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Local Councilman lays an egg, see page 7
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RED HOOK & THE VILLAGE THREE PAGES OF STORIES AND PICTURES, STARTING PAGE 34
What happened to all the protest songs? Jack Grace wonders Long Ryders, Don Dixon and Marti Jones, Highwomen, Les Sans Culottes and Nick Lowe George Grella on Jason Moran Show
Does NYC really need graveyards and golf courses? Yates, page 3
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CB6 listens to Gowanus developer
sibility of providing for efficient mass transportation facilities, including an ADA elevator.
Community Board 6’s transportation committee agreed to table a proposal that involves constructing an additional entrance at the R train’s Union Street stop until more information regarding the Gowanus rezoning is released.
As compensation for this investment, Avery is demanding the right to build a larger building than the proposed neighborhood rezoning might allow.
“They’re being pressured to improve their accessibility, but they’re limited in their capital availability. There are no immediate plans to improve accessibility here,” said Brian Ezra of Avery Hall, referring to the MTA.
Real estate development firm Avery Hall is in the process of buying the Speedway gas station at 4th and Union. They are asking the city for permission to build a much bigger building than current zoning will allow in exchange for taking over government’s respon-
Committee member Pauline Blake asked what would happen if this request were denied, and Ezra responded that he would continue to develop as-of-right without the bonus footage.
Ezra’s $11 million proposal entails a new ADA accessible entrance with an elevator to platform level, a new wide staircase to relieve current congestion, new lighting, and new mechanical, electrical and sprinkler 7.5" systems.
By the end of the meeting, the committee unanimously agreed that no one’s against the concept, but that voting on this before the rezoning gets finalized or approved to take place would be premature. - by Erin DeGregorio
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SEPTEMBE R 2019 IN DE PE ND EN T JO UR NA LIS M
THE NE W VOIC FREE E OF NE W YORK
Last month we ran John Buchanan's interview of local artist Scott Pfaffman. Jeannie Fry, who among other things hosts Red Hook Roxx every Friday at Rocky Sullivans, comments: "Very interesting! Thanks for the timelining of the Red Hook art scene!" Actually, not only Red Hook, but Dumbo and the amazing differences between New York in the 1970's and 80's and today. Our cover piece on Mama D garnered a few complaints because of the cigarette holder in the photo. Persona Grata writes: "sounds great but the pic suggests there is cigarette smoke which would just make it all total shit no matter what else is going on." The author of the piece, the talented Roderick Thomas responds: "No worries, cigarette smoking is outside only, not inside." Theresa Zeigler writes "What a wonderful article about John Pinamonti! He is not only a great musician, but simply a kind, loving, and generous young man with lots of talent. I’m very proud of my nephew." Elena says about The Berlusconic movie ..I am afraid is rather a “pimp” portrayal of Silvio Berlusconi. Sorrentino, oscar winner director, did not need it. In the opinion of this editor, Berlusconi was unfortunately a precursor to the current leadership of this county. In fact, I'd love to run a photo of the Donald in the same situation as Slivio. Maybe I should make a poster!
Mama D 's perfec t nigh is a perfe ct night int out
We left out a photo credit last month - the photo of the Strokes that accompanied a gallery review was taken by Leslie Lyons. She is a reader and I found this out about her: " Leslie Lyons’ aesthetic grew out of here are a by Roderi tonlifestyle the post-punk era of a D.I.Y. exploring culture, sexuality and of parties ck Thstreet omas that spring are a tug of up (and dis war betwee appear) thr n your FO options, yo oughout the MO ur (fear of mi be d,fi tak social engagement. Her early ne art photography work city. In Newas selected for the eout an ssing out) clubb d ing Ne w York, ple tflix usually or bar-hop and peste all the tak nty of week ring indec ping, but fee being a sta eout, with ends isiveness. ple and co ling upbeat Netflix in There are mfortablewith nge chairs enouNude bed fee gh for a nig along so cover of ChroniclelouBooks’ Nerve, Th e New inside pages on many lin and mo e. gs, If you’rfour wh ht out, head vies, its Ma ile curing e too lazy over to a ne your FOMO ma D’s Sn to go out eaky Spea w event tha . Imagine keasy. all-night co t will give yo cktails andLevinthal, u of the collection which included work by Nan Goldin, David Taryn gourmet tre ats, Simon and other fine photographers. Most recently, her practice involves the investigation of cultural identity through a series of inter-disciplinary projects produced with the public and also with a self- portrait series using song lyrics as inspiration. Believing that individualism can be achieved and SCOTT P maintained within an overwhelming mosaic Leslie employs culturally FAsocial FFMAN IS EVERY WHERE experiential data to contextualize persona identity." Intervieand w page
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(continued on
page 34
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BRETT YATES:
Land for the living, not for the dead Good urban planners know that, in order to create cohesive neighborhoods and healthy local culture (and, even more importantly, to preserve the environment), cities must value density and use their land efficiently – partic-
much land in the city sits essentially vacant: spaces that, if opened to new development, wouldn’t trigger avalanches of gentrification and displacement, because there’d be nobody there to displace. And what if I told you that there’s another land use category that’s even worse than golf courses – areas that take up just as much space but offer even less utility? There is such a thing, though most people are too polite to say so: I’m talking about cemeteries.
ularly if they want to create enough housing Get rid of the graveyards Nearly half of New York City households are “rent-
to meet demand. That’s why most planners burdened” (meaning that more than 30 percent of find golf courses so repugnant. Sure, they’re nice for the Donald Trumps of the world, but they take up so much space and accommodate so few users at a time that – relative to a
their income goes to rent) – it’d be difficult to overstate how hard the average New Yorker has to work in order to carve out a tiny sliver of the Greatest City in the World™ for himself. In a crowded metropolis where 60,000 living individuals have no place to call home, does it make sense to give over permanently any parcel of the city that could be used for housing to someone who died in, say, 1831?
basketball court, or a pizzeria, or just about New York City needs green space, but graveyards, anything – the overall public benefit afforded by the land amounts to virtually zero. According to the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell (whose anti-golf stance is a rare redeeming quality), the average course can hold “one golfer per 120,833 square feet.” So how can golf courses afford to stay open, given the cost of property in the city? Well, they can’t, really: they operate under public ownership, or if private, they survive according to a property tax model whereby states calculate the land’s value specifically as a golf course, without estimating what it would be worth in its “highest and best use,” which would take into account the price that, say, a residential developer might pay for it. Golf courses aren’t as big a problem in New York as they are in Southern California, but the city still has 18 of them. The Marine Park Golf Course, for example, occupies 773 acres of Brooklyn real estate. As Mayor de Blasio and City Council initiate one neighborhood rezoning after another – Bushwick is next – in order to facilitate the construction of new residential high-rises that’ll supposedly resolve New York’s housing crisis, it’s worth noting how
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like golf courses, are parks that the public can’t really use. In the former case, anyone can walk in, but for want of recreational opportunities, few would choose to. Some graves receive visitors; many more have outlasted their visitors. In a perfect world, mourners would be able to visit the deceased without traveling far from home, even if they happen to live within a competitive real estate market. Already, however, that world doesn’t exist. New York’s cemeteries, like those of many of the world’s major cities, are filling up fast, and the price of the remaining plots keeps them out of reach for most families. New York is America’s most expensive city for burials: in 2015, Gothamist reported that the last two vacancies for the dead in all of Manhattan – a pair of family vaults at New York Marble Cemetery in the East Village – cost $350,000 each. City Council, tacitly recognizing that New York’s 303 square miles of land have become too dear o make space for the dead, stopped approving new cemeteries decades ago. But in death as in life, wellheeled New Yorkers will continue to lay claim to more and more of the city’s precious real estate until all the existing graveyards meet capacity, while
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the Big Apple continues to expel most of its other i n hab i t a nt s upon expiration.
New York City needs green space, but graveyards, like golf courses, are parks that the public can’t really use.
Do the corpses already installed within the Five Boroughs possess a right to eternal peace, regardless of the needs of the city’s living? It seems to depend on whose corpses we’re talking about. Tourists still visit Alexander Hamilton’s headstone on Wall Street, but New York has never had qualms about paving over the resting places of the indigent. Mass graves (called “potter’s fields”) once occupied the sites of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Washington Square Park. Parkgoers in Greenwich Village tread upon the bones of 20,000 paupers every day. In the mid-1800s, overcrowding in Manhattan’s graveyards prompted the creation of “rural cemeteries” (most famously Green-Wood) out in the countryside, where there was plenty of room for the dead. The trouble is that the countryside of 1840 is now Brooklyn and Queens: central urban neighborhoods that possess concentrations of economic activity and opportunity to which many people would like to have access. The countryside has moved elsewhere, and once again, so perhaps should the dead.
The legalities In New York, all cemeteries operate as nonprofits and don’t pay property taxes – which is how Green-
(continued on page 11
October 2019, Page 3
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October 2019
Where the 2020 candidates stand on public housing by Brett Yates
Two million Americans live in public housing. Because conditions at housing authorities across the country have deteriorated for decades, most of them live in substandard homes – amid rats, lead paint, leaky pipes, mold, broken elevators, and heating outages. Since the government owns public housing and could, using only a small fraction of the federal budget, allocate enough money for its full repair, this arguably represents, for a presidential administration, the most fixable of all major problems in the United States. Yet, year after year, this particular problem gets worse, not better. During the second half of the 20th century, Americans came to regard public housing developments as inherently problematic arrangements: unwholesome concentrations of poverty where crime naturally sprung and architecturally grim tower blocks fell apart thanks to the neglect of the tenants and predictable public-sector fiscal mismanagement. Political solutions formed around this discourse, which disincentivized reinvestment: public housing had been a mistake, and elected officials could either ignore it entirely or focus on tearing it down. Neither option helped its residents. A number of the candidates competing in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have proposed ambitious plans for healthcare, climate change, and student debt, which have prompted a great deal of discussion. Thus far, none of the moderators of the televised primary debates has yet asked about public housing, and most of the candidates seem disinclined to mention it – as though it belonged to the progressivism of the past, not of the future, despite all the people still living in it. Traditionally considered a local issue, housing in general has not historically played a major role in presidential campaigns of the modern era, but rising rents in US cities – along with, it seems, a recognition by some national politicians that perhaps the Democrats can’t win on the backs of suburban soccer moms alone – have forced the candidates to expand their platforms. Among the top 10 candidates in the latest national polling average (Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Julian Castro), eight have released specific plans for housing policy.
What they’re saying Three of these plans – Sanders’s, Harris’s, and Castro’s – mention public housing. Warren’s, Buttigieg’s, Booker’s, Yang’s, and Klobuchar’s don’t. Many of the plans focus on reducing single-family zoning, creating funding for affordable housing by private developers, and narrowing the home ownership gap between white and black Americans. Harris and Castro touch on public housing only tangentially – the former in order to draw attention to his prior efforts, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under Barack Obama, to “connect families in public housing to low-cost, high-speed internet.” Harris, meanwhile, promises to “expand HUD’s fair housing program to make public
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housing more inclusive by banning discrimination based on gender identity, marital status, source of income, and sexual identity.” (The Fair Housing Act currently prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability.) Only Sanders’s “Housing for All” plan addresses the public housing crisis in substantive terms. Most significantly, Sanders pledges to give an additional $70 billion to HUD specifically for the repair and modernization of public housing, while the Green New Deal will fund its decarbonization. By comparison, in 2019, the federal government allocated $2.75 billion for public housing’s capital needs and $4.55 billion for its operating costs within an overall HUD budget of $52 billion. As the United States’ largest housing authority, NYCHA alone requires $32 billion in capital improvements for its decrepit stock. Sanders also calls for high-speed broadband and improved community spaces for public housing residents. Finally, he hopes to repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which in 1998 ended the construction of new public housing units in the United States.
What they’ve done If the other candidates willingly give no hint of public housing’s prospects under their future administrations, we might instead look to the past by examining their records and statements as public officials. Not every Democratic contender has come into contact with a public housing authority in their career (Yang, an entrepreneur, has never held office), but some have. As the former Secretary of HUD, Julian Castro may have left the most significant imprint on America’s public housing. He did this by overseeing the implementation of Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), a program designed to lease or transfer ownership of public housing to private landlords, who receive project-based Section 8 subsidies in exchange for bankrolling renovations and maintaining affordable rents. The program has grown since the departure of Castro, who had capped it at 185,000 units; with 455,000 units eligible for RAD conversion under Ben Carson, some public housing authorities have already privatized their entire portfolios. If RAD continues at its current pace, it won’t be long before public housing no longer exists in America. When the current Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden, ran for public office for the first time, as a 27-year-old looking for a seat on the New Castle County Council, he spoke in favor of expanding public housing in sub-
urban areas. Since a successful Senate campaign brought him to Washington only two years later, he didn’t have time to transform the housing landscape of northern Delaware, but his autobiography Promises to Keep shows that his early concern related to the need (in his view) to spread the burden of public housing equitably across communities, not to increase the number of units. “I thought we should change the way we allocate federal money so we could mandate scattered-site public housing and quit packing the poor into high-rises like Cabrini Green in Chicago that invariably turned into slums and chaos and didn’t help anyone,” he wrote in 2007. “The first thing we should do... was tear down the concentrated high-rise public assistance housing.”
Thus far, none of the moderators of the televised primary debates has yet asked about public housing, and most of the candidates seem disinclined to mention it
The most extensive legislation with regard to public housing in recent decades was the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 (QHWRA), a spiritual sequel to Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. In addition to imposing the aforementioned Faircloth Amendment to prohibit federal funding for new public housing, the QHWRA made “illegal drug users and alcohol abusers” ineligible for public housing, imposed a community service requirement for unemployed residents, and cleared the way for more demolitions under HOPE VI. At the time, Biden was serving in the Senate, where the bill passed by unanimous consent; Bernie Sanders voted against it in the House. In 2017, Donald Trump nominated former neurosurgeon and author Ben Carson to run HUD despite a lack of related experience or expertise. Elizabeth Warren drew rebukes from her liberal base when – as part of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs – she voted in favor of advancing Carson’s nomination on account of the “good, detailed” answers he’d written in response to her questionnaire on HUD issues. At his confirmation hearing before the full Senate, Warren changed her mind and voted against him. Under Carson, HUD’s budget request for the fiscal year 2020 proposed a complete elimination of the capital fund for public housing. Like Biden, many of the other Democratic candidates started out in local politics. In 2015, Mayor Pete Buttigieg replaced the entire board of commissioners at the South Bend Housing
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Authority in Indiana, promising “new leadership” and a “new vision.” Two months ago, when the FBI raided the housing authority on apparent suspicion of financial improprieties, Buttigieg emphasized that the authority was “not part of the city administration.” In 2005, shortly after Beto O’Rourke’s election to the El Paso City Council, the future congressman from Texas married the daughter of a billionaire real estate developer. Her father then presented to the city a massive downtown redevelopment plan, premised explicitly on the displacement by eminent domain of low-income Mexican-American communities near the Juarez border to make way for whitecollar professionals who, with any luck, would flock to El Paso once it had transformed itself into a trendy destination for arts, entertainment, and retail. Despite the apparent conflict of interest, O’Rourke threw his support behind the plan. Before the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, he testified that “really central” to the revitalization effort was the demolition and redevelopment of Alamito Place, El Paso’s oldest public housing project. Due to the 2008 financial meltdown, his fatherin-law’s plan never came to fruition, but Alamito Place fell nevertheless, replaced by a private-public partnership for mixed-income tenants. Although Cory Booker’s floundering campaign may have ended by the time this issue goes to print, he is, right now, probably the presidential candidate most associated with public housing, thanks to the eight years during which he lived at Newark’s
(continued on page 6
October 2019, Page 5
Potential delay on school rezoning
the rezoning as a result of the 436 new seats in the district. Both approaches aim to address the overcrowding in the district and to create opportunities to diversify.
A controversial plan to revise the admissions formula at neighborhood public schools may take longer than expected.
The first approach redesigns geographic zone lines. For some schools, zones would be drawn such that the school could accommodate out-of-zone students living in temporary housing (STH), multi-language learners (MLL) and students who are income-eligible for free and reduced lunch (FRL) in addition to zoned students.
by Nathan Weiser
Over the last six months, District 15 community members’ representatives from the Department of Education and the Department of City Planning have been discussing a potential rezoning for the seven local elementary schools: PS 15, PS 29, PS 32, PS 38, PS 58, PS 261 and PS 676. The conversation about rezoning is happening because of a newly constructed addition to PS 32, which will open in September of 2020 with 436 seats. There will be a new rooftop playground, a new cafeteria and library and specially designed early childhood and special education classrooms. There are two proposed approaches for
Public housing (continued from page 5) Brick Towers, a low-income complex that became property of the Newark Housing Authority (NHA) after its landlord pleaded guilty to tax fraud. Before his mayoralty, Booker had worked alongside housing activists at the Greater Newark HUD Tenants Coalition, and when he took office in 2006, he sought, by his account, to “turn around the troubled Newark Housing Authority. We moved it from one of the nation’s worst to one of the nation’s most improved; housing authority officials from all over the country came to study our turnaround and take lessons back to their cities.” Newark’s Star-Ledger noted that, by 2011, the authority had “improved its federal rating by 80 percent.” But the record shows that Booker embraced the neoliberal consensus of the time, which led, for instance, to
Approach Two would create a single zone encompassing the seven schools. This would be a lottery system. In both scenarios, there would be seats prioritized for STHs, MLLs, and FRLs. The Office of District Planning recently came out with a revised proposed map for approaches One and Two. Some of the zone sizes have been expanded in the proposed map.
a privatization deal that replaced 500 public housing units at Baxter Terrace – a historic NHA complex that donated a portion of its facade to the Smithsonian upon demolition – with fewer than 400 units of mixed-income housing. At the start of Booker’s administration, the NHA owned 8,800 units; by the end, it owned only 7,200. Modia Butler, chairman of the NHA under Booker, now serves as his campaign’s senior strategist. As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, between 1981 and 1989, Bernie Sanders amassed a very different record, in which he used municipal dollars to protect his city’s residential real estate from price-gouging developers. In 1984, amid rising property values, the Sanders administration founded the Burlington Community Land Trust to fend off gentrification in the Old North End by taking swaths of it off the private market.
The office has been conducting many meetings to get feedback from the community about the rezoning and the approaches. Many in the community have thought that there should be more time for engagement and input. From September to October of this year there will be dialogue with the community on the information that was shared at the meeting through email, discussions with other stakeholders and CEC conversations. There was originally slated to be a vote on the two approaches by the 11-member Community Education Council (CEC) 15 this fall. That timeline might now change. In October, the Department of Education and the CEC will collectively determine a timeline based on community input. If the vote takes place in the fall of 2019, District Planning said this would more quickly advance equity for students in the area and address overcrowding. This
An innovative concept at the time, the Burlington Community Land Trust sought to create an affordable pathway to home ownership for low-income Vermonters. It would purchase land and develop housing on it, subsequently allowing home buyers to pay for the cost of the houses (565 of them as of 2019) without paying for the cost of the land beneath them, which the trust would retain. In exchange, buyers would agree to a cap on the profitability of their investments; if they wanted to sell, they’d have to sell at an affordable price – meaning that the housing would remain within reach for low-income families in perpetuity. The land trust also developed its own rental housing and operates as a notfor-profit landlord with a portfolio of 2,200 apartments. Many other community land trusts have emerged in the United States since Sanders’s early experiment,
would align with the opening of the additional seats at PS 32 but would lead to less time for additional engagement before the proposal. If the vote is in the spring or fall of 2020, there would be more time for community collaboration, but PS 32 would open without the appropriately sized zone, and the demographic disparities and overcrowding wouldn’t be addressed for another year. Waiting until 2020 to do the vote would lead to implementation of rezoning in the 2021-2022 school year. A major topic of the rezoning is transportation and how the various plans would change the way students get to and from school. There was also a proposal by the CEC to do a one-year temporary rezoning before the official one takes place. Of course the elephant that is always in the room is the reluctance of many wealthier families to send their children to schools in Red Hook.
but since they function as independent nonprofits without significant municipal backing, they haven’t had the same power to combat local real estate speculation and assert community ownership as the Burlington Community Land Trust (now called the Champlain Housing Trust), which remains the largest in the country. While it isn’t technically a government agency, Sanders instituted a small property tax increase in Burlington to sustain its operations after providing seed funding, and city officials sit on the board alongside residents. It’s not the same model as public housing under HUD – it was something a city could do on its own – but it represents a similar socialistic impulse toward decommodification and shared resources. For some voters, this smalltown success story may lend credence to Sanders’s bigger promises for housing on the national stage.
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October 2019
Menchaca’s finest hour didn’t go well
A
fter an hour or more of picketing and soapboxing outside, a raucous, emotional crowd filled the auditorium of Sunset Park High School to capacity on September 16. After a six-month delay for a comprehensive evaluation, Councilmember Carlos Menchaca had, apparently, reached a verdict on the Industry City rezoning and had invited the community to hear it. By the end of the night – before he could conclude his presentation – the angry audience had shouted him out of the room. Some Sunset Park residents support the Industry City plan because it would create new jobs, and others, fearing gentrification, vehemently oppose it. Both sides showed up for Menchaca’s event, and in the end, his gesture toward compromise likely satisfied neither. But the resisters – including community groups like UPROSE and Protect Sunset Park and leftist activists from the South Brooklyn DSA – bore a superior fury, and their unconditional stance against the rezoning shut down Menchaca’s night. After he left, they took the microphone and, in an energetic display of popular democracy, continued to occupy the room, even after security tried to turn off the lights. How had Menchaca – a darling of the left since his election in 2013, celebrated for prioritizing the voices of community members over those of business leaders – managed to alienate so many of his former allies? It had taken a degree of political courage for him to refuse to rubber-stamp the Industry City proposal right off the bat – publications like Crain’s and The Real Deal erupted in outrage at a legislative misstep so severe, in their eyes, that it warranted a major procedural change in City Council to take away the traditional right of councilmembers to determine individually the fates of ULURPs in their own districts. There’s little doubt that if fellow progressive Brad Lander, Gowanus’s councilman, presided over Sunset Park, Industry City would have been a done deal ages ago. But, then, Gowanus isn’t politically organized to the
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by Brett Yates
same degree as Sunset Park. For his constituents, Menchaca’s principled hesitation wasn’t enough.
Two plans
Industry City’s owners had asked for the right to build (in addition to the property’s existing capacities) two hotels, 900,000 square feet of retail, 1.3 million square feet of offices, and 600,000 square feet of classrooms on their 35 acres, zoned for manufacturing. At Sunset Park High School, Menchaca declared that he absolutely would not allow such a rezoning to take place. But he also announced that he would consider an alternative plan that would exclude hotels and reduce the bonus on retail space. In order to earn a rezoning, Industry City would now have to build a vocational high school and adult job training center and pay into a local fund for affordable housing and tenant organizing, with supplementary investments from the Mayor’s Office. An agreement would mandate that a nonprofit manage a portion of the complex for the purpose of recruiting manufacturers to relocate to Industry City, and PV panels would cover the rooftops as an expansion of an existing community solar project developed in part by UPROSE. Menchaca insisted that he had not yet made a commitment to Industry City – the new rezoning was still in the works, and it might not happen at all – but his opponents, suspecting a backroom deal, assumed the revised plan was a fait accompli, for which they booed him off the stage. More recent reports suggest that the future of the complex may indeed still be up in the air, as Menchaca has demanded that Industry City consent to a second postponement, during which they must negotiate a legally binding community benefits agreement with neighborhood leaders. The process is now set to begin. Will this, finally, satisfy the critics? The answer, of course, is no – at least for many of them. They want Menchaca to jam the system. They’ve stated their position loud and clear: “No rezoning, no conditions!”
