Red Hook Star-Revue, September 2020

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HOWARD GRAUBARD EXPLAINS THE ORTIZ LOSS page 13

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This One’s For You, Pete

By Joe Enright

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ete Hamill was a poet disguised as a reporter disguised as a novelist disguised as a memoirist – there is such a word, I assure you, but Pete would never have used it. It sounds too phony. Like the pre-recorded cheers they pipe in for the radio and TV gasbags at COVID-emptied ballparks.

Remember Pete’s columns in the New York Post and the Daily News? Back when us old folks learned about City happenings and occasionally the world across the Hudson while riding the rails back and forth to our jobs every day, trying to create a little island of space among other straphangers to read those tabloids? The News on the way in, the Post on the way home. Sure I started with the box scores.

Checked the TV and movie listings, of course, then skimmed the news. But if I saw Pete or Breslin had a column, well, that was my treat for the day.

I always thought of him as “Pete”—in a way that I never called his dearly-departed brother-in-prose, “Jimmy.” That guy was always Breslin from Queens, who made you laugh, who gave us the funniest book about baseball ever written, "Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game." Sure, Breslin could tug at your heart-strings now and again, and he was more of a reporter than Pete.

But Hamill’s writing had a knack for tearing away our hard masks and making us feel empathy for other poor slobs just like us. To do that he had to let

you into his own inner world and over time, you came to feel so close, well he was a pal, he was Pete, not Hamill.

And if you were from Brooklyn, and also from a big dirt-poor Irish family, well, so much the better. Snow in August… All those glorious New York short stories…"A Drinking Life… " In the early 1970’s I lived on his block in Park Slope, in a carved-up studio a few brownstones away from him, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was a rent-controlled dump and when my sisters moved out they pre-dated a year’s worth of checks for the absentee landlord. I paid them back in cash every month, naturally, and almost as a Pointing to Manhattan from his Familiy’s 7th Ave Rooftop. Photo taken in value-added extra to apologize for the 2012. roaches, my sisters told me I’d never have to worry would have had an answer for that: Carey was as about my jalopy getting plowed-in on the garage- corrupt as the day was long. And how did you know barren streets below. Because the Right Honorable that, dad? Because at Our Lady of Refuge Church at Governor Hugh Carey lived on the corner and when Foster & Ocean Avenues in the 1950s, when Hugh snow was in the forecast, an army of sanitation guys was President of the Holy Name Society, me dad with shovels would run around catching the flakes was his Veep. And Hugh would often call the night before a meeting and complain that he had to work before they even hit the ground. at his brother Ed’s gas station on Flatbush Avenue But whenever I passed that big building on the again, so “could you step up again, Marty?” In 1968 south side of 2nd Street and Prospect Park West, I’d when Hugh ran for Governor, there was some conwonder how Carey could be running things up in troversy about his brother, Ed. Turns out Ed was an Albany if he lived on my block. Of course, me dad

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THE STAR-REVUE RULES BROOKLYN

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started the Red Hook Star-Revue ten years ago this summer. The main reason was that I like the newspaper business; a second reason was that I found Red Hook a challenging and interesting community, which I suspected had lots of stories to tell.

A third reason was that beginning in the 1970’s, when I worked first for The Villager, and then with Brooklyn’s Phoenix, I loved going to the annual NYS Press Association’s spring convention in Albany. The centerpiece of that weekend was always the Better Newspaper Contest. My boss, the late Mike Armstrong, who we memorialized a few months ago on the front page after his tragic Covid death, made frequent walks to the dais, cigar in hand (you could smoke them inside in those days), picking up lots of first place awards in categories such as coverage of local government, best spot news reporting, photography

by George Fiala

and so forth. Occasionally he let me go up to accept an award.

In between the award luncheons and dinners we attended newspaper seminars, and at the end of the day we all retreated to various bars and rooms stocked with liquor, to talk newspaper talk and get drunk with people who did the same things that we did in various parts of the state. It made one feel like professionals, which I guess is what we all were.

I was very excited to have the StarRevue accepted into the organization a few years after our founding, and except for one year, we have won awards every year. It kind of tells me we are doing ok.

Convention weekend was supposed to be the end of this past March, but of course, by the middle of March all conventions were cancelled. The contest results were not announced, as the press association staff was hoping that sooner or later we could have a

real convention.

Well, sooner didn’t happen and later would be too late, so like a lot of things, including school, we ended up having a virtual awards celebration.

No booze, no hobnobbing, simply 4 half hour youtube video presentations, mimicking the award dinners without the food and drink.

It was still exciting to watch the videos, presented two a day at the end of August, one at lunchtime and one at dinnertime. For the last one I drove up to Port Chester to be with my friend Richard Abel, publisher of the Westmore News, in his office, with his staff. If there were no Covid, these would be the people I’d be sitting with up in Saratoga Springs.

I’m quite excited to announce to my faithful readers that we did quite well – our best year yet! We won six awards in total – four first places, one second, and one honorable mention.

I take a bit of pleasure in noting that

This story was among those honored at the State Press Association's annual awards.

of all Brooklyn’s community newspapers, including the Couriers and the Brooklyn Papers and the Eagles and the Stars, the only other award winner was the Bay News/Brooklyn Graphic, which took a first place in the design of an advertisement. We six, they one, everybody else nil.

The contest was dominated by The Express Newspaper Group, publishers

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RED HOOK SHARES A FRIDGE

by Nathan Weiser

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any neighborhoods across New York City have implemented community refrigerators during the pandemic and as of August 16 Red Hook has one as well.

Hashtag Brooklyn had a ribbon cutting ceremony to officially open the fridge. Anaika Forbes, who started at Hashtag Lunchbag Brooklyn four years ago, has been helping people get food since the beginning.

The ribbon cutting ceremony happened on a rainy day, which likely kept some people away.

Red Hook Art Project partnered with Forbes and Hashtag Lunchbag Brooklyn to help get the fridge set up at Jam’It Bistro which operates as a restaurant at 367 Columbia Street. Jam’it was opened last year by Dawn Skeete Tiffiney Davis, who is the managing director of RHAP, helped Forbes find this location to have the community fridge.

Davis added that four students from RHAP volunteered to paint the fridge “Anytime I need a location to host and make sandwiches, I can always ask Tiffiney and she always finds someone willing to let me borrow their space free of charge,” Forbes said. “When I knew I wanted to do a fridge, Red Hook was the only community I knew I wanted to put it in.”

At the time of the ribbon cutting, at about 12:20 on Sunday, the fridge was already stocked with sandwiches, fresh fruit, bread, milk, water, corn, carrots and yoo-hoo.

“Our plan is to keep it stocked and and full and if anyone has the means to also do the same thing our hours are 11 AM to 8 PM,” Forbes said. “It is a community effort. We are all we got, so we have to help each other out, but otherwise Tiffiney and I got this.”

Forbes thanked Skeete from Jam’It

Dawn Skeete is on the left, Anaika Forbes is on the right of the fridge and Tiffiney Davis is next to her. (photo by Nathan Weiser)

Bistro for allowing her electricity from Jam’It to power the refrigerator and she thanked Davis as well and expressed how excited she was that this came to fruition.

Everything is inside the fridge is free for anyone that needs and and people are encouraged to contribute what they can.

There are a few rules and guidelines for what should go in the fridge and how people should treat the area.

Forbes, who is invested in helping others get food and care, stressed respecting the area and refrigerator.

“Please, above all, keep the fridge nice and neat because we want to make sure the surrounding neighborhood, neighborhood, and block stays clean,” she said.

Forbes would like the community to contribute fresh fruits and vegetables, water, bread and milk, being mindful of expiration dates.

The community fridge will stay in front of the Jam’It Bistro for as long as the fridge is helpful.

Jam’It Bistro has been involved in helping feed people during the pandemic.

Skeete has partnered with World Central Kitchen and generous donors in

Red Hook to provide 185 meals daily to the Red Hook community.

Forbes does not want to people do feel ashamed at all about opening the fridge and taking what they need since she wants this to be a resource for people who need some food.

When she first started Hashtag Lunchbag Brooklyn, whose motto is to end world hunger one lunch bag at a time, they would make sandwiches in a community working space, put love notes in the bag with the sandwich and then distribute them to the community.

They distribute the meals to needy people in Crown Heights, Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant.

“Since I knew this was our four year anniversary in Brooklyn, I figured this is a gift that keeps on giving–having a fridge in a community where people can come in and take as they need at any time,” Forbes said.

Hashtag Lunchbag Brooklyn’s Instagram account is @hashtaglunchbagbk where you can see updates.

Founded June 2010

by George Fiala and Frank Galeano

with thanks to these guys

Page 2 Red Hook Star-Revue

www.star-revue.com

September 2020

we get letters

What a shitty fucking article to write!

— Red Hook Strong You always find the need to write bullshit on your website , GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT — Red Hook Native I know this is an editorial, but if you were confused about anything, maybe, as a journalist, you should’ve contacted any of the organizers to clarify the issues. Also, we don’t know who Jim Tampakis and he has not been a part of the work we’ve been doing for years. —Amy Dench What is wrong with you? Carlos has been busting his ass to get shit done, there’s just a lot to do because – SORRY NOT SORRY – the projects get help last. Tons of buildings are jumping up during this time. Tons of projects on the roads are getting done. Why? Because they turn a profit. NYCHA doesn’t pay dividends so they don’t get help. That’s shitty. I lost water for 2 hours. They lost it on and off for weeks. This is a garbage piece in a bad time to antagonize people rather than bring us together. This isn’t hardhitting journalism or even a strong (if dissenting) opinion – this is lazy button-pushing for no good reason. Want things to be better? Cool, we do, too.

Do some actual reporting not some armchair criticism. — Laura

Another opinion

Finally he’s done WHAT NOW FOR RED HOOK ? I’LL WAIT THE LOCAL LEADERS HERE HAVE DONE MORE THAN HIM – Taina Our mailbag also filled up with comments about Dante's review of a documentary about reporting Vietnam.

Press is not free

After serving in the Army medical corps in Vietnam; I came home to return to working in commercial photography. After much rejection and many poor paying jobs I started freelancing as a photojournalist. Years later when applying to a small town newspaper and being rejected, I was told it was because I was a Vietnam Veteran. There was a short time of homeless living, change of location, a return to chasing stories, too this time of the press being called fake

news. All of this to say: perhaps we should let the people’s Congress and only the Congress declared wars. It is time overdue to have a free press away from corporate, commercial, entertainment, and propaganda as news.

We had that once it was changed so big corporations could make money on news. A free press is the only Industry in the Constitution. – Charles

Still not happy

Having read the above review, there seems little doubt that DatelineSaigon will make a complementary companion piece for Burns-Novick’s documentary epic, The Vietnam War. A similar selectivity of commentary produced from a liberal, political perspective seems set to play its customary role in reinforcing already well-entrenched media misrepresentations of the Second Indochina War. Revealing a ‘dirty war’ does not relieve a correspondent from his or her responsibility to seek out and report with equal vigour those aspects of that war which could be metaphorically described as ‘clean’. If reporting the ‘dirt’ was of primary importance, then revealing the filth-ridden brutality and deceit of Hanoi’s hegemonic war in Indochina was imperative by way of balance. That simply did not happen and there was no excuse for the omission.

