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April 2020
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A Quiet, Good Neighbor
When Urban Recovery at 411 Van Brunt Street first opened its doors on January 7, 2019 nobody really knew what to expect. Rumors swirled and critics, well, were critics. Now after a little over year of operation, it’s time to review Urban Recovery. I have a special relationship with UR, since I was a patient there for 5 weeks in 2019. I saw their ads on a regular basis in this newspaper and only after the need arose, did I dig a little deeper. I found my way to UR via a “drive-by.” I tried calling them with no response, so during a shopping trip to Fairway, I stopped and rang their bell. During that visit, I made an appointment for a full tour. I took the tour with my wife and to say we were impressed is an understatement. While I was there, the patient population was small and consisted of people from all walks of life and different parts of the country. I was the only “local” and if I had to guess, up until that time, I was the only person from the from the local environs to walk through their doors. I have to say that the five weeks I spent there were life changing. While getting the help I needed from a staff of amazing people, the in-patient experience was second to none. The rooms were luxurious with the most comfortable beds that only a 5-Star hotel could match. Add to that a very large-screen TV with every streaming service available, a heated bathroom floor and daily (yes daily) wash-and-fold laundry. The food was equally amazing, if you didn’t like what was on the menu, the chef would cook to order. As patients, we were only allowed to go outside with supervision, although we were allowed access to the rooftop deck (they have a beautiful deck with amazing views of the harbor and Statue of Liberty). Most of the supervised walks included visits to Ample Hills or Steve’s Key Lime. Now let’s talk about the work they do. Their program is rigorous, consisting of 12-hour days with customized individual treatment regimens. The group “classes” are facilitated by some of the most knowledgeable and experienced professionals in their field. These group classes are supplemented with one-on-one meetings as well. In order to get the most out of the program, you must take advantage of everything they offer and be committed to being there. Sometimes it appears that the building is vacant but as I can attest, the inside is a beehive of activity, doing good work. You can’t ask for a better neighbor. — Phil R
Dock problems
Hi, I’m a longshoreman worker from the Red Hook container terminal who is being held out of work due to corruption. It’s been 213 days since 8/26/2019 of seeking hearings and still not able to get back to work. Neither I.L.A. nor my local have gotten to the bottom of my situation — J. Pabon
An out of state fan
As a former New Yorker and Brooklynite , plus a few years on Staten Island, I love your paper which treats serious issues in depth. I presently live in a Philadelphia where the once important City Paper has died. Wishing your Red Hook Star a long life! Very best wishes, Ursule Yates
Don't be greedy, Bard
Last week Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, circulated a letter announcing the dramatic steps against the spread of COVID-19 undertaken by Bard College. According to this plan, the college will effectively be closed for the rest of the semester and students will have to leave campus. All face-to-face instruction will cease and faculty will transition to remote instruction. Effectively, Bard will switch to online courses for the rest of the semester. Distance learning has been lauded in America as a cheap alternative to traditional education. The cost of education at Bard is substantial. Tuition is $55,566 with another $1517,000 for room and board. The steps against COVID-19 that Bard has announced involve the transition to online instruction—a much cheaper version of education than the traditional one. However, in his plan president Botstein has not mentioned any provisions to pay back to students the
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difference between the cost of traditional education and the going market price for online credits. The plan also does not include any provisions to reimburse students for the unused portion of what they have paid for room and board.
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LETTERS
send them to george@ redhookstar.com or post on our website, www.star-revue.com.
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The Red Hook Star-Revue is your interactive newspaper
There is a fatal missing $1.4 billion federal funding shortfall flaw overlooked in "The BQX runs on astro turf" (Brett . Roses EW! ca for Yate's view – March 2020) which Nmay result rtoon in the projO ldster s by Rish s... a ect never being built. After five years, there has been no And m u c much m h, ore real progress in securing federal A funding for the pro...on P ages 15 W A T R h D r u posed Brooklyn-Queens Connector Streetcar. W 18 I2015, NT N SIn CO T PFINGA M N ISU The Friends of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector originallyAFFM EVS I ER CWS Y HEE RC E claimed it could be built for $1.7 billion. In 2016, the NYC Interview page 25 Does N TION YC reall p y lus ou $2.5 billion. need g Economic Development Corporation raveya ru irreve said rds and go rent t sual lf c o a urses? Today, the estimated cost is $2.7 billion. more life in How many Yates, these ke on page 3 herethan billions might it cost upon completion?pIt takes ar ts...more a simple planning feasibility study to turn it into a viable capital transportation improvement project. There have stdesign arts p been no completed environmental documents or age 23 and engineering efforts necessary to validate any basic esWe work hard to present you with an informative and entertaining timates for the $2.7 billion construction costs. for a great D: [laughs On a scale first night party. ] Well, Ma at Mama D’s me. I grew ma D is Dia rived at the she’s somewh of Rachel Ray to Ant Sneaky Spe up outside hony Bou na, that’s venue, inc ere in the akeasy, I arof Philadelp ral suburb rdain, onspicuou gem of an middle. Inside was s. They wer hia, in the sly located area called e originally ru- not-so a well-de a tiny cou in a wer Bushwood farms, so the corate -famous Rid ntry girl in e covered re’s Brookl gewood, Qu , a name for the me. Don’t though, the with art, red d scene. The wal I star get me wro yn border ls eens and Bus moment I brick and . I walked cou ng doors. blackboar I said “bye! hwick, spr ed at the perfectly up to the ds. “I’m here” Hello NYC.” ld make it to New Yor placed coc inkling ligh tall brown I texted. Ou ktail glasse k, tablish t over the Roderick: walked ont tside of the ment, I sto s, neon bar ; Tell me abo o a set of an od waiting cozy esit was like ut mu you ffle HB my r and d chatter of Mama D: Sneaky Spe I O show. As first cockta listening to Mama D’s guests and akeasy. the doo I took a sip il and the lowy Sneaky Spe then Mama of r. In fron couches, the sank into one of Ma akeasy is a D opened ma D’s pilevening was host of an, petite but t of me was a smilin The DJ beg g young wo off to a gre with a stro an her set, at start. mng and com scratching refreshing edic person on real rec departure alords, a from the You tube playlis t DJ’s
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Awarding a $7.25 million consultant contract to perform environmental work supplements the previous $7 million feasibility study for a total of $14.25 million. This leaves the project $2.685 billion short of funding needed for completion. The original completion date has already slipped five years from 2024 to 2029. It is doubtful that the Federal Transit Administration would pay for up to 50 percent of the cost. Dreams of Amazon doing the same have come and gone since they canceled coming to Long Island City. There is no funding for this project in the MTA $51 billion 2020 - 2024 Five Year Capital Plan, There is no commitment to use future Manhattan congestion pricing toll revenues to help fund this project. It remains to be seen if this project will be included within the pending long range MTA 2020 - 2040 Capital Needs Assessment Plan document. This report was supposed to have been released by the end of December 2019. There is no proposed funding to advance this project in either the upcoming July 1, 2020 - June 30, 2021 City Hall or April 1, 2020 - March 31, 2021 Albany state budgets. No one knows if the next Mayor will support this project and make it a priority under their administration. Mayor Bill de Blasio has yet to request let alone been granted approval to enter the Federal Transit Administration New Starts process for future funding. The project is not included within the March 2019 FTA New Starts report for federal fiscal year 2020. Don't count on seeing it in the next FTA New Starts report for federal fiscal year 2021. This easily averages five or more years before there is an approved Federal Full Funding Grant Agreement in place. After five years, NYCDOT has been unable to convince FTA to approve $97 million in New Starts funding toward $258 Queens Woodhaven Blvd. Select Bus Service Phase 2. If NYCDOT can't obtain $97 million, the odds of obtaining $1.4 billion in FTA New Starts funding toward $2.7 billion for the Brooklyn-Queens Street Car Connector are slim to none. Without a billion or more from Washington, don't count on riding the Brooklyn Queens Connector in your lifetime. Instead, try running simple limited stop bus service on the same route. MTA New York City Transit Queens Bus Network Redesign Draft Plan proposes creation of the new QT 1 bus route. It would cross the Pulaski Bridge to connect Astoria, Long Island City, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, The Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Downtown Brooklyn. This might make for a lowcost easy-to-implement improvement versus the $2.7 billion Brooklyn-Queens Connector. —Larry Penner
package of news, events and advertising that makes living in the city a little more intimate and friendly. We are also here to listen to you. You can send us letters to the editor that we gladly print, we accept op-ed submissions on interesting topics, and if you have ideas for stories or tips we can use, please let us know. And if you have gonzo ideas about journalism, definitely get in touch! If you happened upon this paper by chance and would like to be able to pick it up near you, drop us a line and we will get a stack of papers to a coffee shop near you. You can stop by to see us if you like—we are in Red Hook at
481 Van Brunt Street, building 8, across from Fairway, inside of NY Printing and Graphics.
You can call us much of the time at
718 624-5568.
But probably the best way to grab our attention is by email, and here are some email addresses:
Publisher george@redhookstar.com Asst. Editor brettayates@gmail.com Music Editor michaelcobb70@gmail.com Advertising liz@redhookstar.com jamie@redhookstar.com George Grella george@georgegrella.org Erin DeGregorio erin@redhookstar.com Nathan Weiser nathan.weiser@yahoo.com Music Listings will.goyankees@gmail.com Circulation george@redhookstar.com FOR EDITORIAL, ADVERTISING OR EMPLOYMENT INQUIRIES, email george@redhookstar.com.
(Larry Penner is a transportation historian, advocate and writer who previously worked 31 years for the Federal Transit Administration Region 2 NY Office. This included the development, review, approval and oversight for grants supporting billions in capital projects and programs on behalf of the MTA NYC Transit bus and subway, NYC DOT Staten Island Ferry & private franchised bus operators along with 30 other transit agencies in NY & NJ)
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April 2020, Page 3
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3/11/20 11:58 AM
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April 2020
YATES'S VIEW
Do not let Andrew Cuomo become president
A
surprising number of adult Americans are, in fact, tiny little babies who need a big strong daddy to keep them safe – not so much from the coronavirus as from the degeneracy of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, many of these tiny babies spend a lot of time watching cable news. Hence the #PresidentCuomo Twitter trend. As we all know, Donald Trump is a buffoonish liar who has spent the last month or more spreading medical misinformation, stoking anti-Asian sentiment in an effort to shift blame to China for his coronavirus policy failures, and emphasizing that he values the stock market a lot more than he does human life. New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s televised press conferences have presented an alternative, and viewers have taken notice. Cuomo is a professional. He speaks coherently and authoritatively, with sincerity and gravitas. He’s dignified. He does his job. With his polished TV performances in March, Cuomo became the heir to Robert Mueller, the conservative spook who served as a hero to MSNBC-addicted liberals between 2017 and 2019 for his solemn, nonpartisan investigation of Russian interference in the last presidential election. Mueller represented an antidote to Trump in the liberal imagination not only because he seemed poised to upend Trump’s administration but because he conjured a bygone era of diligent Washington bureaucrats with neat haircuts and – by golly – a heck of a lot more patriotism than any of the crooks in the White House have today. In the current political landscape of the mainstream media, there are two poles: the alt-right and the honorable establishment. Trump is a scary outsider, an invader, a repulsive and incomprehensible stepdad. This
must be a bad dream: where is our real dad? What if he were a decorated intelligence officer or (now) a competent machine politician? Wouldn’t that make us feel better? Sometimes I think that TV news should be illegal. Newspapers can be evil, too, but at least their readers don’t come away from them judging political figures solely according to how much they look and sound like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Good or bad, print media contains information of some sort, not just spectacle. I have no idea what Cuomo’s actually been saying at his press conferences. Apparently it’s all very reasonable stuff. Who cares? Anyone who has given New York politics anything more than a cursory glance since 2011 knows that Cuomo is an asshole. Like Trump, Cuomo got his start because of a powerful father. As Bill Clinton’s HUD Secretary, he oversaw the demolition of public housing under the HOPE VI program and empowered subprime mortgage lenders in a misguided strategy to increase home ownership. After his successful gubernatorial run as a Democrat in 2010, he schemed with the Independent Democratic Conference to preserve Republican control of the State Senate, ensuring that progressive legislation wouldn’t reach his desk. When the Democrats finally won the Senate in 2018, Cuomo vetoed more bills than ever before. Cuomo does not support legislation like New York Health Act, which would create a statewide single-payer healthcare system, or Good Cause Eviction, which would fight displacement from gentrification. He has given major tax breaks to real estate developers, which have made it harder to fund NYCHA and the MTA, both of which continue to crumble. On the national stage, Cuomo may
Cuomo holding up state-branded hand sanitizer
only be a fad. Substantively, his handling of the coronavirus isn’t so impressive: he’s refused, for instance, to call for rent cancellation or to instruct the Department of Corrections to offer compassionate release to elderly prisoners who don’t pose a risk to public safety. But, perversely, as the number of COVID-19 cases in New York grows, so does the rationale for putting Cuomo on TV: he must talk about the crisis. Rumors have begun to swirl around Cuomo’s newfound popularity. Democrats expect 77-year-old Joe Biden to win the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, but the combination of his embarrassing political record on the federal level and his rapidly deteriorating brain would make him a sitting duck for Trump this fall. Young voters dislike him, and a sexual assault allegation from a former staffer has recently emerged. Conspiracy theorists are whispering that, after Biden has dispensed with Bernie Sanders and clinched the nomination, party bosses will persuade him to step down for “health reasons” (the scare quotes may be unnecessary – Joe looks bad these days) and will replace him on the
ballot with Cuomo. I’ve heard crazier ideas. Right now, credulous CNN viewers may inadvertently be laying the groundwork for such a plot as their infatuation for Cuomo intensifies. Most CNN viewers, of course, are unlikely to have heard of Long Island College Hospital (LICH), the former medical center in Cobble Hill that served many Red Hook residents between 1858 and 2014, before decreases in Medicaid reimbursements led to its insolvency. Under Cuomo’s orders, SUNY Downstate closed the facility in order to sell its valuable land to a real estate developer who had donated to Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaign. The luxury condo towers are under construction. LICH’s 506 beds might have come in handy during a pandemic. Meanwhile, even now, Cuomo continues to pursue billions in Medicaid cuts in the state’s new budget. While he may look like the opposite of Trump on TV, he’s not the leader anyone should want during a public health crisis. In fact, he’s just another slimeball. Who’s the actual opposite of Trump? Bernie Sanders, duh.
"Sometimes I think that TV news should be illegal. Newspapers can be evil, too, but at least their readers don’t come away from them judging political figures solely according to how much they look and sound like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird." Red Hook Star-Revue
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April 2020, Page 5
Chase will likely sell their building at 79 Hamilton Avenue
Chase to close local branch
C
by Brett Yates
hase Bank has announced that its branch at 79 Hamilton Avenue will close on June 2. This is the closest bank that Red Hook currently has, now that Santander has closed its doors. According to a spokesprson, the bank “is being consolidated to our 360 Court Street branch in Brooklyn, which is 0.6 miles away.” Chase will transfer all accounts there. Red Hook Civic Association president John McGettrick, however, stressed the importance of brick-and-mortar banking, which will become more challenging for locals. “Where do you go and cash a Social Security check? A lot of people both in and outside of the Red Hook Houses are elderly,” he pointed out. “What about people who would need a home improvement or car loan?” When Santander shuttered its branch at Columbia and Lorraine streets last summer, Chase became the only easily accessible commercial bank serving Red Hook. Located in the Columbia Street Waterfront District, it sits directly across the street from Red Hook’s Harold Ickes Playground. The closure will make the area a “banking desert.” Longtime Red Hook residents may recall the term. In 1996, Jay McKnight and Wally Bazemore of the Red Hook Houses organized a petition drive to convince Charles J. Hamm, the president of Independence Savings Bank, to open a branch in Red Hook. They gathered 3,000 signatures, which dispelled Hamm’s misgivings about investing in a low-income community. Recently, the neighborhood has been more prosperous than ever, and that may be the problem. Chase employees report brisk business, but property values have risen. JP Morgan Chase, which owns 79 Hamilton Avenue, is expected to sell the property as soon as they shut the branch. Last June, Chase closed its Williamsburg branch at 819 Grand Street after selling the building, which now sits vacant, to Fortress Investment Group. If a similar deal is in the works here, it won’t be the first time that real estate speculation involving the property has stirred local controversy. In 2018, the owner of 41 Summit Street, which abuts the bank, submitted an unusual rezoning request in the hope of obtaining permission to construct a seven-story apartment tower on the low-rise block. In order to circumvent rules against “spot rezonings,” 41 Summit Street LLC included in its application two adjacent
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properties – 79 Hamilton Avenue and 75 Hamilton Avenue – whose separate owners had not signed on to the plan. Councilman Brad Lander regards rezonings as an important tool for the creation of affordable housing. The proposed tower at 41 Summit Street would not have been big enough to trigger Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, the city policy that requires affordable residences, but the applicant hinted that a future developer might buy 79 and 75 Hamilton Avenue and combine the lots to construct a larger building with affordable units. At the time, Chase said that it had no intention of selling the profitable branch, and Lander rejected the plan. Anthony Bradfield helped lead the Columbia Waterfront Neighbors, a community group that opposed the rezoning. He suspects that since Chase has changed its mind about selling its branch, another residential land use application may arrive sooner rather than later. “Whoever buys it is going to want to develop it,” he said. “I know a lot of my neighbors were shocked because they bank there.” On March 16, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, whose district includes Red Hook, sent a letter to Mark Ricca, the president of the Municipal Credit Union (MCU). Montgomery hopes MCU will open a branch in the neighborhood. Credit unions are member-owned nonprofits that offer financial services. “...the Chase Bank in Red Hook, Brooklyn will be closing, leaving the neighborhood without any banking options,” Montgomery wrote. “I respectfully request that MCU consider utilizing the Banking Development District (BDD) program to expand your services into the Red Hook community.” In December, Montgomery wrote a new law to allow credit unions to participate in New York State’s BDD program, which, according to state government, “encourage[s] the establishment of bank branches in areas across New York State where there is a demonstrated need for banking services.” In these areas, branches can qualify for as much as $10 million in subsidized deposits from the state. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s archives reveal that 79 Hamilton Avenue has served as bank since at least 1894. An early owner, the Corn Exchange Bank, merged in 1954 with Chemical Bank, which acquired Chase in 1996.
April 2020
PRESS CLIPS
BY GEORGE FIALA
What did we know and when did we know it?
A
s I sit here about to write this final piece for the April issue, I checked the COVID-19 scoreboard to see that the US has gone over 1000 deaths for the day, the most ever so far, but probably a normal figure for a number of days or months hereon in. The blame game is already starting, with many criticisms of the president. Yet most of those criticisms come from people who, from day one, criticized the president for not having any government experience, for a lack of intellectual curiosity, for a personality disorder, and for gauging his success as president to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. So why would anybody be surprised at the lack of leadership in this from the top? Back in December, when the disease was beginning to percolate in Wuhan Province, I took a trip to Washington, DC, to visit the Newseum, a museum dedicated to the media, which was closing at the end of the year. The first exhibit I saw was a short movie that examined the New York Times’ coverage of the Holocaust as it was happening. Over the years, many Americans believe that, had they known the extent of the German persecution project, they might have done something about it. The documentary went through the Times’ coverage of the Jewish extermination in real time. In fact, there were extensive articles written throughout the war. The problem, according to historians, was that the stories were buried inside the pages of the paper. In other words, the facts were there, but nobody was shouting them out – at least not loud enough to get anyone to do something. Whether doing something was politically possible was another story – it was mentioned in the movie that FDR asked Sulzberger, the Times’ publisher, to downplay the reporting because he didn’t want the general public to think that they were sacrificing their sons in battle in order to save Jews. In any case, at the beginning of March, my memory is that life in New York City was going on pretty much normally. In fact, the first day of the month I went downtown to help celebrate the imminent opening of Gage and Tollner, an historic Fulton Street restaurant that is being brought back to life by three Red Hook restaurateurs. There was a big crowd eating hors d’oeuvres and oysters and salads, served in the open air, which, back in the pre-pandemic days, was perfectly normal. On the tenth, I journeyed with a cousin visiting from overseas to Gottlieb’s, a Jewish appetizing restaurant that caters to the nearby Hasidic popula-
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tion. We were to meet a third cousin for some old world plates of food. It turned out that day was the holiday of Purim, and we had to drive through streets full of crazed Hasid’s celebrating one of the few Jewish victories that the religion remembers. When we got there, the place was closed, due to the holiday, and the third cousin was visibly disappointed. I suggested going to Peter Luger’s, which was just on the other side of Broadway. Nobody thought we could get in without a reservation, but thinking of the uncomplimentary review they received in the Times, I convinced them to give it a shot. It turns out we were received with open arms, and multiple empty tables were evident. It was like going to the Court Street diner, as we got a nice table right away. The food was great, and I asked whether the lack of customers was due to the review. “Oh no, we only had one off week after the review,” they told me. “All our international reservations are canceled. There are no tourists in town.” Even then it didn’t sink in that we were in for some extraordinary times. It wasn’t until the next day, March 11, when the NBA put a halt to the season, that I realized things were not going to be normal for some time. Why such a surprise? Why did the whole country venture to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, despite the fact that COVID-19 was already a named infectious disease? One would think that somebody, whether in government, the media, or maybe even a celebrity, might have alerted the nation to the need to deal with the situation sooner, rather than later. But I couldn’t find anyone. For the record, here is what I found, going back through the pages of the New York Times. All these stories ran this year. January 6 – “China Grapples With Mystery Pneumonia-Like Illness” – reporting on 59 people in Wuhan who have been sickened – cause unclear. Symptom include high fever, difficulty breathing and lung lesions. January 8 – “China Identifies New Virus Causing Pneumonialike Illness” – identified as a coronavirus, the announcement signifies that researchers are making progress in containing the outbreak, which has caused a panic in central China. January 10 – “China Reports First Death From New Virus” – a 61 yearold man, who had also suffered from chronic liver disease and abdominal tumors. Since all 59 cases were customers at the same Wuhan market, there is no evidence that the virus can be spread between humans, according to a Chinese health commission.