Anti-capitalism on the neighborhood level Is this an inherently unreasonable stance? To most, it may seem so. It exists fully outside the dominant ideological framework of our local and national politics, which take for granted that, in order to stay afloat, cities and neighborhoods must to some degree court the investments of multi-billion-dollar firms like Jamestown LP, which co-owns Industry City. For conservatives, the benevolence of private enterprise is incontestable and warrants absolute public deference, while liberals believe that government must impose restraints to ensure that companies serve their communities in addition to generating profit. Many of the activists in Sunset Park, however, displayed outright hostility to Industry City – they believed that their neighborhood would be better off without it, in its ULURPed form or its current one. They know we live in a capitalist country, and no one can prevent entities like Jamestown LP from owning property, but the least we can do, in their eyes, is refuse to alter our land-use rules to empower them further as they cannibalize vulnerable communities. Menchaca began to lose control of the room when he referred to the real estate consortium behind Industry City as “our neighbors.” A spectator yelled back, “Industry City is not our neighbors!” When he mentioned that, under his plan, Industry City would contribute funding for tenant organizing in Sunset Park, tenant organizers in the audience declared that they didn’t want Industry City’s money. It didn’t help that, for observers on both ends of the spectrum, Menchaca’s speech bore a taste of equivocation and bad faith. In fact, he didn’t really give a proper speech at all – instead, he walked the audience like a kindergarten class through a set of PowerPoint slides, which began by noting the challenges faced by Sunset Park (rising rents, deteriorating housing stock, crowded schools) and subsequently acknowledged that the proposed Industry City rezoning
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wouldn’t help solve those problems. But from there, Menchaca made a logical leap, and much of the crowd declined to follow: he claimed that refusing to do any kind of rezoning also wouldn’t solve Sunset Park’s problems, and therefore, the correct course of action was to design a new rezoning on the community’s own terms. (Of course, it would still have to be attractive enough to Industry City to earn the developer’s co-sign.) Menchaca’s facile logic technically contained a degree of truth – without any density bonuses or special zoning exemptions, Industry City would continue (within limits) to attract new office and retail tenants, accelerating the gentrification of the surrounding area – but it relied on an artificially narrow range of political possibility, essentially asserting that nothing good can happen in Sunset Park except through Industry City.
How things get done By any normal standard, Menchaca is playing hardball with Industry City, but lately the standard for political progressivism in the United States has shifted, and left flank of City Council risks falling behind, especially amid the increased popularity of democratic socialism. For today’s radicals (a term that shouldn’t imply disparagement), the councilman’s task is not to attempt vigorously to persuade the developer to use its money and power to fix the troubles for which the developer itself appears to be a major cause – this may simply be an incoherent mission. Rather, his job is to find other mechanisms to serve the neighborhood’s needs – that is, to use his own power as a representative of the people. Rarely does it occur to a councilmember that, if a rezoning is so unattractive to the surrounding community that it requires a host of givebacks to make the arrangement palatable, it may not deserve on its merits to take place. Unfortunately, our municipal government has come to rely on such givebacks: it is, for instance, a dispir-
(continued on page 10) October 2019, Page 7
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“This mural will make sure that when we cross the streets for fire drills and when you walk around this neighborhood, you can walk in this area and be safe,” Figueroa said. “This is how this whole partnership started with DOT. Now it is an art project. It is allowing us to learn more about marine life. It allows us to work with PortSide, it allows us to work with Gotham, it allows us to learn more about animals.” According to Figueroa, kids at PS 676 can already name many different types of whales. When she said that the students will be able to talk to teachers about adopting pets for the classroom, all the kids screamed in excitement.
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PS 676 has embraced the maritime theme with the adoption of whales through Gotham Whale. They have also adopted with the World Wildlife Fund.
This maritime initiative incorporates the school’s core values. The school’s values include empathy, respect, curiosity, integrity, and courage. Their new core value this year is social adaptability, where students learn how to adjust their social behavior based on where they are. Karen Broughton, representing Assistant Speaker of the New York State Assembly Felix Ortiz, said, “This is great for Red Hook because it is stretching our boundaries to where, when we partner with other people, we can bring in programs that will expand the community and expand our children’s minds and they will go places that they did never think of before.” Leroy Branch, a Red Hook communitiy leader who works for the DOT, also spoke at the ceremony. “We are putting Red Hook on the map,” Branch said. “It is a beautiful day to come out here and talk about safety. As a Red Hook resident, and someone who has run across this street many times, we want to make it safe for you so that when you go back and forth to school it is safe for you to cross the street. With this beautiful mural here, it brings inside the school ideas about saving our environment and saving whales.”
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This mural is based on an illustration that’s on a postcard, but Popa redesigned it a little to fit the space in the open area near the sidewalk. She made the mural more relevant by changing the boat to the Mary Whalen, an oil tanker that sits in the Atlantic Basin.
portance of adopting whales and begin to learn more about whales – where they live, their habitats, why they are becoming extinct,” Figueroa said. “They are part of our water’s ecosystem and we have to make sure that our students become connected just like Annabelle said. Our teachers are working diligently on incorporating projects into their curriculum and their units of study.”
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October 2019
My journey into the Amazon
I
t’s not the sexiest subject, but Red Hook’s ongoing reinvention as an e-commerce shipping hub has for me piqued an interest in logistics. For all their expected negative environmental externalities, the forthcoming last-mile distribution centers on Columbia Street, along with the planned UPS complex near Valentino Pier, at least offer a measure of historical continuity in a neighborhood that once hosted the world’s busiest freight port. But I’d like to know what we’re getting into, exactly. Last year, amid a deluge of unfavorable press coverage about workplace conditions, Amazon started organizing propagandistic tours of its fastmoving, ultra-modern warehouses – called Fulfillment Centers – for curious customers. Anyone can book a free one-hour visit; it’s like visiting the Ben and Jerry’s Factory in Vermont. Although Amazon has a Fulfillment Center in Staten Island, the closest one offering tours (on select dates) is in Edison, New Jersey – coincidentally, very near near my parents’ house in neighboring East Brunswick, which made it an easy trip for me.
Amazon, which in July entered talks with Industry City to create a potential distribution center in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, accounts for about half of all online retail transactions, but independent vendors make more than 50 percent of the sales on the Amazon platform. To get their products to web customers, small businesses can pay for warehousing and transportation through Fulfillment by Amazon, where their merchandise mingles in the supply chain with Amazon’s own, or they can contract a third-party logistics (3PL) provider for the same service. Though Amazon operates more than 150 warehouses of one sort or another in the United States, its facilities can’t accommodate its own incredible volume of sales in every market, and the company itself sometimes outsources operations to 3PL providers. Most of my Amazon home deliveries in Brooklyn come from the LaserShip distribution center in Ridgewood, Queens. The developer DH Property Holdings plans to lease its Red Hook properties for 3PL. I don’t know how much the distribution centers in Red Hook will resemble Amazon’s own, but there’s a fair chance they’ll handle goods purchased on Amazon – as will the facility owned by UPS, a longtime Amazon partner. But as Amazon – which more recently has invested in planes, trucks, and delivery vans – seeks to establish its own end-to-end transportation network, UPS has come to view Jeff Bezos not only as its best customer but also as its most dangerous competitor. In the era of same-day delivery, the race is on to determine who can master the challenges of lastmile distribution, the final and most difficult step in the shipping process, and the one for which the new devel-
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Brett Yates
opments in Red Hook, on account of their up-close access to the New York City market, have been designated. The business magazines say it’s the hottest trend in big-city commercial real estate. The Amazon Fulfillment Center in Edison situates itself earlier in the supply chain – it doesn’t directly serve Amazon customers. Rather, it receives goods from wholesalers and manufacturers and boxes them for individual shoppers, and then Amazon’s big rigs bring them to regional Sortation Centers, which separate the packages by zip code for transfer to USPS or to Amazon Delivery Stations, which put them directly in the hands of Amazon Flex drivers or Amazon Delivery Service Partners for the final leg of the journey inside a personal vehicle or van.
sensors, and artificial intelligence ensure that everything’s in its right place from the moment the goods leave their trailers and enter the enormous, semi-automated merry-go-round of bins and conveyor belts, which loop for miles within the 900,000-squarefoot facility. The Fulfillment Center, which in a 24hour period can process hundreds of thousands of Amazon orders, has 2,000 human employees, but the size of the building makes their presence feel sparse. They load and unload the trucks, store the goods upon receipt, and retrieve them when sales occur, at which point they box them for shipping – essentially, they perform nearly all the tasks that we traditionally associate with warehouse labor. Amazon Robotics just helps them do it a lot faster.
Labor issues
Friendly robots
In the media, the Fulfillment Centers have produced horror stories of inhumane productivity quotas, tightly rationed bathroom breaks, relentless surveillance, union busting, stolen wages, and workplace safety violations (such as excessive heat). Surviving on public assistance despite mandatory overtime, underpaid Amazon employees organized last year and won a $15 minimum wage for all of the company’s US workers, who also can qualify for employer-subsidized health insurance and tuition assistance for community college or trade school. But worker injuries and even deaths, including suicides, have continued. In 2018, Amazon began to pay a few of its employees a little extra to form a pro-Amazon Twitter brigade and tell everyone, in a social media style reminiscent of Russian bots, how much they loved their jobs.
The main difference is that they don’t have to haul the merchandise from one side of the warehouse to another anymore or even keep track of where it is. Instead, they operate fixed stations for “stowing” and “picking,” and all-knowing Roomba-style robots – each of which can hold 1,500 pounds – come to them, bearing mobile storage units (about seven feet tall) where workers can place incoming goods or fetch outgoing goods. Computer screens tell them where to place the merchandise and then where to find it within the multi-shelved unit, which automatically registers all additions and removals.
I suspected that the Fulfillment Center tour would have the same creepy flavor, and it does, but to be honest, it’s a great tour anyway. I highly recommend it: it even comes with a parting gift, a stainless steel water bottle that, without the emblazoned Amazon logo, would probably go for $15 online. It presents an implausibly sunny view of Amazon as a workplace – I have no doubt that it sucks for the workers, who have to pass through airport-level security just to get in or out – but the operation itself truly is spectacular. While postindustrial America still hosts pockets of niche manufacturing, the Amazon Fulfillment Center is like visiting industrial China: the high-tech, hyper-efficient hell of the future. Some kind of home base of supercomputers – whose unfathomable algorithms, every time you click the buy button on your browser, determine the fastest possible homeward path for your purchase among myriad potential routes within a national logistics network – appears to control every movement inside the fully linked-up Fulfillment Center in Edison. Ubiquitous bar codes, motion
The slightly wobbly storage units look like something a college kid would buy from Target for their first apartment. With a (probably false) appearance of precariousness, they balance on top of the robots, which, moving like oversized hockey pucks along the warehouse floor, shuffle them from one place to another, depending on which products customers are clicking on at home. Without bumping into one another, the robots navigate tight spaces with a nearly choreographic grace. On the whole, Amazon’s machines, for all the menace of the company itself, have an oddly likable, almost whimsical quality – especially the slightly fussy automatic label applier, which, with a delicate puff of air, stamps the packages without touching them. Despite my discomfort at gawking, I kept surveying the workers for signs of discontent, but presumably the managers warn them to be on their best behavior when visitors enter the building, and the well-rehearsed, personable employee leading my group of about 10 retirees wore an impenetrable shell of good cheer. She mentioned that all workers get two 30-minute breaks during their 10-hour shifts (full-timers typically work four days a week). Management had partitioned off one corner of the Fulfillment Center as a semi-private prayer area, with several rugs on the floor.
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The facility – 16 football fields inside a gray box – was noisy (some workers wore earplugs), but on a hot day outside, the temperature was comfortable. If Thor Equities really decides to build a last-mile distribution center at 280 Richards Street, it could be bigger than the building in Edison: the zoning allows for 1,333,200 square feet, and because it would function not in the fashion of a suburban Amazon Fulfillment Center (which transfers packages to semi-trailer trucks) but as an enlarged Delivery Station (which passes them off to smaller home delivery vans), the facility would almost certainly generate significantly more freight trips per day. It sounds chaotic, and for the sake of the workers, I hope at least that the architect in Red Hook decides to let a little more natural light into the building than the one in Edison did. For its part, Amazon officially has no workers; it has “associates” – presumably because work sucks, or at least it does within the bleak economic arrangement where people have to sell their labor 10 hours at a time for the purpose of enriching the world’s wealthiest man or else face homelessness. Work becomes more than a means to ward off starvation when the workers have a stake in what they’re building, but in cases of wage slavery, it’s probably safer (from a PR perspective) to mystify what’s going on. Even so, human labor thus far remains essential inside the Fulfillment Centers. Unless the self-driving trucks (for long hauls) and aerial drones (for lastmile distribution) of the future turn out to be nothing but hype, Amazon and other forward-thinking logistics providers may eliminate their delivery drivers before they can do away with their warehouse “associates” – which would be a relief to all the homeowners in Red Hook, who, in their concern over new traffic in the neighborhood, might be willing to tolerate instead a mildly annoying buzzing overhead.
October 2019, Page 9
Land issues in Sunset Park threaten councilman (continued from page 7)
iting fact of modern life in New York that the city hardly ever builds its own parks or schools anymore. Who has the money for such things? Well, developers do – and when they come to the city for a land-use change in order to put up a taller skyscraper than zoning allows, the city tells them to construct a park or a school, too, in exchange for the favor. In this way, the city loses control of its own infrastructure. Instead of a central body allocating public works projects across the city according to need, local councilmen snag infrastructural upgrades for their districts by striking deals with developers, which in turn cough up acts of public charity – say, a renovated subway station – that, of course, turn out in many cases to be necessities for the future tenants of their buildings. What happens to the areas in the which developers have no interest? They’re forgotten. And what happens to the areas in which they do have interest? They begin to change, and unsurprisingly, the changes always seem to end up taking the shape of the developer’s will, not the public’s, no matter how hard the elected officials negotiated. A “free” school sounds like a good deal, but it’s not really free; it’s paid for by dollars that
the city could have already extracted through taxation and used for its own democratically determined purposes (maybe a school, maybe something else). What the loudest members of the crowd in Sunset Park wanted on September 16 was for Carlos Menchaca to reject, categorically, the dominant model of development in New York City. By doing so, he would’ve scandalized some, who take a commonsense view on planning, and would’ve inspired others, who believe there can be power in saying no even when the costs are clearer than the alternate path forward. Instead, he found a middle ground. Understandably, Menchaca would like to avoid earning a reputation as a sellout without gaining one as an obstructionist – it’s a fine line he’s trying to walk, and right now it doesn’t look like he’s doing it very successfully (people are calling him a sellout and an obstructionist simultaneously). But despite the grim realism of his presentation at Sunset Park High School, refusing a rezoning at Industry City wouldn’t have to mean political inaction.
A different idea Sunset Park residents distrusted the Industry City proposal in large part because they doubted the value of increased retail development on their historically industrial waterfront: new shops and restaurants at Industry City would drive up rents nearby by making the neighborhood attractive to yuppies and tourists, but it wouldn’t provide high-paying union jobs. What
residents wanted was manufacturing work. Menchaca’s plan would force the developer to commit a small portion of Industry City to manufacturing in exchange for a moderate retail bonus. Without a rezoning, the developer could add retail (though not as much of it) without adding any manufacturing unless it wanted to. But if Industry City is currently zoned for manufacturing, why isn’t it required to use all of its space for manufacturing as things stand? The answer lies in New York City’s permissive 1961 Zoning Resolution. 58 years ago, planners could hardly have imagined that white-collar firms would want to locate their offices in Gowanus or that fancy food courts would pop up in Bush Terminal, crowding out industry in longtime industrial neighborhoods. In order to avoid noise complaints and environmental hazards, manufacturing zones don’t permit residential uses, but they do allow for offices and most retail uses – after all, in 1961, what was the harm, when the demand for such uses was so low in industrial areas? Things have changed, obviously, but the Zoning Resolution hasn’t changed with them. If New York City truly wanted to preserve and expand its manufacturing, it would have to change the zoning rules to ensure that properties in manufacturing zones devote at least a significant portion of their floor area to industrial uses. UPROSE has advocated precisely for such a revision. Some cities, like San Francisco, have already written new
laws of this nature (although generally they apply only in specially designated planning districts, not in all manufacturing zones). Without Carlos Menchaca, Red Hook today might look a lot more like Williamsburg, and for his steadfastness here he deserves recognition. But if he seriously envisions Industry City as a valuable employer of working-class people and a source of stability – not disruption – for Sunset Park, he might do more for that vision by addressing the underlying problem in City Council. Instead of negotiating with the developer, pushing for a zoning code amendment could have been the bigger, braver fight that some of his constituents wanted – a refusal to give in without giving up.
Socialist Dems to protest Trump-based profiteering Activists and tech workers alike have pushed for Salesforce and Amazon to end their contracts with ICE and CBP, yet these companies refuse to end their profiteering off constant state-led violence against immigrants. The NY Democratic Socialist Party will meet outside the New York Public Library at 4 pm on Friday, October 11th to join in a civil action protesting these corporate activities. The march will last until 7 pm. The library is at Fifth Avenue and 41st Street, New York City.
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Page 10 Red Hook Star-Revue
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October 2019
Red Hook's homegrown climate strike
I
nspired by the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, students around the world left school on September 20 to protest for dramatic political action to address the climate crisis – including elementary school kids from all the Red Hook schools and the Brooklyn New School.
The PS 676 fourth and fifth grades attended a local rally at Coffey Park, and there were also eight fourth- and fifthgraders who marched over the Brooklyn Bridge with Borough President Eric Adams. Climate change awareness directly links to ecological aspects of the school’s new maritime theme. Fourth- and fifth-grade English Language Arts (ELA) teacher Jennifer Thomas said that the students started doing research on Monday, and then on Tuesday they started work on their signs for the climate strike. “They colored during breakfast in the cafeteria and a few of them wanted to stay during recess and work on the signs,” Thomas said. “That says a lot when kids want to work during their breakfast time and during recess to make signs for this.” Some of the signs said: “You are wasting too much electricity,” “Save the planet,” “Act now or swim later,” “We will respect the planet even if adults do not,” “If this was not a problem we would be in school,” and “We should not have to rally for this cause.” Students explored many different climate change-related issues leading up to Friday’s strike. Assistant Speaker of the New York State Assembly Felix Ortiz came to Thomas’s class on Wednesday to speak with the students and lead group activities. “Since we are a maritime STEAM school, most of the research has been centered around how climate change impacts the ocean,” Thomas said.
by Nathan Weiser
“Today they held signs they made, marched, listened to activists speak, met Carlos Menchaca and danced. They were really excited about being activists in Red Hook.” Tim Heintz, who teaches third- to fifth-graders, led the eight PS 676 students on the march over the Brooklyn Bridge. The kids who came with Heintz were ones he had a close rapport with and ones he knew would take the march over the Brooklyn Bridge seriously. “We had a fabulous time,” Heintz said. “We were definitely one of the younger schools there. A lot of high schools were there. Brooklyn Tech came out in great numbers, but everybody was welcoming. They were encouraging us and happy to see us.” “They supported us in our chant, we supported them, and it was a wonderful opportunity,” Heintz continued. “Everybody out there was working together towards the same goal, and it was evident.” The PS 676 kids took the train to Borough Hall, walked over the bridge, and then walked to Pier 11 at Wall Street to take the NYC Ferry back to Red Hook. They enjoyed seeing the ship their school partners with, the Mary Whalen, on the way back, and sitting on the top deck of the ferry after all their walking. In addition to learning about climate change, students gained a better understanding of how to bring public attention to their political concerns. “They can use their voice and be activists in elementary school and make a difference in their community and their world,” Thomas said. “It was important for Principal Figueroa to validate that for the students and for the students to know she supported their activism.”
YATES (continued from page 3) Wood, without producing much revenue, manages still to occupy a swath of land larger than the entire adjacent neighborhood of Windsor Terrace. But law doesn’t guarantee their permanence: the New York City Administrative Code details the process by which the city, having acquired the title to a cemetery, can remove its dead and relocate them, as long it has provided public notice (in two newspapers) and gained the permission of the local branch of the New York Supreme Court. According to the Administrative Code, reinterments must take place within the county where the preceding exhumations took place, or in a county with which it shares a border (this may require a revision eventually). That means that New York City can’t ship its dead out to Montana. But not all land within the New York metropolitan area has equal use value. Since about 1870, taxpayers have funded a mass grave on uninhabited Hart’s Island in the Bronx for city residents whose families can’t afford burials. The Department of Corrections offers a ferry to the public potter’s field three times a month, demanding reservations in advance. Considered an ignominious resting place by some, Hart’s Island really should be a model: we all should be willing to get out of the way once we’re gone. Hart’s Island
Red Hook Star-Revue
Red Hook school children created their own psters and created their own protest. These kids are from PS 676. (Photo by Erin DeGregorio)
Assistant Speaker Ortiz and the parents of the PS 676 students were supportive of the kids participating. “These are all adult issues that they are preparing for,” Heintz said. “To start thinking about these things now is only going to help their future.” PS 15 also had some of their students attend the strike. According to school faculty, the fifth grade went to the strike since they are the oldest in the school.
need to stop burning fossil fuels.” A PS 15 fifth-grade homeroom teacher reflected on the significance of the strike for the kids. “This is their future in Red Hook, especially since they’re vulnerable [by virtue of Red Hook’s geography],” Mr. Coleman said. “I think it’s important for them to know about climate change and the way it’ll affect their future.”
The fifth grade from PS 15 was the earliest to get to Coffey Park, arriving at 11:15 am with homemade signs. Their chants included: “In with the Green New Deal, out with the green house gases!” and “Do we want construction? No more destruction!” Jeylani Thomas, a fifth-grader at PS 15, spoke on stage with her classmates. “I want to change adults’ minds about climate change,” she said. “I think we
already houses a million souls, but there are plenty of untouched islands in Jamaica Bay, too small to warrant bridges, where other kinds of development appear unlikely. Of course, there’s a political question here: would New Yorkers ever allow their public officials to carry out such a plan? New York may have been a rough place in the 19th century, but in a civilized society, aren’t the dead sacrosanct? Who would let the city build on top of Grandma? Maybe I’m crazy, but I perceive a possible upside to the largely unseemly way in which America seems recently to have shed its pieties. A few years ago, for instance, it would have seemed impossible that a U.S. president of either party could have an extramarital affair with a porn star, pay for her silence, and retain the unwavering support of the Christian right. Maybe the concerns of America’s Moral Majority were never real, but hardly anybody feels compelled even to pretend anymore. They seek only their own advantage; any capitulation to moral rectitude would slow them down in battle. In New York, the battle is for cheaper rent. I think there are few niceties – including the undisturbed dignity of the dead – that we wouldn’t sacrifice for it. Sometimes the pragmatic attitude is the right one. That said, New York’s aforementioned “housing crisis” is really a misnomer. It is in fact an affordability crisis. True, the city hasn’t built enough housing in
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recent years, but more significantly, much of the housing it has built has gone unused: the New York Times reported in September that, of the 16,200 condos constructed since 2013, one quarter remain unsold. Who knows how many more, purchased as second or third homes for the rich or simply as financial investments, stay empty night after night? If we adopted an approach to housing that prioritized getting people into homes instead of generating profits for the real estate industry, we might build more wisely instead of simply building more: increased supply doesn’t help much if it’s not supplying what we need, and so far, we haven’t had the courage to look beyond the market for supply. If we demolish a cemetery for the sake of more luxury condos, it won’t be a win for anyone except the cruelest YIMBYs. I still think we should demolish them. At the southeastern end of in-demand Bushwick, Evergreen Cemetery holds hostage 225 acres directly beside the L, J/Z, and A/C trains. What is it doing there? Someday, when New York truly has run out of space, we’ll have to do something about this, and when we do, perhaps the lingering sense of impropriety over our disrespect for the dead will compel us to make something good out of something “bad”: not another Hudson Yards-style monstrosity but a pleasant, walkable, green community where ordinary people can live in comfort and afford to pay the rent. Starting from scratch, we’d have a chance to do it right.