While North Viet Nam cannily prohibited its state-controlled media from reporting ‘dirt’ on the activities of the NVA and Viet Cong, western reporters in South Vietnam had the privilege of reporting free of censorship, a privilege which too many of them conspicuously exploited and abused. By way of one of many illustrative examples, in his tellingly entitled memoir, Triumph of the Absurd, war correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto recounts how he asked an American cameraman why he wasn’t filming the mass graves of South Vietnamese murdered by the communists in Hue. The cameraman replied he wasn’t there to make anti-communist propaganda.

How professionally noble of him!

A similarly noble motivation may have influenced Walter Cronkite when he misreported the 1968 Tet offensive and advocated that the United States abandon South Viet Nam. Cronkite had already recorded a highly professional and, given the short time he was there, remarkably accurate assessment of the US/ARVN victory, but he failed in his duty to convey it

HOTD0G AND MUSTARD BY MARC JACKS0N BeING iN

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to the American people after his return to the United States. Instead, he delivered a demonstrably false and misleading report consistent with his self-confessed sympathies for antiwar ‘dissidents’ and his resentful contempt for conservative opinion. Thus, with catastrophic consequences for the people of Indochina, a misinformed America entered the bright and shining era of fake news.

This leads, in conclusion, to the film-maker’s political antipathies as evidenced in his criticism of President Trump’s attitude towards the media. A well-justified Presidential contempt for the press should not be misconstrued as an attack upon the freedoms which the press enjoys and serially abuses. It is regrettable that President Johnson did not deliver a similarly Trumpian rebuttal of Cronkite’s ideologically tainted reportage of the Tet offensive. Instead, that legendary and disgraceful journalistic performance contributed to Johnson’s resignation and a stunning propaganda victory for Hanoi. If that was indicative of what America’s most trusted journalist could do for Hanoi’s war effort, the mind positively boggles at the collective contribution and achievements of the rest.

While due respect must be tendered to correspondents who reported honourably and to the best of their ability, it is absurd for the maker of this documentary to dismiss as ‘nonsense’ the media’s share of culpability in the defeat of South Vietnam. As a consequence of the US withdrawal which Cronkite and others in the media helped to induce, millions of Indochinese lives and the hopes for freedom shared by millions more were lost.

I do agree with the filmmaker’s assertion that ‘freedom of speech, freedom [of ] assembly, all of that [is] something that every generation has to struggle to maintain.’ While Cronkite was sailing his yacht around Martha’s Vineyard, thousands of freedom-loving South Vietnamese were sailing across the perilous reaches of the South China Sea. Their defeated country’s freedom-struggle was reported as a myth, a brightly shining lie from a supposedly discredited Establishment, but nonetheless a quarter of a million South Vietnamese died horribly at sea in efforts to regain the freedoms which they lost when Saigon fell.

So a ‘dirty war’ revealed? Perhaps. It is a matter of regret, though no surprise,

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Not at risk

Some spot-on comments here. Peter Braystrip’s “Big Story” is a compelling read on this subject. The idea that reporters and the 1st Amendment was somehow imperiled by the government is patently false. Sure reporters like Peter Arnett were criticized, but given his dripping disdain for America, was that pushback so unreasonable? Throughout the war, press critics of our actions in Vietnam, including the most vicious among them, continued to write whatever they wanted, even increasing their vitriol as our withdrawals ramped up. Right up to this day, when the President mocks grandstanding CNN reporters, they are quick to characterize it as a “direct assault on the 1st Amendment” — proving yet again that they remain absolutely free to put out any degree of nonsense. — Steve McGuire in reply to David Hanna Finally, a lot of people wrote about Kurt's review of the newest Dylan album. Here are just a few of them: He ain’t no false prophet, that’s for sure.—Gary A. Frank I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s work for almost 50yrs! In my eyes Bob is all that! And I listen (and sing along irresistibly) to his unbelievable creativity. Around here in my home you are in the “Bob Dylan Zone”! My life has been influenced by many artists including Seger, Allman Brothers, Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, Marshal Tucker band, Clapton, Presley, etc,etc,etc…..

Folk, rock, blues, country, R & B etc, etc…. and proud to say Bobby D is still on top! What a career, what a pleasure to my ears and my soul—Larry A. White Great insights. Wondering at Bob’s imitation of Jimi in the picture. —Sam Trumpold Dylan needs to retire.—GD McFetridge Rough and Rowdy Ways should remind everyone how fortunate we are to have Bob Dylan still around. Agree with the reviewer. One of his best!— John Garvey I love this album and to be honest I love most everything he has done. He has always meant alot to me—Bob Neylan

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YURK!

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this documentary is unlikely to reveal the media’s contribution to the making of a dirty peace. — David Hanna

SeeYA

NEXT TiMe!

mj

Last month George's column made some polite criticism of Red Hook's councilman, Carlos Menchaca. And we didn't even mention Industry City or gurus. The result was the first hate mail we've gotten since our inaugural year. Enjoy....

SEND YOURS TO GEORGE@REDHOOKSTAR.COM

©COPYRIGHT 202O MARC JACKSON AND WEiRD0 COMiCS #18

September 2020, Page 3

Police meet neighbors in person, safely

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Build the Block Neighborhood Policing and Safety meeting for 76th Precinct Sector D / Public Service Area (PSA) 1 was held in the beginning of August on Coffey Street for residents to discuss public safety and other issues in the neighborhood and surrounding area.

Officers Clarke and Conti are the Neighborhood Coordination Officers (NCOs) for Sector D and were at the meeting. NCOs have been given more time and opportunity to collaborate with residents in identifying and solving local quality of life conditions and crime concerns.

These NCOs are assigned to the community each day, so they learn the neighborhood, its challenges and potential and the people who live there.

There was a maximum of 20 people and social distancing protocols were in place. In this meeting, there were six attendees and various topics were brought up.

Officers Ingoglia and Patel who are

Page 4 Red Hook Star-Revue

by Nathan Weiser

the PSA1 NCO officers for Gowanus and Red Hook led the meeting and took most of the questions.

what the cop says. It was also added that district attorneys are now declining to prosecute cases.

Issues that were brought up included a trespassing at 507 Columbia Street, an issue with a vacant area at 38 Bush Street and concern about cars driving where they shouldn’t on closed streets.

Another issue that was brought to the forefront was the Black Lives Matter movement and how the cutting back on police cost is affecting Red Hook.

At the end of the meeting was a man said at 40 Centre Mall from 7:30 to 1:30 to 2:00 a.m. there are people playing loud music. He added sometimes the noise goes down but then comes back on.

Jackie Rivera Rinaud brought up the recent surge in gun violence and asked how they were addressing it.

Patel said that if there is something happening in a certain building, they will increase their presence there for the next two to three days so hopefully there is no retaliation.

Ingoglia said everything is a case by case basis. He said a lot of times they might have solid information but might have to go through other channels to build a case since he said the DA is not going to go just based on

The PSA1 officer added that they defunded the overall department, but it didn’t change in the precinct. Only certain units were disbanded.

The school safety officers are now under the Department of Education.

A discussion on the shooting increase then ensued.

The PSA1 officer said it is because there is now no anti-crime unit. He said when the plain-clothes anticrime unit cops were around, their job specifically was to take guns off the street, and to arrest people for major crimes.

A 78-year-old woman said parents should be better taking charge of their children and believes that is an issue.

has also factored into the increased violence Rivera added that she is concerned with guns in the streets and is scared to go outside. She works from home now as The Justice Center is closed.

She said that their peacemaking program is awfully hard to operate virtually. Doing it at the Justice Center is much different than doing it virtually.

A sector D officer said that The Justice Center helps keeps kids out of trouble more than anybody he has ever seen.

A PSA1 officer said that cops sometimes stop the wrong person or find somebody who fits a description and get aggressive. He said there is a lot of things that he sees on social media or TV that cops do that he disagrees with.

He added that he was raised to treat people with respect, which is what he has done since he started in Red Hook, and that the cops are here to protect people in the community they serve.

A Sector D officer said the pandemic

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September 2020

Jim Tampakis works for Red Hook’s future

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s Red Hook awaits news on UPS’ plans for truck routes as they build a massive distribution center spanning from Valentino Park to the Cruise Terminal, multiple large construction projects are also under way in the neighborhood.

One will be a large parking lot for Verizon across the street from IKEA. Another will be a three-story logistics facility at 640 Columbia St. According to the property owner the facility “features ramp access to the loading docks on the second floor.” That one, next to IKEA, is schedule for completion next fall.

A third will be at 537 Columbia St. and was leased to Dov Hertz for $280 million. His company, a property development company plans (according to their literature) an “industrial building which includes warehouse and office space as well as a parking garage and bay area for up to eighteen semi-tractor trailer trucks.” The construction is expected to be finished by this winter.

Last month, I spoke to Jim Tampakis of Marine Spares International and Tamco Mechanical about his ideas regarding the expected excess truck traffic throughout Red Hook. Tampakis has been in Red Hook for 46 years operating his two businesses which deal with the maritime industry. He spoke about the changes he’s seen over that time and his hopes for the future of the neighborhood.

“When I first came to Red Hook, it was primarily shipping and manufacturing,” said Tampakis. “We would bring in ships 1,000 feet long for $200

by Brian Abate or $300 and could do welding for $25. You never really had to leave the neighborhood for anything like repairs. It was all here.”

Having so many businesses rely on each other also instilled a sense of community. They needed each other to get business and be successful, but business started dwindling in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and there are now hardly any remaining. While it was sad to see businesses fail, Tampakis said there were plenty of issues in Red Hook when he began working here.

“It was a rough neighborhood,” said Tampakis. “You couldn’t leave your car on the street at night. We had to leave ours in our garage and the alarm used to go off three or four times a week for break ins. My brothers and I had to grab bats to scare off burglars.”

He recounted going up on his roof once, to watch fireworks for a few hours. There were 15 cars on the street when he went on his roof and by the time the fireworks were over, every single car had been robbed.

“It’s cleaned up but it’s cleaned up differently,” said Tampakis. There are new problems to worry about.

He hopes that big companies like UPS will work with their new neighbors in Red Hook and listen to their input.

“There always seem to be big construction projects for last mile places, and I’m interested to hear their plans for traffic routes,” said Tampakis. “I know politicians are always trying to get our voices heard but lets see what the companies say.”

Tampakis has made real suggestions to UPS, involving the utilization of a

In this picture from a number of years back, Tampakis is trying to convince the NY Economic Development Corporation that their idea of placing Red Hook's ferry on Greg O"Connell's pier would be inconvenient for many Red Hook residents. They told him that they couldn't use the logical place–the Atlantic Basin, because of Homeland Security considerations. Tampakis, with many maritime connections, had done his homework and already had a letter from the Coast Guard saying that Homeland Security would not be an issue. In the end, EDC relented and Red Hook received a rare victory from the city as the ferry nowdocks at the Basin. (caption and photo by George Fiala, who was there).

truck corridor through the Cruise Terminal, as well as using the waterfront for barging product over to Manhattan. This would most likely avoid a large number of trucks clogging up Van Brunt and Bay Streets, to the detriment of the health and safety of the local residents.

