Red Hook Star-Revue, April 2023

"Trapped pigeons. I wish I knew they were trapped. I found out after construction workers removed all wooden planks, for me to reveal few dead pigeons laying on the edge of the hole they call home. We all think they would fly away. But that isn't the case. I will tell you why? There's a night working crew with whom I spoke today. They are the ones responsible for blocking off all the holes. They are indiscriminately enclosing babies and adults pigeons inside the holes they live and nest without taking any precaution. The pigeons do not leave. They are all asleep or mother pigeon don't want to leave the nest.

The workers block off the holes during the night. The pigeons are being ambushed while nesting, asleep or don't want to fly in the dark. But I am also convinced there's animal cruelty and hatred towards pigeons within the workers themselves. I was cussed out. And hear them saying nasty things to the pigeons as well. I have come up with certain solutions of my own. That includes electrical equipment, diagram, and time routine of the construction site. But I do not have sufficient people as I am the only one doing so many tasks alone. But with that being said! I am determined! No matter the circumstances. This is why I have a working system of my own. To counter the situation and prevent babies from being trapped, from starving to death."

From Kelvin Diaz's Instagram Account

One Man’s Mission to Protect the Pigeons

by Erin DeGregorio

The Gowanus Expressway may not be a part of everyone’s commutes, but, for Kelvin Diaz, walking adjacent to and underneath it is part of his routine. The Sunset Park resident walks approximately three miles between 65th Street and 12th Street under the expressway (a total of six miles), “patrolling the area intensively” for pigeons in need of help.

“I’m a bird owner myself and I see pigeons no differently than my own,” said Diaz, who estimates that he has helped rescue at least 200 pigeons over the past two years. “They are just like any other bird. That’s my motivation.” However, when he noticed state-issued construction projects consisting of painting and steel repairs beginning to take place underneath the steel viaduct last summer, Diaz realized a plan needed to be hatched to effectively rescue any pigeons that may be impacted by the changing landscape. Online records indicate that construction is expected to be completed December 2025.

The urgency, Diaz points out, is that portions of the viaduct have holes, or openings where pigeons tend to perch, sleep, and sometimes nest, that have been covered with either construction tarp or pieces of wood.

“As soon as the construction started in August [2022], I started shadowing the company and bought equipment and personal tool gears to protect myself, because [I knew] I’d be in an environment where you’d need to be careful not to injure yourself,” said Diaz, who has carried and climbed a ladder at his own risk to rescue any pigeons that could be saved and possibly relocated. “No trespassing” signs have since been posted near construction areas.

Although he estimates that he has freed more than 100 adult pigeons and fledglings since December 2022, Diaz has found trapped pigeons in different situations during his rounds: scared and alone, huddled together in small groups, starving, injured, or even suffocated. “People really don’t have any idea,” he said. “But, with that being said, I am determined, no matter the circumstances.”

Diaz says he has contacted construction workers regarding this life-and-death situation, hoping to prevent future tragedies by raising awareness of Brooklyn’s avian neighbors. He—along with Valerie Neck, a volunteer at New York City Pigeon Rescue Central (a group dedicated to helping individual urban feral pigeons in New York City)—have also been documenting the reality that is being faced by pigeons underneath the steel viaduct.

“Kelvin is the complete hero of the construction project in the Gowanus [area],” Neck told RHSR. Neck is a documentary filmmaker and mental health therapist who has been involved with rescues for almost two years and has filmed with Diaz at least three times. “His unwavering dedication and vocal advocacy is unparalleled.”

A petition to prevent pigeon deaths also circulated last month on change.org, racking up signatures from 714 individuals in less than a month (as of March 29). Jairus James, the petition’s author who has previously helped Diaz remotely, outlines the difficulties associated with pigeon rescues and why this issue is important.

“Pigeons have been a part of our com-

(continued on page 13)

Celebrating Community

Non-profit helps local schools

by Nathan Weiser

(718) 624-5568

www.star-revue.com

george@redhookstar.com

Editor & PublishEr

George Fiala

NEws Nathan Weiser

Brian Abate

Katherine Rivard

FEaturEs Erin DeGregorio

CulturE Roderick Thomas

ovErsEas maN Dario Muccilli

iNsights Joe Enright

roCk Kurt Gottschalk

Jazz George Grella

Film Dante A. Ciampaglia

books Michael Quinn

CartooNs Marc Jackson

Sophie Furman

wEbmastEr Tariq Manon

kids Editor Marie Hueston

dEsigN George Fiala

ads

Liz Galvin

Merry Band of Contributors

Michael Cobb

Michael Fiorito

Jack Grace

Carly Quellman

Nino Pantano

Oona Milliken

email gbrook@pipeline.com

The Beam Center, with offices at 60 Sackett Street, works to empower youth by having them build spectacular projects in an intensely supportive and collaborative environment.

Beam provides enrichment programming to schools in a variety of settings, including after school programs, street fairs and day camps. In Red Hook they are at PS 676.

Joshaun Jakes, who grew up in Bushwick, attended Beam Camp City. There he learned fundamental skills including building.

Next he became a Project Leader. He connected with the Beam Center because he was part of the Summer Youth Employment Program.

“They just kind of threw me here because I was a last minute addition but it turned out for the best,” Jakes said. According to executive director Brian Cohen, there are a variety of ways that students benefit and develop from being Project Leaders.

“To articulate a set of instructions and to create an environment where they can be safe and to create a rapport with them,” Cohen said. “And we want them to learn how to make a plan because they have a whole set of logistics that they have to manage in order to do that work with that younger student.”

“The real lessons happen in the schools because you do not get good at anything until you are doing it for real,” Cohen said.

As Project Leaer, Jakes worked on a number of projects.

One was to make a notebook from scratch where they knitted the notebook and stitched it together.

Another was making bluetooth speakers. They had a connector and built the circuit chain from scratch in addition to making the speakers.

Beam will often offer students the opportunity to be part of one of their apprenticeship program.

In the apprenticeship stage kids will learn the basics of how to use tools. Also, they learn how to show up profes-

sionally and learn the basics of teaching because as Project Leaders, they are teachers.

If they thrive as a Project Leader, Beam will give them a staff position, primarily in the summer.

Before he became a Project Leader, Jakes was shy and didn’t talk much. This helped him out of his shell.

“I just let everything go,” Jakes added. “I enjoy teaching. That’s what I have learned. Another thing this has taught me is to speak up and be more comfortable speaking in public.”

Beam Center originated in 2005 when Cohen and his partner started a sleepaway camp in New Hampshire. What Beam Center is doing now is based on work that was done there.

“At the camp, we commissioned large scale projects and then young people built the projects,” Cohen said. “We did that for seven years and then decided that it might be an interesting model to bring to New York City.”

Their first location in NYC was on Pioneer Street at the studio of Chico MacMurtrie.

Their next location was in the basement of the Invisible Dog in Cobble Hill. The approach started out with figuring out the best way to work with the most young people, which consisted of programs where people paid for workshops with their children.

“When we discovered what it was like to work directly with public schools

that changed everything for us because we went from taking tuition money from families to working with the Department of Education to work with young people of all kinds whether they were families that could afford to pay or not,” Cohen said.

Many of the people involved in Beam Center get paid for what they learn and the work they do.

They came to the Sackett Street location back in 2015.

For this year, there is a sound theme for the Project Leaders. The teenagers work in small groups to decide the overall theme that they will have.

Lizzie Hurst, who is the leader of the Project Leaders, will work alongside the Project Leaders to give guidance on how to develop their idea.

“Once they come up with their design, then they have to prototype the actual project,” Cohen said. “That means playing with materials and tools and they are constantly demonstrating for each other, and for Lizzie, about how they are doing.”

Beam has a partnership with PS 676 that is not related to Project Leaders. The project designer will work with teachers at that school to help them design projects that students will make. In this school year, Beam assisted with PS 676’s second through sixth grade. Sixth grade students measured the amount of energy that wind turbines produce.

Project Leaders at the Beam headquarters, 60 Sackett Street. (Weiser photo)

The importance of refreshing

Avery long time ago I tried to keep my marriage going with counseling. The main effect of that was to make me stop talking to her during the week, saving it all up for the weekly session.

I'm not saying this was a good thing, what I am saying is that this monthly column reminds me of it in a funny way. I get ideas about my next column every day. For example, this past month I might have written about the new Civic Association, and how I hope it's success will emulate that of the former association run by John McGettrick.

Or I might have written about how great it has been to notice the return of the in-person community meeting. During one week last month, I attended a transportation meeting at the Miccio Center (the community building for the Red Hook Houses), a farewell meeting at the Red Hook Library (farewell for possibly two years while they make it look as fancy as the nearby ballfields that just recently reopened); and finally, not exactly a meeting, but a St. Patrick's Day celebration at the Van Brunt Street VFW featuring some delicious corned beef and cabbage (with good rye bread and mustard). The following week I saw many of the same people at PS 32 at a public meeting for the mandated community group overseeing the Gowanus rezoning.

Or I could have spoke about another in-person meeting I had with mem-

by George Fiala

bers of the Red Hook Mutual Aid, where I learned about their spirit of volunteerism. However, that will wait until next month as reporter Brian is preparing a story.

Or how it is that the 76th Precinct celebrated the retirement of their commanding officer right after we published an interview with him that never mentioned an upcoming retirement. In addition to lots of other foods, they prepared a donut display which reinforced the cop stereotype that we in fact also reinforced in last month's issue. (I helped myself to two, but don't tell my girlfriend who thinks I should stick to broccoli.)