October 2019, Page 11
LGBTQ community wondering why it took so long to arrest a predator of black men
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he thirst for gratification, validation, and power often leads many men, prominent and not, to destroy their own lives as well as the lives of others. The story of Ed Buck and his victims is one that involves wealth, deadly fetishes, meth, and racism. Here’s what you need to know. Fetish: a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc. A fetish by definition isn’t by definition a bad thing, abnormal perhaps, but not necessarily wrong or harmful. However, what makes a fetish harmful and, in the case of Ed Buck’s victims, deadly, is the coupling of a fetish with dehumanization. Edward Bernard Peter Buckmelter (Ed Buck) is a wealthy American entrepreneur who began his career as a fashion model and actor in Europe, and earned the lion’s share of his early wealth through a courier company he acquired in the early 1980s. Buck, who has resided in Los Angeles for nearly three decades, has reportedly donated over $120,000 to Democratic organizations and politicians over the last 27 years (according to opensecrets.org). Today, however, he is most known for his misuse of meth, money and the bestialization of black gay men. In 2017 Gemmel Moore (26) would become Ed Buck’s first publicly known victim. Originally from Texas, Gemmel moved to West Hollywood (WeHo), California, and quickly found himself struggling to survive. Gemmel and Buck would meet via a popular dating app. Buck had money, and Gemmel unfortunately, fit his ideal profile – black, queer and poor. For Ed Buck, the gratification wasn’t strictly “sexual,” he also enjoyed injecting black men with methamphetamine, getting them addicted and watching them overdose. LaTisha Nixon, Gemmel’s mother, details her last in-person conversation with her son in an interview in PartyBoi, a chilling documentary showcasing the meth issue in the Black and Latinx queer community by Michael Rice. “I couldn’t believe how he looked. Gemmel tells me this man likes to take pictures of him in white long johns.
By Roderick Thomas
He said, ‘Mom, he likes to shoot me up with meth and watch me. He likes to do this to black men. Mom, I don’t like it.’ I begged Gemmel to stay with me, but I couldn’t convince him.” Excerpts from Gemmel’s diary show a young man struggling mentally and physically, as his connection with Buck grew more dependent and dangerous. I honestly don’t know what to do. I’ve become addicted to drugs and the worst one at that. Ed Buck is the one to thank, he gave me my first injection of crystal meth. – Gemmel Moore. Despite his attempts to alert authorities, Gemmel’s reports went uninvestigated. On July 27, 2017, Gemmel’s body was found lifeless in Ed Buck’s Screenshots of Damar Love (friend of Gemmel Moore) and Ed Buck allegedly at Buck's West Hollywood apartment – pornog- home, summer of 2017. raphy playing in the background, syringes and sex toys littering the space. what are we missing? gender traditions and sexual represHis death was ruled accidental by the Our culture is comfortable lying to it- sion, via themed parties, uninhibited coroner, and prosecutors declined to self. We don’t tell the truth about the sexual experiences, and drug use has file charges (insufficient evidence). things that matter the most. Ed Buck created new – and compounded old – On January 7, 2019, Timothy Dean is a symptom of a patriarchal society toxic norms. (African American), a fashion consul- that normalizes and tolerates rape According to the CDC’s National Intant and athlete was found dead in Ed culture and racism. How many peo- timate Partner and Sexual Violence Buck’s West Hollywood apartment. ple saw Ed Buck leave parties or clubs Survey, 40 percent of gay men and 47 As in the case of Gemmel Moore, Ed with vulnerable men? How many percent of bisexual men have experiBuck was present during the death. people knew before any reported enced sexual violence other than rape Coroners determined that the cause deaths and did nothing? (compared to 21 percent of heteroof Timothy’s death was of meth toxicThe LGBTQ community, ostracized as sexual men). ity, but also accidental. it may be by most factions of society, Stories like Ed Buck using hopes and On September 11, 2019, an unnamed still participates in patriarchy. The dreams of young men to gain access African American man had been ad- homophobia, racism, and misogyny to their bodies aren’t isolated. How ministered (by Ed Buck) deadly doses that exist on the opposite side of the many people casually praised Ed for of methamphetamine in Ed Buck’s rainbow also thrive within LGBTQ so- his harem of drugged black men? apartment. The unnamed man re- ciety. Locker room talk, anyone? Our sitting portedly fought Buck to flee the apartIt’s like watching light bend due to hy- president can have multiple sexual ment, believing he was overdosing. per-pressurized trauma. Black male assault cases launched against him, The man called 911 from a nearby bodies (black bodies in general) have brag about grabbing women’s genilocation and received medical treatbeen historically and currently are up talia, and we the people elected him. ment for a meth overdose. The unfor consumption, not respect – run Who could have stopped Ed Buck earnamed man is Buck’s first publicly faster, jump higher, fuck longer. The lier? known survivor. same reason you fetishize the black Buck is reportedly in federal cusOn September 17, 2019, after two male body is the same reason he is tody without bail until trial, facing a publicly known deaths at Ed Buck’s killed or shot. Trayvon Martin, a six- minimum of 20 years in prison, and apartment and three known meth foot, 160-pound teenager, and Tamir a maximum life sentence on federal overdose incidents, Ed Buck was ar- Rice, 12 years old, were branded big charges. rested. Buck has been charged by the and black, both murdered. Our culThis is a deeply rooted societal issue: state of California and the federal gov- ture fetishizes and dehumanizes the we need to remodel our norms. Stop ernment for his involvement in the black body. asking what someone was wearing overdose of the unnamed survivor Human beings often use escapism to when you hear about an assault unand the death of Gemmel Moore. cope with trauma. The black LGBTQ less you think there are “rape-approNow, let’s talk about how this hap- community is exceptionally great at priate” outfits. Stop blaming victims, pens. Ed Buck acted with malicious- creating fantasy and entertainment. stop being silent, change your mind, ness and impunity, he is a current-day But outlets aren’t solutions; they are change the culture, set a new stanJeffrey Dahmer, true. While it’s easy expressions and coping mechanisms. dard. to leave our conclusions and sympa- Unfortunately, for generations of thies there, we have to ask ourselves, queer folk, the departure from some
The LGBTQ community, ostracized as it may be by most factions of society, still participates in patriarchy. The homophobia, racism, and misogyny that exist on the opposite side of the rainbow also thrive within LGBTQ society. Page 12 Red Hook Star-Revue
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October 2019
Movie review: ‘Ad Astra’ By Caleb Drickey
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“ pace,” goes the Star Trek refrain, “is the final frontier.” With terrestrial limits all but explored, it comes as no great shock that filmmakers from Kubrick to Christopher Nolan to Claire Denis have time and again tested the limits of their storytelling prowess in the stars. Implicit in the infinite vacuum is the promise of better and more interesting worlds, of just societies and selfless heroes and swords (!!!) made of lasers (!!!!!). However, to immerse oneself in a new world, one must abandon the old. In his 2016 film The Lost City of Z, director James Gray examined the casual cruelties and structural brutalities that drive explorers away from their homes and families in search of something better. In Ad Astra, Gray shifts his gaze to those left behind, with disappointing results. Major Roy McBride, played by Brad Pitt, lives in the shadow of his giant. Although himself a decorated astronaut, his father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) was the greatest spacefarer to ever live, leading expeditions to Jupiter and Saturn before disappearing soon after his son’s 16th birthday on a mission to locate intelligent alien life. 37 years later, Roy is ordered to track his father down after a mysterious power surge provides evidence of the elder McBride’s survival. Pitt plays McBride as the quintessential soldierscientist: courageous, insightful, equally adept at gunplay and rocketship piloting. Most importantly, McBride is a stoic, determined to weigh duty over his own emotions. This choice comes as no surprise; the defining traits of Pitt’s later-career persona are his stillness and his aura of unflappable cool. In Moneyball, Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he moves slowly or not at all, breaking only occasionally to crack a smirk or a snarl. Without speaking, he emits charm, menace, and melancholy, and forces his scene partners to react to him, never vice versa.
Roy McBride is no Billy Beane or Jesse James. His apparent calm is pure pretense. When provided with information about the father he both idolizes and resents, he reacts. With every fidget in his chair, clench of his jaw, twitch of an eyebrow, or half-choked sob, he betrays his fractured emotional state. It’s a restrained, monumental performance, one that ranks with the best of Pitt’s career. However, not even Brad Pitt at his best can save James Gray and co-writer Ethan Gross from their own portentous screenplay. The film spends the bulk of its running time propelling Pitt and his assortment of underwritten companions from one unconvincing peril to another. These fellow travelers, played respectively by Donald Sutherland, Sean Blakemore, Donnie Keshawarz, and Ruth Negga, function mostly as mindless archetypes who must die in order to further alienate Major McBride from the Earth he left.
understanding and hinders the development of true empathy. And so, despite its occasional brilliance, Ad Astra makes the universe feel colder and less human. It’s a failure, but Gray at least proves that the search for something grander hinders the appreciation of something that’s pretty good. Ad Astra is playing at most major first-run cinemas, including Cobble Hill Cinema, Williamsburg Cinemas, and Nitehawk Prospect Park.
2/4 stars.
Gray’s most self-sabotaging choice is his liberal employment of voiceover. The bulk of this narration concerns McBride’s battle with his father’s legacy and his own emotional deterioration, which he hides from every other character of the film. However, Pitt’s expressive performance renders these verbalizations unnecessary. Gray also uses voiceover to explain his own visual metaphors. In one especially frustrating sequence, as an underwater Brad Pitt pulls himself towards a looming black chasm, he says, “I’m being pulled down the same dark hole” that tore his father away from the world. Ad Astra reveals the destructiveness of mindless exploration and argues that salvation can only be found in the embrace of an imperfect humanity. However, Gray’s use of voiceover undermines this thesis. Gray apparently does not trust his audience to read the anguish in Pitt’s face, or to draw connections between the thoughts and experiences of father and son. In explicitly explaining these moments, Gray robs the audience of interpersonal discovery and
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October 2019, Page 13
An attempt to organize Red Hook's do-gooders
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By Nathan Weiser
ummit Academy founder Natasha Campbell is frustrated by low community turnout at the many local events that are intended to be a service to the neighborhood. She invited Red Hook residents to a school meeting to talk about working together.
At the school meeting, a group of parents, Summit school representatives, elected officials and representatives from community organizations split into three groups to brainstorm ideas for the future.
“When you have a million people working on the same project for different organizations, there is little collaboration and what happens is no one has a great event because there are 20 great events happening on the same day or meeting in the same week,” Campbell said. “It has been our dream to figure out how we start working collectively.”
One group was led by Falinia Adkins, the special projects coordinator at Summit. One of their ideas was a community town hall so that everyone would have an opportunity to voice what they would like to see happening.
“Last year Janet Andrews did a phenomenal father and daughter dance at the school,” Campbell said. “The turnout was low for all the energy that went into it. She catered food from local restaurants. The reason there was a low turnout was because three other organizations threw barbecues for the same thing, celebrating dads and kids.” Summit’s goal is to replace competition with collaboration among Red Hook’s various organizations. “The vision is for partnering to bring opportunities to the community versus everyone having their own moment.”
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Participants assemble for a group photo. Among those pictured are Felix Ortiz, Karen Broughton, Carolina Salguera, Melissa Del Valle Ortiz, and Natasha Campbell. (photo by Nathan Weiser)
Group Two, which included a representative from IKEA, brought forth the idea of a toy drive. It was originally discussed to do this collaborative toy drive during the holidays but since not everybody celebrates Christmas the decision was to do it on Valentines Day. The third group included the Red Hook Initiative and PortSide, Carolina Salguero’s nonprofit organization that supports the red oil tanker sitting in Atlantic Basin. It was proposed that a community Google calendar be created with all community organizations so that everyone can know what is happening (this could also prevent similar events). Also, that a meet-and-
greet that is currently hosted by RHI and the Justice Center be conducted more than once a year at different youth organizations. The local assemblymember, Assistant Speaker Felix Ortiz, made sure everyone knew that he has supported Summit since their inception. “You try to help the best you can schools you think will perform well and this was one of them,” Ortiz said. “We need to concentrate on how we can make our children do better. I speak with the teachers, the principal and the parents and ask them what you think are the most important needs of the school.”
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“The vision is for partnering to bring opportunities to the community versus everyone having their own moment.”
October 2019
Empty Stages at the Whitney by George Grella
Jason Moran is at the Whitney, and it doesn’t seem right.
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ot that he doesn’t deserve such an honor, nor that jazz should not be recognized by our important institutions – Moran should be celebrated as widely as Bob Dylan or Beyoncé, and jazz should be at the forefront of American culture, every day of the week, all year round. So a great American musician given a show at a museum for great American art should be a natural fit, a site for the realization of meaning in the branding and synergy that administrators and marketing people chase like cats following a laser pointer along a wall. But Moran is a musician, the Whitney a museum, the alchemy between the two as tricky to pull off us, well, alchemy. The Whitney has shown it can be done, they did it with their exhibit devoted to the late, great free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. That show collected and displayed archives, in terms of objects like photographs, scores, Taylor’s writing, and used those to inform a series of performances. It was like going to the symphony, reading in the program book about the composers and the music, and with that context enjoying the performance that much more. But that is not how the Jason Moran show is organized or presented. There is a schedule of performances slated that should excite any jazz fan and that promise to be some of the best jazz shows of the fall. As music, those just need a bandstand and space for the audience, that is they can happen at the Village Vanguard, or Zankel Hall, or Roulette, they don’t require a museum exhibit. And as an exhibit, Jason Moran is disappointing, it feels like a gift the Whitney has given to the pianist, full of specific, personal satisfactions and insider-ish details, but as something for the public it is thin, small, and feels more like polite salesmanship than a display of insight and revelation. As Moran and curator Adrienne Edwards described at a press preview, the installation STAGED (the main work in the exhibition) represented stages, places where musicians were on the bandstand in front of audiences. Those were carved out of three spots in the single main room, three discrete sites representing the Savoy Ballroom (Savoy Ballroom 1), the Three Deuces (Three Deuces), and Slugs’ Saloon (Slugs’ Saloon). Those are three famous jazz spots, long passed away. Big bands and small groups played there and literally made history. Very little of that history is preserved (none of it in this show), as this was music made in the moment, improvised. Unless a recording had been arranged ahead of time, no one thought of posterity. Details of the music perhaps stuck in the minds and muscle memories of dancers and listeners and musicians, but mostly what remained were the sensations of those nights, musicians trying to recreate them, audiences trying to hunt them down again. None of that is at the Whitney, but then none of it could be. Those moments only existed in time, and they are lost, as Roy Batty said, like tears in rain. Instead there is a miniature ballroom bandshell, its stage empty, a player baby grand piano, bass, and drum kit standing in for the Three Deuces, and a self-consciously staged depiction of Slugs’, with player piano, jukebox, and overturned chair, as if it had been a rowdy night. (Moran, who was born in 1975, never played any of the rooms.) The absolute literalness of the titles assumes that the viewer knows what these places meant, but Jason Moran gives very little information to anyone without prior experience with jazz. Music plays in
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the exhibit; the player piano reproduces Moran’s playing, and there are video and still projections that show bits of his career and musicians who have informed his work. The overall diffidence feels wrong for a museum show and for Moran’s very public-facing music. The music is all canned, as is an odd and jejune video by Stan Douglas, Luanda-Kinshasa. It depicts an imaginary recording session, circa the era of Miles Davis’s Live-Evil album (1971). A handheld camera glides through a recording studio as a band (featuring Moran, who composed the music) plays a looping, funky vamp. The most interesting part of the whole thing is the care that went into it, all the detailed period hairstyles and clothes, lots of paisley and sideburns, and the tableau vivant of squares at the margins; an engineer in a workman’s jumpsuit, a dude taking still photos, a young woman citing notes or a clipboard. The film stock has the bright, soft colors of the era, the music has none of the hip edge and The bandstand at the seminal East Village club Slugs is recreated for the exhibit. freedom of Live-Evil, it sounds like a sophisticated suburban Bandwagon, in the Hess Family Theater (Decemdad band, pleased with its own skill but lacking ber 19 to 21). Go for the music. anything more than an idle purpose. It’s not even in the pocket. There are a few more things; an abstract film loop by Glenn Ligon that might show better in a different context but that seems ornamental here, some manuscript paper examples of Moran’s sketches and notation, a few of his abstract drawings which show nothing other than he’s tried his hand at that craft.
Jason Moran runs at the Whitney through January 5, 2020.
From start to end, the stages are empty. These are spaces for people to gather and partake in the social activity of music making, but at the Whitney there is no one inside them – we stand in the gallery, looking at objects from which we are supposed to keep a proper distance. It’s a museum, after all, and that’s how it works in museums.
Jason Moran, Thanksgiving at the Village Vanguard (Yes)
The show left the feeling of a wake, a tribute to a dead man and a dead music. Moran, of course, is very much alive – as is jazz, thankfully – and one of his greatest qualities as a musician is compressing time into a single, eternal now. When he plays, the history of jazz (and jazz’ own roots) comes alive and becomes relevant. The meaning of the blues, the sensuousness of stride, the beauty of Brahms Intermezzo Op. 118, No. 2, are revealed as constant and eternal to the human condition.
Charles Lloyd, Manhattan Stories (Resonance)
And that all is the part of the show that will work and is guaranteed to be a hit. Performances began at the end of September, and notable sets include Fay Victor with Darius Jones and Christopher Hoffman, October 19; Oliver Lake on October 25 and 26; and Joanna Brackeen, November 22 and 23 (all in the eighth floor gallery). Moran and Kara Walker will install a steam calliope which they call Katastwôf Karavan, outdoors on October 22. The performances culminate with three straight nights of concerts from Moran’s spectacular trio, The
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Recommended discography: Jason Moran, Modernistic (Blue Note) Jason Moran, The Bandwagon (Blue Note) Jason Moran, Artist In Residence (Blue Note)
Chick Webb and his Savoy Ballroom Orchestra, The King of Drums (Tax) Roy Eldridge, Live! At the Three Deuces Club, 1937 (Jazz Archives)
The real Slugs, which was on East 3rd between Avenue B and C, closed in 1972.
October 2019, Page 15
Three gallery shows to check out by Piotr Pillardy
With fall here, there is an overwhelming number of shows to visit throughout all five boroughs. This month I’m focusing on galleries in the Bowery and Tribeca with shows featuring art that defies traditional categorization.
Show: Wyatt Kahn Gallery: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Duration: Sept. 7th through Oct. 20 Hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm; Sunday, 12pm to 6pm; or by appointment. Address: 39 Great Jones Street, New York, NY For fans of art that is neither a painting nor a sculpture but something in between, the new Wyatt Kahn exhibition is a must see. Hosted at New York City- and Zurich-based Galerie Eva Presenhuber in the Bowery, it is the fourth solo exhibition for the artist with this gallery. Much of the work featured in the show is neither strictly sculpture nor painting but an amalgam of both. Many small painted canvases are assembled in interesting configurations, fitting together like a puzzle. According to the gallery’s press release, these objects – comprised of sheets of lead, oil stick, and shaped canvases – represent people in the artist’s circle. Kahn’s works in the exhibition vary, ranging from the shaped canvas painting/sculptures to framed drawings of similar abstracted geometric forms. This lends an aesthetic continuity to the body of work. Some of the art has pristinely painted surfaces, seeming to eliminate the hand of the artist, while others have rougher applications of paint or oil sticks. These art objects follow in the footsteps of Frank Stella’s shaped canvases, while simultaneously evoking the exploration of materiality and process central to postminimalists like Eva Hesse. The exhibition is split into sections, with one on the ground floor’s white cube space and the other in a downstairs room with a concrete floor, changing the viewer’s experience with the works.
Show: Juan Antonio Olivares, Naufragios Gallery: Bortolami Duration: Sept. 6th through Oct. 19th Hours: Monday through Friday, 10 am to 6 pm or by appointment. Address: 55 Walker Street, New York, NY The next show I recommend continues with the theme of artwork that defies strict characterization of its medium. His first show following a 2018 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Juan Antonio Olivares’ Naufragios at Bortolami in Tribeca does not disappoint. It consists of a mix of a 24-channel sound-sculpture as part of the artist’s Fermi Paradox series and graphite drawings. The series is a response to Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, and his work on attempting to explain the paradox of how the human race has yet to make contact with extraterrestrial life. The sound sculptural work, Fermi Paradox III, is made up of speakers suspended from the ceiling with hidden surface-transducers. These speakers are hidden within various seashells, sponges, and urchins, and embedded within the wall. Each plays different pieces of audio as the viewer weaves through the installation. These clips, which comprise a 13-minute loop, range from Stephen Hawking talking about the possibility of extraterrestrials, to George Harrison demos, to recited poetry and narrated conspiracy theories. Taken together, the work creates an immersive and dynamic arrangement of sound as the viewer wanders and explores the space. Olivares chose shells for the series because of their otherworldly yet distinctly terrestrial appearance. The piece as a whole simultaneously invokes a feeling of loneliness in the viewer as well as the tangible hope of yearning for contact with the unknown.
Show: Diana Cooper, Sightings Gallery: Postmasters Gallery Duration: Sept. 7 through Oct. 12 Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm, Thursday hours extended 11am – 8pm Address: 54 Franklin Street, New York, NY
Like the other two shows, Brooklyn-based artist Diana Cooper’s new show at Postmasters Gallery fits with the category-defying artistic theme. In Sightings, the artist ruminates on technological and information systems through multimedia works that are also not quite sculpture or painting. These works, all hung on the wall as if paintings, extend into the space with their various elements, very much becoming sculptures. This is evident in works such as Astral Life (2018-2019), which incorporates an inkjet print, corrugated plastic, foam, metal hardware, and a mini plastic traffic cone, among other materials. According to the gallery, the piece was inspired by an elevator ride the artist took in Shanghai and explores the duality of the elevator, as a space both claustrophobic and full of opportunity. Like sculptures, some of the works’ materials jut off of the wall and out into the space, adding a third dimension to normally wall-bound two-dimensional canvases. Other works, such as Family Safe (2019), are an assemblage of individual items consisting of PVC, paper, glitter, and felt, which take up space on the gallery floor, not just the walls. See the show soon before it closes on October 12!
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October 2019
‘Under Covers’ helps mighty oak grow by Dante A. Ciampaglia
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international festivals, been highlighted as a Vimeo Staff Pick, and been given installation space at the Radical Film Fair, an event held at Kickstarter’s Greenpoint headquarters in September.
Peterson says. “Curiosity is something that runs through all of us, and that’s a big part of how you grow. And then community has been really helpful, so that also came into play.”
Not a bad nine months for Olsen and her film – and, likewise, her partners at Mighty Oak, an animation and design studio based in Carroll Gardens where Olsen is Creative Director. In fact, the success of Under Covers is a kind of microcosm of Mighty Oak’s meteoric growth from a scrappy startup created by two friends four years ago to what is now an in-demand, award-winning firm with a high-octane client list.
