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JABARI BRISPORT FOR STATE SENATE - PAGE 11
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CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF PUBLISHING
COVID takes a Brooklyn newspaper pioneer by George Fiala
M
ichael A. Armstrong, originally from the state of Washington, but who spent the majority of his 79 years in Boerum Hill, passed away last month after spending 17 days on a ventilator at Methodist Hospital. Dnynia, his wife and publishing partner, succumbed a month earlier, after contracting the virus at the Cobble Hill Health Center. I worked for Mike for a decade, as did a whole host of young people whose first stop on a successful career in journalism was the Phoenix office, first at 155 Atlantic Avenue, and later at 395 Atlantic. This newspaper exists mostly because of what I learned from Armstrong, who was expert at taking 'diamonds in the rough' and teaching them the ropes. It was probably the best education that any aspiring newspaper person would ever want (although we may not have all realized that at the time). Graduates of the Phoenix include Pulitzer Prize winners, reporters and editors for the NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Business Week, New York Magazine; authors of major best sellers and major motion pictures, and contributers to publications such as the NY Review of Books and Esquire. Others have gone on to successful careers in politics, business and the non-profit world. It's still hard to believe I can't stop by his State Street house and shoot the breeze with him when in the neighborhood. He was as active in his work as ever, despite being almost 80, and without the virus would have continue on for many years, contributing his acerbic commentaries to anyone lucky enough to be in the vicinity. I am lucky to be be publishing bylines from these two excellent writers who spent time at the Phoenix. Tracy Garrity came to the Phoenix after a stint at the Brooklyn Paper, and ended up as the features editor for the Reading Eagle. Peter Haley, who wrote a political column called Haley's Comet, has spent a career in sales and government service.
Newspaper boot camp Remembering Mike by Tracy Garrity Rasmussen and the Phoenix
W
orking for the Phoenix wasn’t so much as a job as a calling.
You’d work six days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day. You’d get yelled at regularly for infractions as major as missing a scoop and as minor as tossing a press release without reusing the back to type copy. Your paycheck bounced nearly as often as it cleared. The line between student and servant, ally and adversary often blurred. Yet an army of great journalists did their bootcamp there because Mike Armstrong was the quintessential newspaper drill sergeant, and if you put in the time, fished the press releases out of the trash, caught your bouncing checks and listened through the meltdown for the message, you’d end up a damn fine reporter. I was there in the mid 1980s, writing, editing, taking photos and smoking endless chains of cigarettes. Not too long before he died Mike reminded me that I once interviewed a cow. I wrote about corruption and business (Mike started Brooklyn, Inc. while I was there) and community boards and school boards and the arts. I wrote headlines and cutlines and editorials. I took photos and phone calls and the occasional notes at a staff meeting. I’d walk the four blocks home to my basement brownstone apartment after midnight most Monday nights, locking up the Phoenix office knowing I’d be back in just a matter of hours to wax copy and find space for it on the pages that hung around the production room like family snapshots. Late Tuesday night (sometimes earlier in summer when the papers were smaller and the poor air conditioning made us work more quickly) we’d send the paper off, clean up the half-smoked, half-chewed cigars from the production tables and scatter
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by Peter Haley
rom 1976 thru April ’79 I worked directly for the Brooklyn Phoenix. Prior to that, I worked with Mike Armstrong at starting up a newspaper in Williamsburg, the Williamsburg Advocate, which failed because we could not build enough advertising revenue in this mostly Hispanic and Hasidic community. But based on that effort, Mike encouraged me to join up at his still young Phoenix newspaper, first as a salesman of its advertising and then later as a reporter. Mike loved the local community politics and news of brownstone Brooklyn: Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, eastward to Fort Greene, south to Park Slope and then to Red Hook. He took this love to Williamsburg and then later to the Village in Manhattan with the Villager newspaper, where he took over an ongoing business and kept the ball bouncing. But my work with Mike was with the Phoenix. And as the saying goes, he “brought a lot to the table” to North Brooklyn’s civic, cultural and political communities. He was a pioneer both in local newspaper publishing and, indeed, in homesteading a much wilder, untamed Brooklyn than today. But working there in the mid ‘70s was, as a fellow newspaper person put it, like the “‘60s never died.” We weren’t dropping acid, of course, but definitely dropping the conventional neckties and button-down collars that
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hile PS 676 students are undergoing virtual learning from home, some kids are getting the chance to participate in the 30-day Arts Alive! Challenge. Red Hook’s PS 676 received a generous donation of art supplies from the Cayuga Arts Collective in Trumansburg, NY, and 22 students who enjoy art will get to take part in a challenge sponsored by the group. The supplies were given out to parents and kids in front of the school on May 22. This partnership formed because a friend of parent coordinator Marie Hueston is one of the founders of the organization. “Initially they said they could do this for 20 kids in the school,” Hueston said. “At the last minute, two more kids wanted it, so they were able to get more [supplies], so right now it is 22 kids.” The challenge is for each student to create a drawing or painting for 30 consecutive days. They can use the list of ideas that the Cayuga Arts Collective provided or use their imagination to draw something they are passionate about.
Some of the Arts Alive! Challenge ideas include drawing a picture of a dream, making a self-portrait, making a random scribble and then coloring it in, making a picture of a pet or favorite animal, and creating a picture of New York State or Brooklyn or a picture of a day at the beach with family.
on their website. When school starts in person again, PS 676 is planning on having an art show at the school or somewhere else in Red Hook.
To help make these works of art, the Cayuga Arts Collective sent 22 bags, each of which held a big pad of paper, a paint set, markers, pencils, a paintbrush, a pencil sharpener and an eraser.
Nydia Velazquez announced on May 12 that two local hospitals are receiving federal funding from the CARES Act. The resources, being disbursed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is targeted to hospitals with high rates of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. The two local hospital groups, NYC Health and Hospitals Woodhull and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center will receive an aggregate of $99,779,000 to directly combat the pandemic.
Michelle Torres has two kids who love arts and crafts and attend PS 676, and she was at the school picking up their bag of supplies for them. Her daughter, who is in fifth grade, will be going to Sunset Prep next year in Sunset Park. “My oldest loves to paint and has canvasses around the house,” Torres said. “Anything that has to do with nature she loves. Sunsets and animals are her favorite. She painted an elephant the other day.” Melanie is in fifth grade and came with her older brother to pick up her supplies to participate in the Arts Alive! Challenge. Her brother likes drawing comics, and she said she was excited for the drawing ahead. The kids can pick a different theme each day or choose a few favorites and do variations of those throughout the 30-day process. The only rule that is provided is that the kids finish one piece of art a day. PS 676 students are asked to send pictures of their favorite creations to Hueston and also to the Cayuga Arts Collective, which is sponsored by the Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts. According to Hueston, the Cayuga Arts Collective will be publishing the pictures and the school will put them
Velazquez announced $99 million in aid to local hospitals
“New York City has been an epicenter of this pandemic,” said Velazquez. “Our healthcare workers are performing heroically to provide patients with quality treatment, but hospitals are struggling against unprecedented surges in patients and demand for care. These targeted grants, appropriated under the CARES Act, focus on specific hotspots of activity, servicing the areas that need it most. I’m pleased to see these funds allocated to our hospitals to supply our doctors nurses and other healthcare professionals with the tools they need.” “One painful lesson from this pandemic will undoubtedly be that our healthcare and public health infrastructure have been chronically underfunded for far too long,” Velazquez said. “These funds will help to meet the immediate need of the crisis, but, for the long term, we must also look to strengthen and adequately invest in our healthcare system.
The Red Hook Star-Revue is published every month. Founded June 2010 by George Fiala and Frank Galeano
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STOP THE SPREAD OF COVID-19!
LEARN HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND OTHERS AT HOME. WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF COVID-19? • The most common symptoms are fever, cough, sore throat and shortness of breath. Other symptoms include feeling achy, loss of taste or smell, headache, and diarrhea. • Most people with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) will have mild or moderate symptoms and can get better on their own.
• People age 50 or older (people age 65 or older are at the highest risk) • People who have other health conditions, such as: Lung disease Kidney disease Asthma Liver disease Heart disease Cancer Obesity A weakened immune system Diabetes
WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I GET SICK WITH COVID-19 SYMPTOMS? If you are sick with COVID-19 symptoms, assume you have it. When you are sick: • If you have trouble breathing, pain or pressure in your chest, are confused or cannot stay awake, or have bluish lips or face, call 911 immediately. • Call your doctor if you are age 50 or older or have a health condition that puts you at increased risk, or if you do not feel better after three days. • Always contact a doctor or go to the hospital if you have severe symptoms of COVID-19 or another serious health issue. • Do not leave your home except to get necessary medical care or essential food or supplies (if someone cannot get them for you). • If you must leave your home: Avoid crowded places. Stay at least 6 feet from others. Cover your nose and mouth with a bandana, scarf or other face covering. Wash your hands before you go out, and use alcohol-based hand sanitizer while outside. • Household members can go out for essential work and needs but should monitor their health closely. • Create physical distance: Do not have visitors. Stay at least 6 feet from others.
Page 4 Red Hook Star-Revue
Keep people who are sick separate from those at risk for serious illness. • Cover up: Cover your nose and mouth with a bandana, scarf or other face covering when you are within 6 feet of others. Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue or your inner elbow.
WHO IS MOST AT RISK FOR SERIOUS ILLNESS?
If you or someone in your home is sick:
Sleep head-to-toe if you share a bed with someone who is sick, or sleep on the couch.
• Keep it clean: Throw tissues into the garbage immediately after use. Wash your hands often with soap for 20 seconds, especially after you cough or sneeze. Use alcohol-based hand sanitizer if you are unable to wash your hands. Frequently clean surfaces you touch, such as doorknobs, light switches, faucets, phones, keys and remote controls. Wash towels, sheets and clothes at the warmest possible setting with your usual detergent, and dry completely. Do not share eating utensils with others, and wash them after every use.
WHEN CAN I LEAVE MY HOME AFTER BEING SICK? • If you have been sick, stay home until: You are fever-free for three days without Tylenol or other medication and It has been at least seven days since your symptoms started and Your symptoms have improved • Reminder: New York is on PAUSE. This means that even if you have been sick, you should only leave your home for essential work or errands, or to exercise, while staying at least 6 feet from others.
NEED HELP?