Or maybe I would have taken a less local view and written about the ongoing spread of dictators around the world, or the splintering of the world into multiple poles, reminiscent either of WW II or the Cold War, depending on the depth of one's pessimism. Or maybe something about the Democratic lawyer I have learned over the years to hate, Frank Carone, leaving the mayoral administration after a year in order to make some REALLY big money for himself.

But what generally happens is that I leave it to game time—the time I actually write this ends up always right before going to press. That's when I see what's on my mind which I will save for posterity.

And this month's it's about the newspaper industry event in Albany that I just attended. The Star-Revue has been a member of the NY State Press

Association since 2011. In another life I attended conventions in the 1970's and 80's as General Manager of the Villager newspaper (Greenwich Village), and the Phoenix (covering Brownstone Brooklyn including Red Hook).

When I was a kid, I loved going to Asbury Park with my parents and sister for the medical convention my doctor dad would go to. I loved all the free samples they gave out at the booths, little gadgets like collapsible plastic cups with the name of a tranquilizer on it, and other cheap promos that the pharmaceutical industry has always loved giving out. The Asbury Park Convention Center had walls and walls of pinball machines that I still love to play. The other huge

huge perk for members of a sometimes underpaid industry.

The Star-Revue has gotten awards just about every year since 2011 and this year we ended up with another—an Honorable Mention for a story that Erin DeGregorio wrote a year ago, "New Votive Ship Sails Aloft in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church." It just so happens that Erin wrote a great story this month, which I put on the cover and you can be sure I'll be entering her pigeon story next year.

So yes, the contest is a big draw. It's great to see talent rewarded.

draw was a boardwalk that was much bigger than Coney Island's.

The newspaper industry's convention is held in the center of the state, either Albany or Saratoga Springs. Publishing awards are a big draw. The larger media groups bring many of their staff to get the convention experience. Winning an award is a

Cartoon Section with Marc and Sophie

But the biggest benefit to me is the renewal one gets from being reminded that they are part of something bigger. At the seminars and in get-together's at the bar and the Friday night party, you are reminded that you are not alone. That people all over the state are doing what you are doing—which is being part of a noble profession. Just like my dad loved being part of the grand history of medicine, and loved being able to help people with the most important thing we have, our health, my newspaper peers and myself are all reminded why we do what we do.

Which is of course to help explain the world in which we all live–in the case of community papers like the Star-Revue, the neighborhood we live in. Freedom of Speech is in the very first amendment to the Constitution—and a free press defines the USA.

LIBRARIES CLOSING

by brian abate

The Red Hook Public Library (7 Wolcott St.) closed this March as the building will undergo major renovations. The library is expected to reopen in early 2025.

“We’re going to be bigger, safer, more energy efficient, and serve the community better,” said managing librarian, Joyce Kowpak.

In the meantime, there will be in-person programs and services. There will be a Bookmobile (a truck with thousands of books) and a Techmobile with computers and laptops on Tuesdays outside of the library.

Additionally, Comics with Mr. Nick will take place at Pioneer Works (159 Pioneer St.) on Mondays at 3 pm starting on April 3. Storytime will take place at Red Hook Initiative (767 Hicks St.) on Wednesdays at 11 am starting April

5. Resume and Cover Letter Writing assistance will also begin on April 5 and will take place on Wednesdays from noon to 3 pm at RHI.

There will be a Friends of Red Hook Library meeting over Zoom on Tuesday, April 25. To RSVP for the Zoom link, go to bklynlibrary.org/calendar/friends-red-hook-library-virtual-20230425.

In addition to Red Hook, the Carroll Gardens Library is also going to be closed for renovations starting soon.

“A specific date has not been set for closure, but we anticipate it will be sometime this summer,” said Damaris Olivo, Brooklyn Public Library director of communications.

In 2016, a $350,000 project to add a new teen space was voted on by local residents as part of participatory budgeting. As part of the upcoming renovation, the library will get the new and improved teen room. However, the library is expected to be closed for well over one year and that doesn’t take into account potential delays.

Plans for a Bookmobile, Techmobile etc., at the Carroll Gardens Library are not set yet. However, both Kowpak and Olivo promise monthly updates on the progress at the libraries throughout this long process.

NYC PARKS ISSUES REQUEST FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST TO ACTIVATE ANCHORAGE PLAZA DOWNTOWN

NYC Parks announced that a Request for Expressions of Interest (“RFEI”) has been issued for the temporary and seasonal implementation of programming, amenities, events, and development at Anchorage Plaza in Downtown Brooklyn.

Anchorage Plaza is surrounded by a busy and dynamic section of the Brooklyn Bridge, bound by Old Fulton, Front, York, Washington, and Prospect Streets with views of the Manhattan skyline. It is located between the vibrant and frequently visited historic districts of Brooklyn Heights and Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass (“DUMBO”) neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

“Formerly a parking lot and construction staging area, Anchorage Plaza in Downtown Brooklyn has tremendous potential as a public space with seasonal amenities,” said NYC Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue. “With its stunning views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline, Anchorage Plaza is a prime location for creative activations.”

Prior to 2009, a portion of the plaza was a parking concession. In 2009, the City of New York’s Department of Transportation (“DOT”) started to occupy the site to inspect and make needed repairs to the Brooklyn Bridge. As DOT decreases their footprint at the site, Parks is seeking public input for a creative activation of this space for temporary and seasonal uses.

If upon review by Parks, a new concession idea appears to be feasible, appropriate and advantageous to the City, Parks will then consider beginning the concession solicitation process through the release of a Request for Proposals (RFP).

All proposals for this RFEI must be submitted no later than April 13, 2023, at 3:00 p.m.

The RFEI is available for download on Parks’ website. To download the RFEI, visit www.nyc.gov/parks/businessopportunities and, after logging in, click on the “download” link that appears adjacent to the RFEI’s description.

For more information, prospective proposers may contact Barbara Huang, Project Manager, at (212) 360-3490 or at Barbara.Huang@parks.nyc.gov.

Last year's GALA FUNDRAISER for RHAP an absolute success!!!!

by tiffiney Davis

It was a night of fun and community building and Red Hook showed up for our youth and families! With your support, we turned a moment into incredible memories and raised over $32,000. What did we do with your generous support?

Sustained the operational needs of our studio. Continued our arts, music, mutual aid, academic support and stress management youth programs

Created paid opportunities for our teaching artists and alumni mentors

Supported our student’s popup store and gallery I am thrilled to share with you that our Second Annual RHAP Party Gala Fundraiser and After Party will be held at Hometown Bar-bQue on Monday, May 22nd from 6-9 pm - and this year we’ve added an After Party, 9-11 pm!  You don’t want to miss Red Hook’s hottest party!

Your community will come together for a night of amazing food and drinks to support the youth and families of Red Hook, sustain our safe and creative community hub, and uplift voices! Our leaders, educators and volunteers are on a mission to provide our students with the tools, guidance and opportunities they require to see themselves as both artists and leaders. May 22nd is your night to support that mission. Become a sponsor! Buy a ticket! Invite your neighbors and friends!

Donate an item to the silent auction! Join a committee!

RHAP is a grassroots movement, and we need everyone to show up for this important night. We are at 291 Van Brunt Street, phone is 347-889-4098.

REGINA OPERA PRESENTS A 53rd ANNIVERSARY GALA CONCERT

Date: Sunday April 30, 2023

Time: 3PM - 5PM

Place: Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Academy, 5902 6th Avenue, Brooklyn.

On Sunday April 30, 2023 at 3PM, Regina Opera will celebrate its 53rd Anniversary with a 2-hour concert in its accessible venue, Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Academy, 5902 6th Avenue, Brooklyn.

Featured will be several instrumental selections by pianist/composer Julian Villanueva Raheb, played by a sextet of members of Regina Opera Orchestra. A Park Slope resident, 17year old Julian Villanueva Raheb, is an award-winning composer and classical pianist. Julian has been playing classical piano selections in Regina Opera's ticketed and free concerts at least once a season for about 8 years.

Regina Opera has also been featuring Julian’s own classical compositions in many of our concerts. His compositions have also been played by many other groups such as NY Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and NY Philharmonic Very Young Composers.

Also on the program will be popular opera selections performed by Regina Opera’s leading role singers: soprano Brooke Schooley, soprano Tate Chu, tenor Paolo Buffagni, tenor Percy Martinez, baritone Brian Montgomery, accompanied by pianist Catherine Miller and flutist Richard Paratley.

Tickets are $15 and are available at the door. Face masks are strongly suggested.

For more info: check our website: http://reginaopera.org/sundayconcert4.

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LETTERS

Clean that thing!

Let us celebrate Earth Day Saturday, April 23rd all year long. Besides recycling newspapers, magazines, glass, plastics, old medicines, paints and cleaning materials, there are other actions you can take which will also contribute to a cleaner environment. Leave your car at home.  For local trips in the neighborhood, walk or ride a bike.  For longer travels, consider many public transportation alternatives already available.

MTA NYC Transit subway, bus, Long Island Rail Road, Staten Island Ferry, NYC Economic Development Corporation private ferries along with other private transportation owners offer various options, such as local and express bus, ferry, jitney, subway and commuter rail services.   Most of these systems are funded with your tax dollars.  They use less fuel and move far more people than cars.  In many cases, your employer can offer transit checks to help subsidize a portion of the costs.  Utilize your investments and reap the benefits.  You’ll be supporting a cleaner environment and be less stressed upon arrival at your final destination.

Many employers continue to allow employees to telecommute and work from home full and part time.  Others use alternative work schedules, which afford staff the ability to avoid rush hour gridlock.  This saves travel time and can improve mileage per gallon.  You could join a car or van pool to share the costs of commuting.