The seven-and-half-minute stop-motion animated short, directed by Michaela Olsen, is framed around a voyeuristic moon peeping into half a dozen bedrooms. We enter each room from an overhead, God’s eye view and find someone asleep, the covers pulled up high and tight. When the blankets are pulled back, our expectations are upturned: a blond head turns out to belong to a dozing dog, a dreaming nun receives oral favors from a fellow sister, a sleeping girl is actually a sack with sewn-on pigtails because the real kid was murdered by one of her siblings. And then the beds themselves are flipped, exposing another layer of boudoir mystery: a mermaid cat asleep next to a feline in a banana peel, a dragon-worm living under the floorboards, two crickets chirping in a matchbox.
Located on the second floor of the former Scotto’s Funeral Home complex on 1st Place and Court Street, above a dentist office and Johnny Karate dojo, you could walk by the building every day and be oblivious to the creativity at work. A table is strewn with a graveyard and barnyard made from cookies and frosting for a Lactaid commercial; a nearby life-size pink teddy bear eyes them hungrily. Cardboard is being fashioned into pieces for a series of Unilever spots. Totes of supplies sit alongside walls of tools, racks of materials, and tchotchkes and elements from previous work, like a set from Under Covers sitting atop a file cabinet. And even after 5 pm on a Monday, the space hums: two animators work on a shoot behind a black curtain, while another artist is outside spraypainting a set and CEO Jess Peterson wraps up a client call.
Community helped lead them to creating an Adult Swim promo for last year’s Aquaman film, a Coke spot advertising the Netflix series Stranger Things, a stop-motion segment for HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, and work for Samsung, Planned Parenthood, General Electric, Etsy, and Airbnb. Mighty Oak’s rapid success and unique visual sensibility – handmade animations with a “creepy-cute” aesthetic, as Peterson puts it – led them to making Fast Company’s 2019 list of Most Creative People in Business, with Collins, Olsen, and Peterson clocking in at numbers 39-41 (two spots below Michelle Pfeiffer).
magine, if you can, an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse directed by John Waters. The manic energy of the gray-suited man-child’s retrokitsch house-slash-living-toybox would still rule – talking furniture and beehived visitors feel very on-brand for the Pope of Trash – but it would arrive with a more lacerating, NSFW edge. Miss Yvone might be closer to Waters Dreamlander Divine than heteronormative neighborhood sexpot. The King of Cartoons might bring his wares in brown paper wrappers. And instead of the latest installment in the domestic lives of a mouse-sized dinosaur family that lives inside the Playhouse walls, we’d probably get something like Under Covers.
Under Covers, which Olsen describes as being about the “sweet, spooky, and salacious secrets of a small town,” began as Sleepcrets, a small pop-up book Olsen made as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. (It also feels like an outgrowth of her thesis film, Fuzzy Insides, which similarly peeks in on the various goings on happening behind closed doors.) It took her about six years to complete Under Covers, and it would feel right at home playing before Waters’ A Dirty Shame or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, two films similarly interested in irreverently peeling back the veneer of sleepy suburbia. It’s fitting, then, that it premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in January as part of the Midnight Shorts program. In the months since that high-profile debut, the film has screened at
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Mighty Oak moved into the space in January from its previous studio in Red Hook, near IKEA. But the business began in Carroll Gardens in 2015, in the unused top floor of Peterson’s building. She started the company with Emily Collins, Mighty Oak’s Head of Production, whom she met and collaborated with while managing communications for the Children’s Museum of the Arts in SoHo. (Collins ran the CMA’s stop-motion department, teaching kids and adults how to animate.) Peterson was doing a lot of brand and design work at the time and Collins had animation experience, but as Peterson tells it, Mighty Oak began “with no portfolio or financing.” “We asked a lot of questions” when starting out,
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But it was curiosity that brought Under Covers into Mighty Oak’s orbit. Olsen joined the company six months in, and soon after she was evicted from her Gowanus studio. (It was in the way of a high-rise development.) Peterson found a corner in that first Carroll Gardens space for Olsen to store some materials, which she brought in trash bags. “I peeked in and it was the Under Covers sets,” Peterson remembers. “And I went, ‘What the hell is this?’ She said it was this short she was working on. I said, ‘Finish it here. We’ll help you produce it. We’re going to take it somewhere.’ It looked so wild.” Over the next few years, stealing time here and there and ultimately devoting a chunk of money to the project, the film was finally completed. “Client projects were the priority, but Michaela was going to do this either way,” Peterson says. Mighty Oak eventually partnered with Cartuna, a more film-savvy Brooklyn-based animation studio, to produce Under Covers and get it into festivals. Sundance was the first that accepted it. Ahead of its premiere, the film had some heat, making IndieWire’s list of 10 must-see shorts at the festival. When it screened, Peterson remembers it serving as a kind of “palette cleanser” for what was an otherwise pretty dark Midnight Shorts program. It generated laughs and gasps, even in places that
(continued on next page October 2019, Page 17
South Brooklyn animators create a buzz (continued from page 17)
OPEn STUDIOS: close up on the waterfront
surprised Peterson and Olsen, which helped stoke ride the line of taking something weird and making 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2019 list, and their enthusiasm for a project they’d devoted so it feel accessible,” she says. “We want it to be apit has given Mighty Oak a unique calling card. many years working on and watching. proachable and accessible to people who don’t usu“Clients want to see cool stuff,” Peterson says. 13B–6 Ryan Vahey | Photo, Video, Sound Street #8A 1 461 Van Brunt Street 3 481 Van Brunt ally watch animation. It’s really trying to introduce “Even if what they want to make is very traditional, Mary Louise Geering | Sculpture ryanvahey.com “There areDoor endless possibilities in these illustra-NY Printing & Graphics of Tribeca, Inc. | 14 Studios marylouisegeering.com this level of play and fun to adults in a way that they want to see that you’ve been out there creating respoke Design, B. Schulman | Letterpress, Screen Printing, tive formsTracy of storytelling, pop-up books and Grayson Studio[like | Painting feels it’s for adults.” work and have a point of view. So it was actually Handmade goods from Embroidering animation],” Olsen told Jewelry Vimeo,| “and the fact that Brunt Street Katherine Lincoln 7 499 Van repurposed materials pretty important do this piece.” they’re pigeonholed as ‘forclasses kids only’ makes no481 Van Brunt Under Covers might have begun as a wild short fi lm Jewelry and jewelry #2A etsy.com/shop/respokeDesign Street 4 KatherineLincoln.com “The minutePier this came out, the calls started coming sense. Adults should be able to experience play #9B and(Canal project in a 9,Gowanus Side, Door 2nd Floor)art studio, but it has taken on Glass | Glass 481 Van Brunt Street Hot Wood Arts 6 in about optioning this, you making it a series, exploration too.” a greater life for Olsen and her Mighty Oak partKunihiko Maehara | Painting Scanlan Glass |are Glass Blowing | (a.k.a. 133 Beard Street) hotwoodarts.com kunihikomaehara.com what are we scanlanglass.com doing with this,” she continues. “We ners. The film, which has nearly 100,000 Vimeo Peterson agrees, adding that that sensibility is at #13B (Door 13, 2nd Floor) Hot Woodviews, Arts Gallery | Break thea spot on Filmmaker magazine’s tried pushing that for a minute, but we were kind earned her #3B Kim Mathews | Landscape Paintings 13B–7 the core of how Mighty Oak creates. “We like toCycle: A Gallery Exhibition of Politically (Oils) of forcing the issue.onWe’re Diana Jensen | Painting on Plexi Glass Stephen Jepson | Acrylic canvaspartnering | Motivated Work | hotwoodarts.com 13B–6 Ryan Vahey | Photo, Video, Sound dianajensen.com stephenjepson.com with other fi lmmakers, so there’s a lot runt Street 481 Van Brunt Street #8A Lizbeth Mitty3 | Paintings Bojune Photography | Photography Mary Louise Geering | Sculpture ryanvahey.com #4B Lizbethmitty.com of that going on. But in terms of makAmy Regalia | Photography tudios NY Printing & Graphics of bojune.com Tribeca, Inc. | marylouisegeering.com amyregalia.com opticnerve | Film film] from the ground up, ing [another respoke Design, B. Schulman | Screen Printing, son Studio | Painting Surfnuts MiyahiraLetterpress, Shapes | Ethan Cornell | Painting and mixed Handmade goods from Surfboard Art Embroidering I think when it feels right we’re going media | Ethancornell.com Lincoln Jewelry | 7 499 Van BrunttoStreet repurposed materials get there. I don’t think this will be Junichi Nakane | Visual arts Lise Kjaer | Light installation d jewelry classes #2A etsy.com/shop/respokeDesign 481 Van Brunt Street the last thing we do.” 4 lisekjaer.com Lincoln.com Jonathan Shlafer Art | Pen and Ink
STUDIOS: close up on the waterfront
#9B (Canal Side, Door 9, 2nd Floor)
Maehara | Painting aehara.com
Deborah Ugoretz Hot | Cut Wood paper-Mixed Arts Media | ugoretzart.com hotwoodarts.com
Pier Glass | Glass
Under Covers can be viewed online at
Michael Miller | Abstract 481 painting Van Brunt Street michaelmillerpaintings.com (a.k.a. 133 Beard Street)
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Scanlan Glass vimeo.com/350853814. | Glass Blowing | Other clips cre461 VAN BRUNT scanlanglass.com
#13B (Door Motomichi Nakamura | Projection Work 13, 2nd Floor) Hot Wood Arts Gallery | Break the ews | Landscape Paintings and Drawings | motomichi.com 2 481 Van Brunt Street 13B–7 Gallery Exhibition of Politically #7B (Door 7, 1stCycle: & 2nd A Floor) Diana Jensen | Painting on Plexi Glass M Nash | Poetry Brooklyn Waterfront ArtistsWork Coalition Motivated | hotwoodarts.com dianajensen.com bwac.org tty | Paintings David Pollack | Painting Bojune Photography | Photography The Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition tty.com Amy Regalia | Photography Megan Suttles | Mixed Media, features 200 artistbojune.com members. amyregalia.com Installation Art | megansuttles.com Miyahira Shapes | Ethan Cornell | Painting and mixed Decanted Youth | decantedyouth.com Art 2 481 Van Brunt Street #7B (Door 7, 2ndmedia Floor)| Ethancornell.comYes, Exactly, Yes! | yesexactlyyes.com kane | Visual arts Live Improvised Music Jeff Watts | Photography Lise Kjaer | Light installation
ated by Might Oak can be viewed online at www.mightyoakgrows.com/projects.
DOOR 14
#3B FAIRWAY
Jepson | Acrylic 1 on canvas | xStephen stephenjepson.com 6 #4B 5 opticnerve | Film 481 VAN BRUNT
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13B–6 Ryan Vahey | Photo, Video, Sound lisekjaer.com Brunt Shlafer ArtVan | Pen andStreet Ink #8A 3 481 Brunt Street, #7C ryanvahey.com5 481 Van Brunt Street #11CMary Louise Geering | Sculpture 2 481 Van NY Printing & Graphics of Tribeca, Inc. | (Canal Side, Door 11, 3rd Floor) (Door 7, 3rd Floor, above the BWAC) Michael Miller | Abstract painting marylouisegeering.com 499 VAN BRUNT Ugoretz | Cut paper-Mixed respoke Design, B. The Schulman | Studio Letterpress, Screen Printing, DOOR 7 Feinberg Ingrid Butterer | Painting and Drawing michaelmillerpaintings.com oretzart.com Handmade goods from Embroidering Justin Neely | Digital Paintings 461 VAN BRUNT 7 499 Van Brunt Street repurposed materials Yeon Ji Yoo | Mixed Media Sculptures DOOR 14 Motomichi Nakamura | Projection n –– ly.comWork #2A etsy.com/shop/respokeDesign 481 Van Brunt Street Yeonjiyoo.com 4 Street runt and Drawings | motomichi.com FAIRWAY Yolandi Oosthuizen | Illustration #9B (Canal Side, Door 9, 2nd Floor) Pier Glass | Glass r 7, 1st & 2nd Floor) Van Brunt Street Hot Wood Arts 6 M Nash | 481 Poetry Scanlan Glass | Glass Blowing | Waterfront Artists Coalition (a.k.a. 133 Beard Street) hotwoodarts.com scanlanglass.com #13B (Door 13, 2nd Floor) David Pollack | Painting Hot Wood Arts Gallery | Break the #3B 13B–7 yn Waterfront ArtistExhibition Coalitionof Politically Cycle: A Gallery Megan Suttles | Mixed| Painting Media, on Plexi Glass Diana Jensen Stephen Jepson | Acrylic on canvas | 481 DOOR 13 00 artist members. Motivated Work | hotwoodarts.com Installation Art | megansuttles.com VAN BRUNT dianajensen.com stephenjepson.com DOOR 8 OPEn STUDIOS: close up on the waterfront DOOR 11 Bojune Photography | Photography #4B Y O U R N O T E S DecantedAmy Youth | decantedyouth.com Regalia | Photography runt Street bojune.com amyregalia.com opticnerve | Film Yes, Exactly, Yes! | yesexactlyyes.com 461 Van Brunt Street r 7, 2nd Floor) 13B–6 Ryan Vahey | Photo, Video, Sound 1 3 481 Van Brunt Street #8A Ethan Cornell | Painting and mixed Mary Louise Geering | Sculpture ryanvahey.com
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Door 14 Studios
RED HOOK OPEn STUDIOS
Katherine Lincoln Jewelry | Jewelry and jewelry classes KatherineLincoln.com
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Michael Miller | Abstract painting erer | Painting and Drawing michaelmillerpaintings.com
(Canal Side, Door 11, 3rd Floor) The Feinberg Studio
499 VAN BRUNT Kunihiko Maehara | Painting kunihikomaehara.com
Justin Neely | DigitalBROOKLYN Paintings o | Mixed MediaNakamura Sculptures 2019 Motomichi | Projection Work n –– ly.com com and Drawings | motomichi.com FAIRWAY Yolandi Oosthuizen | Illustration David Pollack | Painting
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Page 18 Red Hook Star-Revue kopenstudios.com pen blic ok.com/redhookopenstudios
Lise Kjaer | Light installation lisekjaer.com Michael13 Miller | Abstract painting DOOR michaelmillerpaintings.com
The Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition features 200 artist members.
and Drawings | motomichi.com M Nash | Poetry
Ingrid Butterer | Painting and Drawing Yeon Ji Yoo | Mixed Media Sculptures Yeonjiyoo.com
Pier Glass | Glass Scanlan Glass | Glass Blowing | scanlanglass.com
STUDIOS #3B
Stephen Jepson | Acrylic on canvas | stephenjepson.com #4B
opticnerve | Film
The 5th Annual Red Hook Studio Tour brings together around a 100 professional artists and the general public, giving collectors and art lovers the opportunity to visit artist’s studios, see their work and get a behind-thescenes glimpse into their working processes. 461 VAN BRUNT DOOR 14
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It’s FREE and kid friendly with so many artists and craftspeople working in diverse mediums, it is an exciting way for people to discover creative makers and 481 DOOR 13 VAN BRUNT acquire new art pieces. DOOR 8 DOOR 11
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Megan Suttles | Mixed Media, Installation Art | megansuttles.com
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STUDIOS
Yolandi Oosthuizen | Illustration The Revue is an independent newspaper founded in 2010. We have had a lot of fun chronicling this wonderful and diverse community. We have been here through Sandy and the fight for our ferry.
This year we have greatly expanded our arts coverage, and we hope you can find a little place for us in your reading habits. YOUR NOTES Have a great day in the neighborhood. The 5th Annual Red Hook Studio Tour brings together
The story of
RED D RE HOOK HOOK OPEn OPEn STUDIOS STUDIOS SPONSORS
Maps available at Fairway Market and at various locations around Red Hook
& open toPM the TOpublic PM
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#7B (Door 7, 2nd Floor)
www.redhookopenstudios.com 2019 www.facebook.com/redhookopenstudios www.instagram.com/redhookopenstudios YOUR NOTES
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#7B (Door 7, 1st & 2nd Floor) Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition bwac.org NOTES
2 481 Van Brunt Street
Yolandi Oosthuizen | Illustration
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Ethan Cornell | Painting and mixed media | Ethancornell.com
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7 499 Van Brunt Street
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DOOR 11 Motomichi Nakamura | Projection Work
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Justin Neely |Studios Digital Paintings and work spaces of artist and makers will n –– ly.com
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october 12th & 13th
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Junichi Nakane | Visual arts
481| Cut paper-Mixed Deborah Ugoretz VAN BRUNT DOOR 8 Media | ugoretzart.com
Decanted Youth | decantedyouth.com Yes, Exactly, Yes! | yesexactlyyes.com Live Improvised Music (Canal Side, Door 11, 3rd Floor) The Feinberg Studio
Bojune Photography | Photography bojune.com
1
Surfnuts Miyahira Shapes | Surfboard Art
Jonathan Shlafer Art | Pen and Ink
Megan Suttles | Mixed Media, Installation Art | megansuttles.com
1 pm to#11C 6 pm Street 5 481 Van Brunt
Hot Wood Arts Gallery | Break the Cycle: A Gallery Exhibition of Politically Motivated Work | hotwoodarts.com
DOOR 14
Lizbeth Mitty | Paintings Lizbethmitty.com
#9B (Canal Side, Door 9, 2nd Floor) Hot Wood Arts hotwoodarts.com
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Kim Mathews | Landscape Paintings 461 VAN BRUNT (Oils)
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M Nash | Poetry
4 481 Van Brunt Street
DOOR 9 | respoke Design, B. Schulman Handmade goods from repurposed materials etsy.com/shop/respokeDesign
BROOKLYN
2019
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Take the NYC Ferry’s South Brooklyn Route to the Red Hook Landing
The story of
RED HOOK OPEn
around a 100 professional artists and the general public, giving collectors and art lovers the opportunity to visit artist’s studios, see their work and get a behind-thescenes glimpse into their working processes.
STUDIOS
redhookwaterfront.com
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NY Printing & Graphics of Tribeca, Inc. | Letterpress, Screen Printing, Embroidering
Tracy Grayson Studio | Painting
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This year we have greatly expanded our arts coverage,
SPONSORS
October 2019 TLES
Photography media | Ethancornell.com
6 5
The Star-Revue goes out to eat First We took Manhattan A little history about our first stop — in Lower Manhattan From the New Yorker, November 17, 1956 The primordial Demonico, which opened as a confectionery shop on William Street in 1827, was New York’s first real restaurant (incredibly, the city got along without one for its first two hundred years), and when the eleventh, and last, Delmonico closed its doors, in 1923, the city was one of the world centers of gourmandise. For a long time, Delmonico restaurants were the focal points not only of New York’s epicurean life but, to a considerable extent, of its social, economic, intellectual, and artistic life as well. They were the favorite gathering places of men who had arrived in business, politics, and the arts, and many a testimonial banquet and many an orotund speech were given in them. In 1901 Charles Crist Delmonico, the last male member of the family to run the restaurants, died of a heart attack, and the enterprise went into a decline. Occasionally, in those years, a dinner or a ball was held in the Forty-fourth Street Delmonico that was reminiscent of the institution’s former splendor. One of the most impressive, indeed, one of the most impressive in all Delmonico history— was a banquet given in December, 1905, as a tribute to Mark Twain on his seventieth birthday. Every prominent American writer, and a number of prominent writers from abroad attended, as well as many patrons of the arts. Twain made a teary, sentimental speech that had everyone alternately laughing and crying. From the New Yorker, November 7, 1929 At Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth the new thirty-two story Delmonico Building has stood bare, lifeless, unoccupied for a year, unique in this excited city: flatly uncanny, if you stopped to think about it. It was tied up in lawsuits. Now, on September 15, it is to be opened as the New Demonico’s. On top is the forty-fivethousand-dollar-per-annum triplex apartments, unrented as yet, according to late word. Some of the terraces of this dwelling in the skies are large enough for regulation are large enough for regulation deck-tennis court—and of course one has been laid out. Helen Wills and Captain McNeil, considered the world’s champion deck-tennis player, have played a match on it. Delmonico's is now back where it all began, in lower Manhattan, where it first opened in 1827. This is the front door at 56 Beaver St, New York, NY 10004
The management of the establishment plans to revive some of the Delmonico tradition. Nicholas Sabatini, chef of the old place, closed these six years, will be
(continued on page 25)
Yes, Delmonico's is considered New York City's first restaurant. The last family operator lasted until 1923. Since then, a number of restaurateurs have operated similar restaurants using the name. The Star-Revue visited the current Delmonico's a thriving tribute to the 19th century version, to kick off this, our first special restaurant section.
Come for the nostalgia, stay for the steak
D
by Linda Stern
elmonico’s lays claim to being the first fine dining restaurant in America. It has changed locations and owners over the time, but its devotion to steak stands firm.
the restaurant, in case you forget where you are. You get the sense that the interior décor of the main dining room and grill are very much part of the brand. The grill has an English pub vibe with again a lot of wood.
fried batter.
If you are tired of farm to table or Asian fusion and want to feel like you are Don Draper out for a decadent old school meal, Delmonico’s is for you. The menu does not change according to the season, and regular diners know what to expect.
We ate in the main dining room as opposed to the grill/bar area. The menus differ and the main dining room is where you go to impress. We started with the B.L.T. Wedge. Wedge salad 101 is that you present the diner with a wedge of iceberg lettuce. So easy to accomplish that it is disappointing when a wedge salad is presented as lifeless cut pieces of lettuce. We went at the end of September and tomatoes are still going strong except — that is right — not at Delmonico's. Instead they were chopped, tasteless and few and far between. The bacon component was MIA. Tiny unpleasantly crunchy mystery pieces were masquerading as bacon. Again, another missed opportunity to wow us.
We ordered their signature steak, the Delmonico Boneless Strip. Even after splitting, there were leftovers. The meat is topped with fried onions and underneath them is a salty crust that adds a wonderful flavor and texture to the extremely tender filet. I kept thinking if my grandmother had been there, she would have given the steak her seal of approval as being as soft as butter.
There is nothing edgy about Delmonico’s and that is the point. You walk in and feel you might have been there as a little kid for a special occasion. Everyone was on their best behavior, and the outing involved putting on a dress or nice slacks. This feeling of timelessness is reflected in the décor. When you enter the main restaurant, you are bombarded by dark wood wainscoting topped with a damask wallpaper. The desired effect is one of a traditional men’s club which is exclusive and only a chosen few can join. On the back wall is a kitschy mural done in the style of Renoir and Manet with several other paintings to match dispersed throughout the dining room. The Delmonico brand is on full display at your table with plates engraved with a black line drawing of the outside of the building and the back of the knives are inscribed with the name of
Red Hook Star-Revue
The customary blue cheese dressing along with huge chunks of blue cheese were the best things on the plate. Both were rich and bursting with flavor. I ate the lettuce just to soak up the dressing. The other appetizer we ordered was the Jumbo Lump Crab Beignets. Basically, three zeppoles that were stuffed with crab cakes. The crab component was your basic crab cake and would have been better sautéed up without the additional
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I will stop being critical now because the steak came next and was well worth the wait. This is what you come here for. You can’t make a steak like this at home.
