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YATES: WE WILL ONLY GET BETTER IF WE TRY- PAGE 5
STAR REVUE
MAY 2020 INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
FREE THE NEW VOICE OF NEW YORK
Spaceworks artists may be evicted during pandemic
19
below-market-rate studios for artists in Williamsburg and the South Bronx are slated to vanish in May, leaving painters, sculptors, writers, and dancers with the grim task of moving out during a pandemic.
Until recently, more than two dozen artists in Gowanus were in the same boat. On March 31, the city-initiated nonprofit Spaceworks, which has used funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York City Council, and private philanthropy to provide subsidized spaces for artists since 2013, quietly announced that it would cease operations in June due to budgetary shortfalls. The impending shutdown drew wider attention in April, however, due to a public campaign mounted by the communitybased organization Arts Gowanus on behalf of 28 artists facing eviction at 540 President Street in Brooklyn. Spaceworks, which leases a portion of the building from PDS Development
by Brett Yates works also waived rent for the month of May and walked back an earlier warning that artists would lose their possessions if they didn’t pack up in a timely fashion.
Corporation, had informed its subtenants that they had to vacate their workspaces by May 25. Arts Gowanus offered to take over Spaceworks’ management contract (or to help negotiate new, individual leases between the artists and the landlord), but PDS, which has not revealed its plans for the soon-to-be-empty space, rebuffed the nonprofit’s attempt to keep the artistic community in place beyond the lifespan of Spaceworks. Artists, however, spoke out about their reluctance to break quarantine for the sake of an impatient landlord, earning the sympathy of local journalists and the neighborhood’s councilman, Brad Lander. By the third week of April, organized pressure – led by Johnny Thornton, Arts Gowanus’s executive director – had persuaded Spaceworks and PDS to coordinate a stay of execution in Gowanus. The occupants of studios at 540 President Street will hold onto their workspaces until one month after
While artists in Gowanus are still hoping for a resolution that would allow them to keep their studios on a long-term basis, the negotiated delay has made the prospect of moving out – if necessary – less daunting. No such delay has yet been promised to Spaceworks artists in Williamsburg or the South Bronx.
Milteri Tucker Concepcion, the director of Bombazo Dance Co. will lose her Spaceworks studio.
the expiration of Governor Cuomo’s stay-at-home mandate (New York on PAUSE) – June 15 at the earliest – irrespective of the termination date of Spaceworks’ master lease. Space-
Spaceworks manages 15 private studios, a community project space, and an exhibition space on the ground floor of 240 East 153rd Street, an affordable housing development – branded Park Avenue Green – in the Bronx neighborhood of Melrose, completed in 2019 by the developer Omni New York LLC. On the second floor of Williamsburgh branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) at 240 Division Avenue, Spaceworks rents out four private studios as well as hourly rehearsal rooms
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A VIEW FROM OVERSEAS
Using the health crisis to break up NATO
W
hatever any government may say, there is not a country with better weapons to face the pandemic, but only countries with better or worse transparency. As never before, sharing information among governments is vital to save lives, and a demonstration of solidarity far bigger than sending medical equipment – which is clearly useful but is not the solution to the global crisis. China and Russia, in fact, are using humanitarian medical aid to expand their influence in the West. Europe in particular is the center of this strategy, as Beijing and Moscow send face masks almost once a week to European Union countries like Italy, ruled by a center-left government that is closer to China and Russia than it wants to admit. Indeed, Italy has been the main European sponsor of China's Belt and Road initiative, the commercial plan to flood (even more than now) the Western market with Chinese-made products and to control European harbors like Trieste in Italy, already strategic for connections with Asia. Xi Jinping and Putin know that Europe is the key to strengthening their economic power in the West and supplanting the United States. If now they are sending medical help, tomorrow they will send money, with state loans becoming the new weap-
by Dario Pio Muccilli
ons to consolidate dominance over smaller countries. Nevertheless, many European politicians push for a stronger relationship with the two Eastern powers, believing that they can play chess together without seeing their kings captured. The main reason this approach is so widely promoted is that Asia is such a fertile market, whose work rules are less tough than elsewhere. Many governments in Europe are like sailors navigating a sea populated by the ancient Greek Sirens without covering their ears. Wishing to assert their legitimate claim to independence from American foreign policy, they make alliances with countries that could represent a threat to their freedom. The US must emphasize its role as the guarantor of European freedom in order to persuade the EU that the Atlantic alliance is the best one. The current outbreak may change the geopolitical structure of European Union, as it will choose its allies according to the amount of help received. US officials understand this, which is why they are trying to push European public consciousness in favor of Washington. On April 9, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo gave interviews to eight European newspapers, with one message: "No one will help you like the USA.” But he is not the only one who has a voice on media across Europe, as there are many websites and TV programs that host intellectuals like Diego Fusaro, an Italian philosopher well-known throughout Europe, who believes that the US has shown a lack of solidarity with Europe because of the recent NATO exercise “Defender Europe 20” in Germany and Poland. He said that while USA was sending 6,000 soldiers, China sent medicine. Fusaro is historically a supporter of Russia, linked to the Italian extreme right, as he wrote articles with titles like “Praise to Putin’s Russia.” He’s now trying, like a thousand others, to undermine American prestige with conspiracy theories about an alleged invasion of Europe supported by NATO. US
(continued on page 2)
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by Brett Yates
Like the rest of New York City, Red Hook has felt the catastrophic impacts of the coronavirus. A number of local charitable efforts and organizations have emerged in recent weeks to assist Red Hook residents who need help during this challenging time. Several community members have formed Red Hook COVID-19 Relief, a volunteer committee that is eager to assist neighbors with whatever problems they may face during the pandemic. Call 646-481-5041 or email redhookcovid19@ gmail.com to contact a helper. Good Shepherd Services is handing out free grab-and-go meals at the Miccio Center (110 West 9th Street) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from noon to 3 pm. The New York City Department of Education is doing the same every weekday at two public schools in Red Hook, PS 15 (71 Sullivan Street) and PS 676 (27 Huntington Street), with distribution from 7:30 am to 11:30 am for families with children and from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm for adults. The Regenerative Resource Network, which operates the event space RE:GEN:CY at 22 Commerce Street and the Above & Beyond Collective Impact Network, is offering new household goods at discounted prices for curbside pickup. Items for sale include diapers, cleaning spray, toilet paper, laundry detergent, and coffee. “We purchase them at wholesale price, and then we pass along the savings and don’t operate the store at a profit,” founder Ashley Taylor explained. Markdowns range from 25 percent to 50 percent below retail price, depending on household income. Email apply@regen.exchange for more information or to place an order. Mutual aid networks have popped up all over the city. The South Brooklyn Community Mutual Aid Group, whose broad coverage area includes Red Hook, can buy and deliver groceries, prepare cooked food, and pick up prescriptions, among other tasks. Visit southbkmutualaid.com. Brooklyn Mutual Aid – founded as Carroll Gardens Mutual Aid, before its expansion – serves several neighborhoods close to Red Hook, including Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and the Columbia Street Waterfront District. Call or text 929314-0899 or email brooklynmutualaid@gmail.com.
View from Europe (continued from page 1)
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diplomacy should not underestimate the power of such influential opinion leaders, who are hosted on TV talk shows every day. The virus is posing a challenge to America’s global standing. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, what has mainly changed is the spread of capitalism in both formerly communist and formally communist countries like
Russia and China. For this reason, Europe does not have to choose alliances based exclusively on a shared economic and political model – it becomes a question of convenience. So the US has to persuade European governments that there is still a difference between Washington and Beijing or Moscow – the difference being freedom, which Europe cannot expect to defend alone with an army out of NATO or with a political strategy un-
popular on the other side of the ocean. Europe’s proposal to make alliances with the Eastern powers, without danger to its freedom, is arrogant and unreal. The coronavirus crisis must not hide this basic truth, whatever help China and Russia can send to the continent. Dario Pio Muccilli is the Star-Revue’s Italian correspondent, based in Turin. Email him at muccillidariopio@gmail. com.
The Red Hook Star-Revue is published every month. Founded June 2010 by George Fiala and Frank Galeano
with thanks to these guys
Page 2 Red Hook Star-Revue
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May 2020
LETTERS Has a bone to pick
There is even more to consider concerning "Do not let Andrew Cuomo become President" (Yates' View, April). Governor Andrew Cuomo has a lot in common with the late American bank robber Willie Sutton. When asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, Sutton replied "because that's were the money is." No wonder Cuomo included in the approved state budget a provision which amends the MTA's $15 billion Congestion Toll Mitigation Revenue "Lock Box." This provision was originally included to insure that all proceeds would be used to help fund the MTA's $51 billion 2020 – 2024 Five Year Capital Plan. Now these funds can instead used against any future deficits to the MTA's annual $17 billion operating expense budget. Language buried in the state budget also allows $10 billion in real estate mansion and internet sales tax revenue to be used for operating rather than capital expenses. Combined, these total $25 billion of the $51 billion Capital Plan funding. Cuomo has become the great train robber of capital transit funding. He is now wanted for robbing commuters of billions in capital transit funding. His picture should be hung on a wanted poster at commuter and subway stations. Commuters can collect their reward by not electing him to another term in 2022. — Larry Penner
Distance learning should stay
Let’s not let go of “distance learning” let’s use it to lessen the need to build more schools and rotate students and teachers on and off physical sites to learn. Keeps schools current in elearning and distance learning technologies; reduces need for building schools, which results in lower taxation for communities burdened with this high expense. #thinkoutsidethebox – when they get to their jobs the only learning they will get is e-learning. Additionally schools can use it to supplement income by offering classes for others. This technology has been here for 25 years, unfortunately the only ones to take advantage of it was Corporate America. — Carol D.
Frank and Caleb not funny
I confess I read just the first part of this article. Couldn’t bear to continue reading this prattle. Young Drickey has quite a pessimistic view of people and life doesn’t he: “dumb uncles,” "lifeless first dates,” “movie to love if you don’t know shit about movies”, “sentimental mediocrity disguised as high art.” Critical reviews are fine but you need to be less obvious relative to your contempt for the world around you and offer more reasoned arguements for your postions. — David Jenkins
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Thoughts on Andrew Gillum
Regardless of what we may think or even want for Andrew’s future political career and his potential to “redefine black masculinity” (not sure what that means exactly), what’s not being deeply considered I’ve noticed in news articles about this incident are his children. Who knows if his wife was or wasn’t a willing participant, but his children, however, are the ultimate victims here.
inconsequential task to him? If Andrew emerged later on when his children are much older (possibly even grown), when they are less vulnerable and susceptible, he would have a much more meaningful and respectful narrative to shape and give to the public (the priority of his family first), versus trying to manipulate some shallow, selfish agenda that everyone will end up picking apart anyway. — Jedi
Through the wisdom gained by life’s experiences, it is a parent’s job to instruct, warn, and help our children navigate through life’s inevitable pitfalls, not create the very hardships that we as parents try to warn against. If we each analyzed our lives honestly, we would most likely find that it’s not the stranger on the street or the “white man” who has made our lives more difficult. Often times, it is the people we know and love that have made life harder, starting out as children. And now for Andrew’s children, the world has become a much crueler and meaner place as they now have to navigate through the foul stench their father has put before them under the relentless glare of the public eye. And unfortunately, they will most likely have to deal with it in all their youthful innocence and naivety – way before any child should be faced with such salacious matters.
Disgusted
No one has to be a parent to understand this because as adults, we were all children once. How would you feel if your father (or any caretaker) had nude pictures plastered all over the internet, in a highly vulnerable and humiliating position where sex and drugs were involved? What would you need from your caretaker and what kind of compassion would you like from the public? Would you not need your father present in a way in which they solely focus on protecting, loving and nurturing you from this point on? And would you not need the public to empathize with you the child by allowing your father to fade to black without trying to calculate his next political move or assign some other
Ethan Fiks is the real thing
As an African American registered Democrat in Florida who supported Andrew Gillum for Governor, I cannot begin to express my disgust and disappointment. The man he presented to the public, a good, Christian family man obviously was all a big lie. For that reason alone, brother Gillum unfortunately has lost my family’s trust snd support. I’ve lifted R. Jai (Andrew’s wife) and the young children in prayer. They are the true victims in this, not Andrew Gillum. —Charles
Too strange
Finally, someone is bringing critical thinking to the situation. In addition,why weren’t the erectile drugs and the prescription drugs mentioned in the police report? If Aldo arrived at 11 pm, when did he actually call the police? They arrived at 1! Too strange. —Gary Branigan I studied with Ethan in the late ‘90’s at the National Guitar Workshop and found him to be a gifted music teacher. Remote instruction can be very effective, in some ways both more efficient and effective than in-person instruction. I hope those who have been taking lessons will continue remotely if that option is available. And when music venues reopen, please support live music and working musicians.—Bill Wilson
Vote for my guy
I’m writing to express my support for Jabari Brisport’s campaign for state senate. Though I live in Connecticut, I’m jealous New Yorkers have the chance to vote for such a strong, forward-thinking leader. In particular, I’m impressed by Jabari’s animal-rights platform — which calls for a ban on fur sales, among other things. Visit his website at JabariForStateSenate.com. — Jon Hochschartner
The Red Hook Star-Revue is an interactive newspaper We work hard to present you with an informative and entertaining package of news, events and advertising that makes living in the big city a little more intimate and friendly. We are also here to listen to you. You can send us letters to the editor that we will gladly print; we accept op-ed submissions on interesting topics; and if you have ideas for stories or tips we can use, please let us know. And if you have gonzo ideas about journalism, definitely get in touch! In case you have out-oftown friends who don't get a chance to pick up the paper, they can see the whole shebang online at www.star-revue.com You can stop by to see us if you like, when things get back to normal, — we are in Red Hook at
481 Van Brunt Street, Building 8, across from Fairway, inside of NY Printing and Graphics.
You can call us much of the time at
917 652-9128 But probably the best way to grab our attention is by email, and here are some email addresses:
Publisher george@redhookstar.com Editor brettayates@gmail.com Music Editor michaelcobb70@gmail.com Advertising liz@redhookstar.com jamie@redhookstar.com George Grella george@georgegrella.org Erin DeGregorio erin@redhookstar.com Nathan Weiser nathan.weiser@yahoo.com Music Listings will.goyankees@gmail.com Circulation george@redhookstar.com
Put a pause on love It might be the best idea to pause weddings in this corona phase ("Wedding Plans put on pause"). It’s tough for couples, especially those who have sent out wedding invitations online. But what can be done? It’s a pandemic and we need to face it. — Ashini S Mehta
FOR EDITORIAL, ADVERTISING OR EMPLOYMENT INQUIRIES, email george@redhookstar.com.