As of now, neither UPS or the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT), have yet come up with a response for Tampakis, who has been waiting for months now, with Amanda Kawn of the DOT saying, “the UPS project is in

very early stages and we have no comment on it at this time.”

It’s important for everyone in Red Hook to make their voices heard, so companies like UPS are aware of the issues that matter to the community before they make important decisions. For now, Tampakis hopes that UPS will make compromises and find resolutions that take into account the input of the community when they respond to his questions.

Brooklyn bike-touring company struggles to survive in a world without tourism

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olling Orange Bikes Tours (ROBT), the local Dutch bicycle shop-turned-touring company that thrives on international tourism, has been struggling to stay afloat the last six months.

Shelly Mossey, ROBT owner and licensed New York City sightseeing guide, said the Dutch – who make up 100-percent of his customer base and who normally visit New York in the spring and autumn – have not been able to learn more about Red Hook’s Dutch history due to the global coronavirus pandemic and travel restrictions.

“This is the fourth disaster I’ve faced in my career,” explained Mossey, who was previously a partner in a bike messenger service company for 25 years before the 2008 financial recession shuttered it. “I survived 9/11, the recession, and Hurricane Sandy. This pandemic is the latest disaster.”

Red Hook Star-Revue

by Erin DeGregorio A Devastating Hit In January 2020, Mossey moved the shop from Gowanus to Carroll Gardens. He purposely chose the new Clinton Street location because of the ample outdoor space there was to stage group tours. Mossey envisioned making this location geared towards older riders, offering comfort bikes, adult upright bikes and recumbent bikes within his fleet. This, he had hoped, would reinvent his shop and would allow the public to be more open to biking for fun and pleasure.

Mossey was excited to celebrate his fifth anniversary as ROBT owner this year, after having served as a ROBT English-speaking tour guide from 2013 to 2015 and then taking over the company from its two Dutch owners thereafter. However, COVID-19 turned everyone’s world upside down by mid-March.

ROBT normally works with two outside agencies that deal exclusively

with bookings from the Netherlands.

ROBT bookings made through Baja Bikes, for example, usually made up 75% of ROBT’s business. Tourists often make their reservations a year in advance, resulting in ROBT being booked solid at the end of April, the beginning of May and for two weeks in October.

Needless to say, ROBT has closed for the time being and all bookings and tours for the remainder of 2020 have been canceled. However, one silver lining, according to Mossey, is that a few of the same Dutch customers who booked their tours for 2020 have now rebooked for August 2021.

Trying to Make Ends Meet In an attempt to make ends meet, Mossey tried opening for repairs and rentals to serve local Brooklynites. He mentioned that, had it been a normal year, dozens of rentals would have easily taken place over the weekends.

However, due to residents purchasing

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their own bikes and using Citibikes to get around, those plans didn’t quite pan out.

Mossey then decided to sell this company’s fleet of famous orange Batavus bikes with baskets in the front.

Though they were eleven years old, all 25 were purchased at $200 each.

ROBT’s fleet of Dutch, VanMoof, Azor, Brooklyn Cruiser and other assorted city-style bikes, ranging in price, are still currently available for purchase.

Mossey also noted that even if he wanted to purchase replacement bikes right now, he couldn’t because he can’t get bikes from distributors and manufacturers until October.

“We have so much time to replace the fleet if we come back for business,” he continued. “Maybe I’ll need 10 bikes for next March and, by the time April rolls around, I’ll need 50 bikes. I’ll figure it out.”

(continued on page 7) September 2020, Page 5

REVUE RULES (continued from page 1)

of the Sag Harbor Express, The Southampton Press, and the East Hampton Press, who won almost twice as many awards as the next best chain, also in Long Island, composed of the Suffolk Times, The News-Review and the Shelter Island Reporter. Just in case anybody is keeping track, the Star-Revue publishes only one paper–this one.

Our Brett Yates won the "Thomas G. Butson Award for In-Depth Reporting." In fact, he not only won first place in our division, but second as well. The late Butson was a one-time publisher of the Villager.

Brett’s series about last mile distribution centers, of which Red Hook will soon be home to three, was the first place winner. As part of his reporting,

Brett traveled to an Amazon distribution center in New Jersey. His idea, not mine. If there ever was an enterprising reporter, Yates is it.

The judge’s comment was this: “Thorough and clear reporting/writing. The lack of attribution struck me as freeing for the writer without sounding made up. You really knew how things work and what the issues are from a lot of angles. I loved this line, which visually describes the business model: Insofar as we’ve accepted a retail model that, by standard practice, whenever someone wants to buy a box of toothpicks, immediately sends a truck to deliver those toothpicks directly to the buyer’s doorstep instead of asking him to walk a few blocks to a store, last-mile distribution centers must exist.”

Bret's second place was for a story that ran in May, 2019. "The Monster That Surrounds You: Tyjuan Hill, Ronald Williams,and the 76th Precinct" explored the history of some questionable local policing situations. It didn’t win us many friends at the 76th, but here’s what the judge said: “An amazing piece of journalism. The time, the effort, the story was outstanding, especially about the self-righteous cop and the phases the police force went to try to improve relations and the case stories. Overall, many strong stories put together.”

Brett and our fearless neighborhood reporter Nathan Weiser shared another first place award – "Coverage of Education." This was for Nathan’s year-long coverage of both the Summit Academy and PS 676. We also submitted his story on the Hallow-

Page 6 Red Hook Star-Revue

een arrests of a group of Black pre-teens, and Brett’s excellent story about educators questioning the need for NYS Regent exams. The judge commented: “Outstanding writing.

Thoughtful, fresh and clear writing tackles complex subjects delivering readers the genuine local journalism every community deserves.”

We won second place in "Coverage of Religion." This was for Erin DeGregorio’s two stories on Mother Cabrini.

You might remember the citywide controversy that involved a local historical figure–Mother Cabrini. There mayor’s wife thought that to correct the dearth of statues honoring women around the city. She held a contest to decide who should get a statue. The top vote getter was Mother Cabrini, who performed selfless works of charity in Carroll Gardens and elsewhere– enough so that she was named a Saint (not a small honor).

However, First Lady McCray chose not to honor her right away, in favor of others such as Shirley Chisholm, and Erin write about the controversy and the steps that good Catholics such as the governor were taking to correct the omission. Erin also put together a Mother Cabrini listicle. The judge said simply: “Fascinating and interesting reporting.”

category called “Best Multi-Advertiser Pages.” This was a front and center page spread that ran three months last year (and the year before) catering to the many tourists we had back in those days. We created a map and a little historical copy and sold ads around them. This project was spearheaded by Liz Galvin, with the help of Jamie Yates, who together make up our intrepid sales team. The judge said: "This is a fun and interesting spread that just spelled FUN.” We actually won another advertising award – this one for an ad that promoted ourselves. It was my takeoff on Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool album, which I put together back in those halcyon days when we were trying to be cool. This was an honorable mention and the judge said: ”Cool!

But also hot. Excellent use of color and style increases the impact with album-cover style.”

All very exciting. It’ll be even more exciting if we can go back to in-person next year!

As always, it is you the reader who makes it all possible, so thank you!

Our final First Place award was in a

www.star-revue.com

September 2020

If the US ignores Belarus, Russia wins

S

ince the Romantic age, every time a society brings a fight in the streets against an alleged regime, Western countries everywhere cheer, with the belief that the unrest is a step towards the idea of “modern democracy.”

Nowadays the same is happening for Belarus, where the former-Soviet president Lukashenko has ruled as a dictator for over 26 years. Recent election results, in which Lukashenko has claimed 80% of the votes, has been questioned thousands of demonstrators, led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main challenger of Lukashenko.

The results have also not been recognized by the European Union.

Tsikhanouskaya, now in exile in Lithuania, stated that her main goal is free and fair elections, where voting rights are not manipulated by the Belorussian establishment linked to Lukashenko.

Tsikhanouskaya was not able to afford her electoral campaign alone, she was backed and funded by many people related to the traditional Belorussian political class, including Valery Tsepkalo, a former ambassador to the USA and Mexico and, moreover, a former aide of Lukashenko himself.

That is the reason why the Belorussian revolt seems to be also an internal settlement of accounts between two sides of the local establishment, one closer to Russia and one to the West.

Indeed, if we don’t look at the protests with an ideological view, we will see how the whole scenario is a geopolitical matter in a country which is a crossroads in the exact middle of two political blocks: the Russian Federation and the European Union, which is now trying to seize control of a strategic outpost in the eastward run that both the EU and the NATO are taking to weaken Russian control on Eastern Europe.

Of course, the masses demonstrating in Minsk are seeking freedom, but, even if they are so romantic and brave, we must not be distracted from the geopolitical implications of these uprisings, where the main characters are not Lukashenko and Tsikhanouskaya, but Ursula Von Der Leyen, EU Commissioner, Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, and Vladimir Putin, Russian Head of State.

But yet in this list there’s a big absence, Mr Trump, who is not taking a strong

ROLLING ORANGE (continued from page 5)

Additionally, ROBT’s 12 tour guides – some of whom, Mossey said, depended on this job for income – became unemployed.

Hoping for the Best In June, Mossey thought he would have been reopening for business in September or October. Now, he is setting his sights on next spring.

Red Hook Star-Revue

by Dario Pio Muccilli stand in the entire Belarussian crisis, despite diplomats like John Bolton who are prompting him to do so.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Trump’s lack of stance is due to his secret will to behave like Lukashenko in the next November Election Day, but to this outside observer, this is quite impossible because the White House would never be allowed to imprison opponents like in Belarus, or to falsify results.

Instead, what probably pushed Washington not to take a strong public stand in today’s crisis are geopolitical reasons.

As a matter of fact, the Belorussian one is not the only internal settlement of accounts which is taking place in the global scenario, where EU and USA are peacefully struggling in order to be the leading power of the West.

Since the EU has decided to pursue an own geopolitical strategy in Eastern Europe, the USA is slowly losing influence there, as it is Brussels who is now alone facing Moscow in countries like Ukraine, Belarus or the nations overlooking the Baltic Sea. Nevertheless, this may not be the biggest reason why Mr Trump is not handling the Belarussian crisis with severe measures like sanctions.

No desire for endless crisis With the US election coming it would not be convenient for him to engage in an endless crisis in Eastern Europe, just one border away from Russia, with the huge risk of a war if something bad happens, like a Russian invasion. Besides, an USA intervention would make the EU officials upset and it would prompt an international crisis, screwing up all the foreign relations that Washington has on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

That is probably one of the reason why literally no one amidst the Belarussian demonstrators has asked the help of the USA, as happened in Hong Kong.