Main courses do not come with a side, so we ordered Delmonico potatoes. It was like macaroni and cheese but with potatoes, so rich you need to share it. The cheesy bechamel sauce along with onion and a smidgen of bacon push this dish over the top. The amount of butter and cheese moves the meter from decadent to obscene. Having said that, we basically polished it off. If meat is not your thing, you can order fish or one chicken dish. We took the tuna and ordered it rare. It came on top of Charred Corn – Fava Bean Fricassee and Crab Stuffed Zucchini Flower. When it came to dessert the choice of tasting Baked Alaska was too tempting to overlook. The dessert was first created at Delmonico’s
(continued on page 25)
October 2019, Page 19
Then we went to the bronx
A living landmark on Arthur Avenue by Brett Yates The Bronx’s Little Italy is – as the name suggests – not huge. From the intersection of East 187th Street and Arthur Avenue that marks the center of the neighborhood, its commercial district extends another two blocks south before bottoming out at St Barnabas Hospital. But those two blocks on Arthur Avenue contain everything you’d imagine a Little Italy should have: mozzarella emporiums, meat markets with sausages hanging like stalactites from the ceiling (and flayed whole calves in the display case), an old man hand-rolling cigars, and a number of legendary Italian-American eateries that predate the first Olive Garden by a few decades. It’s an old-fashioned neighborhood – most of the shops close early, 6 pm at the latest – but, 15 minutes’ walk from the nearest subway station, the area is fairly bustling with locals, Fordham students, and occasional tourists. To outsiders, it’s familiar from A Bronx Tale, but it hasn’t let its fame get to its head. Dominick’s is a neighborhood standby, serving Italian-American dinner staples with nonchalant grace and charm to old-timers, couples, celebrities, and Yankees fans at communal tables from Wednesday through Monday. It provides huge portions of pasta alongside dishes like chicken
marsala, stuffed peppers, tripe, and branzino. The waiters all have an air of having more or less grown up inside the establishment. The menu is long, but until relatively recently, it didn’t exist anywhere except in the servers’ heads. Traditionally, customer asked what was good to eat, and the waiter apparently rattled off some suggestions from which the former chose. At the end of the night, instead of writing up a bill, the server simply told the customer the total, and he paid in cash. This is all still true, except that a single printed menu now hangs at the back of the dining room – presumably a concession to tourists whom the all-verbal scheme freaked out. But it’s too small to read from a distance, and if you’re not a regular who already knows his order, it’s not totally clear whether you’re supposed to get up from your table to examine it or rely on your waiter. It’s a little confusing, but based on my own limited observation, conversation remains the preferred method for most diners.
mari ($22, with big bands of squid piled high), and the veal sorrentino ($22). I didn’t know what “veal sorrentino” was when I ordered it, but here it came in four tasty mounds of pounded meat, tender eggplant, and mozzarella. We drank wine by the glass. (“Red or white?” the waiter asked – that was all he asked.) Earlyish on a Friday night, we were probably the youngest diners in the restaurant and perhaps the only newcomers. Even so, Dominick’s had none of the embalmed quality of some dining “institutions” – it’s a lively and fun place, even for people like me, who don’t especially like Robert De Niro movies. Dominick's, 2335 Arthur Ave, The Bronx, NY 10458, Open noon - 9:30 pm, every day but Tuesday, when they take a day off. Sunday hours are 1 - 8:30 pm, because, after all, it is Sunday. No credit cards. (718) 733-2807.
For whatever haphazardness this system may imply, Dominick’s obviously possesses an unflappable underlying professionalism to which its excellent food attests. My companion and I shared the baked clams (12 for $19), the linguine with cala-
linguini to the left, veal to the right
Page 20 Red Hook Star-Revue
www.star-revue.com
October 2019
Next to brooklyn
Faro is Bushwick, and Bushwick is Faro by Brett Yates Faro, a Michelin-starred dinner-only date spot with a hybrid menu of Italian and New American dishes, serves homemade pasta and precise, mindfully sourced, modern cuisine from a woodburning oven in a former warehouse near the Jefferson Avenue L stop. MoMA previously used the building for art storage, but it doesn’t feel as cavernous or austere as it sounds, though it can accommodate up to 50 diners. Located in the North Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone, the space registers, in a relative sense, as a small refuge of warmth and civility in a still largely desolate stretch of Bushwick in the evening. The name means “lighthouse” in Italian, and the open kitchen adds some vitality. My girlfriend and I tried two of the pastas, an appetizer ($17) and an entrée ($24). I first sampled the agnolotti, which are Gusher-sized ravioli; for all their delicacy, I could have eaten these unadorned little envelopes of ricotta in mushroom broth like a quick morning bowl of breakfast cereal. In truth, I had wanted to get the small plate of culurgiones with foie gras and sweet potato, but it seemed too embarrassing to have to admit in print to having eaten foie gras (which appears twice on the menu, as City Council pursues a ban on the product). The main course offered supple cords of bucatini
so fresh it seemed almost to writhe in an inconspicuously fatty sauce with lamb neck and turnip greens. I washed it down with a draft IPA ($10) from KCBC, just down the street, while my companion enjoyed a splendid gin cocktail ($14) with amaro, chamomile syrup, lemon, honey, and hibiscus from the chef’s farm in Mexico (according to our server).
filled, including the entire middle section, despite the place’s reputation as a foodie hotspot.
We also ordered two non-pasta dishes: a high-quality tuna tartare starter ($16, identified only as “tuna” on the minimalist menu), with embedded crouton bits adding the crunch that would normally demand an additional laborious process of spreading the mixture onto baguette toasts; and a delicious plate of three plump scallops ($27) with edible sunflowers and oddly potent Thumbelina carrots.
By the end, it felt like a metaphor for the surrounding neighborhood, whose status since about 2012 as perhaps Brooklyn’s hippest feels primarily like a victory of real estate hype. Bushwick South is a normal working-class residential area with some recent injections of hideous luxury housing; Bushwick North, where Faro sits, is in large part a light manufacturing zone, which can also accommodate commercial uses as long as some team of investors has enough capital to turn a dilapidated 20th-century factory into a multi-floor nightclub. But there are no bodegas or laundromats in sight because, notwithstanding a few residential spot rezonings, basically no one lives here.
We finished with an unmemorable German chocolate cake, deconstructed amid decorative smears and screens but otherwise indistinguishable from a convenience store treat. I’ve hardly ever enjoyed desserts at Italian restaurants, and I guess the rule holds true even at Italian restaurants that are actually New American restaurants.
The gentrification of homely Bushwick is rightly regarded as a done deal, but that doesn’t mean it already looks like central Williamsburg. For the diners and partiers wandering through its graffitied blankness from one isolated destination to another, it remains confusingly empty thus far. After Faro, just go home.
That morning, I had looked online for dinner reservations at Faro, and since it was a Saturday, it didn’t seem unusual to find only two choices: 6:45 or 9:30. I took the early option, but throughout the meal, the restaurant remained mostly un-
Faro, 436 Jefferson Street, Brooklyn, NY 11237. Open 6-11, every day but Sunday, when they change to 5 - 10. Credit cards accepted. (718) 3818201.
Bucatini on the left, Tuna Tartare on the right
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October 2019, Page 21
Off to Queens
More, more momo by Brett Yates In Jackson Heights, Lhasa Fast Food is famous, but for the unfamiliar, the most useful restaurant review is probably still a set of directions. It’s not hard to get to, situated about a block from the Roosevelt Avenue subway station (which fields the 7, E, F, M, and R trains) in a section of Queens that only looks distant on a map – it’s actually a 15-minute ride from Rockefeller Center, for instance – but because Lhasa isn’t visible from the street, it’s easy to miss. At 37-50 74th Street, across from Rahul’s Couture, there’s a storefront with mixed signage (look for the scrolling red-text scoreboard above the entrance) that contains an internal mini-mall with a cell phone store (Tibetan Mobile), a beauty salon, and a tailor in the basement. Turn right at the entryway, go past the cell phone store, and in back you’ll find perhaps the best-known of several eateries in Jackson Heights specializing in momos, a type of steamed dumplings popular in Nepal, India, and Tibet. About 25 local establishments participate in the neighborhood’s annual Momo Crawl, including Lhasa Fast Food, which, despite its name and its tucked-away location, is a proper restaurant with seating and table service, not a
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cart or counter (let alone a drive-thru). A large portrait of the Dalai Lama, perched high on a wooden beam, presides over happy diners in the small, windowless space. The menu has 20 items, costing between $4 and $7 each. In most cases, the full list of ingredients – sometimes as few as three – appear on the wall, attesting to the food’s unembellished traditionalism. With my girlfriend, I ate the beef momo, the chive momo, the thenthuk (a beef soup featuring wide noodles ripped into bitesized pieces), and the yellow laphing (slabs of gluten soaking in chili oil and soy sauce). I had hoped for a more powerful broth from the thenthuk, but the steady bloom of spiciness in the laphing – a strikingly simple dish, the preparation of the distinctive noodles surely involved some labor – left its mark on me. The main event was the beautifully wrapped momos, which come eight to an order.
are chives, though; based on their width, I – no expert – would label them scallions. The tricky part is making a perfectly mixed dipping sauce from the black vinegar, chili sauce, chili oil, and soy sauce on the table. And the other tricky part is finding the bathroom. It’s not inside Lhasa but on the exact opposite side of the retail arcade, if you imagine the building’s south wing (with the bathroom at the end) as a mirror image of the north, which concludes at the restaurant. In other words, go back to the main entrance and follow the other hallway past the beauty salon to a door that looks like an exit to an alleyway and turn left to find the restroom. The hand soap is above the toilet. Llasa Fast Food, 37-50 74th Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372, Open 7 days, 11 am - 9:30 pm, except till 10:30 on Saturday and Sunday. Cash only. (646) 256-3805.
The beef inside the momos is tasty but tough. I’d recommend traveling to Lhasa Fast Food specifically for the chive momos, which burst with vernal greenery – and, if you’ve never had it, for the “butter tea” (undrinkable, to me, in its oily richness, but a worthy experience and a Tibetan staple). I’m not sure the chives really
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October 2019
More Queens All in the mall by Brett Yates Until recently, I’d never been to Flushing, but my friend Rachel often spends significant portions of her weekends up there, despite the three-train journey from Bushwick. When I asked her to take me on a day trip, she gladly obliged. I think all New Yorkers, even the natives, are tourists in this town, and sometimes it helps to have a guide. Rachel goes to Flushing for the food. Born in Shenyang, China, she says that the Chinese dishes cooked east of Citi Field in Queens are the only ones in New York that make her feel at home. When she first came to New York for a summer internship at the consultancy firm for which she now works, she lived in Flushing and commuted all the way to the Financial District. Now, she lives in the apartment above mine and rides the J for 20 minutes in the morning, but she misses the Asian grocery stores and restaurants. In her view, Brooklyn tends to favor “fusion” cuisine. Flushing feels less like an ethnic enclave than a wholly independent municipality. It has its own jam-packed downtown with more multi-story retail developments than anywhere else in the city. It reminds Rachel of “China in the ‘90s.” She moved at age 11 to Atlanta, where she quickly became fluent in the new language; back home, she’d known
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another Chinese family with a boy of similar age that immigrated to Flushing at about the same time, and by her account, the boy never really learned English – it wasn’t necessary here.
on the inside and altogether superior to the Western iteration, topped with matcha ice cream. These were all inexpensive street foods for which I paid in cash, but the flavors were incredible.
Unlike the primarily Cantonese Chinatown in Manhattan, Flushing offers cuisine from virtually every corner of mainland China. It has the best hot pot, the best dumplings, the best noodle soups. It has fancy banquet halls and beloved holes-in-the-wall, but the best place to get a sense of all the variety is the New World Mall food court, open from 10:30 am to 10 pm daily in the basement of 136-20 Roosevelt Avenue.
The duck wings, served in a portable container, came with a plastic glove for sanitary handheld consumption. I remarked on the thoughtfulness of the inclusion, and Rachel observed that, while some Americans tend to find Chinese food service brusque, its quality is in its consideration rather than its courtesy: from utensils to condiments, the purpose is to make sure you have everything you need all the time.
Come famished and try to grab a bite from all 30-something stalls – an impossible task, but worth the try. I managed to sample six of them. It was an unforgettable experience.
In a hectic space, the New World Mall food court offered a smooth dining experience. There were enough food stalls, during a mobbed weekend lunchtime, that none had long lines, and we managed to find a table without too much trouble.
I’m not competent to describe every item of food, but I know that I ate cold braised duck wings that turned my mouth numb; thickly seasoned skewers of grilled chicken gizzard and squid; chewy noodles made from potato starch in a savory broth; a spicy stir-fry of various meats, mushrooms, and bok choy that Rachel described as “dry hot pot”; and a dessert of “egg puffs” – that is, an eggy waffle with ovoid protuberances, crispier on the outside and cakier
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Rachel did most of the ordering for us, but she’s smaller than I am, so I handled the bulk of the eating. That was all right, apparently: sometimes just seeing the food, she claimed, is comfort enough. New World Mall, 136-20 Roosevelt Ave, Flushing, NY 11354. Open every day, 8 am - 11 pm.
October 2019, Page 23
Finally, Back to Manhattan
So good, so right, soba by Brett Yates I’ve never had soba that I didn’t enjoy, but it’s nice to know that the chefs at Sobaya (sometimes rendered soba-ya) at 229 E 9th Street take it more seriously than most. They handmake the noodles every day from organic buckwheat flour imported from Nagano, and then “simmer high-quality bonito and kelp in charcoal-filtered water to make a dashi broth,” to which they add Higeta Soba-zen, “three times more expensive than regular soy sauce.” They claim to be the only U.S. restaurant using the brand. Those who admire the clean, precise flavors of Japanese cuisine may seek to enhance their experience at Sobaya by keeping all this in mind. Or if they prefer, they can just scarf down some noodles, which is what I did. Serving lunch and dinner in a pleasant wood-accented dining room at 229 E 9th Street, Sobaya is a modestly upscale yet casual restaurant, very popular but somehow not too crowded, boasting an extensive menu of traditional foods (fried, grilled, and raw). With its soothing elevator music, it could be a nice, cool place for cold soba in the summer, or a nice, cozy place for hot soba in the winter. When I visited with two friends for dinner,
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it was one of the last super-hot days in September, and I was too dehydrated to drink anything but water, but they shared one of many sakes on the menu. They both ordered the Early Bird Special, offered from 5:30 to 7 pm, which at $22 must be a steal in the East Village. There are cheaper noodle shops, but Sobaya offers the (debatable) pleasure of paying a little extra for a degree of unobtrusive formality and culinary rectitude. The special comes with an appetizer of vegetables in neat bento-style piles (burdock root, pumpkin, green beans, and lotus root – the last being my favorite for its soapy flavor and starchy-watery crunch), inarizushi (rice-stuffed tofu pouches), shrimp and vegetable tempura, basic hot or cold soba or udon, and a dessert of vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce. The menu doesn’t mention the inarizushi, so it’s an even better value than it first appears. This was clearly the best option, but to mix things up, I ventured off-piste and for myself ordered a pair of less familiar à la carte items: the tuna yuba maki ($11.50), a kind of low-carb sushi roll, with soft hunks of fish packed into raw bean curd skin over a generous (even excessive) pat of citrusy avocado paste; and for my main course, the toro toro soba ($22), with nameko mushrooms, okra,
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grated mountain yam, and seaweed root. Whereas mori soba (the standard cold variety) arrives on a flat surface with a separate bowl of broth for dipping, and kake soba (the standard hot variety) begins already sitting in a bowl of broth, hiyashi soba – the kind that has a bunch of toppings – comes in a bowl with a pourable teapot of cold broth on the side, allowing the diner to determine for himself the best level of immersion for his noodles. For me, this is too much pressure; I’d rather have someone else decide. I had chosen the toro toro soba mostly because okra makes me nostalgic for the years I lived in North Carolina, where it shows up commonly in the local cooking. It’s a wonderful vegetable but has to be treated carefully lest it turn into mucus. Intriguingly, my soba dish seemed to lean into its snotty character on purpose, with each of the ingredients (especially the yam) contributing its own sliminess to the mixture. I probably wouldn’t get it again, but it was fully unlike anything I’d had before, and how often does that happen? Sobaya, 229 E 9th St, New York, NY 10003. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner, noon - 3:30 and 5:30 - 10:30 pm, open til 11 on Friday and Saturday. (212) 533-6966.
October 2019
New Yorker on Delmonico (continued from page 19)
in charge of the grillroom, and as many of the old Delmonico waiters as can be recruited will be on duty there. That is why the grillroom was put in the basement; the waiters were too old to climb the stairs from the kitchen. So we were told, anyways. At this writing they don’t know whether they will be able to get enough of the servingmen to make up a complete staff or not. Many of them are unavailable. Charles Groise, one of the most famous of the old captains, was offered a job but refused it. He is running a Coffee Pot in Elizabether, New Jersey, market-house. Several of the others are working for Eugene Taupier, general manager at Demonico’s for years, who has a restaurant at 23 William Street. Among these are Ernest Stockmer who served three presidents at various times. –Harrison, McKinley, and Roosevelt. The site of Taupier’s place, incidentally, is that on which Peter and John Delmonico opened their first little restaurant a hundred and two years ago. A bronze plaque has been put on the wall to commemorate this but Taupier keeps it covered because he doesn’t like people staring at it. Jean Columbin, a famous chef in the old times, won’t come out of retirement. Now nearly eighty, he lives at the Chef’s Club in West Forty-eighth Street. Everybody probably knows how Louis Napoleon used to dine in Delmonico’s when it was in Beaver Street and, after dinner, clear off the table to practice sleight-of-hand tricks with the handsome young actor, James Wallack, and how, in 1861, at a dinner in the Forty Fourth Street restaurant, Samuel Morse operated a telegrapch key on the table and sent the first message by cable to Europe. But Delmonico’s itself took still greater pride in other matters—chiefly, the number of new dishes its chefs created. Terrapin was first served at Delmonico’s; minute steak was suggested by one of its most famous gourmets, Edwin Gould; lobster a la Newburg was created by a Delmonico chef, under the guidance of a patron. This gentleman was a famous sea-captain with a taste for good food, and his name was Captain Ben Wenberg. The dish was, accordingly, christened “Lobster a la Wenberg,” and was so known until the mariner had a row with Charles Delmonico and left the restaurant never to return. To get even, Delmonico transposed a couple of letters and time did the rest. It emerged, “Lobster a la Newburg.”
FRESHEST LOBSTER IN NYC!
SUNDAYS • 11AM - 3PM Featuring
cakes n’ waffles
Benedicts Lobster Benedict Crab Cake Benedict Lox Benedict
review
Lobster Claw
(continued from page 19)
Bloody Mary
Maine lobster meat, olives, and pickle spear, vodka and our house made spicy bloody mary mix
in 1867 to commemorate the purchase of Alaska. Baked Alaska starts with a crust that has ice cream mounded on top. Then, meringue is piped on and then baked in the oven until it has brown edges. The ice cream does not melt as one would expect and the result is a true sugar high. The meringue at Delmonico’s was like a light melted marshmallow and played off of the banana ice cream to perfection. It was a decadent ending to a rich dinner. This might not be a restaurant to go to on a regular basis but, for something different, or a special occasion it is worth a visit for the steak and baked Alaska.
Lobster n’ Waffle Chicken n’ Waffle Maine Blueberry Pancakes
Football Season is here!
$5 PINT SPECIALS DURING GAMES All Jets & GIants Games shown on our projection screen! Games only shown during regular business hours.
Catch us on
THE FLAY LIST on
284 VAN BRUNT ST Brooklyn NY
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230 PARK AVE
New York NY
October 2019, Page 25
October Film Preview by Caleb Drickey
Welcome to October, the third-best month of the film release calendar! It’s not quite Oscar season, but the major film festivals have concluded, and the word-of-mouth awards campaigns are roaring to life. So, after a long summer of comic book blockbusters, Disney IP, low-budget horror flicks, and the occasional indie darling, October promises a cineplex packed with… comic book blockbusters, Disney IP, low-budget horror flicks, and the slightly-more-than-occasional indie darling. Check out the highlights:
Joker- October 4
What it is: An edgy and nihilistic re-imagining of America’s favorite killer clown that suggests he once liked doing stuff other than killing. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Arthur Fleck, a struggling standup who trades his microphone for clown make-up. Why you should see it: It might actually be good? Despite the protestations of snobs such as yours truly, Joker garnered rave reviews, comparisons to Taxi Driver, and the Golden Lion award for best picture at the Venice Film Festival.
Dolemite is My NameOctober 4
What it is: A biopic about down-and-out comedian Rudy Ray Moore and the rise of his most iconic creation, the foul-mouthed pimp/vigilante Dolemite. Eddie Murphy co-produced and stars in this ode to blaxploitation that critics compared to The Disaster Artist. Why you should see it: Eddie’s back, baby. It’s been more than a decade since the Academy snubbed his last tour-de-force dramatic turn (here’s looking at you, Norbit), but Dolemite drew praise on the festival circuit, and his upcoming appearance on SNL indicates that he wants that Oscar.
Gemini Man- October 11
What it is: Will Smith plays Henry Brogan, an aging super-assassin on the run from the one thing he can’t escape—(a clone of) himself. Why you should see it: Will Smith and director Ang Lee are fascinating collaborators; each responsible for spectacular action hits (Men in Black; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and inexplicable misses (After Earth, Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk). Lee filmed Gemini Man at 120 frames per second, so expect either a new, silky-smooth standard for action filmmaking or an unwatchable mess.
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Parasite- October 11
What it is: After engaging in some light document forgery, a lower-class family of four secures employment for the Parks, an ultra-wealthy family. Director Bong Joon-ho documents the various lies, exploitations, and parasitic relationships upon which economies are built in this nasty satirical thriller. Why you should see it: Bong Joon-ho is one of the world’s great living weirdos. His best films, including The Host and Snowpiercer, balance slapstick comedy, action set pieces, and scathing cultural commentary. Earlier this summer, Parasite unanimously won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, so it apparently ranks among his best.
The King- October 11
What it is: A modernization of Shakespeare’s Henriad (that’s Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 plus Henry V for those of you who didn’t waste six figures on an English degree), featuring Timothée Chalamet as the rakish prince-turned-conquering-king Hal. Why you should see it: Sword fights are VERY cool. I’m talking Top-5 Cool Things. Those who require further persuasion may be interested in Shakespearean court intrigue minus Shakespearean language, or in the fact that it’s a Netflix film, and therefore free for subscribers.
Jojo Rabbit- October 18
What it is: A young German boy, Jojo, questions his devotion to the Reich and the Fuhrer after discovering a Jewish girl hiding in his home. Director Taika Waititi, best known for Thor: Ragnarok, also appears as Jojo’s imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, in this goofy send-up of Nazi Germany specifically, and racism generally. Why you should see it: Despite a middling critical reception, this crowd-pleaser won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. In other words, it’s this year’s Green Book or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
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The LighthouseOctober 18
What it is: Two 19th century lighthouse keepers settle in for a long and lonesome winter, but their peaceful coexistence is threatened by ego, madness, and mermaids in this black-and-white horror period piece. Why you should see it: As with his exceptional 2017 debut The Witch, writer/director Robert Eggers studied the customs and folklore of New England to inform the colorful dialogue and supernatural unease of The Lighthouse. Those seeking a traditional horror experience may leave disappointed, but fans of slow-building nightmares or Willem Dafoe’s bug eyes should have a creepy good time.
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil- October 18
What it is: Angelina Jolie returns as the titular horned demon in this sequel to the 2014 Sleeping Beauty quasi-prequel. Michelle Pfeiffer joins the cast as Jolie’s foil, a manipulative, faux-noble queen. Why you should see it: Did you know Maleficent made $700 million? Wild. Get that money, Ms. Jolie. Anyway, big-budget blockbusters made by women (veteran Disney scribe Linda Woolverton returns as a co-writer) and targeted at teen girls are shamefully rare.
Countdown- October 25
What it is: There’s an app for almost everything, so what if there was one that counted down to your murder?!?! Why you should see it: I mean, you probably shouldn’t. Countdown looks too corny for anyone older than 14 to take seriously, but there are joys in watching 30-year-old models play high schoolers, and in showing one’s kids something scarier than Pixar.
