, as in The Eternal Enemy. In this young adult novel from 1993, the protagonist is surprised to discover her VCR records news broadcasts from the future. Sometimes the device becomes shorthand for the ambivalence we feel as these devices instantly gratify us and shorten our attention spans.
And sometimes these references begin to “date” us. Marvin Kitman, the well-known former television critic for Newsday, titled his 1982 book “I Am a VCR.” Would he still do so today? (Well, maybe. With tongue in cheek, he does refer to himself these days as “George Washington’s only living co-author.”)
So today, let us recognize the world-changing promise that first clunky old video tape deck delivered in 1975. In 2013 we can re-watch our favorite old movies, cartoons, news broadcasts and even old commercials, and we can do it just about anywhere at any time. Virtually nothing is lost. But the first step to our world of instant recall was that $2,500 box, a few $16 cassettes, and a creaky analog “play” button.
Congratulations to Cyndi Lauper, who won “Best Original Score" at this year's Tony Awards. Lauper is no stranger to the limelight — or to Queens. She shot to stardom in the 1980s with her string of pop hits and she most recently wrote the score to the hit Broadway musical Kinky Boots. She is also an Ozone Park native.
The musical, based on the 2006 film, is about a struggling, family-owned English shoe factory that avoids bankruptcy by producing custom footwear for drag artists. The off-kilter nature of the subject material fits in well with a performer who’s never been afraid to hide her eccentricities.
Lauper was raised by a single mother and spent many afternoons as a child by herself, singing along to soundtracks. She emerged on the scene with her four-octave voice and songs of loyalty and female empowerment in the early 1980s, but she spent years toiling away as the singer in a cover band and even blew out her voice before getting it back. When “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” burned up the charts, she was already 30.
After several albums of pop songs in the ‘80s, Lauper ventured into more socially conscious territory in 1993 with her album Hat Full of Stars. She wrote songs covering topics like homophobia and domestic abuse. She followed that up in 2010 with a full-on campaign supporting LGBT rights. Two years later, she was named grand marshall of the New York City Gay Pride Parade.
She also appears in occasional TV and film roles, including the soap opera Days of Our Lives, the 1993 Michael J. Fox film Life With Mikey and a celebrity-studded season finale of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock.
Lauper achieved international stardom, but she has never shed her fundamental quirkiness. She speaks occasionally about her Queens upbringing and the experience of being a childhood misfit. In a television interview a few years ago, she talked about getting expelled from Catholic school for her frank, straightforward manner.
Lauper’s colorful way of talking seems to owe a lot to Queens, too. In the same TV interview, Lauper said she was very self-conscious about her Queens accent, likening it to “being able to hear the sheets being pulled from the clotheslines.” Nonetheless, her spunky brand of honesty seems to encapsulate the best of our borough.
May 20 marked the 86th anniversary of the first nonstop solo transatlantic flight, made by American pilot Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris.
Lindbergh was not a child of New York. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he learned to fly in Americus, Georgia, and made his career as an Air Mail pilot operating out of St. Louis, Missouri. It was only after he set himself on completing a nonstop transatlantic flight that he made the trip to New York.
Using money he had saved as an Air Mail pilot along with a $15,000 loan, Lindbergh had Ryan Aircraft specially design an airplane for the journey. It was essentially a flying fuel tank, with a stiff wicker seat built to keep the tall, thin Lindbergh from getting too comfortable and dozing off. The plane required so much fuel to complete its journey that Lindbergh had them fit a tank where the windscreen would be; he peered out the side windows or used a small, built-in periscope to see forward.
Lindbergh was competing for the Orteig Prize, offered by a wealthy French-born hotelier operating in New York City: $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. The prize had been up for grabs since 1919, but real contenders hadn’t emerged until 1926.
Lindbergh’s was just the latest in a bloody succession of attempts that cost the lives of numerous adventurers and WWI flying aces. Just nine months before Lindbergh, the French ace Rene Fonck crashed and burned on takeoff from Roosevelt Field, Long Island. Fonck escaped, but his two crew members died in the flames.
A month before Lindbergh’s flight, two U.S. Navy aviators were killed testing the plane they intended to fly across the ocean. And then, on May 8, 1927, two decorated French flying aces, Charles Nungesser and François Coli, embarked on a flight attempt from Paris in a massive biplane they named “The White Bird.” After being spotted off the Irish coast, they were never heard from again. Rumors and old reports suggest the duo may have reached Newfoundland or even Maine before crashing, but no definitive evidence has ever been recovered.
Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field, his fuel laden monoplane barely clearing power lines at the edge of the field. For the next 33.5 hours, he flew without a radio and without navigation equipment beyond a compass, dodging storms and navigating by stars whenever possible. When he landed in Paris the next night, he was mobbed by a crowd of about 150,000. He not only won the Orteig Prize, but also the Medal of Honor. Popular songs were written about him. At age 25, he had become immortal.