Nevertheless Belarus’s geographical proximity to both Russia and Europe is not only a danger, but also one reason why the US cannot afford to ignore everything that is happening there, because while heavy interference will make all Washington’s allies, not acting at all will make

“I hope we’ll be up and running by March 2021, but it doesn’t look like it.

I’m getting nervous,” he continued.

“The hotel and tourist industry is not going to come back right away. This industry is all we have and we have no idea when that’s coming back. Every two days, everything changes with the pandemic … it’s very much like a Rubik’s cube. We don’t know what to do.”

It’s clear from his persistence and dedication that he loves his business and cycling in general.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya greets people waving old Belarus flags during a meeting to show her support , in Brest.

Washington lose its supremacy on international politics.

So, today US diplomacy has to do its best to show how the USA is still a leader worldwide, while avoiding crises that would be caused by a reckless interventionism that no one can afford.

However, we should not believe that, even if Lukashenko fell, Belarus would soon become a free and fair democracy, as the country does not have this kind of history. The international scenario is not a film where, after the “THE END”, the two lovers keep their feelings alive and bury all their past conflicts.

Despite Tsikhanouskaya seeming to be an innocent Joan of Arc, struggling for her country and her sons, she herself admitted that she would be only a transient leader toward democracy, but freedom is not a present you receive after you defeat the villain, as there are many steps to be completely free.

First of all Belarus, does not need any more people already involved in the Lukashenko regime, as many of Tsikhanouskaya›s supporters are, while secondly, Belarus has to free its economy from the chains of some global investors.

Indeed Belarus does not seem to be able to be independent from the Russian economy, which claims 46.3% of its exports and 54.2% of its imports.

Both industry and the rural economy depend on the Russian market, as it is for the oil supplies.

As long as Belarus doesn’t break the economic ties with Russia, it doesn’t matter who rules in Minsk, because

Moscow will always control the survival of the local facilities, which are still organized as during the Soviet age.

Thence, both Tsikhanouskaya and Lukashenko are only chess pawns of an international game where the EU is the main challenger of Russia, as Brussels is both the second export (23.6%) and import (19.8%) partner of Belarus.

In this scenario, Tsikhanouskaya is the puppet of the European will to expand eastward, while Lukashenko is the puppet of the Russian resistance in a capitalist war between two models, the Russian state capitalism and the liberal one promoted by the EU. Historically Belarus has always been near to the middle of these two fires and the USA has never counted a lot there, but nowadays something can change, because the Belarussian uprisings is intertwined with lots of other crises, like the Syrian, the Crimean or the oil ones.

These are the reasons why the USA can use its weight to achieve the best solution possible in Belarus both for its interest and for the Belarussian democracy.

The only role now available for the States is the ref, because, even if Washington has no roots on the Belarussian territory, it must be careful of whatever happens there, as Eastern Europe is becoming a new center of world politics.

Now more than ever, China should not be the only concern US officials must pay attention to.

tire, but I really don’t want to. I’m too active to have nothing to do,” Mossey said. “I’m still worried we’ll go out of business, which I really don’t want to happen. If things don’t start looking up, it’s closing curtains for us.”

Mossey said he will continue to sell his bikes and will offer bicycle repairs by appointment only for the remainder of the pandemic. For more information, email info@rollingorangebikes.com or call 347-5544162.

“I’m actually at the age where I can re-

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Mossey on his custom bike.

September 2020, Page 7

HAMILL (continued from the cover)

whose gas might have flowed thirdhand through plenty of nozzles on Flatbush Avenue, but none ever manned by brother Hugh. When Marty Enright read that story in the Daily News, his eruption could be heard in Riverdale. Thankfully, me dad passed away decades before they re-branded the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

Anyway, one cold day at that Park Slope corner, waiting for traffic to pass on the way for a stroll, I heard voices behind me. I turned and there was a glamorous woman. Shirley MacLaine?

Faye Dunaway? No clue. As she flashed some leg getting into a car, she waved goodbye to a guy grinning ear-to-ear on the steps of that house. He didn’t look like Governor Carey at all.

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A couple of days later we got hit by a blizzard – there were no Sanitation guys in sight – and I got plowed-in for ten days. It seems months before all that snow, Pete had bought Carey’s home. And there he raised his two young daughters for the next 15 years while chronicling New York’s decline and rebirth. And that brief sighting was as close as I ever got to Pete Hamill...

New York needs such a glorious unifying voice now, someone to remind us two or three times a week where we came from. To recall our shared struggles and joys. Whether it’s a Park Slope walk-up apartment crammed with seven hungry kids, or a hallway in Red Hook where a youngster cries watching his older brother bleed-out as collateral damage in the drug-gang wars, or a Pakistani mother beaming with pride watching her daughters perform at the holiday concert at PS 217.

Hopefully, that new voice will be as finely-tuned as Pete’s. Because Pete Hamill cared deeply about his craft.

When he became the Daily News editor, an old hand there remembered how Pete installed a “circus size” popcorn machine. As the writers, copy boys, and other staff gathered ‘round to marvel at his generosity, Pete shouted: “And remember! Never use ‘impact’ as a verb!”

And never call him a memoirist. Next round’s on me, Pete.

When I heard Pete died in Methodist Hospital, fittingly in August, five blocks from the crowded apartment of his youth which he so lovingly brought to life, I rummaged around and found those short stories he wrote for the Sunday Daily News 40 years ago. My God, they still made me tear up. How much

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Page 10 Red Hook Star-Revue

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September 2020

Superfund science advances in Gowanus

I

n its contentious rezoning proposal, the Department of City Planning reimagines Gowanus as an urban Venice—or something vaguely resembling Miami. The sketches in the Waterfront Access Plan the city presented last year show pedestrians crossing bridges with scenic views of the canal. They show children frolicking in waterfront parks shaded by trees and new residential high-rises that shine with glassy, sterile beauty. On the water, rendered in deep blue by the artist, people are kayaking.

One can dip an oar into the Gowanus Canal today, but anybody who does should probably be wary of getting splashed. The canal, today more of a chocolate brown color, contains pathogens such as typhoid, dysentery, e. coli, and gonorrhea. Many of these diseases, like cholera, which has been present in the past, are found in water contaminated by human feces.

There’s a lot of feces in the Gowanus Canal—millions of gallons of combined rainwater runoff and sewage flow into it every year. Over the waterway’s 160-year lifespan, the feces have mixed with the oils and tar produced by the area’s heavy industry and congealed into a toxic sludge known as “black mayo.” In some stretches, the mayo that covers the bottom of the canal is 10 feet thick.

Chemical engineer Christos Tsiamis was tasked with leading the cleanup of this supra-centennial mess in 2010, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the site a Superfund, mandating its remediation.

When he and his colleagues conducted an investigation into how to best go about doing this, Tsiamis explains, they discovered that simply dredging the gunk out wouldn’t suf-

Red Hook Star-Revue

by George Bellows

fice. “So once you remove the black mayonnaise, you’d expect that you would have a clean bottom of the canal, right? But you don’t.” The pollutants have infiltrated the original sediment below, he says. Left untreated, remnants of the black mayo, as well as lighter toxic compounds, will seep back up into the waters in a process known as leaching.

Tsiamis’s team of engineers can’t decontaminate the sediment, but they can trap the pollutants it contains, in place. To do this, they have opted for a relatively new approach called insitu stabilization, in which barges carrying drilling equipment will inject a specially crafted cement mix into the most heavily contaminated areas of the canal—usually those located near erstwhile industrial buildings.

Complicated to explain The mix causes a chemical reaction that prevents pollutants from being released back into the water. Identifying what areas of the waterway needed to be stabilized in the first place could have itself been a trickier job, he adds, had it not been facilitated by another innovative technology: TarGOST. Short for Tar-specific Green Optical Screening Tool, this equipment uses lasers to precisely map underground tar deposits. “It’s complicated to explain,” Tsiamis chuckles.

may become coated with salt crusts, making them even less permeable.

Yet, while heavy contaminants like tar can be held in place by the cement, lighter ones will inevitably seep out. To deal with this, Tsiamis and his team will deploy a layer of absorbent clays and activated carbon on top of the cement-stabilized sediment. This “cap” layer, which will be applied throughout the canal, will keep the water clean for a century, says Tsiamis. Just to make sure, though, the entire sediment cake will be topped with sand and gravel for extra isolation.

With the years-long testing of pioneering approaches and technologies out of the way, the EPA engineers have been gearing up for the actual cleanup. In preparation for the dredging.

Tsiamis and his team have been mobilizing equipment and scouting for offsite facilities to which to send the black mayo once it’s been removed— it is eventually mixed with cement, solidified, and used as cover material in landfills. Dredging is scheduled to

begin mid-November.

To ensure its remediation efforts aren’t for naught, the EPA is also overseeing the construction of two retention tanks by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection that will hold the raw sewage that currently pours directly into the waterway when it rains.

Located at the top and middle of the canal, the tanks will be able to handle 8 and 4 million gallons respectively. In late July, however, Tsiamis informed the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group, a local organization that liaises with the EPA, that the city had requested federal approval for an extension of up to 18 months on the design and construction of the tanks.

The city pointed to budgetary woes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason for its request, but the EPA has asked for additional information before deciding whether to grant the extension. Tsiamis writes in an email that he does not expect a decision will be made for the next several weeks.

In-situ stabilization had never been tested in saltwater. To make sure it would work in the brackish Gowanus Canal, Tsiamis and his team carried out pilot tests in 2015. According to a paper published by the American Society of Civil Engineers last month, stabilization may prove to be even more effective in salty environments. The paper, authored by Tsiamis and his colleagues, found that cement-stabilized layers exposed to the canal’s waters

www.star-revue.com

September 2020, Page 11

Politics: ROSE vs. MALLIOTAKIS

P

residential political campaigns have coat tails which during their elections can pull borderline Congressional and Senate candidates along for the ride. The city’s 11th CD, which is all Staten Island plus hefty pieces of southern Brooklyn, including Bay Ridge, is in play with a hotly contested race. In fact the national Dems and Republicans regard this seat as so important they are putting several million dollars in play to win it.

What with the pandemic’s distortions of normal life plus the prolonged street protests against the police, Summer 2020 metro NYC is definitely not the best of times or places for a contested U.S. Congressional campaign.

Just ask 33-year-old Democrat Rep. Max Rose, who is waging a reelection run for his second term. Or his rival, Republican Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis who’s trying to derail him.

Rose had enough trouble the last time, 2018, when he beat the then incumbent Republican Congressman Daniel Donovan in a hard fought race by edging the incumbent slightly in Staten Island while pulling stronger vote margins in Brooklyn .

At 35, Malliotakis is already a 10 year veteran of the State Assembly. She ran for mayor in 2017, losing big time citywide but getting more than 70% of the Staten Island vote, nearly 3 times as much as the de Blasio .

A Bronze Star decorated Afghan war vet , Rose is a former health service administrator and also worked as

Page 12 Red Hook Star-Revue

by Peter Haley

special assistant to the late Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson.

Recently, Congressman Rose, serving a two-week deployment with the National Guard, worked to set up a 262-bed emergency hospital at South Beach Psychiatric Center on Staten Island.