October 2019
the Supergroup women of country by Rebecca Castellani
This July, a new collaboration debuted at the Newport Folk Festival. The name? The Highwomen, a riff off the original supergroup of country renegades, The Highwaymen. The players? Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Moss, and Amanda Shires, with a host of supporting characters that counted Yola and Sheryl Crow in their ranks. The uniform? Pantsuits. Morris wore a pink one adorned with bedazzled vaginas. The vibe? Empowered. Reminiscent of the Women’s March – a similar energy bewitched the respective crowds: excitement, yes, but also understanding, the bond of shared experience transmuted in the knowing smiles, spontaneous cheers, and tears of strangers turned suddenly into sisters. I know this, because I was there. And I’m proud to say I only cried five times. The Highwomen maximized their 40-minute set with the kind of efficiency one could only expect from mothers, performing the entirety of their eponymous album, The Highwomen, which was released September 6 and went on to top the country charts (thank you very much). As we quickly learned on that hot day in July, The Highwomen is a masterclass in songwriting, album engineering, and goosebump-giving. Reflective of the emotional whiplash women often experience over the course of a lifetime or a single day, the album oscillates between poignant ballads and self-referential country rockers. The thread connecting these twelve songs is, naturally, womanhood, but instead of performing the tired cliches often expressed in the country music, The Highwomen reveals the depth, nuance, and intersectionality of modern feminism. Motherhood isn’t always a beautiful blessing, especially if you’re hungover (“My Name Can’t Be Mama”). The token love song is crooned by a woman, for a woman (“If She Ever Leaves Me”). The token feisty-break-up song isn’t about getting revenge, it’s about getting your self-worth back (“Loose Change”). And sure, women sometimes clean the kitchen and buy eleven pairs of the same shoe, but they’ll also break every jello-mold you throw at them. They’re saints, and they’re surgeons. How do they do it? (“Redesigning Women.”) But the song that made the biggest impact on the women of the Folk Festival, and on me, was “Highwomen,” the album’s opening track and the
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song through which the rest are conjured. Rolling Stone reporter Marissa Moss describes “Highwomen” as “not only the tale of the band in classic response-song style, but also the story of how women, throughout history, have often sacrificed everything for a good greater than themselves.” The response in question is to “Highwayman,” originally written by Jimmy Webb in 1977 and rocketed to fame in 1985 when it became the swashbuckling origin story of The Highwaymen, aka Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash. “Highwayman” is a pretty straightforward song as far as songs about reincarnation go. Each of the group’s famous heroes sing a tale of masculine bravado: Nelson is the highwayman, stealing jewelry from hapless young maids until “the bastards” hang him; Kristofferson is a sailor (hornpipe included) who falls off a mast; Jennings slips off the Hoover dam and dies in wet concrete; Cash is… a starship captain? The twist is, none of these bad-ass dudes have died in any finite sense; they’ve just been reincarnated into other bad-ass dudes and come back again. And again. And again. You get the point. “Highwomen” is also a straightforward song, but instead suggesting a literal act of reincarnation, the return promised in the refrain is the enduring resistance of women. They also raise the stakes. None of the Highwomen die from slipping. Carlile starts things off, singing as a Honduran immigrant with the kind of intimate intensity I largely associate with campfires. Her voice is clean, stripped back to give her tale the respect it deserves: a mother sacrificing herself at the border so her children can survive. Shires is a healer, emoting girlishness and grace defiled by (male) voyeurism and condemned by (male) intolerance; hanged in the Salem gallows not for thieving, but for being a witch, for being a woman. Yola is a freedom rider, belting out the power of protest, and the painful reasons we protest in the first place; shot dead in a Greyhound bound for Mississippi. Hemby is a preacher, convicted and condemned for her conviction; she chooses peace and dies a martyr. The refrain hits hard enough to knock you right off the Hoover dam and into some wet concrete:
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We are The Highwomen Singing stories still untold We carry the sons you can only hold We are the daughters of the silent generations You sent our hearts to die alone in foreign nations It may return to us as tiny drops of rain But we will still remain And we’ll come back again and again and again See why I’m proud I only cried five times? The lyrics alone are a force, evoking the pathos of protest and offering a hopeful vision of the future through the spirit of a powerful past. Musically, the Highwomen sound like a legion, the convergence of voices akin to a spiritual experience. Sheryl Crow sings backup! Comparisons to the original suddenly feel awfully unfair. How could the bravado of a chaotic thief or a hapless sailor stand up to the bravery of the silent generations? How can you recover from a burn like “We carry the sons you can only hold”? I’m sorry, but literal reincarnation is just not as compelling as a philosophical rumination of what it means to be a woman, and, more importantly, what it means to be women. According to sister Marissa Moss in Rolling Stone, this distinction of plurality is what ultimately gives “Highwomen” its edge over “Highwayman”: “The chills come in the tiniest details: in the original version [...] the song closes with Cash singing ‘I’ll be back again.’ On this one? It’s ‘we’ll be back.’ That may seem like a trivial change, but it’s the crux of what this band is all about.” “Highwomen” is not the origin story of a band; it is the origin story of us, and in this sense of historical togetherness dwells the real magic of the Highwomen; they may have made their debut at Newport, but by the end of their set they felt familiar, like long lost sisters or old friends. Every time I have listened to The Highwomen since, the power of that camaraderie reactivates: we’re here. We’ve been here. And together, we remain. We are the Highwomen. The Highwomen is available for download on all major streaming platforms. For the latest information on The Highwomen, visit thehighwomen.com.
October 2019, Page 27
How to be French when you’re not: on Clermont Ferrand’s magic bus by Mike Morgan
I have an important announcement to make. Clermont Ferrand, the founder and lead singer of Brooklyn’s catchy French pop and rock band Les Sans Culottes, is not who he says he is. His real name is Bill Carney, c/o 47 Railway Junction, Apartment 2E, Brooklyn, NY. It’s not easy pulling off the dual personality number, unless you have the experience. The French used to be quite good at this – remember how many were in the resistance during World War II? Just about everybody after it was eventually over, I believe. Admittedly, for the genuine underground fighters then, it was either pretend to be someone else or it was Gestapo time. Who wanted that? But let’s not waffle (crêpe) on about those days. Let’s get to the real meat and potatoes (the boeuf bourguignon). Les Sans Culottes had its first gig at the old Brooklyn Freddy’s Bar in April, 1998. In human time, that means that the band is over 21 years of age, old enough to drink. In dog years, they would have a mere 150 or so behind them. They perform their own written brand of French yé yé music, heavily influenced by the tunes of characters like Serge Gainsbourg and Francoise Hardy (wellknown ‘60s Parisian songsmiths). Serge Gainsbourg always had a way with words. His song Ford Mustang not only extolled the virtues and style of the American Pony car, but it also included a driving lesson, very utilitarian: “Mus” à gauche, “Tang” à droite Et à gauche à droite Bob Newhart, him of the button-down mind and the classic “Driving Instructor” skit, would be proud. The current Sans Culottes line-up is Clermont Ferrand (chef), Kit Kat Le Noir (chanteuse), Brigitte Bourdeaux (chanteuse), Benoit Bals (clavier, keys), Jacques Strappe (batterie, drums), M. Pomme Frite (basse), and Jean L’Effete (guitar, axe). The important thing to bear in mind here is that none of these people are French. The band, in different formations, has released nine albums so far, the latest being She is Tossed by the Waves, But Doesn’t Sink (2018). They are a serious working group, and they perform regularly all over Brooklyn, Manhattan and even the Bronx and Queens. They have toured across the length and breadth of this country, like the famous Michelin road map. They have played north of the border and they even made it to France in 2009, providing much needed relief to indigenous audiences there starved for French rock and roll. If you haven’t seen a Sans Culottes show, you’re in for a real treat, visually and audio wise. The music is upbeat, energetic and well played (not for the weak of heart, definitely for the sturdy of mind), the lyrics are funny, and the patois in between the numbers is even more so. The band is all rigged out in their number-one dress uniforms, somewhere between the New York Dolls and the Ronettes. Going to a Sans Culottes concert is exciting, like sneaking out to a midnight movie at the drive-in when you weren’t even allowed to watch television past 10 pm. It sniffs a bit of tempting danger, akin to disobeying a “Trespass-
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ers Will Be Prosecuted” sign and climbing over the fence anyway. It seems like a foreign experience in that exotic, alluring way (try Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca). Above all, it almost feels like a subversive act of protest, the same way that dining at an Indian restaurant on Thanksgiving Day can be interpreted as not going along with the usual. That, or making sure that you are visiting the pissoir when America the Beautiful is blaring at Yankee stadium so you don’t have to take the flak from the regular boring punters for not standing during the 7th inning stretch (see, dangerous). The whole project is Clermont’s (Bill’s) baby, his brainchild. I’m lucky enough to call Bill Carney and his wife Margie longtime friends and neighbors. Bill and I have been through the odd culture war or two together. We were both co-editors of Lurch Magazine, a saloondriven writers’ and artists’ rag back in the 90s and early 2000s. We are old drinking mates, the kind of pals that would steady each other on our wobbly bicycles and would weave home together at the end of a session, except I don’t ride a bike. Bill and I first met at the infamous O’Connor’s Bar on 5th Avenue, Brooklyn. Early on, Bill was promoting the idea of forming a French band. The rest of us just thought it was the whiskey talking. The proprietor Pat O’Connor, himself no stranger to conspiracy theories, was worried that this French band proposition might be anti-patriotic. George Miller, an old effete opinionated aristocratic drunk and an O’Connor’s denizen, even went so far as to suggest that Eisenhower trusted the French too much, raising a new concern for Pat that Dwight D. Eisenhower might have been a communist. After all, he suspected Bill and I were – why not Ike, whom he used to like? I am not making any of this up. Lo and behold, Bill pulled it off. By later 1998, Les Sans Culottes was out of the gate and running. Within a few years, they were packing out bar venues. Bill penned his songwriting ass off, all in a different lingo. I saw his band perform at the top of the World Trade Center before it was vaporized. I attended a show in the hold of an abandoned tugboat that some entrepreneur had turned into a speakeasy on the west side of the Hudson River. I was there for their 21st anniversary at the new Freddy’s Bar, also in Brooklyn. This was no mean feat what Bill (Clermont) had accomplished. Detroit son, public defender lawyer, and jug band leader makes good. Perhaps one of the most entertaining aspects of being part of the Sans Culottes in-crowd is reading Bill’s emails announcing upcoming events. Now I can bullshit with the best of them, but these scripts are downright hilarious. I tip my hat here. If only the nightly news was this entertaining and insightful. See what I mean:
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Salut! Well the Amerikan experiment in democracy is about to come to an extreme angry and cross road tomorrow when the Amerikans (or those allowed to vote) decide whether the Sinking City on the Hill is worth saving. It is referendumb on the Lying Horror Clown and to those who say well Trompe is a little like punk rock, well it is true, some Anglais punks liked the swastika and the Stooges had an album called Raw Power. So, a little eh?... These kind of screeds get pumped out regularly. This beats the Rachel Maddows and the Anderson Coopers of the official broadcast news world, hands down. Indeed, Bill Carney created Clermont Ferrand, just like John Lydon made Johnny Rotten. And such an invention allows for this particular duality – the critic who sounds like he stands on the outside but meanwhile functions on the inside, your average homegrown American conservative’s bad dream come true. While these same reactionaries fret, stew and dither about their boggle-headed notions of barbarians at the gate, Bill has come up with a different kind of headache for them, the thinking opposition actor on this side of the borderline. He’s not Mexican, he’s not a member of a numbered gang, he’s not a dope dealer, and he’s definitely not French. Rather he is of their own stock, born and raised here. Bill Carney has done this with vision, imagination, humor and French rock and roll. And that’s what gave us Clermont Ferrand. Cool, n’est-ce pas? Les Sans Culottes will be playing on Saturday, October 19, at Lucky Thirteen at 644 Sackett Street, between 3rd and 4th Avenues in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
October 2019
Book review: ‘Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe’ by Kurt Gottschalk
It all could have been wrapped up for Nick Lowe by 1994. He’d had moderate success and had earned favorable reviews. He had a couple of songs – “Cruel to Be Kind” and “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?” – that seemed universally known, though they’d come out ages ago. He’d even married into American music royalty by wedding the daughter of June Carter and stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, and the wedding was seen on MTV in the clip for his “I Knew the Bridge (When She Used to Rock and Roll).” But the marriage to singer Carlene Carter was over and he hadn’t had a hit in years. He’d been in two supergroups (Rockpile and Little Village) whose concerts were heralded, but the records fell flat. He’d been around the drug abuse bend (a predilection for LSD sometimes left him unable to perform in the early 1970s), and now drink was getting the better of him. Not long after passing the age-40 mile marker, however, Lowe did something few pop stars manage: he grew up. “I didn’t want to sing songs about being on the road again, or ‘here I am in a bar,’” Lowe tells author (and fellow musician and record producer) Will Birch in the excellent new Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe (Da Capo Press). “I wanted to sing some grown-up shit, about being extremely pissed off, because I am. And I needed to put this across and really tell a story like a proper geezer, like all the people I admire. . . . Suddenly I thought, ‘I can do this.’”
What he went on to do was a series of a half-dozen remarkable records, coming only once every three or four years, that were candid, clever, and quite grown-up, songs about domestic life (and the concomitant strife) that come from the point of view of the other side of the hill. He also went on to become a remarkable showman, playing solo concerts with a generous humor and a worldly croon to small but adoring audiences around America and the UK. “Candid and clever” also works well to describe the biography of one of pop’s greatest songwriters. Birch interviewed friends, bandmates and lovers from every phase of Lowe’s life, but most significantly quotes from extensive interviews with Lowe himself. And if Lowe is a humble subject (“I enjoyed being the big fish in a small pool” he says of his early days as one of the breakout stars of the British pub rock scene), his biographer can be a bit overly laudatory (it’s debatable whether “there is hardly a popular music genre that Nick Lowe hasn’t tackled”). The two achieve a balance and, with Lowe’s hands-off policy toward the narrative, craft a rich and readable story about how he went from Lothario to happy hubby and from near acid casualty to near alcoholic to a class act that wouldn’t turn down a glass of wine. The book also chronicles the evolution of the nascent New Wave movement and the fascinating rise and fall of the Svengali figure Jake Riviera, who managed Lowe and Elvis Costello and co-founded Stiff Records, where Lowe was in-house producer.
But first and foremost, it’s a portrait of the singer as a young and old man and a hard guy not to like. To some readers, it might be surprising that he comes off as being as kindly in interviews as he does on stage. To others, the surprise might be that he wasn’t always that way. But either way, the book will cement his position as a pop songster for the ages – if not for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame then at least for the lover of a smart turn of phrase and a memorable tune. Kurt Gottschalk is a journalist and author based in New York City. His writings on music have been published in outlets throughout Europe and America and he has two volumes of short fiction to his name. He is also the producer and host of the Miniature Minotaurs radio program on WFMU.
In stereo: Don Dixon and Marti Jones interview by Andrew White
To music aficionados and dedicated album-linernote-completists, the names Don Dixon and Marti Jones should be instantly recognizable. In the 1980s Dixon produced albums from seminal indie acts Guadalcanal Diary, Dumptruck, New Jersey’s Smithereens and co-produced early albums for R.E.M. with Let’s Active’s Mitch Easter. It’s of note that Dixon was one of several producers considered to produce Nirvana’s breakthrough album Nevermind along with Scott Litt (who also produced R.E.M.) but ultimately lost out to Butch Vig. You can’t win ‘em all. Dixon’s production work continues today, most recently working with the Gin Blossoms on their Mixed Reality album, once again teaming up with Mitch Easter; and on his own solo projects and with his wife of 31 years, singer and accomplished painter Marti Jones. Jones recorded several albums for A&M and RCA in the 80s and early ‘90s (produced by Dixon) that delivered an indie-tinged, country-rock sound. Think if Dusty Springfield made a Lucinda Willams album that was produced by Don Dixon and you get the picture! In addition to production, Dixon’s songs have been performed by artists such as Joe Coker, the Counting Crows, Hootie and the Blowfish and Marshall Crenshaw. He’s one of those guys that when you start digging through his credits on Discogs, you’ll start finding his name pop up in all kinds of familiar musical places. And in many cases, with the husband-wife connection, you’ll find Jones’s name right alongside Dixon’s. And it’s as a duo that Dixon and Jones will be per-
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forming at NYC’s Rockwood Music Hall Stage 3 on Saturday, October 5. As a lead-up to the show I had the chance to ask the Ohio-based couple a few questions: Is the NYC show part of a dedicated tour you’re doing together? When was the last time you performed here? (Dixon) We’re doing a short run down the East Coast. Boston, Beacon, NYC, Philadelphia and D.C. The City Winery in 2015 is the last show in the city I can remember but we played Englewood, NJ, a few years ago. Is there anything in particular about NYC you like or have a memory of that relates to a previous musical experience here? (Dixon) We used to play the Bottom Line twice a year. Miss that place. I started coming to New York in the mid-70s when my band signed with [record label] Vanguard. We lived in the Chelsea Hotel while we made that record and the Lower East Side was a war zone. Flaming cars, garbage strikes. A colorful, magical place. My kind of town as the song says. (Jones) I’ve had the most magical career moments in NYC. I hopped in a cab one night to go to the Bottom Line where I was opening a run of shows with Richard Thompson. When I told the driver where I wanted to go, he asked if I was Marti Jones. I felt like a star.
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What material will you be playing? Is it old or new, a mixture of songs from both of your repertoires, or do you have a new album coming out? (Dixon) We have decided to play a variety of songs from our records. A mish-mash of stuff. (Jones) Yes, we’re drawing on material from each of our individual records as well as our one duet record [Living Stereo]. Don, will you be playing bass guitar, and is that instrument your favorite to play? I look at myself in the mirror and see a bass player. My first instrument was trombone but I picked up
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Rolling Stone charts: end of payola? by Roderick Thomas
The Billboard charts have long been the industry standard when it comes to determining music’s popularity and success. However, recent years have seen controversy surround Billboard. To varying degrees, Billboard has been affected by industry tricks to boost streaming numbers and song plays with bots, payola, etc. Additionally, the Billboard charts’ historical dependence on radio airplay has made the chart susceptible to opinions of gatekeepers, and less the listening public. On July 2, 2019, the magazine Rolling Stone launched its chart system, powered by Alpha Data (analytics), a direct competitor of Nielsen SoundScan, which powers Billboard. The Rolling Stone (RS) charts aim to take away the “middle man,” so to speak. The RS charts do not include programmed airplay, digital or terrestrial. Meaning, if you’re turning up to your favorite radio station in your car, phone or laptop, the Rolling Stone charts don’t include those plays towards chart positioning. What do they factor into chart positioning? Online/digital plays and purchases. Now, that may seem odd to the casual listener, but let’s examine this. Radio stations are loyal to their advertisers, who pay money for airtime; thus, due to their revenue model, they are susceptible to traditional forms of payola. Streaming companies are subscription-based and rely far more on their subscription base: that’s you, the consumer. Streaming services, while still attractive for advertisers, are in theory less susceptible to payola. Traditional gatekeepers like DJs, program directors, etc., are no longer a part of the process, in the traditional sense. Rolling Stone, a musical
powerhouse, is shaking up the music industry by pitting itself against Billboard and redefining the standards of success, somewhat. The problem is payola. Payola is the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product or interest. In music, payola means to pay for play. While the RS chart may lessen the influence of pay for play, the chart’s reliance on streams (Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, etc.) means it’s still susceptible to payola. Yes, it seems streaming platforms like Apple Music, Tidal, and even the RIAA which certifies albums and songs as gold (500,000 copies sold), platinum (one million copies sold), and so on, are vulnerable to payola. On September 4, 2019, FCC commissioner Mike O’Rielly sent an official letter to the RIAA citing reports of payola. While the letter itself reads like a preemptive slap on the wrist, it is telling about the current state and future of commercial music. In recent years, the traditional markers of music success have declined in importance and popularity. Grammys and Billboard positions, while still important, do not carry the weight they once did. Simply put, people don’t care the way they used to. There are other markers of popularity, particularly streaming numbers, digital sales and of course, social media. Thanks to streaming, platinum certifications are being handed out with much greater ease than in the past. Lil Nas X soared to popularity via Tic Toc on social media and subsequently went on to have the longest-running Billboard number-one song in
music history, breaking the record previously held by Mariah Carey. So, what does all this mean for up-and-coming musicians (and entertainers in general)? Popularity matters now more than ever. While talent is still a factor, popularity is taking up more space these days on the list of requirements. Record labels have been blasted for using bots and paying companies for likes and followers on social media and boosting streams. Services like Stream.ko even offer “buy streams” packages for up to 2 million streams. Now it’s important to note that documented payments for play aren’t illegal as long as they are public. However, public pay-for-play payments could ruin or negatively impact an artist’s image, and the image is everything to a label’s investment. See Tekashi69, the rapper facing 47 years in prison for his ties to the 9 Trey gang, a faction of the Bloods. Over the past eight years, we’ve seen an increase of social media and reality stars make their way into music and entertainment and even political prominence. I don’t expect that to change any time soon. Today, the line between organic plays and payola is becoming more invisible. Until we can eliminate payola, the Rolling Stone chart is at best a well-meaning attempt at ensuring that an artist’s ranking is based on real listeners. It’s not a payola cure, but it’s a step in the right direction. Roderick Thomas is a NYC-based writer and filmmaker. Instagram: @Hippiebyaccident. Email: rtroderick. thomas@gmail.com.
Old nightmares and new music at Lizzie King’s Parlor by Jody Callahan
Take a little walk to edge of Park Slope down on 5th Ave between St. Marks and Warren to Lizzie King’s Parlor, a name with an origin story that seems ripe for a Nick Cave murder ballad. It comes from Elizabeth Lloyd King, who lived around the corner in the late 1800s and is famous for having shot her estranged husband three times in the head. The inside is decorated with antique mirrors and a couple of fireplace mantles for a postProhibition 1930s vibe. By one of these mantels is displayed a copy of the New York Times article detailing King’s murder of Charles Goodrich.
and pickers like Matt Wiffen a formidable student of the American songbook who comes to us by way of England and would be right at home in any honky-tonk across the nation.
The signature cocktails are spot on. Their names, such as Illicit Tryst, Womanhunt, and Love Letters, are more call-outs to the nefarious Lizzie King. Ingredients are sourced from local (like, down-the-block local) vendors, and as is expected of a Brooklyn gastropub, their entrees are quite tasty, though not as playfully named as the drinks. However, it is difficult to not say fava beans in a sinister Hannibal Lecter voice.
All of this is to say that Lizzie King’s Parlor is worthy of your night out to pay tribute to local crime lore, sip drinks in eternal celebration of prohibition’s end, and to hear some damn fine songs by some carefully picked and damn fine singers while you do so.
The owners take equal care in the curation of their musical acts. All performers are vetted, and this cultivates a vibe above the “here is some proficient jazz to try and talk over” – a move too many trendy bistro-venues lean on. I was excited to hear the vibrant and Django Reinhardt-inspired Brooklyn Caravan whose gypsy stylings complete the ‘30s-era feel of Lizzie King’s Parlor. On another night I witnessed the bad-ass Beccs and her soulstirring to soul-crushing singing and songwriting that harks back to Fiona Apple in her heyday. There are, of course, the more traditional singers
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One somewhat regular in rotation and infinitely noteworthy musician is Chris Q. Murphy. A one-time punk rocker who is now an illimitable folkster able to weave a tale or make tangible in song your abstract emotions acutely enough to rival Townes Van Zandt and all other Americana forebears. You can even catch him playing at LKP Oct. 29th, and I recommend you do.
