The last time I tried to unload some of my old LPs I was sneered at and derided: “What are those?” people would say, as if regarding a manual typewriter. But like that underdog the Underwood, the long-playing phonograph disc is back, big time, if yesterday’s stoop sale was any indication. 

Our neighborhood has become the nexus of cool in Brooklyn; young people in skinny jeans and straw hats now rule the pavement, as proven by the success of the Brooklyn Flea Market, held each Saturday a few blocks from here. The last time we held a stoop sale the hot items were used toys, especially my son’s old action figures. But the people doing the shopping yesterday were closer to toy age themselves, and what they wanted to play with were my old records.

As readers of this space know, I love music, and my record collection (winnowed down over the years to about eight boxes of wax) is a fair representation of some part of my musical odyssey. From my earliest purchases (the Beatles, Traffic), to my country phase (Merle, Willie) to the punk and new wave and jazz and you-name-it that followed — each stop was marked in pock-marked vinyl. And like most people my age, I’ve gone digital, with tens of thousands of songs on disc or in various computers and iPods. It’s not that I don’t dig the difference of the analog sound; it’s just that I think someone else is going to love these much-loved (and sometimes only liked) records a lot more than I have lately. Especially as they sat in my basement… 

It was very gratifying to see a girl with her first phonograph ogle an image of the early Prince, in raincoat and women’s stockings, or see a young dude struggle over the choice between Buck Owens and Captain Beefheart (I think he went with the Byrds). A DJ at a club downtown, who carried a portable phonograph with him for just such chance encounters, bought a couple singles by now-defunct San Francisco bands I knew in my youth. “Come on down Thursday nights,” he said. “I’ll probably be playing 84 Rooms!”

The karma flowed both ways. A couple of young women alerted us to the Muslim music festival happening at BAM, and at the last minute we ended up going to a screening of a new documentary about Youssou N’Dour, followed by a live performance by the man himself. Sitting in the BAM Cafe before the show, I told my wife it was like being in an international airport, hip Berliners in black on barstools beside Africans in what looked like pajamas and gold shoes. All were in the same place, brought together by a love of the same music. Or as the title of film says, I Bring What I Love.

There’s a store in the Atlantic Center on the site of the former Circuit City (which declared bankruptcy a few months ago) called, appropriately, Pay Half. Actually there’s no space between the words — they can’t afford it! — but I can’t help but think that Bruce Ratner must have been inspired by their credo. 

It is the developer’s company, Forest City Ratner, that is responsible for the big box that is the Atlantic Center, and it is FCR that wants to develop the Atlantic Yards project right across the street. As reported in the New York Times this weekend, Atlantic Yards — a series of skyscrapers fronted by a basketball stadium for Ratner’s team, the New Jersey Nets — is in a bit of trouble right now. Thanks to a series of lawsuits brought about by Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a growing sense of outrage over the land giveaway that the city and state seem determined to hand him, and the tanking economy, it looks like he may not break ground on the project this year after all. Which would be a good thing for everyone who lives in this area. 

But the MTA, which was already selling him the land on which he wants to build the stadium at a deeply discounted $100 million, announced that he could have it for half that — even less! — at the same time they are preparing to raise subway fares 25 cents to make up for the historic shortfall — huh? We pay more and the billionaire developer pays half? The whole thing seems nonsensical, possibly even crooked…

DDDB will be hosting a community meeting Tuesday, June 9 at the Lafayette Avenue Church for those who want to be updated on the status of the project and the opposition. It’s a perilous time for our cause; just as those of us who opposed Ratner five years ago were told it was a lost cause, and that you couldn’t fight city hall (and Albany, and Washington), the conventional wisdom now is that the project is dead and we can all go back to sleep. But with incentives such as the one the MTA has just given him, the AY remains a zombie project, the kind that can reach out of the grave and grab you. Be vigilant! It’s your neighborhood. Don’t let the thugs drown you out. 