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May 2020, Page 3
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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May 2020
YATES'S VIEW
Things can get better, but they don't have to
I
n the wake of manmade tragedies, natural disasters, and other local or global shocks to the system, people often begin, optimistically, to feel that, upon recovery, life surely cannot return to normal. We’ve seen and felt too much. The everyday, numb routine has fallen away, revealed its mutability, and given us space to rethink our choices and values. In these times, we may perceive more humanity within the project of recovery than we did in our usual economy, and what makes that exhausting project a little easier is the conviction that this newfound humanity shall be sustained in peacetime. If we must rebuild the nation (or the world, or a neighborhood), doubtless it’ll be a better one. It doesn’t take an especially cynical observer of history to notice, however, that somehow it frequently doesn’t work out that way. 9/11 generated acts of heroism at Ground Zero, but in the longer run, it spawned two unnecessary wars of endless violence and destruction. Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans, mobilized volunteers across the country; it also created the conditions for the privatization of the local public school system, the razing of the city’s public housing, and the closure of its largest public hospital. Why don’t our epiphanies last? Unfortunately, positive sentiment alone doesn’t produce positive change. In truth, the hearts of ordinary people were never the problem in our world. The problem, always, was the political structures that shape their lives – structures where, once the crisis has receded, they’ll be plugged right back in, whether they like it or not. The social and economic arrangements of American life were not, in the first place, democratically determined. While you and I may be spending our quarantines dreaming of a better world, the power elite probably haven’t. Already, one can imagine a future of long-term unemployment, where contact tracing becomes a tool to bolster the surveillance state, and large corporations – sustained during the crisis by government largesse – step in to fill the vacant storefronts of evicted small businesses. Still, I have hope for our post-coronavirus planet. The lessons that the pandemic has imparted have not only been personal – they have been political: as other commentators have pointed out, you don’t see a lot of libertarian capitalists in a pandemic. All of this is only to say that the world can change, but it won’t happen unless we change it. The coronavirus is not going to hand us a new country:
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we need a playbook of our own. Once the pandemic has passed, many of us will rally for a single-payer healthcare system with renewed determination. Others will push for a universal basic income. The list of possibilities is infinite, but we must pursue concrete goals. I’d like to use this column to bring attention to two promising initiatives in New York State: public banking and public power. Both campaigns have rallied passionate coalitions and have spurred bills that legislators have already introduced in Albany. Their goals, though entirely logical and feasible, may have been a little bolder than New York’s pre-coronavirus political imagination would have allowed. Now we must see whether we can move past those self-imposed limits.
ers and financial experts. Since 1919, the Bank of North Dakota, whose responsible lending practices kept it comfortably afloat even in the 2008 financial crisis, has shown that a government-owned bank can be successful. New York would bring to that model a stronger prosocial mission. Wall Street wouldn’t like to see New Yorkers control a bank of their own. The financial industry will lobby against the idea, as it has in other states. We must encourage our elected officials to support it anyway.
Power to the people While Chase and Bank of America likely disapprove of Sanders’s legislation, Con Edison and National Grid must absolutely hate the trio of bills (A8937, A8938, and A8887) introduced in January this year by Park
Bank shot Three nonprofits – New York Communities for Change, the New Economy Project, and Chhaya CDC – came together to form Public Bank NYC in 2018, and in 2019, State Senator James Sanders of Queens introduced the New York Public Banking Act (S5565A), which would permit municipalities in New York State, including New York City, to establish public banks. Like a business or an individual, New York City requires banking services – it has to keep its money somewhere. Currently, it deposits municipal tax revenue into private institutions, like Bank of America and Chase, which charge significant fees and use the deposits to finance investments that, in many cases, do not help New Yorkers. As institutional investors, banks influence the shape of our economy by dictating the flow of capital. They select projects to finance on the basis of pure profitability. For this reason, they often choose oil pipelines, private prisons, luxury condominiums, and other unsavory investments. The charter of New York City’s public bank would prohibit such behavior. Instead, it would finance an economy we want to live in. According to Sanders’s bill, it would “prioritize loans supporting worker cooperatives, community land trusts, low-income and affordable housing, renewable energy, infrastructure development, small businesses and small farms, minority- and women-owned business enterprises, and other initiatives that fulfill the public bank’s mission, with a focus on serving underserved and under-banked communities.” It could even finance new public works in New York City, like parks and bike paths, without requiring the city to pay interest to the municipal bond market. It would not offer checking or savings accounts to individuals (at least at first), but in the post-coronavirus economy, it would play a vital role in extending small business loans to vulnerable commercial corridors hollowed out by the current lockdown. New York City would own the bank, appointing a board of directors that would include both community lead-
Park Slope's assemblyman Robert Carroll
Slope’s assemblyman, Robert Carroll. Carroll has teamed up with Public Power NYC, a campaign initiated by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, to challenge New York State’s for-profit energy model. Despite costly utility bills, New Yorkers faced blackouts and brownouts last summer that trapped subway passengers and left homes in targeted sections of Brooklyn without power for days. The responsible party, ConEd, has used its billions in annual revenue to reward shareholders with generous dividends instead of maintaining its grid. It gets away with shoddy service because power distribution represents both a natural monopoly and an essential service, and New Yorkers have nowhere else to go. National Grid, which supplies New York City with natural gas, held downstate hostage for months last year by denying its own essential service to new customers unless Governor Cuomo approved plans for a 37-mile fracked gas pipeline against the guidance of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Without hookups, new apartment buildings sat empty, unable to receive their first tenants, and fledgling small business owners watched their life savings dwindle as they pushed back the opening dates of their restaurants. Cuomo had to threaten to revoke National Grid’s franchise to end the manufactured crisis. Most New Yorkers want more than reliable service. They also recognize the importance of clean, renewable energy. ConEd and National Grid – despite
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lip service to the contrary – do not. The quickest, surest route to a green future is a publicly owned energy system. Carroll’s legislative program would permit the public New York Power Authority (NYPA), founded in 1931, to acquire privately owned renewable generating stations through the right of first offer and refusal, and to sell electricity directly to individual customers as a nonprofit energy services company, supplying clean power through existing corporate utilities by replacing today’s often predatory ESCOs. The NYPA, which currently owns oil- and gas-fired power plants as well as hydroelectric dams (including the Niagara Power Project), would also begin for the first time to construct its own solar and wind farms. Next, Carroll’s legislation would convert all state-owned and city-owned properties – from universities to hospitals to NYCHA – to 100 percent renewable energy from a now green NYPA by 2025. Finally, it would consolidate ConEd, National Grid, and Central Hudson G&E’s distribution networks in 12 counties (including the five boroughs) into the democratically controlled Downstate Power Authority, using eminent domain if necessary. The Downstate Power Authority, a new state-owned public benefit corporation, would provide cheaper electricity to New York City than ConEd, and its charter would include a mandate to investigate and implement “resource conservation and energy efficiency measures and equipment intended to reduce power demand and usage.” Meanwhile, the expanded New York Power Authority would ensure that New York State can actually meet its goal (as determined by state law) of carbon-free electricity by 2040 – or, better yet, significantly sooner. The coronavirus is the current crisis, but we must remember that, in the longer run, climate change remains our biggest emergency and the true existential risk facing humanity. As they did with COVID-19, many public officials will downplay the threat and avoid taking action until it’s too late, unless we organize a movement sufficiently powerful to force their hand. Albany’s 2019-2020 legislative session normally would last until June, but the coronavirus has shut down the New York State Capitol, and it remains to be seen whether lawmakers will reconvene digitally this year. Cuomo declared the session “effectively over” after the budget passed at the start of April. The public should reject this premise. (New York City Council reopened for legislative business by Zoom on April 22.) If Cuomo gets his way, however, we must redouble our efforts to win a better, fairer, cleaner New York in 2021. We’re all getting a little antsy in our apartments: let’s promise now to hit the streets as soon as possible. Visit publicbanknyc.org and publicpower.nyc for more information and to get involved.
May 2020, Page 5
Red Hook’s RETI steps up big
T
by Nathan Weiser
here has been a major shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Red Hook's RETI Center has been doing all it can to contribute.
pital; 400 to Brookdale Hospital; and 400 to Jamaica Hospital.
RETI, which stands for Resilience, Education, Training and Innovation has created an initiative called Rapid Resilience, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, in an effort to deliver much-needed masks and other vital medical supplies to women and men treating infected New Yorkers.
Public hospitals have been starved of PPE much more than private hospitals, which have the necessary resources and the right supply-chain infrastructure in place to secure them.
Tim Gilman-Sevcik is the executive director. His goal has been to get FDA-certified N95 masks into the hands of doctors, small hospitals, clinics and others who would not get support through government channels. The organization has reached out to nonprofits and midwives providing direct support to vulnerable populations.
The good old days
when the enemy was easy to identify
RETI has taken advantage of contacts in overseas manufacturing and has tasked RecycleGo, led by CEO Stan Chen, to head the supply chain of PPE. Rapid Resilience found a way to get masks from China in three to five days instead of the usual two weeks – and for $3 a mask instead of $7, the price announced by Governor Cuomo. Once supplies reach their destination, volunteers like Alex Dumitrescu pick them up and distribute them. According to Dumitrescu, preparation began in earnest on March 23. From that day forward, the Rapid Resilience team made sure they had everything lined up to access the right amount of PPE and could transfer funds in the right ways. Dumitrescu emphasized the importance of finding “somebody that could help us do customs, because that has been a huge difficulty.” Deliveries started on April 3. Rapid Resilience’s MaskForce campaign has delivered PPE to 20 hard-hit healthcare centers in the New York City area. 2,150 masks have gone to Brooklyn Methodist; 1,000 to Coney Island Hospital; 800 to Elmhurst Hospital; 800 to Wyckoff Hospital; 700 to Woodhull Hos-
until then, stay safe reopening wed~sun 2:00-ish till 6:00-ish window service only no mask, no pies
MaskForce has PPE arriving on a weekly basis and delivers it as it becomes available. As of an April 23 update, the team had secured about 92,000 pieces of protective equipment for frontline healthcare professionals. A lot of the work was led by Emily Bauer, who collaborated with different organizations to avert a competitive landscape of multiple, uncoordinated charitable endeavors. “The RETI Center’s mission in general has been to be there in time of disaster,” Dumitrescu said. “The idea is to continue this initiative and continue expanding in ways that will ensure medical professionals have what they need.” “The idea of MaskForce is to provide a scalable decentralized model that other organizations can replicate, not just here in New York,” Dumitrescu said. “I know that we have worked with people that are trying to deliver to Boston, Miami and San Diego as well.” The need for PPE has started to slow down, but the problem has not yet been resolved. Rapid Resilience’s strategy has been to communicate with the medical professionals and assess how long each recurring delivery should last based on their evaluations. “When we deliver the necessary PPE, none of the doctors said that this is not enough or that it will not make an impact,” Dumitrescu said. “It is more, ‘This is going to be huge, this definitely buys us time, but we may require more.’ If that is the case, we work with them to figure out how much more.” To make a donation, visit reticenter.org.
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Page 6 Red Hook Star-Revue
Farther afield, Rapid Resilience’s Project PPE NM campaign has delivered 200 face shields to Chinle’s Comprehensive Healthcare Facility in New Mexico.