January 15 – “Japan and Thailand Confirm New Cases of Chinese Coronavirus” – Malik Peiris, a public health virologist in Hong Kong, is quoted saying that if it is really true that these new cases are from people arriving from China but who had not visited any seafood markets, then “that is very concerning, for sure.” January 20 – “China Confirms New Coronavirus Spreads from Humans to Humans” – The World Health Organization, in response to this news, announces an emergency meeting “to ascertain whether the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, and what recommendations should be made to manage it.” January 21 – “North Korea Bans Foreign Tourists Over Coronavirus, Tour Operator Says” – this is bad news for the North Korean economy, because tourism is one of the few industries not covered by US sanctions, the story reports. January 21 – “First Patient With Wuhan Coronavirus Is Identified in the U.S.” – identified as the “Wuhan Coronavirus,” it has been detected in a 30-year-old Washington state resident recently returned from China. February 9 – “As Deaths Mount, China Tries to Speed Up Coronavirus Testing” – testing kits take too long and are in short supply, in China. February 10 – “U.K. Declared Coronavirus ‘Imminent Threat’ as Europe Scrambles” – while the risk is called moderate, health authorities are given the authority to keep individuals in quarantine if deemed necessary.
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February 11 – “The Illness Has a Name, COVID-19” – the new name makes no reference to any of the people, places or animals associated with the coronavirus. “The goal was to avoid stigma.” February 11 – “Huge Shelters for Coronavirus Patients Pose New Risks, Experts Fear” – by this time there are 40,000 cases identified in China. The article compares immense isolation wards built in a sports stadium, an exhibition center and a building complex to warehouses built to shelter patients during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. In both cases, these shelters are seen as a possible risk to patients as well as a breeding ground for the virus, although possibly necessary. February 11 “Coronavirus Shock Could Push Europe Into a Downturn” – disruptions in China could spill over to the rest of the global economy February 12 – “Coronavirus Test Kits Sent to States Are Flawed, C.D.C. Says” – despite the fact that it was guaranteed that the “kits would not go out until the C.D.C. was sure they were as accurate as possible.” February 20 – “Why the Stock Market Isn’t Too Worried About Coronavirus” – because the Fed would bail them out. February 24 – “Is It A Pandemic Yet?” – a column by an infectious disease expert and a documentary filmmaker. “Governments should conduct Covid-19 preparedness drills in local hospitals and expand their capacity, and the manufacturing and
(continued on next page) April 2020, Page 7
PRESS CLIPS (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE)
distribution chains for drugs and other vital products must remain open and with international cooperation. “Pandemic isn’t just a technical public health term. It also is – or should be – a rallying cry.” February 25 – “Stocks Slide for 2nd Day as U.S. Sounds Alarm on Coronavirus” – the market is resigning itself to the fact that the impact will go well beyond China and the first quarter of 2020.
An arts and play space for children with disabilities and their families. Now offering free online play-based programming for the whole family! extremekidsandcrew.org | 347-410-6050
February 27 – “Coronavirus in N.Y.: Growing Anxiety as Doctors Prepare for an Epidemic” – NY State officials say they are ready, with a huge store of supplies hidden in three locations around the state, filled with surgical masks, gowns and gloves, and more extreme protective gear like N95 respirators and ventilators. March 1 – “Coronavirus May Have Spread in U.S. for Weeks, Gene Sequencing Suggests” – I guess so! March 2 – “Coronavirus Outbreak Will Spread in New York City, Officials Warn
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April 2020
Dispatches from the old country
G
iorgio (the name is fictitious for his privacy) is a nurse who works for a hospital in northern Italy, and last week he got infected. He is now one of the 69,176 coronavirus cases in the country. He probably got infected while he was working, and he knew it after the swab he did tested positive. “They called me the day after the swab, and they said I should stay home because I was ill,” said Giorgio, who is now in quarantine with his family and without any kind of public assistance. If Giorgio left his home, even to buy basic goods, he would risk a fine of about 3,000 euros ($3,266). The quarantine is not easy. The illness makes him vomit, and he has a fever, but nobody helps him and his family.
"Italians are famous for being physical; now people are afraid of any kind of contact." Red Hook Star-Revue
by Dario Pio Muccilli
Predicaments like Giorgio’s are now commonplace in the panic-stricken nation of Italy. The coronavirus is a new shock for a country that was already struggling to muster vitality. The whole economy is damaged, and many workers are obliged to stay home without salary unless their jobs support essential industries and activities. During the last month, we have seen lots of different presidential decrees with increasingly restrictive measures to halt the outbreak of COVID-19. At the beginning of the emergency, there was a lack of awareness of the danger both in the Italian establishment and in the public consciousness, but when people understood that coronavirus is not only an influenza, the first reaction was to stock up on food supplies. At the beginning of March, I spent two hours in line in front of a supermarket to buy pasta, flour and basic goods. People in line were confused – some were optimistic while others thought the outbreak was a plot ordered by the “great powers.” The fear has changed the behavior of the nation. Italians are famous for being physical; now people are afraid of any kind of contact. In the queues in front of the supermarkets, people respect the one-meter security distance between one another like never before. There’s fear in the eyes of the people you meet in the streets. We don’t know if this period will end. Maybe
the epidemic could stop, but our souls and behaviors will be marked forever. The government has decided to hang our freedoms for the public health, and Italians seem supportive of the government’s policies, but a decline of the epidemic could rapidly overturn this consent. Students are facing the closure of schools with a move to online classes. “But it’s not easy,” said a teacher of a high school near Turin. “The government left us alone, and there are lots of web problems.” It’s not a good period for any kind of activity. At the end of January, when the outbreak began, many Italians went on winter holiday, not yet understanding the danger. My girlfriend, for example, was on a train when the national emergency was declared. Screens on the wagons started announcing crisis measures by the government, and the passengers got panicked. Now it’s not possible to travel on a train without a necessary reason. People must stay home, and there are lots of psychological problems in the solitude. Up to now, the hysteria of the Italians is expressed by singing and dancing from the windows and the balconies every day at 6 pm, but this emotion could soon give way to radical urges. There are hints of nationalism when people sing “Mameli’s Hymn.”
Dario Pio Muccilli
believe that the real worry is not the virus but its potential legacy upon our freedoms and our society. About Pio: “I was born in 2002 and I live in Turin, in northern Italy. I have a passion for every kind of literature, which is why I do theater and write poems. I collect newspapers and I’ve also founded one in my neighborhood. I love art, and I curated an exhibition about the role of women in society last January. I would be glad if someone wanted to write me by mail to talk about my reportage or about common interests. My email is: muccillidariopio@gmail.com
Maybe the danger of a revolution is exaggerated. Many Italians, however,
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April 2020, Page 9
maining theaters to close. Before the closure, fear had already begun to thin the crowds during what had begun as a busy month at Film Forum. “We were playing a lot of popular things, but as soon as this coronavirus thing started happening, it was a lot more dead,” remembered David Carozza, a full-time film student at Pace University and part-time worker. “It was kind of eerie. In the area in general, there were a lot less people, and Film Forum itself is kind of unique to having a large customer base of older people, the exact age range of vulnerable groups that are affected by coronavirus the most.” Carozza moved from Connecticut to New York for college in 2016. “I come from a lower-middle-class family, and as soon as I got my own apartment, it was my own responsibility to pay the rent and pay bills,” he said. Before the furlough, Film Forum’s paychecks had covered those expenses. “The financial situation is definitely worrying, as I think it would be for most people,” Carozza admitted. Some help on the way
AN ANXIOUS INTERMISSION FOR CINEMA WORKERS by Brett Yates
B
efore I moved to New York, I worked for four years as a movie theater employee. My coworkers and I made minimum wage or a little more, and many could barely afford their rent during the best of times. For some, the lack of disposable income was tolerable only because their favorite recreational activity, by far, was watching movies, and their employment entitled them to free passes not just at their own workplace but at neighboring cinemas.
New York is a destination city for cinephiles, and there’s never been a worse time to be a cinephile – or at least the kind that prioritizes the big-screen experience – than now. But for financially precarious cinema workers, whose jobs have suddenly vanished, the situation is far more dire. I talked to three employees at Film Forum, my favorite theater in the city, about their predicament during the coronavirus pandemic. “It sucks,” Juanita Fama, a 26-year-old who joined the art-house landmark in early 2019, succinctly summarized. On March 12, Film Forum – an independent cinema on Houston Street in Manhattan – announced that it would limit capacity in its auditoriums to 50 percent in compliance with Governor Cuomo’s ban on large gatherings. But by March 14, management had decided to pause operations completely. Three days later, a mandate from Mayor de Blasio forced New York City’s re-
Page 10 Red Hook Star-Revue
Fama noted that she’d already applied for unemployment insurance, despite some challenges on the state’s overtaxed website. “I was doing it on my phone, and it was really kind of dicey. There’d be a few hours where I’d get to one page and it wasn’t working at all. It’d be like ‘server error.’ By the end of the day, it worked.” But, unsure when her benefits would begin to arrive, she fretted over potential delays. She had some money saved, but it wouldn’t last long. Along with Carozza, Fama had also signed up for the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund, a GoFundMe organized by the local film guide Screen Slate and the Brooklyn-based exhibition venue Light Industry, from which she expected a $200 payout in the near future, thanks to charitable donations. 27-year-old Chris Hampson, who began working at Film Forum in the summer of 2018, had done the same. “In terms of my own finances, I’m OK,” he said. “As soon as this happened, I immediately went out and bought a bunch of microwave food.” Before the coronavirus hit, however, Hampson had been searching to fill a vacant room in his leased apartment. He still needs a roommate to cover a portion of the rent. “If I have to pay out that whole sum, things will get much worse very quickly,” he acknowledged. For now, he’s looking to public officials for possible solutions. “My rent collects on the first of each month, so we’re nearing that date, but I have not paid any of my bills as of yet because I’m still waiting to see what the city is going to do in terms of pausing that system for the month of April,” he said. Fama mentioned that the $2,000-amonth universal basic income proposed as an emergency measure by Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters would, for her, represent a raise, exceeding her monthly pay. New York State offers 26 weeks of unemployment benefits for laid-off workers. No one knows when movie theaters will be allowed to reopen. “The problem that we’re all facing is
that there is no real timeline for any of this,” Hampson remarked. Before its closure in 2014, the Brooklyn Heights Cinema hired Hampson as an 18-year-old and taught him to project 35-millimeter film. Subsequently, in the age of primarily digital cinema, he worked as a floor staffer at Film Forum, but in December 2019, Nitehawk Prospect Park brought him abroad to help man the old-fashioned projectors that the new dine-in operation had inherited from Park Slope’s Pavilion Theater, whose shuttered moviehouse Nitehawk had bought and refurbished. “I’d been trying to find good projection work and get out of the minimum wage bracket for, literally, years,” Hampson said. “And then this happened.” While at Nitehawk, he had continued to pick up shifts at Film Forum to supplement his income. In a world without cinemas, Hampson doesn’t have a great deal of hope for his immediate employment prospects. “I do not have a college degree. Part of the reason I selected projection, besides being a cinema enthusiast to my bones, is just because it’s a specialized field that not many people know how to do, which creates a nice sort of job market for yourself,” he explained. “But where do you go to project movies when there are no movie theaters?” Carozza, meanwhile, is a college senior who will soon finish his degree through remote learning. He recognized the global economic shutdown as an inopportune moment to enter the full-time labor market. “I don’t have much experience, and I’m trying to move up the ladder, and this kind of happens, and where do you even apply for a job now?” he wondered. Long live cinema Recently, Hollywood studios have redistributed March’s would-be blockbusters on video-on-demand and streaming platforms. Industry insiders have speculated that, even if the coronavirus is temporary, its disruption of audience habits might end standard theatrical releases for good. For Hampson, who sees 300 movies a year in theaters, this would represent a professional and personal crisis, but he noted that pessimists have forecast the death of cinema plenty of times before. “I think that when theaters reopen, people are going to absolutely flock to them. If you go on social media right now, you have all these people who are cooped up and talking about how crazy they’re going,” he observed. “I honestly think that we don’t give audiences enough credit sometimes, and that we have this idea that they’ll simply take whatever’s easier, more convenient, less effort to absorb content and forget about it. But if that were as true as I sometimes feel that it is, Nitehawk wouldn’t have survived ten years. Metrograph wouldn’t have been able to open so recently and stay open and become a destination that people talk about who aren’t even from New York City.” If Hampson feels relatively confident about the long-term viability of traditional cinema, he and his colleagues recognize the danger of the shortterm crisis, especially for independent theaters. “They’re much more vulner-
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able than an AMC or something with more money behind them,” Carozza pointed out. As a nonprofit with a host of high-profile backers like Matthew Broderick and Ethan Hawke, Film Forum may be able to count on philanthropic revenue to outlast the pandemic. It’s less clear how other small theaters, like Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater and Syndicated BK, will pay their rent. The National Association of Theater Owners has requested a federal bailout. “It’s also very much on the city to keep the New York-y things about it open,” Hampson contended. “It’s part of the reason people still move here in droves, even though it’s absolute hell living here sometimes. I’m not saying ‘gimme, gimme, gimme’ to the city, but they need to support these sort of businesses if they want to be New York. The citizens are willing to pay for it; they simply cannot pay for it right now. So I do think it would behoove the city to provide relief to these businesses – not just to us but also to the bars and restaurants that really are part of the essential fabric of this town.” Passing the time To take his mind off the uncertain future, Hampson has been watching movies at home during the quarantine. Among his recent viewings, he recommends Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) and the Wachowski sisters’ Bound (1996). For Fama, the stress is too big a distraction. She borrowed her friend’s Criterion Channel password but hasn’t watched anything yet. “I haven’t been feeling it. I’m still kind of restless. It’s hard to read, too. It’s hard for me to feel relaxed. Maybe once the unemployment is taken care of and I know I’m not going to be completely broke, I can sink into chilling,” she speculated. Even as the question of money looms, the “weirdest” part of the pandemic for Fama, in some sense, is the inability to go to the movies, which she had done almost “every other day” before the coronavirus. Now she goes on walks to get out of the apartment once in a while. Carozza has used the break to catch up on schoolwork. “But even that doesn’t seem to fill a lot of time,” he sighed. “I skateboard, so I do that if it’s nice out.” Although he recognizes the moral imperative to stay home as much as possible, he’s tempted as an artist to try to document the strange moment in New York history. “This is a very interesting time, if you take a New Wave approach, if you’re a filmmaker and the streets are empty in SoHo and Midtown – that’s been one thing that’s inspiring, almost, from a filmmaking perspective, how the appearance of the city changes,” Carozza described. Fama looks forward to getting back to work once life has returned to normal. She, Carozza, and Hampson all expect their employers to welcome them back upon reopening. Fama misses the job, not just the paycheck. “I really do just like working there. I’m not a person who likes work, but it’s fun. I like the people I work with, the weird people who come watch movies,” she said. “I hate talking to my roommates.”
April 2020
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Red Hook Star-Revue
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April 2020, Page 11
The Mayor speaks to the community press by Nathan Weiser
Editor's note: While much water has gone under the bridge since the time of this event, we include it for historical reasons. Much of it is still timely.
M
ayor Bill de Blasio along with Dr. Oxiris Barbot (Commissioner of Health of City of New York), Raul Perea-Henze (Deputy Mayor of Health and Human Services) and Marco Carrion (Commissioner of the Community Affairs Unit) held a press conference and Q&A on March 11 for community media on the emerging coronavirus. They emphasized that anyone who asks for healthcare will not be asked for documentation. They will take anybody with symptoms of the coronavirus and have them tested. De Blasio said he has been impressed by New Yorkers’ resilience and stressed the need to watch out for people with preexisting conditions and the elderly. They also said that any mass gatherings are risky with the spread of the coronavirus.
“If you are sick, do not go to work or school,” Dr. Barbot instructed. Dr. Barbot underlined the importance of washing your hands frequently and coughing into your arm to avoid spreading the virus. “I emphasize that this is not a process that the government takes care of it and will call you when it is over,” de Blasio added. “Everyone has to be part of solving this.” March 1 was the first case of COVID-19 in New York City, and as of March 11 there were 53 known cases. De Blasio spoke about some benefits that New Yorkers have at this time. “We are blessed to have some key and distinct factors in our favor,” de Blasio said. “We have unquestionably the best healthcare system in the USA. That is both our private voluntary hospitals and nonprofit organizations and our public hospitals and clinics.”
De Blasio noted that Dr. Barbot has informed him that the city could be working to subdue the coronavirus until September. “It could be six months that we are trying to get this under control,” he said.
He talked about the desire to give everyone the help they need. “We have more and better healthcare available and a history of making healthcare available to people in a very universal fashion,” he stated. “They will not deny on it on the basis of not being able to pay. If they have insurance they will draw on that and if they do not they will get them on insurance. They will not deny anyone who can’t afford it.”
Physical separation is the best way to avoid contracting the virus.
De Blasio brought up the crisis in Italy. “The speed which it happened was
It has now been announced that mass gatherings of 500 people or more are not allowed.
Page 12 Red Hook Star-Revue
The mayor at his March 11 news conference for community media.
in such an unexpected manner,” he said. “It’s very different than what we have experienced so far.” De Blasio got together with Dr. Barbot on January 24, after the situation in Italy, and had a press conference telling New Yorkers that the disease would eventually reach New York. They outlined the preparations, and the city did not have its first case until March 1. De Blasio said New York City had five weeks of preparation before the first case of COVID-19, whereas Italy had almost no preparation before experiencing a full-blown crisis. According to Dr. Barbot, the average time that it takes for someone that has been exposed to COVID-19 to develop symptoms is anywhere from five to six days. In that time most people develop fever and cough or fever and shortness of breath. “What we are advising New Yorkers to
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do is stay home for the first 48 hours and if they are not getting better then reach out to their doctor,” Dr. Barbot said. “What we are asking doctors to do is to implement things such as instead of someone having to go into the office they can be assessed over the phone or FaceTime.” When necessary, physicians can administer a test called BioFire, which rules in or out 26 common diseases. “If you do not have one of those and have symptoms consistent of coronavirus, then we want you tested for coronavirus,” de Blasio said. “If you came back from one of the affected countries and have symptoms, we want to get you tested, and if you have a direct nexus to an existing coronavirus case and have symptoms, we want to get you tested. " The Deputy Mayor for Health, Dr.
(continued on page 16)
April 2020
Red Hook’s elected officials respond to pandemic by Brett Yates
A
cross the nation, federal, state, and city officials spent the month of March scrambling to prepare their constituencies for an unprecedented public health crisis, advocating for various policies to limit the spread of COVID-19 and to mitigate the impact of the resulting economic shutdown upon business owners, laid-off workers, and other affected populations. Between campaigns to encourage self-isolation and debates about how best to patch the holes in America’s social safety net, it’s been a busy time for government.
Nydia Velazquez
More than three weeks before Congress passed the largest economic stimulus in history ($3 trillion, with $500 million allocated for corporate bailouts), U.S. Representative Nydia Velázquez, whose district spans most of Red Hook, introduced the “Small Business Relief from Communicable Disease Induced Economic Hardship Act” in the House of Representatives, where she serves as Chair of the House Small Business Committee. Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-NY) incorporated Velázquez’s bill into the “Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act,” which President Donald Trump signed into law on March 6. The law made businesses suffering from the pandemic eligible for emergency loans from the Small Business Administration’s Disaster Loans Program Account (“coronavirus shall be deemed to be a disaster”) and appropriated $20 million to cover the bureaucratic costs of doling out the funds. The legislation freed a total of $7 billion for low-interest mom-andpop relief during the COVID-19 crisis – though Velázquez’s original bill had set the interest rate at zero. “From the local barber shop or neighborhood café to the innovative technology startup, a pandemic can mean fewer customers, supply chain disruption, and workforce reductions,” Velázquez stated on March 4. “Just as the SBA helps small firms get back on their feet after a hurricane, wildfire or earthquake, the agency can be critical to helping local economies recover from this public health crisis.” On March 23, Velázquez sponsored legislation to cancel fees for American
Red Hook Star-Revue
travelers abroad who need evacuation services from the Department of State during the pandemic. When crises ground commercial flights, the US government may organize emergency homeward transport for stranded Americans for the cost of economy airfare. She called the fee an “unconscionable” burden upon individuals “who are desperate to get home and reunite with their families.” So far, HR 6376 has garnered 11 cosponsors. The next day, Velázquez offered a new bill (HR 6484) to “provide community-based nonprofit feeding and anti-hunger groups with funding to partner with small and mid-sized restaurants to expand meal access and delivery for low-income and vulnerable populations during a pandemic or public health emergency.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred the bill to the House Committee on Agriculture. Velázquez also has written but has not yet introduced the “Ensuring Affordable Housing Security During the Coronavirus Emergency Act,” which would suspend rent collection by public housing authorities and Section 8 landlords for the duration of the pandemic. In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo has banned evictions for 90 days, but tenants – including those in NYCHA – must continue to pay rent or else face possible trouble once the moratorium has ended. Under Velázquez’s bill, the federal government would cover rent payments for anyone who makes use of HUD’s or the USDA’s subsidized housing programs (“our most vulnerable neighbors,” as the congresswoman put it) until the coronavirus has receded. Additionally, Velázquez – alongside congresswomen Alexandria OcascioCortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (DMA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) – sent a joint statement on March 22 to the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons, advocating “compassionate release” for “incarcerated people who are elderly or have underlying health conditions, and who pose no risk to public safety” from federal prisons. As an administrative decision, the move would not require legislative action.
emphasis on protecting immigrant populations during the crisis. The New York City Council closed its City Hall offices indefinitely and suspended public hearings on March 16, but Menchaca has continued to use his position as a bully pulpit. On March 16, he and Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez of Washington Heights sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio urging the decriminalization of the throttle-assist e-bikes used by food delivery workers. They emphasized that, during the coronavirus shutdown, restaurants (and many city residents) would rely heavily on the services of these cyclists. Felix Ortiz powers upon the governor in times of emergency, allowing him to “issue by executive order any directive necessary” to deal with a disaster.
