Home Beer Kit, $40

The glass bottle and quality ingredients make this way better than a Mr. Beer kit from a home goods store. And the owners are CUTE! They’re this week’s Hey Brooklyn.

from BrooklynBrewShop.com

Remember that time I said I was going to blog every week about who was on Hey Brooklyn that Friday? Yeah, I kind of forgot. Here’s the makeup post.

Hey BK 28 was awesome. Cathy Erway has a radio show called Cheap Date on the Heritage Radio Network and she writes about not eating out in New York. I met her while selling cupcakes at the Brooklyn Flea for Cupcakes Take the Cake‘s charity bake sale. Nichelle introduced us and I emailed her almost immediately. (Look at me, networking at charity events. I’m so NYC I can’t stand it.)

Hey BK 29 was also awesome. I don’t remember how I met Fiona Bloom; I think Rob knew her first and hooked us up via Twitter. Her career is really interesting, but honestly I could listen to her pontificate on different colors of dryer lint and find her just as fascinating. She’s one of those people… you have to listen to know what I’m talking about. After her interview I wanted to go forth and take over the world. In our post-interview photo session we were looking for somewhere creative to shoot her portrait and she climbed up on the railing of the loading dock at the studio like a gymnast. Definitely a grab life by the nards kind of girl. I mean that in the nicest way.

Hey BK 30* is the most recent episode. David Wingo is a chill dude with a gorgeous voice (and rockin’ beard!). He brought both a guitar and a banjo to the studio and played a tambourine with his foot which I thought was really cool, but he shrugged off. Musicians, I guess, can’t appreciate how deeply awesome every musical thing they do is.

When it’s time to do the music portion of an interview we take a few minutes and Rob adjusts the microphones to get the sound just right, and then he’ll ask the musician to play a few chords into the mic to check the sound levels. They do and boom! this MAGIC comes out of the guitar and they’re not blown away by it AT ALL and I always want to yell, “You’re WASTING IT on SOUND CHECK!” and also, “Why are you not freaking out that you can make this beautiful sound with your hands?!” but it’s just always… there, you know, and it’s not magic to them it’s, like, breathing. And every time I get all choked up. God help me if someone walks into the studio with a ukulele.

Anyway, David’s PR company sent me an advance copy of the CD (wtf? who says things like that? me.) and it is fantastic. It’s called Belly of the Lion, and you can buy it here. The most recent film he composed for is called Gentlemen Broncos and is in theaters now.

And now I am all caught up!

*omg. 30!

I’ve started compiling a list of places that I can ask to advertise on Hey Brooklyn.

It’s nerve-wracking to say to someone, “Take me seriously enough to invest your dollars with me.” It should be cake, because my podcast has grown to a point that advertising on it is something that I sincerely believe would be beneficial to a business. The number of listeners and downloads are there. The quality of content is there. The quality of production is *SO* there – Rob is amazing. It’s all there, and now the scary part is saying, “Hey, come advertise on my show. This is what I can do for you.” EEEEk! But I’m doing it, because, you guys?, I am *SO* over not making any money.

[Sidenote: I'm wondering if blogging about this is unprofessional, but the truth is: I'm not cool! I quiver, I get nervous, and I blog about it.

Ehh, I think it's ok. It's honest.]

***

My friend Walt Ribeiro gave a talk once, and someone asked him about reacting to getting rejected. Walt (who is one of those really sincere people brimming with zest and pep) answered in what would become a bit of a catch phrase among our friends: “Ask your face off!” The logic is that if you ask a bunch of people for whatever you need, someone will, eventually, say yes.

I’ve since found this post and video on his website, and felt newly inspired. It’s super-basic stuff that we all know but sometimes forget. (He usually does daily music lessons on YouTube, but on this day he chose to shoot a pep talk instead. I suggest you merely listen to it, not watch; his walking down the street might make you queasy! ).

So here I go: I’m going to ask my face off.

My blog was down for a bit, so I’m late posting about my awesome interview with Erica from Fucked in Park Slope, which you can hear here.

I was aware of her blog for ages, but I didn’t meet her until we were both guests at a Shabbat dinner. After that, Rob and I both became good friends with her (and interviewing friends is such a delicious treat for me!) so we had a time in the studio.

I spaced on taking a photo of her (life is hard, yo, and I can’t keep on top of everything!) plus we interviewed at night and I like to take my photos outside, so she sent me a cute photo of her at her wedding. I love the sleeved gown!

Here, because I still don’t have a photo of her, I used a photo of Oliver, her dog. He’s cute.

I let Dan do the intro, a Hey Brooklyn first! We were in the studio goofing off for a while and he tried to imitate me. I don’t think he nailed it, but he made me laugh.