When it comes to Washington The Congressman is proud to point out in ads how he has delivered for the district. ”We passed the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, cut through years of red tape to get the Seawall project going, took on the Port Authority to save our toll discounts, passed split tolling to take out-of-state trucks off the expressway, secured millions of dollars more for the opioid epidemic and slapped China with sanctions for flooding our streets with fentanyl. We did all of that and more without taking a cent from Corporate PACs or federal lobbyists. “ But he does have significant support from Democratic party funding sources.

Money needed, he says, to battle the $2.4 million in “dark money” from the “most powerful super swamps “ of influence, Republican money, that will be aimed at ending his term of office by 2021.

Meanwhile the beneficiary of this “swamp” media spend surge ostensibly will be Malliotakis, the Staten Island counterpoint of the city’s celebrated AOC, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, the new liberal Dem NYC congresswoman who has already carved out some big space for herself.

Malliotakis aims to do the same, on the flipside, of course.

The daughter of Cuban and Greek immigrants, she is pro-President Trump.

Indeed, she was quick to respond to AOC’s attempted call for boycott of Goya Foods, because its Spanish American CEO gave a White House appearance endorsement of President Trump.

The Assemblywoman called Ocasio-Cortez’s actions “shameful” and “symptomatic of the radical left’s attempts to bully and intimidate those who hold opposing views.” She has since participated in a food drive lead

by Goya canned foods aimed at NYC and New Jersey families.

Max, for his part, has called Nicole shameful for her duplicity in her alleged Trump support, and other issues, launching a NicoletheFraud. com website right after the June primary to bolster his arguments.

Insisting that she’s “everything you hate about politics. All in one person.”

That includes flipflops on her previous support for sanctuary cities and her onetime opposition to Trump.

He also targets her recent State Senate votes aimed at cutting hospital funding and slowing down investigations of nursing homes. Malliotakis staffers argue back that Assembly Democrats likewise voted the same way on both hospital cuts and protecting nursing homes from investigation.

Malliotakis campaign spokesman Rob Ryan insists that Max is quite the flipflopper himself--pointing out his initial decision late last year to vote against

www.star-revue.com

impeachment of President Trump and then his subsequent Yes vote on the final House roll call to impeach, joining the rest of the Dem delegation.

Ryan added, Rose more recently joined a Staten Island march earlier this summer, protesting police brutality, where many protesters called for defunding the police. And then later in July Rose stated his strong support to not defund the police.

Some of this stems from Rose’s selfdescribed role as a “centrist, populist” trying to find the right balance to fit in with voters. Because the 11th C.D. is the most conservative in all of NYC and until Rose’s recent election, the last stand for federal elected Republicans in New York.

Malliotakis seeks to bring the district back in the fold, pointing out to its voters from Bay Ridge to Eltingville that Max Rose is too liberal to represent them.

Likewise, both President Trump and his surrogate, former city mayor Rudolph Guiliani have recently publicly attacked Rose. Such attacks would be a plus for the Democratic candidates in most parts of NYC. Congressional districts. Not necessarily so in the 11th where Trump got 53% of the vote in 2016 (Indeed, it was the only city CD that he won).

Malliotakis, who has strong support from Trump and Giuliani sees law and order as a critical issue. And yes, the NYPD Police Benevolent Association and other local law enforcement

(continued on page 13)

September 2020

Holding up the building POLITICS BY HOWARD GRAUBARD

“I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it.”— An Ortiz Autopsy by Howard Graubard

I

n the 1980s, most, but not all, of Sunset Park was linked in the State Assembly with most of Park Slope and Windsor Terrace in a district which was majority Latino on paper, but where the majority of actual voters were white. Since the 1984 election, it had been represented

by Jim Brennan, a white liberal whose support was based in Park Slope.

In an effort to create a district more likely to elect a Latino, Red Hook and Gowanus were moved into the 51st and only the most Latino blocks of the Slope were left in the AD, along with Brennan’s residence. In an effort to hang on, Brennan formed a slate with a Black civic leader from Red Hook, Bea Byrd, running for female district leader, and a young Latino from Sunset Park running for the male position.

At the last minute, however, Brennan decided to drop out of the 51st race and run in AD 44, newly home to most of the Slope he used to represent, against incumbent Joni Yoswein, who had just won a special election there and had few of the advantages of incumbency. Brennan won.

Meanwhile, Byrd ran for Assembly in the 51st, with the young Latino as her candidate for male leader. But while strong in Red Hook, Byrd did not inherit Brennan’s Slope or Sunset Park support, especially when another candidate from the Brennan faction entered the race.

However, the young Latino running for Male district leader benefited from not only from his own strength in Sunset Park, but from Byrd’s support in Red Hook and the united backing of Brennan’s old support base, especially among white liberals in the district’s Slope portion.

nor did not represent a single block of AD 44. Gold answered, “Yes, but he does represent the 51st and Felix Ortiz is our wholly owned subsidiary.”

It wasn’t really true then, and it certainly became less true as time went on, but this year, white liberal voters essentially told Felix Ortiz what one of the tough old-timers on my block used to tell her kids: “I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it.”

A little over a year later, I was working for Sunset Park’s State Senator, Marty Connor, when I got a call from 44th AD district leader, Jake Gold, asking Connor to buy an ad in his club’s dinner journal. I demurred, noting Con-

Red Hook Star-Revue

For instance, for how long could a pol’s treasurer keep filing in the pol’s name “no activity” campaign finance reports, or no reports at all, year after year, while the campaign committee held fundraisers, and made expenditures, without the pol ever noticing?

This really isn’t the whole truth. Very little of Gowanus and Park Slope remains in the current 51st and the white voters who voted Ortiz out are mostly young voters not around in 94 or the subsequent years, when white liberals were still an essential part of the Ortiz coalition.

Although, it should be added that these newcomers are not necessarily any more left than those who backed Ortiz in the beginning; while many in Brennan’s Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats (CBID) of the '70s and '80s would not have been comfortable with the moniker of Democratic Socialist, it was partially because some of them identified more readily with the CPUSA (sharing, for instance, the CPUSA view that the Equal Rights Amendment was a bourgeois distraction from the true struggle of the working class).

But young white voters were not the whole story. What led a 26-year incumbent to lose to a young upstart, even when two other candidates were splitting what was supposed to be the left-wing voting base?

This problem was amplified by the rumor Ortiz himself had been on the trip to China which was central to the most glaring counts to which Alam pleaded guilty (Alam has been awaiting sentencing for over half a year, as the investigation continues). The problems already apparent in the indictment were amplified by the loss of Alam’s services and political savvy, and the sudden lack of enthusiasm for Ortiz the indictment generated in the district’s large Arab/Muslim community, where Alam’s father is a cleric.

•

A few thoughts: •

That young man was named Felix Ortiz.

The winner of the Assembly race was another young Latino named Javier Nieves. In his first and only term, Nieves made a big blunder, getting involved in a primary against the incumbent City Council member, a Brennan protégé named Joan Griffin McCabe. McCabe hung on, and the next year Brennan’s folks backed Ortiz for the Assembly seat. While the numbers were close in the rest of the district, Nieves could not survive the overwhelming defeat he suffered among white liberals from the Slope and the other, more slowly gentrifying areas of the district. Ortiz was now the Assemblyman, and there he remains, until this year’s end.

treasurer, Maruf “Mitu” Alam, was indicted and pleaded guilty to using Felix’s campaign committee and its credit card as his own personal piggy bank. It is not in my nature to blame the victim, but something smelled to many locals like mierde del toros.

Making Unnecessary enemies. Like Nieves in 93, Ortiz had made a fatal mistake in a City Council primary, in his case by challenging the re-nomination of Carlos Menchaca. This not only infuriated Menchaca’s supporters in the district, but lost him the support of LGBT voters, who had always backed him previously.

By losing to Menchaca, Ortiz also drew a road map for opponents of his weaknesses, which were amplified the next year, when his supporters barely held on to the female district leadership against a Menchaca supporter. The challenge to Menchaca stirred a hornet’s nest, without which the left insurgency might otherwise have left Ortiz alone.

•

Absence. It is an open secret that Ortiz spends more time in Albany than his duties require, and has been cited in the press for taking more $174 a day per diems for overnights than almost any other Assemblymember. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder.

•

Indictment. Last year, Ortiz’s prime local staffer and campaign

•

Bernie. The COVID pandemic and a Federal Court decision resulted in the Presidential primary being held the same day as the primary for local offices.

The enthusiasm of Sanders supporters who might not otherwise have turned out certainly generated votes for the other socialists on the ballot, State Senate victor Jabari Brisport and Assembly victor Marcela Mitaynes.

The DSA. White votes alone were not enough to beat Ortiz, but the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) picked a candidate, Marcela Mitaynes, who had a strong track record as a tenant organizer in a district facing gentrification and tenant harassment by landlords looking to reap gentrifications’ benefits (ironic that Mitaynes’ two bases of support were the gentrifiers and the victims of gentrification).

Further, the DSA planned its work and worked its plan, and when COVID came, they were quick to alter it. The DSA is notorious for not spreading itself thin. They pick a few races, even though many others elsewhere sought its support, and they concentrate their people and money in those races. Effective use of smoke and mirrors may make DSA’s numbers seem larger than they are, but the very policy of their refusing to

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bite off more than they can chew and concentrating their resources where they can count is what makes them such a viable threat; so much so that more established politicians like Bobby Carroll and Mike Gianaris have essentially Finlandized themselves in an effort not to incur DSA’s wrath.

•

Other factors. A) The old Sunset Park Latino establishment of Puerto Ricans and, to a lesser extent, Dominicans, has gradually been displaced by Mexicans, and South and Central Americans, who are finally flexing their political muscles (Menchaca is Mexican; Mitaynes is Peruvian).

B) Though white lefty Katie Walsh’s race for the seat probably cost Mitaynes more votes than it did Ortiz, it should be noted that many less than liberal white Sunset Park old timers, a constituency likely to back Ortiz, knew Katie’s dad Bob, from his days in the leadership of Lutheran Medical Center, and Walsh seems to have done well in the areas in which such old timers are a factor.

Adios Felix.

ROSE RACE (continued from page 12)

unions have endorsed her.

Marching in Blue Lives Matter across the Brooklyn Bridge in July and participating in other “Blue” events in the district, she is out there insisting that liberal political leaders like Rose are endangering us all.

Of course, congressmen have no direct role in local law enforcement except to guide federal funds to the state and such. But they can and do set the tone or add to it. Rose has supported bail reform, the closure of Rikers Island, and other criminal justice reform measures in New York.

Malliotakis claims his actions are out of step with local voters, particularly in light of the recent violence and looting that have accompanied Black Lives Matter protests and the separate but equally troubling increase in shootings this summer in the city.

With the broader Trump vs. former VP Joe Biden presidential campaign as the lead, there certainly won’t be any problems with voter turnout this November.

Will Rose ride a “Blue” wave in addition to his own support from his work in Washington and in the district? Or will Republicans and independents upset over liberal shifts rally to Malliotakis’ side to oust him?