Cuomo signed the act into law on March 3. “I am proud to take the lead,” Ortiz said, “in making sure this legislation was passed swiftly in the Assembly so we can get these emergency resources out the door right away to ensure we are best prepared in the coming days, weeks and months ahead.” On March 24, Ortiz sponsored two more bills. One would require health insurers to provide coverage for patients to “immediately obtain an additional thirty-day supply of any current prescription” during a state emergency (with exceptions for “schedule II and schedule II controlled substances”). The other would ensure that the City School District of the City of New York would not lose out on financial aid from the state as a result of its closure owing to COVID-19. Ortiz also urged the State Legislature to pass the New York Health Act, a longstanding proposal for the state to adopt a universal, single-payer healthcare system with no premiums, co-payments, or deductibles. “The best and most comprehensive way to fight the coronavirus is to ensure every single New Yorker has health insurance,” he commented.
On March 30, the Attending Physician of Congress diagnosed Velázquez with presumed coronavirus infection based on a phone consultation. “My symptoms are mild at the present time and I am taking Tylenol for fever, and isolating myself at my home,” Velázquez said. She pledged to continue working remotely.
Three bills from Ortiz Red Hook’s representative in the New York State Assembly also has been active during the crisis. On March 2, Assistant Speaker Felix Ortiz sponsored a bill appropriating $40 million for the state’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. His legislation bestowed broad
Menchaca talks to mayor In city government, Red Hook’s councilman Carlos Menchaca – who also serves many Latino and Chinese constituents in Sunset Park – has put an
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De Blasio quickly acceded to the demand, announcing that the NYPD would temporarily suspend enforcement. Cuomo had vetoed a bill to legalize the delivery bikes last year. Menchaca wrote to de Blasio again on March 19, co-authoring a letter with Councilmember Brad Lander of Park Slope and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to call for “a directive to the NYC Department of Buildings to suspend all non-essential construction in New York City due to the COVID-19 crisis.” They highlighted the need to “protect the health of construction workers, their families, and the general public” and asked the city “ensure that construction workers, and especially day laborers who are particularly vulnerable, receive compensation for work they have already performed.” On March 10, New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM) created a text messaging service for city residents to receive coronavirus updates (text “COVID” to 692-692). Menchaca pushed to have the alerts made available in multiple languages. On March 13, NYCEM expanded the service to reach Spanish speakers (text “COVIDESP” to 692-692). On behalf of 20 members of City Council, Menchaca sent a letter to Thomas R. Decker, New York Field Office Director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), on March 17. The letter asked ICE to “halt all immigration enforcement in New York City until such time as the COVID-19 pandemic is resolved. This includes arrests and detentions, as well as releasing everyone from immigration detention facilities, or at minimum those who are elderly, pregnant, immunocompromised, or need medical treatment already.” The councilmembers stressed that “immigration detention facilities, which are designed to hold as many human beings as possible, not preserve public health, are becoming incubators of the disease. That is a recipe for infection in the best of times. During a pandemic, it spells almost certain disaster.”
April 2020, Page 13
Justice Center becomes emergency court
T
he coronavirus has changed everything in New York City. The Red Hook Community Justice Center and the court system are one example. The city has asked the staff at the Red Hook Community Justice Center to vacate their building at 88 Visitation Place, which it will utilize for emergency court operations, according to Red Hook Community Justice Center Project Director Amanda Berman. During this time, arrestees with COVID-19 or flu-like symptoms in New York City will be taken to the Midtown Community Court or to Red Hook to be arraigned by video link. According to Colby Hamilton, the Chief of Public Affairs in the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the State Courts forbid those who show symptoms or anyone exposed from entering typical court facilities. The Red Hook and Midtown locations will serve as precinct, central booking and arraignment court in these cases. Only a small percentage of those who are brought in will move into custody. This is partly due to the bail reform laws. “I imagine [the number] will be smaller than normal, but it is a case-bycase decision for the judges,” Hamilton said. The New York City Department of Correction (DOC) has a screening
by Nathan Weiser
process, and if someone is clearly ill, they will be taken to a medical facility. They will not be brought into Rikers Island. “The people at the Red Hook Justice Center are there because they are either symptomatic or they meet one of the conditions of potentially being exposed,” Hamilton said. Those who display symptoms will receive a health screening and will be referred to appropriate treatment. However, COVID-19 testing is not being done on-site at ambulatory precincts. The goal of the ambulatory precincts is to reduce to an absolute minimum the number of coronavirus carriers taken into custody, Hamilton explained. Those who are released from the Red Hook Community Justice Center or the Midtown Court will be provided transportation back to where they live. The Red Hook Community Justice Center wants neighborhood residents to know that its staff is still available remotely to support community members through their various programs and services. Below is a contact list with important phone numbers related to how the Justice Center and other offices can give help.
Defense Attorneys: Legal Aid Society – 718-237-2000 Brooklyn Defender Services – 917426-5616
Other agencies: Clerk’s Office (New York State Unified Court System) – 718-923-8270 District Attorney’s Office – 718-2502001 or 718-250-4782
Justice Center program staff: Community Service and Social Services – 347-813-0318 or 917-860-7494 GED (Pathways to Graduation) – 718208-7324 Housing Resource Center: 347-2165738 or joyr@nycourts.gov or emcgoldrick@nycourts.gov Neighborhood Safety Initiatives and MAP – 917-971-6355 Peacemaking – 917-319-0121 Red Hook CARES (victim services) – 646-573-4665 Youth Programs / AmeriCorps – 929277-8554
Greenwood Cemetery still open
Green-Wood Cemetery will have “Birding in Peace” events once again this spring. Guests will be able to discover the sights and sounds of the early-spring bird migration. These events will tentatively happen every Sunday in May, depending on COVID-19 restrictions. Even if these events do not take place, the cemetery is, at press time, still open to the public. Meet in the meadow at the main entrance at 5th Avenue and 25th Street.
Take the R to 25th Street and walk up the hills one block to Green-Wood. Free parking is available. Both novice and expert bird watchers will have a rare opportunity to discover and observe birds of all species in the peace and quiet of Green-Wood before the gates open to the public. Tours are led by Rob Jett, who is an expert birder and founder of the birding blog, The City Birder. Their tours will be a feast for the ears and eyes with the song of pine warblers and drumming pronouncements of woodpeckers on newly blossoming trees. This is truly a sight to behold as Green-Wood’s grounds boast over 7,000 trees including magnolias, maples, quinces and dogwoods. Guests will discover songbirds as well as herons and egrets and GreenWood’s glacial ponds. The cost is $15, but there is a $10 charge for members of the The GreenWood Historic Fund and members of the Brooklyn Historical Society. To make an online reservation or to find out more information, visit www. green-wood.com/tourevents or call 718-210-3080. Walking tours are available to birders of all levels. Participants are encouraged to bring binoculars, but a limited amount of binoculars will be available on a first come, first served basis.
Discover what you love - FOCUSING ON TASTE, QUALITY, CRAFT AND FUN! -
Weekly Tastings 357 Van Brunt
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WINE & SPIRITS Open 7 days
April 2020
Parents adjust to homeschooling
P
arenting, as anyone who’s had a kid or been a kid knows, is a complicated job under the best of circumstances. During a pandemic, it’s a whole new ballgame. On March 14, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York City’s public schools would close until at least April 20 to limit the spread of the coronavirus. After three days of on-site faculty training, the Department of Education (DOE) transitioned to a distancelearning format facilitated by the web service Google Classroom, where teachers upload assignments for students to complete at home. Many parents expect the new system to last until summer vacation. Jamie Yates, who lives in Red Hook, has three children: 16-year-old River, 13-year-old Cash, and nine-year-old Cassidy. Normally, they all attend public school in the same building in Carroll Gardens at 610 Henry Street, which houses the Brooklyn New School (BNS) and Brooklyn Collaborative. Yates has two part-time jobs – in ad sales (which she can do by phone and email) and at a furniture store – but the furniture store has closed for now. Her partial furlough hasn’t offered much of a break. Instead, her second job now takes place at home, supervising the real-life bodies within a virtual classroom. “It’s hard because I do still have some work that I need to do,” she said. “For me, it’s brain overload, because I’ve got three kids that I need to manage and make sure that they’re doing all of their work.” Yates praised the efforts of the teachers and administrators at BNS and Brooklyn Collaborative. “They’ve been really on it. Any special services that my kids have, they’ve been sending emails and getting my consent to continue doing those virtually. That’s been really great. It’s just keeping up with all of it that’s hard for me. My email box is literally full all the time.” Red Hook resident Kiki Valentine has a five-year-old, Hart, who also attended BNS before COVID-19. For the most part, Valentine has enjoyed their shared quarantine. “It’s actually great. We already spend a lot of time together, and we have a lot of fulfilling and enriching activities together,” she said. “Keep in mind, no one is sick, so if that changes, everything will probably change.” For Valentine, who left her job as the director of operations for a public health company prior to the pandemic, remote learning has been “pretty seamless” so far. The Google Classroom software isn’t too difficult: “I’m pretty tech-savvy, and I haven’t had problems,” she reported. Despite the change of format, BNS has emphasized continuity. “There are a lot of contributions from different educators of different subjects, like Spanish, PE, art, math, and gen-
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Brett Yates eral classroom activities that they already had going. Seeing how that’s been maintained has been really encouraging,” Valentine said. Some DOE teachers offer optional live instruction by Zoom or Google Meet. “It was very nice to see my son interacting with his teacher in real time,” Valentine related. “This morning, we watched his teacher Doug read a book that the kids really like called The Book with No Pictures.” Having a child nearby all the time isn’t always easy, though, particularly during a world-historical catastrophe. “Last week, I felt very sad about certain things, so processing those feelings in front of a child has been an interesting navigation, because I don’t want my child to repress their feelings if they are scared or frustrated,” she said. Valentine confessed that watching Hart’s teacher read to him and his classmates made her “cry a little” as she thought about what a “great teacher” and “great class” the pandemic had removed from her son’s life. “There is some grieving around the loss of that community for him,” she said. “This is grief we’re all experiencing to different varying degrees.” For children, however, electronic community isn’t such a distressing concept. “Kids these days are on FaceTime with their grandparents who live elsewhere, or with their friends who live elsewhere, so it’s not a stark contrast from regular life,” Valentine acknowledged. “It’s just more of that instead of hanging out in person. He has said, ‘Can I have a virtual playdate with Finn?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’” Yates’s children have been faring reasonably well during the crisis. “There were a couple times with my daughter where she wanted to play with someone she saw outside at the park, and we had to explain to her that she couldn’t play with that person right now, and that was really hard. But honestly, I think it’s harder on us than it is on them. Kids are very resilient,” Yates observed. “I have kids who are pretty chill homebodies, so they’re actually doing fine.”
Cassidy Yates shows off a home-schooled project
sitting down and teaching for eight hours. In school-based learning, they learn for about two hours, out of all those hours they’re there every day, considering their meals, transitions from one place to another, or lunch, or recess, or library time,” she explained. “If you think about it that way, the day becomes much less stressful.” In Valentine’s view, “focused, dedicated learning” should be “broken up” into “one hour in the morning and one hour at some point in the afternoon,” surrounded on each end by “enriching activities that are their choice and things to do together.
Sometimes, taking it easy can go too far. “They’re all trying to view this as a vacation – they don’t want to go to bed on time. Keeping them to a routine is next to impossible. It’s hard for me to keep to a routine at this point,” Yates admitted. Discipline has been a challenge in the home-based school environment. “My middle guy is the typical middle kid in that he wants everything to go smoothly, so he’s doing his part to do what he needs to do. My oldest is kind of slacking and tells me that he does the work, but I have to check up on him. My youngest essentially bursts into tears every time I have to give her an assignment,” Yates recounted. Valentine underlined the importance of both flexibility and structure for elearners. “A lot of homeschoolers will tell you that homeschooling is not
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Learn how to bake bread, make something together, work on that photo album that you’ve been meaning to do for several years.” Unfortunately, for parents whose fulltime occupations constitute “essential services” that haven’t ceased during the pandemic, such advice may be difficult to follow. “My thought is always going to the folks who maybe are still having to work through this or who don’t have the resources to spend the time needed to help their kids get the work done,” Yates said. “I think the virtual learning option is not realistic for a lot of people.”
RED HOOK COVID-19 RELIEF
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED Please join your local group of volunteer neighbors with helping our elderly, immunocompromised, or those otherwise at risk to COVID-19 (Coronavirus). If you are not especially vulnerable, please consider helping us in this effort! IF YOU NEED HELP If you are in need of assistance, please contact us and we will assign a volunteer.
Contact us at 646-481-5041 or redhookcovid19@gmail.com
April 2020, Page 15
Local bartenders face life after nightlife
I
t’s no secret that the hospitality industry is in trouble right now. While New York City’s restaurants have pivoted to takeout and delivery during the coronavirus shutdown, drinking establishments that don’t serve food have closed altogether. That’s true of several beloved watering holes in Red Hook: Seaborne at 228 Van Brunt Street, Rocky Sullivan’s at 46 Beard Street, and Sunny’s Bar at 253 Conover Street. The loss of St. Patrick’s Day, normally one of the busiest days of the year, was particularly hard on Rocky’s, an Irish pub.
by Brett Yates
legislation will help on that front. “I have some savings. That, however, is going to be depleted in a short while. I think I can last two months, and then I’m really going to be challenged,” Gonzalez confessed. Schmidt has kept panic and self-pity at bay. “I have no income, and I don’t know when it’s going to pick back up again, but I think this is a far more dangerous situation for other people. I can get by for a little while,” she said.
Local bartenders, as reliably friendly faces and facilitators of conversation and community, play an important role in the fabric of the neighborhood. They don’t know when they’ll get back to work.
Schmidt’s colleague Lillie Haws – who called herself a “self-sufficient person” who has “always planned for the worst” – explained her similar mentality: “You never compare yourself upwards. You compare yourself downwards. That’s how I feel: there are people worse off than myself.”
Before the pandemic, Grayson Schmidt tended bar at Sunny’s and at 40 Knots Bar in the Columbia Street Waterfront District. “I’m fully unemployed at the moment and for the foreseeable future,” she said.
Haws, who once owned a bar called Lillie’s on Beard Street, has worked at Sunny’s for four years. “But I’ve been going there since the mid-’90s,” she clarified. “They’re kind of like my New York family.”
Signing up for unemployment benefits has been a challenge on the state’s overloaded system.“I’ve had no luck,” Schmidt lamented. “I’ve gotten locked out of the website every time. It either just doesn’t even initiate the process because of the traffic or it times out before I can finish the application.”
Spring cleaning
David Gonzalez, a part-time bartender at Rocky Sullivan’s and at Red Hook’s VFW, also freelances in fabrication and construction work, but for now, his temporary gigs have dried up, too. “Everything has come to a standstill,” he observed.
Clearing out old junk – valuable or not – appears to be a popular activity during the quarantine. “I’ve reorganized many different corners of my house,” Schmidt mentioned. “I’m trying to stay home and do projects that I haven’t gotten around to in a long time. I made a bunch of plant hangers.”
In New York State, unemployment insurance often fails to cover independent contractors, although new federal
Press conference (continued from page 12)
Perea-Henze, said that the public health lab in New York City can do up to 60 or 80 tests a day. “As of today, commercial labs are online, Quest and LabCorp,” Dr. PereaHenze said. “The governor announced that 28 more labs statewide will be approved to do testing, and some can do 150 to 200 tests. By the end of the week, collectively we will lave the capacity to do 5,000 tests a week.” Direct contact and fluid transmission is the essence of what spreads the disease. You will not get the disease through food or drink. They said that people should not avoid going to restaurants but should make sure they are healthy when doing so. The virus’s origins in Wuhan, China, have inspired a rash of anti-Asian propaganda and racist incidents, which de Blasio addressed. “We have seen particularly troubling incidents of discrimination directed at Chinese communities,” he said. “This is unacceptable. I am beseeching you all to tell members of your communi-
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But like Schmidt and Gonzalez, Haws lives alone, not in a “shared-expense household” with a second income to fall back on. She is considering “turning all the stuff I’ve been wanting to get rid of for months into an online shop and surviving that way.”
Pottering about the house has been relaxing so far. “I feel like I haven’t
ties that if they are a victim of a hate crime it must be reported to NYPD so we can act on it and find the perpetrators. There will be consequences.” The city will also be giving benefits and aid to restaurants and businesses that have been negatively impacted as a result of the Coronavirus. “For businesses of fewer than five employees, we can do direct grants up to 40 percent of their operating expenses,” De Blasio said. “We can do substantial direct grants. We are looking for any other direct relief we can find.” Avoid crowds, and if you can don’t ride on the subway in rush hour. There has been no suggestion to delay the Census or the borough president election, which a reporter asked de Blasio about. Dr. Perea-Henze said that 80 percent of people who get the virus will be impacted minimally and recover after not a lot of time. The government will not use emergency powers until they absolutely have to. When considering the public school system, they don’t want a full closure but want to pinpoint specific schools based on specific needs. They want to
slowed down and rested for so, so long,” Schmidt said. For Gonzalez, however, staying active has been the key. “I keep myself busy with a lot of exercise, which I’m thoroughly enjoying. The ceiling in my living room needed painting – I just painted it yesterday. I’m a cleaning fanatic anyway, and now with the virus, I’m constantly wiping surfaces,” he related. “I can’t sit in one place. My drawers are all organized already. I’m afraid I’m going to run out of work.” Loneliness hasn’t become a problem. “I’m texting with my friends back and forth. I have conversations,” Gonzalez said. “We share what we’re watching on TV. Most of us stream: ‘Watch this movie. Watch this show. You have to watch this documentary, this comedy.’ We’re still alive, if you will. We’re still conversing.”
What it means to bartend
Haws pointed out that, in times of crisis, people have often turned to bars for solace, as they did in the aftermath of 9/11. “Everybody was flocking to bars in this apocalyptic panic of ‘I just need to be around people. I need that comfort,’” she recollected. “It’s unfortunate that we could not be open at a time like this.” Many Red Hook residents, surely, are wondering how they’ll cope without their favorite barkeep. “It takes a special person to do certain jobs,” Haws mused. “If you’re an actor, a fireman – there are all these different types of jobs out there that are built for certain people, and I think you have to be that certain person to be a bartender, in that you can experience joy from the genuine and authentic ability to give it.”
this business: we enjoy joy so much. If we can keep that going somehow in our hearts for other people, that’s how we’re going to survive. We have to keep each other happy and keep in touch.” Gonzalez speculated that, once “the curve” has flattened and bars can reopen, Rocky Sullivan’s usual convivial atmosphere – with plenty of hugs, handshakes, and kisses – won’t be the same unless a coronavirus vaccine has been widely distributed. “We’re going to be cognizant of health and hygiene,” he anticipated. Still, Haws expects booming business in the future. “When the air is clear,” she predicted, “I think there’s going to be a giant onslaught of people running to bars.” In the interim, Schmidt hopes Red Hookers will keep in mind the plight of service workers, including those who continue to operate cash registers and make food deliveries in spite of the danger. “I think what would be really important and helpful are people that do still have a steady income coming in, who have the means to give, to donate, to shop locally, to be ordering food and drinks from the places that are still serving, and to throw something in the virtual tip jar for the employees that are out, because we’ve certainly all been there for each other in many times of need, so it would be very special and appreciated if that came back around during these times.” Sunny’s Bar has organized a fundraiser for staff at https://www.gofundme. com/f/support-sunny039s-bar-staff. Donate to the United States Bartender Guild’s COVID-19 Relief Campaign at https://www.usbgfoundation.org/beap.
She continued: “That’s why we’re in
keep schools open for the overall benefit of the kids. “Families depend on those schools for a safe place for those kids, and many families have no alternative, in some cases, as a place to get their children quality food and nutrition,” de Blasio observed. “Families want to make sure their kids get educated. We all care about health and safety first, but the notion of losing months of a child’s education should be troubling for all of us.” Starting on March 11, all international school trips for the remainder of the school year are cancelled.
