VOLUME 29, NUMBER 8
April 21 – MAY 4, 2016
Sacrebleu! TriBattery Pops are HUGE in France
File photo by Tequila Minsky
Democrat Alice Cancel won the Apr. 19 special election for the 65th Assembly District.
Cancel secures Assembly seat BY LINCOLN ANDERSON Alice Cancel, running on the Democratic Party line, won Tuesday’s special election for Lower Manhattan’s 65th Assembly District, according to unofficial Board of Elections results. Cancel, a longtime Lower East Side Democratic district leader, lives in Southbridge Towers, on the downtown side of the Brooklyn Bridge. She will fill the seat, formerly occupied by the convicted former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, for the rest of Silver’s term, through the end of this year. However, future control of the Assembly district will be up for grabs once again in September, when there will be an open Democratic primary, followed by a general election in November. The results of the three-way race, with 98 percent of the district’s polling sites reporting, show Cancel with 7,284 — or 41 percent — of the votes. She staved off a stiff challenge from Yuh-Line Niou, running on the Working Families Party line, who came in second with 6,250 — or 35 percent — of the votes. Meanwhile, Lester Chang, running on the Republican line, plus three other party lines, won 3,520 — or 20 percent — of the votes. The district is about 6.5-to-1 Democrat-to-Republican, yet the GOP was hoping Silver’s downfall on corruption charges would be a “perfect storm,” allowing them to pull off a huge coup by finally winning a Manhattan Assembly seat — in Silver’s former district, no less. Former Mayor Rudy
BY COLIN MIXSON This local band has gone international. Members of the TriBattery Pops, Tom Goodkind Conductor, a community band of local amateur and professional musicians, recently learned that they’re a hit in France. This came as a surprise to the bandleader, because the group has never been to France.
“We haven’t been to France, not even close,” said Tom Goodkind, the band’s eponymous conductor. “The farthest we’ve gotten was Irving Plaza.” Nonetheless, the local group’s latest album has gone viral in the land of fine wines and fancy cheese. A Facebook post linking to the group’s latest album has gar-
nered an unprecedented 108,000 clicks and rising, of which nearly 93,000 — 86 percent — hail from French IP addresses, mostly young people in their 20s. It’s the type of inexplicable phenomenon that could only exist in the digital age, and it has left the tribattery pops Continued on page 22
TriBattery Pops
The TriBattery Pops’ latest album, “Turn On, Tune Up, and Drop Out” — which features a choir of elderly singers crooning psychedelic hits from the ‘60s — has garnered a surprising number of fans in France.
Cancel Continued on page 10 1 M e t r o t e c h • N YC 112 0 1 • C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 16 N YC C o mm u n i t y M e d i a , L L C