September 2020, Page 13

Postcards from Little Italy

L

ocated in the middle of Grand Street, just one store down from Ferrara’s Pastry Shop, E. Rossi & Company first opened in 1910. It is one of the last remaining authentic stores in Little Italy.

“Initially,” says Ernie Rossi, grandson of the founder, “we sold newspapers and magazines.

Then we began publishing translation books, enabling native Neapolitans to translate their dialect into standard Italian and into English. E. Rossi & Company even provided services to help people write postcards to home. This then led to the publishing and selling of sheet music, mainly of Neapolitan songs.”

Word got around; the store soon became a global center for publishing Neapolitan music. They received compositions in the style of the Canzone Napoletana tradition from South America, The United States and Europe.

“I often say that you could trace the footsteps of the Neapolitan song tradition in the store’s archives,” adds Ernie.

Many who walk by the store do not know its history. Looking at the store from the outside, it’s easy to see why.

The store window is stacked with religious statues, images of saints, and parking signs. One warns: “You Taka My Space, I Breaka You Face.”

Inside the store are more statues and signs, piles of kitchen supplies, Neapolitan espresso makers, molds for cannoli shells, pasta cutters, T-shirts, and other memorabilia. Despite the apparent chaos, Ernie can find anything at a moment’s notice.

I asked Ernie about his early memories of the store.

“Well, I was born and raised in the shop,” he says.

“I would come in to dust the items on the shelves, the saints, the Italian horns, kitchen appliances, earning a dollar a week. After a while, I asked my uncle to give me a raise to one dollar and twentyfive cents, which he did, eventually.”

“Do you remember how the publishing business started?” I ask.

“One of the first songs that my grandfather published was “A cartulina e’ Napule (Postcard from Naples).” It was sung by Gilda Mignonette, but written in New York City by Pasquale Buongiovanni and Guiseppe De Luca in 1927. The song is about a young Neapolitan, now living in America, who receives a postcard from his mother.

“The words are in Neapolitan dialect, not standard Italian. The lyrics were very meaningful to the newly arrived immigrants in this country, reminding them of their native country and the family they abandoned. The song was even successful in Naples, too.”

Red Meat- Live at Jack’s Sugar Shack- Ranchero Records

by Jack Grace If you understand legitimate rootsy country music, listening to the band, Red Meat is satisfying in a way not unlike scratching that hard to reach itch way in the middle of your back. They have a deep groove all their own that only a truly committed band with years of seasoning manages to discover.

The band began in a garage in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1993. Basically no one was playing genuine honky tonk country on the Cali-

Page 14 Red Hook Star-Revue

by Michael Fiorioto “My father told me that he carried Gilda Mignonette’s bags into the theater to sing,” says Ernie.

“One time she was roughed up by the Mafia when they tried to shake her down for payments on the success of “A cartulina e’ Napule.”

“He told me that, even after being roughed up, when she got on stage, she made a hand gesture at the Mafia goons who were now in the audience.”

“Another song that my grandfather published was “Comm’e Bello a Stagione.” It was written by Rodolfo Falvo and Gigi Pisano in 1924.

“Then, in the nineteen sixties, Connie Francis did an album of Italian songs.

Among those songs was Comm’e Bello a Stagione, which became a big hit,” Ernie adds.

The interesting thing, Ernie tells me, is that many of the Neapolitan songs then became American hits, when translated into English.

Songs like “O Solo Mio” became “It’s Now or Never,” a big hit song for Elvis. “I Have But One Heart,” originally “O Marenariello,” was recorded in 1947 by Vic Damone and became a big hit. It was even recorded by Sinatra.

“The songs have beautiful melodies. That’s why they were picked up by American producers,” says Ernie. “The songs have you laughing or crying.

Sometimes both.”

“My father told me that he was about to publish a song that Caruso was going to perform, but then Caruso suddenly died. Sadly, my father did not remember the name of the composition. Maybe when I go through the many cases of music, I’ll find that song.”

“That would be a great discovery,” I say.

Ernie and I often play in the store together, sometimes accompanying each other or performing solo. We often regale the customers – many of whom are from all over the world. He often plays his favorite — “Fa L’Amore Con Te (Making Love With You)” — which he wrote for his wife, Margaret. Years ago, Ernie and I play for Rosetta Papiro and her daughter, visiting from England, who stumble upon the store on their New York City trip. Rosetta is now a dear Facebook friend; we stay in touch.

“Maybe someone famous will turn one of my songs into a hit and I could stay open for a few more years,” he says. “Any entertainer that comes in, I play the song for them.”

This has included Dion and John Sebastian. He’s even performed the song for director Francis Ford Coppola.

“I have a few rooms in storage where I’ve kept the sheet music. I wish that I were able to read and write music and had more time. I would love to go through the archive, one by one. It’s going to take time and money. Between the high storage rent, and the pandemic, we have no revenue coming in. We were already finding it difficult to keep the business going before the pandemic, but the last few months have made it even harder to pay the bills. We’re now reaching out to the public. I even have a Gofundme page.”

“Did you ever play the song for Jimmy Roselli?”

I ask, knowing that Roselli, a contemporary of Sinatra, frequented the store and even sold his own albums there.

I promised my dad I would keep his own father’s name alive, by keeping the store open.

E. Rossi & Company Documentary: http://www. folkstreams.net/film-detail.php?id=174

I am hoping that PBS does a special on the history of the store. Maybe they’ll turn the store into a museum someday.”

Gofundme link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ quotthe-oldest-italian-american-store-1910

Ernie dreams that someone famous will record one of his original songs and turn it into a hit. fornia circuit they were working at the time. It was a sincere approach and Scott Young’s lyrics were bringing a new voice that was observing the world of country while still being inside it. Smelley Kelley’s offbeat and hilarious frontman style blended seamlessly with Jill Olson’s playful, “keeping things under control” style banter. Yes, it was a new kind of country show and they started a movement, but one that would not catch up to them in the 20th century.

This new release was actually recorded March 20, 1999 live at Hollywood, California’s legendary, Jack’s Sugar Shack (It sadly closed within a year of this performance). Wait a minute, this is one show!

33 songs, I mean it takes most bands 5 shows to put together a 12 song live album.

Red Meat delivers a special moment in time on this live album and you can understand why they still

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“He used to come in for one thing,” Ernie says, chuckling “to buy big, heavy frying pans to make his steaks and veal cutlets.”

E.Rossi & Sons 193 Grand St, New York, NY 10013 T: 212- 226-9254 | email:erossicoinc@ gmail.com | social:@erossiconyc

Mike Fiorito’s book, Call Me Guido, was published in 2019 by Ovunque Siamo Press.

Mike Fiorito: www.callmeguido.com wanted to release it 21 years after it’s performance; genuine heartfelt music often ages quite well.

Here’s the thing, if you have never seen Red Meat live and this recording was your first initiation to the whole operation, you may not pick up on all of the nuances that they bring to the table on your very first listen. But if you give the tracks a chance, you will begin to discover the magic that could very well leave you wanting to know more about a curious operation where two of the members had met in Keokuk, Iowa, one hailed from Ottumwa, Iowa and another was from Lorain, Ohio, and yet all ended up forming a band in a more laid back and non- Google devoured, 1993 San Francisco.

These five original members are still together and based in the Bay Area with plans for a new studio album as well. At least some of the world still makes sense.

September 2020

The Beating Heart in The Living Dead

BY KURT GOTTSCHALK From the gruesome to the humane, George Romero’s posthumous novel goes places his movies couldn’t The coronoavirus pandemic of 2020 would have been a goldmine for George Romero, a milder mirror of the world he explored over the course of nine magnificent and gruesome movies. People with COVID-19 are far from animated corpses, of course, but the unwillingness of so many of the noninfected to work together and protect one another strikes at the core morality of Romero’s Living Dead movies.

And there is a morality at play in Romero’s stories. Beginning with his first movie—the 1968 self-financed feature Night of the Living Dead and up through 2009’s Survival of the Dead—Romero told stories that depicted people at their best and their worst, not as victims but as selfless heroes and selfish wretches. That core of humanity is what so many of his imitators got wrong: the movies were never about the monsters, the movies were about the people trying to survive.

Romero—who joined the ranks of the dead in 2017 at the age of 77—was an old hippie. He cared about people, even people who didn’t care about

each other. He believed that people would be OK if they just helped each other out, if they would try to get along, even when confronted by animated corpses trying to eat their flesh.

In his movies, however, people rarely rose above self-interest.

At the time of his death, Romero was working on what would have been— and now is—the 10th installment in his tales of the living dead, and the first to come in the form of a novel.

Daniel Kraus, who co-wrote the novelization of The Shape of Water with director Guillermo del Toro, was asked by Romero’s wife to complete the half-finished manuscript. At 630 pages, it’s far too significant a piece of work to call an “epilogue” or a “coda.”

It is, rather, a worthy installment to a fantastic, multi-arc myth, continuing and extending the humanity of Romero’s best films.

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September 2020, Page 15

(Sorta) Virtually the Same: Exploring UNTITLED Art Online

BY PIOTR PILLARDY

My last in person museum experience was at the MoMa in February.

As the months have passed and the pandemic still rages on, I have been eager to engage with new art in an immersive way. UNTITLED’s (a contemporary art fair organizer) inaugural VR art fair, UNTITLED Art Online (running from July 29th through August 9th), looked like a promising way to engage with works outside of the standard static online format of clicking through pages and images.

Longing for even a semblance of the experience of visiting a museum, art institutions are reinventing how to engage with their audiences.

Methods range from the Met’s AR experiences allowing users to project ancient sculptures in their homes to the Getty Center using the popular Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing to showcase work in a new and accessible context. Many art fairs have followed suite and pivoted to new ways to engage their audi-

Page 16 Red Hook Star-Revue

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ences. Virtual tours have emerged as a popular way for fairs to continue showing artists’ works without the need for in person viewing. The new modality has helped fairs achieve a more global reach but simultaneously somewhat reduced the exclusive nature that is inherent with the prior format.

Touting itself as the “first-ever VR fair,” I was interested to see how the virtual edition of UNTITLED would be handled, having physically attended it last year. To recreate the in-person feel of an art fair, a company called Artland was used to allow users to point and click as a way to stroll through the exhibition hall. I opted for navigating the fair through clicking in a browser, though the option of experiencing the fair through VR equipment (a technology which has yet to see widespread adoption, likely meaning not the way most viewers would see the fair) would have surely made the experience more immersive. In addition to the exhibition space, UNTITLED Art Online also included a schedule of virtual programming, from video conversations with curators, gallery

(continued on page 17)

September 2020

Books by Quinn Review of The Paperback Guy: Words from the Sidewalk by Kurt Brokaw

F

or over thirty years of Sundays, Kurt Brokaw has hauled a table to Broadway (somewhere between Lincoln Center and specialty food store Zabar’s) to set up shop on the sidewalk. He’s there to sell his collection of pulp fiction magazines and vintage paperbacks from the ‘40s and ‘50s. From 8AM-8PM, in his trademark fedora, Brokaw sits on a stool, picks up a magazine, and waits.