In keeping with last week’s aviary theme: I just got back from a week in San Francisco for a (mostly) enjoyable respite from the Brooklyn grind. My son showed me a hilarious five-minute movie he did at his film school; I saw a number of old pals I hadn’t seen in years, including John Sheehy and Jane Palacek, who are launching a new magazine (remember those?), and Charlie Haas, whose novel The Enthusiast is out in stores now; and I finished a short story that I began (in my mind at least) decades ago. Funny how much you can get done when you don’t have a wireless connection!

I also spent a lot of time communing with the city’s best known birds, the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill. The flock is estimated to number about twenty now and they fly around squawking; I think it’s because they mate for life and are always ragging each other, though my brother Ethan said they are often the victims of the local hawks, who admire a parrot for breakfast now and then. 

While I was there, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition Eight, denying gay couples the right to marry, with one bizarre exception: The 18,000 or so couples who got married in between the time the courts allowed them to marry and the day the voters took that right away may continue to be wed, making them the rarest birds in the state. But don’t imagine that they will become extinct. One way or the other, the voters will change the law. Time is on the movement’s side. Polls indicate that young people just don’t care that much about the idea of Mr. and Mr. Jones, and the intolerance and fear that guide most of the proposition’s supporters will expire, finally. 

And it may not take decades, either. A few wags observed that had Milk won the Oscar before the election, the outcome might have been different. The canonization of Harvey, and the acceptance of gays across the board, is the sign of a sea change and the tide isn’t going to turn the other way. Let us pray that the vicious Christians (shouldn’t that be a contradiction in terms?) who fight gay rights and kill abortion doctors poison themselves and reap the whirlwind. May history deal them the dodo’s hand, or claw I guess that would be…

I took a stroll through the newly renovated Washington Square Park yesterday afternoon and was relieved to find things as they had once been: kids were playing in the fountain; folkies were banging on their guitars while conga drummers boogied to a different beat; and while the pot dealers were not yet plying their wares, they seemed to be waiting on the sidelines. The new grass (not that kind) was adorned with signs that read: ‘Passive Lawn: No Sports, No Dogs.’ Frisbee catching canines were a double no-no. Instead lovers and loafers were spread out on the sod in a tableau right out of Seurat. 

The whole scene was alarmingly tranquil — until the silence was broken by a high-pitched shriek and the cry of several bystanders. I looked to the branches above to see what the fuss was and was amazed to see a spectacle worthy of the Nature Channel taking place in the heart of Greenwich Village: A hawk had swooped down and grabbed an unsuspecting starling and, after a quick hop to another branch, was now feasting on the hapless bird with that predatory indifference that says: What are you looking at? 

When I got back to Brooklyn, cable news coverage was devoted to Obama’s speech — in which he tried to explain his increasingly contorted approach to the terrorist suspects at Gitmo — and Dick Cheney’s rebuttal, in which he warned (yet again) that anything less than torturing these people and locking them away forever would make make America less safe.

While it’s easy to say that Cheney is stepping into a void — the Republican Party has no leader now save Rush Limbaugh and no one else is rushing to defend the Bush war record — it seems that Obama is speaking from within a void of his own creation. After vowing to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Obama has hit resistance from his own party, in part because he has no plan for what to do with these Jihadists and in part because he is wavering in his commitment to break with the past. 

He called the climate that condoned torture and throw-away-the-key justice a “season of fear,” as good a description of the Patriot Act days as any. “And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists and citizens — fell silent,” Obama said. “In other words, we went off course.”

Though I like the fact that our new president can change his mind when presented with new information (and maybe some of these guys should be locked away forever), he is in danger of appearing off course himself. The Washington Post and the other major dailies cast the “dueling speeches” as “a national security debate” and there was a campaign feel to the back-and-forth, with Cheney gnashing his teeth and trying to scare people while Obama went for nuance. But as in the campaign, nuance may not play with the hoi polloi. They want to know: torture, human rights abuse — are you for it or agin it? If he appears too qualified he runs the risk of being eviscerated by the hawks, filled with terrible certainty, as citizens look on from the passive lawn below.