• If you are having a medical emergency, call 911. • If you do not have a doctor but need one, call 844-NYC-4NYC (844-692-4692). New York City provides care, regardless of immigration status, insurance status or ability to pay. • For more information, call 311 or visit nyc.gov/coronavirus. The NYC Health Department may change recommendations as the situation evolves. 4.20
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June 2020
YATES'S VIEW Vote for Bernie Sanders in NY's presidential primary
D
uring the first half of my twenties, I cared about art, not politics. I skimmed the news about wars and oil spills and participated in elections as a matter of civic duty, but deep down I intuited that nothing good or exciting would ever happen in Washington – or probably anywhere in the real world, which I found alienating and dispiriting in a number of ways. Novels and movies, on the other hand, served for me as an indispensable reservoir of vitality and solace, particularly during periods when I suffered seriously from depression. I liked art, in short, because artists imagined versions of the world that were different than the way it was in real life. Around 2015, it occurred to me that politics, too, had the capacity to function as a means to imagine a different world. For someone born in another era or another country, this revelation might have been obvious, but in the United States, a right-wing duopoly in the political system had narrowed the ideological playing field not only in Congress but throughout mainstream discourse. We could have a threadbare social safety net, as the Democrats wanted, or none at all, as the Republicans hoped for, but a comprehensive Nordic-style welfare state would never be on the table. We could plot disastrous full-scale invasions to dislodge Middle Eastern regimes, as George W. Bush had done, or we could merely use strategic airstrikes, drone bombings, and proxy forces to patrol the frontiers of the American empire, as Obama had done – either way, annual military spending would never drop below $700 billion, and plenty of people would die. We could accept or reject the scientists’ alarming claims about climate change, but in any case, we would continue to drill and frack and build new pipelines. As Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, likes to point out, none of his ideas are radical – or, at least, they aren’t by any normal international standard. But the United States is not a normal place. Before Sanders’s 2016 campaign, I had heard of the notion of single-payer healthcare, but Bernie, though hardly the first to endorse it, made the concept credible within our uniquely fallow
political landscape. Through his candidacy, it became possible to believe that, as voters, we could make a choice to abolish a major for-profit industry for the sake of public health – for the sake, in fact, of justice. Sanders told us that we didn’t have to limit our ambitions to fine-tuning our irredeemably monstrous existing healthcare system, where the ability to afford premiums, deductibles, and co-payments dictates whether Americans live or die: using progressive taxation, we could simply treat everyone who needed treatment, without any cost at the point of service. The impassioned movement that Sanders built around what we now call Medicare for All activated a portion
mostly successfully denied them. In the United States, we are all taught that every form of unhappiness – poverty, homelessness, medical debt – owes to personal failure, not to structural defects in our society. This is why most people regard politics as irrelevant to their lives. Sanders, however, asks us to consider whether we’ve been ill-served by our system and to participate in the creative endeavor of building a more humane alternative. He does not ask us to vote for him merely as a capable administrator of an established, immovable order – his purpose is to open the unquestionable assumptions of hypercapitalism, for the first time in a
"On a policy level, Bernie Sanders is a standard social democrat. In America, this makes him a revolutionary." of my brain that previous presidential candidates had never engaged. If we could kill Aetna and Humana, why not drive a different kind of stake through the black hearts of Exxon-Mobil, Lockheed Martin, and Goldman Sachs, too? Why not reorganize every miserable, exploitative, environmentally catastrophic sector of our economy around the public good? What would that look like? On a policy level, Bernie Sanders is a standard social democrat. In America, this makes him a revolutionary. After standing all but alone on Capitol Hill for two and a half decades against a bipartisan consensus of austerity and deregulation, he began a popular uprising against the power structure that has denied Americans the basic social contract afforded even by most capitalist nations in the developed world: at a minimum, free healthcare, free education, unions, and living wages for all. The most inspiring part of Bernie’s two presidential campaigns was their willingness to take on the enormous uphill battle of leading ordinary people toward the political awareness and class consciousness that America has
long time, to public scrutiny and revision. In the end, this democratic impulse to offer a broader and deeper range of choice, more than any specific legislative goal, may be the most important feature of Sanders’s program. When our government ceases to be a black box inhabited by DC think tank experts, Wall Street bankers, and welltrained establishment politicians, our country will be a safer and healthier place, and it’ll be a more imaginative one as well. I still like art, but Bernie Sanders made it fun for me to think about the real world, too. I’ve anticipated writing this column for about a year. Of course, I believed I’d be writing it for the issue in April, when New York’s presidential primary was supposed to take place, and I thought Sanders’s campaign would still be active at the time of publication. As recently as the beginning of March, Sanders looked like the Democrats’ probable nominee. In the early states, voters had a variety of options, and three out of four times, a plurality chose Bernie. For those who simply wanted a steadier, more sustainable
HOTD0G AND MUSTARD BY MARC JACKS0N MUSTARD
AND i ARe PRACTISiNG SOCI AL
But when Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar, in obvious coordination, dropped out of the race just before Super Tuesday, they immediately threw their support behind Joe Biden, the centrist with the best chance to thwart Sanders (“centrist” being a euphemism for “reactionary”). Ex-candidate Beto O’Rourke suddenly reappeared in Texas, a crucial toss-up state, with an endorsement for the former vice president. Biden surged ahead nationwide, and soon after, COVID-19 displaced the presidential primary in the public consciousness, effectively freezing the race with Biden in the lead. During a pandemic, in which roughly 30 million Americans have lost their employerbacked health insurance, we’ve ended up with the candidate who doesn’t endorse Medicare for All. It all happened very quickly, but Sanders’s supporters will never forget it. The Democratic Party’s decision to close ranks had given the media an opportunity to coalesce around a single, easy-to-understand message: Biden – a top candidate from the beginning on account of name recognition, even if he had few passionate followers and almost no volunteers – was the guy to beat Trump. Voters understood, and they fell in line. The hard part of running an insurgent campaign in the Democratic primary is that most primary voters are party loyalists who trust and respect the Democratic leadership. When the bosses align behind a single candidacy, a lot of registered Democrats – with the help of MSNBC and the New York Times – will follow. Biden’s ability to run a successful presidential campaign in the year 2020 is a testament most of all to the rottenness of our corporate media, whose owners, above all else, dread an informed public. Instead of discussing the pressing issues that informed Sanders’s campaign, columnists and TV personalities talked about the largely fictional “Bernie Bros.” The catastrophe of 2016
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WE ALWAYS STAY TWO-
PANeLS APART!
DiSTANCING
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economy, without excessive corporate greed or Wall Street irresponsibility forever threatening to tank the fortunes of all but the billionaire class, Bernie was the right choice, and for those who harbored bigger dreams of a world without oppression or exploitation, Bernie was the obvious first step.
STAY WeLL, STAY STRONG, NYC!
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June 2020, Page 5
NYCHA tenants lead Red Hook in census response
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by Brett Yates
ince March, 60 percent of U.S. households have responded to the 2020 Census, which will determine each state’s share of congressional representation and (to a large extent) federal funding for the next 10 years. With a 54.9 percent self-response rate, New York State trails New Jersey (62 percent) and Connecticut (63.7 percent). The self-response rate refers to the percentage of households that voluntarily submit an answer – by internet, by phone, or by mail – to the census’s questionnaire. Households that don’t respond will sooner or later receive in-person visits from enumerators, but for months, Mayor de Blasio’s NYC Census 2020 initiative has emphasized that a robust selfresponse is the best way to avoid an undercount. Unfortunately, New York City’s rate (50 percent) trails New York State’s. In urban areas, public officials tend to fear undercounts particularly in black, Hispanic, and low-income communities. The U.S. Census Bureau has estimated that the 2010 Census overlooked 2.1 percent of America’s black population, 1.5 percent of the Hispanic population, and 1.1 percent of renters. Red Hook, however, looks so far to be a counterexample. The neighborhood consists of three census tracts, one of which comprises exclusively the Red Hook Houses, Brooklyn’s largest NYCHA development, 98.6 percent of whose residents are nonwhite. As of late May, New York’s Tract 85 – the Red Hook Houses – boasts a 56.5 percent self-response rate. Meanwhile, only 44.3 percent of families in Tract 59 – Harold Ickes Playground to Pioneer Street – have responded. Tract 53, whose southern expanse runs from Valentino Pier to the Gowanus Canal, has done even worse at 42 percent. Tracts 59 and 53 are both high-income and majoritywhite. In January, Red Hook Initiative (RHI), a nonprofit community center that serves the Red Hook Houses,
won a $125,000 grant from the NYC Complete Count Fund. The organization announced that it would “hire and engage a team of Red Hook residents to host events, canvass, use social media channels, and increase awareness about the importance of the Census for the community.” RHI ran a similar campaign in 2010, when the Red Hook Houses also outperformed the rest of Red Hook on the census. The area of Red Hook known as “the Back” – outside of the public housing complex – has underperformed all four directly adjacent tracts in Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, and the Columbia Street Waterfront District. Red Hook’s councilman, Carlos Menchaca, co-chairs City Council’s Census 2020 Task Force. During the 2010 Census, the nationwide self-response rate reached 76 percent. It’s not too late for New Yorkers to participate in the 2020 Census. Visit my2020census.gov or call 844-330-2020.
Celebs speak out for the census
In the beginning of May, NYC Census 2020 released a new public service announcement featuring New Yorker Alicia Keys. Keys emphasizes the importance of being counted in the Census, especially in historically undercounted neighborhoods, as the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all New Yorkers and having a disproportionate impact on Black and brown communities. The Census is available online and by phone this year at my2020census.gov and 1-844-330-2020. “Just like Alicia Keys sings in ‘Empire State of Mind,’ there’s nothing we can’t do in New York,” said NYC Census Director Julie Menin. “Alicia Keys embodies the spirit and determination of New Yorkers and we are so grateful to add her voice to our campaign. Now is not the time to be invisible – now is the time for every New Yorker to fill out the Census and be counted.” Other announcements have featured rapper Cardi B, Lin ManuelMiranda, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Census results lead to direct investments in New York City‘s healthcare system, as the data from the census determines allocations for funding for CHIP and hospitals. The more NYC residents who fill out the census, the more money the city will receive for schools, transportation, job training, and so much more. It also determines how local, state and federal legislative district lines are drawn. The website www.mycensus.gov is easy to use and takes very little time.
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June 2020
Cycle of frustration: Outrage and police violence
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n a word, fatigue may be the most accurate response to 2020 thus far. Pandemic aside, viral content of Black people being racially profiled and murdered by either vigilantes or police is sadly routine. On March 13, 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor, was killed by a spray of bullets from officers shooting under a ‘no-knock’ warrant – it appears the officers may have raided the wrong home. On February 23, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was followed, shot, and killed by three men while he jogged through his neighborhood. The three men, William Bryan, Travis McMichael, and father Gregory McMichael, believed Ahmaud Arbery to be ‘suspicious’. On May 25, George Floyd died as a Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck for several minutes. Floyd’s body went limp on camera. Officers believe Floyd may have used a counterfeit $20 bill at a deli. Floyd cried, “I can’t breathe, they gon’ kill me,” chilling last words echoing the equally horrifying death of Eric Garner, who also died via police induced asphyxiation in 2014. The recent killings of Breonna Taylor, Geroge Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery have reignited familiar outpourings of marches, riots, and hashtags. Public outrage around incidents like these typically rises and settles with little to no long-term corrective action. Here are my thoughts. Often, conversations around racial injustice in America bestow responsibility on Black people to make others understand our plight, and to somehow transform or correct white supremacy. This belief is rooted in the systemic and sociological belief that Black people are inherently guilty of “something” and thus need to prove our innocence. On any occasion, live Black bodies can be reduced to bullet casings, whether bird-watching or jogging. As a result, Black people like myself grow up trying our best to rub the targets off our bodies, with limited and inconsistent individual success. The first and only Black and biracial man to be president of the United States had to be a model of near perfection, whose indiscretions included wearing tan suits and smoking cigarettes. Respectability may give access, but it won’t grant immunity, and it damn sure won’t even the odds.
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Roderick Thomas
There is no great chasm between the snuffing out of Black bodies that occurred at the dawn of the last century and now. Technology and laws may have changed, but our ideas and practices around race and “worthiness” haven’t. Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin knelt into George Floyd’s neck and killed him on camera because this society tells him he can. Former Franklin Templeton employee Amy Cooper, called the NYPD while falsely accusing writer Christian Cooper of threatening her life because she knew she could. Time is the only divide between Amy Cooper and Emmett Till’s accuser Carolyn Bryant.
Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd are the latest victims of racist violence.
In contrast, Black people don’t have the social power as a community to take any of the aforementioned actions. Yet we do need social power. Black people need enough social power to render ‘Amy Coopers’ and violent officers less likely to harm Black bodies. If centuries of brutal racial injustice have led to Black people experiencing psychological and physical trauma, what has it done to white folks? What has being told for centuries, explicitly and implicitly, that you are superior done to the empathy and humanity of white America? Moreover, collective social power won’t come with any adherence to America’s hypercapitalist structure. There aren’t enough Black millionaires, and celebrities to fix systemic racism and violence. Hypercapitalism won’t save any Black person, Black people need collective wealth and a collective movement that pivots away from capitalism. Every generation had specific goals, desegregation in the 1950s, or voters’ rights in the 1960s. If nothing else, the most immediate fight for this current generation might be police brutality. While body cams and surveillance don’t prevent the killings of Black people, what they do provide is objective data and information that can be observed. (Currently, there is no federal requirement for officers to use body cams.)
archival footage. What the recording of these police killings proves is just how close to the civil rights era we actually are. Anyone who watches interviews of civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin or Coretta Scott King would find that most past concerns have not changed for Black Americans today. Simply put, the dream has not been realized yet. In a 1979 interview, activist Bayard Rustin said, “The success of the civil rights era was attributed to three things, achieving the right to vote, the right to use public accommodations, and the right to send your child to a school of your choice. It did not ad-
dress the economic and social problems of Black people. The first lesson is, don’t try to repeat what was done before you, because we are in a different period. The movement wasn’t just leaders, and a few politicians, it was everyone. Don’t vote with your feet and rhetoric: protest is no substitute for the ballot box.” Roderick Thomas is an NYC-based writer and filmmaker and the host of Hippie By Accident podcast (Instagram: @ Hippiebyaccident; email: rtroderick. thomas@gmail.com; website: roderickthomas.net).