Officials handed out a COVID-19 guidance and safety tips flyer at the meeting. It is available in 15 languages and will soon available in 23 languages The flyer says that if you have chronic heart disease, diabetes, a compromised immune system, chronic lung disease and/or cancer, you are advised to limit exposure to large gatherings and crowds. If you are not sick, there is no need to wear any kind of mask in public. If taking public transportation, au-
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thorities recommend practicing good hygiene by avoiding touching your mouth or face and washing you hands with soap for 20 seconds following the ride on the train or bus. They are asking New Yorkers to help with overcrowding on the trains. They recommend that those who can get to where they are going by walking, biking, taking a ferry, or taking a car should do so in order to help themselves and other New Yorkers stay healthy. Consider coming into work an hour earlier or later to avoid overcrowding. The city is advising employees to telecommute where appropriate. In terms of visiting elderly family members, if you are sick, then stay home. If you are not sick, it is fine to visit family, but practice good hygiene. Animals are not known to transmit COVID-19 and you should feel free to walk your dog. It also also fine to take a cab or Uber/Lyft. If you have any questions about finding medical care call 311. A useful website to go to at this time is nyc.gov/ coronavirus.
April 2020
SIGNS O'THE TIMES
Red Hook Star-Revue
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April 2020, Page 17
Andrew Gillum: Sex, Politics and Black Masculinity
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n 2018, Andrew Gillum was the handsome, 38-year-old runner-up in Florida’s gubernatorial race. Gillum, the state’s first black nominee for governor, lost by fewer than 35,000 votes. Despite his loss, Gillum’s political capital was rising on the national stage. Rumors of a vice presidential nomination spread.
In March 2020, on Friday the 13th, Gillum, now 40, was found in a heavily intoxicated state at the Mondrian hotel in Miami. Also present was an unconscious Travis Dyson, 30, a registered nurse who allegedly also worked as an escort. A third man, Aldo Mejias, 56, who rented the room, called the police after finding Andrew Gillum vomiting and Dyson struggling to stay conscious. Police found methamphetamine baggies in the room. Dyson was taken to Mount Sinai Medical Center, and both he and Gillum have since recovered. No arrests were made. The coronavirus pandemic has overtaken the initial public interest in the Gillum story, but the scandal’s far-reaching impact is just beginning to unfold. Andrew Gillum, a former mayor of Tallahassee, husband, and father of three, may have effectively squandered his political future. Though more details are sure to come, this unfortunate story already smells like familial heartbreak and political sabotage – self-inflicted or otherwise. Considering the implications of the reports, I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the challenges that are frequently and sometimes uniquely attached to black masculinity. Andrew Gillum, born in Miami and raised in Gainesville, Florida, is a true son of the Sunshine State. A child of blue-collar workers, Andrew had a humble, middle-class upbringing. Gillum was a star pupil throughout high school and college. He would go on to serve as president of student government while majoring in Political Science at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), a historically black university. His early success foreshadowed his political career: Mr. America, Mr. Black America. At age 23, before graduating college, he would be elected to the Tallahassee City Commission. In many ways, Andrew Gillum has displayed black excellence throughout his life. In 2009, Gillum would marry his longtime girlfriend, R. Jai Howard (pronounced Ar-Jay). The couple met at FAMU and like her husband, R. Jai also served in student body leadership. As political careers go, Andrew Gillum’s record was relatively clean. Until recently, 2018’s Hamiltongate was perhaps the biggest scandal of his career. The Hamilton ticket controversy gained wider attention during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Hamilton-gate involved Gillum’s alleged acceptance of tickets from lobbyists in 2016 to see Hamilton on Broadway in New York City. Gillum denied the
by Roderick Thomas allegations but received a $5,000 from the Florida Commission on Ethics on charges of failing to report lobbyist gifts. Hamilton-gate, by comparison to Gillum’s current scandal, is quite tame. To the public, Andrew Gillum was still a political star, though there were grumblings about his sexuality. His relationship with his former mayoral campaign treasurer (2014) and longtime friend Adam Corey had historically drawn some whispered scrutiny. However, these rumors mainly lived on lesser-known corners of the internet. Interestingly, Adam Corey was friends with the lobbyist – actually an undercover FBI agent – who gave the Hamilton tickets to Gillum. Corey’s friendship with Gillum, which began in college, waned as the two cut ties around Hamilton-gate. Fast-forward to March 2020: conservative commentator Candace Owens somehow obtains the Gillum police report containing each party’s contact information (Gillum, Dyson, Mejias) and releases it on Twitter. Democrat Andrew Gillum was involved in a crystal meth overdose incident last night in a Miami hotel. Orgy suspected, but unconfirmed. The obvious suspicion is that at the very least, Andrew Gillum participates in same-gender sexual relationships. Pictures of Gillum’s naked body quickly surfaced online. In the leaked photos, an individual with bare-feet can be seen standing over Gillum’s nude, unconscious body. According to reports, Gillum was too inebriated to communicate with police upon their arrival. Mejias, the third man in the hotel room, claims Dyson opened the door for him and then collapsed, as Gillum threw up in the bathroom. From Mejias’s account, his own involvement with Andrew Gillum and Travis Dyson remains unclear, though he (Mejias) paid for the hotel room. Andrew Gillum issued a statement shortly after the incident, citing struggles with alcoholism. “I was in Miami last night for a wedding celebration when first responders were called to assist one of my friends. I want to be clear that I have never used methamphetamines. I apologize to the people of Florida for the distraction this has caused our movement. Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that has led to alcohol abuse. I witnessed my father suffer from alcoholism and I know the damaging effects it can have when untreated. I had too much to drink. I know that alcoholism is often a symptom of deeper struggles,” Gillum stated. Some reports confirm Gillum was indeed supposed to officiate a Miami wedding, but according to wedding attendees, he was a no-show. So far, details of this story lead to obvious pain and disappointment for the Gillum family, his supporters, and associates, but also to more questions. Who took the photos of Andrew Gillum’s nude
Gillum with the former president
and unconscious body? Why were there no leaked photos of Dyson? Who is Mejias, and what was his involvement with Gillum and Dyson? Why did Mejias pay for the hotel room? Who leaked the police report? Sex seems to be the Achilles heel for many politicians, for more reasons than primal urge alone. Moreover, the combination of gay party life with meth is becoming an unfortunate regularity. For many queer men and queer black men, in particular, a successful career as a same-gender-loving individual had never been a practical option – there were no models of that. Sex parties and hard drugs are the de facto mecca for many men struggling to live out another narrative. If Andrew Gillum is queer (bisexual or gay in this case), it also juxtaposes the rigidity of black male sexuality to white male sexuality. Today, there are openly gay white politicians (Pete Buttigieg). Would Gillum have had the same support as an openly queer black man in politics? In 2020, despite the growing media acceptance, when it comes to queerness in day-to-day life, America still leans conservative – even more so in black communities. For Andrew Gillum, this likely meant that whatever same-sex feelings he may have experienced had to be buried under his accomplishments, his heterosexual marriage, his looks, and overall image: Mr. Black America, respectable HBCU grad. Today, Travis Dyson’s nursing license in Florida is under a “voluntary withdrawal” status. Much of Aldo Mejias’s background and current whereabouts remain unknown. Andrew Gillum has withdrawn from political life. Gillum’s political future is indefinitely dormant, but his future as a public figure may be bright. In time, perhaps this scandal could be an opportunity for Gillum to reemerge as a champion for the expansion and redefinition of black masculinity. Roderick Thomas is an NYC-based writer and filmmaker (Instagram: @Hippiebyaccident; email: rtroderick.thomas@gmail.com).
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April 2020
Lifting up the vulnerable:
Audrey Moore’s commitment to end human trafficking
H
uman trafficking is the criminal practice of buying and selling coerced or kidnapped individuals for the purpose of sexual slavery, involuntary labor, child soldiery, another form of exploitation. Audrey Moore, CEO of Lift Up the Vulnerable (LUV), is committed to fighting against human trafficking. Moore’s discovery of the human trafficking market began in the early 2000s as a recent college graduate working in a children’s home in Portugal. What Moore found was a lawless world where women, men, and children are enslaved in and out of plain sight. Today, Moore is focused on ending human trafficking in areas where people are most vulnerable, as well as shedding light on what the human trafficking world looks like. Originally from New Jersey, Audrey Moore would go on to obtain a degree in education from the University of Delaware. In 2001, her interests in international affairs and travel led her to Belgium, working with a pastor and international students. Soon, Moore found her way to the Iberian Peninsula, where she connected with a couple that assisted orphans – or so they claimed. During our interview in Manhattan, Audrey recounted what she experienced during those years and discussed what the public needs to know about human trafficking. Roderick: What can you tell me about the orphanage in Portugal? Audrey: I worked with an orphanage in Portugal via an organization called Make Way Partners. Most of the children were of African descent, either children of refugees or refugees themselves. These kids were in the foster care system. At the orphanage, I met a young boy named Carlos. He was the child of a Portuguese father and an African mother. His mother was a sex worker, and his father was completely absent. Roderick: That’s hard to hear. What do you remember about Carlos? Audrey: Carlos was a sweet young child, I was so fond of him. He really opened up to the staff. However, the kids seemed to be directed to not speak to us very much – they seemed reluctant to open up. Carlos was a bit more talkative. One day, Carlos kept asking for sal, or salt, I didn’t know why. I asked him, “Why do you need it, Carlos?” Then I saw the bruises. Roderick: Was he being abused? Audrey: Yes, he was being abused sexually. I immediately got in contact with local authorities.
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Roderick Thomas That’s when we discovered the orphanage was really a front for a child sex trafficking operation. We hired legal help, but it was difficult to stop the operation. From a legal perspective, these children were not citizens of Portugal; they were refugees. Roderick: What was the reaction from the authorities, and others? Audrey: To be honest, things were quiet. I sensed that the authorities were kind of apathetic. Their hands were tied. We began to understand how human trafficking affects orphans and vulnerable people in general. I was in shock. Roderick: What shocked you the most? Audrey: Everything. We were uncovering the complexities of the human trafficking global market. Here are children being sexually exploited and we can’t just rescue them. It took us two years to shut down that orphanage. Roderick: What did you learn? Audrey: I learned how human trafficking manifests itself in places that have civil unrest, how vulnerabilities are taken advantage of. Human trafficking is a global operation. It manifests itself in the US as well. Roderick: Is there a profile of a person, or people who engage in human trafficking and enslavement? Audrey: That’s the thing, there isn’t a profile. It’s youth ministers, business leaders, politicians... anyone. Roderick: Is there a type of trafficking that is most common? Audrey: There aren’t concrete numbers, but we believe labor trafficking and enslavement is actually the most common type of trafficking. However, sex trafficking is obviously very prevalent. Vulnerabilities show up in so many ways. Human trafficking is very psychological. Predators prey on isolated people, they look for them. Roderick: If there isn’t really a predator profile, how do we protect vulnerable people? Audrey: First, by being aware that there is a problem. Second, look out for the people in your communities, the kid that doesn’t say very much, the person that may seem uncomfortable, someone that is being isolated. Why? Predators are looking for them too. Traffickers are preying on the psyche of vulnerable people. Roderick: Do you see men being trafficked for sex as well?
trafficked as well. There is lots of prostitution of homosexual men in India for example, and elsewhere. LGBTQ young men can be at risk; sex trafficking isn’t limited to a specific gender. Roderick: Where do you think we are in 2020 with our knowledge of human trafficking? Audrey: Oh, we’re just scratching the surface. It’s a much bigger issue than people realize. When we think of enslavement, we often think of the transAtlantic slave trade. The truth is, slavery is still here and it’s happening right under our noses. Roderick: Your organization LUV, Lift Up the Vulnerable, is here in NYC. Can you tell me more about it? Audrey: Of course. LUV launched in 2019, and we work in the most vulnerable communities. We provide education and medical assistance for children, men, and women, nearly 1,000 of which are in South Sudan. Today, LUV provides over 1,600 children with housing and schooling. Roderick: LUV works internationally – how different does human trafficking look from place to place? Audrey: Human trafficking is a multi-pronged issue. It looks different in New York, compared to Alabama, to Sudan or Portugal. To solve issues, we partner with local leaders to help us understand the area and its idiosyncrasies. Roderick: What do you want people to remember about human trafficking? What do you aim to accomplish with LUV? Audrey: I want people to remember that we are not just isolated beings – we are connected. An out of sight out of mind mentality doesn’t bring changes to our world. Right now, every headline is talking about how divided we are. This issue is not an issue to be divided on. Human trafficking is about right and wrong. With LUV, we want to push more communities towards empowerment. Roderick: Where can we contact LUV, and how do we support? Audrey: You can support by choosing to participate in our programs offering medical aid, education and housing for vulnerable people. Volunteering is also a welcomed form of support for LUV. To learn more about LUV and its various programs, visit liftupthevulnerable.org. Roderick Thomas is an NYC-based writer and filmmaker (Instagram: @Hippiebyaccident; email: rtroderick.thomas@gmail.com).
Audrey: Yes, men can be coerced and sexually
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April 2020, Page 21
In quick turnaround, teachers make the transition to remote learning methods by Erin DeGregorio
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eachers were thrown for an unprecedented loop last month when they were given just days’ notice to adjust their teaching methods and lesson plans in response to the escalation of COVID-19. On March 15, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York City schools would be closed from March 16 to April 19, resulting in a move to a remote learning model.
“The health and safety of our students and families remains our top priority, and we are committed to providing instructional opportunities for all of our students,” said Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza on March 15, when the City had 329 confirmed cases of coronavirus and five deaths. “We know that millions of New Yorkers depend on our schools for education, but also so much more, and we will be supporting each of them during this time. We have the best students and most dedicated staff in the world, and nothing will change that.” Six educators from both public and private institutions spoke about their transitions and the challenges that arise when pivoting from traditionally face-to-face instructions to virtual ones.
junior high students to watch a video that showed 25 different kinds of planks. Students then had to choose five planks and record themselves completing the plank for either 10 repetitions or 30 seconds. The junior high science teacher also assigned her students a lab in which they had to make a prediction of whether a waterfilled balloon would break when pierced by a pencil. The next day, the teacher posted a video of herself completing the lab, which allowed students to see if their hypotheses were correct. While teachers would prefer to be back in the classroom and teaching in person, Donato noted that her faculty has been impressed by the technology and resources that are available online. “Right now we are working on seeing if we could provide resources for students with individualized education services programs, so that learning can continue with the resource room teacher. Our afterschool program is also developing a plan to see if they can help students in their program with any homework support,” Donato revealed on March 25. “These resources are still just being developed, but hopefully they will be up and running within the next coming week or so.”
TYLER THIER Adjunct Professor, Hofstra University (Hempstead); Teaching two levels of Introductory Composition Writing, Creative Writing
The Diocese of Brooklyn prepared for distance learning in advance. Talks between principals and their staff took place a week before schools were shut down, and teachers began to map out how they would shift their teaching styles as smoothly as possible. DeSales Media Group, the communications and technology arm of the Diocese of Brooklyn, equipped the K-8 school with 92 iPads, which have been given out to students who are in need of a device to complete work.
Bushwick resident Thier no longer has to travel to Long Island to teach his writing classes for the rest of the spring semester. Given that his real-life instruction is centered on intimate workshops with students’ desks arranged in a circle, Thier initially felt stressed about how to recreate the same environment online. “I was unsure of how I would maintain that level of interaction through an allvirtual platform. But now that I’ve taken a lot of how-to webinar sessions [conducted by Hofstra’s IT Department] that showed us the step-by-steps and figured out that there’s so many options available to me, I feel pretty confident now. At the same time, it’s overwhelming because there’s so much at my disposal now.”
“The most difficult part that the teachers are concerned with is making sure that they’re developing a high-quality learning experience for their students, and that the students are understanding the platforms being used and how to complete their work online. When you’re teaching face to face, you can interact with your class and can observe who is understanding the lesson being taught, based on the questions being asked and the body language that might be displayed,” Donato said. “However, the teachers have taken the sudden change tremendously well and they have run off with it, doing tremendous things and becoming more creative in how to engage with the students.”
Thier’s classes – which will stick to their usual once-a-week schedules – feature asynchronous and synchronous components. Students will be using the video platform Zoom to speak with Thier and one another in a live, virtual classroom every Monday. Students will also watch pre-recorded lectures, answer follow-up questions, participate in Blackboard discussion boards, and work in pairs or larger groups via Google Doc group work at their convenience. “I’ll have deadlines set for these, but they can do it on their own time, just to account for the fact that everyone is in a different time zone and having a different experience right now,” he said.
Teachers use Google Classroom every day to keep the students academically on track, posting audio recordings of themselves teaching the lessons. And for those classes that may seem difficult to translate virtually, teachers have gotten creative. For example, the physical education teacher assigned
The debate portion of his lower-level introductory writing course will have to be canceled. “Usually I split the class in half where students have a certain side to argue surrounding a certain topic. They do the research, compose an argument and allot different responsibilities to one another,” he said. “I’m
MICHELLE DONATO Principal, Salve Regina Catholic Academy (Bushwick)
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actually not going to be doing that at all anymore because that’s going to be very messy and probably not as smooth if I were to do it in the Zoom Room session. I’m going to have them make their own arguments individually or do it in pairs instead.”
JILLIAN GALLO Teaching Assistant, Summit School at Nyack (Upper Nyack) Teaches: Global One, Global Two, Sociology for Grades 9-12
The Summit School at Nyack is a specialized, small residential and day high school treatment program for students with a wide variety of learning and emotional needs. Gallo explained that students come from at least 30 different school districts. A number of students live on site through the school’s offered residential program, but some travel to and from New York City by bus each day. Gallo spoke with us midway through her first day of remote learning on March 23, noting faculty members would try various different platforms throughout that week to see which would be suitable for their subjects and assignments. “I’ve been on my laptop all morning with our Google Classroom and email tabs up. We’re going back and forth constantly because kids are going to come on sporadically throughout the day” to sign in, interact with the teachers and complete assignments, she said. “We’re going to experiment with making set times that students are on in the morning and in the afternoon, and figure out Google Hangouts.” Gallo also noted that social workers at Summit School will have to resort to Zoom or FaceTime in order to continue holding sessions with students. “A lot of what we do is face to face, and you build a relationship with your students,” she said. “Not being able to do those in-person meetings and interactions makes our job, honestly, more difficult because we can’t sit down and speak with them like we’re normally used to.” Though this experience has a learning curve for all involved, Gallo emphasized the importance of teachers like herself being there for the students virtually. “It’s hard not being able to give students a solid answer of what will happen [in the long run]. But we’re all trying to be a consistent part in our kids’ lives, even when this pandemic is going on and it’s, for lack of a better word, a mess,” she said. “Students can still know that their teachers are putting up assignments, so they can continue doing the necessary work.”
HADLEY RUGGLES Head of School at BASIS Independent Brooklyn (Red Hook)
The pre-K-to-12th-grade private school, which was on its spring break during the last week of March, is stepping up their distance learning platform for when classes virtually resume on March 30. “Our team is working ‘round the clock, even though it is technically spring break this week, on our phase II,” Ruggles said on March 26. “Our community has truly mobilized quickly to translate all of our lessons online, and we are so grateful that parents have been patient and supportive during the necessary change to home learning during the pandemic.” BASIS Independent Brooklyn will be using the Microsoft Teams platform, and will be scheduling more live faculty and staff hours via video conferencing. This, Ruggles said, will allow teachers to continue their curriculum while adding in extra support so students can continue learning effectively. “Our sister schools in China have months of experience teaching through remote learning plat-
April 2020
forms,” she explained. “That experience informed our plans, such as videotaping lessons so parents can play them back at different times of the day rather than livestream, particularly if family members are sharing computers or devices. Parents need flexibility at home, since they are working full work days alongside their children. We also realized the need to offer more support to students through live video conferencing times with faculty to review lessons and differentiate learning.” Prior to spring break, staff and parents also began organizing “virtual recess” meet-ups on Zoom so that the youngest students could see each other. “Maintaining connections right now is so critical, and our students want to see their teachers, and they also benefit from seeing their classmates,” Ruggles noted. “Even afterschool options are migrating online. For instance, our chess team practices and plays remotely now.”
NELI BRUSSI World Language Teacher and Department Chairperson, Fontbonne Hall Academy (Bay Ridge) Teaches: Latin and Italian Grades 10,11
When it was confirmed on the evening of March 12 that Fontbonne would temporarily close, Brussi said she felt a mix of emotions. “I remember leaving campus on March 13, going towards my car and trying to pretend that everything was okay and normal. Deep down I was wondering, ‘When will I come back to work? When will I see my students and my colleagues again? Is this for a week, two weeks, for the rest of the year?’ she explained. “But you rationalize and stay positive. I have to commend my administrators for giving us good directions and a schedule because I think that it reassured all of us that this wouldn’t be such a hard transition.” Fontbonne has been technologically equipped to implement online learning for years, having used Google Classroom for class assignments and communication with students since 2014 when the school was an actual test site for that Google product. In the wake of COVID-19, Fontbonne used March 13 as a Professional Development Day for teachers to brainstorm and troubleshoot potential problems.
products available out there and I think we are really learning a lot and bringing it into our online teaching,” Brussi said. “As soon as a teacher finds a good app that we could use, we share it and we try it. We are very open-minded about going beyond what we used to do while classes were in person.” Two ways online instruction has been easier for faculty is that they have more prep time for lessons and that they can have extended, virtual office hours. “I don’t end anymore at 2:45 or 3 pm because, if a student really needs help, I’ll make myself available – even at 5 pm. I’m helping them beyond those regular hours that we had when we were in school.”
Since mathematics is one of the more difficult subjects to teach verbally, Duggan and the rest of the department have been pre-recording lessons using their touchscreen laptops and Screencastify, a screen video recorder for Google Chrome. “When I share my screen with the students, they see the equivalent of a whiteboard where I can write and where they can follow along with the example. They are basically seeing the lesson as if they were in class,” she explained. “You’re obviously not able to pause and ask questions in this way, but during our pre-recorded lessons, we can say, ‘Pause. Try the next example and then come back and press play.’”