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Q&A WITH A DOCTOR ON THE FRONT LINES
D
r. William Chiang is a native New Yorker who moved to California last year for fellowship in wilderness medicine at UCSF Fresno. On April 12, he flew home to serve as a daily volunteer in the emergency departments of several New York City hospitals until May 7. On April 17, after four consecutive nights of 12hour shifts, he shared his impressions of a healthcare system beginning to emerge from crisis. Star-Revue: How did you decide to volunteer in New York? Chiang: I grew up in Queens. I went to school in Manhattan. I went to med school in Brooklyn, and I went to residency in the Bronx. Every person in every aspect of my life has been affected by coronavirus, either through work or personally. So my social media was just inundated with that kind of information. There were nurses that I had worked with who were protesting, and I found out that one of my residents had ended up in the ICU, and we had a neurosurgeon at one of our hospitals that passed away. It was seeing people from my own hometown being afflicted by this illness and feeling helpless in Fresno that compelled me to come back. Star-Revue: What have you been doing so far? Chiang: I arrived on Sunday. I went to one of the hospitals on Monday and got credentialed, and that day they told me, “Hey, put on your scrubs. You’re going to start working now.” So that was kind of a running start. The first couple days was more shadowing, but mainly I was seeing my own patients, and then if there was any question as to how to do the process of admitting, discharging, or transferring patients, I would just ask anyone else who had slightly more experience with that system. I’ve been involved with every aspect of care. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, but most hospitals right now, in their emergency departments, are divided between “cold zone,” which means people who are not under investigation for COVID, and then “hot zone,” which is people who likely have COVID but have not had the test results. And then there’s a “critical zone,” where people are imminently dying, and if you don’t attend to them within minutes, they would pass away. I’ve worked in every section so far and dealt with the spectrum of non-sick patients, people who don’t have COVID, people who have COVID, and people who are actively dying. Star-Revue: When a patient comes in with coronavirus, what do you do for them? What’s the standard procedure? Chiang: When you say “a patient comes in with coronavirus,” that is a presumption. We don’t have test re-
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Brett Yates
"This pandemic actually offered us an opportunity to have a discussion with patients who most likely won’t benefit from being on life support, and they sometimes just say straight out, 'I’d rather not be on a ventilator. I’d rather go.' " sults that come in that quickly. The fastest I’ve ever seen was hours. Maybe if we’re doing the point-of-care testing, we’ll have something on the scale of seconds. But basically what people come in for is two things: either exposures to coronavirus, or they have a flu-like illness that resembles either coronavirus or any other viral syndrome. If you came in with the same coronavirus symptoms last year, I would’ve told you you had the flu. So a patient like that, with any viral syndrome, is treated exactly the same way: they’re treated supportively. If they have a fever or they’re dehydrated or they’re in renal failure, we try to support that system in order to keep body functions so they can fight the infection themselves. The thing about coronavirus that everyone’s terrified about is that there’s a certain subset of patients that start
Dr. Chiang came back home from California to volunteer in NY hospitals.
accumulating fluid in their lungs. And we call that ARDS. And when they accumulate fluid in their lungs, they’re unable to oxygenate, and the only supportive measure that we can do for these patients is to provide oxygen. If your lung is full of fluid, you can’t get oxygen into the blood because the fluid is a barrier, so you’re going to work extra hard. Any muscle will fatigue after a long period of stress. You breathe with a diaphragm, and the diaphragm will fatigue, so that requires a ventilator to support the diaphragm to help the lungs expand. So that’s the limitation: when a patient comes in critically ill with their lungs full of fluid, they need a ventilator, and that is only way to keep them supported until they can fight their way through the illness. When it comes to actual therapies, everything for this particular virus is investigational. I know the FDA is talking about hydroxychloroquine, plaquenil, azithromycin – those have not been proven yet. I know certain hospitals are administering those medications, empirically, but there is a lack of evidence basis for that, so it’s always recommended with caution. Star-Revue: Do the hospitals have the necessary equipment to offer adequate treatment to everyone? Chiang: I have arrived at the intersection of when cases are starting to come down and shipments of ventilators have gone up, so I haven’t had any issues obtaining a ventilator. From what I understand, during the peak last week, there was a lot fewer ventilators, and there was some triaging in terms of rationing those ventilators. But also I’ve noticed that there’s been a more frank approach to goals-ofcare discussions with patients, so that’s another interesting point: if a patient is not likely to benefit from a ventilator – I’m sure you’ve seen on soap operas people saying they don’t want to be put on life support. This pandemic actually offered us this opportunity to have this discussion with
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patients who most likely won’t benefit from being on life support, and they sometimes just say straight out, “I’d rather not be on a ventilator. I’d rather go.” Star-Revue: Are the hospitals providing the protective materials and procedures that are needed to keep doctors and nurses as safe as possible? Chiang: That’s another thing where I think I’m experiencing something that’s very different from what it was a week ago. I think there’s been a huge outpouring of support in terms of the local communities providing PPE and then shipments coming from the government or just local friends. I think people have been judicious about their use of PPE, so the rationing has leveled out. That doesn’t mean that PPE is not in short supply. Typically, PPE would be disposable after every patient encounter. The hospitals have adapted by saying, “If you never take off the PPE, that’ll be OK.” So instead of wearing 20 different gowns for 20 different patients that I’m working with, 20 patients will be in one room and I’ll wear one gown for the entire day to deal with those patients. So it’s just being more judicious, but that’s fraught. A month ago, if we had done that, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would cite us and fine us because it’s a danger to patient health. But this is what we do in order to ration our supplies. Star-Revue: What’s the emotional toll of this work like for you? Chiang: It’s kind of sustainable in that I’m relatively fresh. The volume and intensity isn’t as bad as it was. I like to say that I’m here doing a sprint – I’m doing a bunch of shifts all together, but the New York City healthcare providers have been taking care of these patients for a month and half, two months, with this incredible acuity. So they’re at the end of their marathon, and I’m just here to push them along.
May 2020, Page 7
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by Brett Yates
he boats of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club – an organization that advocates for aquatic recreation and environmental conservation in Brooklyn – are a familiar sight on the Gowanus Canal. Starting in March, pedestrians on the canal’s bridges and esplanades may have noticed a couple changes when they observed the usual paddlers on the water. First, for the sake of social distancing, the two-person canoes had become solo vessels. And the voyagers inside had turned them into floating billboards, taking turns holding a sign promoting the club’s latest initiative: supporting Gowanus’s vulnerable small business community during the coronavirus shutdown. The idea was to convince Gowanus residents to buy gift local certificates as a means to sustain neighborhood stores until New Yorkers’ usual shopping and dining habits could resume. At the same time, the organization’s members began spontaneously to compile a list of Gowanus businesses that had remained open during the pandemic, with information about hours and services; their Google Document remains active. Eventually, club captain Brad Vogel came up with the idea of using $2,000 from the Dredgers’ own coffers as an infusion to buoy the local economy. The club bought a stockpile of gift certificates from establishments including bars, bakeries, and plant nurseries, and then created a website on the online auction platform Clickbid (which waived its usual fees) in order to distribute the certificates as raffle prizes throughout the month of April. All ticket revenue beyond the initial $2,000 investment will go to the nonprofit Arts Gowanus. “The underlying mission of the Gowanus Dredgers is to keep our waterfront alive, but our waterfront community includes everybody around it, so we need to keep these businesses alive as well,” club treasurer Owen Foote said.
In cases where businesses did not normally sell gift certificates, the Dredgers persuaded them to produce some. The raffles have been a success.
Page 8 Red Hook Star-Revue
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“A lot of people are writing back to say they didn’t even know those businesses existed, like a company that makes custom cards in Gowanus. I know people are placing orders because they didn’t win the raffle,” Foote noted. On March 27, Vogel and Foote drafted a letter to local landlords to encourage them to cancel or reduce commercial rent in April and May, arguing that, without short-term relief, local storefronts would not survive COVID-19. They don’t know whether any Gowanus property owners complied. In April, the Dredgers’ civic involvement during the pandemic began to coalesce into a program of activism with its own hashtag: #GowanusStrong. “We have over a hundred unpaid members who are pitching in, and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve been so quick to respond,” Foote explained. While the raffles have primarily benefited restaurants and shops, Foote and other Dredgers noticed an additional crisis in the fitness and wellness sector, which also makes up a significant portion of the Gowanus economy. Gyms had shut down, and to make things worse, trainers and yoga teachers often work as independent contractors, which makes it difficult for them to collect unemployment benefits. The Dredgers put together a virtual “tip jar” for these workers in April. The web host, ioby, will match contributions, dollar for dollar, until the fund reaches $8,000. Foote hopes to distribute checks in time for the May rent. #GowanusStrong is a fluid project. The Dredgers’ expect to continue their activism in May but, as of this writing, can’t be sure what shape it’ll take. “We have heard from so many people that they are just glad to see some small step in their own neighborhood that is sort of a lightning strike for good, some little thing that is making people feel they have agency – they can pitch into this new effort that is doing something to alleviate the pain out there,” Vogel said. For more information and to stay upto-date, visit gowanuscanal.org.
May 2020
Public housing weathering storm by Brett Yates
I
n zip code 11231 – which encompasses Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, most of the Columbia Street Waterfront District, southern Cobble Hill, and eastern Gowanus – the rate of verified COVID-19 infections is seven per 1,000 residents, roughly half that of New York City on the whole, according to data from the New York State Department of Health.
The low-income tenants of NYCHA’s Red Hook Houses, 98.6 percent of them nonwhite, are outliers within an otherwise largely affluent section of Brooklyn, though they compose the majority of Red Hook residents. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has revealed that Hispanic and black New Yorkers tend to come into contact with the coronavirus more frequently than their white and Asian counterparts. In the five boroughs, 34 percent of coronavirus patients are Hispanic, and 28 percent are black, though these ethnicities make up only 29 percent and 22 percent of the total population, respectively.
NYCHA at risk No one knows the number of COVID-19 cases inside the Red Hook Houses. NYCHA hasn’t sought to keep a count of how many of its tenants have tested positive, entered hospital care, or died during the pandemic. But troubling anecdotal evidence has begun to pile up – Politico, for instance, reported on 10 deaths in April in Brownsville’s Van Dyke Houses – and NYCHA has come under fire in the press for its coronavirus protocols, including its failure, until April 7, to provide personal protective equipment to workers who perform in-home repairs. Due likely to mold inside their buildings and air pollution in their neighborhoods, NYCHA tenants suffer from
disproportionately high asthma rates, which make them more vulnerable than others to the coronavirus. On average, they’re also older than other New York City residents, with 21.2 percent of them over the age of 62. Even so, the courtyards of the Red Hook Houses, NYCHA’s largest complex in Brooklyn, haven’t turned into apocalyptic scenes of carnage. “I really and truly don’t see too many ambulances out here, and I’m outside every day,” said Red Hook Houses West Tenants Association president Lillie Marshall. “Mostly, as I look out the window at people, they’re really complying with wearing the mask and gloves,” Bea Byrd, the local tenant leader whose presidency preceded Marshall’s, added. “I’m happy to see that. We’re all coping as best we can.” None of Marshall’s or Byrd’s close friends in the development had fallen ill when they spoke to the Star-Revue. In April, Frances Brown, the president of the Red Hook Houses East Tenants Association, was mourning two family members who had passed away elsewhere, but her immediate network in Red Hook had remained healthy. Brown, however, lamented the local impact of the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown. “A lot of people are suffering. Bills haven’t stopped coming because of this.” Marshall praised charitable initiatives in the area for setting up food banks and food deliveries. “They have Red Hook pretty well covered, I guess.” New York State residents have filed 1.2 million unemployment insurance claims since the start of the pandemic. “How many [in Red Hook] are working or not working, I can’t say, because I don’t know,” Marshall acknowledged.
“But the people that normally go to work, I see them get on the bus or walking from the subway or whatever.”
Weak disinfectant Marshall had some harsh words for the temporary cleaners hired by NYCHA. “They have a bunch of little young kids running around with a rag in their hand and a spray can. They’re cleaning the doorknobs and wiping down the incinerator and take that same rag and wipe down the railing that you walk down the steps with. I don’t consider that cleaning, but it is what it is.” In late March and early April, NYCHA finalized two contracts – worth $30 million and $38 million – with thirdparty janitorial services, EastCo and Alliance Maintenance, to supplement NYCHA staff for the duration of the crisis. NYCHA scheduled them to sanitize senior housing five times a week and other buildings – like the Red Hook Houses, where Alliance handles the duties – three times a week. In a letter to residents in March, NYCHA chair Gregory Russ and general manager Vito Mustaciuolo described “a two-step process that includes deep cleaning and a bio/eco-friendly protective coating that kills germs before they attach to the surface and typically lasts for 90 days. As a precautionary measure, we will have the vendor conduct this process on a 30-day cycle.” Karen Blondel, a community organizer in the Red Hook Houses West, tells a different story. “The first thing they did was they came into the hallway about eight together: they’re not even social distancing,” she said. “They came with a bottle of something that smells like nothing – it smells like water.” She continued, “They should be listening to the residents. If a resident
points out a high-touch area, that’s a high-touch area. A way you can tell it’s a high-touch area is that the paint is gone. But they ignore those areas and come wipe my damn door.” According to Blondel, NYCHA worries more about revenue than about public health: by her observation, the only flyers posted in the Red Hook Houses during the pandemic inform residents (in five languages) of “the five ways you can pay rent.” With the help of two friends, Blondel took it upon herself to design COVID-19 flyers, which, among other precautions, warn residents not to spit, which she said has been a problem in public spaces. Still, Blondel believes that the crisis hasn’t hit the relatively uncrowded, isolated peninsula of Red Hook as hard as other parts of the city. “Our numbers are just a little lower probably because we don’t have the same density,” she speculated. “Six stories is not that bad. We still have some open space. We can still go to the park with six-feet distancing to walk the dog. In areas where it’s more concentrated, they can’t do that. I think it’s because we’re cut off.” Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, activists like Blondel have worked to ready the neighborhood for the next calamity, but doubtless few predicted that it would look like COVID-19. “This is something we have to learn to prepare for,” Blondel advised. “Our emergency preparedness should now include a thermometer, a face mask, some gloves.” Byrd also recalled past disasters. “I love the people here,” she said, “and when we’ve had catastrophes here before, we all come together and we try to weather the storm. I wish the best for all of our community, all over Red Hook. That’s my prayer.”