"This belief is rooted in the systemic and sociological belief that Black people are inherently guilty of “something” and thus need to prove innocence."
Americans look at the civil rights era as antiquity, lost in black and white
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A comprehensive guide to voting during COVID-19 by Brett Yates
T
he coronavirus hasn’t delayed New York’s June 23 Democratic primary. In fact, it has added to the ballot a presidential contest – rescheduled from April 28, then canceled (which prompted a lawsuit from candidate Andrew Yang), then restored, then challenged again in court, then affirmed – where 10 candidates who’ve suspended their campaigns will compete for delegates to August’s Democratic National Convention against presumptive nominee Joe Biden. All New York Democrats will have a chance to vote in the presidential primary, but the rest of the ballot will vary from one district to another. In Kings County, voters will choose nominees for the U.S. House of Representatives, State Senate, and State Assembly, as well a host of minor offices: State Committee (synonymous, within the Brooklyn Democratic Party, with the position of District Leader), County Committee, Judge of the Civil Court, Delegate to the Judicial Convention, and Alternate Delegate to the Judicial Convention. Thanks to the early retirement of Bushwick legislator Rafael Espinal, one district in Brooklyn will even have a nomination for City Council (which otherwise will hold elections in 2021) up for grabs. It all sounds like a lot, but most ballots will be of manageable length – particularly in districts where incumbents go unchallenged. Anyone who registered to vote as a
Democrat by May 29, 2020, can participate in the Democratic primary. Voters who previously registered with another party or as independents can take part if they changed their registration to Democrat by February 14, 2020. How do I vote? The best way to vote during a pandemic is to cast an absentee ballot – a measure normally reserved for voters on vacation, in the hospital, or otherwise incapacitated. To avoid a public health catastrophe, an executive order issued on April 9 made all New Yorkers eligible to vote from home for reason of “Temporary Illness or Physical Disability” (the excuse applies even for healthy voters, due to the risk of illness). To vote absentee, you need to apply first. This means filling out a brief form. On April 24, Governor Cuomo announced that every registered voter in the state would receive an absentee ballot application with prepaid postage in the mail, but in New York City, voters also can easily apply online at nycabsentee.com until June 16. The deadline is the same for postmarked applications. If you miss this deadline, you can still apply in person for an absentee ballot at the local Board of Elections office (345 Adams Street, 4 Fl, Brooklyn, NY 11201, open 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday) through June 22. The BOE office can also directly accept the ballot itself, which otherwise must be in USPS’s hands by June 22. Fill out your absentee ballot carefully – follow instructions!
Despite the risk of COVID-19 transmission, polling stations will also be open on election day. You can find yours at nyc.pollsitelocator.com. New York also expects to offer early voting between June 13 and June 21, but details had not yet been finalized at press time. For more voting information, call 1-866-868-3692. Who’s on the ballot? It depends on where you live. The nyc. pollsitelocator.com website will show you a sample ballot (click “Ballot Information” at the top-right corner of the page after you’ve entered your address). In early June, the New York City Campaign Finance Board will publish a voters’ guide with additional candidate information at nyccfb.info. Nearly all Red Hook residents live in Congressional District 7, Senate District 25, and Assembly District 51. A tiny minority, however, live in Assembly District 52 (where, without a challenger, incumbent Jo Anne Simon will receive the Democratic nomination by default), and a few more live in Congressional District 10 (see “Boylan and Herzog challenge Nadler in NY-10”). In Congressional District 7, the rapper Paperboy Prince – who found a measure of YouTube fame last year as a musical advocate for presidential candidate Andrew Yang – has mounted a long-shot challenge against Nydia Velazquez, who has served Red Hook in the House of Representatives since 1993. Like Yang, Prince has centered
his campaign on a universal basic income of $1,000 per month (along with a promise to “spread love to everyone”). On the state level, three candidates – democratic socialist Jabari Brisport, progressive Jason Salmon, and establishment favorite Tremaine Wright – will compete for an open seat in Senate District 25. And in Assembly District 51, several insurgents – community activist Genesis Aquino, tenant organizer Marcela Mitaynes, and urban planner Katherine Walsh – will face off against Assistant Speaker Felix Ortiz, who has represented Red Hook in Albany since 1995. Do I have to care about any of the other stuff? Technically, no. If you don’t want to think about Alternate Delegates to the Judicial Convention, you can leave that field blank. In fact, if you live in Red Hook, it won’t show up on your ballot in the first place. But in case you’re interested: the party’s judicial delegates select nominees for judgeships on the New York Supreme Court at a convention prior to the general election in November, when voters will elect the judges themselves – the alternates step in if the delegates can’t fulfill their duties. (The delegates and their alternates, however, typically take their cues from higher-ups within the party, and the voters have to
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Two working-class New Yorkers who will fight for us in Albany
MARCELA MITAYNES
onors, D e t a r o p r o C No Money No Real Estate
Marcela is a tenant organizer and advocate who has lived in this community since she migrated from Peru when she was 5. Together, they are ready to fight for their neighbors. They will fight for a more just and equitable state, particularly as our elected officials choose to prioritize the wealthy and corporations above regular people during this crisis.
Jabari is a public school teacher and community organizer who was born and raised in Brooklyn. Two democratic socialists who will fight to: ٚ Provide emergency COVID-19 relief for the working class — not corporations ٚ Stabilize rents and stop unjust evictions ٚ Improve and expand public housing ٚ Fully fund public schools ٚ Get ICE out of New York ٚ Divest from fossil fuels & bring utilities under public control ٚ Increase income taxes on multimillionaires & billionaires to fund services for the rest of us
Vote for Marcela and Jabari by June 23 All New Yorkers can vote absentee - request a ballot at nycabsentee.com by June 16
PAID FOR BY JABARI FOR STATE SENATE AND MARCELA FOR NEW YORK
*
ENDORSED BY:
Red Hook Star-Revue
JABARI BRISPORT
Democrat for State Senate District 25
Democrat for State Assembly District 51
*Jabari Only
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June 2020, Page 9
Brisport, Walsh lead fundraising race in SD25, AD51 by Brett Yates
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ew mandatory disclosure reports filed in May at the New York State Board of Elections gave local voters a glimpse into the campaigns of several candidates who hope to represent Red Hook in Albany in 2021. The documents reveal political donations and expenditures made between January 12 and May 18. Schoolteacher Jabari Brisport, who trailed former State Senate staffer Jason Salmon in January, now boasts the largest campaign treasury in the Senate District 25 race. His 32-Day Pre-Primary report shows a haul of $128,660, dwarfing the sums raised by Salmon ($54,900) and another competitor, Assemblywoman Tremaine Wright ($15,425, including $7,000 from Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie’s political action committee). This brings Brisport’s fundraising total to $171,554 since September, ahead of Salmon’s $142,630. Heading into the home stretch before the decisive June 23 primary, Brisport has $89,138 on hand, followed by Wright at $44,359 (thanks to a transfer of $43,075 from her old Assembly campaign) and Salmon at $27,503. Brisport’s advantage owes to a preponderance of small donors, with an average individual contribution ($37) much lower than Salmon’s ($167) or Wright’s ($195). Wright has amassed only 38 donations, while Brisport has
Page 10 Red Hook Star-Revue
received 4,547. In the Assembly District 51 race, urban planner Katherine Walsh continues to lead in fundraising with $50,202 in contributions between January and May. She has pulled in a total of $108,650 since the start of her campaign.
trict Leader. One candidate, Julio Peña III of Sunset Park, has reported $7,133 in contributions. His opponent, Red Hook’s Robert Berrios, created a campaign committee on May 22. The Board of Elections has scheduled
one more disclosure requirement, on June 15, before the June 23 primary, which will determine the Democratic nominees for State Senate and State Assembly and elect the new District Leader.
Red Hook Fest goes virtual
community.
Housing activist Marcela Mitaynes, whose 32-Day Pre-Primary report shows $33,902 in contributions, has now raised a total of $57,216. She leads, however, in the number of donations with 1,732, ahead of Walsh’s 1,269. As of May 28, New York State Board of Elections website suggests that incumbent assemblyman Felix Ortiz and community activist Genesis Aquino – who had raised $45,168 and $15,713 as of January 11 – have not yet filed their 32-Day Pre-Primary reports in spite of the May 22 deadline. Walsh previously accused Ortiz of missing the January deadline. In all likelihood, Ortiz – who recorded a closing balance of $178,502 on his January Periodic report – has more cash on hand than any of his competitors, thanks to 21 years of incumbency and few primary challenges. Walsh has $45,936, and Mitaynes has $29,731. Assembly District 51 has an additional race for an unpaid position within the Brooklyn Democratic Party called State Committee, also known as Dis-
COVID-19 has had to delay or cancel all kinds of events, but Red Hook Fest will happen again this summer one with one major change. Red Hook Fest, presented by Hook Arts Media, is Red Hook’s largest music festival and will take place for the 27th consecutive year. According to Heather Harvey, director of marketing, the change this year is that it will be livestreamed for people to watch at home. The festival will feature an exciting lineup of NYC-based performers and highlight the recovery efforts of Red Hook. The event will once again be free and a celebration of New York City’s arts and culture scene, social justice and the vibrant Red Hook
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On June 27 starting at 2 pm, audiences around the world will be able to enjoy Red Hook’s largest yearly festival at RedHookFest.com and social media sites including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The livestream producer of the event has also been in charge of Essence Fest and the Super Bowl. According to Hook Arts Media, some of New York’s most progressive and talented performers will share music and dance from their homes and studios. In addition to Hook Arts Media highlighting relief efforts in Red Hook, they will also spotlight local individuals, essential workers and nonprofits’ efforts to provide resources during this challenging time in the city.
June 2020
A
Our July 23 primary endorsements
fter 36 years with Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Red Hook will have a new voice in the New York State Legislature’s upper chamber in 2021. With little doubt that the Democratic primary on June 23 will also determine the victor in November’s general election, the open seat in Senate District 25 – rarely challenged by a significant opponent under Montgomery, who will retire next year – makes for an unusually consequential political moment this month for citizens of South and Central Brooklyn. Now would be consequential political moment in any case. Police violence has generated civil unrest across the nation. In April, New York State experienced the largest drop in employment in its recorded history. A quarter of New York City tenants couldn’t (and didn’t) pay rent in May, and the number will go up in June. Under the leadership of Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, the coronavirus has killed 23,000 New Yorkers. Frontline workers continue to risk their lives without anything close to adequate compensation, and the rest of us – if we’re not out in the street protesting – sit dazed at home, dreaming of a better world. There is no clear favorite in Senate District 25. Assemblywoman Tremaine Wright, who will give up her seat representing Bed-Stuy in the lower chamber, is the choice of Brooklyn’s Democratic
machine, with pledged support from 22 elected officials (from City Council to Congress). But both of her opponents got an earlier start in the Senate race, earned significant endorsements, and have raised more money than she. Jason Salmon, a former staffer for Montgomery with strong ties in the Clinton Hill-Fort Greene area, has rallied a coalition of progressive insiders, trade unionists, churchgoers, and artists. Jabari Brisport, a public school teacher, is the choice of left-wing activists: the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, the local branch of the Sunrise Movement, and Our Revolution. As the Star-Revue previously reported, Wright’s record in the Assembly – where she has introduced a number of bills designed to protect property owners – betrays a hostility to renters almost unparalleled among Democrats in New York City. All signs indicate that, if elected to the State Senate, she will continue to use her position in Albany to serve as an advocate for landlords. Salmon’s campaign, which has taken on the issues of overpolicing and gentrification, has credibly presented him as a passionate reformer. But Brisport’s platform, which shares these themes among others, is a bolder flight of fancy. We mean this as a compliment: with the world in ruins and few signs of hope on the federal level, now is the time in New York – for the always bold
and the typically cautious alike – to demand a radically more humane society, and the transformative measures proposed by Brisport would make for a good start. Brisport is an unabashed democratic socialist – which means, of course, that he is a pie-in-the-sky idealist. But he also has a pragmatic, detail-oriented side that allows him to speak with expertise on arcane policy matters ranging from housing to education to energy. On his website, Brisport offers a program of legislative proposals far more precise and exhaustive than either of his competitors. He knows where preexisting bills need a boost, and where brand new legislation is needed. The candidate has in mind not a vague anticapitalist agenda but – if we support it – a workable plan for New York State. Brisport’s recommendations – for new taxes on the rich, for social housing, for labor protections, for COVID-19 relief, for green infrastructure, for single-payer healthcare – take the form of small tweaks and major overhauls. Together, they would constitute not only a significant leg up for tenants and workers in our state but, also, a meaningful form of local resistance in the face of the national and global troubles of our time: wealth inequality, mass incarceration, climate change.
cial justice, LGBTQ rights, and animal rights likely reflect these identities. But the charismatic 32-year-old talks about himself infrequently – he has not made himself the star of his campaign, which is a campaign of ideas aimed at collective liberation. It draws its energy not from any individual from a popular movement whose principles are unlikely to waver. In our view, a vote for Brisport is a vote for dignified living conditions in the Red Hook Houses, for the protection of undocumented immigrants in Sunset Park, and for the safety of homeless families in Bed-Stuy. It’s also, we hope, a vote for a post-coronavirus world where we all recognize that what comes next doesn’t have to look like what came before. The Star-Revue also endorses Bernie Sanders for president, Marcela Mitaynes for State Assembly, and Julio Peña III for District Leader.