Use a hand powered lawn mower instead of a gasoline or electric one.  Rake your leaves instead of using gasoline powered leaf blowers.  The amount of pollution created by gasoline powered lawn mowers or leaf blowers will surprise you.

A cleaner environment starts with everyone. —Larry Penner

Slight error but otherwise great!

I was made aware of  Michael Quinn’s wonderful review of Forgotten No More: The Restoration of Untermyer Gardens, which was so well written and spot on. Just one minor correction. The Untermyers bought the property in 1899; the garden was designed in 1916 and built in 1917. Thanks so much for your excellent coverage and help to spread the word! — Stephen F. Byrns, President, Untermyer Gardens Conservancy

Much ado about the BQE.

Will it be more than nothing this time?

“There is an asthma belt from Greenpoint to Bay Ridge for the people who live along the BQE. The noise, the vibrations, the division that it has created within our communities,” City Council Member Lincoln Restler listed as just a few of the ills created by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). Clad in a tan raincoat and a friendly smile, Restler has a cartoonish charm only matched by his oratory prowess. At the request of Transportation Alternatives (TA), a nonprofit that advocates for biking, walking, and public transit, Restler, Assemblymember JoAnne Simon, State Senator Andrew Gounardes, and a handful of other local leaders shared their grievances over the BQE.

March 4 was a cool morning in Brooklyn, but a small crowd of residents stood behind the officials, ready to participate in a visioning walk along the central portion of the BQE. The group ranged from a former NYC DOT Commissioner to a local mom who was just excited about the potential to improve the neighborhood. After the speechmaking and pandering to the press, the real work began. The 50-some odd group walked along the BQE, pausing to ask attendees for suggestions on how to improve areas and providing context and history about the existing features alongside the expressway. This was the second of three walks led by TA, the third of which covered the southern portion of the BQE, the area closest to this paper’s reader base.

Built between 1937 and 1964, the construction of the expressway led to entire neighborhoods being divided, often bulldozing its path through lower income or working-class neighbor-

by Katherine Rivard

hoods. The structure is now past its design life, but around 130,000 daily vehicles (about 13,000 of which are trucks) travel on the BQE each day. This transportation corridor comes at a cost to the surrounding inhabitants who are subject to air and noise pollution, increased traffic on side streets, and decreased access to neighboring areas.

These days news and events about the BQE are almost as constant as the traffic on the expressway itself. The city is considering plans to re-design portions of the aging expressway, and the structure’s outsized footprint in Brooklyn has led to significant interest from advocacy organizations to professional groups and beyond. But with so much buzz around the potential infrastructure, it is hard to not worry that many of these discussions are either siloed, and thus not being heard by decisionmakers, or giving outsized weight to every spoken criticism or thought, and therefore leading to a tempered plan that does not attempt to create something new and great.

Transportation Alternatives and other transportation advocacy groups are not the only ones excited about this project; urban planners and engineers also recognize the massive potential this project has to improve the lives of thousands of residents.

On March 14, the American Institute of Architects hosted the event “The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at 75: A Crisis in Context.” In the non-profit’s stunning space near Washington Square Park, intellectuals and practitioners sat eating cheese, sipping beer, and shaking their heads about the inability to make the changes necessary to really transform the BQE.

Experts like former NYC Traffic Com-

missioner Sam Schwartz and Associate Principal Raju Mann from the design and engineering firm Arup each gave presentations on past BQE plans, proposed changes that failed to come to fruition, and the difficulties of implementing any plan. The thread throughout the presentations was clear—grand (and some less grand) BQE renovations have been put forward for decades, but all have been mired by bureaucracy or concerns around funding. Each plan and study has been shelved until now, when the BQE’s physical failure is imminent. While advocacy groups and planners think up meaningful ways to make changes, the City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) is doing its best to propose a modern, effective design that makes sense financially and reflects community input. On March 16, DOT presented a BQE update to Brooklyn Community Board 6’s Transportation/Public Safety Committee over Zoom. DOT Chief Strategy Officer Julie Bero calmly presented a simple overview of DOT’s approach, timelines, and community engagement efforts. While the former Administration’s plans for the BQE involved spending about half a billion dollars to simply preserve the BQE, the new administration hopes that new infrastructure money in the form of federal grants will allow for a longterm fix.

The city owns the 1.5 miles of expressway near the Triple Cantilever in Brooklyn Bridge Park, while the other 10.6 miles are owned by the state. Therefore, DOT is tackling the BQE updates in three chunks—Central (Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street), North, and South, and leading with updates to its portion—BQE Central. The design concepts, newly released in Feb-

ruary, include three options to re-attach the surrounding neighborhoods to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Named The Terraces, The Lookout, and The Stoop, the concepts attempt to make the area more pedestrian friendly. All three options are largely expressway updates with greener facades rather than meaningful changes to an outdated and changing transportation system.

The potential designs for BQE Central are moving forward and DOT is preparing for the environmental review process (to stay updated on the project, visit bqevision.com). Meanwhile, BQE North and South will receive short-term fixes to improve public space, safety, and mobility, with the longer-term goal to design and implement a goal of reconnecting communities. Concurrently, the Regional Planning Association is collecting information related to truck and freight use to provide white paper recommendations on freight diversion.

Robert Moses had a goal in mind—an expressway—and in his uniquely Machiavellian manner, he achieved his goal. Now, as the city and state grapple with how to move the BQE into the 21st century, there seems to be no one with either the power or the vision, let alone both, to take the BQE and truly reimagine it into something efficient, equitable, and sustainable for Brooklyn.

While the amount of community engagement and meetings for the project has been admirable, residents will feel the greatest impact from having a leader step forth to transform their feedback into a clear, visionary plan for a modern BQE, and then, to actually build it.

NYU Langone opens at 70 Atlantic Avenue

NYU Langone celebrated the opening of the Joseph S. and Diane H. Steinberg Ambulatory Care Center at 70 Atlantic Avenue with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Staff also gave a media tour after the ceremony.

Going on the tour in the state-of-theart facility felt like stepping into year 3000. The facility looks beautiful and while it is certainly never ideal to end up in the emergency room, or in need of medical care, it looks like patients will be in good hands at this medical center.

The facility includes five floors with a variety of services. Radiology is on the cellar floor, the NYU Langone HealthCobble Hill Emergency Room is on the first floor, multi-specialty physician practices are on the second floor, ambulatory surgery is on the third floor, and the Perlmutter Cancer Center-Cobble Hill and multi-specialty physician practices are on the fourth floor.

The emergency department, which is replacing the one at 83 Amity St. (a temporary location) includes 27 open treatment beds and bays, including two triage rooms and five negative pressure treatment rooms—nearly doubling the capacity of the former location, two overnight hospital beds, dedicated CT and X-ray imaging services, as well as bedside tablets to facilitate patient communication, education, and entertainment.

The facility will have more than 65 providers from a variety of clinical areas including cardiology with comprehensive noninvasive cardiac testing, gastroenterology, neurology, neurosurgery, spine surgery, and

by Brian Abate

much more.

As part of the ceremony, Mayor Adams praised NYU Langone, saying, “They treat each patient as an individual, who countless individuals are counting on to recover. There was a lot of trepidation and fear when the hospital closed many years ago. People thought that we were not going to bring back quality care and services to this community. That has been proven wrong and the question mark has been straightened to an exclamation point. We are bigger and better than ever because of the great team at NYU Langone.”

Speakers from NYU Langone, as well as Adams and Council Member Dan Goldman all emphasized that the facility would serve Brooklynites from neighborhoods including Red Hook, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and more.

After they spoke I got to see the facility for myself. All of the floors looked high-tech and efficient. The third and fourth floors had nice views and there was an entertainment system that patients at the Perlmutter Cancer can use if they have to receive treatment for extended periods.

There is also valet parking which is very convenient (especially for getting to the emergency room.) I broke my ankle a while ago and had to hobble along a pretty long way to make it to the emergency room which was not a fun experience.

In addition to meeting many helpful media contacts on the tour, I got to meet a lot of the doctors who will be working at the facility including transplant surgeon, Bruce Gelb, and gastroenterologist Fritz François. Having

the opportunity to speak to them and learn about what they do helped me understand the human side of medical care.

“One of the most important things I want people from this area to know is our commitment to bringing quality and safe care to Brooklyn,” François said. “We’re anticipating that this ambulatory care center will see over 200,000 patients between the multi-care center and the emergency department. In other words, we are prepared to serve the borough from Greenpoint to Red Hook and everywhere in between.”

It has been a long process since 2014 when Long Island College Hospital (LICH) closed, but Cobble Hill now has a new ambulatory care center that Brooklynites can rely on.

“We are ready and we are very excited to serve the community,” François said.

THE STAR-REVUE HAS TWO OPENINGS:

1 - DISPLAY ADVERTISING SALESPERSON. The job involves meeting neighborhood store-owners and educate them about the wonderful goodwill they will get by advertising in the local newspaper. Another aspect is to talk to bigger corporations such as hospitals and schools to tell them that this is the perfect place to get their messages across to the people they are serving. You get paid with a percentage of what you sell, which is called a commission. This is a part-time job to supplement your income - you decide on the hours.

2 - WE ARE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO LIVES IN NYC PUBLIC HOUSING, preferably Red Hook or Gowanus, to write about things going on where you live. You do not need any experience. As long as you can put on paper interesting stories that our readers will want to read, you are our person. You don't have to be a great writer to start - see how we edit your stuff and learn from it. This is a free-lance position, meaning part-time.

For both positions call George at 917 652-9128 or email me at gbrook@pipeline.com

Ribbon cutters included Congressman Dan Goldman and Mayor Eric Adams.