The Paperback Guy: Words from the Sidewalk (available from Small Press Distribution, spdbooks. org) is both a fascinating testament to Brokaw’s passion and a concise history of the genre. Brokaw begins by making some important distinctions.

“Pulp fiction magazines and vintage paperbacks are not the same thing,” he explains.

“Pulps” preceded women’s glossy magazines and were printed on cheap, ragged paper (hence the name). Sold for a dime at newsstands, these magazines gave some of the 20th Century’s bestknown writers (including Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ray Bradbury) their start.

Pulps evolved into novels for economic reasons.

“Publishers sensed there was a far wider market for novels at a quarter than for short-story pulp magazines at a dime,” Brokaw writes.

What pulps and paperbacks have in common is their distinctive cover art: paintings that are at once colorful, dramatic, and suggestive. Brokaw notes that “glamour gals of the era were often drawn to resemble Lana Turner.” Color photos highlight a few of his favorites.

Not much brick and mortar competition

Today, Brokaw can sell a title from between $15$1,000. With most of the New York City’s specialty bookstores closed (well before the COVID-19 pandemic), there’s no competition, and exempting bus fare and a cup of coffee, little overhead.

Brokaw doesn’t take credit cards, own a mobile device, or hand out business cards.

As an outside vendor, Brokaw must contend with the weather, the occasional dog lifting a leg against the edge of his table, a bird relieving itself overhead—and trying to find a place to relieve himself.

Most dispiriting of all? On any given day, he might not sell a thing. “There is not a living in this,” Brokaw warns, estimating that he’s ignored by about 95 percent of the people who pass by his table.

PIOTR (continued from page 16) representatives, and artists themselves.

The format succeeded in some ways, such as the fairly easy to navigate video game-like way to traverse the virtual exhibition hall. Users explored the fair through pointing and clicking on where they would like to go, which would then move the view in a somewhat fluid human-like walking pace. For those wishing to quickly navigate to a particular booth, the dollhouse view allowed for getting a birds-eye view of the entire exhibition hall and clicking on the booth one would like to visit and getting transported there instantly.

Certain pieces worked especially well in the virtual immersive format, namely Tsedaye Makonnen’s sculptures Senait & Nahom | The Peacemaker & The Comforter (2019), a series of seven engraved mirrored towers illuminated through internal lighting elements. The pieces explore themes related to migration and transnational Black

Red Hook Star-Revue

While the income that does trickle in allows Brokaw “to put a few steaks in the freezer,” he’s not in it for the money. A former ad executive, a professor at the New School for thirty-three years, and a teacher of film (especially film noir) at the 92Y (where I learned from him how “literature migrates onto the screen”), Brokaw continues to work as senior film critic for The Independent. Part of “a small band of rabid collectors,” Brokaw’s Sunday gig is a passion project. He finds that “the attraction of curating one table for 8 million people is irresistible.”

Born in Iowa in 1938, Brokaw recounts learning to read from pulps while his dad shot pool, building his collection as a teenager from “spinner racks in Rexall pharmacies and cigar stores.”

These stories of “tough guys and loose gals with too much past and too little future” seem to have deeply impressed themselves upon his sensibility.

He’s become his own kind of New York character, one with a clear idea of who he is and what he values—along with what his rights are.

“People think bookselling is a First Amendment right. It’s not,” Brokaw writes. He points out that while anyone is free to publish something, the method by which it can be sold is determined by local government.

An obscure clause to an 1893 law “originally designed to protect Jewish immigrants who peddled chapbooks out of pushcarts in the hurly-burly of Orchard Street for a penny a copy” allows Brokaw to sell written matter without a license (although he collects and pays New York sales tax). A surprising ally? The late mayor Ed Koch (his grandfather had been a peddler), who assured Brokaw that “as long as I’m in office, you’ll never have a problem selling your books.”

Also surprisingly, Brokaw writes that 95 percent of New York City’s sidewalks can still be used for this purpose of selling written material. Vendors can occupy a 4’ x 8’ space as long as it’s ten feet from a residential door, twenty feet from a business entrance.

While Brokaw hawks “a little bit of everything— classics, hard-boiled crime, science fiction and fantasy, romances, westerns, sports, gay/lesbian, African American literature, film tie-ins, warrelated fiction and nonfiction, children’s titles”— the main thing he seems interested in peddling is stories. “Sharing the stories is a great part of the

experiences, with each of the individual cubes of the sculptures memorializing the name of a Black woman whose life was cut short due to institutionalized racism. As a powerful and meditative work reminiscent of a candle lit vigil, which is as relevant now as it was in 2019, the sculptures read in a life-like way within the virtual space, allowing the viewer to be immersed in the reflective nature of the pieces.

Other works in the fair which deviated from the standard format of canvas on a wall included Vik Muniz’s Verso (Back of the Painting): Ilha de Itamaraca (2016). The art object exists as an interesting study in subverting reality through an extracting detailed recreation of the back of Frans Post’s seventeenth century painting of the same name. In the virtual gallery booth, the painting is displayed on the floor, leaning against the wall in stark contrast to the mainly traditionally displayed paintings around it. This deliberate recreation of the curatorial details for this work helped

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value of an object,” Brokaw writes. Encounters with famous customers include Phillip Roth, the Beat writer Gregory Corso, Whoopi Goldberg, Madonna (“not once, but twice”), and a friend of Marin Scorcese who was shopping for a birthday gift for the director. Brokaw remembers little of meeting singer Rod Stewart, blinded as he was by the gorgeous woman on his arm.

Over the years, Brokaw’s witnessed changing tastes (less interest in sci-fi, more in queer pulp), but he reflects little on the greater changes to the city itself. Reading The Paperback Guy, you get the feeling Brokaw inhabits a self-created world, full of mystery and romance. Brokaw admits to imagining himself as a character in a story—no doubt populated by tough broads, hard-nosed detectives, smoky rooms, and Remington typewriters.

Brokaw, now in his eighties, has come to think of selling off his collection as a “going-of-life” passage.

He seems equally resigned to reluctantly committing his story to paper (calling it his “gasbag narrative”). He only did so at the urging of a devoted customer—now his publisher, David Applefield.

Writing the book’s introduction, Applefield praises the kind of kismet that comes with secondhand shopping. “With used books, you never know what you’ll find. The joy goes deeper too in that you do not even know what you are looking for.”

It’s Applefield who points out that while these stories might be new to Brokaw’s customers, they are “stories that have been told countless times and whose pages have been turned silently in the past by anonymous fingers.” Perhaps those fingers continue to point and beckon, leading one to pick up a story that has a special resonance.

Brokaw is the middleman. But he isn’t just connecting authors and readers. He’s fostering a singular experience of accessing a unique past. This is a limited time offer. If these past few months have illustrated anything, it’s how quickly a way of life can vanish.

Should you find yourself on the Upper West Side some Sunday, look for the man in the hat sitting beside his table of books. There might just be a title that speaks to you. As Applefield sees it, “literature’s mission is completed via the courage and patience of the bookseller.”

Michael Quinn reviews a book every month for the Star-Revue

further the immersive quality of the fair overall.

However, UNTITLED Art Online fell short in some respects, especially when the illusion behind the fair was disrupted through issues of scale and other inconsistencies. Areas such as the lounge were not to scale and allowed the visitor to walk atop them like a rampaging giant. Additionally, given the virtual nature of the fair, the exclusion of any multimedia works such as video or virtual works that took advantage of the VR setting (which do exist), was surprising and seemed like a missed opportunity by the galleries. Overall, the format worked well and helped breathe life into touring art fairs and exhibitions online during challenging times but fell flat of truly leveraging the VR itself to create a more unique art fair experience. On a personal note, even though the fair itself wasn’t revolutionary, it did help recreate some sense of normalcy of pre-pandemic life in a virtual setting.

September 2020, Page 17

Jazz by Grella Tight Like WAP Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, fuckin’ with some wet-ass pussy Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass pussy Give me everything you got for this wet-ass pussy “WAP,” it’s the song of the summer, even though summer was cancelled by the coronavirus. So, not much of a summer, and truth be told not much of a song. Once you get past the NSFW lyrics and video, the production sounds pretty rote, phonedin, the beats aren’t anything more than the kind of loop you can pull out of Garageband, and even the performances aren’t that sharp. The song sounds like Cardi B., Megan Thee stallion and whoever else was in the recording booth realized that lines like, “Hop on top, I wanna ride / I do a kegel while it's inside” were all they needed to make a hit. And they weren’t wrong. As Ian Faith, manager of the notorious band Spinal Tap, said, “sex sells.”

Cue the moral panic, the concerned adults of America, the desperately pathetic heavily subsidized dweebish scolds like Ben Shapiro. If Trump gets reelected, I’d put money down on some selfidentified liberal in The New Yorker or The New York Times typing out 800 words of pap about how “WAP” is the reason why Trump won. To that notion, as a jazz player/lover/writer, I say (if my editor permits) fuck that shit.

Human beings have been having sex for a long time, it’s why we’re all here. And humans have been making music for a long time too, two great tastes that go great together. It is a matter of historical record that there’s been music about sex (and drinking and all the other fun stuff) since there’s been any kind of civilization, if not before. And jazz, believe it or not, has been part of that great tradition.

Why the possible disbelief? Ever since the neo-traditionalist revival pioneered by Wynton Marsalis, jazz has had a lot of its edges sanded down. With moneyed institutions like Lincoln Center behind it, there’s been a need to make it safe for a broader

public, which in America pretty much means a white, middle-class audience.

At the roots, jazz was embedded in American popular culture, and even back to the 19th century there were songs about getting high and getting down. In 1928, when Louis Armstrong and Fatha Hines were discussing if it’s “tight like this,” they were talking about something pretty specific, something like that bowl that Bessie Smith sang needed some sugar down in it. Early in the 20th century, jazz was a staple in the saloons and whorehouses of Storyville, and there’s a good argument that before the word referred to music, “jazz” was a term for making the beast with two backs.

Jazz has been respectable for a long time now, and along with that it’s been, for decades now, a music very much about itself—I hear again and again music that is about how jazz is played, how the rhythms work and how the phrasing is supposed to go. I read titles that refer to topical political and social issues (though the music captures none of this in sound). This is all sincere and extremely well done. But I don’t hear a lot of rejection of this bourgeois society that has put jazz on a pedestal, don’t hear a lot of what’s happening on the streets of the city. At least we have Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion for that. — I will admit upfront that I was not a big Pete Hamill fan. For everything I enjoyed from him on boxing and comic strips, there were things that were off-putting, particularly a New York City, Irish-American sentimentality and parochialism that instinct tells me is phony at best and manipulative at worst. His hysteria about the Central Park Five, which I read in real time, was an upsetting window into how people who imagined themselves socially liberal were so attached to a materialist notion of order that it made it easy for them to excuse their own racism. And as I’m an apostate on Bob Dylan (I’d rather listen to Self Portrait or Time Out of Mind than the Basement Tapes, and since he started recording standards he’s just been phoning it in and cashing checks), the Blood On the Tracks liner notes never meant much to me.