If elected, Brisport will be the first black, queer vegan in the New York State Legislature, and his commitments to ra-
OP-ED: BQX more and more a pipedream
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t is no surprise that, due to the financial crisis imposed by COVID-19 upon the municipal budget, Mayor Bill de Blasio is reconsidering advancing his $2.7 billion Brookyn Queens Connector streetcar project known as BQX. There was never a guarantee that the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) would pay for 50 percent of the cost. Dreams of Amazon doing the same have come and gone, since they canceled coming to Long Island City, Queens. There is no funding for this project in the MTA’s $51 billion 2020-2024 Five Year Capital Plan. There is no commitment to use future Manhattan congestion pricing toll revenues starting in 2021 to help fund this project. It remains to be seen if this project will be included within the MTA’s pending long-range 2020-2040 Capital Needs Assessment Plan. There is no proposed funding to advance this project in either the city or state budgets. No one knows if the next Mayor will support this project and make it a priority. Mayor de Blasio has yet to request approval to enter the FTA New Starts process for future funding. The project is not included within the February 2020 FTA New Starts report for federal fiscal year 2021. Don’t count on seeing it in the next FTA New Starts report for federal fiscal year 2022. Successful completion of this process
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Larry Penner
averages five years before there is an approved Federal Full Funding Grant Agreement in place. The project has a fatal flaw. It is missing $1.4 billion in federal funding. This has been overlooked by those who champion the project. After five years, there has been no progress in securing federal funding. In 2015, the Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector claimed it could be built for $1.7 billion. In 2016, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) said $2.5 billion. Today, the estimated cost is $2.7 billion. How much more might it cost upon completion? It takes more than a simple planning feasibility study to turn it into a viable capital transportation improvement project. There have been no completed environmental documents or design and engineering efforts to validate the $2.7 billion construction costs. Awarding a $7.25 million consultant contract to perform environmental work supplemented the previous $7 million feasibility study for a total of $14.25 million. This leaves the project $2.685 billion short of funding needed for completion. The original completion date slipped five years from 2024 to 2029. Claims that construction would start in 2019 have come and gone. The environmental review process has been underway since in 2017. Final design
and engineering would require several more years. Mayor de Blasio’s plan to finance this project by taking a percentage of property taxes on new development (value capture) was always robbing Peter to pay Paul. This would reduce the amount of money available for police, fire, sanitation and other essential municipal services. Both the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) and the EDC have no experience in design, construction or operations of street car systems. De Blasio will have to ask the MTA to serve as a project sponsor and future system operator. The MTA, not wanting to use its own funding, would have to enter the project into the FTA New Starts program. The MTA, the DOT, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak are all attempting to qualify other projects for the same federal New Starts program. Completion of a planning study is just the first step of any potential capital transportation project improvement. The journey for a project of this scope can easily take 10 to 20 years before becoming a reality. Given the uncertainties of project financing and growing costs for utility, sewer line and water main relocation, buses would be a better solution. Adding more cars to each train and
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increasing the frequency of service on the Brooklyn-Queens Crosstown NYC Transit subway G line, which runs in close proximity along the same corridor, could quickly be implemented. Without a billion or more from Washington, don’t count on riding the Brooklyn Queens Connector in your lifetime. What about simple limitedstop bus service on the same route? The MTA’s ongoing Queens Bus Network Redesign Draft Plan proposes creation of the new QT 1 bus route. It would cross the Pulaski Bridge to connect Astoria, Long Island City, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Downtown Brooklyn. This could make for a low-cost easyto-implement improvement instead of the $2.7 billion Brooklyn Queens Connector. Larry Penner is a transportation advocate, historian and writer who previously worked 31 years for the Federal Transit Administration Region 2 NY Office. This included the development, review, approval and oversight for grants supporting billions in capital projects and programs on behalf of the MTA NYC Transit bus and subway, the Long Island Rail Road, the MetroNorth Railroad, the NYC DOT Staten Island Ferry, and private franchised bus operators, along with 30 other transit agencies in New York and New Jersey.
June 2020, Page 11
Bay Ridge volunteer ambulance corp answers the call during the health emergency
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by Erin DeGregorio
ince March, healthcare workers have come face-to-face with the coronavirus disease that has taken the lives of way too many New Yorkers. This is the story of the Bay Ridge Ambulance Volunteer Organization (BRAVO) – a free, community-run ambulance service that serves Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights and Fort Hamilton. The organization has been working tirelessly during the pandemic to help not only residents in those neighborhoods, but in the entire borough of Brooklyn as well.
$250,000 each year, insurance being a major expense.
A brief history
“I fight tooth and nail, and will continue to fight, to keep BRAVO free because there are other voluntary ambulances around the city that bill for their services,” said retired FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief and BRAVO President Tony Napoli, who has been a part of the BRAVO family for the last 46 years. We are still surviving, and that’s mainly due to the fact that we own the vehicles and building [located at 86th Street and 7th Avenue].”
In 1974, in response to very slow ambulance service, then-Community Board 10 Chairman Hank Vogt worked with local politicians including Assemblymembers Bob Kelly and Chris Mega, Congressman Hugh Carey and Senator Bill Conklin and religious and civic leaders to launch an alternative. to provide faster response times. The first such squad was established in 1941 in College Point, Queens. BRAVO, which accepted more than 100 members, responded to its first emergency call on July 4 that year – taking less than five minutes. They transitioned into 24-hour service on August 18 – around the same time when a second ambulance was purchased to meet increasing community demand. Three years later, BRAVO volunteers were chosen to be among the state’s first advanced emergency medical technicians and received training under Dr. Richard Seigel at Flushing Hospital. In 1986, BRAVO was chosen to pilot the Emergency Medical Technician – Defibrillation Program, which is now used by emergency services throughout the state and across the country. The corps responded to its 100,000th call for help in 1989.
Because it doesn’t receive financial support from federal or state government agencies, BRAVO relies on donations from the local community. To raise funds, for example, the organization has sold holiday greeting cards and has held biannual fundraisers and 5K runs. It also applies for grants, receives funds through memorials, bequests and estate-planned gift-giving programs, and receives subsidies through the City Council.
Facing COVID-19 head-on BRAVO’s initial personal protective equipment (PPE) supply was sufficient prior to COVID-19. But as the weeks went on, BRAVO, like many other healthcare providers, found themselves low on N95s and unable to order certain supplies from their suppliers. Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, for instance, was distributing a wide range of PPE to first responders, hospitals, nursing homes, and long-term care facilities in Staten Island and Brooklyn in early April. She reached out to BRAVO via social media on April 9 and was later able to secure 50 N95 masks for them. However, the corps turned the donation down so that somebody else in need could have them instead.
Community support
“At that time we had received an allotment through New York State’s Regional Emergency Medical Service Council (REMSCO). So when we received the REMSCO supplies [including gloves, surgical masks, face shields and disinfectants] at the same time, I was quick to express my gratitude to Malliotakis and told her to distribute them to others who needed them much more than we did,” Napoli told us on May 8.
BRAVO’s expenses amount to more
BRAVO’s Vice President of Operations
BRAVO has gone beyond its borders to provide support and pre-hospital emergency care at major mass casualty incidents, including the plane crash at JFK International Airport in 1975, the Century 21 Department Stores warehouse collapse in 1990, the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
Page 12 Red Hook Star-Revue
David Aspiazu, who orders the medical supplies and handles the day-today ambulance operations, added that they have enough N95s, gowns and surgical masks – thanks to donations and allotments – and are secure for the next six months to a year. Napoli explained that their volunteer base has shrunk during the pandemic – partly due to a majority of BRAVO members working full-time as FDNY EMS responders and local hospital EMTs, and partly because some don’t want to subject themselves (and their families at home) to exposure to the virus. Those who had the availability in their work schedules still volunteered with BRAVO. “That’s because these individuals either grew up with us at BRAVO or they wanted to get back into their neighborhood to volunteer out of the kindness of their hearts,” Napoli said. BRAVO, which these days doesn’t run 24/7, had been out in the field about 26 hours a week since the “New York State on PAUSE” executive order was enacted on March 20, according to Aspiazu. Most of the calls BRAVO answered came from the local community when its 11-digit number was specifically dialed. However, available BRAVO ambulances were also put into the FDNY EMS Mutual Aid Response System (MARS) to help alleviate the City’s backlog. As a result, BRAVO superseded its boundaries on multiple weekends throughout the pandemic. In April, for example, BRAVO answered 19 emergency calls while in the MARS 911 system, while having at least one ambulance available for the Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights areas as well. Aspiazu said most calls in May were related to injuries and non-coronavirus-related emergencies, compared to the rampant COVID-19 and cardiac arrest calls received early on.
One volunteer’s experience The number of volunteers dwindled when a handful exhibited coronavirus symptoms. Napoli, who rode on the ambulances throughout March, later self-quarantined with his family. Aspiazu tested positive for the coronavirus in April and was forced to quarantine for two weeks at home. “It was really scary in the beginning,” Aspiazu
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told us. “I know that we’re not going to go back to normal. It’s going to be awhile before that, and I think that wearing a mask is going to become the new norm.” There were 68 volunteers who were still available to help out in early May. One of those volunteers included 21-year-old Joseph Culmine from Borough Park – one of the youngest members who joined the corps in September 2017. He works for FDNY EMS full-time, working 12-hour tours (5 pm to 5 am) in two-days-on-twodays-off intervals. Given his experience with the FDNY, he helped BRAVO members who weren’t as familiar with the 911 MARS system become acclimated to it. Despite the long hours and new scheduling due to the pandemic, he estimated that he had clocked at least 100 volunteer hours since the shutdown started. “For me, I felt it was an obligation,” Culmine told us on May 19, noting that he hadn’t ridden in a BRAVO ambulance in the last two weeks. “Whether it’s the coronavirus or not, it doesn’t matter because you can contract anything at any time. But as long as you take the right precautions, you should be fine.” Culmine has also been the corps’ equipment officer since 2019, making sure all the ambulances are properly stocked before they leave the Bay Ridge headquarters. He noted that since Governor Andrew Cuomo’s executive order went into effect, keeping up with constantly changing rules and guidelines from the State and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made the job a little more stressful. “I didn’t want to send anybody outside, especially working on the ambulance, without any surgical masks, N95s and gowns,” Culmine explained. “It was one of my main concerns and that weighed heavily on me because, if God forbid, anybody got sick, I would have that on my mind. Thoughts like ‘Did they go out without an N95 on the ambulance? Without a surgical mask? Without a gown?’ would probably race through my head.” For more information about BRAVO, visit bravoambulance.org.
June 2020
News from Italy: The plague won’t stop art by Dario Pio Muccilli
D
uring the first phase of the shutdown, art galleries were forced to close everywhere.