Major upgrade at Red Hook Rec Center

The Red Hook Recreation Center at 155 Bay St. unveiled its new and improved gymnasium with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on March 28. Kids counted down from five as leaders from the Center, Council Woman Alexa Aviles, NYC Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue, and others all cut the ribbon together.

Renovations include a new maplewood floor, a new scoreboard, wall padding, rubber flooring, paint, and decals. Additionally, there are expected to be new locker rooms at some point this summer.

This project was made possible thanks to a $115,000 anonymous donation through the Adopt-a-Park program.

“From basketball and volleyball to holiday celebrations, the Red Hook Recreation Center gym is beloved by local athletes and also acts as a gathering space for the community,” said Donoghue. “We are so grateful for the generous donation to give this gymnasium a much-needed makeover so it can continue to serve the residents of Red Hook.”

The basketball court looks great and it feels great under your feet with a little more give to it now than it had before the renovations. It is a dramatic upgrade as the basketball court had

by Brian Abate

some chipped paint and was worn down after getting lots of use.

I have seen a lot of basketball courts (both indoors and outdoors) throughout Brooklyn and in my opinion, the renovated gym at the Rec Center is one of the nicest ones. The floor actually looks a little bit like the floor at the Barclays Center. The renovations are great for the community.

“We have an incredible staff here at the Rec Center, whom we love and appreciate,” Aviles said. They work so hard and this is such a gorgeous space. We will be hearing the sound of sneakers squeaking and kids playing… We want the entire space to be as beautiful as all of you and we’re going to keep building the Rec Center until it is everything you can imagine it to be!”

The Best Slice in Red Hook

Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue throws up the first jump shot on the new hardwood floor. (photos by Abate)

Tesla will have a skateboard park neighbor

Construction is finally underway at Harold Ickes Playground to construct a BMX bike and skate park, as well as a multipurpose play area. The $4,345,500 project is expected to be completed in March of 2024.

After a teen activist pushed to turn the playground into a skate park, the project was initially agreed upon in 2017 by then Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Councilmen Carlos Menchaca and Brad Lander.

There were numerous delays in the project and at times a temporary skateboard ramp was put up in the playground. It has also been used for children’s baseball and softball practices. “It’s too bad the kids won’t be able to use the space for baseball anymore,” said Christopher from Cobble Hill. “I don’t know of any other skate parks in the area though, so I understand why

by Brian Abate

they’re doing this.”

Others were happy to see the work getting underway.

“The playground hasn’t been in the best shape for a while,” said Andrea from Red Hook. “I think it’s good to see them fixing the place up. I just hope there won’t be any delays with the construction.”

The construction started suddenly after the long delays and it surprised a lot of people. While it was nice to see the project moving along, local activists had some concerns.

“I saw the flyers in early March saying the construction would be starting on so I started reaching out to as many people as I could think of to try to get a more detailed plan,” said Claire Merlino, a local activist and gardener. “Others did the same. Community gardeners and various staff from Community Board 6, the parks department, and council member Aviles’ office were all helpful.

“We wanted to find out what the construction would mean for the trees around the park. Community gardeners and neighbors have planted and taken care of the ones around the perimeter for a long time.”

Merlino was able to find the plan but the people she reached out to weren’t able to tell her which trees would be

staying and which ones would be removed based on the plan.

“Inside each of the circles on the plan used to represent a tree, there was a tiny dot or plus sign,” Merlino said. “I learned that every plus sign was a new tree and every dot was a tree that is going to be retained from what’s there now. It was a relief to find out that they are going to be keeping all of the trees.

“There were also three trees that community members planted which were not on the plan. After a lot of calls, we got official confirmation that the trees which are going to stay had been tagged with orange paint.

“There is also a big, sprawling shrub in the area that a community member from Red Hook has been taking care of for a very long time. Unfortunately, workers said that because of a drainage issue, they had to remove that shrub.”

Merlino and other activists were ready to protest if the project included getting rid of a lot of the current trees and shrubs around the playground

but fortunately, they did not end up needing to protest. It is reassuring to know that there are activists watching out for the best interests of the community.

As for the park itself, it is exciting to know that the construction is already underway, and progress is being made.

“I’ll miss bringing my dog here and letting him run around but I’m excited to see the finished product after all the work is done,” said a woman from Red Hook. “I think it will end up being good for the neighborhood.”

NYC DOT meets and greets at the Miccio

Members of the Department of Transportation (DOT) announced the beginning of a Red Hook Traffic and Truck study at a meeting in the Miccio Center on March 14.

Red Hook is an ideal location for the study as many people in the community have become worried about the number of last-mile distribution centers (including Amazon) which have moved into the neighborhood.

Michael Griffith, Diniece Mendes, and Keith Bray of DOT said that the study will include traffic analysis and data will be collected on the number of vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians coming into and going out of the neighborhood. There will also be a parking analysis which includes examining parking regulations, parking supply and demand, price structure, and truck parking.

Regarding trucks, Griffith noted, “We are aware of safety concerns as well as air quality concerns.” He also ac-

by Brian Abate

knowledged the “Need for enforcement of oversized vehicles and offroute trucks.”

One concern voiced by many people in attendance is that based on information presented during a slide show, data would only be collected through this May. However, Bray said that the “Data collection will be ongoing and won’t end in May.”

Jim Tampakis of Tamco Mechanical, 54 Richards St. shared his thoughts on the study.

“As you heard at the meeting, I’m always pushing for these last-mile distribution centers to use the water,” Tampakis said. “That’s always at the front of my mind. I’ve also been pushing for Amazon to use more bikes and fewer vans to make their deliveries. There are just so many Amazon vans that come down Van Brunt St.” Indeed, Amazon is already ramping up use of bicycles to make their deliveries in Red Hook. It is becoming increasingly common to see bright yel-

low delivery bikes carrying packages. However, a piece of bad news is that RXR (another planned last-mile warehouse) told Tampakis that they have no plans to use the waterfront.

“It’s very frustrating because they say they want to be good neighbors but at the same time they aren’t even considering using the waterfront,” Tampakis said.

Tampakis has given tours of the neighborhood to politicians including Council Member Alexa Avilés and Senator Andrew Gounardes while speaking to them about these issues.

“Residents have been calling for a truck traffic study for years, and studying alternatives like water-based transport to get fewer trucks on our streets is urgently needed,” said Avilés.

“Although the City and the State are currently engaged in the process of re-envisioning the crumbling BQE, we must also heed the Department of Transportation’s findings that the only fix for this issue long-term is to

shift freight traffic from roadways to other modes, like water transport,” said Gounardes. “But billions are needed to repair the necessary infrastructure such that our waterways could take on a meaningful amount of shipping traffic.

“This is why I introduced my bill to tax online deliveries within NYC at 25 cents per package to raise revenue for crucial repairs to infrastructure: New Yorkers receive 2.3 million packages per day, and this bill could raise over $200 million to repair our infrastructure in just the first year.”

While it is clear there is still a lot of work that needs to get done, it is very encouraging to hear that politicians are listening and willing to address the various issues raised by community leaders.

Another public meeting is expected to occur sometime between September and November with a third public meeting taking place between June and September of 2024. A final report

“Inside each of the circles on the plan used to represent a tree, there was a tiny dot or plus sign,” Merlino said. “I learned that every plus sign was a new tree and every dot was a tree that is going to be retained from what’s there now. It was a relief to find out that they are going to be keeping all of the trees."—Claire Merlino

Ickes Park is across the street from the former Chase bank. (photo by Abate)

They are working quickly and protecting most of the trees.

City's dyslexia investment will help area students

PS 295 on 18th Street in the South Slope is one of two schools in Brooklyn that is receiving a $50,000 investment for a dyslexia pilot program. The other school, PS 107 on 8th Avenue in Park Slope, also received $50,000.

This new specialized program is for students with dyslexia or who are otherwise struggling to read, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced.

The schools are part of a promise made by Mayor Eric Adams, whose dyslexia was not diagnosed until he was in college, to bring at least one program like this to each borough. Adams’s administration had previously announced dyslexia pilot programs in Manhattan and The Bronx.

“I am very appreciative of what we did get,” PS 295 principal Valerie Vaderpuije said. “It’s really nice that I can invest in some of the decodable readers that I have been able to this spring so that is going to be a nice influx of books that are more tailored towards the programming that we are using.”

With the investment, the principal has been able to train the staff in helpful programming. She is arranging for more training with the Orton Gillingham program, which some of the staff had already been trained in.

“Now we can afford to get even more people trained in that program, so that is really nice,” Vanderpuije said. “Orton Gillingham is a way of teaching literacy that has been shown to be very effective for students with dyslexia.” However, the program is not just for

Summit Academy holds college fair

by Nathan Weiser

On March 16, Summit Academy charter school hosted their second college fair. The fair, which was held in Summit’s gym, gave students an opportunity to learn about college admissions, financial aid, housing, degree programs and dorms. Questions answered to help in their college search. Some of the colleges that were represented at the college fair were Manhattan College, University of Connecticut, SUNY New Paltz, Utica University, University of Maine, NJIT, Kean University, St. Francis College, University of Rhode Island and Virginia State.

The college fair has grown significantly since the first one last year. According to Kim Cincotta, who is the college and career readiness coordinator, 15 colleges came last year and this year there were 25 in the gym.

They also had the US Army, the National Guard and Universal Technical Institute since some students are interested in trade schools or the army. The US Army has been going to a

by Nathan Weiser

students with dyslexia. It works well for students with dyslexia since it is a strong, systematic and powerful approach to teaching literacy in the foundational years.