Tue 10/22 Beccs (mentioned in this article) http://www.beccsmusic.com/ Thur 10/24 Brooklyn Caravan (mentioned in this article) https://www.brooklyncaravan.com/ Tue 10/29 Chris Q. Murphy & The Coolest Ranch (mentioned in this article) http://www. chrisqmurphy.com/ Wed 10/30 Elana Brody https://www.mattwiffen. com/ (Mentioned in this article.) Lizzie King's Parlor, 75A 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217. (347) 460-7514.
Lizzie King’s Parlor October Lineup: Tue 10/1 Augustin Grasso & Special Sauce agustingrasso.com/music Wed 10/2 The Ben Kogan Band benkogan. bandcamp.com Thur 10/3 Anna May annamaymusic.com Tue 10/8 Will Armstrong willarmstrong.bandcamp. com Wed 10/9 Lesedi Ntsane www.lesedintsane.com Tue 10/15 Audrej Jusufbegovic www.instagram. com/andrejjusufbegovic Thur 10/17 7th Boro www.7thboro.com Fri 10/18 Taylor Watson www.taylormusica.org
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October 2019
The Long Ryders, pioneers of alt country by Mike Cobb
As part of LA’s Paisley Underground, The Long Ryders were one of the first American groups to combine the cosmic country of the Byrds with the DIY punk ethos of the early 1980s. The band recorded their debut LP Native Sons with Henry Lewy who worked with The Flying Burrito Brothers on their legendary album Gilded Palace of Sin. Former Byrd Gene Clark joined them on their gorgeous tune “Ivory Tower” and Melody Maker Magazine called the record a “modern classic.” Signed to Island Records in 1985, the band released their second album State of Our Union. Their revved-up country punk number “Looking for Lewis & Clark” became their signature song and was second only to the Smiths in the British radio charts in the mid 80’s. The band’s jangly pop won them the attention of REM., who stated, “As soon as we get through making the Replacements famous, you guys are next!” The group toured extensively and continued to make a global impact with an invitation to open for U2 but disbanded in 1987 when members settled down to start families. Despite leaving the road, The Long Ryders created the template for the alt country sound and counts groups like The Byrds, Tom Petty, the Black Crowes, the Jayhawks, and Wilco as friends, admirers, and collaborators. Various projects have kept them busy over the years. Singer-guitarist Sid Griffin moved to England, published numerous books on Bob Dylan and Graham Parsons, and played with the bluegrass band The Coal Porters. Lead guitarist Stephen McCarthy worked on solo projects, collaborated with old friend and early bandmate Steve Wynn, and began playing with the Jayhawks in 2003. Bassist Tom Stephens earned a degree in computer science and released solo albums while drummer Greg Sowders, who was married for a time to Lucinda Williams, has made a career in music publishing. In between there were side projects, reunion tours
and shows including playing Glastonbury in 2004. It’s been 33 1/3 years since their last release, and while that’s a long gap, those numbers coincide perfectly with the revolutions per minute on their latest vinyl double album Psychedelic Country Soul, which was recorded at Dr. Dre’s studio in Los Angeles and features old friends the Bangles on harmony vocals and Dave Perlman on pedal steel guitar. The Long Ryders in their previous heyday. (photo by Greg Allen) “Greenville” is the perfect track to kick Sid’s “What The Eagle Sees” harks back to the of the album with twangy riffs reminiscent of band’s garage rock roots with psychedelic imagery Exile-era Stones crossed with the 12-string jangle above the clouds: “See, see, what the eagle sees…” of the Byrds and an infectious chorus that brings On “California State Line,” McCarthy’s voice to mind REM’s “Don’t Go Back to Rockville.” brings to mind Jay Farrar with gorgeous pedal Stephen McCarthy penned lyrics with political steel guitar thanks to old friend Dave Perlman. overtones – “How’s your revolution, and your war machine?” – that cleverly rest within a country The band does a lovely version of Tom Petty’s pop framework. “Walls”, an endearing tribute to their recently
Another McCarthy tune, “Let If Fly” boasts tasteful B-bender guitar licks that evoke the classic sounds of the Flying Burrito Brothers with lovely fiddle and gorgeous harmonies courtesy of the Bangles.
“All Aboard” has melancholy melodies with slashing guitars that show how Uncle Tupelo were influenced by The Long Ryders, and perhaps viceversa. “Make It Real” features great harmonica playing with lush harmonies that show McCarthy picked up a thing or two from his work with the Jayhawks. “I’m getting high as a satellite.”
Don Dixon and Marti Jones bass soon after. I didn’t start on guitar. I was drawn to bass at an early age and that’s what I saved up my pennies to buy. A little black Silvertone Danelectro bass from Sears. I bought it in 1964 for $79.95 and that’s the bass I play with Marti. I’ll pick up the guitar on a few songs, too. And any artists or releases you’ve been producing lately that we should keep an eye out for? Mark Bates, a young singer-songwriter from West Virginia. Austin Walkin’ Cane, R&B singer from Cleveland. I just finished a record of songs I wrote with a guy named John Bare The Lassie James Songbook, Volume One. I wrote music to lyrics he had written for his novel, The Fair-Skinned Brunette with the Porcelain Shine. I put together a band of NC folks for this and recorded it in Mitch’s [Easter] studio in Kernersville. My buddy Jeffrey Dean Foster sings them. Marti, how does your painting interact with your music? Or are they completely separate entities? Do you find it more challenging to write a song or finish a painting? (Jones) They’re completely separate. It’s why I had trouble painting before I was more grounded at home while tending our daughter. It was during those years that I was able to have the inclination to pick up a brush and not have to worry about leaving a painting the next day. It’s definitely more
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departed friend. The album closes with “Psychedelic Country Soul.” Throbbing tremolo and 12 string acoustic guitar lure the listener into a dreamlike state.
This excellent album is available as a digital download, CD, and double vinyl package (recorded at 45 rpms for higher fidelity). To purchase their music and find out more about this legendary band, see their website: thelongryders.com. The Long Ryders are on tour worldwide. Catch them if you can!
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difficult for me to write a song. Also, any thoughts on the infamous Universal fire where supposedly many master tapes were lost, including Marti’s output for A&M? (Jones) It’s sad, not just for my stuff that was lost, but for the entire mass of musical history that perished. Did you guys ever have any plans to remaster and re-release those recordings via your own label, Dixon Archival Remnants Records? (Dixon) We actually re-issued [Marti’s 1985 album] Unsophisticated Time on CD as a limited run in the early days of this century. A&M never had an American CD release of that album. We haven’t been able to get permission to release any
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of Marti’s other stuff… or most of my older solo records either. To hear more great stories and songs from Don and Marti at Rockwood Music Hall on October 5th, head over to Eventbrite for advance tickets before they sell out!
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No pretense, no pretending in Chrissie Hynde’s song stylings by Kurt Gottschalk
It’s easy to take Chrissie Hynde for granted. The songs she wrote and sang with her band the Pretenders shoot straight from the heart. You don’t think about her performance because you’re too busy thinking about her, about the story she’s telling and the character she’s portraying. The communication is so direct that it’s easy to miss the singer delivering the song. Take a step back, though, and you’ll hear Hynde the singer of heartbreaking vibrato and masterful phrasing. You can’t divorce her words from the way she sang them. Try it: “When love walks in the room / Everybody stand up / Oh it’s good, good, good / Like Brigitte Bardot”; “Don’t harass me, can’t you tell / I’m going home, I’m tired as hell / I’m not the cat I used to be / I got a kid, I’m thirty-three”; “A, o, way to go Ohio.” Even when you don’t understand the words (“Moving through the Cleveland heat / How precious”), you know the way she sang them. In pop music, phrasing is everything. Plenty of people can carry a tune, but it takes a Frank Sinatra or an Ella Fitzgerald—or a Janis Joplin, Johnny Rotten or Axl Rose—to imprint their interpretation onto your imagination. And that’s what makes Chrissie Hynde a great singer and Valve Bone Woe (BMG) a great album. Never mind the orchestra, never mind the fact that some of the songs are associated with the jazz tradition. This isn’t a jazz album, it’s an album in the old style of
popular song, and Hynde does a hell of a job. As great as the greats? Maybe not. She does give the Sinatra-penned “I’m a Fool to Want You” a confident read and her updating of the Beach Boys “Caroline, No” is positively heartbreaking. She’s bold to hold herself up to such singers as David Bowie and Nina Simone in taking on “Wild is the Wind” but falls short of claiming the song as her own. On the other hand, the song was first recorded by Johnny Mathis, and she easily bests his forgettable version. The Mathis connection is apt. Valve Woe Bone (credited to Chrissie Hynde and the Valve Bone Woe Ensemble) is a record in the tradition of the song stylists of yore: new interpretations of old familiar tunes (the most recent is Nick Drake’s 1969 “Riverman”). The orchestra is competent if undistinguished, a bit Hollywood even though it was recorded in London, and is there to make her look good. They do pull off an invigorating, mostly instrumental take on Charles Mingus’ “Meditation on a Pair of Wirecutters,” but the album is all about the singer. The other distinguishing factor at play is the production. Marius de Vries and Eldad Guetta do a beautiful job at blending Hynde’s voice with the instruments, adding sparing studio effects on top of mix. John Coltrane’s “Naima” takes on an eerie quality with distant, disembodied voices sounding like a phone call you should be paying attention to.
Jule Styne’s “Absent-Minded Me,” first recorded by Barbra Streisand in 1964, drifts into daydream with electronic effects in the extended outro. Valve Drum Bone is far better than the thin novelty of the cosplay jazz of so many rockers before her, but despite all its trappings, it isn’t a jazz record, either. It’s a weary and impassioned set of songs from the past from a singer who, having past retirement age, is still ready to take up a challenge.
Where are all the protest songs? by Jack Grace You are outraged, and have written a protest song. You’d like it to be a part of the catalyst for change; march out in the streets, sing it, have all the radio stations play it with a new anthem for a better world out there and change on its way. Well…it’s happened before. According to Wikipedia, a protest song is “a song that is associated with a movement for social change and hence part of the broader category of topical songs (or songs connected to current events). It may be folk, classical, or commercial in genre.” Let’s face it, these times are screaming for protest songs and yet new protest songs are not exactly filling our media stream in this era. They are being written, but not really reaching a big audience. During the late '50s into the early '70s the protest song enjoyed a Renaissance. There was a Folk Boom blossoming in popular culture in the late 50’s, along with the actions of the Civil Rights Movement. “We Shall Overcome”, arguably the most iconic and sing-along-able protest number still in use today, seemed to be the triggering battle cry. Pete Seeger is largely credited for bringing the number to international attention; variations of the song were in the ether since at least the early 1900s. Seeger heard the song in 1947 from folklorist Zilphia Horton, altered the title from We Will Overcome and brought a new sense of rhythm to it. So really it was a team effort. How do we get new protest songs that help us all feel like a change can come? These days comedians are picking up the slack. Sometimes the greatest relief is hearing a comedian skewer the news of the day. They have daily access to your attention, sympathize with your frustrations and package it all by taunting the oppressor in a way that feels, oh, so just.
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Jon Stewart’s shaming of Congress to pass the September 11th Victim Compensation Bill used the same kind of star power that allowed Neil Young to get the protest song “Ohio” on the radio across the United States only ten days after the Kent State Massacre. Neil Young is still writing protest songs, they are just not becoming anthems. He wants you to know how messed up Monsanto is. But his new material doesn’t get that massive level of attention these days. We all can and should write protest songs. You can put them online, try adding them to spotify playlists, make videos for YouTube, and sing them at protests. Or maybe it is your role to find a song already in the ether, update it, and aid in bringing it to international recognition. The modern pop music world needs to step up and use their star power to sing about something other than how fine their or your body is. Taylor Swift speaking out against Trump after he is already unpopular is a far cry from Bob Dylan’s Masters of War. An August 2019 article in Vanity Fair stated, “Swift believed her public image would have made her something of “a hindrance,” but she’s gotten past that.” Well, I’m glad she is finally finding her voice, but it appears the latest musical pop stars may just be lacking substance.
5) I Ain’t Marching Anymore- Phil Ochs 6) Loretta Lynn- The Pill 7) Legalize It- Peter Tosh 8) Ani DiFranco- To The Teeth 9) Fuck the Police- NWA 10) The Revolution Will Not Be Televised- Gil Scott Heron Let’s hope the protest song returns to prominence one day. It might just occur as folks begin asking, “Why is everyone getting so heavy? “Whatever happened to all of those great comedians from the early 21st century?” Jack Grace is a composer, performer and writer, born in Brooklyn, NY and now resides in Peekskill, NY. He has been a contributor and radio personality for WNYC's The Takeaway and Sirius/XM's Freewheelin'.
Hopefully, the industry will enjoy a more inspired time where lyrics on the level of poetry make a comeback in pop music. That would surely aid in bringing forth more popular protest songs. 10 beautiful Protest Songs 1939-2019: 1) Nazi Punks Fuck Off- Dead Kennedys 2) Voicemail For Jill- Amanda Palmer 3) Billie Holiday- Strange Fruit 4) Johnny Cash- What Is Truth
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October 2019
Louis Prima Jr. & The Witnesses by Mike Fiorito Life has a funny way of coming full circle sometimes. Someone I don’t know writes me about a piece I had placed in the Red Hook Star-Revue on Louie Prima a few weeks prior. That someone, my new friend Charlie Diliberti, then tells me that Louis Prima’s son, Louie Prima Jr., tours around the country playing New Orleans-style jazz, like his father. In fact, he knows Louie Prima Jr., he says. Would I like to meet him? Charlie also tells me that he speaks Sicilian and that he’s from a town not too far from where Louie Prima’s family is from in Sicily. Then we write back and forth about our Sicilian origins.
and exotic, hand on hip like Betty Boop.
I’m going to pause here for a moment to connect the time travel elements of all of this. The piece that Charlie reads is inspired by my leaning backward in time to explore my dad’s musical interests. He was a big fan of Louie Prima. And by writing the piece, it connects me to the future. To new friends.
The sound level, now at twelve, threatens to blow the roof off the venue.
A few weeks later, Charlie writes saying that Louie Prima Jr. & The Witnesses are playing at The Cutting Room in Manhattan. Would I like to meet him there? Of course, I say yes. When I get to The Cutting Room, Charlie has filled three tables with friends and family. He introduces me and my 23-year-old son, Thelonious, whom I drag along, to the people at the table. They are friendly, talking and having fun. Like in Spinal Tap, when Prima Jr. and the Witnesses take the stage, their set starts at volume eleven. Not ten. Eleven. From the first note, they erupt on the stage, bucking and kicking, stomping and romping. Never missing a single note. They are smack on. Meanwhile, the room is eager and wanting, but they haven’t yet caught up to the high velocity of the band. They’re still eating, having only had a few drinks. Prima Jr. is hopping around and singing, like his father. The band follows his antics, bouncing on one foot in unison, while playing their instruments with incredible accuracy. And like his father, Prima Jr. has a lead sax player and a female vocalist. Marco Palos, lead sax player and arranger, also writes some of the songs. Kate Curran, like Prima Sr.’s vocalists, can hit the high notes and make it sound easy. And she too plays the on-stage theatrics. She’s the steady to Prima Jr.’s wild gymnastic performance. She’s shapely
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The band then plays a few of Marco’s songs from their two albums The Wildest and Blow. The songs are reminiscent of Prima Sr.’s style, but they are new and fresh. Marco is impeccably dressed, tall and handsome. He is debonair, expertly playing his sax like it’s a walk in the park. Meanwhile, the whole band is singing harmonies. And the whole band is stomping on one foot now, as if trying to tilt the stage. I imagine that even the street outside The Cutting Room is on a slant, parked cars rolling down the street. I hold on tight to my beer, so it won’t slide off the table.
As Louie and the band bounce and hop around, the venue is yet hot and humid. It’s a rainy and sticky night. Somehow there isn’t enough air-conditioning flowing into the room. All the players are mopping their faces with rags. I’m sweating too and I’m not running laps like they are. Four songs in, the audience is now warming up. The band’s intoxicating energy is infectious. The audience is no longer just passively watching. They are part of the show. As I look around, most people in the audience are out of their seats, some are whipping napkins around over their heads. This is a party. This ain’t no foolin’ around. I get up to go to the bathroom. When I come back, I’m grabbed by the hand and spun by a woman I don’t know. Now I’m dancing, too. Even my son Thelonious is bopping around in his seat. He winces at me dancing with a stranger, as if saying Dad, how could you? You look ridiculous.
every lyric, punching their fists with every stomp and stop. I see two guys in the audience fall to the ground while dancing drunkenly. This scene has become an orgiastic Mardi Gras. After their last song, Prima Jr comes off stage. He has literally just run a marathon. Still wearing a fancy Vegas performer suit, he walks toward me. I ask him if I can take a picture. Even though he’s been running on stage for two hours, in the picture I take, he looks cool and relaxed. I, on the other hand, look haggard, like I’ve run into a Mack truck. After the picture, I thank him with a hug. I think to myself that we’re about the same age. Our parents would be about the same age. It’s as if our fathers introduce us from the past. Wait, how could that be? I leave The Cutting Room thinking about how things come full circle. How little gestures or events can change the future. How life can be so ironic. That I’m looking at a picture of me and Louis Prima Jr., which I wish I could show my dad – mainly because he’s responsible for all of this. Sometimes life just makes sense in some way that can’t be explained. Mike Fiorito’s most recent book, Call Me Guido, was published in 2019 by Ovunque Siamo Press. Call Me Guido explores three generations of an Italian American family through the lens of the Italian song tradition. Mike’s short story collections, Hallucinating Huxley and Freud’s Haberdashery Habit, were published by Alien Buddha Press. He is currently an Associate Editor for Mad Swirl Magazine.
After a break, the band comes back on, taking turns singing songs. They are all excellent singers. I now notice that Prima Jr. has slipped behind the drum kit. Everybody plays every instrument in this band, it seems. They perform lively versions of songs like “Born on the Bayou” by Credence and Elton John’s “Saturday,” revealing their rock music roots. The crowd is now almost all out of their seats. It’s literally pandemonium. Now fully lathered up, Prima Jr. returns to the mic, singing a few of Sr.’s old hits like “Just a Gigolo” and “Buona Sera”; the audience is now totally wild, singing along with
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Louis Junior with the author.
October 2019, Page 33
A deep dive into the Village Halloween Parade
Y
ou’ve probably watched the annual spectacle on the local TV new stations or maybe have even participated in it yourself, dressing up in costume and walking the mile-long route in Lower Manhattan. New York City’s Village Halloween Parade is just one of those city-specific events that you can only experience here, much like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square. As the parade approaches its 46th year this month, we took a deep dive look into its longstanding history.
Bennington and the very beginning
To understand its immense popularity now, you have to revisit the parade’s past, which led us to speaking with puppeteer Ralph Lee, the original organizer. He had been working simultaneously as an actor and a mask maker prior to the parade; but in the spring of 1974, he was teaching at Bennington College (Bennington, Vermont) when he was asked to direct and produce an outdoor campus production. “I had been making some big puppets – not a lot of them at that point, but I thought, ‘Should I do some kind of a thing that incorporates a lot of these puppets?’ and having the students make some as well,” Lee explained. “So I got this idea of doing an event that would take place at various locations on the Bennington College campus, and so we [he and playwright Nancy Fales] developed this scenario of a young woman who is sort of on a search.” Excited audience members traveled along a certain route to various locations and experienced different scenes that involved puppets as char-
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by Erin DeGregorio
acters. Lee included and featured, for example, a large lobster and a two-headed pigbeast that he had made specifically for Sam Shepard plays. He also made a giant lizard puppet crawl, which he created with the students, across the wall of enclosed garden. “It turned out to be a very successful undertaking. It was the first time I’d seen my big puppets outdoors, and it seemed like this was where they really belonged, not indoors onstage in a theater,” Lee said. “I was really excited about this and began to think of ways of doing more theater outdoors.” He later connected with George Bartenieff and Crystal Field, who ran the Theatre for the New City (where he had done previous work), and they decided to put on a community parade in Greenwich Village, where the theater was located and where Lee lived, on Halloween. Lee provided about 100 masks and big puppets and the Theatre provided some performers for the parade, which also had staged scenes along the route. Much like the Bennington College event, the idea was that the parade could momentarily stop so attendees could watch mini acts take place. It started at the Theatre for the New City, came over to Westbeth, went to Abingdon Square, down Bleecker Street for a while and then zigzagged over to Washington Square. After finding success with it the first year with fewer than 200 participants, Lee organized another Halloween parade with Bartenieff and Field and discovered that local residents were really interested. “At the end of the second year, I felt the parade needed to be its own organization, an entity of its
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own,” he said, later explaining that he started his own not-for-profit. Subsequent parades became partially funded by the City, started at the Westbeth Community Room instead and became interspersed with musical groups like bands from Chinatown and from the Bread and Puppet Theater, which had worked with Lee for a number of years. Puppets were spotted in windows, on doorsteps and even flying off flagpoles. The parades continued to get bigger as years went on, with increasing local and international media coverage and with more people coming to watch and coming in costume to join Lee’s creations. Lee’s apartment in Westbeth Artists Housing served as the central headquarters for parade planning and, after 12 years, Lee decided it was time to step down in 1985. Jeanne Fleming, who had already worked on the parade, has been its artistic and producing director since 1981.
Handing over the reins
Before entering the spooktacular world of the Halloween parade, Fleming was a clothing designer, cooperative arts program creator for 30 colleges above New York City and the themed event curator at Mohonk Mountain House. But after a life-changing experience in the Sahara Desert, she decided to pursue the one thing she’d always wanted to do – create her own theater piece. Fleming developed a large-scale, outdoor pageant, held every October 4, during which attendees walked between various set pieces that had performances, music, dance, theater and storytelling. She told us that, after all the hard work of putting on her event, she’d always treat herself by attending the
October 2019
Halloween parade in Manhattan a few weeks later. When she heard Lee didn’t want to spearhead the parade anymore, Fleming came down from upstate New York and brainstormed ways with him to keep it going. She met with the local community boards, City agencies and anyone else who was involved with helping the event run smoothly. Fleming noted to us that, over the decades, crowd sizes amassed from 15 to 20 thousand (spectators plus participants) to 2 million attendees and between 60 and 70 thousand participants now. “The Halloween parade is an eccentric event,” she said. “I really see [it] as being about individual creativity but on a mass scale. It’s about each person coming out and what fantasy they decide to live in for that night – breaking out of everyday reality and being able to perform in this transformative environment.”
Traditions and themes
Fleming has stayed true to Lee’s vision and has expanded upon it too, as it now includes 53 different kinds of music from around the world, hundreds of master and volunteer puppeteers, and tens of thousands of participants from all different walks of life dressing up in creative costumes. One element that’s been the same since its inception, for example, is having the now-40-year-old dancing skeleton puppets lead the parade.
direction or creative inspiration when it came time for them to think about their next best costume. But just because the parade has a theme each year doesn’t mean you have to adhere to it; you can still dress up as whomever or whatever your heart desires. The team usually discusses themes as early as May, but Fleming notes that the zeitgeist of the world can change it at any time. For instance, after the 9/11 attacks, the theme changed within seven weeks to “Phoenix Rising,” providing hope to New Yorkers when it became the first major event held in the City and showcased a huge phoenix puppet. “We felt it was even more important to do [it] at that time. New York City has this spirit of continuing and a faith in humanity – it’s the same spirit as the Halloween parade,” Fleming said. Other previous themes have also included: “I am a Robot” last year, “Revival” for the 40th anniversary and “Metamorphosis” for the 25th anniversary. But this year’s theme is “Wild Thing!” – a call back to nature when our lives are inundated with technology.