He has a podcast called VendrTV where he hops around the country interviewing food cart proprietors. I’m jealous. What he does is similar to what I do in terms of interviewing people with interesting stories, but he does it on camera, and he set his show up so he can travel to places. I, of course, focused on the local scene, and now I never get to go on planes. Live and learn. My next podcast is going to be called Hey Tropical Islands.

Go here to listen to the show and visit vendr.tv for the show’s site.

I’m crossing number 43, “Have my own weekly or daily radio show”, off my life list as done. It hasn’t made me any money, but it COULD, and this past week was the first time I could see that it could, but more to the point, who wants to define “success” solely as “making money”? It makes me happy, which is infinitely more valuable, and I’ve stuck with it for six months, and built it from the ground up, from nothing, into something that is listened to and enjoyed by hundreds of people each week. It is the most successful project I’ve ever worked on, and I am very, very proud.

Cheers to me!

This is Rachel Lee Walsh. She’s pretty awesome.

This was the first time it occurred to me to snap photos of our studio. Rob likes to have the microphones just so, and you can tell in the sound quality of my final project. If you need a sound engineer in Brooklyn you should hire him and pay him lots of money. He’s worth it.

Rachel and he were scheming to play together, because she noticed his upright base in the corner of our sound booth and found out that he used to play blue grass. She has a country/folk/blues kind of thing going on. I think they’d rock together.

At one point in the interview I say to her, “Oh, you are of my people” which is a weird thing to say, I know, but the way she writes songs is from the perspective of wanting to tell a human story, and this is the way I do my podcast. Her writing is both clever and simple.

This is Rachel’s guitar strap, and I think it’s SO cool. It’s from Kelly Horrigan.

To listen to our interview, go to the interview page at HeyBrooklyn.com or type Hey Brooklyn into iTunes.

Anna Jane was fun to interview, and it was great to have a woman on the show after a long string of manly guests. We giggled our way through a lot of it, and I imagined Rob on the other side of the booth wall getting really uncomfortable; we were talking about “body hair” and “waxing down there”. Good stuff.

Her new book, Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By is awesome. It’s a book of things that are becoming obsolete but we can still find and can definitely still remember. In the interview she says that she wrote it for herself – it’s not covered wagons or butter churns that she’s talking about, it’s stuff from our early 80′s childhood: answering machines, rotary phones, Polaroid pictures*, mini discs, and boomboxes. Since she and I are about the same age, it rang all the same bells for me, too.

Anna Jane has a contest going on on her Obsolete Blog:

Every day [until September 21], I’ll be accepting submissions…: photos, videos, short essays, audio clips, etc. Each day, the best submissions will be featured [the Obsolete Blog]; each day’s winning entrant will receive a free signed copy of OBSOLETE.

To enter, please email me your submission to ObsoleteTheBook@gmail.com or use the form [on the blog]. Make sure to include your email address so that I can contact you if you win.

But wait! There’s more! If you are a TUMBLR or FACEBOOK or TWITTER user and you reblog or mention this post, you will receive a little token of my appreciation. For free! Via mail! Old school, right? All you have to do is email me a link to the reblogged post, or a screen shot, and your mailing address.

*I can’t possibly the only person in the world who says “Polaroid picture” and then has to think, “Shake it, uh, uh, uh! Shake it! Hey ya! Shake it like a Polaroid picture!”

Sean Kershaw of Sean Kershaw and the New Jack Ramblers

Go here to listen, or download the show on iTunes by typing in “Hey Brooklyn”.

It was a fun sight to see a man on a bike in a cowboy hat riding to the studio! In this episode, Sean told me that every Wednesday this month, he and his band are going to be playing at Hill Country in Manhattan. Hill Country is authentic Texas BBQ, and that’s pretty much all you need to say to get me to show up with my bib on. Especially if there’s beer, too.

The music at the end of this podcast is hilarious; it includes what is probably “the only country song written about Brooklyn”.

Thanks, Sean, for a great interview!

(Rob pointed out to me that I should be cross-posting my weekly episodes of Hey Brooklyn here on the blog, so I’ll be doing that every Monday from here on out.  I might as well, there are all these “tidbits” and little funny things that happen when I’m recording these that just don’t make it into the interview because of time restraints, and now I can share them all here.)

matty’s modeling debut

I’m doing my very first Hey Brooklyn giveaway!  Friday’s episode features Porter Block and we’re giving away their latest CD The Gowanus Yacht Club. It’s a collaborative work featuring a lot of different singer-songwriters, and makes fantastic summer listening. Go to the episode page for details.

Please note: Only the CD is being given away. That cuddly dude with the soft brown eyes is mine-all-mine!