Private galleries have long functioned within the art market as a crucial link between artists and their audience: critics, collectors, and the general public. But today, the “art market is in apnea,” said Pietro Gagliardi, owner of the Gagliardie Domke, one of the biggest contemporary galleries in Turin, Northwest Italy’s largest city. Contemporary artists have grown used to the support of powerful galleries, which often set up stands in the international art fairs, like Art Basel in Switzerland and Art New York in the United States, hosting their main sponsored artists in showcases for visitors and purchasers. Art fairs, often criticized by conservative reviewers as overhyped blockbuster events, sometimes feel more like art supermarkets than cultural moments. Whatever they are, art fairs are now at risk of shutting down for a long time. “It’s quite impossible to think about art fairs with contingent entrances and social distancing,” remarked Gagliardi. “They are made up of gatherings; they value their success based on the crowd that visits them. Even if they were allowed, they would plunge below their usual rate of visitors with today’s containment measures remaining in action.” As the usual sharing tools are disabled, artists must find new ways to put forward their art. The first solution they came up with, obviously, was the internet. Of course, the web had already served to display artworks, but until the recent lockdown, it wasn’t the only game in town. In Italy, the prospect of a world without tangible art prompted many experts and enthusiasts, like Tomaso Montanari, a well-known reviewer, to level polemics against the museums’ closure under the belief that culture is as important as food, retail, or industrial facilities. Suddenly, after many columns in national newspapers and speeches on TV programs in favor of reopening both museums and galleries, the Rome government decided
Red Hook Star-Revue
to schedule it for May 18, with some containment measures. In the opinion of Montanari, the internet could not replace the bodily relationship fostered between the viewer and the artwork. Despite this, internet kept art alive, in some fashion, during the outbreak To quench their cultural thirst, people stuck at home had, for example, the opportunity to visit the Louvre virtually. It wasn’t the same experience as traveling to France, but it was better than nothing. Besides, the web is becoming itself a tool to make art, as in Pietro Luigi’s experience. Luigi, a high school student, is an Italian photographer who has decided to take photos by FaceTime, the iOS videocalling app. “How I did it? It’s simple,” he declared. “I have always been used to portraying female models, but during the lockdown it is illegal to meet them for a click, so I had to take photos at distance. Thence I decided to use FaceTime. I videocall the model, thanks to this app, and I choreograph her posture, seeing it from my smartphone. When I am thinking her position is perfect, I press a button on my screen, which makes the model’s phone take a photo of her, thanks to a FaceTime function.” Asked how he feels about this new way to take photos, Luigi said, “The quality is not the same of a reflex, but it is not the camera which makes the photographer. The outbreak pushes me to stimulate my creativity beyond the usual tools.” Other artists who toyed in the recent past about new ways of sharing their work seem now to have been prescient. While today the pandemic obliges many artists to show their creations only via social networks, Davide Coltro, a creator born in Verona in 1967, built at the beginning of the new millenium an ancestor of Pinterest or Instagram, a sort of social media ante litteram, called the System, made up of a staggering number of video terminals, owned by different purchasers around the world. These terminals, called “electronic paintings,” are all linked to Coltro’s studio, from where he sends them (via the web)
sequences of selfmade images, which change over time. “When he created the System, his work was not fully understood. Maybe tomorrow, because of the lockdown, people will valorize this kind of artistic research” said Gagliardi. Historically art forecasts the future trends, telling us where the world is going to go before anyone else understands it. That’s why usually ages of decline have been linked to a decadent art, like Art Nouveau, which predicted the European race to the abyss in the years before the first World War. A few months after the war’s end, a young Austrian artist, Egon Schiele, painted The Family (1918), where we can see the painter himself with his wife, Edith Harms, and a child still carried in Edith’s womb. The painting is very sad. The protagonists are naked and there’s a strong pathos in the dark atmosphere that surrounds the three figures in the center of the canvas. This gloom suggests a looming calamity over the family portrayed. Indeed, a few months after Schiele completed The Family, he and his wife died because of the Spanish Flu, while their child was never born. What is most striking is that the skin of the subjects shows the same symptoms caused by the 1918 flu pandemic: the bluish stains covering the bodies of Egon and Edith resemble those which afflicted the Spanish Flu’s victims. One century after Schiele’s death, people like Gagliardi, Montanari, Luigi and Coltro, are facing a new critical challenge for the future of art, even if they are different in age or profession. Nowadays we must not forget the importance of the art system, which CO-
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VID-19 has pushed – as the 1918 flu and the plague once did – to change its usual ways of both creating and sharing work. This work may describe our current catastrophe, or distract us from it, or envision its resolution. In any case, we can’t afford to ignore it. Dario Pio Muccilli is the Star-Revue’s Italian correspondent, based in Turin. Email him at muccillidariopio@ gmail.com.
"It is not the camera which makes the photographer. The outbreak pushes me to stimulate my creativity beyond the usual tools.”
June 2020, Page 13
Tenant unions demand recognition
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egal Management, a corporate landlord in Brooklyn, has a portfolio of more than 20 buildings located primarily in Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Its tenants have the same complaints as most renters in Brooklyn: namely, high rents and subpar maintenance. In March, after COVID-19 hit New York City, Regal sent a form letter to residents. “We are aware that you might be in a tight situation; financially, due to the heavy impact the Corona Virus is leaving on us all,” it began. Unfortunately, it seemed there was little Regal could do to help. “Since April’s rent is coming up, we’d like to reiterate, that tenants are obligated to pay their rent fully at this time,” the letter continued. “In fact, we did not cut our services but increased them to keep the properties clean and sanitized during this difficult period. We therefore cannot afford any rent breaks now, As landlords are totally responsible for all property expenses, mortgages etc.” The best Regal could do, according to the management team, was to offer a “onetime $50 bonus” to households that paid on time in full – a small subsidy, functionally, for the tenants least in need. Regal tenants dispute the landlord’s claim of expanded cleaning services, but either way, many of them weren’t going to pay: after losing their jobs, they didn’t simply have the resources. A tenant in Bushwick, who asked to remain anonymous, noted that, while his own work had been “affected,” the earnings of one of his roommates had dried up to such an extent that they had fled the city. “Now we have an empty room that we’re trying to fill, and we can’t,” the tenant related. “Leading up to April, we had emailed Regal about that and how we needed the price of that room deducted from our total payment, and they sent us back the same form response that they were sending to everyone, that they were demanding full payment.”
Solidarity in the era of social distancing The tenant, who had “done some organizing in the past,” came up with the notion of forming a tenant union, which he called the Regal Tenants Council (RTC). He approached some of his neighbors, whom he’d never met, and they volunteered to help get the concept off the ground. “Some of us went around and knocked on doors, wearing masks and keeping a six-foot distance and using hand sanitizer as well, but still making contact and speaking to people and actually getting to hear what’s going on with them and also getting to express what the power of banding together can be at this moment,” the organizer recalled. The campaign wasn’t limited to one building – the tenants visited Regal properties all over Brooklyn. “People were really on board with the idea of starting a tenant council for this crisis and beyond,” the organizer described. “If a landlord has a large amount of
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buildings, it only makes sense that folks be able to speak to the needs that they have when these large development companies, these large LLCs, are commonly not even considering them.”
and ease your rent burden” (which the landlord had declined to do upon request in March), but they refused to acknowledge the formation of the tenant union.
Tenant unions, also known as tenants associations or TAs, serve as a collective voice for renters who may desire protection from unsafe living conditions, unjust evictions, or rent hikes. Anyone can start one.
“This is a tactic used by landlords to try to break the links and get individuals to start doing their own mini-negotiation,” the organizer explained. “That would presumably be only minor concessions, compared to what we’re asking for as a collective, and won’t keep those who can’t pay at all safe.”
“Things moved pretty quickly,” the organizer said. Before long, the RTC had a group chat, a weekly Zoom call, and a shared Google Drive. “It’s been a noticeable difference, organizing through digital means,” the tenant observed. “That said, it’s proved to be not a stumbling block as much as I thought it would be. You still need to be in contact with each other and keep up with each other.”
Let’s make a deal The RTC collaborated on a list of demands intended to protect residents who, to varying degrees, had lost the means to pay rent. These included a universal rent abatement of 50 percent across all units, a pause on late fees, a complete rent waiver and forgiveness for tenants especially affected by COVID-19 (as established by a submitted attestation form), and guaranteed lease renewals. On April 30, Regal Management received a letter signed by 123 leaseholders, representing 58 units in 16 buildings. “We will not go hungry or forgo medical attention to pay rent,” it stated. The letter promised that if the landlord did not accede to its demands, the tenants – including those who were still financially solvent – would withhold all rent. It urged Regal to make use of “small business relief aid” and “opportunities for landlords to restructure and renegotiate the terms of their mortgages” to compensate for the proposed reductions in payments. By the organizer’s account, Regal didn’t take it well. “They immediately reacted by attempting to harass tenants,” he alleged. “They came around within the hour. They sent the building manager around to several apartments to knock on the door, trying to find out who had started this, and trying under false pretenses to get into the apartments, saying they were looking into maintenance issues and things like this.” Later on, the landlord directed texts and phone calls to some of the signatories. On May 6, the RTC responded with an “official notice that you must immediately cease such aforementioned behavior and all acts that constitute harassment and intimidation under the Real Property Law and the NYC Administrative Code. Such harassment may be subject to civil penalties.”
Heads in the sand For a landlord, avoidance can be as powerful a tool as open hostility. Ultimately, Regal’s representatives emailed the rent strikers with a promise to “make every effort to discuss in a friendly manner on how to satisfy
Subsequent emails from Regal’s team acknowledged the RTC only insofar as to assert “that they don’t recognize the tenants association as being valid. They’ll only communicate with you individually.” Tenants fielding inquiries pointed Regal to the official email account of the RTC, which so far sits empty. Achieving recognition may be the hardest hurdle to clear for most tenant unions. While laws protect the act of tenant organizing, those laws don’t require landlords to negotiate rent increases or maintenance standards with the tenant union thereby formed – in other words, there is no equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board that would, by card check or a supervised election, certify a TA and compel its landlord to engage in collective bargaining. Although tenant associations ostensibly operate on the same principle as labor unions – that is, strength in numbers (a landlord can easily evict one noncompliant tenant, but none wants an empty building) – their informality tends to make them less formidable. Some settle for operating primarily as social clubs and community information hubs. The organizer in Bushwick proudly noted that the RTC, too, had strengthened ties among neighbors and built relationships in buildings where, previously, “nobody knew each other.” But its members still have bigger dreams. “Our hopes are that they come to the bargaining table,” the organizer said. “We’re not asking for anything more than what is the necessity for basic human decency and justice to be seen here.”
A busy period at SWBTU Balanda Joachim, a community organizer at the nonprofit Carroll Gardens Association, heads the Southwest Brooklyn Tenant Union, an umbrella organization for “about five” small TAs in buildings in neighborhoods like Red Hook and Boerum Hill. Its usual monthly meetings have become weekly Zoom calls during COVID-19. “We’ve been supporting folks, giving them information in regard to what’s happening on the state level, and also helping them in their own buildings,” Joachim said. Since the coronavirus, she’s observed an increase in tenant militancy not only among renters with empty bank accounts but also among those whose landlords have long ignored their requests for repairs. “I would say, on my radar, a good five to eight TAs are new and because of this have formed,” Joachim reported. Only
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one of TAs with which she’s in contact, however, has successfully initiated collective negotiations for abatements with its landlord. Elsewhere, letters have been ignored and demands rejected. “These things take time,” said Joachim, who noted that she’d heard some success stories from “other groups in Brooklyn, but those are groups who’ve been organizing a little longer.” Joachim acknowledged the challenge of persuading tenants to hold the line in a rent strike. Had she ever seen a TA that had successfully sustained mass noncompliance even among tenants who could afford to pay? “Successfully done it? No,” she admitted. Under COVID-19, so many tenants can’t pay rent that, in many buildings, rent strikes take place by default, but their power to win concessions lies in withholding that which might – given those concessions – be granted. “This is a time for folks to fight, and in some places, it’s reluctant: we need folks to stand in solidarity, and they aren’t, necessarily,” Joachim lamented. (The RTC, however, has affirmed knowledge of tenants who’ve withheld rent by choice, not by necessity.) Until June 20, Governor Cuomo’s eviction moratorium protects all rent strikers – accidental or otherwise. After that, the moratorium will continue in a weakened form until August 20, defending only tenants who can prove “financial hardship” on account of the coronavirus. Activists are pressuring Cuomo and the New York State Legislature to cancel rent statewide for the duration of the crisis. To this end, small tenant unions and large political organizations within the Housing Justice for All movement have worked hand-in-hand. “I think that making housing a human right can only happen through people starting to organize their own tenants associations to put pressure not just on their landlords but also on politicians, beyond this crisis and during this crisis as well,” the Regal tenant commented. The RTC expects to stick around for a long time. For tenant advocates, a legacy of vigorous TAs established all across New York City could be a small silver lining to the coronavirus, but Joachim isn’t totally sure what will happen once the crisis has ended. “Folks are working together and coming together, and it’s cool, and it’s fun,” she said. “Will they last after the pandemic? That is the question. I only say that speaking from an organizing perspective – understanding that this fight doesn’t end. I think for the most part they will continue, but I guess it’s a matter of how and under what circumstances.” In conclusion, she struck a positive note. “Overall, I think it’s just been a really good response, especially because a lot of people are learning more about their rights as tenants, understanding that they do have rights, and it really makes them want to push forward.”