But Lindbergh’s was an extraordinary life long after his feat of endurance. In 1932, his young son was kidnapped and held for ransom. Sadly, Charles Lindbergh Jr.’s body was discovered a few days after the $50,000 ransom was paid. The resulting search for and trial of the suspect became known as the Crime of the Century.
Lindbergh fled to Europe for several years to escape the media attention. In the late 1930s, when he returned to the U.S., he became a politically charged figure as the public face of the isolationist movement. As someone who spoke out about British and Jewish pressures on the U.S. to enter the war, his loyalties were questioned by President Franklin Roosevelt. In response, Lindbergh resigned his commission in the Air Corps Reserves. Lindbergh’s public comments have also spawned extensive debate over whether he was antisemitic.
Nonetheless, Lindbergh served his country when it finally entered World War II. He was a high-level consultant for Ford, which was license-building bombers, and another aeronautics firm as they dealt with manufacturing problems. Eventually he even traveled overseas and flew missions with active fighter squadrons in the Pacific.
After the war, he wrote The Spirit of St. Louis, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. He was portrayed by James Stewart (himself a pilot) in an acclaimed film of the famous flight. He also became an Air Force consultant and was eventually designated a brigadier general by Dwight Eisenhower. He met and befriended astronauts. In the 1960s, Lindbergh began emphasizing the importance of protecting the environment and endangered species like whales. He died in Maui in 1974, half a world away from the site of his defining triumph.
Lindbergh’s entire family was prone to literary and scholarly ambitions. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, accompanied him on many of his flying adventures around the world and became a celebrated author. His daughter, Reeve, has written novels, children’s stories, and several memoirs, including one in which she grapples with meeting children from the three secret families Lindbergh started in Europe.
May 28 marks a birthday of a man whose life was almost as interesting as the immortal character he created: Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels. If you’re only familiar with the movies, you’re not alone, but let’s take a brief look at the man whose own espionage exploits helped shape everyone’s favorite secret agent.
Fleming was born to a wealthy financier family in England in 1908. He bounced around from private school to private school, romancing girls and underperforming academically. Eventually his mother got him a job with the Reuters news agency, enabling him to spend time in Soviet Russia during the 1930s.
When World War II broke out, Fleming was drafted by the director of the Royal Navy’s intelligence operation to be his personal assistant. Fleming spent the war devising clever operations meant to dupe the enemy into revealing weaknesses. He was instrumental in establishing military commando units dedicated to capturing and preserving enemy intelligence documents and personnel.
After the war, Fleming became manager of the foreign correspondents of one of Britain’s major newspaper chains, where he worked for most of the rest of his life.
With all of Fleming’s experience in military intelligence during the war, it was no wonder that he dreamed of writing a spy novel. He finally started writing his first James Bond book, Casino Royale, in 1952. Eleven more Bond novels would follow.
The books are products of their time. Far more than the films, which have been produced sometimes decades afterwards, the novels reflect the post-war anxieties of a British Empire in rapid decline. Fleming gave his character the name of an American expert on birds of the Caribbean, where Fleming made his home. He imbued Bond with personality traits of some of the spies he had known and worked with during the war, including his brother Peter, as well as with some of his own preferences.
Fleming’s mix of intrigue, exotic locations, sex and savagery was well received by critics until about halfway through his run of books. Then a critical backlash began, accusing Fleming’s work of being empty, ugly and sadistic. Of course, some of those perceived negatives translated well onto an increasingly cynical silver screen, and Fleming became wealthier still.
But Fleming didn’t only write James Bond novels. At the prodding of a friend, he put down on paper the story he told nightly to his young son. That became the children’s novel Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang. You read that right: The same man whose vision brought you Sean Connery seducing exotic women and killing ethnic thugs by the bushel also brought you Dick Van Dyke flying around the European countryside, singing songs in a magical, sentient antique automobile.
Fleming died of a heart attack in 1964, having lived a life worthy of a novel and leaving behind a body of work that continues to capture the imagination of Brits and Americans thirsty for hardnosed stories of treachery and geopolitics. Queens Library has it all.
Thanks to you and our partnership with BIG! Compost, we have diverted over 13,631 pounds of kitchen scraps and food waste during four, weekly Queens Library compost collection sites. These numbers reflect collections through April 30, 2013. Here is how it breaks down:
Queens Library at Broadway, Saturday afternoons from 1-3 p.m., started in January 2013
4,286.58 lbs. diverted
519 total drop-offs
Queens Library at Steinway, Monday morning commuter composting 8-10 a.m., started in spring 2012
6,310.1 lbs. diverted
945 total drop-offs
Queens Library at Long Island City, Saturday afternoon 1-3 p.m., started in April 13, 2013
73 lbs. diverted
11 total drop-offs
Queens Library at Sunnyside, Saturday mornings 10:30-noon, started in January 2013
2,961.1 lbs. diverted
386 total drop-offs
Queens Library at Woodside also has a popular evening collection each Tuesday from 5:15-6:30 p.m. This compost is processed locally at Smiling Hogshead Ranch, a Community Compost Project Site, and the weight is not recorded after each collection so we can't report on the numbers, but the effort is greatly appreciated.