But, in 1978, Columbia released Dexter Gordon’s Manhattan Symphonie. I probably first heard it the next year, when I switched from flute to baritone saxophone and my best friends in the high school band and I were getting into jazz. I don’t think any recording, not Bitches Brew, not the New York Philharmonic playing Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, not anything by Cecil Taylor or Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elvis Costello or Charles Ives, James Brown or Gustav Mahler, has had such an effect on me. Manhattan Symphonie made me want to play jazz, Gordon’s buttery, masculine sound was one I tried to emulate for far too long, his solos on “As Time Goes By” and “Body And Soul” and “Tanya” made such sense to me that I could hear fucking words in each note. He made jazz, for me, not just something that sounded great but was logical, that made sense and also made sense out of my own confused adolescent thinking. And Pete Hamill wrote the liner notes for this album, and I read them each time I put it on, which was dozens of times. So Hamill left a mark in me that will continue to last as long as I live, one that, because it began a path that led me to, in this moment, write these words that you are now reading, is passed on to you. Thank you, reader, and here’s to you Pete.

George Grella writes a monthly jazz column for the Star-Revue

"I don’t hear a lot of rejection of this bourgeois society that has put jazz on a pedestal, don’t hear a lot of what’s happening on the streets of the city. At least we have Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion for that.

THE LIVING DEAD (continued from page 15) they turn, as the craving for flesh sets in. They’re not so much dead, it seems, as dormant, and then awake with an unspeakable appetite. They’re not the enemy, there are no enemies, and everyone’s a threat. In The Living Dead, it’s no longer us vs. them because, more so than in any of the nine movies, any one of us at any point could become one of them.

The mysterious crisis brings out the worst in people, not just in desperation but in blind efforts to blame. Racist and anti-immigrant attitudes define theories informed by intentionally dumbed down broadcast news reports in scenes that feel all too familiar. The short chapters fly by. Some pages seem brittle with suspense, others practically dripping with gore. But what propels the narrative isn’t the flesh, it’s the heart.

400 Lonely Things can make for a perfect score for your reading. Nigths and Profecy (released on cassette and download) is deeply enmeshed in the sound and spirit of Romero’s undead. Both projects have considerable histories with zombieinfluenced audio works, often incorporating processed samples from Romero’s films. They share an affinity for dark, industrial ambience, bringing to mind the longstanding and astoundingly aptly named Illusion of Safety. Each has an extensive Bandcamp library, and the new album is available for streaming as well. Nigths and Profecy brings out the bleak best in both and is chilling in both senses of the word: it provides a dark background for reading or other nefarious activities, but might bite you if you get too close.

Kurt Gottschalk is the regular music critic for the StarRevue. His review of the new Bob Dylan album was featured on the cover of last month's paper.

Unlike movies, novels don’t come with soundtracks. In this case, however, a recent split release by Fossill Aerosol Mining Project and

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September 2020

Feels Good Man Sings the Ballad of Pepe to Save American Democracy

I

n Donald Trump’s America, there’s no wall between reality and screenland. When he lazily entered the 2016 presidential race on a golden Trump Tower escalator, it resembled a dress rehearsal for an SNL parody of The Apprentice. Scenes of Black Lives Matter protestors gassed by riot police and refugee children at the southern border packed into chain-link cages could have been lifted from a Google search for “third-world dictatorship human rights abuses.”

And the look, tone, and trolling of alt-right covens (and Trump rallies) can be indistinguishable from social media meme culture.

That fissure between the real and the virtual has IRL consequences. Consider the mold-spread of QAnon. It went viral on the online message board 4chan and quickly became a cause taken up by cops, troops, high-profile felons like Michael Flynn and Republican congressional candidates Laura Loomer and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

That is despite its core ethos being predicated on violently stopping a cabal of child-sex-trafficking globalist elites. Its adherents — many of them armed and outfitted for American jihad — believe in QAnon so fanatically that the FBI has labeled it a domestic terror threat.

Law enforcement concern and media hyperventilation means we must take it seriously, too. But is it a cult of apocalyptic conspiracists, or just run-ofthe-mill social media trolling that has taken on an extreme life of its own in the real world? Why not both? For a beacon to help illuminate this moment, we need to look to Pepe the frog, the party-dude comix amphibian that became a social media meme that was co-opted as a symbol of hate and violence by white nationalists during the 2016 election.

Pepe’s improbable journey — and his creator’s quest to reclaim the character — is the arc of Feels Good Man, a documentary directed by Arthur Jones that will be released September 4. By turns DayGlo optimistic and pitch-black despairing, the 2020 Sundance Festival Special Jury Awardwinning film is an expertly crafted highwire act of nonfiction storytelling. But it’s also an act of media literacy, Jones says, meant to make sense of the often-obtuse forces slipping out of the internet to alter and imperil America.

“This story is really about how the aesthetics of trolling moved off of these fringe message boards into mainstream politics, and that’s not going away,” Jones tells the Star-Revue.

That sounds out of scale when talking about an illustrated frog who likes urinating with his pants around his ankles. But as the film establishes, we should expect nothing less from Pepe, who was created by Matt Furie as one of the four anthropomorphic characters in his 2005 comic book Boy’s Club. (He’s named Pepe because it sounded like “pee pee,” Furie has said.) “It’s just been kind of a slow-drip of frogs throughout my entire life,” Furie says in the film. “And then eventually it was Pepe. It’s a happy little frog.”

Furie, whose vibe is a mix of countercultural Bob Ross and stoner Maurice Sendak, eventually shared Boy’s Club pages on MySpace. One frame, of Pepe explaining it “feels good man” to pee with his pants down, became a reaction meme for weightlifters bragging about epic sessions in the gym. But Pepe quickly migrated to 4chan, where feels-good-Pepe became a superstar. “To not post Pepe would be strange,” 4channer Pizza says in the film, “because it’s the meme.”

A quick aside about memes. Richard Dawkins coined the term in his book The Selfish Gene.

Biology is ruled by genes, he wrote, but culture is shaped by memes, information copied from person to person that gives shape to our world, be

Red Hook Star-Revue

by Dante A. Ciampaglia it furniture or clothes or personal grooming. In the same way, internet discourse is shaped by memes, be it the dog-in-a-trilby smiling as he sits among a burning house while exclaiming, “This is fine,” or the gif of a guy blinking rapidly in disbelief, or of a smiling frog saying, “Feels good man.”

Most memes don’t metastasize into avatars of hate, let alone slip the bonds of the virtual and escape into reality. But Pepe did. On 4chan, a space where users, mostly young dudes, troll each other in the most vile, vicious ways, many created Pepe memes that expressed rancid anti-semitism, racism, misogyny, and calls to violence, typically couched in a perverted irony. But there were real-world implications, such as when Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others in 2014 and copycats took to 4chan to initiate a so-called “Beta Rebellion” with images of Pepe. “Back then it was just the most offensive thing you could do, but now it reads as a weird prologue to when the irony kind of melted away,” artist and writer Dale Beran says in the film.

When Trump entered the 2016 race, 4channers adopted him as their candidate and created proTrump Pepes that were, naturally, often vicious, vile, and racist. Alex Jones talked up Pepe. So did Richard Spencer. And the Trump campaign noticed the Pepe love — and embraced it. Pepe, in effect, became Trump’s “invisible running mate,” occultist and scholar John Michael Greer says in the film. “A magical force had entered the race,” in the form of Pepe, which became the way likeminded people focused their energy to get Trump elected. “That’s a basic tool of meme magic.”

Yes, meme magic.

The Pepe story is full of strange turns (there’s even a cryptocurrency-based “Rare Pepe Economy,” that’s too convoluted to go into), and Feels Good Man follows as many of them as it can. But it was a balancing act, as producer and co-writer Giorgio Angelini tells the Star-Revue. “How do we tell this story in all of its beautiful complexity without the entire narrative coming apart,” he says. One strategy was dubbed the thin green line. “The idea was that Matt and his sweetness was an important inoculation point anytime we would veer off into the darkness.”

As the alt-right mangles Pepe, Furie struggles to deal with the Pepe phenomenon manifesting in a culture he doesn’t quite understand. “Matt’s world is analog,” Jones says. Still, he tries to reclaim his creation from the racists. He creates a #savepepe campaign to generate new, positive Pepe memes.

He sues Infowars, alt-right authors, and others for copyright infringement. He even kills Pepe off.

But at every turn, Furie’s actions further embolden those who see Pepe as “the symbol of our culture,” as 4channer Mills puts it in the film. Eventually, Furie decides the only way to deal with all of it — and the toll it takes on him and his family — is “to go hardcore happy.”

Despite the dark place it goes, Feels Good Man does that, too. Its ability to manage the Pepe story, in all its wild tonal shifts and whiplash-veering into absurdity, sets it apart from other documentaries attempting to deal with American political lunacy. This isn’t a Michael Moore echo chamber, a Fahrenheit Pepe that confirms like-minded viewers’ self-righteousness. Rather, Feels Good Man is the best kind of nonfiction — thorough and fastidi-

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ously researched and sourced, but with a POV that gives it shape, purpose, and direction.

“I felt like I understood something about the meme or the larger story that others didn’t because I knew Matt and I had been a fan of the comic book,” Jones says. “Whenever I would see Pepe I would always have this feeling that Pepe was lost.”

But the film is also exemplary pop history and criticism. The internet is ephemeral and too often an arena of cynical commercialization and consumption. That makes it easy to dismiss something like Pepe, or memes generally, as not worth the effort.

But Jones and Angelini reject that. Feels Good Man rescues Pepe from the culture’s short-term memory cache to place Pepe within a larger context.

Furie is neither crass nor cynical, and Pepe wasn’t created in that spirit. But the character, now listed on the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbol Database, has been perverted by an ideology that manipulated the digital ecosystem and economy in ways that should alarm everyone.

“Professional racists and white supremacists have always used pop culture icons and movements within youth culture to ingratiate themselves with the masses,” Angelini says. “It happened with punk rock, which was originally a leftist anti-establishment movement [co-opted by] David Duke in his strategy to blend white supremacist ideas into the mainstream, and Pepe is an offshoot of that.”

The Pepe story matters — not just for Furie, but for America. At the end of the film, Greer, the occultist, says “Pepe the frog is an omen. We need to listen because it’s not going to go away until we hear the message it has to say.” That seems a bit much, but he’s not entirely wrong. The danger inherent in Pepe’s odyssey has evolved and learned from the experience in 2016, as QAnon and the election victories of Loomer and Green demonstrate. And that makes hearing Pepe’s message necessary, more so now than even at the height of his infamy.

“The hope,” Jones says, “is that people will see the film and be able to recognize how these badfaith actors are able to cut through the attention economy in a very particular way and realize this is something we have to push back against to save our democracy. Not to sound too grandiose.”

Pull out? For a beacon to help illuminate this moment, we need to look to Pepe the frog, the party-dude comix amphibian that became a social media meme that was co-opted as a symbol of hate and violence by white nationalists during the 2016 election.

September 2020, Page 19

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