The two schools in Brooklyn and the others chosen around the city are among the landmark structured literacy schools, which means all those teachers are trained to support students who are at risk for dyslexia and other print based learning disabilities.

The funds for the school are being used to offer the specialized training for the educators. The training for the teachers will allow them to continue this new revamped and improved programming in the years to come.

The pilot program officially started at PS 295 last September. PS 295 had already taken steps to help students with special needs and to transform their approach to education overall last year.

“The funding allows us to do this change more rapidly and more cohesively because we have the resources we need to do it,” the principal said. “But this is a change that started last year. Last year was the first year we moved to Super Kids, which is our reading program in kindergarten through second grade.”

Everyone at the school has been screened for dyslexia with a universal screener called Acadience, which happens throughout the district.

“Everyone is getting screened with Acadience to see if there are areas where certain students need to focus and areas where teachers need to

few different schools letting students know about benefits.

Cincotta chose the schools that would be represented at the college fair based on the schools this year’s seniors are interested in or ones that past seniors have applied to. She thought they got a good turnout of schools.

“I personally reach out to each college they are interested in, reach out to the reps and hope they can come join us to give more information,” Cincotta said.

“All week they have been prepared with who is coming and questions to ask them,” Cincotta said. “Some of them are really interested in sports so they are asking about the sports teams they have. Our juniors and seniors are asking more closely about what they are interested in, like their majors.”

Many of Summit’s 35 seniors had applied and had been accepted to a lot of schools already. A few of them even applied at the college fair at the school’s table.

Last year, a couple of Summit students took a gap year, but most of the students went to four year colleges.

This is Cincotta’s second year at Summit as the college coordinator. In her first year, they tried to have college

look at carefully,” Vanderpuije said. “Depending on how they do with the Acadience screener, there would be further screeners for those who are flagged as needing further screening.”

“We have made the most dramatic changes in our early grades because it is so important to make those foundational changes in kindergarten and first grade especially,” Vanderpuije said. “I am really looking forward to seeing how those changes move up with the students and how we change the upper grades as we broaden the scope of our work.”

They had been using a way of structuring and organizing books based on levels. It was called level readers, which was when they were using more balanced literacy.

“It was a whole language approach to reading,” Vanderpuije said. “We found that approach had not been equally effective for all of our populations, so we are switching to this new design to reading approach, which has a larger emphasis on things like phonemic awareness and phonics.

The books that support their new approach with the new emphasis on phonemic awareness and phonics are decodable readers. They are tailored to look at the skills, sounds and letters that they intentionally taught the students instead of asking them to guess the words.

According to the principal, the new approach allows them to practice taught reading skills whereas in the previous literacy approach, they had to figure

tours but were not able to due to Covid, so she brought the colleges to the school and the students liked it, which led her to do it again.

Summit’s middle school students were also involved in the college fair. They had a scavenger hunt card to fill out, which was organized by the middle school guidance counselor Helen Pepperman.

They organized this activity with the middle schoolers to show that it’s never too early to plan ahead and think about what is important.

“Especially for our eighth graders, we want to tell them your grades and what you do in high school prepares you for college, so it gives them motivation,” Pepperman said.

“This is the big event to really expose as many of our students as possible,” Cincotta said.

things out.

“It is good to learn how to figure things out using logic, but when you do that you are not necessarily practicing the decoding skills, the actual work of figuring out what letters make what sound,” Vanderpuije said.

This pilot program is a shift from their balanced literacy approach to this more systematic approach that focuses heavily on phonemic awareness and phonics.

They knew years ago that change needed to happen but they were not sure who would give them the funding to make it happen.

They were pleased when this opportunity happened with Assembly Member Robert Carroll.

Carroll, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in first grade, is proud that this is happening.

“I know how important early identification and intervention are to remediating dyslexia and making all children academically successful,” Carroll said. “These funds will provide the teacher training in literacy that is required to teach all of our children to read and I am so proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with this Mayor and Chancellor to support this vital pilot program.”

According to Nicole Brownstein, director of media relations at NYC Public Schools, PS 295 was chosen for this investment because it is a Title One school in assembly member Carroll’s district.

Pandemic Over..... PEOPLE GET TOGETHER!

March showed a revival of the pre-pandemic community involvement as meeting after meeting escaped ZOOM. Among these photos of events that happened last month are the Red Hook Transportation Study meeting, Joyce explaining what's going on at the Red Hook library, the retirement party for 76th Precinct's Captain Zelykov, the new Red Hook Civic Association, and the Brooklyn Bridge Rotary Club. All photos by George Fiala

It Came from My Word Processor!

by Joe Enright

UFOs are much in the news lately, rebranded by the Pentagon as UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), but I learned all about them early in life, thanks to Hollywood…and a rather odd neighbor.

In the Flatbush of my youth, a movie theater sat across the street from our house, The Farragut. On many a Saturday morning, equipped with a quarter for admission and a peanut butter & jelly sandwich for lunch, the kids on my block would line up well before the box office lady opened her window at 11:30 am.

Once inside, the rich kids would get popcorn and candy while us mutts would rush past the white-uniformed matron to grab the best seats in the far left area labeled, “The Children’s Section.” The kiddie extravaganza would then ensue: a cartoon, a newsreel, and a double feature. The movies we wanted to see had to feature cowboys, soldiers, monsters or Martians. But only a few of the westerns were memorable, Shane especially, because of the child character, Joey, who idolized the gunslinger-trying-to turn-the-page, Shane (when it ended, we all burst out onto Flatbush Avenue warbling Joey’s famous plea, “Shane! Come back!”)

The only war movie I remember resulted in me and three of my siblings getting thrown out and banned from the Farragut. It was The Bridges at Toko Ri, starring William Holden and some blonde (whenever she appeared, we knew there’d be no action so we took bathroom breaks or ogled the candy counter). The drama ended with most of the male cast biting the dust. Frederick Marsh, playing an admiral, upon learning their fate, stares off into the distance from the bridge of his carrier and utters the solemn closing line: “Where do we find men such as these?” At that point my sister Mary rose up out of her seat to answer the admiral by bellowing in her finest Brooklyn accent, “IN HOLLYWOOD, WHERE ELSE, YA JERK!” Marched to the manager’s office by the matron, a man in a suit vowed we would nev-

er enter his hallowed theater again BY GAWD! But since face recognition technology would not be invented for another 60-odd years, we kept going to the Farragut on Saturdays.

Our favorite genre, by a wide margin, was science fiction in all its flavors:

1) prehistoric behemoths encased in the deep sea or Artic ice, revived by darned nuclear bomb tests, who then inevitably find their way to Tokyo (Godzilla), San Francisco (It Came From Beneath the Sea), or New York (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms); 2) ordinary organisms transformed by nukes, aliens or careless scientists (ants in Them!, a tarantula in Tarantula!, and humans in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and The Incredible Shrinking Man); and 3) aliens from outer space (Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, It Came from Outer Space, Not of This Earth, etc. Of course, some films mixed and matched these categories. For instance, The Thing was an alien monster who was thawed from Artic ice.

Most of these movies adhered to a predictable structure. In the first half hour, a mysterious deadly but unseen thingie causes havoc, followed by 30 minutes of escalating carnage as the thingie shows up in some urban center. At that point, stock World War II military footage is spliced in as our

armed forces bomb the hell out of the thingie, all to no avail. This leads to the denouement, when the hero, usually the love interest of a female relative of some scientist or general, goes mano-a-mano with the bad thingie and Earth survives until the next movie.

Strangely, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers was based on a non-fiction book, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, by retired Marine Major Donald Keyhoe who also served as a “technical consultant.” A few years later the Science Fiction Book Club offered a free book if you signed up, so I selected a book by Keyhoe, Flying Saucers Top Secret. It read like an action thriller, with brave government agents leaking info to Keyhoe as other sinister agents try to silence everybody, all of which is delivered in breathless conversations wherein incredible hidden events and possible earth-shattering developments are suggested. I was hooked, and I guess I still am.

Meanwhile in the middle of our block, there resided a man whose information about aliens went way beyond Keyhoe’s “leaks.” Mr. Steele (nobody knew his first name) looked exactly like the truant officer, Mr. McNabbem, in the Little Lulu comics, complete with a Hitler-esque mustache and a bowler hat. Except, un-

like McNabbem, Mr. Steele would urinate against trees and frequently walk around bare-chested, wearing a knotted tie to emphasize the fact. It was said his father had been ambassador to some Eastern European country who left his son a monthly stipend in perpetuity. Of most interest, however, Steele was receiving messages from space aliens and my oldest brother, Buddy, a copy boy for the New York Times who conducted tours for visitors, would regale us with stories of Mr. Steele showing up in the lobby of the Times building, demanding to speak to reporters about the aliens’ latest dire transmissions.

Prompted in part by his interactions with Times’ visitors getting radio beams from wire coat hangers they had wrapped around their foreheads, Buddy came to share my interest in UFOs. It seemed to me (being a Keyhoe convert), there had been many unexplained sightings. Buddy, who served some time in the American southwest for the Army, joked about being mobilized to fight the alien menace and winding up in the stock footage for Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, Part Deux. But more than anything else, I think we savored the bizarre tales told by the “contactees” getting phone calls from outer space because they took us far, far away from hardscrabble Rogers Avenue and the dull daily drudge of city life.

Buddy died in my arms in 1979 as I was helping him to his bed, his body wracked with cancer. A couple of months later, I was in a motel out in the Hamptons where I dreamed that he was waving to me from a UFO. In the dream, my brother was very happy, telling me that our spirits did survive death, the universe was wonderful and we would see each other again. It was a very vivid dream and it ended with his telling me to go to the balcony of my motel room. I woke up and walked to the balcony and slid open the glass door. It was a beautiful, clear night. I looked up, and there, streaking across the sky, was a shooting star. To quote the last line of The Thing, “Keep  watching the skies!”