Red Hook Laundromat reopens
R
ed Hook Laundromat at 282 Van Brunt Street reopened on Monday, April 27, after a temporary closure at the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March. It will operate daily from 8 am to 8 pm. For safety, customers must wait outside while their clothes wash and dry and must fold their items at home. The unexplained reopening, which followed a campaign of pressure from the community and city government, marked an end of sorts to a perceived public emergency in Red Hook. The crisis had its roots in the summer 2019 closure of the neighborhood’s largest laundromat on Lorraine Street, the future site of a mixed-use development. When COVID-19 shuttered the laundromat on Van Brunt Street less than a year later, Red Hook residents realized they had only one option left: the Hicks Mega Laundromat at 779 Hicks Street. In the era of social distancing, one
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Brett Yates
laundromat for an entire neighborhood – especially one with limited access to surrounding areas – was deemed insufficient. On April 14, community advocates prompted Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to send a letter to Mayor de Blasio, suggesting several possible city interventions, such as providing incentives for the owner of Red Hook Laundromat to reopen his business, renting “portable laundry trailer(s),” or setting up a new laundromat in a vacant warehouse. The local elected officials, Nydia Velasquez, Velmanette Montgomery, Felix Ortiz, and Carlos Menchaca, added their signatures to the missive. Neighborhood residents did not wait for de Blasio to act. Natasha Campbell, the founder of Summit Academy Charter School at 27 Huntington Street, reached out to a contact at Teach for America, who previously had helped the school obtain an on-premises washer and dryer
through Whirlpool’s philanthropic Care Counts program, which aims to reduce absenteeism by ensuring that students have access to clean clothes. Whirlpool offered to make another donation to Red Hook – possibly as many as ten washers and dryers – if Campbell and other local activists could secure a location for their volunteer-run, pop-up laundromat. But a free, open site with electricity and sewage connections proved elusive. Some locals who breathed a sigh of relief over Red Hook Laundromat’s surprise reopening in late April may nevertheless continue to hold a grudge over its sudden closure in March. The lack of advance warning meant that residents who had recently dropped off their clothes for cleaning ended up with their possessions trapped behind locked doors for more than a month and a half. The owner, who didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article, reportedly ignored phone calls from concerned citizens.
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Red Hook resident Amy Dench noted that her family lost access to nearly 30 items of clothing at Red Hook Laundromat. “All of it is my husband’s work clothes, and he’s an essential worker,” she said. “We can’t afford to replace them.” Dench declared that, after the longawaited retrieval, she wouldn’t return to Red Hook Laundromat. Already, she had switched to Park Slope’s EZ Laundry Cleaners, whose coverage area for pick-up and drop-off service includes Red Hook.
May 2020, Page 9
Learning to help at PS 676 by Nathan Weiser
L
ike all schools in New York City, Red Hook’s PS 676 has been closed since March 16, but the teachers are doing all they can to be there for the students virtually and to help the greater community get PPE. Science teacher Fred Nouvertne took home the 3D printers from the school’s STEAM lab and is making masks for institutions that will be suggested by his students. Nouvertne was inspired by seeing a video about a doctor in Montana. Dusty Richardson, a neurosurgeon in Billings, had used 3D printing technology to create a reusable, sanitizable mask of rigid plastic, into which one can insert a medical-grade filter taken from a standard surgical mask to form a safe breathing apparatus. Because each disposable fabric mask, cut into 2.5-inch squares, can yield six filter patches for Richardson’s plastic mask, the innovation extends the lifespan of each disassembled surgical mask sixfold. Richardson has published instructions online to help others fabricate the masks in their own communities. With all the kids in Red Hook at home, Nouvertne found a way to involve his students. “With the lockdown taking place and everyone being forced home and then seeing the story online, I thought it would be cool if we could get those
printers and somehow have our students, despite being locked down and working remotely, still have a way to advocate for something and help out,” Nouvertne said. “It is something that feels good despite the negative stories.” It takes three hours to make each mask. Using the 3D printers, the masks are created from PLA (polylactic acid) filament. The filament costs about $25 a spool, and each spool creates about 20 masks. The first step in making the mask is that a design is created with a computer program called CURA, which is saved as a file like a Word document. Nouvertne downloaded such a file and uploaded it to the 3D printer. The filters are being purchased through the Flowmark company in Montana, which has begun to manufacture filters that can be applied directly to the plastic mask without manual cutting. PS 676 has a GoFundMe and a Donors Choose campaign to raise money for filters, filament and straps to make more masks. “People are getting creative in terms of raising money,” said Jen Thomas, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher. Nouvertne and Thomas consulted with the students, and they were still deciding which of many deserving groups of people should receive the masks. “Many of them think that our school safety agents should receive masks, as
well as grocery store workers,” Thomas related. “Many of them want to send PPE directly to nurses and hospitals. Many want to give them to their parents who have to go to work every day. We are really doing a lot of work with students in terms of promoting awareness with regards to PPE in general.”
Remote learning Thomas, an English teacher, has found that the students have been fascinated with learning about COVID-19 and everything that goes along with it, since it is happening around them and affecting their lives. To highlight the need for more PPE, she has used articles featuring testimonials from healthcare workers who have to wear the same face masks over and over. The kids “are aware of what is happening in their world, and we are enforcing skills that they have learned in school with regards to research, and they are able to connect into their emotions and empathy for others and impacting the world,” Thomas said. Initially, remote learning presented challenges for a number of PS 676 students who didn’t have access to digital devices and had to rely on printed packets, distributed just before the school’s closure, to continue their lessons. But the administration worked together with the Department of Education to secure deliveries of internetenabled tablets for those in need, and teachers quickly began to put together
Science teacher Fred Nouvertne
detailed daily schedules with plenty of “student interface time.” “The kids adapt very well,” Thomas observed. “This is a tough time in the world, and I can only imagine how scary it must be for kids, so we are trying to do everything we can to support not only their academics but their social and emotional need as well.” In addition to the timely coronavirusrelated content, Thomas has brought in another subject to try to take the students’ minds off the ongoing crisis, at least for a little while. “We are doing a fantasy unit with students – like Harry Potter, Princess Bride and Star Wars,” Thomas said. “This is also timely because everybody needs an escape from reality. Physically, we can’t really escape our home. Doing it through fantasy is one way to do it.”
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/kegandlantern /kegandlanternredhook May 2020
POLITICS These are the candidates for the local state Assembly and Senate seats to be voted on in the June 24 Democratic primary. From left to right: Assemblymember Felix Ortiz, challengers Marcela Mitaynes, Katherine Walsh and Genesis Aquino; for the open Senate seat vacated by Velmanette Montgomery: Tremaine Wright, Jason Salmon and Jabari Brisport
Coronavirus interrupts state races
H
ow do you win an election without leaving the house? Local politicians – their sights set on Albany – hope to figure out the answer.
With seven major Democratic candidates vying for New York State Legislature seats in Senate District 25 and Assembly District 51, which overlap in Red Hook and Sunset Park, this spring would – under normal circumstances – mark a busy campaign season on Brooklyn’s waterfront. But just over three months before the June 23 primary, the coronavirus put an end to inperson canvasses and speeches, changing the nature of what was, before the shutdown, a highly active pair of races.
Three potential senators Due to State Senator Velmanette Montgomery’s upcoming retirement, Tremaine Wright (who currently represents Bedford-Stuyvesant in the Assembly), Jason Salmon (who previously worked as a community liaison in Montgomery’s office), and Jabari Brisport (a public school teacher and previous City Council candidate) are competing for an open seat in District 25. Wright announced her candidacy at Montgomery’s well-attended retirement party in January, showcasing her broad support within the Democratic Party establishment, as she drew warm remarks from state legislators like Jo Anne Simon, Diana Richardson, Kevin Parker, and Montgomery herself. Wright quickly garnered endorsements from the Vanguard Independent Democratic Association and the Independent Neighborhood Democrats – plus U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (among other politicos) and District Council 37, New York City’s union for public employees. But her opponents, running to Wright’s left, made inroads with other significant political clubs. Salmon won the support of the Lambda Independent Democrats, the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, Equality New York, Citizen Action of New York, the Stonewall Democratic Club of NYC, and the Jewish Vote, as well as that of Red Hook councilman Carlos Menchaca and the United Automobile Workers (UAW Region 9A). Brisport also has a significant collection of endorsements: the Working Families Party, New York Communities for Change, Indivisible Nation BK, Our Progressive Future, the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, the New York Progressive Action Network, Voters
Red Hook Star-Revue
by Brett Yates for Animal Rights, State Senator Julia Salazar, and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon. Most importantly, he is the candidate of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has marshaled its large corps of volunteers on Brisport’s behalf.
website makes no policy pledges, highlighting instead her prior achievements in Albany (including the CROWN Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on “natural hairstyles” such as as Afros, braids, and cornrows) and operating as an informational hub for her constituents.
reduce air pollution, and increase home ownership among New Yorkers of modest means. Genesis Aquino, a tenant organizer, has said she’ll fight for immigrants and NYCHA residents. Marcela Mitaynes is a housing activist whose platform also prioritizes climate justice and police reform.
According to Brisport’s communications director, before the coronavirus outbreak, more than 300 of his supporters had knocked on a total of 24,000 doors in Senate District 25, which has a population of 351,552. The volunteers have since turned to phonebanking to get the word out.
Salmon’s campaign began training phone bank volunteers on April 11. On April 17, he hosted a digital “SpeakOut” on Zoom with the certified-platinum rapper Maino to address the problem of coronavirus infections in New York’s overcrowded prisons.
Like Brisport, Mitaynes has had loyal DSAers on her side as canvassers since last fall. She’s racked up many of the same endorsements, including that of the Working Families Party, as well as those of TenantsPAC, the Jewish Vote, the Peruvian American Coalition of New York, and the activist Linda Sarsour. Aquino, meanwhile, has won the support of the New Kings Democrats, the Lambda Independent Democrats of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Young Democrats, and the Union of Arab Women. Walsh is the preferred candidate of the Sunset Park Latino Democrats, the Stonewall Democratic Club of NYC, and Take Back 20 for Real Dems.
As the leading organization for radical activism in New York City, the DSA also has a reputation – fair or not – as a haven for transplants and gentrifiers. Brisport and Salmon share a number of progressive priorities, such as as tenant rights and decarceration, but while Brisport has, on his website, assembled a detailed policy platform with a number of ambitious demands (such as expanding sanctuary protections, implementing single-payer healthcare, and canceling rent during the COVID-19 crisis), Salmon has framed his candidacy in less starkly ideological terms, positioning himself as a voice not so much of the anticapitalist left as of Clinton Hill-Fort Greene in particular, where he grew up in a diverse family that, by his account, came to the area 70 years ago. Salmon’s first digital ad – a video called “My Community” – broadcasts his longstanding relationships with his neighbors and his commitment to “bringing them to the table” in Albany, where he aims to fight gentrification and police violence. “I am Brooklyn through and through,” he underlines. Among his several endorsements, he has particularly publicized that of Reverend Anthony L. Trufant, the senior pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church on Lafayette Avenue. “First and foremost, having a campaign that represents the entire community is what we need,” Salmon said. Brisport, for his part, is a third-generation Prospect Heights resident. His communications director said that the “race isn’t just about left vs. center – it’s about a movement of working-class people fighting to be heard in a political system that was built to protect the establishment and their mega-donors.” Wright, according to her official biography, “still lives on the same block where her grandparents raised their family” in Bed-Stuy. Eschewing an “Issues” or “Platform” tab, Wright’s
Brisport has taken part in similar events: on March 22, a “virtual fireside chat” with Marcela Mitaynes, the DSA’s candidate in Assembly District 51, and on April 5, a livestream with Julia Salazar of Senate District 18 about the inadequacies of the new state budget. Wright has sponsored a weekly online series of breathing meditations, led by a yoga teacher in her district. With 11,600 Twitter followers, Brisport is roughly ten times more popular on the social media platform than his closest competitor. Financial disclosures provided to the Board of Elections (BOE) showed Salmon leading the fundraising race with $87,730.34 as of the first reporting deadline in January. The next deadline is in May. The coronavirus may not affect all campaigns equally. While Wright, with endorsements from 21 elected officials, appears to have inherited the reliable institutional power that sent Montgomery to the State Senate 18 consecutive times, a candidate like Brisport, in all likelihood, will have to locate and mobilize voters outside established networks. In 2018, energetic DSA volunteers did the necessary legwork to secure Salazar’s victory in Bushwick over an entrenched establishmentarian, but in 2020, they’re stuck at home. All three candidates, in their own ways, will soon discover how effective phone calls can really be.
The incumbent and the challengers In Assembly District 51, Felix Ortiz has held office since 1995, rising in the ranks of the Assembly to the position of Assistant Speaker. Three women from Sunset Park, all of them political newcomers, hope to use grassroots organizing and small-dollar donations to unseat him, following a scandal last year that saw Ortiz’s former chief of staff plead guilty to stealing campaign funds. Katherine Walsh, an urban planner, wants to raise taxes on the wealthy,
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Walsh – for whom the coronavirus interrupted a busy schedule of meet-andgreets and public happy hours – had amassed more financial contributions than any of her competitors as of the January disclosure deadline, raising $58,448. She pointed out that Ortiz’s campaign had not received a single contribution from a district resident by that time. Even so, Ortiz has more resources on his side, owing to his campaign committee’s opening balance of $158,174 left over from earlier fundraising. Some progressives in District 51 worry that the three insurgent candidates may split the vote among residents who believe that Ortiz – despite some noteworthy accomplishments – doesn’t have enough to show for his quarter-century in Albany. Ortiz, who has chaired the Assembly’s Mental Health, Alcohol and Substance Abuse, Cities, and Veterans Affairs committees, has spent much of his career authoring bills that, in the eyes of critics, might fall under the category of “nanny state” legislation – cracking down on unsafe cell phone usage, reckless driving, and pernicious dietary trends. The coronavirus pandemic, however, has given Ortiz an opportunity to call for bolder measures. Since March, he has advocated publicly or the passage of the New York Health Act (a singlepayer proposal that Ortiz co-sponsored), rebuked Governor Cuomo’s cuts to Medicaid and rollbacks on bail reform, and introduced legislation to suspend payments on student loans, mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and utility bills for 90 days.