DAWN DUGGAN Math Teacher and Department Chairperson, Fontbonne Hall Academy Teaches: Two levels of Geometry, A.P. Calculus
Unlike other subjects that can have tests with multiple-choice questions or short answers, math doesn’t always lend itself easily to virtual testing because students have to be able to show their work, Duggan noted. She’s planning to upload tests for students to print out – or, if they don’t have printers at home, they can view the tests online and do their work on other clean sheets of paper. “I want to make sure my students know how to do the questions, can work through the process, and can solve the problems on their own.”
with blue lace were sent out in early March and cost $2,300 – including the $300 fee to have them printed right away. They also added a small insert with the invitations that said, “We are aware of the current circumstances associated with the virus and its impact on our nation. . . . Please RSVP and we will keep you posted on any changes, as we approach the big day.”
ancé to connect with his family,” Tanya said. “And it’s honestly not even about losing the money because that doesn’t matter – it’s important for them to be there to support him and see him.”
For now, the all-girls Catholic high school is slated to return to traditional classes on April 20. “Nobody really thought we would be closing at all [at the beginning of March]. It was in the back of our heads as a maybe or just in case,” Duggan said midway through Fontbonne’s second week of distance learning.
“It’s a learning journey for us too. There are so many
Wedding plans put on pause due to the pandemic by Erin DeGregorio
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ride-to-be Tanya Gonzalez put the two pairs of custom Converse sneakers, which she and her fiancé Michael Sanchez designed together months ago, back in their boxes. The shoes were supposed to be worn at their wedding reception on May 15. But due to the coronavirus outbreak in New York City last month, their plans came to a sudden halt, leaving both Tanya and Michael uncertain of what would happen next. They decided to organize their wedding together, without the aid of a planner, after getting engaged in late February 2019. Within a month, the couple had already chosen their hall, Russo’s On The Bay, in Howard Beach. “We were really eager to start our lives together as a married couple and we didn’t really want to wait,” Tanya said. When choosing where the ceremony would actually take place, Tanya wanted to get married in her childhood church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help (OLPH) in Sunset Park. “I’ve always pictured myself getting married in that beautiful basilica,” she commented. After a long process of working with the church to collect and submit the necessary paperwork, OLPH approved the date of their springtime wedding in January 2020. This late approval, Tanya noted, caused a delay in designing and getting their wedding invitations, which would be sent out to more than 200 guests. The invitations
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When reports began to come out in the following days that there were an increasing number of COVID-19 cases in the City, Tanya remained hopeful that her wedding wouldn’t be affected. “I thought, ‘Our wedding is scheduled for May 15; this is going to pass by then.’ But as time went on and we saw things closing down, we realized this might not even happen,” Tanya said. “We were kind of at a loss. We weren’t sure who to contact first. Do we contact our hall or vendors? Do we contact the church? We hadn’t heard from anybody.” By March 23, their priest called, saying that all upcoming scheduled events at the church were canceled, including their wedding. Tanya’s bridal party and her sister Nicole, who had their dresses ready and were putting the final touches on the bridal shower that was supposed to be held April 4, had to cancel both the shower and the bachelorette party. During that same week, multiple wedding guests reached out, saying that a postponement was understandable and that these circumstances were out of their control. Though most of Tanya’s family lives here in New York, some of Michael’s family would have been flying in from Nicaragua. “Questions like ‘Can we change their tickets and will they even be able to make the wedding when we push it back?’ came up. For me, as the bride, it’s very sad because this was the time for my fi-
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Since 90 percent of their wedding had already been paid off in advance, Tanya said they have to really look at the fine print of their contracts with the vendors and other involved parties – including asking if they would be available for a new date and if there were any insurance policies. That will mean reaching out to their hired videographer, photographer, florist, DJ entertainment and limousine company – to name a few. Plus, they’re still unsure if their summertime honeymoon plans in Greece, which were also paid in full, will still take place. For now, Tanya and Michael remain optimistic and are busy trying to coordinate with their vendors in finding a feasible postponement date – which they hope will be sometime this fall. They called Russo’s On The Bay on March 26 and were told that the venue was working with April brides to see if they wanted to reschedule, before getting to the May brides like Tanya. “They seem willing to reschedule, but we aren’t at the top of the list yet,” Tanya said to us later that night. “But I’m hopeful because they sounded very understanding.” Though this wasn’t at all what they expected when getting engaged a year ago, let alone two months ago, Tanya reflected on the situation. “As sad and frustrating as it is, it’s helped us to refocus as a couple on what it is that what we’re doing because you get lost in the details while planning a wedding. You get lost in the color schemes and the bedazzlement, and it’s really not about that. I think this really helped us to realize that,” she said. “Even if we lost money, the goal is to be safe, to be healthy and to be happy.”
April 2020, Page 23
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by Will Drickey
f any character stands at the heart of Westworld’s narrative over its now three-season run on HBO, it’s Maeve (Thandie Newton). Over the past three years, the bordello-madame-turned-sentient-android, a creation of a faceless entertainment corporation, has awakened to greater ambitions than the simple genre tropes she came into being with, only to realize that there isn’t anything for her outside the walls of her comfortably simple home. The show is the same: for as deeply as it wants to be about more than its adult-theme-park shenanigans, its attempts to reach the “real world” are an utter failure. Season 3 of Westworld finds Maeve trying to escape the park for the third time, while escaped enlightened robots Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) engage in some sort of rivalry (for the fate of humanity!) for reasons that have not been (and likely will not be) discussed. Bringing up the rear is new addition Caleb (Aaron Paul), who is... some guy. He works in construction. Watching Maeve plan her getaway from the reconstructed 1940s Italian village of WarWorld is bittersweet. On the one hand, her character has earned moments of pathos, if only because she alone doesn’t speak exclusively in cryptic truisms, but on the other hand, the only thing waiting for her is a bargain-basement Black Mirror. (What if you could use an app to do crimes? Isn’t technology just, like, a religion??) Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have also made the classic blunder of saddling the storyline with a hack writer sidekick, which puts them in the apparently impossible position of proving they know the difference between good and bad storytelling themselves. For as “deep” of topics as Westworld pretends to be interested in – can artificial life truly be sentient, and what are the ramifications of perfect robotic copies of real people, and what happens when humans innovate themselves in obsolescence? – the show drops them when the writers realize that they’re getting in the way of the “violent delights” that brought us there in the first place. When the aforementioned hack writer sidekick comes to terms with the fact that he is not only a robot copy of his former self but a simulated robot copy of his former self, the revelation takes place over the course of about five minutes, so that we can get to the good stuff: a prison break from virtual reality. “Free will is overrated,” says robot security chief Stubbs (the third character to have his death from Season 2 undone in a single episode) before chasing a team of soldiers down a hall with a battle axe. Caleb’s emotional arc, his grief over his dead friend, is shunted to a stilted voiceover while he blows up ATMs with Marshawn Lynch to earn “Crime Coins.” The fact is, Westworld has backed itself into a corner – on the one hand, its central premise is that the violence and subjugation of the Delos robots is deplorable because, after all, aren’t they human too (it asks, before slaughtering a few dozen security guards)? On the other hand, the show is now centered around a conflict among three robots over control of a fourth robot who is God. So much of the dialogue of this season is devoted to the various robots elaborating on just how superior each of them is to us mere mortals that the only equivalence between them and their human counterparts is that all of their conversation is equally mechanical, whether they’re organic or not.
every Wednesday
284 VAN BRUNT ST
TV review: ‘Westworld,’ Season 3
Despite everything, Westworld seems poised to turn away from both senseless spectacle and tired moralizing about robots (it’s been 38 years since Blade Runner came out, after all) to finally talk about something concrete. ”We’re not so different,” escaped robot Dolores says to construction worker Caleb in a trailer for a later episode – but I suspect Nolan and Joy will handle that subject matter with all of the subtlety and nuance of a Nebraska freshman hitting his roommate’s bong for the first time (Did you know that “robot” comes from the Russian word for worker? Crazy, right?). This exploration of the exploitation of labor is, after all, coming from the same writers who brought you cyber-communion wafers, “Robots don’t kill people, people kill people,” and (I can’t stress this enough) Crime Coins. Westworld airs Sunday nights at 9 pm on HBO and is available to stream on HBOGo.
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April 2020
On Books Lose Yourself in a good book Review by Michael Quinn
The nesting instinct isn’t natural this time of year when, through our dirty winter windows, we can faintly hear the birds’ songs, and maybe catch glimpses of daffodils and forsythia, that particular green-yellow that only shows up in early spring. Inside, we scrub down surfaces. We check the news and wipe our phones on our shirts. We wash and wash our hands. The fantasy of spending endless hours immobilized on the couch binge-watching Netflix series is a bitter reality when the allotted time has no endcap. Already, some people are ready to climb walls. The way out is in. Why not try the humble, timeless pleasure of losing yourself in a good book? Permanent Record, by Mary H.K. Choi (New York Times bestselling author of Emergency Contact), is a story about young adults written for young adults, yet its memorable characters and excellent storytelling deserve a much larger audience (adult readers, I’m looking at you). I was drawn to the book for the simplest, most obvious reason. It has the most incredible graphic, comic book-style cover I’ve ever seen, a clear dust jacket with blue and white artwork by an artist who goes by the name ohgigue. The novel’s protagonist and narrator, Pablo Neruda (“after the Chilean poet”) “Pab” Rind, is a college dropout working overnight shifts at a Koreanowned Brooklyn health store. “Not. A. Bodega,” Pab insists. Pab has a quick, easy wit that masks his insecurity about his lot in life. He has “unequivocally zero idea what the hell to pursue,” a state of uncertainty which fuels and is fueled by frequent bouts of crippling anxiety. “Honestly, it scares me the way I end up living out the aftermath of decisions I don’t remember making,” Pab confesses. Pab’s parents are separated. He can’t live up to the expectations of his uptight, Korean, anesthesiologist mother – “‘You can’t be good. You have to be exceptional,’” she tells him – and is too embarrassed and inhibited to follow the example of his free-spirited Pakistani father, an aspiring playwright whom Pab writes off as “a total ABCD. American-born confused desi.” Pab also has a little brother, Rain (named after the Bohemian-Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke), who’s 13, musically talented, and already something of a ladies man. Pab lives in a tiny, crowded apartment with three roommates and one of their girlfriends. When the actor among them lands a regular role on a popu-
lar series, Pab can’t help but spoil the news, a reaction that might as well have a soundtrack by Morrissey: “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.” The secret Pab hides from everyone is a dresser drawer stuffed with unopened bills stemming from the huge debts he’s amassed from both credit cards and student loans. Like many young people of his generation, Pab constantly scrolls though his phone, “convinced that the next video in the autoplay is the answer. That it’ll be the antidote to my entire life.” Pab is alternately depressed by his existence and cheered by the certainty that it’s temporary. Sliding into a pair of bootleg brand fuzzy slippers for his shift at work, noticing a hole in his sock, Pab reflects, “When I’m successful and rich, these are the details of the biopic I’ll have to remember to include for color and relatability.” Groomed by our culture to be an American success story, he can overlook what are surely temporary hardships, certain he’s destined for something great. That something great rushes into the store in the dead of night on two legs with Bambi eyes. Woefully underdressed for the cold, this mystery woman is watched by Pab on the store’s camera monitors. He delights in seeing her stalk the snack aisle. When she finally approaches the register, they bond over their love for junk food. Here Pab’s passion and knowledge give him a chance to shine in this beautiful girl’s eyes. It’s only when it comes time to pay – when she produces a Black Amex card – that Pab realizes who she is: the former-Disney-child-actress-turned-pop-star, Leanna Smart. That name becomes something like Cinderella’s slipper Pab is left holding after she slips off into the night. Permanent Record is a love story, but it manifests itself not just between these characters, but first between Pab and his idea of who this woman is. He sees her face in posters while walking down the street. He hears her music out of a passing car (“I straighten up and walk normal style as if she can see me”). She stares at him from the pages of a perfume ad while he lies in bed with a different woman. Of course he falls into an Internet hole, Googling the hell out of her, but the more he learns, the farther away she seems to be.
STAY WeLL, NYC!
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Choi has done a remarkable job creating a fully realized world with complex characters whose relationships are infused with deep, recognizable feelings. Pab admits, “It is honestly so terrifying – so intolerably humiliating – to want anything and to declare it.” Here Choi has staked her claim as a masterful storyteller. And in these sorrowful times, we need stories more than ever: to help us make sense of what’s happening, and to help us escape from it.
What makes Permanent Record exceptional is that it expands the idea of what a love story should and could be. It shows all the ways love can show up in
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relationships: between Pab and his brother, Pab and each of his parents, Pab and his roommates, Pab and his employers. And it shows the way private, inexplicably meaningful moments are the ones that tend to register. In one such instance, Pab seems to take himself aside: “Will myself to record this. Log it for keeps.” The title might refer to the way our past continues to haunt us, or to the indelible mark a relationship leaves on us, the story we’ll then carry with us.
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here isn’t a human life on earth that hasn’t been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. For the first time in human history, there’s no other place to which we can escape. Here in New York City, many of us are quarantined at home.
©COPYRIGHT 202O MARC JACKSON AND WEiRD0 COMiCS #13
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Page 26 Red Hook Star-Revue
You hate to see It Caleb Drickey & Frank Meyer
Caleb and Frank like movies. Caleb and Frank are also snobs who think they’ve seen everything. Of course, they have not seen everything, and there exist a great number of movies that they have absolutely no intention of sitting through. But, trapped indoors and bored to tears, Caleb and Frank forced each other to watch the movies they’d otherwise avoid like a different plague.
Shawshank Redemption (1994) Caleb Drickey: Before we begin our exercise, let’s get one thing straight. I did not force you to watch The Shawshank Redemption because it is good. Not that it is a bad film, but Shawshank represents something that transcends quality, an attribute that has long since disappeared from the Hollywood landscape. I am speaking, of course, of earnestness. Shawshank is a perfectly safe, competent film. Director Frank Darabont constructs a washed-out world of grays and browns that grow richer and more saturated over time, an obvious visual language to convey prison’s monotony and Andy Dufresne’s (Tim Robbins) resurgent self-regard. The tall, lean figures of Robbins and Morgan Freeman are the classical image of soft-spoken dignity. Darabont may lack Steven Spielberg’s slick hand behind the camera, but he adopts a Spielbergian aura of almost embarrassing sincerity. Shawshank scrimps on honest depictions of the violence of prison life, and instead celebrates the triumph of the human spirit with melodramatic gusto (see Tim Robbins bellow in victory after crawling through excrement – get the metaphor?). Just three weeks after Darabont’s meditation on soft-spoken strength dropped, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction hit theaters and rendered everything that came before it obsolete. There was no longer any room for something so unabrasive, so nice, so deeply B-plus in the new industry of irony and caustic wit. The world loves Shawshank because it is a bowl of mac and cheese: warm, uncomplicated, and a nostalgic reminder of more comforting times. Frank Meyer: “You’ve never seen The Shawshank Redemption? But I thought you loved movies!” This indictment haunts me. I have heard it in college dorms, from dumb uncles at Thanksgiving, and on lifeless first dates, but I never thought I’d hear it from you, Caleb. If Jordan Peterson is the dumb person’s smart person, Shawshank is the movie to love if you don’t know shit about movies. I, and apparently no one else, saw through it from a mile away: a juicy morsel of Oscar-baiting, sentimental mediocrity disguised as high art. The Shawshank Redemption is all about taking up time. Our characters amuse themselves and their audience with episodic misadventures that make prison out to be no worse than the mild boredom of endless detention. Stephen King wrote limp platitudes on the passage of time and thankfully Morgan Freeman was on set to muster his full gravitas and make this script sound significant. Cinematographer and all-around hot boy Roger Deakins elevates drab stone walls and autumn fields through stark contrasts and wellcalibrated choreography, especially during any scenes on the prison yard. But these standout elements can’t overcome how this film reduces incarceration into a mind-numbing waiting game. Sexual assault, injustice, and suicide all float across the screen to trigger our emotions without earning them. Every conflict resolves itself with a montage and a comforting voiceover from
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April 2020
Morgan Freeman. This movie is no more than an expensive slideshow on why prison is sad and freedom is good. Upon finishing Shawshank, I raised my hands in the air like Tim Robbins in the movie’s climax, feeling as though I too had crawled through an endless pipeline of excrement to reach sweet release.
An American in Paris (1951) FM: If An American in Paris was an otherwise abysmal film, Gene Kelly’s dancing would elevate it to high entertainment. Whether he’s in the midst of a whirling tap-dance routine or walking across the four feet of his studio apartment, Kelly always glides with an incredible poise. Most movie stars know which angles flatter their face the most. Kelly moved his body to make every angle his best one. If this movie had no other redeeming qualities, I would still insist Caleb watch it. Fortunately, Kelly does not outshine An American in Paris. He is, rather, one among many ingredients in this delicious confection. Director Vincente Minelli’s production and color schemes seduce viewers with a comforting spectacle. In a film about lofty ambitions and impossible dreams, every character’s fantasy seems totally attainable by the brilliance of everyday Parisian life. It is a love letter, not to any specific city, but to the notion of home. In the wordless climax, we enter Gene Kelly’s mind to see Paris as he does. The landmarks become a flat canvas with his neighbors and friends dancing in front of them, lending it the color and emotion of community. If you have any love for Sesame Street, In the Heights, or any similar portrait of neighborhood, you owe it to yourself to visit An American in Paris. CD: I don’t like dancing. It is a dumb activity best done whilst inebriated, preferably no earlier than 1 AM, and as the last in a long night of shenanigans, because it reminds me that I am no longer having fun and am allowed to go home. So: An American in Paris. Gene Kelly dances real nice -- big whoop. I could probably dance as nice as him if I wanted to become an insufferable nerd and wear funny metal shoes for a little while. Frank argues that Paris is a stand-in for a general idea of community, and here I must disagree. Paris is the dream of postwar innocence, a holy center art and culture untouched by the trauma of the Second World War or the paranoia of the Cold one. But to idealize a place is minimize it. Paris is not some sun-drenched paradise of friendly shopkeepers and carefree artists; it’s an insular, unfriendly place that became the cultural capital of Europe through sheer orneriness and spite. An American in Paris skimps on measly things like character and narrative to instead celebrate an art form I don’t respect and a city sans all the interesting bits. I shall never reclaim these two hours, nor shall I ever forgive you, Frank, for taking them.
Rio Bravo (1959) CD: Rio Bravo, Howard Hawk’s greatest and most enduring Western, was born of an act of oneupmanship. Hawks hated High Noon. He hated that the 1952 masterpiece was written by noted communist Carl Foreman, and he especially hated its ending, in which aging Marshall Will Kane is rescued from certain death by... a woman?! So, alongside fellow reactionary John Wayne, he built a film around a brave sheriff facing long odds, but one who meets certain death head-on, backed only by his guts and a handful of proven companions. This being John Wayne, however, there’s never a doubt that the Duke and his compatriots will emerge from their prison siege unscathed. If Hawks can’t threaten the town of Rio Bravo from without, then he makes sure to load up on metacommentary and strife from within. John Wayne plays, well, a John Wayne type: big, competent, so masculine that he lugs around a rifle while anyone else packs pistols (cuz you know he’s got the biggest gun). His greatest threat is not the villainous bandit in his jail cell, but the prospect that his best gal will skip town before he swallows his pride enough to admit he wants something. Dean Martin, playing a washed-up sidekick to a more powerful man, battles the demon drink with the tenacity of a gladiator. Babyfaced Ricky Nelson yearns for an outlet for all his youth and talent. Hawks understood that grand crises come and go, but these smaller battles define our stories and our lives. So, he anthropomorphized them as known entities, threw in a few gunfights, and sprinkled on some real racist comic relief (he was, after all, a reactionary). Also, Dean and Ricky sing a duet, and I just think that’s neat. FM: I have hated John Wayne since my seventhgrade social studies teacher ordered the class to salute a cardboard cutout of him. On screen, John Wayne was a brute who made a name for himself by shooting Native Americans and growling at women, and off screen, he used his celebrity status to eject leftists and personal enemies from Hollywood, deputizing himself to decide what influences did and did not belong in American cinema. Rio Bravo is the ultimate conservative fantasy: a paternalistic sheriff defends his idyllic, and idiotic, corner of Americana from the Other. I genuinely enjoyed the first third of this film, which moved at a deliberate pace to introduce the town as a fabric of overlapping relationships. But once the bullets start to fly, our story collapses into a rudimentary tale of Good versus Evil. Internal conflicts that were previously treated with nuance become a question of simply “manning up” to survive the climactic gunfight. John Wayne, ostensibly a movie star, is instead a black hole that sucks the vitality from his scene partners until they all land in an alternate dimension of American Exceptionalism. Angie Dickinson outdoes all her costars in this film, creating a character (with no help from the screenplay)
who is believably insecure and still much cooler than all the grizzled man-boys orbiting her. “They don’t make pictures like Rio Bravo anymore,” my grandpa might declare wistfully. Thank God.