June 2020
This is where the Italians shop
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here are a few genuine Italian specialty food stores left in New York City. One of them is D. Coluccio & Sons. In what used to be the center of Little Italy in Brooklyn, D. Coluccio & Sons is sandwiched between Borough Park, Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge. Founded by Domenico Coluccio in 1962, D. Coluccio & Sons has the finest variety of imported Italian pastas, cheeses, baking products, prosciuttos, soppressatas, and delicious cakes available today in the Tri-State area. Did I mention that they also make mozzarella on premises? You will often find the mozzarella still warm on deli countertop display. Immigrating from Gioiosa Marina, a small town in southeastern Calabria, Italy, Domenico began importing foods that you could get only from his part of Calabria. This tradition of maintaining an inventory of unique food imports has continued today with his children, Luigi, Rocco, and Cathy. I drove to the store in late April to shop and to see how things are going in the wake of the coronavirus. I had to queue out in front, along with other people, as the store now only allows five customers in at a time. Everyone must wear a mask and a pair of gloves (they provide the gloves) to enter.
by Mike Fiorito
When it was my turn, I rushed into the store like a thief, grabbing a few essential items: a box of fresh pasta, packages of stuffed raviolis, olive oil, bottled artichokes, and a few bags of pepperoncino-flavored taralucci (a snack which is like a cross between a cracker and pretzel). Of course, no visit to D. Coluccio & Sons is complete without at least one (or two) spicy soppressata(s). There is nothing like biting into a Coluccio soppressata. It is not a packaged food. Made with pepperoncino and other flavors specific to Calabria, I always close my eyes and sigh when I take the first bite. Before the virus, when my wife and I had company, I would proudly serve sliced Coluccio soppressata, stacked up next to Coluccio’s Asiago cheese, and watch people’s reactions after their first taste. Most would shake their heads and point at the delectable treat in disbelief. Here is a little secret: I often wake up in the morning and cut a few pieces of Coluccio soppressata to eat first thing. Before vitamins. Before anything. I eat as much soppressata as I want in the morning because I know I’ll burn it off during the day. As I was curious to learn more about how else the virus has affected the store, I called a few days later to see if I could talk to someone. When I said I was calling from the Red Hook
Star-Revue, I was passed to Cathy, the founder’s daughter. I told her that I have long been a big fan of D. Coluccio & Sons and would love to chat about the impact of the coronavirus. Cathy was immediately friendly and warm. “Importing is definitely slower,” said Cathy. “But our inventory is completely stocked.” ‘I noticed all of the regular items are on the shelves,” I said. “We’ve done our best to adapt,” Cathy added. “And because of our connections in Italy, we made adjustments to our business early on. In fact, we were among the first stores in New York City to require wearing masks and gloves and to limit the amount of people in the store at the same time.” “Has the virus changed the things people purchase?” I asked. “People are buying more things to cook at home. Our pastas fly off the shelves. Our all-purpose double zero flour (also called doppio zero) has been immensely popular. People are doing a lot of baking at home: breads, pastas and pizza. We also have fresh yeast and dry yeast, both of which have been in short supply every-
where.” “How has the community reacted to D. Coluccio & Sons staying open?” I asked. “Everyone has been incredibly supportive,” said Cathy. “One of the really wonderful things is the stories we hear. People making cakes and baking breads for each other, leaving them at the door. Neighbors, friends, and family. It’s really sweet.” “When do you think you’ll get back to normal?” I asked. “Hopefully soon. This is not just another store. This is our family tradition. It goes back generations. In the meantime, we will continue bringing great food into people’s homes in the safest way we can.” For more information, go to dcoluccioandsons.com.
Local restaurants adjust to pandemic ‘new normal’
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ll nonessential businesses must remain closed in New York City, including dine-in restaurants. It has now been almost three months since restaurants were forced to close their doors to customers. While the financial effects have been devastating for many restaurants, having customers get takeout and delivery orders has helped them get some business. Some restaurants have found more creative ways to get through the pandemic. Kitchen at Cobble Hill, located on Court Street near the corner of Kane Street, has taken its business outside. They decided to set up tables with food in front of the restaurant to get the attention of people walking by on the street. A couple who had just gotten food from Kitchen at Cobble Hill told me the unique setup had influenced their decision to get food there. They weren’t planning on getting food but decided to after they saw it while passing by, and thought it looked good. “It’s been a crazy time,” said Olga Potap, the owner of the restaurant. “We moved the bar to the front of the restaurant. Hopefully having it in front has caught people’s attention.” She recommended potato latkes, chicken soup, kale salad and dumplings as some of her favorite dishes. Potap also said she felt responsible for
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by Brian Abate
everyone who works at the restaurant. “The team has been amazing and super supportive.” Potap has experience dealing with adversity. She had been working in finance when the market crashed in 2008 and she lost her job. She switched careers completely with no experience working in restaurants but had success. She attributes her success in large part to her colleagues. “I’m not really sure how I did, but here I am 11 years later,” said Potap. Another restaurant that has been forced to adjust since the pandemic is Krok, located at the corner of Kane Street and Columbia Street. They were usually filled with customers for lunch and dinner. Part of the experience of going to Krok is having the opportunity to eat meals in a traditional Thai manner, include having many courses and eating some food with by hand. I spoke to Jeerathinan, who is a manager at Krok. She said that lately they weren’t getting much business early in the day but that they got busier in the evenings.
“We open at 2 p.m. instead of noon now and had to switch around people’s shifts. At first there was very little business after everything closed down. Then we started getting more deliveries. Now with the nicer weather more people are picking up orders.” I spoke to Krit Ploysomboon, the owner of Krok, about his restaurant. He believes that their unique menu has helped them continue to get business after the initial shock of not being allowed to have customers eat inside.
mal as possible. They are just forced to rely on pickup and takeout orders now.
He recommended the Gai Yang Bu-riram, which is marinated grilled chicken and sticky rice that comes with tamarind chili sauce. He also recommended Leo beer and Singha beer to customers who are 21 or over.
While both owners are healthy and continue to work, the changes the restaurant has been forced to make have taken a toll on them.
“No other places serve the same food as we do,” said Ploysomboon. I also had the opportunity to speak to Claudio Whang and Victor Navarette, who are the co-owners of Fragole. The restaurant is located on Court Street between 1st Place and Carroll Street.
As I was speaking to her, a customer arrived to pick up his order.
They are known for their authentic Italian food. Pappardelle con ragu di carne and rigatoni alla bolognese are among their most popular dishes.
“I was worried when I heard we had to close the inside of the restaurant because that’s where most of the business came from,” said Jeerathinan.
Navarette, who began as an employee at Fragole and worked his way up to become an owner, said they are trying to keep everything as similar to nor-
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“The most important thing has been everyone’s safety and health,” said Whang.
“We’ve had to change our hours and cut down our staff,” said Navarette. “Everyone is working harder than ever. I just want people to know we’re still here right now and making food is all we can do. We’re hoping to get more business because we’re dying slowly.” Right now, local restaurants are adjusting to the reality of not being allowed to have customers inside. They are doing everything that they can to survive until they are allowed to fully reopen, but they need customers now. A sign in front of the Fragole says, “Brooklyn is the best thing that happened to us. We love you all. We are still here because of you.”
June 2020, Page 15
Books by Quinn ‘THE DAIRY RESTAURANT,’
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by Ben Katchor
or months now, New Yorkers have been bent out of shape, either cooped up at home or stretched thin on the front line of what’s happening during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s strange to think of the world we all inhabited a few months ago, the casual freedoms we enjoyed: seeing friends, going out to eat. In his ambitious illustrated history The Dairy Restaurant, Ben Katchor writes of “the mythology of an inaccessible or lost paradise: similar to a defunct eating place that one can know only from memory, or postcard images, but can never visit again.” Mostly gone, largely forgotten, one-time New York institutions like Ratner’s and Rapoport’s hold a special place in Katchor’s heart. He recalls how, as a young man, “the appearance and atmosphere of these dairy restaurants… attracted me. I assumed that the resigned and forlorn air that filled these places was due to their being businesses in their final decline. Their customers had died or moved away, the cuisine they offered was no longer considered healthy or fashionable, and the owners did not want or expect their children to continue in their line of work.” Famous Dairy Restaurant (formerly on 72nd Street) is remembered for how a “long-suffering elderly waitress limped back and forth to the kitchen, a tiny saucer of creamed spinach in her trembling hand.” The “modern American dairy lunchroom with its emphasis on cleanliness and efficiency” – tiled walls, small tables, a marble or enamel bar with stools – could at one time be found throughout Lower Manhattan, as well as in Brooklyn, upstate New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, and even San Juan. Sharing reproductions of matchbooks and menus, Katchor laments that it’s “the twentieth-century Jewish dairy restaurant, possibly due to its utilitarian design and lack of picturesque ethnic qualities, that’s least memorialized and preserved.” Katchor remembers sitting on a stool in front of a plate of gefilte fish at B&H Dairy on Second Avenue, and how a young woman plopped down next to him to ask what he was eating – a coy move to start a conversation. Later, he married her. This personal history, while just one aspect of The Dairy Restaurant, is the most straightforward and moving. Katchor would have done well to build the structure of the book around his reminisces. Instead, he relegates them to the end, focusing, for the most part, on an unwieldy history of Jews (as recorded in the Bible) with a special interest in what was eaten, and where. He follows the evolution of the Jewish people and their migration to the New World and the New York restaurants they created, where “the Eastern European dairy dishes they grew up eating at home constituted a
cuisine of their own and could serve as the basis for a specialty restaurant.” Katchor begins dramatically, immediately, without introduction. A line from Genesis (1:2) is printed directly on the inside cover: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The accompanying black and white drawing depicts a restaurant: an advertisement for borscht on the wall (75 cents a bowl), a bare light bulb, and a water level almost to the ceiling. Floating on top are bubbles and what look like bars of soap, labeled “carbon dioxide,” “carbon monoxide,” “methane.” Soon after, Katchor takes us to the Garden of Eden (“the first private eating place open to the public”) where “the relationship between patron, proprietor, and waiter is established.” Katchor sees the creature tempting Eve as “a middleman in the business of human nourishment” and Adam and Eve’s move to cover themselves, after partaking of the forbidden fruit, as “the first account of dressing for dinner.” Frequently digressing in his writing, Katchor also has a habit of illustrating not just what’s on the page, but what else is on his mind. For example: Abraham’s desert tent is imagined as the striped awning over a city storefront. The lively drawings, executed in black and white with sketchy lines and smears of shading, are mostly of squat-looking people (about three heads high). Although there’s a drawing on pretty much every page, this is a text-heavy history, nearly five hundred pages, dense and often going in many different directions at once. Katchor writes of working on this project over many years, calling attention to the “interesting tidbits of information” and “collected discoveries,” warning that “the complete history of the dairy restaurant remains to be written.” And Katchor’s book is a long sort of ramble, with only a little help from section headers here and there, ranging from the specific “SeventeenthCentury Vegetarian Resistance” to the general “Travel and Food.” Readers will be glad for these breaks. Diving back in, Katchor parses out the “long and complicated history of cultural antagonisms, economic power struggles, and theological differences between the numerous Jewish sects” to determine the origins of the Torah’s commands “not to cook meat in milk, not to eat a combination of milk and meat, and not to profit from the cooking of meat in milk,” discovering how “ritual prohibition” becomes “dietary law” and then “culinary style.” Katchor writes, “According to Hasidic lore only kugel, or noodle pudding, is an authentic Jewish dish – all others are preexisting dishes adapted by Jews according to the possibilities of their dietary law.” Katchor tracks down a few surviving owners of some of Manhattan’s dairy restaurants, including Pola and Salek Gefen of Gefen’s Dairy Restaurant, formerly on Seventh Avenue. New to the business,