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May 2020, Page 11
ARTISTS FACE EVICTION (continued from page 1)
for musicians and dance troupes.
Dance company says goodbye Milteri Tucker Concepcion, the director of Bombazo Dance Co. at the South Bronx Spaceworks, gave an account of her situation: “We have been in the space for one year and had renewed our contract lease for another year. Just as the coronavirus pandemic hit NYC and the city was preparing to ‘shelter in place,’ I received a call, then followed by an email that Spaceworks was shutting its doors, it would no longer exist, that all artist and organizations needed to vacate in 30 days.” According to Concepcion, the initial move-out date of May 1 got pushed back to May 25 on account of the COVID-19 outbreak, but Spaceworks has not offered additional relief. “We are trying to communicate with the landlord to see if we can have a bit more time, as we do not feel it’s safe to have a group of people gathered to vacate,” Concepcion related. Lionel Cruet, another Spaceworks artist in the Bronx, also struggles to imagine moving out under the current circumstances. “As of today I know this would be a complicated task, as most moving services in the city are not available until further notice. If we get closer to the date and we are still in this health crisis, the city will have to make an intervention,” he said. Omni, the landlord, sent the Star-Re-
JUNE PRIMARY RACES (continued from page 11)
Conspicuously, the bill leaves out rent payments. Ortiz’s opponents have lambasted him for continuing to accept donations from the real estate industry. Hoping to increase voter turnout in June, Walsh and Mitaynes – along with Salmon and Brisport – signed on to a letter in late March to pressure Governor Cuomo to mail absentee ballots with prepaid postage to all registered voters in anticipation of unsafe polling stations in June. On April 8, Cuomo moved to make absentee voting accessible to all voters – not just those who would be out of town on election day – but voters would still have to print an application form (or request one from the BOE), fill it out, and return it by mail or email in order to receive an absentee ballot. Criticism persisted, and on April 26, the governor announced an executive order that would send absentee ballot applications with prepaid postage – but not the ballots themselves – directly to all registered voters, a compromise measure (endorsed by Ortiz in a public statement) that by the Cuomo administration’s account reflected the limits of gubernatorial power. It followed several other recent executive orders aimed at the BOE, whereby Cuomo canceled all but one of the spring’s special elections and reduced ballot petition requirements for state office. Walsh suspended real-world campaigning on March 12 and, on Facebook, started to recruit phone bankers
Page 12 Red Hook Star-Revue
vue the following statement: “In early March, Omni was notified of Spaceworks’ intent to vacate the space. While no plans for the space have been made, Omni would like to retain the use and value of the space, ideally by locating a community service provider comparable to Spaceworks to operate the space. Omni welcomes and encourages community service providers who may be interested in taking over this space to reach out for more information by contacting Max Kelner at 646-762-4947, or email mkelner@onyllc.com.”
Evictions at the library For public safety, BPL temporarily shuttered all 60 of its branches on March 16, but Spaceworks artists retained access to their portion of the Williamsburgh Library. This access, however, won’t last long: four days after BPL’s closure, Spaceworks told its Williamsburg artists that they, too, would have to vacate their studios by May 25. “I was absolutely shocked to receive the call that Spaceworks would be closing and that we’d be losing our spaces during an epidemic,” said an artist based at Williamsburgh Library, who asked to remain anonymous. “Just going to the grocery store is a challenge. I’m not sure how to even begin a move out during an epidemic.” The artist, wondering at Spaceworks’ sudden insolvency, questioned the organization’s staffing decisions (“Were that many people necessary?”) and fiscal management. “We all pay to have these spaces. Although it’s below market value, it’s still a significant amount
two days later. Alongside Julio Peña III, a candidate for District Leader (an executive position within the Brooklyn Democratic Party, held, in Assembly District 51, by Ortiz), she began to broadcast a virtual “town hall” every Thursday, and the tradition continued through April. On April 23, she introduced her text banking platform, TextOut, in her email newsletter. Much of her energy, however, has gone into the South Brooklyn Mutual Aid Network, a pandemic relief effort that she initiated to help affected neighbors get groceries. Having raised $10,000, it has expanded to offer a range of services in several parts of Brooklyn and, according to Walsh, has assisted 550 households, with more than 300 volunteers and 20 managers fielding 30 to 40 requests per day. Mitaynes, unfortunately, came down with a case of COVID-19 herself. “She is doing much better and will be back in action very soon!” her campaign manager, Alex Pellitteri, affirmed on April 9. Mitaynes’s phone bank volunteers hoped to pick up the slack. “In addition to talking about our campaign, we are calling people in the district, checking up on them and making sure they’re okay,” Pellitteri said. Like Aquino, Walsh, and Ortiz, Mitaynes continued to maintain an active Twitter presence. On April 29, Mitaynes hosted a Rent Strike Town Hall on Zoom with Andrea Shapiro from the Met Council on Housing. Ortiz, whose campaign has the support of the SEIU 32BJ service employees union and District Council 37, last faced a primary challenger in 2014.
of money coming in on a monthly basis. Our rents went up 6 percent just this past year.” BPL, they said, has been no help so far. The second floor of the Williamsburgh branch may continue to serve artists in the future – just not the ones who currently rent studios there, it seems. “No communication was initiated by BPL,” the artist noted, “but we as individual artists have reached out and explored options of trying to stay and keeping the program going, for the community. The library will be exploring the option to keep the programs going, but after we all leave.” The artist pointed out the particular frustration of having to vacate BPL premises before BPL resumes operations, which they viewed as a “ridiculous demand,” given that their space would almost certainly would not find another use until after the COVID-19 pause. The loss of affordable studios perhaps couldn’t have come at a worse moment, with the art market suffering in the economic shutdown. “I’m not sure staying in NYC is an option with the subsidized studio closing and galleries closed indefinitely,” the artist confessed. According to BPL, the post-Spaceworks fate of the Williamsburgh branch remains up in the air. “The Library has not yet determined how the space will be used going forward, but we expect to do so over the next few months,” said Press Officer Fritzi Bodenheimer. On March 20, Governor Cuomo announced a 90-day moratorium on com-
Walsh, who pointed out that aboveaverage asthma rates in District 25 mean that Sunset Park and Red Hook residents face increased risk from COVID-19, believes that the epidemic has made the political establishment vulnerable by making clearer its failures. “In a lot of ways, coronavirus is revealing a lack of state leadership that we’ve had for a long time,” Walsh said. “We’re calling this out.”
Fundraising during an economic lockdown William Deegan is a partner at North Shore Strategies, a Queens-based consultancy firm that has organized campaigns for Democratic candidates on the local, state, and federal level. In March, he saw clients switch abruptly to “mail, digital, and phone services.” Consultants help candidates put together these operations. “We work with a couple of different services to set up call centers. It’s been a product that various companies have offered for a few years now, where we can set up a system where your volunteers can log in and dial from the comfort of their own homes to automatically connect with voters around the district,” Deegan explained. “That’s an incredibly easy thing to do in 2020.” The real trouble, right now, is fundraising, which has slowed dramatically. “We’ve heard it across the board that people are facing fundraising challenges, from Congress down to district leader, but the bigger candidates that have an infrastructure in place are better able to weather this than smaller ones,” Deegan observed, emphasizing
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mercial and residential evictions in New York State. Courts will not begin to process new evictions until June 20 at the earliest, and it’s illegal in New York for a landlord or a master tenant to remove a tenant or a subtenant forcibly – for instance, by changing the locks or tossing out possessions – without a marshal eviction. While some Spaceworks artists have considered refusing to vacate their studios until a judge has ordered a formal eviction, they worry that the unusual nature of their subtenancy under Spaceworks might weaken their position in any ensuing battle with the property owner. By law, the Spaceworks artists are not technically subtenants but licensees, having signed license agreements rather than subleases. On April 28, a representative from Spaceworks declared that the organization is “working towards extended move-out periods in all of our spaces.” As of press time, no deal for an extension had yet taken shape in Williamsburg or the South Bronx. Previously, Spaceworks operated a facility in Long Island City that closed in 2019, and in 2014, it sought to take over a portion of BPL’s Red Hook branch in order to provide a home for the local ballet school Cora Dance until community opposition canceled the plan. In addition to shutting down facilities in Gowanus, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx, Spaceworks’ closure will end a recent partnership with the Abrons Art Center in Manhattan.
the “big difference between a Congressional candidate who’s been fundraising for two years” and “an Assembly candidate who decided three or four months ago to toss their hat in.” Candidates who rely on small-dollar contributors, instead of wealthy donors, may be in especially hot water. “We have a huge chunk of Americans who don’t have jobs, and the people who could contribute $50 or $100 to their favorite local candidate need to save that because they don’t know when their next paycheck is coming in,” Deegan pointed out. Fewer campaign contributions also means less money for consultancy firms, which typically hire canvass directors and doorknockers to serve their political clients. “We, as a firm, last year were employing about 150 people during the month of April. Right now, we’ve got, I think, eight on staff,” Deegan acknowledged. In Deegan’s view, quickness, flexibility, and inventiveness will be the key this spring as candidates scramble to adjust to the new reality. Before Cuomo decided to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters automatically, several campaigns, for instance, had already begun to send the forms directly to targeted voters. “It’s a hard situation for everybody,” Deegan summarized, “and I think that insurgent candidates are definitely going to be hit harder than incumbents. But I think it’s an opportunity for the right insurgent candidates who manage to adapt and manage to change around their campaign plans in time to make a difference.”
May 2020
Privacy is getting further and further away by Roderick Thomas
The first decade of the 2000s saw the birth of several current-day digital marquees: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google. In 2006, I remember uploading pictures and posting status updates on Myspace, the most popular social network at the time – periodically reorganizing my Top Friends. The social media boom ran almost concurrent with the mass expansion of mobile technology. And while the association of digital expansion with Millennials and Gen Z is understandable, it would be a mistake to dismiss concerns regarding the misuse of digital footprints as a problem for these kids nowadays – the concerns apply to everyone. Surveillance capitalism is why you should care. Surveillance capitalism involves the collection, analysis, selling and buying of personal data and information. It is by no means limited to any generational cohort, nor is it limited to just technology companies. Today, when using nearly all apps, digital products and services, we agree to giving companies our information through lengthy privacy policies and terms and conditions that are almost never read. As a common practice, the information we offer is used in training models for AI technology. Data surpluses that were once considered “waste” at the dawn of the 2000s are now gold. Your commute to work, pictures, voice, likes, shares, opinions, etc., are funneled through complex algorithms that produce rich, predictive informa-
tion that companies then sell to other parties. Surveillance capitalism fuels an entire hidden market, hidden by the veil of “providing convenience,” and we’ve all bought into it. Tech giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook, to name a few, are parent companies to many other giant subsidiaries: Facebook’s Instagram and Whatsapp, Google’s YouTube. There is seemingly no escaping the gaze of digital surveillance. While most privacy infractions go unnoticed, security breaches occur more frequently than one would think. Early last year, Google finally acquiesced to concerns about the discovery of a built-in microphone in its home device, Nest. Google did not reference the microphone in any Nest diagrams or manuals at the time. Remember Cambridge Analytica? The “analytics” company that stole the data of 87 million users through a third-party Facebook app? In April 2020, a Federal judge approved an unprecedented $5 billion settlement to be paid to the US Federal Trade Commission by Facebook. Also, this year, Facebook settled an Illinois class action lawsuit regarding the misuse of its facial recognition technology for over half a billion dollars. No one was being harmed, facial recognition doesn’t count as biometrics data, Facebook argued. Social psychologist, author and Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff discusses many of her findings and concerns in interviews and in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. “We think the only information they have about us is what we give them. The information we provide is the least important part about what they collect from us – it’s the inferences, the re-
sidual data that matter most. Surveillance capitalism is an economic logic, it is not the same as technology. Loss of your privacy is not an inevitable outcome of technological advancement. We are going to need a response that outlaws it. Most of these apps are shunting information to third parties, who feed your information primarily to either Facebook or Google,” Zuboff said. Zuboff has also discussed the “shadow intention” behind Google-backed Niantic’s Pokemon Go. Zuboff states that Pokemon Go’s location-driven catching and training of fictional creatures was a fun distraction for the sale of your footsteps to businesses: the guarantee of your body in a location. The understanding and manipulation of users’ psychology is a vital component to the surveillance market. The use of rewards, propaganda and gamification tactics, in essence, creates a zoo for humans, without us recognizing we’re the exhibit. I recently spoke with the chief operating officer of GetGlobal International, an international data privacy consulting company. Chief Operating Officer Marcio Cotts shared his thoughts on surveillance capitalism from an international perspective. Roderick: When thinking about surveillance capitalism, how do you see other governments handling this in their respective countries? Marcio: Many countries have regulated the use of personal data. In Europe for instance, they have the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation. Brazil has passed into law its General Data Protection Law as well. Now, in the US there are some sectoral regulations, and the state of California was the first state to have a compre-
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hensive data privacy law, CCPA. However, the European GDPR and the Brazilian LGPD are more restrictive on the use of personal data by businesses. Roderick: What can be done to control the selling of our personal information? Marcio: Well, in Europe and Brazil the individuals or data subject can decide what companies can and cannot do with their personal data. In California, as far as I know, based on the premise that people desire privacy and more control over their information, the law ensures Californians five rights, including the right to say no to the sale of personal information. I’m not sure about other states. Roderick: Is there any way to protect ourselves legally? Marcio: Data protection laws are needed to solve these problems, and digital education is the key. People need to know their rights. Today, the infamous Cambridge Analytica is a company named SCL Elections, yet another analytics company – eerie to say the least. The age of digital surveillance and surveillance capitalism has unfortunately changed the concept of privacy. Surveillance capitalism is particularly pernicious because it combines an insatiable need for data, with an eclipsing thirst for money. Concern over privacy can’t simply be about anonymity anymore; it’s about access to our psychology at the deepest levels – digital footprints turned into digital DNA. Roderick Thomas is an NYC-based writer and filmmaker and the host of the Hippie By Accident podcast (Instagram: @Hippiebyaccident; email: rtroderick.thomas@gmail.com; site: roderickthomas.net).