Miami Vice (2006) FM: Miami Vice is undeniably dated. The soundtrack, clothing, and early forays into digital film-making all reek of 2006. You could never mistake Miami Vice for any other film. It is a singular artifact through which you enter a world of mojitos, neon, and speedboats. There’s a plot you can choose to follow down its byzantine corridors and emotional chasms, but I prefer to lay back and let this movie wash over me. I, backed by fathers across the globe, believe Michael Mann to be an artist of indisputable importance. His films are spectacular and illuminating, stylish morality tales that hold the same depth as an intro college course in sociology or political science. While Heat and The Insider are Mann’s best work, Miami Vice is the peak of his directorial vision. Revisiting the old terrain of the glizy 80s television series he created, Mann now reckons with the aching despair that exists behind every adrenalinefueled crime epic. The film is a staggering production that meticulously documents the complexity of transnational drug-trafficking. Mann recorded this circus from the inside-out, experimenting with the potential of the digital camera to capture the tiniest facial gesture against the enormous Miami skyline behind it. This movie is a priceless gem, a cascade of details that reveal new facets upon each viewing. CD: Franco my friend, you misidentify Mann’s masterpiece (Collateral whips, slaps, bops, et cetera), but I think you’re spot on with your diagnosis of Miami Vice as the most Michael Mann: it’s his platonic idea of a Very Serious Action Epic For Big Boys (see also Heat, Last of the Mohicans, Blackhat). Do we have a brooding, uncharismatic leading man with a dogshit American accent? We do. Are we asked to follow an incomprehensible narrative that’s really just killing time between action sequences? You know this, baby. Are the aforementioned action sequences nasty affairs elevated by precise, muscular camerawork that make me momentarily forget that I don’t care what happens to these underdeveloped violence-doers? Stopping asking me stupid questions. Miami Vice, if seen as a loose accumulation of bold choices instead of a cohesive masterwork, is not a complete waste of time. Frank’s admiration for the photography is valid: Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe craft sublime images in which a cold, infinite background looms over the rest of the frame like the shadow of an unavoidable iceberg. But Colin Farrell’s flat, growly performance and Mann’s inert writing simply cannot support the film’s visual splendor. Miami Vice is not bleak and impersonal in accordance with a defined philosophical thesis; it feels lifeless, demonstrating just how hollow the moving image is once you’ve sucked all the humanity out of it.
The Shawshank Redemption is available to stream on Netflix. An American in Paris, Rio Bravo, and Miami Vice are all available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, and other streaming platforms.
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April 2020, Page 27
Four delayed films to enjoy in quarantine by Frank Meyer
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ith all new releases on hold and movie theaters closed indefinitely, the film industry is in a dire place. But delays are nothing new to Hollywood. Here are four films, delayed in their own time, that can help make sense of your new life under quarantine.
Ad Astra When Disney executives purchased 20th Century Fox in 2018, they found they now owned Ad Astra, an outer-space drama starring Brad Pitt. Unsure how to fit the dour science-fiction movie into the Disney brand, the film sat on the shelf for eight months before seeing a September 2019 release. The plot is simple: an astronaut (Brad Pitt) must venture to Neptune and retrieve his father, another astronaut whose rogue experiments threaten the solar system. If most science fiction is an opera, Ad Astra is a ballet. We follow a lonely man reckoning with his father’s legacy against a stunning backdrop of landscapes, colors, and sounds. Director James Gray and cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytem weave a solar system of frigid blues and rich ambers that bloom across the black canvas of space. Ad Astra is a film about profound loneliness and the absolute necessity of showing love to everyone in our lives. If there is a film that can make sense of our frustration and sadness that we can’t hug the ones we care about right now, it is Ad Astra.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was finishing its post-production in 1988 when DEG, the studio producing it, abruptly declared bankruptcy. Director Stephen Herek shopped a rough cut around to different distributors, but the film’s surf bro dialogue turned most buyers off. A series of test screenings at shopping malls in Southern California proved that the film resonated with modern teenagers, and Herek’s film was released in 1989. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a story of optimism and friendship, and it is as comforting as cheese pizza or french fries. High school burnouts Bill and Ted are about to fail their history final and flunk out of high school. This is a bummer of cosmic proportions, as failing school will derail their destiny to unite the world with most outstanding tunes. Sent a time machine from the future, the duo embark on a madcap adventure across time. With the outside world indefinitely postponed, it can feel like our future is in similar jeopardy. The pure friendship of Bill and Ted remind us that the diversions and pastimes we discover now could be laying the groundwork for a more excellent future.
The Cabin in the Woods Completed in 2010, The Cabin in the Woods did not premiere for another two years, during which its distribution rights were resold and the film was converted into 3-D for theatrical release. A delightfully paranoid creature feature, The Cabin in the Woods oscillates between a meta-commentary on horror movies and a workplace comedy about those who make them. A group of college students venture on a weekend retreat to the countryside where things quickly turn horrific. Audiences will recognize tropes from the Friday the 13th, Evil Dead, and Texas Chainsaw
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Massacre franchises, all pointing out the danger our protagonists are in. It turns out a shadowy corporation is rigging an elaborate massacre inspired by horror films. Writer-director Drew Goddard penned a sharp script that has you rooting for both the survivalist teens and the asshole corporate executives engineering their demise. A relic from a time before we filmed every moment of our lives, The Cabin in the Woods is a cautionary tale about a world devoid of face-to-face connections. Social distancing only keeps our bodies apart; digitally, we are closer than ever. While we may see ourselves as the isolated teenage victims of the film, we are just as likely to be the faceless bureaucrats who watch and judge their demise. In the coming weeks, we will mostly socialize through our online behavior. Let’s hope we show more empathy than the villains behind The Cabin in the Woods.
Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
An absurdist comedy of petty and self-interested leaders too busy squabbling among each other to solve a doomsday catastrophe. Sounds familiar, no? Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) is a madcap satire of American jingoism, masculinity, and militarism set in the height of the Cold War.
Columbia Pictures executives pushed Strangelove’s November 1963 release back after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, feeling that a grieving nation would not appreciate the film’s satire of American politics. The film overcame its own poor timing and is now a celebrated entry in Stanley Kubrick’s career. When America stumbles into atomic war with the USSR, Washington’s establishment scrambles to diffuse, then later capitalize on, the impending crisis. Peter Sellers stars as three officials responding to the crisis: a well-meaning British officer, the ornery president of the United States, and the Kissinger-esque, former-Nazi mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove. Dr. Strangelove is a bubbling cauldron of talent: Kubrick, Sellers, and screenwriter Terry Southern bring out the best in each other’s work. Though we are quickly losing patience with the politicians and institutions that are meant to lead us through a crisis, we can at least appreciate that mismanagement is the norm, not the exception, of American history. The Cabin in the Woods is available to stream on Hulu and Amazon Prime. Dr. Strangelove is available on the Criterion Channel and Crackle. Ad Astra and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure are available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, and other streaming platforms.
remembering Mike Longo by George Grella The sad state of the days means that pianist Mike Longo will, for at least a good period of time, be remembered more for being the first American jazz musician to succumb to the COVID-19 virus than for the what he did musically, and how it added to the world. Dorothy Longo, his wife for 32 years, reported his death the penultimate Sunday in March, and noted that he had suffered from an underlying health condition that has made the virus so much more deadly for those who contract it. Along with Dorothy, Longo is survived by a sister, Ellen Cohen. A swinging, dynamic, intelligent musician, Longo had a major role in jazz as a longtime member of Dizzy Gillespie’s group. His tenure with Gillespie began in the late ‘60s, and the pianist was music director for Dizzy from that time to the mid-’70s – he can be heard on the classic, live Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac album on Impulse! Records. Though no longer a permanent member after, Longo continued to collaborate with the trumpeter through the decades. As heard with Gillespie and his own albums as a leader – especially two 1972 releases on the Mainstream label, The Awakening and Matrix – Longo sounded at home in many shadings of jazz, including Latin and bossa nova rhythms, funk, and blues, where his playing was always natural and soulful. Born in Cincinnati, he started playing the piano as a child, starting lessons with a teacher at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music when only just four years old. His family moved to Florida, and Longo began his professional career as a teenager, playing with his father’s dance band (his father played bass). Before Gillespie heard Longo, the young pianist’s playing caught the ear of the great
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saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who at the time was the band director at a high school in Longo’s hometown, Fort Lauderdale. At times, Longo filled in for Adderley’s regular pianist. The young musician went on to study classical piano technique and repertoire at Western Kentucky State University. An early musical hero for Longo was the renowned pianist Oscar Peterson. Longo studied with Peterson for six months and later told All About Jazz that he learned “how to be a jazz pianist,” picking up the subtleties of harmony, timing, and working in an ensemble. After that, New York City, the center of the jazz universe, beckoned. Gillespie found Longo playing in the house rhythm section at a jazz club, and the rest was history. Longo’s relationship with Dizzy produced an orchestral composition, A World of Gillespie (1980), with the trumpeter as soloist. This was later played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The two men connected beyond music, as both belonged to the Baha’i faith. At WBGO, Nate Chinen quoted Dorothy Longo saying that “the Baha’i faith was his moral and musical compass.” The wholistic, unitarian thought in Baha’i was a natural for a musician like Longo, who had an easy way with giving value to and elevating each musical style and idea that flowed through his mind, his heart, and his hands.
April 2020
something special before the lockdown
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his is not about listening to jazz at home, which is how we’ve done it for most of the last 100 years. The radio, the stereo, 78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, what else is there to say about them? They deliver music to our ears, and while that may not be the best way to experience jazz, it’s the most convenient and creates the greatest accumulation of experiences. And in listening, quantity is its own quality. This is about being in the audience for jazz without ever leaving your home. Because that’s where we are at. Drop the prescriptive terms for plain language: stay away from groups of people so you don’t give them something they’d rather not have and so they don’t give you the same. The easiest way to do that is to stay home as much as possible. That’s an easy game of abstract logic. Living that way is harder. And it really makes no sense whatsoever for music, which is a social activity, something people make together going back to the origins of the identifiable human species. I can’t prove it, but I would argue that when the first person made the first music, humanity was born. That there are solo artists reinforces this. Playing by themselves, they require an audience more than any other kind of musician. People in a group can play for each other – the solo artist needs a crowd more acutely than any ensemble. (The exception is Glenn Gould who, once he abandoned concert performances, made music in the recording studio only for himself, but he was as much an oracle as a musician.) I think about this all the time when I’m in a concert hall or a club – it’s a conscious part of my listening, getting a read on how other people are reacting, getting a sense of that invisible but very real oxytocin bond that builds among the audience and across from them to the musicians, a feedback loop of community feeling, solidarity in the experience. The first Saturday in March I was at the Jazz Gallery for the Tyshawn Sorey Sextet, and knowing that I was part of a crowd was essential to how phenomenal the performance was. Sorey is one of the great jazz drummers, with incredible technique and musicianship, and he’s also one of the leading composers in new classical music. He’s one of the very few who, when he sits down to play, plays jazz, and when he sits down to write, writes stuff that is not at all jazz (the late, truly great André Previn also comes to mind), and his accomplishments at each have made him a well-deserved MacArthur Fellow. At the beginning of March, he self-released his first just-jazz album in a while, Unfiltered (digital only at https://tyshawn-sorey.bandcamp.com), and that’s the music he and his group played at the show, one uninterrupted set lasting a shade over two hours. The album is one of the finest jazz records made
by George Grella in the 21st century, and the night felt historic. In one way that was a given, as it is whenever any deep-thinking jazz musician plays. Sorey and his group of tremendous young musicians were building off two of the most important foundations in modern jazz, the Miles Davis Quintet circa 1965-68 and Charles Mingus’s 1964 band and the recordings from their live tour. Like both those groups, the musicians (saxophonists Nathan Reising and Morgan Guerin, vibraphonist Sasha Berliner, pianist Lex Kortan, and bassist Nick Dunston) had the incredible ability to switch what they were doing – a solo, a particular rhythmic pattern or cadence – to something drastically different with a seamless immediacy. That’s not just chops in terms of how quick the hands are, but in the mind’s agility and the ability to play with the intensity and passion that has the musician lost in the music flowing through them while at the same time listening with great focus and sensitivity to what is going on around them. It is the height of musicianship and jazz playing and has never been surpassed.
A lucky night
That Sorey’s Sextet was playing at this level was indeed historic: it just has not happened that often. Jazz fans are lucky that we can hear so much of this, from Dean Benedetti following Charlie Parker around with his disc-cutter recording apparatus, Columbia Records setting up their microphones at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, December 22 to 23, 1965, the concert recordings and radio transcriptions that by happenstance documented so much of Mingus’ sextet on the road in 1964 – we can hear history being made in the moment, and no matter how often we listen to those records, they always sound new because they are the sound of new ideas emerging. It’s like listening to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity again and again, it’s always going to be astonishing. This was historic too because it was new ideas emerging. The group played with the concepts and means that Davis and Mingus left here for us to learn, but within the framework of Sorey’s large-scale compositional form. They bit, they swung, they burned, all the while moving through an enormous through-composed landscape, the kind of endlessly developing phrases that have much more to do with the legacy of Wagner and Mahler than jazz song form, even at its most sophisticated. Einstein took the world
Tyshawn Sorey at his kit
that Newton accurately described and showed how it worked at levels never before imagined, and Sorey took mainstream modern jazz and made it into an epic journey that had previously been the domain of poetry and opera. In both cases, everything looked the same yet history had been changed. But then what do we know about history? Jazz is so alive, and jazz musicians are so good (they’re like baseball players, you have to be really goddamn good to just be in the middle of the pack), and so much of the music has been made in front of small crowds, with no audio captured, that we just don’t know what we all have likely missed. And there were only so many people at the Jazz Gallery on March 7 (the last night of a week-long run). Nowadays the bulk of live gigs are recorded somehow, but that doesn’t mean the music will ever find its way to more than a few select sets of ears. With the clubs closed, musicians are streaming, but the effect has been one of loss; jazz just doesn’t lend itself to streaming like classical music, based on preordered instructions, does – there is so much history not being made, so much lost to time, like, Roy Batty said, “tears in rain.” I kept thinking of the classic A Night at Birdland albums from Art Blakey, with Pee Wee Marquette announcing at the start, “Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, we have something special down here at Birdland this evening, a recording for Blue Note Records. When you applaud for the different passages, your hands go right on the records there, so when they play them over and over throughout the country, you may be someplace and say, well, that’s my hand on one of those records that I dug down at Birdland.” I witnessed history down at the Jazz Gallery, I hope everyone around me felt the same way. And when the world opens up again, go out and catch some history in the making. You may someday get to say, “That’s my hands on one of those records.”
Sorey and his group of tremendous young musicians were building off two of the most important foundations in modern jazz, the Miles Davis Quintet circa 1965-68 and Charles Mingus’s 1964 band. Red Hook Star-Revue
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April 2020, Page 29
A drum maker’s long journey
25
years ago, Ibrahima Diokhane opened Keur Djembe, an African drum shop, on Union Street. When I stopped in to talk to Ibrahima last month, he was sitting on a stool, as if waiting for me. “Ibrahima?” “Yes, that’s me.” The store was about as big as my living room. I told him that I wanted to write an article about his shop. We started talking about its history and origins. “I was very lucky,” said Ibrahima, “I was living in this building and when the space I’m now in opened, the landlord said I could take it.” He told the landlord he didn’t think he had enough money to pay the rent. “The landlord told me not to worry,” continued Ibrahima. “He offered me a very reasonable rent. And he told his children to never raise the rent on me.” He put his hand to his heart and said, “I was blessed.” “How did you learn how to make drums?” I asked. “Everybody has to learn something,” he said. As a 12-year-old boy in Senegal, he became interested in drums and how they are made. “I learned on my own,” he said. His hands looked strong from the many years of carving, sawing, and working the wood. His knuckles were thick and barbed from decades of use. “It’s not easy work,” he added. “You can’t make money just selling the drums; you have to make them. And I can fix any drum. People even bring me their congas and other percussion instruments to repair. This is my life.” I saw a trunk loaded with wood in the back room of the shop. “Where do you get the wood?” “I get the wood and the skins from Senegal,” he answered. “I go to Africa about once a year. I want
by Mike Fiorito to buy from my home country. My drum-making creates jobs for a lot of people. People who make the goat skins, people who cut the wood. Artists, others.” “I have a container of 200 drums waiting for me in Senegal,” he noted. “But with the coronavirus, it’s slowing down exports. People are waiting for me to come. It’s a problem.” As he talked, Ibrahima picked up one of the drums and showed me how to tip the djembe holding it with your inner thighs. To get a snare-like thwack you hit only the edge with your fingertips. To get a deeper sound you move closer to the center. You hit the very center for the bass drum sound. He then pointed to the intricate web of stitches that extend from the skin; you tune the drum by tightening the stitches. The drums easily drift out of tune, he said. “People come to me for tuning, for repair. These drums need constant care.” Now about 70 years old, Ibrahima has no apprentice. “I have six children,” he explained. “They don’t want to learn about making drums. They see how hard this work is and don’t want to do it.” Ibrahima told me that the building that houses his shop will likely get sold sometime in the foreseeable future. I asked him what he would do if that happened. Work from home? “No,” he said, “I would retire. I’m tired. After all these years, working hard, going back and forth to Africa, I want to take a rest.” As he looked pensively down at the drum in his hand, he then began playing it. Then I picked up a djembe and we started playing together.
“How did you learn how to make drums?” I asked. “Everybody has to learn something,” he said.
Guitar lessons in the age of isolation
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ike most of us, Ethan Fiks has had to respond creatively to the new reality of the coronavirus.
Ethan has been teaching my nine-yearold-son, Travis, guitar for the past year and a half. Travis went from not being able to play guitar to now playing songs like “Stray Cat Strut” and “Wonderwall.” We go to Ethan’s house on East 16th Street, just off Cortelyou, in Ditmas Park for lessons. I’m more of a chaperon than anything else. My main challenge is getting Travis to suspend his ongoing stand-up act during the lesson, or to stop spinning around in his stool. “Travis, stop spinning. Look at the music sheet,” I say. Initially, Ethan needed parental support. But now I think Travis takes the lessons seriously and focuses well. What I love about Ethan is that, despite Travis’s attempts to sidetrack his instruction, the sheet of music sitting on the stand remains Ethan’s focal point. “OK, let’s do the chorus now,” he says, gently but matter-of-factly, bringing Travis’s attention back to the lesson after a joke or two. But this past week, everything has changed. Due
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by Mike Fiorito to the requirement for social distancing, we’re now taking lessons via FaceTime.
“Do you think this might change the way you teach going forward?” I asked.
This past Sunday, we set up an iPad, using a stand to point the video camera at Travis, and displayed Ethan’s video on our smart TV using wireless HDMI. Ethan can see Travis’s hands and listen to his execution, making sure he hit the 7th on the G7 chord or correctly barred a minor chord.
“Well, I have friends that live in NYC and teach people all around the world, so yes,” he replied. “And we don’t know how long this will continue.”
“I think you’re playing on the wrong fret,” says Ethan, correcting Travis’s playing of “Stray Cat Strut.” Travis moves one position down and voila, the song sounds right. After the lesson, my wife, Arielle, Travis and I talk to Ethan. “That seemed to go pretty well,” says Arlelle. “I agree. That was great,” says Ethan. “I could hear everything he was playing. I could even see his hands.” “And we don’t have to tell him to stop spinning on the stool,” I add. We all laugh a bit. After teaching in New York CIty since 1997, Ethan, like so many others dealing with COVID-19, has had to find a new way to do things. “Not all of my students have moved to online lessons yet,” he said.
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We’re always running late to Ethan’s house. Being able to take the lessons remotely is a great advantage. Now we don’t have to run out of the house bedraggled and unkempt to make an 11 am appointment. Travis can sit on the couch and do his lesson while we shuffle about, make breakfast and get ready for the day. Of course, the fact that I’m a guitar player means I’m not able to watch or to listen or provide any instruction. “You do things differently from the way Ethan does stuff,” says Travis after I try to help him with “Stray Cat Strut.” I sigh and back off, wishing I could be more helpful. Perhaps not now, but maybe someday. In the meantime, we’ll continue doing lessons online with Ethan for now. I suspect we will keep doing lessons online even after all of this is over. We will at least have the option. See more info on Ethan Fiks at ethanfiks.com.
April 2020
Looking for cribbage I met a bluesman
B
en Bierman lives around the corner from me, which explains how I first met him and his partner Val at the local gin palace.
It was the usual Sunday afternoon gathering, and I was on the prowl for a game of cribbage, but there were no takers, no suckers, no ringers. I felt like a cross between an also-ran Paul Newman in The Hustler and a weak-kneed Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid. So why not punish those unlucky enough to be seated next to me on the nearby bar stools, in this case the strangers Ben and Val? Our idle banter moved rapidly into interesting territory. I soon learned that Ben Bierman was a lifelong professional musician, and he had spent a number of years playing trumpet for the Johnny Copeland Blues Band in the 1980s. I smelled a story. So this article is about Ben Bierman and his musical odyssey, as a player, student, author, teacher and composer, right up to the present. As Bruce Springsteen once wrote, “From small things mama, big things one day come.” My abortive cribbage foray in the pub that afternoon turned into a fortuitous encounter. Ben Bierman is 66 years old (we are kindred spirits in the age department). He was born and grew up in Haight-Ashbury. Before it became the epicenter of hippie migration and the “beautiful people,” and long before massive gentrification transformed San Francisco into a well-heeled metropolis, the Haight was a truly mixed neighborhood, at least 50 percent black. Jazz clubs and blues bars dotted the streets and avenues. Heavy hitters like Lightning Hopkins, Charlie Musselwhite and John Lee Hooker regularly played at these joints.
