Short notice, yes, but its a lovely day and you should go get your tipico on in Sunset Park. It starts at noon, runs until 6 p.m., and I have full faith that someone will be able to carry the festivities forward. Boriqua festival next week. Stay tuned.

This notice about the baseball and t-ball league at the Rec Center came over the transom this week. Seems like a great summertime activity for kids around the neighborhood:

Sunset Park Recreation Center has a baseball and t-ball league open for registration right now. Coaches are volunteers (if you’d like to help let them know that as well). The uniforms are also free. The only thing you’d have to pay for is the recreation center membership ($25-50). The membership includes axis to the gym, computer lab and other activities like yoga in addition to the baseball league.

The center is located in the park 7th ave and 43rd street 718-965-6533. The best thing to do, however, is go there in person rather than call.

Sunset Park Santo, by Vee

*Sunset Park Stills has a show! Photographs of “Sunset Park’s santos” by the Brooklyn local will adorn the walls of Taza de Oro on Eighth Avenue at 14th Street in Manhattan. Take a wander over to Chelsea this weekend (they say the weather’ll be fine), eat food, scope photos and see the other western waterfront.

*Sunset Park songstress Robin Aigner got some coverage on American songwriters. She is a part of a loose core of singers playing with contemporary lyrics over old-timey tunes, lines about the F.D.R. intermixed with calico dresses and strums on an acoustic guitar. You can listen in on her MySpace page.

*Dee the Dinosaur, dedicated to a friend who drifted off one night, disappearing under the Gowanus. Check out that track and others by Brian Bonz and the Dot Hongs at daytrotter.

*Glazer has shots of some new work on the Buendia Productions website. Take a look.

Flushing this week hosted the big-time festivities for Chinese Lunar New Year, but “Brooklyn’s Chinatown” saw some action, too. On Eighth Avenue last Monday to have a bowl of new-year’s noodles (long noodles=long life), I happened upon a miniature dragon parade Lion Dancers parade, put on by a group of young people associated with the Freemasons. These snakey, multi-legged creatures are a staple of the Lunar New Year’s parades–dragons have a long symbolic history in China, and are considered auspicious. Dragon’s are indeed auspicious, but as Frank pointed out below, these are lion dancers. As always, thanks to readers for keeping SP Chron on the straight and factual.

2010 is the year of the Tiger. If you’re a Tiger (born in 1914, 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998 or 2010) you are kind, given to deep thinking, sympathetic and, apparently, a bit hot-tempered. For those among us not born under the sign of the “dynamic and powerful” big cat, which is usually associated with big changes and social disorder, “2010 is likely to be a turbulent year—on both a global and a personal level,” (this according to Yahoo!, mind you, which also offers tips for navigating this years’ ups and downs).

I hadn’t gone to Eighth Ave expecting to take photos so the images are rather b-grade, but I thought it worth a post regardless. Do you have New Year’s images from around town? Pass them along to sunsetparkchron@gmail.com. For a look at some truly stunning images of China ringing in the New Year, check out the Boston Globe.

For something closer to home, here’s a short video:

The Sunset Park native has in two decades made a name for himself on his albums and as Chad Danforth in “High School Musical.” He will soon take on the starring role of Usnavi, the rhyme-spitting bodega owner in Tony-award winning musical “In the Heights.”

Though Bleu’s roots stretch to Italy, he says growing up on a block with Dominican and Puerto Rican families has made him feel at home in the play all about the streets of Washington Heights. Bleu will be on Broadway for three to six months. Then, depending on development with his production company Bleuman, he may keep moving up from the Heights.

Read the Daily News’ interview with Blue here.

Big Bird flirts with Pat Nixon

How do you get to Sesame Street?

For those of you still pondering this existential question, the Sunset Park Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library can help. The branch this Saturday will hold a “Sesame Street” themed family event from 12-3:30pm. It will feature crafts, bilingual storytelling and a screening of Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland. (Fun fact. Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland is the only item to vanish from the collection of the Bibliobús this year. Hot item, you know).