Pola easily adapted to cooking for a crowd, having been “used to cooking for at least eight people in Berlin – concentration camp survivors who had lost their families.” Katchor writes, “Six million people with a taste for the Eastern European dairy dishes mentioned in this book were murdered in Europe in World War II. The remaining Jews and their children had a complex relationship to this cuisine. It may have been the beloved food of their childhood but it was often associated with the embarrassments of immigrant life, suffocating family relations, economic failure, or making them fat.” “To some [the food of their childhood] is part of a lost paradise that they strive to return to for the rest of their life. To others, it represents a family bondage and provincialism, the escape from which they mark as a day of liberation.” Katchor seems like a little bit of both: someone who has cultivated a sophisticated palate, but is brought to his knees by a certain taste of home because of the flood of memories it invokes. “In the quiet of this restaurant with its faint smell of frying butter and sweet baked goods, I was truly in a walled paradise of sorts,” he writes of a restaurant of his youth. He’s a little bit like Proust with his madeleine. One of the last images shows a man and woman standing in front of a gas station in yoga poses, in water up to their ankles. As if foreseeing the future (the book was published in March), the people wear masks on their faces. Giant hornets fly overhead. Harder than remembering the world we left behind when we were quarantined is imagining the one we’ll make for ourselves when we emerge, pale and blinking, at some future point still to be determined. No doubt the first thing we’ll want to do is go get something to eat. Katchor’s book is a reminder that while our memories can sustain us for a lifetime, the places that nourish us are fleeting. If there’s a restaurant dear to you, make it a point to go there first. - Michael Quinn
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June 2020
The end of the jazz empire by George Grella
“We came up from the subway / On the music midnight makes / To Charlie’s bass and Lester’s saxophone / In taxi horns and brakes.” – Joni Mitchell Take the 1 train to Christopher Street and walk uptown on Seventh Avenue South for a few blocks and you end up in a rough triangle marked by Smalls, Mezzrow, and the Village Vanguard. You go down steps to get into each of these basement jazz clubs, where you’re likely to be knee-to-knee and elbow-to-elbow in a way that would make that subway car seem roomy. These clubs have been off-limits since mid-March, and it’s impossible to see them reopening until there’s a vaccine for COVID-19. This is a jazz problem and also a music problem, a math problem and a physics problem: how many tickets can you sell for a set at the Vanguard and how much will they be so working musicians and staff can get paid and the club can have some profit to pay the landlord and the utilities bills; and how do you devise an HVAC system to keep pumping fresh air through the room, because a group of people breathing in a small, enclosed space is a dangerous proposition. And how do you charge a premium ticket in a county where unemployment is around 20 percent at Memorial Day (and most likely undercounted) and unemployment benefits are set to run out without any reasonable expectation of an extension on the horizon? Put it another way, how does jazz work in a de facto neo-feudal political economy? Yes, this is a music problem but especially a jazz problem. Not only is the market for the music so niche-like as to constitute a cult, but the jazz musicians who can make a living without doing non-music jobs depend on live music situations. Those are jazz gigs, of course, but also playing in pit bands on Broadway, touring with popular music acts, teaching, recording for other musicians’ albums or arranging music for other per-
formers. Without the constant flow of live situations, there’s very little to do, and without listeners buying records (if you like a record, please buy a copy!), streaming revenues are so infinitesimal that they show services like Spotify have contempt for music, seeing it as a loss-leader for “content” like Joe Rogan. That is just another landmark on the decades-long journey wherein talk has replaced music as the broadcast content of choice. I don’t understand it and I can’t figure it out. Media surrounds us already, and given that it’s all talk – strange how news in the visual medium consists of watching someone sit at a desk and talk – about politics and crime and maybe books and movies, the desire to consume more and more talk seems bizarre. We make music too, in some ways we talk with music, and there has to be some alternative to the constant, repetitive yammering. The great keyboardist Joe Zawinul once said something to the effect that he used synthesizers along with the piano because he loved potatoes, but he didn’t want to eat potatoes all the time, every day, only potatoes. And there is why, for the first time in my 40 years of playing jazz, studying jazz, writing about jazz, I’m genuinely worried about the music. Since its drastic commercial decline in the 1960s, it’s managed to hang on economically while growing artistically in an inspiring and majestic way. But if musicians can’t get a gig, any kind of gig, they have to find another way to survive. The top-down money is guaranteed to exist – just as the human inclination tends towards hierarchies and authoritarianism, so there will always be rich lords who wish to impress the peons with their good taste and largesse. But that money will continue to go to the Lincoln Centers of the world, places that serve institutionally acceptable entertainment to people who seek to be flattered for their own values and pestilence and presidential politics. Alphabetland picks up where 1983’s More Fun in the New World left off and was bumped in April to soundtrack the quarantine, making it available digitally (and streaming in full on Bandcamp) in anticipation of an August physical release.
More fun in the new century: X returns for uncertain times by Kurt Gottschalk
X broke the mold of what a punk band should be. Amid 1970s West Coast zealot savants like Flipper and Germs, X was a talented band versed in multiple styles and with a passion for vocal harmonies. They were also as committed to the cause as any of their upstart peers and through five essential albums held fast to the history of country and rockabilly without acting like Reagan’s America was a sock hop. Their smarts flowed through the music but never watered down the punk impetus. After practically forever away (26 years, to be precise, and 35 since the last album with the four original members), the drunken poets of LA punk are back with a lightning flash of an album (all of 27 minutes) that’s neither their best nor their worst but feels necessary in these days of
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There is, at times, a bit of the hard rock sound they adopted after the brilliant, smiling, toe-headed guitarist Billy Zoom decamped, as on “Free,” which isn’t so much an anthem as a yearning for one. What made the band great still does: lyrical imagery, close harmonies, ramped-up drive and existential ennui. But the big news is Zoom’s return. He adds bits of piano and saxophone this time out but the return of his guitar is what’s essential to the band’s humor and drive. He adds some solid Carl Perkins licks to the barfly agnosticism of “Water and Wine” (“who has to wait at the end of the line? / who gets water and who gets wine?”), punctuating it with a vibrato boing straight out of a Roadrunner cartoon. You can practically hear his grin. The final track – an atmospheric two minutes backing a poem read by vocalist Exene Cervenka – features guitarist Robbie Krieger, an interesting footnote after the band’s work with Krieger’s old bandmate in the Doors, Ray Manzarek, in the ‘80s. Zoom is a big part of the success of Alphabetland, but he’s not the whole equation. Drummer DJ Bonebreak is, unsurprisingly, still rock solid, grounding the pedal-to-the-metal “Delta 88 Nightmare.” And Cervenka and John Doe’s tight harmonies sound as great as ever. On “Star Chambered,” the singers and onetime romantic partners swap lines and join in non-socially-distanced intervals to sing of the row they’ve hoed, the rows they’ve had and the roads they’ve traveled. Lyrical turns and melody lines (“I wish I was someone else, someone I don’t even know”) might call to mind songs from
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sense of importance. That Lincoln Center is a literal blighted sepulcher right now, a tomb ironically emptied because to fill it would be to infect it, will in no way deter funders from tossing their money that way a year from now. In that year, from June of this to May of next, many places are going to disappear. How many doesn’t matter so much as that, in this center of the jazz universe, city of eight million people that never sleeps, there’s not that many jazz clubs – again, the musicians are most often playing other gigs. If in the Seventh Avenue South triangle, Smalls and Mezzrow close and the Vanguard remains, that’s a huge loss. While the Vanguard-style full-week engagement is great, so is the fact that a club can have a different act every couple of nights. There’s already a surplus of good musicians out there, so losing a couple dozen sets a week means that at least a couple dozen musicians aren’t playing. Jazz is tied up to this country as one of the few truly original, 100 percent American things, and one of the greatest things civilization has produced. More, it’s tied to the mess of history – without the Civil War and Emancipation, there would be no groundwork for the music. Segregation also formed the ideas and styles in no small part, and the sheer beauty and excitement of the music had no small part in fueling the civil rights movement. Before rock, soul, and hip-hop, jazz was reflecting the times, and the chaos of the 1960s shattered the musical landscape as it did the political and social. Now we’re at the end of empire, at the edge of collapse of a decadent late-capitalist system. If people can’t work, they can’t make money, and without money they can’t churn through the endless cycle of consumer goods and services that have had America treading water for 50 years. It’s an intensely important topic, one worth talking about, but maybe all we have left is talk. their past (“What kind of fool am I? I am the married kind”), but Alphabetland drives too fast for the band to spend much time looking back.
With a name that rules out the dudes, Nobro goes for the gold “Nobro” means just what you think it means, and what you maybe hope it doesn’t. The all-female (no bros) Montreal four-piece might be breaking a logical implication of the Bechdel test – a band without dudes shouldn’t have to talk about them – but that’s already committing too much thought to it. So OK, stop, back up. Nobro rocks retro from before they were born. They flaunt independence and defiance like spoiled adolescents, and it’s freaking awesome. After making the rounds of splits, comps and a single (much of which can be found on Spotify), the band has issued its longest release (a walloping 11.5 minutes) and it’s a bruiser. They cite the Damned and Royal Trux as influences, but the simple riffs and shouted backing vocals quickly bring the Runaways to mind. They do patron saintes of XX rock Lita Ford and Joan Jett proud. The four tunes on Sick Hustle all pound, but it’s the opener that makes it worth talking about. Katheryn McCaughey sneers her way through “Don’t Die” with indifference before a stadium-worthy “don’t end up six feet deep” chant knocks it through the rafters. The fact that they have a cartoon video for the song only sweetens the deal. The band was supposed to be touring Canada with Pussy Riot right about now, but that like everything else in the world got waylaid by a microscopic virus that looks like a squishy toy. But the EP is up on Bandcamp just awaiting heavy rotation. Recommended listening, even for bros.—Gottshalk
June 2020, Page 17
Haley's Phoenix memories (continued from page 1)
awaited many of our buddies. There were shades of the Vietnam war, dodging the usual “draft” into the white-collar army of banks, government and business offices that led them to steady pay and soon bigger pay, in favor of publishing a weekly newspaper. Meanwhile, Mike was the ringmaster of the circus. He chased after “redlining” Brooklyn banks that often withheld mortgages from locals seeking to buy houses because the areas of Boerum Hill, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, and Fort Greene didn’t have a future as far as they saw. Mike helped open their eyes to the brownstone rebellion led by a new breed of folks, many of them like him who didn’t want to march off to the suburbs. And aided by the Brooklyn Union Gas company, Borough Hall and various neighborhood associations, he boosted Brooklyn. The Phoenix under Mike pushed on, writing about the struggles of the then still to be born River Café or the “discovery” of the Arab and Italian enclaves that enriched restaurants and food shops on Atlantic Avenue, Court Street and beyond. And always covering local community board meetings and every whisper of real estate development worth hearing. Likewise, the Phoenix reveled in the “reform” versus “regular” battles of the Democratic Party as well. BAM, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association and others were covered. We started out at a storefront on 155 Atlantic Avenue, near the waterfront, and then moved east to 395 Atlantic, our own three-story building. Mike’s management style was tumultuous for the most part anyway, but the paper’s open door policy extended to friends and family of the employees, self-styled community activists, potential advertisers, et al, many of whom would just walk in off the street to buttonhole editorial and advertising people and
circulate. Editorial functioned with a slow start with phone calls on Wednesday by reporters to line up likely news stories. Conference with Mike and/or editor later that day or early Thursday to get story ideas approved, assigned and started. Meanwhile work went on, with sales folks on the phone or else hitting the streets for close encounters with the various retailers, restaurants and other would be clients. Back at the office, reporters would be banging out copy on old stand up typewriters with old desks and chairs, bare floors mostly with some area rugs. And then the fun began, arguing with the editor and/or Mike that your story was good, indeed, great. Or becoming convinced yourself that it was a dog and should be let out into the backyard of storiesto-come – only to be told, “We don’t have enough copy yet, write up something.” For Friday these relaxed outlooks were fine and the wee-end was off. But by Monday, print product was cooking, new ads (hopefully ) were coming in, classified ads filling up. And Tuesday it was all out of the oven, stories searching for photos, cursory fact-checking and things coming to a head. By Tuesday evening, most reporters fled the premises, leaving the editor, Mike, the layout and copy people taking over. And Mike would be in earnest like both an expectant father and an angry midwife trying to bring this week’s baby – 24 or 32 pages of print – home in time to Expedi Printing, at that time located in now plush Greene Street in Soho, run by Sam Chen, to get published on Wednesday. Changes to copy, layout and content went on and were reconsidered until finally the new baby was born! And sometimes this would run into the early Wednesday a.m. hours – no matter, it had to happen. And then it was Wednesday p.m. and time to start all over again.