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very day we share ourselves, our thoughts, our preferences knowingly and unknowingly across the web and elsewhere, leaving our digital footprints behind. But why should we care?
©COPYRIGHT 202O MARC JACKSON AND WEiRD0 COMiCS #14
May 2020, Page 13
Tropical fruits invade food d banks
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hanks to donations from Queens-based food importer Redi-Fresh Produce Inc. (RFP), more than 100,000 pounds of pineapples and bananas have made their way to the needy in New York and New Jersey. RFP is a produce importer that receives containers at the Red Hook Container Terminal (RHCT). RHCT President Mike Stamatis and RFP President Peter Malo felt they could be helpful after New York State went on PAUSE in March. “Based on what we were seeing and hearing in the news and seeing what was going on with the COVID-19 virus, Peter said, ‘Why don’t we donate the pineapples that just came in?’” Stamatis explained to us. “It was initially going to be just one shipping container of pineapples – which is about 10,000 pineapples – and we weren’t sure where we were going to donate that many pineapples.”
A team effort The duo reached out to several local elected officials and community organization leaders for recommendations on possible places for distribution in South Brooklyn. Before Easter and Passover, they donated more than 2,040 pineapples from Costa Rica to the Center for Family Life Food Pantry (960 pineapples), Community Help in Park Slope Inc. (480 that were completely distributed in one afternoon), the Red Hook Art Project (300), the Red Hook Initiative (300) and the NYPD’s 76th Precinct. The tropical fruit was inventoried, sorted and unpacked by workers of the International Longshoremen’s Association, and later delivered to the locations by volunteers from MTC Transportation, an RHCT trucking partner.
THE HEALTHY GEEZER
Fred Cicetti Q. I’m considering having a hip replaced. What are the odds that this operation will work?
by Erin DeGregorio
The more, the merrier That first donation worked out so well that Malo donated the next incoming shipment to City Harvest. The group received 21 pallets of pineapples, weighing a total of 48,720 pounds, which were given away to five food pantries, soup kitchens and community food programs in Gowanus and Sunset Park during the week of April 13. Saul Puche, a food sourcing coordinator at City Harvest, noted the physical immensity of the delivery and how shocked he was to see it. “The pineapples were actually still in the shipping container from Costa Rica, which is something that City Harvest never gets. That’s the first time I had ever seen it,” he said. “The pallets were so high that the warehouse employees had to break them down to just get them in the door – that’s how tall they were.” On April 24, City Harvest’s Long Island City warehouse also received nearly 44,000 pounds of bananas from Ecuador. The usual transit time from Ecuador to Brooklyn, according to Stamatis, takes about 10 days. Once the vessel arrives at the RHCT, the bananas are unloaded and trucked to a ripening facility in New Jersey for processing. In this case, that banana load was distributed by volunteers four days later to at least eight agencies located throughout the high-need areas of Sunset Park, Gowanus and Red Hook. The Red Hook Art Project received 40 cases each of apples, oranges, bananas, tomatoes and potatoes. “It was a huge impact in the community, especially the community of color because it’s hard to have access to healthy choices and fresh fruit. But it was also a happy moment to be able
The goal of surgery is to relieve the pain in the joint caused by the damage done to cartilage, the tissue that serves as a protective cushion and allows smooth, low-friction movement of the joint. Total joint replacement is considered if other treatment options will not bring relief.
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons says joint replacement surgery is successful in more than nine out of 10 people. And replacement of a hip or knee lasts at least 20 years in about 80 percent of those who have the surgery.
In an arthritic knee, the damaged ends of the bones and cartilage are replaced with metal and plastic surfaces that are shaped to restore knee function. In an arthritic hip, the damaged ball and socket of this joint are replaced by a metal ball and plastic socket. Several metals are usually used, including stainless steel, alloys of cobalt and chrome, and titanium. The plastic material is durable and wear-resistant polyethylene.
In the procedure, an arthritic or damaged joint is removed and replaced with an artificial joint called a “prosthesis.” Artificial joints are medical devices, which must be cleared or approved by the FDA before they can be marketed in the United States
The two most common joints requiring this form of surgery are the knee and hip, which are weight-bearing. But replacements can also be performed on other joints, including the ankle, foot, shoulder, elbow and fingers.
Page 14 Red Hook Star-Revue
to share the blessings with the greater Red Hook area,” Tiffiney Davis, co-founder and managing director of the Red Hook Art Project, said. “The pineapples were a great way to get everybody engaged in supporting and respecting one another during these difficult times.” Karen Blondel, an organizer for the Fifth Avenue Committee, also led various distribution efforts in Red Hook and Gowanus last month – including making sure that deliveries from RFG would be made to public housing residents. Through her network of connections, she also spread the word that RHCT volunteers organized produce boxes for local pickup at the container terminal’s entrance. “Tons of pictures started coming out on social media of what people were doing with their pineapples,” Blondel said. “Seeing the pineapples and the smiles on their faces, in the middle of this pandemic, really touched me that we can help each other in dark times. Sometimes it’s just those little acts of sharing some fresh produce that can make the difference in someone’s life.” According to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, RFP also donated a shipping container of pineapples on April 17 to the Community Food Bank of New Jersey in Hillside – a supplier to more than 1,000 food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters across New Jersey.
All hands on deck The response to RFG’s donations was so overwhelmingly positive that other food importers, whose shipments also come through the local terminal, joined in too.
After total hip or knee replacement you will often stand and begin walking the day after surgery. Initially, you will walk with a walker, crutches or a cane. Most patients have some temporary pain in the replaced joint because the surrounding muscles are weak from inactivity and the tissues are healing, but it will end in a few weeks or months. Exercise is an important part of the recovery process. After your surgery, you may be permitted to play golf, walk and dance. However, more strenuous sports, such as tennis or running, may be discouraged. There can be complications from joint-replacement surgery. These include infection, blood clots, loosening of the prosthesis, dislocation of the joint, excessive wear, prosthetic breakage and nerve injury. There are remedies for all of these complications, but sometimes the correction will take more surgery. Surgeons are refining techniques and developing new ones such as mini-
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“We’re an essential business; however, the term ‘essential’ has provided some new perspective for us in this difficult time,” said Jose Concepcion, Seaboard Marine’s vice president of Central America, on April 9. “Yes, we provide transportation, but we’re humbled to be working with all of our dedicated partners – even those we don’t work with directly. From the farms, exporters, and overseas governments, to customs brokers, customers, U.S. government agencies, and grocery stores, both large and small.” In that same vein, Stamatis emphasized the importance of having an active port here within the five boroughs. “A lot of fresh produce that’s coming into the city is coming directly here into the Red Hook Container Terminal and being distributed all over the city, including the Hunts Point Market, the Brooklyn Market and other local distributors and retailers,” Stamatis said. “It’s providing a true lifeline for the local community and for the city at large. Without having these port facilities, like the one in Red Hook, everything would depend on being trucked into the city, which may not always be the best option.”
mal-incision surgery. In this type of surgery, smaller incisions are used. Minimal incisions reduce trauma, pain and hospital stays. Not all patients are candidates for minimal-incision surgery. There is a surgical alternative to total hip replacement. It’s called hip resurfacing. The primary difference in hip resurfacing is that the surgeon doesn’t remove the ball at the top of the thigh bone. Instead, the damaged ball is reshaped, and then a metal cap is anchored over it. Hip resurfacing, unlike hip replacement, preserves enough bone to permit a total replacement if it is necessary later. Resurfacing is not recommended for patients with osteoporosis, a disease that makes bones porous and vulnerable to fractures. Some healthcare experts advise getting a replacement hip joint, not a resurfacing, if you are older than 65. All Rights Reserved © 2020 by Fred Cicetti
May 2020
OP-ED: We Deserve More Than Weak TEA by Julio Pena III
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hen I announced my campaign for District Leader in Assembly District 51, my goal was to bring the T.E.A. to Kings County Democratic Committee: Transparency, Equity, and Accountability. We hear far too often about the selfserving narcissism and general lack of leadership from our President. But this is a problem at all levels of government, and when it comes to local leadership – the offices that are closest to and should be most accessible to the people – we deserve so much better than what we’ve gotten. We deserve Transparency, to know what our elected officials do and why they do it. We deserve Equity, to know they are looking out for all our interests, and not just for the good of a wellconnected few. And we deserve Accountability, to know that, in the end, they serve us, their constituents, and not the bosses at the top. We deserve strong TEA, and with it a Democratic Party for the people. The Brooklyn Democratic Party needs to represent the values of its diverse communities. Given all this, it is both shocking and yet completely unsurprising that on March 24, 2020, Felix Ortiz, the current incumbent candidate for District Leader, someone who has held the position for over two decades and who dually holds the seat of Assemblyperson in the District, declined the nomination for District Leader. He
then filled the vacancy on March 27 with someone who has done none of the work of talking to constituents and gathering their signatures to be placed on the ballot for District Leader. This information was only brought to light on March 30, when the New York State Board of Elections updated its ledger. There was no explanation of why Ortiz could not serve. There was no acknowledgement to those who signed his ballot petition that someone else, whom they did not sign for, would be running in his place. Doesn’t he owe us more than this? This appointment was made by the Committees to Fill Vacancies, a group listed on most designating petitions of every candidate. They are listed in the event of an incapacitation, death, disqualification, or indeed declination of a candidate before the election. And so, this move was legal. But shouldn’t we expect more than the barest minimum required by law? Don’t we deserve to know why Ortiz could not serve and what qualifications his designated successor brings? We have none of that. That is not even weak TEA. That is not any TEA at all! I can only make assumptions at this point. Anyone who chooses to run for office, I would hope, does so with good intentions to represent their community in good faith and with a clear purpose to put the community above themselves. However, nothing
about this move seems to be in good faith or in the interest of respecting the electoral process. There was nothing transparent about this whatsoever. On the contrary, there was no announcement, no notice, no opportunity for the community to speak. Just closeddoor decision-making that once again reinforces how far the status quo will go to protect power. At a time when communities are scared, fearful, and our democracy is threatened by a pandemic, there are those who are willing to use this moment when attention is diverted to an ongoing crisis as an opportunity to push an agenda of keeping the politically connected in power. Not to help the people, but only themselves. This is why I am running to represent my community and why so many of my fellow District Leader candidates throughout Brooklyn are doing the same; from Sunset Park to Greenpoint, from Crown Heights to Bushwick. It is why I petitioned my neighbors, did the work and ran for the District Leader seat openly stating my goals. I have served as a County Committee member for the past two years and was elected by fellow County Committee members as the Head of Public Meetings for our Assembly District Committee 51. TEA is the bedrock of my campaign and Transparency, Equity and Accountability will be the key to how I will help facili-
tate County Committee in the future. The days of business as usual and the Brooklyn Democratic Party status quo must come to an end. This June, Brooklyn voters have a choice to make. A choice between candidates who choose to be transparent, open, and inclusive, and those who perpetuate the same backroom decision-making that protects the interests of the candidate and leaves the community desperate for leadership. I’m bringing the TEA and I’m making it strong, just like we like it. Just like we deserve. Julio Peña III is a lifelong Sunset Park resident who is running for State Committee/District Leader in Assembly District 51 against Robert Berrios of Red Hook. He is a Kings County Democratic Committee member representing Election District 31 in AD51. He is also a member of Community Board 7 and works for a community based organization in Red Hook supporting afterschool programs.
Saving a life is easy.
Pay attention. Respect work zones.
