Beautiful Fort Greene

On Saturday we headed to Fort Greene, a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn that I had only read about. And indeed it seemed to be inhabited by unusually attractive people, their children, and their toy dogs - or so it appeared on the first warm spring day of the year. Our ultimate destination was Kronos + Cosmos, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an artistic juggernaut of an institution that I had never visited. But first we wandered around the park and the neighborhood in search of a restaurant, and wound up at Loulou, a sweet little French place on DeKalb Avenue that happened to be playing Belle and Sebastian when we sat down.

Is this what 9/11 sounded like? At BAM we heard the New York premiere of "My Beautiful Scream," composed by Julia Wolfe and performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet. The piece was inspired by September 11 and written in its aftermath, an orchestral evocation of the day's panic and unfolding terror.