"This leads to the denouement, when the hero, usually the love interest of a female relative of some scientist or general, goes mano-a-mano with the bad thingie and Earth survives until the next movie."

Erdogan's fall may signal bad news for NATO

Turkey’s going to elections next May 14th, a day when the world will see whether the former Ottoman power will still be led by the conservative and Islamist Justice & Development Party of the current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or rather by the progressive social-democrat Republican People’s Party.

These elections will come in an important period for the Turkish stance in the world geopolitical landscape, especially regarding the Ukrainian crisis.

Since the war broke out, Turkey has proved to be the only NATO country capable of opening a stable diplomatic channel with Moscow, as evidenced by Erdogan’s brokering of last October's grain deal, where Putin agreed to unblock Ukrainian ports for the export of grain, avoiding a worldwide food crisis.

Turkey has not even joined the sanctions on the Russian Federation. This was possible as Erdogan has treaded carefully between NATO's wishes and Putin's. After an initial holdup, Turkey approved Finland's ascendency to NATO. Turkey was the

by Dario Pio Muccilli, Star-Revue foreign desk

last country to approve them, and admittance is only granted with a unanimous vote of all the members. Sweden’s application process is still pending. Turkey is demanding extradition of supposed Kurdish terrorists that are allegedly harbored in Sweden.

Erdogan's veto is of course allowed by the organization’s rules, but seeing it as a procedural difficulty is just part of it. Turkish military power is the second by strength in the alliance, meaning that Istanbul has the second word, just after Washington. This gives it great political leverage. The former Ottoman power has managed to oppose the official US line many times, on scenarios like Syria and Libya, where the Turkish army is involved, or as well as regarding the nomination of the former Alliance’s general secretary, the Danish Anders Fogh Rasmussen, allowed by Istanbul only after Obama promised to appoint a Turkish deputy.

It is like if on some dossiers no Western leader is actually able to get things done without bowing to the Sultan. One might think that if the elections will overthrow Erdogan it will be bet-

ter for the Western stance. However, militarism and nationalism is well rooted in the opposition Republican People’s Party—the biggest difference from Erdogan being approach to Islam and secularization. Moreover, this opposition party has been softer on Russia than the conservative majority, marking a possibly lose-lose scenario for the Alliance's internal balance.

At the same time NATO is not the only international organization that relies on Ankara for its key interests, as the European Union counts on Erdogan for stopping migration fluxes coming from the Middle East. That is why Turkish internal stability is a crucial ingredient for the years to come, where an endangered anatolian peninsula could easily affect all the surrounding and fragile regions: the Black Sea, the Balkans, the Middle East, as well as areas with strong turkish military presence as Libya, Syria, the Gulf.

A change of leadership in Ankara can be turbulent. A failed coup attempt hit the roads of Istanbul in 2016, and terrorist attacks are still commonly spread in the southeastern part of the

Pigeons,

country. They sometimes even effect Istanbul, as happened last November 13th. So nothing can be forecast as elections approach.

Surely the recent earthquake that caused more than fifty thousand fatalities will play a big role. Government’s response has been often inadequate or late, but it’s still early to know if this tragedy has cost Erdogan the support of the rural people who has continuously supported him throughout his almost ten years of presidency.

According to recent polls by Euronews, Erdogan’s biggest opponent, Kilicdaroglu, is ahead of him by 2.5%, yet other factors can intervene, like the army, terrorism or even the development of the Ukrainian crisis. What’s certain is that the West will look concerned at whatever it happens in Ankara, as a possible mixture of strong regional power and internal instability could create a ticking bomb able to erase any previous plan on the region, any balance in the NATO and a new heated international dossier that would be another burden on the already fatigued international community.

munities for hundreds of years, and have natural instincts to … raise young in safe spaces such as the cells of these bridges,” James posted in early March. “We have a responsibility to accommodate their survival, and it does not have to mean ending ongoing projects, but rather modifying them to ensure their lives are taken into consideration.”

Volunteers like Diaz and Neck are currently in contact with PETA and hope to get additional assistance from the NYPD Animal Cruelty Squad, The Audubon Society, city officials, and the public.

If you see an injured or ill pigeon anywhere in the city—for example, one that is sitting against a wall puffed up and not moving when approached— you can gently handle it by placing it into an open cardboard box and bring it to the Wild Bird Fund (New York City’s only wildlife rehabilitation and education center that cares for injured, sick, and orphaned birds and small mammals) on the Upper West Side. If you’d like to learn more or volunteer with New York City Pigeon Rescue Central, visit nycprc.org

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Celebrating the Warner Bros. Centennial with 100 Warner Films

The golden age of Hollywood — lasting from the mid1920s until the mid-1960s — was dominated by five studios: RKO, MGM, Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros. RKO went belly up in 1957; now a faint whimper of its former roaring lion, MGM is part of the Amazon empire; and Fox has been absorbed into the Disney collective (for its Marvel and Star Wars rights, not its history or legacy catalog). Only Paramount and Warners are left standing. But in our era of ceaseless corporate consolidation, the Hollywood studio is a dying breed and these last giants’ fates, increasingly tied up in IP plays, feel, at best, shaky.

So let’s celebrate them while they’re here, starting with Warner Bros., which marks its centennial on April 4. The brothers Warner — Albert, Sam, Harry and Jack — had been in the film business for years before incorporating their studio on April 4, 1923. It didn’t take long for Warner Bros. to put its stamp on Hollywood — and the globe. The studio brought synchronized sound to cinema, established genres (gangster pictures and musicals) and perfected styles (noir and widescreen Technicolor), gave the world legendary stars (Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean), made animation anarchic (Looney Tunes), and invented the comic book movie (oops). The studio released plenty of stinkers, but when it connected — which it did, a lot — the results were some of the best, most enjoyable movies ever made.

Many of them are on the following list of 100 films for Warners’ 100 years. In organizing it, I didn’t include any documentaries, films that WB distributed but didn’t produce, or shorts. I also left off lost films and exercised some critical judgment. There are some years where, frankly, Warners released a lot of garbage. So rather than exclude a good film just to ensure complete coverage, I erred on the side of quality at the expense of representing every moment of the studio’s existence.

With that, enjoy (or not!) this Warner Bros. centenary watchlist.

The Gold Diggers (1923) — A silent film that set the template for Warners’ greatest musical.

The Jazz Singer (1927) — The introduction of synchronized sound into cinema. We ain’t heard nothing yet, indeed.

Lights of New York (1928) — The

by Dante A. Ciampaglia

first (now all but forgotten) all-talking feature film.

Little Caesar (1931) — The birth of the gangster genre; a little creaky but its stark fatalism still packs a wallop.

The Public Enemy (1931) — More modern and cynical than Little Caesar, this dirty rat gave us James Cagney and a murderer’s row of memorable moments.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) — A harrowing, haunting exploitation film starring Paul Muni as a poor sap ground up by the Depression’s worst depravities.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) — Warners’ best musical drips with snappy dialogue, indelible performances, and magnificent pre-Code Busby Berkley numbers (“We’re In the Money,” “Petting in the Park,” and “My Forgotten Man”).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)

— Pre-Code Shakespeare is the best Shakespeare.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

— Every cinematic Robin Hood will live in the shadow of Errol Flynn’s Technicolor swashbuckler.

Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) — Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in a gangster picture directed by Michael Curtiz — you can’t miss.

Dark Victory (1939) — Bette Davis is always great, but never more than when she’s in an Oscar-winning drama.

The Letter (1940) — Another great Davis role that marries noir with drama — a signature WB style.

High Sierra (1941) — Bogart and Ida Lupino in a noir written by John Huston and directed by Raoul Walsh — a perfect studio picture.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) — The best noir Warners ever made, period. Casablanca (1942) — A film somehow more perfect today than when it was released 80 years ago.

Now, Voyager (1942) — Davis as the original spinster-to-sensuous beauty.

To Have and Have Not (1944) — Bogart and Lauren Bacall together for the first time.

Mildred Pierce (1945) — Joan Crawford won an Oscar as a woman on the verge of a breakdown in this classic studio melodrama.

The Big Sleep (1946) — A notoriously nonsensical noir, but who cares when you get Bogart and Bacall burning up the screen?

Dark Passage (1947) — Why not follow up The Big Sleep with Bogart and Ball round three?

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) — Maybe director John Huston’s best film, an immensely entertaining take-no-prisoners excavation of man’s greed and hubris.

White Heat (1949) — Cagney’s last great gangster picture is the top of the world!

Strangers on a Train (1951) — A twisted murder masterpiece that finds Hitchcock at his most perverse. The carousel scene will haunt you forever.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) — It made Marlon Brando a star and embedded “Stelllllllaaaaaa!” in our cultural lexicon.

A Star is Born (1954) — Judy Garland’s best film and one of Hollywood’s toughest interrogations of the price of fame.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — James Dean smoldering in his red leather jacket, hot-rod chicken races — postwar generational ennui was never so cool, or dangerous.

The Searchers (1956) — Yes, its racism and gender issues are problematic. It’s also director John Ford’s most epic work and one of the most beautifully shot films ever.

Giant (1956) — George Stevens’ 201-minute chronicle of a Texas oil family is epic in every sense, starting with its cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Dean.

A Face in the Crowd (1957) — Hard to imagine Andy Griffith as anything but Mayberry’s most affable lawman, yet here he is as America’s most fascistic celebrity in a film that only grows more relevant.