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May 2020, Page 15
Books by Quinn A first person look at trauma inheritance My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman, translated by Corina Copp We inherit many things from our mothers, from the color of our eyes to our bad skin. Is it possible we inherit the traumas they’ve experienced as well? Belgian writer and director Chantal Akerman was the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, and her mother was the subject of much of her work. My Mother Laughs, recently translated from the French by Corina Copp, is a memoir that draws from the experience of Akerman witnessing her mother’s last days, illustrated with family photographs and stills from Akerman’s films. “I have the impression it’s the end but it’s not the end,” Akerman writes, in what would turn out to be her last book. She killed herself in 2015, at the age of 65, not long after her mother’s death. In deceptively simple, childlike prose, Akerman directly and plainly records life on all its levels. Death consumes the dying in a different way than it does those around them, who still have to contend with a mouse problem, or water in a washing machine that won’t drain. Unlike a diary, none of the entries are dated. Akerman skips forward and backward in time, repeatedly coming back to particular moments. Through these snippets, stories and characters emerge – intimate, intriguing, sometimes confusing, the way family histories can be. It’s only after putting the book down that they synthesize into a cohesive narrative. The translator’s note gives us the kind of concrete facts we expect from a literary biography, and they’re helpful. It’s here, for example, that we learn Akerman’s mother’s name: Natalia, Nelly for short. Akerman refers to people by their first names, and in the case of her lovers, a single initial. The story of C., Akerman’s young, unstable, abusive lover whom she meets over Facebook, who is frequently mistaken for (the childless) Akerman’s daughter, is a kind of counterpoint to the main narrative. “She listened with intense attention. . . . No one had ever listened to me like that,” Akerman writes. The women try living together in New York City, although Akerman keeps an apartment in Paris. “But I don’t feel like I have a home or an elsewhere,” she writes. She’s tied to her mother, and at the same time always trying to escape her, writing “elsewhere is always better. So I’m just leaving and leaving again and coming back forever.” Central to Akerman’s understanding of herself is a feeling of being born old. “The child was born an old child, and as a result, never grew up,” she writes. “The old child said if its mother passed away, it would have nowhere to come back to.” In fact, she is the eldest, with a younger sister who lives in Mexico with her grown children. En route to her granddaughter’s wedding, Nelly
suffers a heart attack on the plane and is subsequently hospitalized. A period of surgery and convalescence follows. Nelly looks frightful at the wedding, her makeup crudely applied (she insists on doing it herself), and Akerman notices the strain it takes for her mother just to sit up, how grotesque she looks smiling for a photo while people come over and congratulate her on how well she’s doing, how good she looks. Akerman writes that “instead of rejoicing, I was saddened the entire time, and what’s more, saw nothing.” When Nelly is well enough to travel, she returns to Brussels, where everyone expects her to die. At ninety, she is racked with arthritis, a broken shoulder, an ailing heart. Akerman describes her as a “bag of bones” with “a few hairs on her head, she who had been so coquettish. She was so beautiful.” This shock registers on every page: this can’t be her, this can’t be happening. Nelly moans in pain, but only when none of her aides are around. “She reserves it for me or for alone-time since she isn’t aware of it,” Akerman writes, the same way Nelly doesn’t hear herself talking aloud, sometimes in Polish: “It simply crossed her mind and she said it.” It’s as if Akerman is so much a part of her mother, Nelly doesn’t know where one stops and the other begins. Akerman’s landmark film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerces, 1080 Bruxelles, was made in 1975, when she was twenty-five. Its story focuses on three days in the life of a middle-aged widow whose life is sustained by her daily routine, which stabilizes her even as it brings about a kind of madness. In this film, Akerman (with an all-female crew) established some of her trademarks: shots framed in doorways and long hallways, captured by a camera that rarely moves. The film is long, nearly four hours, and sometimes the apparent nonaction on screen – watching the protagonist dust or peel potatoes – can feel excruciating. Akerman didn’t want moviegoers to escape for a few hours, but to really experience what time feels like for this housewife – perhaps a stand-in for her mother. Here as in her films, Akerman uses repetition as a narrative device. “She laughs over nothing. This nothing is a lot,” she writes. Akerman uses this laughter as a kind of gauge of her mother’s wellbeing, like taking her temperature: the capacity for joy is a line that separates the living from the dead. Nelly perks right up whenever Akerman talks groceries. A favorite cheese is “always first on the shopping list,” Akerman writes. Akerman finds this domesticity stifling. For her mother, it’s sustaining. Their different ideas about femininity are another tug-of-war. Indifferent to her appearance, Akerman writes, “The press about me, my films, compensated a little, but not quite. She cut up the newspaper articles and kept them. But if only I had nicely combed hair, it would be better. ”
But what’s at stake is more than just appearances. Horrified by her own lack of empathy towards the homeless living near Akerman’s Paris apartment, Nelly confesses, “I can’t face this filth. . . . Nor especially to see it, not at my house or anyone’s. . . . There is not only seeing in life there is also feeling. And sometimes feeling is worse.” When Akerman writes “no one understands how she’s survived,” it’s a loaded statement. All the suffering in her mother’s life leads back to the trauma of her time imprisoned at Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. Akerman can only address this horror, as her mother does, obliquely. “A woman on borrowed time. Who survived.” The homeless, it turns out, remind Nelly of her time in the camp. The Holocaust is a specter whose shadow colors all of Nelly’s conversations: “You never know what can happen, and I know less than everyone because what happened to me happened to me, and who could have thought such a thing.” Another time she says, “Everything was possible before. Even falling in love.” Yet when pressed for details, Akerman writes, Nelly might say, “a friend saved me by going to steal some potatoes. She mentioned only positive things. Otherwise she couldn’t say anything.” Other types of confessions tumble out: memories of a cousin Nelly loved as a child, an Israeli soldier she was involved with before she married Akerman’s father. “In the end, it doesn’t matter. It was only letters, beautiful letters but only letters,” Nelly protests, mirroring the best part of Akerman’s courtship with C., the messages and emails with which they first correspond. Throughout, Akerman contends with her lifelong depression, reflecting on suicide attempts (“I told myself I could not do this to my mother. Later, when she’s not here anymore,” she chillingly warns), time spent locked up in a mental hospital, an addiction to sleeping pills. Overwhelmed at first seeing her mother laid up in the hospital in Mexico, Akerman wants nothing more than to go to her sister’s house and take a pill. “Stay with us,” her sister begs, poignantly. My Mother Laughs doesn’t offer the kind of illumination or closure we’re used to in stories like these. It offers something deeper, richer, more unsettling, because it’s closer to how life really is when it’s not compressed into the ball of a narrative and easily tossed in a familiar arc. Near the end, Akerman has a conversation with her mother about her reconciliation with a lover, a relationship her mother supports. “She’s a good person, I only saw her once but I know she’s a good person. Good and nice. I sense these things,” her mother assures her. Although Akerman took her own life, the story she wrote ends on a note of love.—Michael Quinn
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May 2020
In case you miss the outside, catch it in these movies by Patrick Preziosi To flatten the curve of the coronavirus, all New York City movie theaters are indefinitely closed, and New Yorkers are urged to stay indoors except when absolutely necessary. For those who miss being able to venture all around Brooklyn, here are four easy-to-find, contemporary films set in the borough’s neighborhoods that don’t typically get featured in cinema all too much.
En el séptimo día
Jim McKay’s modestly scaled but incredibly rich En el séptimo día achieves a true portrait of a multicultural New York City, not the least for the majority of the dialogue being spoken entirely in Spanish. An undocumented delivery driver living with a group of friends in similar situations, José (Fernando Cardona), criss-crosses Brooklyn for a week, as he tries to formulate a way to get out of work on the upcoming Sunday, his soccer team having made it to the championship game to be held in Sunset Park that same day (he’s their best player). José also weathers the all too common mistreatment of delivery couriers, as trips to Gowanus, Dumbo and Carroll Gardens highlight a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn, of which Sunset Park remains a contrastingly vibrant center. Shot with an unvarnished simplicity, much of En el séptimo día follows José’s silent, pensive rides, during which he attempts to sort out his dilemma: he can’t jeopardize his standing at his job, as he’s trying to save enough money to bring his wife Elisabeth over from Mexico, but the match offers the possibility of a potent sense of victory that he can’t ignore. As the film races towards its expected climax on the day of the match, its true thematic concern becomes clear. As much as José is battered about on his delivery runs, there’s also a chance to maintain a strong sense of community among his friends, whom he
visits at their jobs scattered across Brooklyn, and even of fostering such deeply rooted empathy anew, such as with a benevolent spectator at the match, or even just a fellow soccer fan. Available on Amazon, Hulu and HBO.
It Felt Like Love / Beach Rats
Eliza Hittman’s excellent Never Rarely Sometimes Always is another victim of theater closings, being dumped straight to video-on-demand after spending only a scant few days in release. Those who caught the film, however, are encouraged to seek out Hittman’s first two features, 2013’s It Felt Like Love and 2017’s Beach Rats, both of which situate themselves within southern Brooklyn milieus that are rarely committed to film, much less by a director so refreshingly fascinated by the ways in which the regional attitudes of a neighborhood influence the everyday decisions of its inhabitants. Born in Flatbush, and an alum of Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, Hittman brings a particular know-how to the ways in which adolescents and teenagers of Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay pass their hazy, loping summer days, as they navigate a network of deadbeat friends, absent parents, and doomed relationships. It Felt Like Love follows high-schooler Lila (Gina Piersanti) struggling to emulate the romantic exploits of her close friend (she’s often third-wheel on trips to Coney Island, and even some petty theft in what appears to be Sea Gate), which results in her self-insertion in increasingly unsettling and potentially unsafe situations. In Beach Rats, the young Frankie (Harris Dickinson) tragically tries to reconcile his façade of heteronormativity with his internal desires that lead him to hooking up with anonymous men met online. Hittman trades in a casual realism, a filmmaking mode which trains the camera on mundane and thoughtless gestures as opposed to a blunt sense of drama. One doesn’t watch her films as much as one is over-
taken by them. Available on Amazon and iTunes.
Two Lovers
Another film set in southern Brooklyn, Two Lovers – James Gray’s 2009 adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights – transports a classical sense of Hollywood romance to 21st-century Brighton Beach. It’s the rare studio film of the past two decades to so casually subvert tried-andtrue love story conventions while still retaining their inherent heartrending appeal. Joaquin Phoenix bends his visceral mode of acting to an impressively emotive effect as Leonard, a depressive young(ish) man who’s moved back into his parents’ apartment after a broken-up engagement and subsequent attempted suicide. As his family gently – and relatively successfully – pushes him in the direction of the daughter of a potential business partner in their dry-cleaning business, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), Leonard finds himself equally infatuated with his new next-door neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), set up in the building by her married boyfriend. Gray tastefully squeezes the circumstances for all their worthy melodrama, luxuriating in a detailed atmosphere of impossible longing that is only strengthened by the underlying tension between the enclave-like community Leonard, his family and Sandra hail from, and the larger, more superficially cosmopolitan Manhattan Michelle longs to return to. Gray’s modestly burnished directing gives ample space for a performance by Phoenix that gracefully pivots between touching inwardness, and overlyearnest, even embarrassing, declarations of love. Two Lovers elevates its Brooklyn backdrop beyond simple window-dressing to something much more personal for the director, its location and unspoken customs inextricable from the film’s universally recognizable, much welcome beating heart. Available on Amazon and iTunes.
A virtual visit to F.S. Lutherie by Mike Fiorito
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f course, everything’s different now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So instead of walking over to the shop, I called Farhad Soheili, owner and founder of F.S. Lutherie in Brooklyn. F.S. Lutherie (946 Lorimer Street) is a custom guitar maker and guitar repair workshop started by Farhad. Originally from Los Angeles, he has spent the past two decades repairing, restoring, and building custom-made guitars, first out west and now in New York City. “Did you come from a family of luthiers?” I asked. “Actually, I started doing repairs as a kid,” said Farhad. “I used to go to the guitar repair shops. I was so young my mom had to drive me. I asked a ton of questions. I watched everyone and learned as much as I could.” At that time, he learned how to do guitar setups and make string nuts and began to grasp the fundamentals of basic wiring. By twenty, he began doing his own guitar work. Then, in 2007, Farhad moved to New York City, hoping to be a session musician. But what he found was that his true passion was making and repairing guitars, not gigging.
“Do you focus only on electric guitars?” I asked. “I custom-make only electric guitars, but I repair acoustic guitars as well. I used to do violin and other string instrument repairs, but now I just focus on guitars.” “Who are some of your favorite luthiers?”
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Farhad said he was inspired by the work of Ken Parker, Ric McCurdy, and Dan Erelwine. He watches their online videos and sees them at luthier conferences and shows. “You can never stop learning in our work,” he added. “How has the coronavirus impacted your business?” “I’m not accepting new repairs now. I’m only working on things that were in the queue. Custom guitars take months to build.” “When did that start?” “Well, in January and February, business was booming. Then, in the first days of March things started to change.” He explained that on about March 12, the public awareness of the virus slowly altered his behavior and the behavior of customers. It was a daily evolution. He began disinfecting guitars both received and prepped for pickup. Then some people, particularly older customers, or people with health conditions, didn’t want to risk coming in. Then his woodshop closed. Eventually he had to tell customers who had ordered custom made guitars that all work would go on a pause. “They were all really understanding,” he noted. “Like we were all in it together.” “When do you see yourself opening?” He said that maybe they can consider opening again in May. “I’ve always done everything by appointment. But now we could do something like scheduling a pickup or drop-off at the entrance downstairs. We can coordinate everything via
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email and phone. Customers could make payments electronically.” Farhad explained how interconnected his business is with other small businesses. “When musicians have gigs, they need guitar setup, repairs. Not to mention all the workers that are involved in guitar production. People who paint the guitars, the companies that supply wood. The occasional skilled help I hire. As mentioned, even the woodshop where I do the wood cutting is closed. So many people are affected.” “How do you see this impacting you for the next few months?” “A luthier’s work is reliant on other people having jobs and a good economy. If musicians aren’t working, there isn’t as much regular work. Not to mention that a custom guitar is a luxury spend. It’s certainly not a priority. I see custom guitar work on a lull at least until the end of 2020.” “Do you see yourself needing to change what you do?” “No,” said Farhad. “I’m a luthier. It’s what I do. It’s what I love. And my health hasn’t been affected, thankfully. When this tragedy comes to an end, I’ll resume the custom guitar making and repair work I’ve done. Despite the long-term impact on small businesses and people’s lives, we’ll all have to get back to work. Get back to our lives.” Then he paused, let out a sigh. “I’m really looking forward to that.”