Accepting a first place award for the Villager in the NY Press Association's better newspaper contest. In the photo are Mike, Dnynia, George Fiala, Tracy Garrity and George Fiala.
The Phoenix office at 395 Atlantic Avenue decorated for the 4th of July.
Page 18 Red Hook Star-Revue
Tracy Garrity has spent a career interviewing famous people.
Peter Haley on a local story.
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The Phoenix made Brooklyn a better place (continued from page 1)
to our homes, or bars or, in my case, Dnynia’s office for a cigarette and a chat. She was always there for advice – although more in the “what the hell were you thinking” vein than the kindly newspaper matriarch’s yin to the volatile patriarch’s yang. She was able to talk just as expertly on how to get rid of water bugs in the bathroom as how to eradicate a broken heart. Together, for those couple of years I worked there, they were my family. And I can say now in my sadness for their loss: a pretty fine family they were. When my brownstone was robbed, Mike was the first one I called and the first one to arrive to my rescue. When we lost touch after years of different jobs and
the unimaginable demise of the Phoenix, he found me on Facebook to compliment my work as a journalist and as a parent to twins. When I left the Phoenix, Mike gave me the gold pocket watch he often checked when we were long past deadline. I am a better journalist for knowing them and Brooklyn is a better place because they loved it so. I often speak with fondness of the grueling brain work that was putting out the Phoenix, but not because I’ve forgotten the burn out that plagued me or the debt I accrued. It is because more than any other person and any other workplace, Mike taught me to understand the incontrovertible power of a good story, told truthfully and well.
Junior's was often a place for important Phoenix meetings. Years later, I had a great lunch with Mike and Dnynia there.
The Armstrongs honored for their business publication by Brooklyn's Borough President, Howard Golden.
June 2020
YATES'S VIEW (continued from page 5)
could have led longtime Democrats to reflect upon the failures of their party, from the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform under Clinton to Obama’s foreclosures and deportations; instead, primetime entertainers like Rachel Maddow led them on a years-long wild goose chase through Russia and Ukraine, and they emerged in 2020 having learned absolutely nothing – not even why it might be a bad idea on pragmatic grounds to nominate Joe Biden, who wholly embodies the Democratic legacy of fecklessness and venality that gave Donald Trump’s demagoguery so much power last time. Since 1973, Biden has stood on the wrong side of virtually every issue that progressive, liberal, and even moderate voters care about. By and large, his supporters do not share his conservative ideology: they view him, mistakenly, as a left-leaning incrementalist whose occasional failures to stand with working-class families and vulnerable Americans have owed to political constraints – that is, to the necessity of making certain sacrifices in order to live to fight another day in Washington, where unfortunately the Republicans must sometimes get their way. They believe that Biden shares Sanders’s commitments to universal healthcare, economic justice, and environmental responsibility but has pursued them in a more flexible and therefore ultimately more effective way. In fact, Biden belongs to a generation of cowed, dishonorable Democrats who, instead of standing up to the Reagan Revolution, preferred to protect their careers. For Biden, it wasn’t a hard sell. Acceding to right-wing dogma on economics, foreign policy, and criminal justice, he and his colleagues sought to beat the Republicans at their own game. They threw their support behind free trade deals designed to enrich investors and impoverish workers, and they built massive new prisons to manage the social fallout. They expressed their patriotism by advocating for wars overseas. They pushed for cuts to Medicare and Social Security and voted for the balanced budget amendment. Today, Biden functions not only as a confirmation of Democratic Party leaders’ unwillingness to contemplate bold public policy but also as a refutation of the relatively modest claims by which the centrist establishment typically sells itself to voters in the absence of any “unrealistic” promise of systemic reform: he is not an emblem of technocratic competence, of “woke” cultural liberalism, or of stellar personal conduct. What he has going for himself, in other words, is that he isn’t named Donald Trump. In November, that may turn out to be enough. 100,000 Americans have died due largely to Trump’s mismanaged response to the coronavirus, and the U.S. economy this fall is likely to be a wreck. We may see the Democrats take power by default – at which point, the few Sanders policies that Biden may reluctantly champion during the campaign will suddenly disappear from his
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agenda. We will continue to live in a failed state, defined by unconscionable wealth inequality, heavy policing, and an increasingly militarized border, but staunch Democrats will stop noticing these problems – or else will begin to see blameless misfortune where, under Trump, they perceived presidential agency. Until then, Biden’s base and Bernie’s will both waste a lot of breath about leftists’ obligations – or lack thereof – in the upcoming general election. Liberals will argue that we all have a moral duty to vote for the lesser of two evils, while socialists will balk at the notion of sanctioning the Democrats’ schemes to forestall a progressive shift within the party. Out of boredom, I’ve already participated in debates of this kind, which weigh the long-term risk of allowing the Democrats to succeed as a right-wing party (thereby more or less foreclosing, for instance, the possibility of substantive climate action until 2028) against the dangers of another Trump term. These debates don’t amount to much. Whether we hold our noses to take down Trump (thus restoring the conditions that yielded him in the first place) or, with 2024 in mind, sabotage Biden as a (possibly futile) means to persuade liberals that nominating centrists is not the safe bet they think it is, there are no good outcomes from here. The truth is that the meaningful part of the 2020 presidential election is already over. Vote for Biden, or don’t. The choice is little more than a distraction as each of us struggles to locate – as we must – a real path forward, outside the presidency, for the next four years. In New York, many Bernie supporters have turned their attention to local Democratic candidates who hope to bring socialism to the state legislature. Others, perhaps, will help launch third-party campaigns. Some leftists will abandon their flirtation with electoral politics altogether and go back to labor organizing. Many will throw their efforts into volunteer organizations like Food Not Bombs and Books Through Bars. A few may start worker coops or rural communes. If we understand that our individual actions matter only insofar as they serve to build collective power, which is the right course? I don’t claim to know the right answer. Of course, there surely is no single answer. There are a million ways in which those who seek to promote human freedom and dignity can continue to press onward within the fog – through protests and petitions, through strikes and boycotts, through mutual aid, through art, through conversation, through love. Write a letter to the editor, and fight with your relatives about politics at Thanksgiving, and keep yelling at people online. Befriend your neighbor. Unionize your workplace. Self-publish a manifesto. Join a Maoist sleeper cell. Come up with your own ideas, which will be better than mine. For me, the lesson of Bernie 2020 is not that the machinations of the Democratic Party will always manage to stymie the left or that its voters will always be insufficiently rebellious to get
on board with our program. I have no confidence that any particular change in campaign strategy would have been a difference-maker in the primary, but I don’t subscribe either to the notion that the endeavor was hopeless from the start. In truth, I’m not sure there is a lesson here at all, except to keep going. From the start, the goal was to awaken Americans to their power to enact radical social change to better their living conditions – the goal now is exactly the same. Above all else, Sanders’s campaign of New Deal liberalism functioned as a vehicle to spread a deeper revolutionary message. Now we must find new methods. We wanted to win, too, of course. But we recognized that putting Bernie in the White House was only one part of the battle – even then, very few real gains would have been feasible without an engaged and even militant body politic. If Bernie had beaten Biden, we’d be trying just as we are now to figure out how to persuade the general public to revolt against the indignities and injustices of American life – their votes alone wouldn’t have cut it. In reality, we didn’t get even the votes: America still has an incomparably poisoned political culture, dominated by incoherent grievances, meaningless partisanship, and grotesque spectacle. It is not a space where citizens (whether smart or dumb, kind or cruel) contemplate ways to improve society, as a vast majority of Americans already understand that, for some reason, society cannot ever improve. Bernie’s army of volunteers entered this terrain not just with a long list of attractive, commonsense policies – from free childcare to public broadband – but with an insistence about what is possible: everything. We must continue to insist at every opportunity, by any available means. The gains of our seemingly quixotic efforts will often be invisible, until they’re not. It’s in this spirit that I exhort New Yorkers to cast a vote, in the Democratic primary, for Bernie Sanders’s suspended presidential campaign. Ostensibly, the reason to vote for Bernie is to give him a few additional delegates for the Democratic National Convention, where, with significantly less power than he had in 2016, he’ll supposedly have a chance to help draft the new party platform, which is basically meaningless anyway. A better reason to vote for Bernie, I think, is simply to make a public declaration that we’ve not been beaten or destroyed. They’ll never get rid of us. The world is an unmitigated disaster: what else would we do but fight? At this point, voting for Bernie may serve only as a desperate assertion that even the most futile expressions of resistance are preferable to capitulating to the delusion that the elite-mediated, corporate-approved forms of “progress” made available to us are good enough – but hey, it can’t hurt. If you’d like, you can still vote for Biden in November. My favorite Bernie Sanders quote of all time – which I put forth now as one more reason to vote for him – comes from a December 1977 article in the Rutland Herald, a Vermont newspaper, in which several Vermonters offered their New Year’s resolutions.
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Most of them talked about normal stuff like quitting smoking or getting a new job. Finally, Bernie – then a divorced 36-year-old who, as a member of the Liberty Union Party, had lost several local elections by enormous margins – told the reporter his resolution. “In 1978, as in other years, I hope to be able to play some role in making working people aware that the present reality of poverty, wage slavery and minddestroying media and schools is not the only reality – but simply a pathetic presentation brought to us by a handful of power-hungry individuals who own and control our economy,” Bernie said. Here’s to 1978.
PRIMARY GUIDE (continued from page 9)
make do with predetermined slates that may run unopposed.) In Red Hook, the only slightly obscure position that will appear on the ballot is State Committee, also known as District Leader. Each Assembly District has two District Leaders, a man and a woman. In Assembly District 51, the new District Leader will primarily provide volunteer labor to the Brooklyn Democratic Party. They’ll also endorse judicial candidates, cast a vote for the next local party boss (or “county leader”) – currently Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte – and help choose the New York State Democratic Committee’s representatives within the membership of the Democratic National Committee. Assembly District 51’s current male District Leader is also its longtime assemblyman, Felix Ortiz. Ortiz, who seeks reelection in the Assembly, will step down as District Leader and hopes to see Red Hook civic leader Robert Berrios take his place. His opponent Julio Peña III – an aspiring party reformer from Sunset Park, now serving on County Committee – has campaigned in tandem with Katherine Walsh, one of Ortiz’s opponents in the Assembly race. District Leader is a party position, not a government position. For this role, therefore, there will be no general election. What if I’m a Republican? June 23 is also the date of New York’s Republican primary, but not a lot of Republican candidates are running. In New York City, there are four in total. In Congressional District 11, the GOP will likely nominate Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis to take on U.S. Representative Max Rose, a Blue Dog Democrat who upset a Republican incumbent in 2018, but she must first defeat Donald Trump enthusiast Joe Calderara, who has cast Malliotakis as insufficiently conservative. A subset of the same voters will choose between U.S. Marine Marko Kepi and prosecutor Michael Tannousis to replace Malliotakis in Assembly District 64, which the Democrats will not contest in November. If you’re a Republican and you don’t live in Staten Island, Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bath Beach, or Gravesend, you don’t need to worry about casting
June 2020, Page 19
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