Saturday’s event is part of a larger Brooklyn Public Library exhibition on Sesame Street celebrating “40 years of life of the street.” Thug life, Big Bird style.

From the NY Times:

‘SESAME STREET: A CELEBRATION OF 40 YEARS OF LIFE ON THE STREET’ (Friday through Wednesday) Sesame Street may not have an official location, but a good chunk of it will be in Brooklyn for the next few months. This exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library, commemorating the television show’s 40th anniversary, includes objects like animation cels, scripts, sheet music, props and even a few Muppets. This Saturday the fun is also extending to the library’s Sunset Park Branch, 5108 Fourth Avenue, at 51st Street, which will hold a free “Sesame Street”-theme family day from noon to 3:30 p.m., with crafts, bilingual storytelling and a screening of “Elmo in Grouchland”; (718) 567-2806. (Exhibition through Feb. 21.) Fridays and Mondays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m.; Tuesdays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., except Christmas Eve, when the library is closed; Central Library, Grand Army Plaza, at Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway , (718) 230-2100, brooklynpubliclibrary.org; free.

Update: New York 1 reported on the event at the library Saturday. Check out the video!

Chinese documentarian Wang Bing made a name for himself with Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, the nine hour chronicle of the demise of an industrial district in northeast China. Crude Oil, which follows a 14-hour workday of crude-oil extraction the Gobi desert of Inner Mongolia, runs 14.

From November 4-8, Light Industry, an alternative art space in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is screening Crude Oil in its entirety each day from 9am until 11pm.

The film refuses to abbreviate, and the length makes it feel true while verging on abstraction. A twenty minute shot of a worker monitoring a whirring oil rig mesmerizes in its monotony. The play of a shadow on the whirring machinery conjures Muybridge or early cinema, and the orange-clad men begin to seem like passive projectionists.

Light Industry makes an apt venue for this blurring of art and hard, dirty reality. A big, spare room at the end of a sterile hallway, the art space takes up just a corner of a warehouse on Brooklyn’s once-thriving Bush Terminal. At the turn of the 20th century, Irving T. Bush erected buildings, and laid rail. Bush revolutionized the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and industry itself. He offered an economy of scale, providing access to an infrastructure previously out of reach for smaller manufacturers. And they thrived. At its peak in the mid-1900s, Bush Terminal occupied 200 acres, moving goods from factory floors to the hulls of massive cargo ships with speed and efficiency.

As manufacturing has moved abroad, industrial Brooklyn has become a relic—garment factories that had crossed the water from Manhattan’s Fashion District have hop-scotched the Pacific. Trains stopped running as massive machines choked to a halt. The buildings on the narrow strip of land between the upper New York Bay and the the Gowanus expressway now stand largely empty, their facades of rusted steel and old brick crumbling.

This, too, is the west side of the tracks.

It’s a cycle seen throughout New York City–as industry leaves, artists come. Brooklyn’s artists have transformed warehouses and factory into work spaces. Those places have also become art. Photographs of the repetitive patterns and patina of old manufacturing spaces appear on gallery walls and in online portfolios.

But if you come and go from Wang Bing’s showing just at nightfall, you’ll see old-style industry hasn’t entirely left Brooklyn. At 6pm Monday through Friday, a factory whistle blows two floors below Light Industry. With that sound, forty workers at Popular Clothing Inc. call it quits. After an busy day piecing together men’s pants and boys’ shirts, they pack their bags, pick up and head home.

Light Industry is located at 220 36th Street at 3rd Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Crude Oil will show November 7th & 8th from 9am until 11pm. On Saturday at 4pm, Coal Money (Tong Dao) will be screened. On Sunday beginning Light Industry will show West of the Tracks from 12pm–9pm.

The Rolls Royce wasn’t Sunset Park’s only star-studded moment on Sunday. Locals gathered around the see the action when a team started rolling on what appeared to be a music video. This crew hasn’t made a name for themselves yet, but it drew a crowd in the minutes before the sun went down. Check out a clip. Be warned, it’s PG-13.