Ben had decided that music was for him. He studied piano, learned bass in the school orchestras, and taught himself how to play the guitar. He picked up the trumpet as well. His mentor was a fellow by the name of John Coppola (RIP), a veteran of the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman orchestras. John taught him many tricks of the trade, but also instilled in Ben what some might refer to as “the code of the road.” At age seventeen, Ben hit that road. He found himself in Chicago, performing in what he called “two beat bands.” This was the style that Guy Lombardo made famous (Louis Armstrong once stated that Guy Lombardo was his favorite musician). These kinds of two beat bands were territorial outfits, traveling a similar route as the Count Basie and Jay McShann bands in the Midwest, and Ben was part of their Chitlin’ Circuit equivalents. He even ran off and joined the circus, several of them. In the early 80s, Ben Bierman landed in New York City. Here he gained regular employment in the salsa, Latin jazz orbit... Johnny Pacheco, Celia Cruz, those larger-than-life characters, along with Ray Baretto and Machito. He played all over the city, even at funerals in Chinatown. In the mid-1980s, Ben was hired by the late Texas blues guitarist Johnny Copeland as trumpeter. Copeland was heavily influenced by the music of an earlier Texan, T-Bone Walker. Later that decade, Johnny Copeland recorded a hit blues album with Albert Collins and Robert Cray called Showdown. Well, all of this sounded rich to me. So I asked Ben for a couple of Johnny stories. He acqui-
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by Mike Morgan esced. On tour in some far northern snowbound Norwegian city, Johnny Copeland could not be found. The bass player and drummer were dispatched to track him down. He was discovered in a sauna. Decked out in the full black ensemble, leather jacket and cowboy boots while smoking a cheroot, Copeland calmly said, “It’s hot in here, Dick.” He called all other men Dick. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, not as the Texas bluesmen do. This one is quite touching. Ben remembers an attractive woman hitting on him at a Houston gig. It transpired that she just wanted to explain to him that she was an old flame of Johnny Copeland’s, although there was more to the encounter later that evening. Johnny had set her up in the hood with a hair salon and parlor. She owed her livelihood to him, and he had never come back demanding recompense. That’s the difference between bankers and local celebrities who can afford to help their friends and who never forgot their roots. This story stuck with Ben, rightfully so. Ben continued with his tales. He has one about how he got tinnitus (that’s hearing loss), courtesy of Stevie Ray Vaughan. It involves a massive speaker situated right behind Ben on stage. He had another one about B.B. King inviting him to play with his band at the Channel nightclub in Boston, having just heard him perform with Johnny Copeland on a National Public Radio broadcast. Ben quickly learned that B.B. would play in any key, and he called the first number in a challenging key for the trumpet, an old school play. Ben passed the audition with flying colors. Hearing Ben tell this proudly is reminiscent of the John Lennon quote, the one on the roof of Apple Studios in the Let It Be film. Settled in Brooklyn, well in his mid-fifties, Ben decided to pursue the study of music. He obtained a PhD in compositions. His research topic was George Handy, a Brooklyn pianist and composer who studied under Aaron Copeland. George Handy wrote progressive jazz arrangements. Ben then prepared a treatise on Pharaoh Sanders, the old John Coltrane sidekick who is still kicking. Ben graduated from student to teacher. In 2015, he authored a book entitled "Listening to Jazz." He is currently a tenured music professor at John Jay College in Manhattan. About his life as a musical academic, Ben explains that his goal is to humanize the musicians and explain what they are trying to do and how they do it. For many of us peasants, jazz is complicated material. We might appreciate it, but we are a little lost when it comes to figuring out the hows and the whys. Ben doesn’t seek to simplify this, he wants to contribute to the discourse of why it is such a unique and important African-American cultural contribution to the world. And he wants to share his technical and historical knowledge so that others can learn too. That’s good enough. But it’s not like Ben has sacrificed the horn for the pen, or the stage for the classroom. He graciously gave me both of his latest albums, Beyond Romance (2013) and Some Takes on the Blues (2018). I want to talk these up, especially the latter, because it speaks directly to me. On Some Takes on the Blues, Ben is not only the composer, but he plays the trumpet, the piano and the guitar too, along with other guest musicians, including his son Emanuel. It is a visit into his sophisticated understanding of the music that he has been performing all of his
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Ben Bierman, from the back cover of his new album
life, delivered without pretension. I recommend these records: they belong in any serious collection. They cook. I asked Ben about the dynamic of being the white guy in the black blues band. He replied that the only distinction that mattered to him was between those musicians who lived the life, who knew it in their bones that this was what they were born to do, versus those who might have been temporary travelers. B.B. King and Willie Dixon were mentioned here. He told me another story about a Beaumont, Texas, gig at a tinned-roof honky-tonk, where the audience was very hostile in a dangerous way. But such is the fickle nature of a drinking crowd. Their original animus eventually dissipated, and they wound up helping the band break down at the end of the set. There was no more aggro behavior, and a lot of back-slapping. There are insights here. Ben Bierman understands this stuff because of what he has experienced and where he grew up. His mother was a community activist in San Francisco. One of Ben’s friends was Wes Wilson, the artist who created the famous posters for Bill Graham’s Fillmore West and who recently passed away. Ben still owns some of the original prints. Wes Wilson’s next-door neighbor was the Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver. That was Ben’s world. It helped draw up the charts for the waters that he currently navigates. I want to tell you, looking for non-existent cribbage partners has its advantages. Ben Bierman is a going concern. He deserves our full attention. For more information on Ben Bierman and his work, visit benbierman.com.
"The only distinction that mattered to him was between those musicians who lived the life, who knew it in their bones that this was what they were born to do, versus those who might have been temporary travelers."
April 2020, Page 31
Musicians grapple in a gutted industry
F
ew industries are immune to the financial and structural chaos that COVID-19 has wrought. The music business, though, is particularly vulnerable. Essentially made up of dozens of patchwork business models, with the majority of workers being selfemployed, there is little relief for the majority of musicians. Broadway is shuttered, bars are closed, weddings are postponed, international tours are canceled, and every venue from opera houses to DIY spaces has been shuttered indefinitely. Even recording sessions and music lessons have ended. The “Great Gig Bloodbath of 2020,” as I call it, began Wednesday, March 11. The cancellations began pouring in that morning, starting with small bars and clubs, and cascading throughout the day until, by Wednesday night, the carnage was in full swing. Over the next two days, the entire income of thousands of New York musicians was obliterated. If you were lucky, you were under a contract that would be seen out. But even those musicians faced a terrifying prospect: there was no end in sight. May? June? The fall? There’s an old saying: “How do you get a musician to complain? Give them a gig.” While I can attest this is more than half true, musicians are also some of the most optimistic, hopeful, and resourceful people around. In an industry where few gigs offer any real stability, and the “hustle” is also the next move, people are always trying to find ways to innovate and cut through the noise. By Friday, my Facebook and Instagram accounts were awash with people trying to figure out how Zoom works, experimenting with live concerts from their bedrooms or kitchens with links to their Venmo account – a form of cyber-busking. Turning lemons into lemonade, or something. Everyone was desperate, and terrified, and looking for answers. The entire bottom of the original
by Stefan Zeniuk “gig economy” had just come out from under them, and there was no clear support system. But with thousands of musicians trapped at home, with nothing but their WiFi and instruments on a Saturday night, they also realized that they had a (literally) captive audience trapped in their respective living rooms. There were several creative solutions that stood out to me. With so many musicians out of teaching jobs, everyone was suddenly posting that they were “available for online lessons.” Bass player Steve Whipple, watching hundreds of these queries being yelled into the cyber-void, sprang into action and put together an open-source Google spreadsheet, in which musicians could add their name, instrument, and teaching ages. Within one day, 250 musicians signed on to offer lessons, and it is now an index of over 500 musicians of (truly) world-class level that are available for online instruction. The website maestromatch.com went live within a week of gig-mageddon! Perhaps the most artist-friendly online music service, Bandcamp, waived its revenue share on music sales on Friday, March 20. I don’t know if they plan to do this again, but it was a great incentive for people to buy music and support so many artists whose songs regularly get streamed in the depths of the internet with next-to-zero payment. If you want to help artists, buy albums instead of streaming them! Among many crowd-sourcing funds, one of the best I’ve seen is Artist Relief Tree (ART). Formed by Morgan Brophy (Wolf Trap Opera) and Andrew Crooks (Lawrence University Conservatory of Music) as a Facebook fundraiser, it quickly expanded into a website with an impressive list of famous and established musicians as supporters, and they have already raised $250,000, and begun sending out payments. To see more, go to artist-
relieftree.com. There are new ideas and schemes being hatched at a dizzying pace, and we’re not sure where all this will lead. But in the meantime, unemployed musicians can’t be held down. As one friend said to me, “Look out for one of the most overwhelmingly prolific periods for new music and compositions this summer,” when everybody is released from their enforced artist retreats – as long as we can survive that long.
"The Great Gig Bloodbath of 2020 began Wednesday, March 11. The cancellations began pouring in that morning. Over the next two days, the entire income of thousands of New York musicians was obliterated."
Ghost albums of the corona days By Stefan Zeniuk
W
ith the world – and the arts world with it – shuttering its doors amid COVID-19’s havoc, life as we know it has sputtered to a standstill. That doesn’t erase the months or years that bands and musicians had poured into preparing albums slated for a release whose timing turned out to be impeccably poor. But that also doesn’t discount the quality or relevance of new music – in fact, I would say their importance is heightened. As everyone is hunkered at home, craving stimulation, I decided to take a look at some of the Ghost Albums – recordings being released to slightly less fanfare than they may otherwise have been, hiding behind the confusion and surreal backdrop of a nation under lockdown. Weston Olencki - Solo Works (modern classical/2avant-garde/metal), Creative Sources Recordings -: This album was scheduled to be released on April 6, but they decided to release the album early, on March 20. This is one of the most brutal solo albums I’ve ever heard. Olencki’s suggestion to “listen to this LOUD” wasn’t a joke. While it’s an album of solo performances for bass trumpet, trumpet, trombone or euphonium, the performances sound like the music of wind turbines, ventilator air shafts, or all sorts of broken and malfunctioning machinery. Without the use of electronic processing or overdubbing, Olencki
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brings brass instruments to an otherworldly place. Recent ventures into the extreme uses of wind instruments by folks like Colin Stetson or Rebekah Heller barely come close to sheer abrasive limits to which he takes instruments typically associated with Bach or Wagner. With only four songs on the 45 minute album, it comes across as a response, a comment, a perspective on the truly dystopian surreality of the times in which it was released. Development of these pieces began about three years ago, according to Olencki. The album is available digitally at https://westonolencki.bandcamp. com/album/solo-works. Soraia - Dig Your Roots (rock), Wicked Cool Records: Philadelphia rockers Soraia hit hard, and straight, delivering a booze-soaked revelatory party that is infectious and well needed in these days. “I’m all about playing a fun song and throwing myself around. That’s rock ’n’ roll at its heart,” lead singer ZouZou remarks. “But I’m also about telling the stories of resurrection and life and hope and darkness.” Coming from a multicultural family, with Egyptian and Belgian parents, the album has a message of being proud of who you are and embracing our differences. Perhaps the music doesn’t exactly represent the sound of deserted streets and empty, shuttered bars, but it can give you that electric jolt of energy and party joy that is
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distinctly missing right now. Despite the album’s release on Friday, March 13, via Stevie Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records, ZouZou told me that they’ve had enthusiastic and positive response from a well-established fan base. Their last album was 2017. Check out more at soraia.com. Tony Holiday - Soul Service (Americana/blues), Vizztone Records: Holiday’s debut record, slated for April 24, has been pushed back to July 10, which is a shame, really, because his album’s soulful blues approach is so, so, soooo laid-back and comforting, and it’s exactly what’s needed in these long-drawn-out days of quarantine and isolation. Holiday’s singing reflects the days when the blues was transitioning and cross-pollinating with soul music: sad but uplifting, heartfelt, and always exceptionally cool, never forced. Holiday put together a spectacular band from his hometown of Memphis, produced by Ori Naftaly of Stax Records. I’ll be looking for the full release. In the meantime, there’s been one song teased, “It’s Gonna Take Some Time,” a good mantra for all of us to take as we wait out this epidemic. Go to tonyholidaymusic.com.
April 2020
Technology and the pandemic: A 1918 musician’s crossroad by Jack Grace
1
918 was a strange intersection for musicians even before the 1918 Flu Pandemic hit. These were the final times that music would be experienced primarily the way it had been for thousands of years. With the exception of music boxes that evolved into player pianos, music had always been performed live. There was little need for the term “live music.” In 1918, radio was in its infancy; there were no official radio stations on air yet. The first US licensed commercial broadcasting radio station (KDKA, Pittsburgh) didn’t begin until November 2, 1920. The phonograph was gaining momentum, but it was hardly in every home at this stage. Recordings were still rather primitive and rarely involved proper microphones. A typical recording session in 1918 might involve musicians crowding around a giant horn – their musical efforts vibrated the needle that directly etched the audio into wax. Low bass sounds were barely audible, and all the higher pitched sounds such as violins, were often faint with almost a ghost-like quality. Yet, a big, booming, operatic voice could cut through the wax. European tenor Enrico Caruso had the perfect voice for sounding prominent in the new technology, and one of the first recording stars was born. “Why has this great interest and enthusiasm for Opera so suddenly developed?” asked one journalist in 1917 in National Music Monthly. “Almost every layman will answer with the two words, ‘the phonograph.’” The blues would not really make a proper appearance until 1920, when Mamie Smith sold one million copies in six months with “Crazy Blues,” the first genuine blues hit, opening the door for the jazz and “hillbilly” records that were to follow. This was an era when musicians, conductors, composers had lively debates about how recording was going to affect their livelihood. “Once the talking machine is in a home, the child won’t practice,” complained the bandleader John Philip Sousa. His reasoning was that if anyone could listen to the finest music at home with the flick of a wrist, why would anyone bother to learn an instrument themselves? Many musicians were concerned that other players would be able to listen to a record and steal their licks. Before recorded music, if you wanted to steal a piano player’s chops, you’d have to go see that player a hell of a lot of times. Others argued, “Who will bother to pay to see us, if they can hear Enrico Caruso in the comfort of their own home?” These were days of change and a rethinking how the music world was going to function. It might just reflect some the emotions musicians today feel
about streaming and the dwindling support of live performances in the 21st century.
The flu arrives
The flu arrived in New York City on August 11, 1918, aboard the Bergensfjord, a Norwegian vessel that reported 10 people had fallen ill and three people had perished. New York City greeted the boat with ambulances and took a few select patients to the hospital but did not isolate them from the rest of the patients or staff. Approximately 200 other passengers were set free, and the pandemic in Manhattan began. The number of deaths did not decline until early November of that year. New York City had lost around 30,000 lives to the flu. New York’s death rate per 1,000 residents was 4.7, compared to Boston’s 6.5 and Philadelphia’s 7.3. Undoubtedly, musicians died. Some likely contracted the deadly pandemic by playing in small and crowded places such as Thomas Cloke Liquor, which was located at 326 Spring Street in Manhattan. Thomas Cloke Liquor was a popular pub near the docks that served food and liquor primarily to longshoremen, coastwise workers, and drivers who transported goods on and off the piers. It was the perfect place for exchanging germs. Official statistics on musicians affected by the pandemic are difficult to find, but it is obvious they lost work and did not have technology like Facebook Live as an option to stay in touch with the public. Making things worse, 1919 brought the enactment of the 18th Amendment, also known as Prohibition. The new law ended more performance opportunities than it created. In years to come, the phonograph and the radio launched the most financially successful musical careers of all time, but demand was to change. A musician that could play a song precisely had become more useful for recording sessions than a performer that might be all personality but a bit sloppy in their technique. On March 9, 2020, at 326 Spring Street, the former Thomas Cloke Liquor was bustling with a band scheduled to play on that Monday from midnight to 3 am. When the band finished at 3:02 am, a few drinkers insisted the band play an encore. It was my band, Jack Grace Band with Dan Green on bass and Diego Voglino on drums. We played that encore. Ironically, it was a song I wrote entitled “It Was A Really Bad Year.”
326 Spring Street back in the 1920's. Today it's still there with a name change to the Ear Inn.
Red Hook Star-Revue
Little of that pub’s basic structure has changed since those 1918 struggles except that is now called The Ear Inn. It has remained open as a pub since
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1817, it shall survive yet another pandemic, and will likely endure whatever other turmoil or technology the world has to offer. The 1918 Flu Pandemic essentially lasted three months in New York. It was the second and deadliest wave. It also arrived when the world thought the worst was over. There was even a third wave that erupted in Australia and made its way back to the US in January of 1919. The end of World War I played a major role in slowing the spread. COVID-19 is going to end, but not before most everyone’s patience does. Brilliant music has been created in conditions of significant suffering. I believe live music will return with gusto when we get through all of this. In the meantime, if we had protected musical properties better in the transition to the internet, far fewer musicians would be looking at such financial peril during the current situation as everyone at home enjoys our music on Spotify, YouTube, etc. We need to enact laws that require musicians and composers to be paid a fair streaming rate. We created laws to protect the movie industry, so we can certainly do the same for the music industry.
"A musician that could play a song precisely had become more useful for recording sessions than a performer that might be all personality but a bit sloppy in their technique." April 2020, Page 33
The Fabricated Elegance of Judd by Piotr Pillardy, photograph by Rakin Azfar “I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It’s all right, but it’s already done and I want to do something new.” — Donald Judd (1928-1994) This quote from Judd perfectly embodies how the artist successfully changed the direction of the art historical canon, with the influence of his work transcending visual arts into architecture, design, fashion, and more. The artist is now the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at MoMA. I was luckily able to witness the glory of Judd before MoMA’s closure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 13. Judd, a seminal Minimalist artist (a term he rejected), was instrumental in changing how we think about sculpture – though again, he refused traditional vernacular, preferring the term “objects,” embodying a space between painting and sculpture. Judd is an exhibition bringing together works in all mediums from his career including sculpture, painting, and drawing and is a rare look at a remarkable artist in his first US retrospective in over 30 years. The show is arranged chronologically, starting with his early painterly works and ending with the monumental sculptural pieces at the end of the artist’s career in the early ‘90s. Consisting of five rooms on MoMA’s sixth floor, the show comprehensively allows for an immersive experience of the Judd oeuvre without overstaying its welcome. Having begun his career as a painter, the beginning of the exhibition contained some of Judd’s geometrically abstract works from the early ‘60s, reminiscent of Frank Stella’s early proto-minimalistic works in the late ‘50s. Other works, such as a wall-bound object and its floor-occupying compatriot, echo a series of colorful red parallel lines. The first works are visceral and rough around the edges, evincing the hand of the artist and demonstrating the artistic process. These sculptural works show Judd’s early experimentation with his
new form of art making. Unsatisfied with the bothersome process and crude look of his homemade objects, Judd realized he could turn to industrial fabrication – a transformational juncture in his career. Containing the first of Judd’s fabricated work from Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties, who helped carry out Judd’s artistic vision in 1964, the second room truly took my breath away. I was awestruck by the scale and the gravitas of the large format sculptural works in the space. The curation gave carefully executed space to the works and let them breathe but still allowed for thematic groupings that engaged in a meaningful visual dialogue. Judd himself understood the immense importance of place/context, experimenting with and examining how his works interacted with their surroundings. The room contained the first iteration of Judd’s “stack works,” seven galvanized iron boxes that jutted out from the wall with uniform distance between them, a format the artist would continue to explore throughout his career. The yellow plexiglass in between the metal portions and its interaction with light creates an illusionary aura around the work. It is here that Judd’s explorations between surface, volume, color, and form become most evident. Every work pushes the boundary of the materials themselves, lending a visual tactility to the way each object sits in space while creating new spaces within it. In the third room of the show, I was particularly drawn to an object created of plexiglass and a reflective gold-hued material. A rectangular box with a void in its center, the front and back of the work show the seemingly gilded material while
the center is a blue plexi box showing a smaller rectangle encompassing the negative space inside of the work. The artist’s vision is evident here, creating a sculptural work that simultaneously ruminates on conceptions of space while seemingly denying its own dimensionality. The show concludes with sculptural objects in two rooms focused on the later portion of Judd’s career. The majority of the penultimate room is occupied by a dazzling, multicolor, long rectangular form from 1991 that occupies as much space as it creates, along with more iterations of other prominent Judd serial works. Upon exiting, I was sent on my way by one last final colorful Judd stack. Judd runs through July 11, so when the pandemic subsides, there will hopefully be an opportunity to see the show for yourself. When New York as a whole reopens, there is more than enough Judd to go around, with other shows at David Zwirner on West 20th Street, Gagosian on West 21st Street, Mignoni on Madison Avenue, and the Judd Foundation’s 101 Spring Street location.
Pandemic cuts short successful Summit season
A
fter undefeated regular season, Summit Academy Charter School’s boys basketball team easily won their first two playoff games, both of which took place at home in Red Hook, and notched an impressive victory against South Bronx Preparatory. The Eagles were on a roll – until the coronavirus canceled the final games of the postseason. In their first playoff game, Summit beat the Institute of Collaborative Education by 32 points. In their second playoff win, on March 4, the Eagles, a number-three seed, beat the Pace High Setters, the 14th seed, 81-61 to advance to the B Division’s Elite Eight. The bleachers were filled, and there were even some people standing in a packed and enthusiastic gym to see the team play for their 22nd overall victory of the season. Coach Phil Grant was satisfied with the win against Pace. “We moved the ball well and got some good shots early,” Grant observed. “I was most impressed with our defense. I was kind of upset because there were a couple of plays where I thought we could have taken charges, but we bailed
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by Nathan Weiser
them out by reaching, but we were in good position most of the night. We did a good job helping and jumped ball screens well.” Against Pace, a crew of five Summit seniors led the way with doubledigit point totals: Jordan Council (24 points), Donte Howard (14), Nicholas Mickens (11), Soumana Sylla (11), and Jeremiah Hewitt (10). “It’s great to have senior leadership at this time of the year,” Grant said. “You need leadership in the playoffs, and they are stepping up.” With their victory against Pace, the Eagles moved on to South Bronx Prep, the defending B Division champions, on March 7. “We are going to be in for a dogfight,” Grant predicted. Grant was right. The quarterfinal at Achievement First Brooklyn High School turned out to be a thrilling victory for Summit, in which the Eagles pulled ahead at the end of the game to edge the defending champs, 64-62. Jordan Council was once again the high scorer for the team, finishing with 25 points and the game-winning basket. Mickens had 11 points, and Howard and Hewitt each chipped in with seven.