The Old Man and the Sea (1958) — A solid adaptation of Hemingway’s slim novel; an even better performance from Spencer Tracy.

Rio Bravo (1959) — Howard Hawks’ best Western stars Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson — oh, and John Wayne — and somehow it all works brilliantly. Ocean’s 11 (1960) — It doesn’t hold up all that well, but who can turn down the chance to hang with the Rat Pack in Vegas?

My Fair Lady (1964) — A musical Pygmalion and the standard by which all makeover movies are judged. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) — Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were never better than in Mike

Nichols’ deeply uncomfortable, eminently watchable adaptation of Edward Albee’s play.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — Arthur Penn’s film changed Hollywood with its graphic violence and the lusty energy of its gorgeous stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) — No failure to communicate here — this Paul Newman prison flick is a classic. Bullitt (1968) — Steve McQueen was never cooler, and car chases were never better.

The Wild Bunch (1969) — Sam Peckinpah covered the Western’s frontier towns and myths with buckets of blood and gore. The genre was never the same.

The Learning Tree (1969) — Photographer Gordon Parks’s debut feature proved he was as adept with motion pictures as he was with stills. (Two years later, he made Shaft.)

Trog (1970) — A cheapie B-movie about a modern doctor trying to communicate with a prehistoric man-creature. Also Joan Crawford’s infamous final film.

THX-1138 (1971) — George Lucas’ first feature is a singular achievement, the kind of paranoid sci-fi dystopia he would never approach again.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) — Robert Altman’s anti-Western is unglamorous, muddy, and often hard to hear. But when we can make it out, what we get is spectacular.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) — This too-hot-for-UK-cinemas dystopian nightmare is as important to the sensibilities — and mystique — of director Stanley Kubrick as 2001: A Space Odyssey

Dirty Harry (1971) — Clint Eastwood got his signature line “Do you feel lucky?” from this late-career potboiler from director Don Siegel, as well as a series of Harry Callahan films.

The Candidate (1972) — A sly political comedy starring Robert Redford as a senate candidate running a hopeless campaign, freeing him to be honest. An energizing watch in any political climate.

Super Fly (1972) — Warners’ blaxploitation cash-in directed by Gordon Parks Jr. boasts a killer Curtis Mayfield soundtrack and is centered on a cocaine dealer trying to reform. What’s not to like?

Enter the Dragon (1973) — Bruce Lee’s American breakthrough was, is,

and will always be a cinematic and cultural landmark.

Badlands (1973) — Terence Malick’s beautiful anti-Western, anti-Bonnie and Clyde debut feature is the foundation for every ruminative, challenging film he’d make afterwards.

Mean Streets (1973) — Scorsese’s second feature paired him with Robert De Niro for the first time and cinema was never the same.

The Exorcist (1973) — Physical body horror is scary; psychological spiritual horror is terrifying.

Blazing Saddles (1974) — One of Mel Brooks’ pantheon films is irreverent, vulgar, uproarious, and impossible to imagine it getting made today.

The Yakuza (1975) — An unexpectedly moving Japan-set noir directed by Sydney Pollack (from a Paul Schrader script) starring Robert Mitchum at his most hangdog and introspective.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) — Attica! Attica! Oh, and Pacino is great. And John Cazale is heartbreaking.

All the President’s Men (1976) — The best journalism movie, period.

Superman (1978) — It made us believe a man could fly — and that Hollywood could make comic book movies.

The Shining (1980) — Kubrick upended horror convention (and expectation) in this Stephen King adaptation. It’s still beguiling and frustrating viewers and readers alike.

Blade Runner (1982) — Ridley Scott’s towering dystopian sci-fi noir, mercilessly rejected upon release, is one of the most influential films ever made.

National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) — Hard to imagine National Lampoon magazine and Chevy Chase were popular enough to turn a goofy road trip comedy into a massive hit. But here we are!

The Right Stuff (1983) — You’re legally required to scream “Let’s light this candle!” when watching this 193-minute dramatization of the early days of America’s space program.

Gremlins (1984) — Only in the ‘80s could a campy creature feature about fuzzy little pets who turn into mischievous reptilian monsters if they’re fed after midnight not only get made but become a huge hit.

Purple Rain (1984) — Is this Prince vanity project dated? Sure. Is it still the best rock movie ever made? Absolutely. And the music and performances are timeless.

After Hours (1985) — Scorsese’s cult

black comedy spins yuppie Griffin Dunne’s Soho sojourn to score with Rosanna Arquette into a Kafkaesque nightmare — and saved his career.

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) — Tim Burton’s zany masterpiece turned a transgressive underground character into a mainstream American phenomenon.

True Stories (1986) — Talking Heads frontman David Byrne made a weird art film about smalltown America that no one knew what to do with it. A strange trip worth taking, at least once.

Lethal Weapon (1987) — Screenwriter Shane Black conquered Hollywood — and rewrote the economics of Hollywood screenwriting — with this buddy cop classic.

Beetlejuice (1988) — Another unique Burton classic, this time about a foulmouthed ghoul-for-hire played by Michael Keaton, firmly established his aesthetic sensibility.

Crossing Delancey (1988) — Joan Micklin Silver’s intimate romantic comedy is a classic New York film and a small miracle of Reagan ‘80s American cinema.

Batman (1989) — Ground zero for our comic book cinema culture, Burton’s take on the Caped Crusader put the “dark” back in Dark Knight.

GoodFellas (1990) — Scorsese’s gangster film to end all gangster films is like nothing that came before it — and totally in line with the genre tradition. It could only have been made at Warners.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) — Every generation gets a Robin Hood. Kevin Costner was mine, and I will forever defend how fun and weird this film is (and the six times I saw it in theaters).

Unforgiven (1992) — Clint Eastwood’s best film — as an actor and director — and the best Western ever made is something rare: a summation, dissection, and end point for a genre.

Malcolm X (1992) — This epic biopic could be Spike Lee’s (and Denzel Washington’s) best film. A powerful, mature, serious, but never pretentious film that only grows more relevant.

The Fugitive (1993) — “Hugely entertaining” perfectly describes this big-screen adaptation of the classic TV series. It’s the kind of mid-budget film Hollywood has all but abandoned.

Heat (1995) — Michael Mann’s nearly-three-hour epic is the apex crime film and pairs Pacino and De Niro for the first time. A towering achievement.

Twister (1996) — Director Jan de Bont followed up Speed with a wild

actioner about tornado hunters. A straight-up good time at the movies.

Mars Attacks! (1996) — Burton’s love letter to campy B movies of the ‘50s and those star-studded disaster flicks of the ‘70s is totally strange and a blast to watch.

L.A. Confidential (1997) — A classic noir so violent and perverse it could never have been made in classic Hollywood. Like GoodFellas and Unforgiven, a deconstruction and denouement of a genre.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997) — Pacino (as the Devil!) spitting out some of film’s most absurd dialogue. Keanu Reeves (as the Devil’s son!) just trying to keep up. Absurd fun in every way.

You’ve Got Mail (1998) — Nora Ephron’s remake of The Shop Around the Corner is an early Internet movie, a proto-Amazon-is-evil narrative, and the final on screen pairing of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Analyze This (1999) — A mob boss who needs a psychiatrist is a goofy, hugely funny riff on De Niro’s onscreen persona that works thanks to his incredible chemistry with co-star Billy Crystal.

The Matrix (1999) — If you haven’t seen the Wachowski’s masterpiece in a while, watch it immediately. Everything holds up and, in fact, feels more urgent than 25 years ago. Whoa.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) — Ignore Kubrick’s final film’s reputation as the masked-sex-party movie and watch it for a bracing examination of adult relationships and the assumptions we have about our partners.

Three Kings (1999) — The rare Gulf War film is also one of the great modern war pictures, an irreverent and confident heist flick that proved George Clooney (and Mark Wahlberg!) could act.

Romeo Must Die (2000) — A visceral, fun martial arts flick flecked with hiphop and style starring Jet Li and Aaliyah that kicks way above its weight.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) — Steven Spielberg directs a unique sci-fi take on the Pinocchio story, conceived by Kubrick. What else do you need?

Ocean’s Eleven (2001) — Soderbergh’s remake is an effervescent caper with one of the great casts of all time (including the man, the myth, the legend Elliott Gould).

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) — Shane Black’s buddy neo-noir, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, is a good hang and stuffed full of acidly hilarious dialogue.

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) — Clint Eastwood’s companion to his WW2 melodrama Flags of Our Fathers, focused on the Japanese experience and done in Japanese. An audacious achievement.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) — The best of a crop of early 21st century neoWesterns — a gorgeous, 160-minute slow-burn cinematic novel.

Michael Clayton (2007) — Clooney as a degenerate fixer setting fire to his corner of corporate America to earn back a bit of his soul. One of the best films of the ‘00s and a stone-cold classic.

The Dark Knight (2008) — Possibly the greatest Batman ever made; definitely the greatest Hollywood crime film of the 21st century.

The Hangover (2009) — This clever film revived the raunchy mainstream comedy (before squandering audiences’ love with two lousy sequels).

Magic Mike (2012) — I was surprised as anyone that this Soderberghdirected, Channing Tatum-starring male stripper film was not only fun but smart and emotionally intelligent.

42 (2013) — A biopic that soars as a great baseball film, Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey are an unbeatable battery.

The Lego Movie (2014) — Yes, it’s a 101-minute toy ad. But c’mon, it’s so fun! And it has some heart in an ‘80s family film way.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) — There’s no reason for a decades-inthe-making Mad Max sequel to have worked. And yet it did and is one of the best films of the 2010s.