“What the dancing skeletons teach us and tell us is that life is short, so you better dance when you’re alive,” Fleming said. “They’re really the spirits of the parade.”
“We’re hoping people will go back to making things that are made out of natural materials or [dressing up] as things that are more based in nature,” Fleming added. “I think it’s going to be interesting to see because we’re going to have everything from kitties to pretty deep creatures. And I hear in Game of Thrones there’s a group called the Wildings; I would expect we’d get some wildings who live outside the walls of the palace.”
However, one component that was added about 25 years ago was providing a special theme. Fleming said someone had mentioned that it would’ve been helpful if the parade team could give people a little
She and her colleagues also decided to have a new section in the parade last year, in which participants who dressed to the theme could march in a special part for $25. Additionally, those who
wanted to be a VIP and get into the parade early could pay $100 to do so. One of the VIP perks is a participant choosing what band they would like to march next to for the whole night. These opportunities are available again this year. But just like it started in 1974, the parade remains free to watch and free to march in for those who dress in costume.
Where they are now
Although Lee is no longer involved with the Halloween parade, he and the Mettawee River Theatre Company (his own theater company) have staged the Procession of the Ghouls at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s Halloween Extravaganza since 1990. The extravaganza, which is always held on the Friday before Halloween, includes the showing of a classic silent film with live organ accompaniment; this year’s film will be Nosferatu (1922). The event concludes with Mettawee’s spooky costumed characters and puppets overtaking the Cathedral’s Nave in a display of sinister (but family-friendly) mischief. The Village parade route has changed a couple of times through the last four and a half decades, but it currently runs straight up Sixth Avenue, from Spring Street to 16th Street (most crowded between Bleecker and 14th Streets). This year’s grand marshals are Zohra the Giant Spider puppet and its creator, Master Puppeteer Basil Twist. Zohra has gone up and down the famous clock tower of the Jefferson Market Library for the last 30 years. Fun fact: the puppets are fabricated and assembled at Superior Concept Monsters’ workshop in Red Hook, New York. That’s upstate, not the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Grand Opening
718 643-2737 718 643-0741 218 Columbia Street, near Union
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October 2019, Page 35
Ny's newest tradition, the Barnacle Parade by Erin DeGregorio
When Hurricane Irene made landfall in New York in 2011, Red Hook experienced storm surge flooding that made residents think about hurricane preparedness more seriously. But Superstorm Sandy forever changed the neighborhood a year later with unparalleled flooding and 12-foot-high storm surges that left locals to literally pick up the pieces and rebuild from scratch. Neighbors relied on one another in the days, weeks and months that followed, whether it was looking for bottled water and food or helping a business clean up in the aftermath. On Sandy’s first anniversary in 2013, a group of residents and business owners teamed up to organize and put on a parade, which celebrated the neighborhood and its resiliency to overcome adversary. Local business owners included those from The Good Fork, Fort Defiance, Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies, Red Hook Bait & Tackle Shop, Hometown Bar-B-Que and others. Outlines of blue waves were painted on storefronts’ windows, and highlighter-green and pink tape ran along brick warehouses to mark the floodwater’s heights. A homemade sign made from a flattenedout cardboard box outside of Steve’s, which served as a pit stop along the parade route, read, “Key Lime Pie loves its Red Hook. Sandy didn’t kick our asses, we kicked Sandy’s!” There was live music, folks wearing homemade costumes, people holding up cardboard waves with sharks, cars and gas cans, and giant floats rolling down the streets – all of which our paper saw in person. The “Generhook Model #102912” float pumped green water and released smoke. “Some people are calling it the Barnacle Parade – a
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celebration of the fact that we are still here, that we hung on, and an acknowledgment that in Red Hook we sometimes have to get in over our heads in order to thrive,” St. John Frizell, owner of Fort Defiance, wrote for Al Jazeera in 2013. When asked why they had chosen a parade, of all things, parade co-founder and owner of The Good Fork Ben Schneider said a number of them had already been interested in parades and had talked about doing a fun neighborhood parade for years. For Schneider, it was nothing out of the ordinary because he had attended the annual Fourth of July parade in Warren, Vermont, and had worked on parade floats growing up. The Mermaid Parade, which brings maritime mythology to life every summer in Coney Island, was a source of inspiration for some others. “We thought it’d be a fun way to kind of shake off the hardships of that first year and have a good time together,” he added. Schneider and others continue to take time out of their schedules to prep for the parade and build the next eye-catching float. And it really does take an “all hands on deck” approach to conceptualize an idea and create something extraordinary from wood, chicken wire and other materials for the neighborhood to see. After the inaugural year, there was the fused City sanitation truck/ pirate ship float that battled Sea Monster Sandy; a mixed-use building float that had a red crane and green construction fence in 2015; a Red Hook Ark (“to seek refuge on during the next flood”) in 2016; Lady Liberty canoeing in 2017 while it rained; and the Godzilla that stood more than 25 feet high last year.
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“The lifelike creature could swing his arms, bend at the waist, crane his neck, and even breathe smoke from his red-illuminated mouth,” our reporter Brett Yates wrote in the November issue. “The hurricane – a shopping cart adorned in blue parachute cloth, PVC, and upholstery batting – kept its distance.” Giving back A few years ago, the organizers decided the parade would also serve as a fundraiser to give back to other hurricane-hit cities that needed help. “It’s really become a great thing because we have, in the past two years, continued to benefit for other communities who have been most recently affected by a natural disaster,” Schneider said. In 2017, almost $6,000 went to groups Taller Salud and Rincon Brewery Maria Relief in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit. Last year Barnacle Parade participants donated to the World Central Kitchen, an organization founded by SpanishAmerican chef José Andrés after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Proceeds from donated, themed raffle baskets – like “ski weekend getaway” and “wine and cheese party” – went toward relief efforts in North Carolina and Florida, following Hurricanes Florence and Michael respectively. This year’s funds will most likely go to the Bahamas, according to Schneider. The 7th Annual Barnacle Parade and block party afterward will feature music, food and fun on Tuesday, October 29. Parade meets at Van Brunt and Pioneer Streets.
October 2019
Brexit is a state of mind in ‘Dreams of Leaving and Remaining’ by Brett Yates
F
or many newspaper readers in the United States, Brexit feels like the story that simply – almost perversely, given our short attention spans and massive self-absorption – refuses to end: a baffling saga of tortuous parliamentary procedure, protracted negotiations, political flameouts, and missed deadlines, requiring minute-by-minute updates from the international press. In a concise book focused on the crisis’s origins, journalist and novelist James Meek leaves behind the daily news cycle and offers a different perspective on Brexit by examining it within the context of the United Kingdom’s collective dreamscape: the reservoir of myths, memories, and promises that inform the emotional lives of both Leavers and Remainers. Dreams of Leaving and Remaining (Verso Books, 2019) regards the referendum of 2016 as an emotional decision, not a logical one – but that, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily mean Brexit was a foolish choice in the usual sense that its supposedly rational opponents claim. Meek’s starting point is the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, which he identifies as one of Great Britain’s two foundational folk tales – the easier of the two: a straightforward, purgative moment of victory over an external enemy within a simplified world where long-term plans and problems don’t matter. Thanks to influential right-wing demagogues, the “vote on whether Britain should leave the European Union was sold to the electorate as a St George moment, a swordthrust in the dragon’s heart that would end the suffering of all good people.” Meek, a Remainer, nevertheless believes that, in a European Union increasingly dominated by cutthroat high finance, “it would have been perfectly possible to make a reasonable case for Britain leaving the EU, and to come up with a sound, twenty-year programme for leaving it.” Instead, the Conservative Party’s David Cameron put forth – as a concession to traditional Tory voters who had begun to drift toward the UK Independence Party – an irresponsibly undetailed referendum premised on his own inability to picture any circumstance in which a plurality of Britons would actually choose to throw away their country’s allaccess pass to the European Single Market, whose GDP matches that of the United States. Ironically, the imprecise nature of the proposal allowed UK residents to imagine the withdrawal in whatever terms they liked, which in turn led to large voting blocs that stood to lose out on significant EU subsidies joining the Brexit camp against their selfinterest, including (most famously) farmers. The UK’s legacy industries – farming, fishing, min-
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ing – occupy a space in the national psyche greater than their current economic output, and this holds true in discussions of Brexit. Meek’s book, comprised of essays previously published in the London Review of Books intermixed with new reflections, operates partly as a travelogue, bringing him to the EU-sustained farmlands of Norfolk, where one grower acknowledges that Brexit “would be bad for farming, but there are some things more important than farming”; to the largely disused and now privatized seaport of Grimsby, where old trawlers blame the EU’s (environmentally necessary) prohibition on overfishing for unemployment; to the hospitals of Leicestershire, staggered by NHS cuts; and to a relocated Cadbury chocolate factory, formerly of Somerdale, before tax incentives and cheap labor in Poland prompted a move. (The Poles appreciate the foreign investment, but they recognize neocolonialism when they see it.) Meek’s research missions recall the flood of journalistic pilgrims, after Donald Trump’s election, to the American Heartland, where reporters have sought ever since to comprehend the resentments, tragedies, and follies of rural voters who helped put a senile billionaire in the White House. Written alternately by condescending, solution-free liberals and by elite crypto-conservatives all too eager to “give in” to Trump’s program of white nationalism on behalf of their prejudiced inferiors, the stateside tales of postindustrial dislocation mirror experiences across the pond, but Meek, in his prescriptions for the UK’s deplorables, refuses to advocate either for continued economic punishment or for cultural appeasement. To Meek, the enlightened Remainer is equally a figure of pity, now stranded in a nation that suddenly feels as alien to him as it did to the Leaver whose aggrieved disorientation within multicultural Britain gave rise to Brexit in the first place. The Remainer’s cosmopolitan dream has died, and just as abruptly, his political philosophy seems to have started to fray at the edges. “British liberals like to see support for remaining in the EU as a marker, of and by itself, of good universal values: openness, receptiveness to other cultures and ideas, freedom for people to move and work in different places, widely pooled security,” Meek writes. “Indeed, Britain in the EU does approach these values more nearly than Britain on its own. But they aren’t applied universally. Britain, on its own, is an exclusionary, overwhelmingly white, post-Christian society; Britain in the EU is part of a larger, overwhelmingly white, post-Christian society that still excludes fourteen out of fifteen of the world’s population from freely moving, living or working there.”
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Remainers, consequently, are “firm on their insistence on free movement within Europe, firm on the rights of migrants and refugees, and vague on the ideal degree of permeability of the external borders of the jurisdiction in which they live.” They’re equally vague on how they might reconcile their support for universal principles – LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, animal rights – with the value they ascribe to the uniqueness of local cultures, which, in the liberal worldview, possess some right to self-determination. While Leavers yearn for a return to a pre-Thatcher form of paternalistic one-nationism that the leading Brexiteers only pretend to espouse, the Remainers prefer to imagine global capitalism as a meritocracy based on tolerance and opportunity for all. Both sides are delusional. The great dream of the liberals, which has lost some of its luster in recent years, arrived upon the fall of the Soviet Union: “democracy and free markets,” as Meek puts it. This stale slogan offered little in the face of Brexit’s imaginative temptations – perhaps it wasn’t the right one to begin with. According to Meek, it should have been “democracy, trade, and fairly shared wealth.” In his view, the second great British myth is that of Robin Hood: stealing from the rich and giving to the poor – a legend “crystallised into reality” by taxation and the modern welfare state. But more recently, the right has repurposed even Robin Hood: conservatives’ tall tales of the luxurious lives of welfare queens and on-the-dole fat cats have managed to convince the public that tax cuts – by allowing ordinary, hardworking people to reclaim their rightful earnings from the greedy clutches of single mothers, retirees, and foreigners – constitute the ultimate act of just redistribution. As Meek points out, Robin Hood was never much of a socialist anyway – his banditry ultimately did nothing to overturn the imbalance of power in British society that required his back-end intervention. Still, to the author, Sherwood Forest at least makes for a stable mythological foundation for a political system, because Robin Hood’s work, unlike Saint George’s, never ended: it was not a one-time heroic event but a constant practice. Projected into politics, Saint George tends to conjure ethical dualism and scapegoating. But if the politicians of the left hope to win as storytellers, they may need a new populist myth, based not on redistribution but on liberation. This could mean taking back Saint George and changing his foe’s identity. The immigrants, after all, never were the dragon, but perhaps the multinational corporations really were. In the UK, the Remainers knew the first part, but how many could admit the second?
October 2019, Page 37
JAIMIE'S MUSIC CALENDAR
Lots of beautiful concerts gracing the neighborhood this October. One concert in particular that I am very excited about is Les Filles de Illighadad, lead by Fatou Seidi Ghali, one of the only Tuareg female guitarists in Niger - Les Filles brings us the music of secluded Illighadad in central Niger. Meanwhile over at Sunny’s, Smokey Hormel starts his weekly Wednesday’s back up on the 16th, other not to miss sets over there include bassist Max Johnson and guitarist/ songwriter of the souls, Joana Sternberg. Also I would like to extend a personal invitation to all Red Hooker’s to come by Bene’s Record Shop on Oct. 10th for a listening party of Fly or Die II: bird dog’s of paradise. Be well and listen deep. —Jaimie Branch RED HOOK CONCERT CALENDAR OCTOBER 2019 * critics pick ********* Bene’s RECORD SHOP 360 Van Brunt St. 718-855-0360 All Shows 8:30PM, unless noted. THURS 10/11, 7PM LISTENING PARTY* jaimie branch’s Fly or Die II:
bird dog’s of paradise DJ’s Adam Downey and Bene Coopersmith SAT 10/12* Jeff Kimmel - Bass Clarinet Ben MacDonald - guitar Peter Bitenc - bass Mike Johnson - drums + ANTELOPER jaimie branch - trumpet/ synths Jason Nazary - drums/electronics ********* IBEAM 168 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Ave. ibeambrooklyn.com Shows at 8:30 PM unless otherwise printed. Wed 10/02* William Hooker’s Remembrance Mara Rosenbloom - piano Adam Lane - bass William Hooker - drums Fri 10/11 Mike McGinnis: Road Trip Mike McGinnis - Woodwinds / Compositions Jeff Hermanson - Trumpet Barry Saunders - Bari Sax Justin Mullens - French Horn Brian Drye - Trombone Peter Hess - Tenor Sax Jacob Sacks - Piano Dan Fabricatore - Bass Vinnie Sperrazza - Drums Sat 10/19 Eva Novoa Trio + special guest Eva Novoa - piano
Ryan Ferreira - guitar Kim Cass - bass Devin Gray - drums Sat 10/26* Sam Newsome, Soprano Saxophone + Items Stephen Haynes, Cornet/ Flugelhorn/Alto Horn Lester St. Louis, Cello Olivia De Prato, Violin Sara Schoenbeck, Bassoon Ben Stapp, Tuba/Compositions + Items ********* JALOPY TAVERN 317 Columbia St. 718-625-3214 jalopytavern.biz Shows at 9 PM unless otherwise printed. Fridays in October Papa Vega and the Rocket 88’s Wed 10/2 Frankie Sunswept & The Sunwrays Sean Cronin - bass, vocals Rachel Housle - drums, vocals Kyle Morgan - guitar, piano, vocals Frankie Sunswept - guitar, piano, vocals Thurs 10/3 Anna J. Witiuk & Friends Sat 10/5, 8PM Skalopy Tues 10/8 East River String Band & Friends Fri 10/12 Jay Sanford and Band Sun 10/13 Sam Talmadge plays Ragtime Tues 10/15
SUNNY'S BAR OCTOBER 2019 ALL SHOWS 9PM UNLESS LISTED OTHERWISE
Page 38 Red Hook Star-Revue
The Honky Tonk Heroes Thurs 10/17 Audra Rox’s 3rd Thursday Sat 10/26 Stillhouse Serenade ********* JALOPY THEATRE 315 Columbia St. 718-395-3214 jalopytheatre.org Every Tuesday Night, 9PM Open Mic Night, sign up by 9 sharp! Each performer gets 2 songs or 8 minutes. Every Wednesday, 9PM Roots n’ Ruckus - hosted by Feral Foster. Real deal folk music in NYC. Free! Thursday, 10/4 8PM show 10PM jam Brooklyn Raga Massive Weekly: K.G. Westman & Mir Naqibul Islam Raga Jam: Free entry to musicians who come at 10 and are ready to play! Sat 10/5, 9PM M Shanghai String Band Dan Rauchwerk of Lords of Liechtenstein Sun 10/6 11AM: Little Laff’s 7:30PM: The Blues Project Fri 10/11 Big Cedar Fever/Tamar Korn & Michaela Gomez Sun 10/13 3:30 PM - Brooklyn’s Oldtime Slowjam 6PM: Exceedingly Good Song Night Thurs 10/17, 7PM Louisiana Dance Party w/ The Pine Leaf Boys Fri 10/18, 8PM Grain Theif, Cole Quest & the City Pickers, and Moreno & Webb Sat 10/19, 8PM Sweet Megg & The Wayfarers w/ Mara Kaye Sun 10/20 11am: Hopalong Andrew 1PM: Vocal Harmony Workshop Fri 10/25, 8PM Mile Twelve Thurs 10/31, 9PM Halloween featuring: Zombie Cash, Sanford: Zom Petty ********* LITTLEFIELD 635 Sackett St. littlefieldnyc.com Wed 10/2, 9PM Liv Warfield, Nao Yoshioka Sat 10/05 7PM: Flying Pace (Record Release), Pocket Protector 11PM: Reggae Retro Dance Party Wed 10/16, 7PM Iberi Fri 10/18, 8PM Karen & The Sorrows, My Gay Banjo, The Ebony Hillbillies, Onliest Sat 10/19, 7:30PM The Pound House Tour* W/ Doug Pound & Brent Weinbach Sat 10/26 7PM: The Mommyheads, Church of Betty 11PM: Be Cute Brooklyn ******** PIONEER WORKS
www.star-revue.com
159 Pioneer St. pioneerworks.com All Shows 7PM unless printed. Tues 10/15, 7PM Les Filles de Illighadad* Sat 10/19, 7PM 24 Hour Ragas Live Festival: an epic 24 hour, 24 set festival see website for full listings ********* ROCKY SULLIVAN’S 46 Beard St. 718-246-8050 rockysullivansredhook.com Every Tuesday Irish Night Traditional Sessions Every Sunday Jazz: The Open Mind Fri 10/04, 9PM Calendar Year, Sad American Night, Recalculating Sat 10/05, 9PM Salsa Night: La Madrugada Fri 10/11, 9PM The Lower Tolpa, Paper Sails, Serpentones Sat 10/12, 9PM Reggae Night: Alegba and Friends Fri 10/18, 9PM Aradia, She’s Excited!, The High Heals Fri 10/25, 9PM This Strange Paradise, What Famine, With Sat 10/26, 9PM Reggae Night: Alegba and Friends Fri 11/01, 9PM Terry Maple, Violent in Black, Altered Native ********* SUNNYS 253 Conover St. 718-625-8211 sunnysredhook.com all shows 9PM unless otherwise printed. EVERY SATURDAY TONE’s Bluegrass Jam Bring your axe! Tues 10/01 The Queens of Everything Wed 10/02
Charlie Burnham and Kings County Thu 10/03 Ana Egge and the Balladears Fri 10/04 John Pinamonti Sun 10/06, 5pm Paul Spring Mon 10/07 Mara Kaye Trio Tue 10/08 Max Johnson* Wed 10/09 Tubby Thurs 10/10 Lisa St. Lou and Tor Fri 10/11 Simon Chardiet and the Roof Toppers Sun 10/13 Tamar Korn Band - Father's Day Tue 10/15 Joanna Sternberg* Wed 10/16 Smokey's Round Up Thu 10/17 Ryan Scott and the Kind Buds Fri 10/18 Mara Kaye Band Sun 10/20 3PM: Harry Bolick Old Time Jam 6:30PM: Curtis J and Adam Armstrong Tue 10/22 The Cheap Dates Wed 10/23 Smokey's Round Up Thu 10/24 Tim Barnacle and the Brooklyn Flyers Fri 10/25 Bill Carney's Jug Addicts Sun 10/27, 5PM Honky Tonk Heroes Tue 10/29 Ali Hughes Wed 10/30 Smokey's Round Up* Thu 10/31 Halowe'en Tiki Costume Party! Bill Malchow Band!
Rafe Stepto at Branded Saloon Rafe Stepto is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with a smokey voice that brings to mind Al Green. He will be playing a solo set on guitar and piano Thursday, October 3, from 8:30 to 9:15 pm, at Branded Saloon in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Stepto will sing original songs from his current project “Kiss Attack,” which employs a wide variety of jazz, funk, and even Brazilian chord changes along with 21st century production techniques and can loosely be described as “global soul.” “Change” is a socially critical song about belief. Stepto says,”Religion is like McDonald’s. If you didn’t have it then, you’re not gonna.” Though Stepto has recorded “Kiss Attack” as a solo venture, he seeks collaboration from the Brooklyn musical community. With little online presence, Stepto’s huge talent is a hidden gem well worth discovering. Hear him yourself at Branded Saloon, 603 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY11238 (brandedsaloon.com).
October 2019
Helping Seniors
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REAL ESTATE
Members of the Brooklyn Bridge Rotary Club pose after doing their good deed. Among the dignitaries are fellow newspaper people Ed and Celia Weintrob, as well as Vivian Jackson, mother of the Star-Revue calendar editor. Rotary is a worldwide organization and always open to new members, opportunity to join is on their website.
The Brooklyn Bridge Rotary Club, which meets twice a month on the second and four Wednesday, delivered approximately 60 kits to senior citizens in East Flatbush on Sunday, September 23. The kits contained free items and information about preventing falls. The kits were provided by Heights and Hills Senior Services, which is based in Downtown Brooklyn and connects seniors in 19 Brooklyn neighborhoods with Meals on Wheels, senior events and social workers. For more information information about the Brooklyn Bridge Rotary Club, or to contact the Brooklyn Bridge Rotary Club, visit BrooklynBridgeRotaryClub.org.
EPA chooses tanks by Erin DeGregorio
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EPA officials rejected New York City’s proposal to build a long tunnel to prevent sewage overflows into the Gowanus Canal. Instead, the original plan to build two holding tanks will continue uninterrupted. This was the main topic of the September Gowanus Community Advisory Group (CAG) public meeting, held the last Tuesday of month as usual.
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“The risks outweighed the benefits, [particularly] in regards to prolonging canal cleanup – which is not something that would be desirable,” said EPA Remedial Project Manager Christos Tsiamis at last month’s CAG meeting.
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While this decision is a step forward in what’s already been a decade-long journey, many CAG members still want to know what will happen to canal remediation if the Gowanus rezoning moves forward. Lopez covered that in his letter, saying the EPA is open to discussing a potential expansion in the two tanks’ storage volumes – if the City thinks that should be considered in relation with the proposed rezoning. However, he believes the slated volume is “adequate, in combination with other appropriate control measures.” According to Tsiamis, developers would be held responsible for properly disposing additional sewage, as a means to protect the remedy and to not overload the system. Tsiamis also reiterated at the meeting that the tank scalability could be altered, since further rezoning was anticipated at the time when the Record of Decision was written in 2013. The next meeting is on October 22 at 6 pm at 41 1st St.
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October 2019, Page 39
Page 40 Red Hook Star-Revue
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October 2019