The win over South Bronx Prep earned Summit a berth in the Final Four for the first time in school history. But the Eagles’ championships dreams ended abruptly – not because of another team, but because of COVID-19. Mayor Bill de Blasio suspended Public School Athletic League activities on March 12, and New York City schools closed their doors altogether starting on March 16. Coach Grant’s son, Philip Grant, had played his first games of the season in the postseason after tearing his meniscus before Summit’s opener in the middle of November. He had returned to action after a long recovery and was playing well off the bench. “He had 12 points the first game and eight points tonight,” Grant said after the second playoff game. “He is playing limited minutes, but that’s all I need from him. He came in and did a good job. He rehabbed well, his practices went well, and it’s a good time to have him back.” After a very successful season, the Summit Eagles saw their run to possibly winning the B division championship end not because of another team but because of COVID-19.
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The Eagles win over South Bronx Prep on March 7 put them in the Final Four of the playoffs for the first time but because of the coronavirus Mayor de Blasio said as of March 12 all public school after school activities including sports were cancelled. The NYC public school system would not close its doors until Monday, March 16. The semifinal game was supposed to be played on March 14 against Achievement First Brooklyn. Summit, which was the No. 3 seed in the playoffs, won the three playoff games that they did play. They finished 14-0 in the B division and went 4-4 in a challenging non-league schedule, which included three games in a tournament in North Carolina.
The Eagles were on a roll – until the coronavirus canceled the final games of the postseason.
April 2020
Gowanus bridges (continued from back page)
Brownstones then discharged their brown effluvia back into the Gowanus, as the Canal became the waste treatment plant for up-Slopers. Now add the benzene, pyridine, creosols, naphthalene, toluene, hydrogen sulfide, phenols, and coal tar from the many gas plants springing up there. Sprinkle in the perfumes of adjacent lime kilns, cream of tartar works, fertilizing factories and you have what Lynyrd Skynyrd used to croon: “Ohhhhh, that smell, can’t you smell that smell?” So come 1883 with a new Brooklyn Bridge to get to, well folks was mad as hell and weren’t gonna take it anymore. The damn bridges kept getting stuck and rebuilt, causing delay after delay. In 1888 alone, the five bridges had to open more than 22,000 times on demand. And they took quite a while to close. Which afforded riders quite a whiff of the increasingly noxious surroundings. In 1889 a Commission appointed by the Mayor to study the problem recommended closing the Canal and sealing it up. They noted a dozen carcasses of dead horses and other animals in the Canal during their brief survey, along with “the outpourings of a large number of water closets and four sewer lines.” Failing the nuclear option, it recommended shoring up the deteriorating bulkheads, installing a flushing tunnel and tearing down all five bridges, replacing them with higher spans. “The condition in which the Canal is allowed to exist is simply a disgrace to the city of Brooklyn,” they concluded. In 1893, a bill was introduced in Albany by the Sanitary League, with the backing of the Mayor, to fill the Canal, pave it and erect a railroad on top with sidings to existing businesses, from Butler Street all the way to a rail barge dock that would be built under the Hamilton Bridge, thereby substituting “one form of highway for another.” The Board of Trade objected and the bill, like so many before it, was dead on arrival. A pumping station with a flushing tunnel at the west end of the Canal did provide some relief in 1911. Until it eventually broke down. Just like the drawbridges.
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But after World War II, traffic on the Canal started a long decline. And all the magnificent bridge rebuilds since the 1980s provided more clearance for vessels. Now only the Hamilton opens on demand, but always at off-peak. In fact, from 1990 to 2017 total annual Gowanus bridge openings declined from 4,400 to just over a thousand. The flushing tunnel was revived, the EPA’s Super Fund cleanup of the Canal will start in September and the Union Street Bridge rebuild is a certainty. So there’s your happy ending. But one thing still bothers me. Sonny Dove. Sonny was a senior at St. Francis Prep in Williamsburg when I was a junior at St. Augustine in the Slope. Sonny single-handedly beat us in 1963 with an unstoppable jump shot. Sonny, like so many of us Brooklynites now, was a mixed blend. African-American, Narragansett tribe on his father’s side, Mashpee Wampanoag on his mother’s. He was once described by the Daily News as “a study in grace and athleticism.” He was also deadly from the top of the key and went on to win the NIT with St. John’s, then spent five years in the NBA, including the Nets, before a really bad bicycle accident ended his career. He became a sports broadcaster, calling St. John’s games on the radio, but it didn’t pay a lot, so he also drove a cab to make ends meet. On a snowy Monday night in February 1983, Sonny was returning in his empty yellow cab to Manhattan, driving west on Hamilton Avenue. The bridge was up but due to an electric malfunction its guard rails didn’t descend and there were no lights. Sonny hit the brakes and skidded into the Canal 25 feet below. He died on impact and was recovered by NYPD divers. His family sued the City for $1 million and they settled for $750,000. I’ve been driving over that bridge for most of my life – and cursed when it opened more times than I care to remember. Especially on Saturday mornings. But every time it did, after February 14, 1983, I couldn’t help thinking about Sonny Dove. After the Hamilton Avenue Bridge was completely rebuilt in 2017-2018, the Department of Transportation, as part of “The Percent For Art Program,” installed a fixture created by Jim Conti, a former Pratt Institute professor, consisting of LED lights viewable in all directions by pedestrians, motorists and mariners alike. It’s called “Assent Ascent” and is actually quite dazzling. Sort of like Sonny Dove’s smile after he went vertical to drain a jumper.
Red Hook Star-Revue
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April 2020, Page 35
the red hook
STAR REVUE
APRIL 2020 INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
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THE NEW VOICE OF NEW YORK
The Bridges of Gowanus by Joe Enright
T
his article will be like that uplifting movie, The Bridges of Madison County. Except there’s no Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, or romance. And the part of that idyllic Iowa stream is played by a canal brimming with sewage and dead horses. But there are bridges. Five of them! And one is even a covered bridge. However, unlike the ones in Iowa, with birds chirping all around, this one is covered by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and 200,000 daily vehicles crawling above, while 55,000 more rumble over the bridge below. What follows is a remembrance of uplifting moments when drawbridges wouldn’t close and a reminiscence of one Brooklynite who never made it to the other side. Where to begin? The Gowanus Bridges have been entirely rebuilt more than twenty times and have been stuck on so many occasions, their malfunctions were offered by Robert Moses as a major reason for erecting the War of the Worlds behemoth above Hamilton Avenue that effectively locked down Red Hook long before Corona. Even today, with traffic on the Gowanus Canal dwindling to a pittance, citizens are demanding a rebuild of the decrepit Union Street Bridge. It’s a familiar refrain. A little history music if you please, maestro… In 1834 the City of Brooklyn was incorporated when the Village of Brooklyn (Brooklyn Heights bankers) joined hands with the Town of Brooklyn (the common people – whom God must have surely loved because he made so many of them, as ol’ Abe Lincoln used to say). Why incorporate? Brooklyn’s population was exploding then, tripling since 1814 when Fulton’s steamboat inaugurated a 12 minute passage between Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan. New streets needed to be opened and paved, more ferries were needed, and especially better over-
land transportation to the East River for the Townies. Only a City could float bonds and levy assessments to pay for all that stuff. In April 1836 the Brooklyn & Jamaica Railroad (the forerunner of the Long Island Rail Road) started steaming all the way to the end of Atlantic Avenue. A month later a new “South Ferry” – meaning way south of that fancy Fulton Ferry – shoved off there too, offering a seamless commute for those rail travelers (and farm produce) across the River to Whitehall Street. And everybody on Whitehall still thinks “South Ferry” refers to the place where you get that Staten Island ark. Hey, Manhattan! That was our south ferry, you name-stealing jamokes! Amidst all this hub-bub, the need for hoof-driven access to the waterfront was immediately foreseen by some cagey Manhattan capitalists. By simply fording a tidal creek flowing in from Gowanus Bay, they could make the venerable Hamilton Avenue the principal road connecting the waterfront to 3rd Avenue and points south – particularly to the City’s southwestern frontier where Green-wood Cemetery would open for customers in 1840 and become the hottest party spot in New York. But travelers got what they paid for when the hastily-assembled Penny Bridge opened in 1835. It was so rickety that the City immediately began negotiations with the Gowanus Toll Bridge Company to buy and rebuilt it. But the asking price was way too high. Then in 1846 a third ferry service opened at the foot of Hamilton Avenue, and suddenly the Penny Bridge issue rose to the top of the list for the Brooklyn Common Council. The need was not to facilitate travel for the peons of Red Hook and Gowanus so much as to accommodate the thousands of visitors to Green-wood now streaming off the ferry from Manhattan. And so in 1847 Alderman James Stra-
The Carroll Street Bridge in 1900
Page 36 Red Hook Star-Revue
nahan rolled up his sleeves. The historian Thomas Campanella aptly describes Stranahan as “one of the unsung heroes of our urban landscape” in his recent opus, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (if you can’t afford the book, read his delightful account of The Union Street Bridge in 1949 tracing an old stream that ran by his boyhood home in south Brook- 1857. Tracks were laid at that time lyn at https://www.terrain.org/es- for the horse-drawn rail cars which says/10/campanella.htm). Also, as charged a nickel a ride. A bridge tenyou no doubt remember from the der was appointed each year by the Star-Revue’s seminal 2015 mono- ruling political party to open and graph by Townie Connor Gaudet – a close the draw for the increasing boat self-described “Brooklyn-based writ- traffic below for a dollar a day. Shortly er and musician passionately pursu- after this third Hamilton bridge was ing a life of debt and poverty” – Stra- completed, its new-fangled boiler nahan played a major role in making contraption powering the drawbridge the Atlantic Basin accessible long be- blew right up, killing the bridge-keepfore becoming the father of Prospect er and maiming his assistant. His Park. So taking care of a rickety bridge replacement was on duty the moonwas not a heavy lift. Perhaps the cru- less night of Wednesday, August 19, cial moment that impelled immedi- 1863, however, when a northbound ate action occurred on July 28, 1848, horsecar approached the open bridge when his fellow Aldermen aboard shortly before 10pm. Sitting in the rear a horse-drawn hearse on its way to were a blind preacher and his teenage Green-wood suddenly jumped off as guide who lived at the corner of Cothey neared Gowanus Creek, prefer- lumbia & DeGraw Street. They were ring to walk across the “rotting and returning from a sermon delivered to decrepit Penny Bridge.” Within a year, Union soldiers at Fort Hamilton about the nuisance was gone, and the City to embark for the War. In addition to was erecting a new bridge in its place the conductor and the driver, there while the length of Hamilton Avenue was also another young man who was simultaneously widened, graded boarded at 9th Street & 3rd Avenue. and paved. The horses, the car, and the people all Of course, another major impetus for that new drawbridge was the transformation of the Creek into a shipping canal. In 1849 the NYS legislature authorized the dredging of the Creek and widening it for a length of almost two miles north and west of the bridge. This allowed barges laden with coal, oil and building supplies to offload much closer to their destination. Traffic on the new Canal was brisk from the outset, even before the final dredging was completed in 1869. As a result, the Hamilton and its four sister bridges downstream had to be raised and lowered. A lot. Their piers and pilings also got rammed and shredded by tugs and barges. A lot. And the vehicular traffic just got heavier and thicker every year, including horsecars, followed by trolleys, buses and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks.
went into the drink. The driver survived and told the Coroner he usually had four drinks a day, no big thing. By the way the New York Times, in its three dispatches on this story over the course of a week, identified the site of the tragedy as the Hamilton Avenue Bridge while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle maintained it was the bridge at 9th Street. I went with the Times because they outnumbered the Eagle’s stories and plus, I wanted to show my support for New York’s only surviving daily paper from the Civil War.
So the 1849 Hamilton Avenue Bridge was replaced with a new model in
(continued on page 35)
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After the War, activity along the waterfront exploded. Sand stones barged across the harbor from quarries on the mainland were unloaded from the Canal’s banks and assembled to form the row houses of what is now called Brownstone Brooklyn. The new
April 2020
12 days that changed the world a quarantine journal by Brian Abate
gloves to work.
Walking on Smith Street
It has been difficult selling advertising for the paper, which is my regular job, so I was asked to keep a diary of the past few weeks as I walked around the neighborhood. I also have no sports to watch, which has given me a lot of extra time.
Day 1: Wednesday, March 18
My first day of keeping track of everything around me. On March 12, New York State had declared we were in a state of emergency and on March 17, all schools, bars and restaurants in the city were supposed to be closed. I expected chaos to ensue but for the most part people just wanted to go outside and enjoy the nice weather. There were joggers everywhere, kids playing in parks and lots of people walking their dogs. It was strange seeing so many businesses that would normally be open were closed, and I had to pick up my lunch from Francesco’s and eat it home instead of eating it there. They said they were getting business but it hurt them to not have any customers allowed to sit down and eat. Workers at Margaret Palca Bakes on Columbia Street near Degraw Street were worried that there would be a complete shutdown. Multiple delis reported they were still doing fine in terms of business but were worried about the virus. Some workers at Bonafide Deli on the corner of Hicks Street and Kane Street wore masks and
Day 2: Thursday, March 19
I had to get groceries and realized that the Key Food on Henry was much more crowded than usual and there were a lot of people buying in bulk. The lines were much longer than they typically are. In addition to supermarkets, butcher shops were also getting a ton of customers. Esposito’s and Staubitz Market had lines out the door. Both are located on Court Street in Carroll Gardens. Some places put up signs limiting the number of people allowed inside at a time since health experts calling for social distancing. Bakeries and liquor shops also had pretty long lines. Most nail salons were closed and so were some barbershops, although others remained open. Some people looked like they were intent on going about their business as usual whether that was jogging or families eating outside together, while others looked terrified and covered all their extremities. I overheard people talking about coronavirus everywhere I went. My mom, a public-school teacher, had to go to her school building for lessons on how to use the technology required to teach students from home.
Day 3: Friday, March 20
While I was walking to work I started getting a bunch of text messages. When I checked my phone I saw that Governor Cuomo announced a statewide stay-at-home order. That meant all non-essential businesses would have to close. The order doesn’t prevent me from going to work because journalists are considered key workers. I also got an extreme haircut earlier in the week so luckily I won’t have to worry about getting one for a while. The weather was beautiful and there were still some people out but fewer than I had seen in the previous two days. I spoke to a few parents, whose kids were playing in a park. They told they wanted their kids to be outside for a Empty soccer fields at Brooklyn Bridge Park while. They
Page 18 Red Hook Star-Revue
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just made sure they avoided contact with other kids and used hand sanitizer afterwards. I also spent a lot of the day outside (just avoiding getting close to people or touching surfaces), but a few of my friends told me they didn’t want to go outside or that their family told them not to. On my way back home, I saw that the butcher shops and liquor stores were still very busy and had lines that were so long people had to
technology, and also because it was difficult to get in touch with other people to ask questions. I turned on ESPN because I’m a huge sports fan. ESPN had been starved for news Tom Brady’s announcement that he was leaving the Patriots dominated the news. They ended up showing a marathon of Brady’s best games. As a Giants fan, I usually wouldn’t watch, but there wasn’t anything else I found interesting. Sadly they didn’t show one of the two Super Bowls where the Giants beat the Patriots. It wasn’t a very exciting day for me.
Day 6: Monday, March 23
The weather was awful today. The streets were empty. According to NY1 the bad weather was actually a good thing because it kept everyone inside. The only people outside were a few workers in masks and people walking their dogs. The park across the street from the Chase Bank was filled with kids last week. Today someone from the Parks Department put up a sign saying it was open but recommended that people not go in.
Day 7: Tuesday, March 24
wait outside.
Day 4: Saturday, March 21
As I walked through my neighborhood (the Columbia Waterfront District) everything looked empty. I can’t remember ever seeing the streets so quiet on a Saturday afternoon. All the restaurants were closed and had signs saying that costumers could only order takeout or come in to pick up their food. I crossed over the highway and walked to PS 29, which is usually filled with kids playing in the schoolyard on weekends. Today, the gate was locked. After a while I got hungry so I went to Margaret Palca Bakes for lunch. They put up a sign outside saying they were still open and asking people to help out local businesses. When I stepped inside I was the only one there. Workers told me they were worried about business but didn’t know what to expect because this had never happened before.
Day 5: Sunday, March 22
I noticed more people on the street than yesterday. There were a lot of people on the street near Fairway although I didn’t see many people on Columbia Street or Van Brunt Street on my way there. The buses that passed me along the way never had more than a couple of people on board (and most of the ones I did see were wearing a mask). I ended up spending much of the day at home, which wasn’t very exciting. My mom had to set up Google Classroom to prepare for teaching students online, which was difficult because, partly because as a family we’re awful with
April 2020
The rain finally stopped and I ventured out. Nearly half of the people I saw were wearing a mask. I noticed more signs at parks saying that they were still open but that it was at your own risk to go and not recommended. My mom had to start teaching her students from home. A lot of the students had trouble figuring out how to use Google Classroom and what their new schedules were, so many couldn’t join their online classes, and some who did were late. My family usually uses public transportation frequently and my dad works in Manhattan. Now, when he has to go to Manhattan he walks over the Brooklyn Bridge instead of taking the subway. I’ve also been avoiding public transportation. I walk anywhere within a few miles and drive when I must. It’s actually nicer that there is less traffic. Today I went out for work but spent the rest of the day inside.
Day 8: Wednesday, March 25
The first thing I do when I wake up is to look out my window to check the weather. It was drizzling. I live above the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and today there were hardly any cars even at rush hour. I notice that lot of local businesses that had been open the last time I passed them were now closed. That included a few delis even though they weren’t forced to close because of government policies. I spoke to workers at House of Pizza, Brooklyn Bread and Fragole, with one worker from Brooklyn Bread calling it “a very slow day.” They all said they were all less busy than usual but said they were still getting some business from pick-up and takeout orders. Brooklyn Bread and Fragole are located on Court Street in Carroll Gardens. House of Pizza is located on Union Street.
Red Hook Star-Revue
With so many people out of work or working from home, more Gates down on Van Brunt people are cooking and fewer are ordering food. I’ve still been going to many of these local businesses consistently and they Today was was the first day I really noticed haven’t been crowded. Some friends and other people were going out of their way to avoid people I’ve spoken to have said they aren’t gostrangers on the street. When I would walk by ing out except to buy groceries. people would move to one edge of the sidewalk and I would move to the other one. I tried to go shopping for essentials but there a lot of things that were all gone, including toilet I checked the news and saw that Governor paper, tissues, hand sanitizer and protective Cuomo announced patients would have to masks. I had to go into work and only about a start sharing ventilators in hospitals. third of the people who are usually at the ofI decided to go see if people were still takfice were in. ing the subway after that piece of news so I After that I was able to spend the rest of the stopped by a few of the local stations. Carroll day at home. My dad went grocery shopping St, Bergen St and Borough Hall were all pretty for my grandparents. I was able to speak to much empty. I only saw a few people in each them on the phone and it was nice to catch of the stations even though it was the midup and hear that they were okay. They’ve been dle of the day. More than half the people I saw staying inside all this time, with the exception there had a mask or gloves on. About a third of of walking their dog in the backyard. the people I saw outside had a mask on. I also I noticed papers posted on telephone poles overheard a woman on the phone saying that and windows by people offering to shop for the hospital she worked at was running out of the elderly. In the midst of all the hoarding, masks. panic and chaos it was nice to see people still There were still kids playing in parks. I walked trying to help others and do the right thing. by Van Voorhees Park and it was packed with tennis and basketball players. It’s possible that basketball courts will soon be closed to help I woke up, looked out my window and saw that it was raining. The street was empty and there was no traffic on the BQE. I’ve actually been hoping for rain for multiple reasons lately. The first is it keep people from going outside and spreading coronavirus. The second is it helps with my allergies. I usually get allergy shots every Tuesday but because of coronavirus the allergy clinic I go to is closed right now. That, along with very warm weather lately, has made my allergies flare up. The New York Times announced that hospitals and the emergency response system in the city were already overwhelmed by cases and were forced to prioritize specific cases. The family and friends I’ve been talking to are especially scared because the numbers continue to rise instead of falling.
Day 10: Friday, March 27
Day 9: Thursday, March 26
Day 11: Saturday, March 28
Day 12: Sunday, March 29
The author looks out his window
enforce social distancing. I’ve been doing my best to keep the six foot rule and I’ve started carrying hand sanitizer when I go outside. My parents both worked from home today and most members of my family are going outside only when they absolutely have to (buying food or walking their dog).
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My friends told me that the city might start giving $500 fines to people who don’t follow social distancing policies. We’re not sure if and when exactly that fine would be put in place. For me, it’s been another boring but safe day spent working from home. Thanks for sticking with me through these 12 days. My biggest takeaway from this time and this journal is to listen to the advice of medical experts and stay safe. Help out people who need it the most whenever it’s possible and make the best of this challenging time. Being miserable won’t make anyone any safer. This is a lousy, stressful situation, so find safe things you can do from home and enjoy them.
April 2020, Page 19