For more information, go to fscinstruments.com. May 2020, Page 17
Hard-boiled lovely eggs go over easy
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’ve been admiring the Lancaster, England, duo the Lovely Eggs from afar for quite some time. They’ve been at it for well over a decade and are perfectly molded for the age of internet-induced attention deficit disorder. Their songs and videos are fast, funny, charming and can serve to work out aggression in a matter of minutes, either by giggles or guitar distortion. I fear over the years I’ve been doing those Lovely Eggs a disservice, however. It turns out they’re also skillful proponents of an all but forgotten art form: the sculpted rock album. Their new I Am Moron (available on LP, CD and download and streaming on most services) is a perfect 40 minutes of tension and release. Their many videos show them as a cheeky guitar-and-drum duo, spartan and driving, common yet quirky, singing about liking animals, not liking being looked at, and, sure, love and loneliness. Holly Ross is a strong singer, delivering visceral anger over and heartfelt affection for little things and everyday occurrences quite convincingly. But she’s also a powerful guitarist, supporting well-crafted songs with punk energy, noisy breakdowns and sweet musicality when called for. Her partner in and out of the band, David Blackwell, is a solid drummer with quite a nice voice for harmonies or the occasional lead. All such elements make a sink into their YouTube
by Kurt Gottschalk channel a good bit of fun. But the digital age doesn’t care much for staying on course, and the Lovely Eggs are at least as much an AOR as they are a WWW band. I Am Moron deserves to be heard top to bottom and then listened to again. It leaps from the speakers in layers, with wonderful production by David Fridmann, who has packed sonic, psychedelic booms for the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev and MGMT (to name a few) in addition to producing the Lovelies’ 2018 album This is Eggland. I Am Moron opens with a techno swirl before stepping up to the two-count “Long Stem Carnations,” a melodic bit of power pop littered with bloopy synths, calling to mind Fiery Furnaces at their oddball best. That’s followed by a catchy dismissal of household implements, fast food, television and hallucinogens in “You Can Go Now,” another track so thick with syrup that it belies the fact that it’s a two-piece behind it. It’s not until the third cut that the multi-faceted Eggs give us what we’re waiting for. “This Decision” is a pounding, anthemic declaration of autonomy. It’s doesn’t matter from what Ross is declaring her independence, and I’m not entirely sure if she says what it is or not. As with the best punk songs, you can use it as you need it.
“This Decision” was the album’s lead-off single, followed by another slammer. “Still Second Rate” is as close to moron as the album gets (it’s really not punk in praise of stupidity), a pronouncement of pride in not being top-notch. They may have sung too soon, however. I Am Moron topped the British independent album charts in April, firmly establishing itself as a first-rate platter. Give it 40 minutes, give it 80. It is, as they say, a right corker.
Joy, survival and other endless pursuits: Vienna Carroll’s throwback blues for modern times
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he blues, according to B.B. King, is about survival, and if there’s a list of people who know about both the blues and survival, King’s got to be near the top. The blues, we learn from King, isn’t about being beaten down, it’s about getting back up again. Singer Vienna Carroll knows about blues and survival, too. And she knows history, which her new album, Harlem Field Recordings, is full of. Carroll has written plays and contributed to a museum exhibit about African American life in pre-Emancipation America. She graduated from the African American Studies program at Yale University. It’s also worth noting that her grandmother played guitar with country star Minnie Pearl. There’s a strength in her voice and a richness in her blood. Harlem Field Recordings has history and survival by the bushel. It’s simple and it’s deep. It’s wise and it’s relatable, smart and soulful. It’s an easy listen, but not one to be taken lightly, as steeped in the past as it is modernity. The album is packed with references. Not just in the songs – Carroll and her tight little band play tunes penned by Willie Dixon, “Son” House and Robert Johnson, along with her own songs and some whose authors are lost to history – but in the musical telling of the tales. The album touches on country and gospel and riffs on Gershwin, Rogers and Hammerstein, Jimi Hendrix and the Stylistics, to name a few.
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by Kurt Gottschalk Carroll displays a storyteller’s versatility right off the bat. The first track opens with a cry that quickly brings to mind the strawberry saleswoman in Porgy and Bess, but she’s soon supplanted by an adolescent boy (still voiced by Carroll) selling candy on the subway, as if to say, the times, they ain’t a-changed. Time remains suspended with the country two-step “You Better Mind,” then moves easily into Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen.” Here, as with Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” the switch from the original vantage to a female narrative is easy. Carroll’s aim is a humanist one, and when it rains, it rains on everyone. A trio of prison songs serve as the centerpiece for the record. “No Mo Freedom” is a variation on the Parchman Farm blues, given a staggering delivery without accompaniment. The band kicks in with a contemporary groove for “Dangerous Blues” and “Do Berta,” slyly contemplating cheating and killing. The second half of the album includes some uplifting gospel, a beautiful, slave-era lullaby with a brief, professorial introduction and a killer take on “Son” House’s “Grinnin’ in Yo Face.” The closing “Singin Wid a Sword in Ma Han” is downright inspirational. The band is propelled throughout by the light precision of Newman Taylor Baker, who has drummed with a number of avant-garde jazz luminaries but here sticks to shuffle and swing on
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the washboard. Guitarist Keith Johnson is wellversed in a number of blues styles, helping along the changing scenes, and Stanley Brooks provides bounce while maintaining footing, with guest string players rounding out some of the cuts. Survival can feel like a new game, but it’s been around as long as people and other things have been living, and singing has long been a way to make it through the storm. Times seem right right about now to sing along with Vienna Carroll.
May 2020
The Prize of Consolation
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by George Grella
he musicians are doing their all, but the zoom-type media experience is just not working for jazz. Jazz has an in-themoment feedback that streaming can’t support. Catch a live performance and the musicians (if it’s safe for two or more to get together) can be seen responding to each other, but there’s nothing they can get from the viewers, nor nothing the audience can pass around via anything other than text chat. A solo performance, like pianist Fred Hersch’s daily lunchtime sets on Facebook, are self-contained in a way that makes them slightly more suitable for streaming, but it’s not enough. For the viewer, it’s like watching practice – the playing can be great but it often seems meant for an internalized purpose, it’s not extroverted in the inherent manner of a public gig. And then there’s the screen. The screen, the screen, the screen, I scream. It’s draining to concentrate on streaming events, whether a concert or a business meeting – it takes more energy to focus on a what’s happening, and there’s fewer resources left for real listening. The distractions never end, either, there’s always something popping at the edge of the screen, and digital muscle memory is attuned to switch focus at the slightest lull – one reason streaming from Spotify can be so jejune.
it again, and pretty soon you implicitly anticipate every moment, and when that moment comes, it feels damn good, and that feeling just accumulates until the record stops, and there’s something like a sigh that comes out of you and out of the stereo and sits there in the air for a moment. That’s almost like a concert, that moment of silence before the hands come together. The records are still coming out, and that’s good too. The external enemy is COVID-19 and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the federal government and a substantial number of our fellow inhabitants of this mess of a country. But inside our homes, the enemy is monotony and its agitations. I look at my record collection, all the albums that I know I love, and I can’t listen to them because I know what they are, just as I know every detail of my home. It’s the stasis that eats at the mind and soul, the lack of new sensations and experiences. Listen to new things, there’s some awfully good new and recent releases: •
If you’ve spent the day in front of a screen, working from home, trying to occupy yourself, or even dealing with the New York State Department of Labor, how much desire do you have to plant yourself in front of that same glowing rectangle for entertainment and release? Good thing the liquor stores are still open. But there’s still records, CDs, even cassettes (they’re making a modest return). Do you have any of those sitting around? Despite the continued paradox of improvisational music set in wax, records still work, they still satisfy. Listen to Kind of Blue again, every note falling into place exactly where memory tells you it should, and it’s still beautiful, it still makes you stop what you’re doing and listen. That’s how records work, that’s how jazz records work; you listen to it, it sounds good, you listen to
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Jeremy Pelt, The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 1 (High Note). This is essentially a ballads album from the trumpeter, in a trio setting with the great, unsung pianist George Cables and bassist Peter Washington. Pelt has been a sophisticated, poised player and composer for many years, and this record is everything the title promises – warm and expansive in the way of someone holding you close, the music is full of weight and meaning to the musicians, and Pelt’s mellow tone is succulent. Avishai Cohen, Big Vicious (ECM). Cohen is also a trumpeter, a lovely player who in the past has been bound a little too closely to emulating Miles Davis’ 1950s-60s styles. This album is something new from him, an electroacoustic hybrid that mixes jazz thinking with sounds and beats from rock, hip hop, and new soul. It’s lyrical through and through, and Cohen’s arrangements have impeccable taste and craft. It’s a hip record that keeps its hipness to
of this quarantine is that many musicians who have been too busy playing live have not able to see each other perform. They now have gotten the chance to do so via streaming and begin to realize, “Oh that’s what that person’s thing is all about, I had it all wrong in my head.” This can be a source of inspiration. It is always better when contemporary artists can interact and be inspired and expand on each other’s work.
A live streaming music renaissance is here (for now)! by Jack Grace
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ive streaming has certainly become a fine escape for many people who love music in these days of pandemic. It is working out ok for certain musicians and many suddenly less distracted music lovers. A positive side effect
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Musicians that sing and play a chordal instrument like, guitar, piano, ukulele, banjo, mandolin, accordion definitely have an advantage over a solo horn player in this new solitary environment. Performers with a solid solo show can simply do their act to a new and hungrier audience that may be less likely to shout over their more sensitive material. I personally have done a live streaming show consecutively for the past 32 days. I have definitely noticed that the audience is more receptive to my slower, more complex compositions and as a writer, that has been a great source of joy. There also appears to be a population out there financially contributing to musicians that have relied on live performance for a living. It is definitely encouraging to see and hear about. Yet, we have to wonder, how will that continue to evolve if we are really going to be quarantined until July or beyond? The tipping or financial support may dwindle as other folks accounts continue to be
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the side and puts communication and pleasure at the fore. •
Pianist Lewis Porter and guitarist Ray Suhy have an album on Sunnyside, Transcendent. The two players have built a modern update on the spiritual jazz movement, a kind of yearning, reaching poetic quality with a muscular rock groove and feel. This is an exhilarating album, not the least of it the drumming by Rudy Royster, some of the best I’ve heard on any new record in several years.
You’ll have to wait for the June 12 release date, but the duo Endless Field (guitarist Jesse Lewis and bassist Ike Sturm) have a gorgeous new album on Biophilia (digital only), Alive in the Wilderness. These two come out of the exceptional Pat Metheny/Charlie Haden album, Under the Missouri Sky, and have a unique sound that’s modern music made with a folk conception. Their name, and the title, indicates how they like to connect to the experience of facing the natural world, and it’s amazing how they capture it with only the most basic elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm. The album was recorded live in the desert in southern Utah and proceeds go to the National Resources Defense Council, so put this one on your shopping list. These musicians, and everyone dedicated to making jazz, are your friends, the music is just waiting for you to let it say hello to you. They can be there with you, if only in the moment. impacted by the hardships that lie ahead. But some careers might actually thrive as a result of this newly popular performance method. We could just see a new kind of show emerge from the cinders of this pandemic. Great art so often comes from times as challenging as this. Yes, we must worry about the venues that may never return, the people that perish, the systems that collapse. But live streaming is a new friend that can help the viewer and the performer discover a new way to interact and let the age of the cell phone finally become friends with the here and now of live performance. I am quite certain that even when we are on the other end of this pandemic, the live stream will continue to have a greater role in our culture. It certainly will change, but it will also continue to re-invent itself as long as an audience remains interested in what might happen next. The record labels are certainly taking notice and they are getting better at muting content that uses their copyrighted material without proper consent. Yes, often ya might follow the money, to see where its all heading but for now live streaming is in it’s “Wild West Era,” yet to be properly ruined by the ugliness of manipulative commerce. So I think we should simply enjoy it while we are in it. It’s nice to feel good about something so deep in the days of this damn lousy pandemic!
May 2020, Page 19
FRESHEST LOBSTER IN NYC! Can't get groceries delivered? Don't want to go to the store? Neither do we!
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7 DAYS A WEEK | 12-8PM
Shop at the Fort Defiance General Store
DELIVERY ALSO AVAILABLE FOR
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LOBSTER
per pound
SEAFOOD
per pound
CRAB LEGS
per pound
CLAMS
per dozen
LAND LUBBERS
per pack
live lobster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Call for pricing LOBSTER tails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 lobster meat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 maine lobster salad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
prince edward island mussels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 e-z peel shrimp (16/20) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 peeled iqf shrimp (51-60) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 scallops (U-10 frozen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 local calamari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 jail island sustainable salmon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
dungeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 snow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 king . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
Order at FortDefianceBrooklyn.com
little neck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 .50
Pick up at Fort Defiance on Mondays and Fridays, 5-7pm Each food purchase makes a donation to the Fort Defiance Employee Fund.
dry aged ground beef patties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 free range chicken breasts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Berkshire pork & bacon hot dogs . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
DIY LOBSTER ROLL KITS
per 4 rolls Lobster meat, paprika, scallions, buns, lettuce & lemon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80
CALL F OR WEEKLY FRESH FISH AVAILABILITY PRICES SUBJECT TO CHANGE
Stay Brave and Healthy, Red Hook!
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#REDHOOKSTRONG Page 20 Red Hook Star-Revue
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May 2020