Are there any ways you think we could increase community participation in this important program? Please let us know in the comments below and help us spread the word that composting is easy, fun and vital for the health of our communities and the city as a whole.
Do you have a smartphone, tablet computer or e-reader? Are you curious about getting e-books from Queens Library? This is your chance to test the waters, and also to join readers around the world in experiencing the same good book.
From May 15 until June 1, libraries around the world are taking part in the Big Library Read, encouraging customers to download the engrossing Michael Malone novel The Four Corners of the Sky and read it together. Just go here and click the “ebooks@OverDrive” link to go to Queens Library’s e-book catalog and you will see a big picture of the novel. Click on it to download the e-book and get started!
Part of the fun of a group read is discussing the book afterwards. You can do that right here in the comments section of this blog post. I’ll get the ball rolling with a brief review of the book to whet your appetites.
Author Michael Malone wastes no words before dropping the reader in the thick of the action. The prologue is a whirl of foul weather, broken familial bonds, fear and mystery. Our protagonist is Annie Peregrine Goode, a 26-year-old U.S. Navy fighter pilot whose annual return to her childhood home in North Carolina for her birthday proves fateful.
On her way, a Florida police detective calls to pump her for information on her con-artist father, who abandoned her with her aunt at the family home two decades ago and disappeared. When she arrives, she gets word that her father is dying and that he needs her to fly the old airplane he gave her as a child to meet him in St. Louis. At the same time, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, a fellow Navy pilot, announces he is coming to patch things up.
Got all that? Well, there’s more. Annie’s father, Jack, is suspected of stealing a prized Cuban artifact called the Queen of the Sea, which was looted from Peru four centuries ago, lost in the wreck of a galleon, and retrieved by a Cuban fisherman. And, in a Faulknerian twist, Annie also begins to learn about the dark secrets of her bloodline in that small town—and, perhaps, the long-concealed identity of her own mother.
Malone peppers his story lovingly with quotes and references to classic movies. He has a love for colorful characters, who say bold and sometimes sassy things at unexpected moments. The story tends to drag whenever it tries to move quickly through large chunks of backstory — like the story of Annie’s wedding. When the central adventure of the story — the journey by airplane to St. Louis to resolve an enduring mystery — again becomes the focus, the bumps smooth out a bit and the narrative moves right along. It can be said that Malone has a much more authoritative grasp on the dynamics of con men and father-daughter relationships than he does naval aviation culture.
It sometimes seems like Malone is trying to have it all with The Four Corners of the Sky: a romance novel, a coming-of-age story celebrating female achievement in male-dominated fields, a Southern gothic, and a ripping adventure yarn. The novel is at its best when it’s in the latter mode, dragging the reader through dreary hotel rooms, ancient shipwrecks, desperate fistfights and stormy flights.
Agree? Disagree? Let's hear from you in the comments below!
As a part of The Big Read--a national movement aimed at creating a country of readers--in libraries across Queens, we are reading and delving into the themes of the classic Fahrenheit 451. We will explore Ray Bradbury's novel--a character-driven, thought-provoking read set in a dystopian future world that is still recognizable--through free book discussions, film screenings and more community activities open to any and all in the community.
Read the book and want to sink your teeth into another novel that makes you think and assess your own values? Try these:
1984 by George Orwell
"'Big Brother' is watching" has become a catch phrase in our society. 1984 and communism may be in the past, but the ideas in this book remain relevant.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
John Galt said he would stop the motor of the world that penalizes human intelligence and creativity.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
What kind of individuals arise from cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control?
Lovestar by Andri Snaer Magnason
Technology, advertising, and mass media are ever present in this world where even love is regulated by science.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Explore how runaway social inequality, genetic technology, catastrophic climate change, and an effort to improve mankind culminate in an apocalyptic event.
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Not to be confused with the erotic novel 50 Shades of Grey, Fforde explores a world where social castes and protocols are rigidly defined by acuteness of personal color perception.
When She Woke by Hillary Jordan
A young woman awakens to a nightmarish new life; her skin has been genetically altered, turned bright red as punishment for the crime of having an abortion.
Can you think of any others? Add your suggestions in the comments below.
To celebrate Cinco de Mayo, on May 5, children at Queens Libraries at Steinway and Sunnyside made a unique craft project: "ojos de Dios" (translated: God’s eyes) ornaments. Cinco de Mayo--a chance for us all to celebrate Mexican culture, freedom and democracy--originated in the Mexican state of Puebla and is a holiday that symbolizes pride in Mexico and its people. Keeping with our theme of creating environmentally-friendly crafts, we used old popsicle sticks and leftover yarn to create these beautiful ornaments (pictured here).