The Nice Guys (2016) — Shane Black’s ‘70s buddy noir, starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, is irreverent fun that could easily exist in the same universe as Altman’s The Long Goodbye Dunkirk (2017) — Christopher Nolan upends the war film by depicting the Dunkirk evacuation through three timeframes: one week, one day, and one hour. There’s no other war film like it.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) — A Blade Runner sequel didn’t need to happen, yet Denis Villeneuve’s film is way better than it has any right to be. An honest reckoning with and expansion of the original.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) — What could’ve been a crass cash-in is a subversive undermining of our IPdominated remake culture and a fun action movie.

Riverside Odds: Rock Will Make a Comeback

by Roderick Thomas

As a genre, rock n’ roll hasn’t seen the heights it flourished in during the 70s and 80s, or the pop culture dominance of the grunge and pop rock mid to late 90s.

However, that hasn’t stopped Riverside Odds from continuing to tour and create some classic rock music. I spoke with band front man R.W Hellborn about their new project, Punching Above our Weight, their tour and the state of rock n’ roll.

Roderick Thomas: Mr. Hellborn! Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

R.W. Hellborn: It’s my pleasure.

RT: Where is everyone from?

R.W.H: All of us in the band are from different cities right outside of Philadelphia.

RT: Is Rock dead?

R.W.H: Well, you definitely don’t hear rock n’ roll on the radio as much as you used to. It doesn’t have the same marketability like it used to in the 80’s and 90s.

R.W.H: People complain about Kiss and Motley Crue still touring. Well, nobody is doing it the way that they are, you need these guys. Everything is cyclical though, rock will also have a resurgence.

RT: Is it because rock requires you to play instruments and we are in a digital era?

R.W.H: I don’t know. I think things just come and go in cycles. Even the word rockstar has grown beyond the rock genre. To be honest it’s overused.

R.W.H: I mean disco is back in a way with artists now too. For rock, it’s just a matter of time.

RT: How do you think rock will make a comeback?

R.W.H: Maybe through grunge, it’s hard to say. There are so many different sub genres within rock itself. Humans haven’t changed music, what sounds good, sounds good no matter the interpretation.

RT: Who were the folks that you loved when you were coming up?

R.W.H: I love musicians that aren’t afraid to be theatrical and command a crowd. Freddy Mercury in Queen, Fiona Apple and Tina Turner are great examples of that. I especially love women in rock, they’re just so badass as performers.

RT: What makes a Rockstar?

R.W.H: It’s about the feeling for me. It’s not just music, its performance and its theater. For me, a rockstar has all three things: good songs, personality and great performances.

RT: Who do you like in music right now?

R.W.H: These days, I listen to more pop artists than

rock n roll. I like Billie Eilish, she’s interesting.

RT: Do you think women have an edge in the genre?

R.W.H: I think women have freedom on stage. I think for a lot of dudes in many genres, they get typecast and aren’t as expressive on stage.

RT: How was it creating your new album Punching Above Our Weight?

R.W.H: With this album, we let go of all restrictions and we allowed ourselves to have some freedom, and wrote the best songs we could write.

RT: What’s the hardest part about touring?

R.W.H: Doing it when you’re independent, encountering the unknown and all the idiosyncrasies of being a bandmate on a bus [laughs].

RT: What do you want to accomplish this year?

R.W.H: We definitely want to get back to the west coast and the midwest by the end of the year.

RT: What kind of musical legacy do you want to create?

R.W.H: That we were having fun. That you had a great time watching and listening to us.

RT: What’s coming up next for you?

R.W.H: We’ve got a couple shows coming up on the east coast. We are actually doing a show with Lisa B and Supreme, some excellent Philly rappers, can’t wait!

RT: Thank you so much for speaking with me, congrats on your new album.

R.W.H: Thank you!

RT: Check out Riverside Odds on tour and their new project, Punching Above Our Weight, available now on streaming platforms.

Roderick Thomas is an NYC based writer, filmmaker, (Instagram: @Hippiebyaccident, Email: rtroderick. thomas@gmail.com, Site: roderickthomas.net)

The new books of Liturgy. Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix has long fronted a powerful band. The first three Liturgy releases were impressive, intelligent, calculated and well-executed albums fairly entrenched in black metal. The group (of which, at this point, Hunt-Hendrix is the only constant) has since released a second three discs, and it’s with these—2019’s H.A.Q.Q., 2020’s Origin of the Alimonies and the new 93696 (CD, double LP and download from Thrill Jockey)—that Liturgy rises above the form. At this point, skipping out on the Brooklyn band’s music is like giving Nina Simone a pass because you don’t like vocal jazz. Sure, that’s what she does, but she’s so much more. Liturgy’s music is still pretty heavy, think sheets of cold rain in the night, but they’ve grown into something remarkable, something unique and powerful. Hunt-Hendrix is fortunate to have a new line-up that’s fully able to realize her compositions, but the last three albums have been all about her vision. There is plenty of philosophy behind them (lengthy expositions are up on YouTube) but it’s the sonic architecture that makes the records so exciting. In adding guests from New York’s contemporary classical and improv realms on H.A.Q.Q. and Origin of the Alimonies, Hunt-Hendrix developed ideas about orchestration and studio engineering that are further refined on 93696. The results are surprising, unsettling and beautiful, like being in a trance in a chasm of broken glass. There’s glockenspiel, Wurlitzer and zither and moments of angelic chorales. There are passages of thrash interrupted by processed beats and jarring digital glitches. There’s bits of riffage and lots of screaming into the bleakness, which certainly isn’t for everyone. But at this point, it shouldn’t be dismissed for reasons of not liking metal.

Liturgy has been a point of controversy at least since 2015, when its frontperson (then known as Hunter Hunt-Hendrix) issued a lengthy screed on what black metal is, or should be, or could be. At this point, understanding the meta-

physics behind Hunt-Hendrix’s music is probably about as essential as being versed in Aleister Crowley is for appreciating Led Zeppelin. There’s a lot going on beyond the theory, and it’s pretty powerful stuff.

four tubas and has delved into reggae and calypso, traditions from India and Mali, all the while retaining his own, enigmatic style. On Savoy, he lays claim to an older generation of song from the first track, where he talks about his parents meeting at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem and his growing up with all their “cool and hip” music. Like the great Lead Belly, he’s a living songbook of the African diaspora. If U2 is deserving of a Kennedy Center Honor for making “significant contributions to American culture,” as the Irish band received in December, surely Mahal is overdue.

“Die! Die! Die!” to mark indictment day and then encored with a favorite from the MIDI days, with Singing Resident intoning in his pronounced drawl that “life is a lot like the freak show ‘cuz nobody laughs when they leave.” The Residents have doggedly been chasing an immediately recognizable aesthetic of cartoon creepiness for 50 years now, which makes their projects great even when they’re not. Hell, let’s put them in the Kennedy Center Hall of Fame as well.

#IYKYK: The duo that got Iggy Pop to guest on a song, repeating the word “moron” 21 times—that being Lancaster, England’s the Lovely Eggs–debut their Eggs TV on YouTube April 6. It can’t not be good.

The natch’l jazz. Louis Jordan’s “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” was—for me and I suspect for many—an early peek into a musical past. I don’t know where I heard it first, but it’s likely it was seeing the 1946 Tom and Jerry cartoon “Solid Serenade” on television. I know it was well familiar when I heard Joe Jackson sing it on his 1981 album Jumpin’ Jive. It’s an immediately likeable song, even for a kid, with lots of rhymes, creative license with the grammar and a sentiment that’s easy to grasp. Jackson’s rendition, and the whole of the album, holds up remarkably well four decades later. He takes it on with a love for early jazz but, even more, respect for the craft of past songwriters.

The song shows up again on Savoy, the new album by Harlem-born octogenarian Taj Mahal (CD, LP and download out April 28 from Stony Plain Records). Mahal put his best foot forward in January with the single, “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” a slow blues with lush horn accompaniment. It’s a fine album all around, though, with a strong band of San Francisco session players, and it reminds me of Jackson’s record in that it’s all about the songs. He steps up to Jordan again with a grooving take on “Caledonia” (it doesn’t top James Cotton’s 1976 live version, but what could?) and does quite nice readings of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and “Do Nothin’ Til You Hear From Me.” He also executes some sweet scat on “Sweet Georgia Brown” and duets with Maria Muldaur on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Beginning to end, it’s a pleasure.

Mahal formed his first band, with fellow guitarist Ry Cooder, in 1964 and around that time was working for Howlin’ Wolf, Lighnin’ Hopkins and other blues greats. Later that decade, he appeared in The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. He led a band that featured

Everyone comes to the freak show. I decide over and over again that I’m done with the Residents but every time the wheel spins I’m right back in, buying each reissue and going to every tour. Time and again, from their 1990s discovery of MIDI technology to the sad loss of founding member Hardy Fox in 2018, it’s been easy to say their day has past, but the fact is they keep on delivering. Triple Trouble, a new movie by the anonymous-ish outcasts, got its NYC premiere at the Museum of Modern Art on March 7 and had all the hallmarks of Residents storytelling: first-person narrative, clumsy exposition and plenty of referencing themselves and their history. It was also, in their always dependable way, kinda great. On March 30, they brought their Faceless Forever tour to Le Poisson Rouge and reliably, joyously, rolled out their hits, opening with Hank Williams “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)’ and ripping through reworked versions of “Hello Skinny,” “Smelly Tongues,” “Moisture,” “Constantinople” and “Semolina.” Unusually, the one known as the Singing Resident didn’t say a word between songs, but they played “Bach is Dead” for Bach’s Gregorian-calendar birthday eve and the Donald Trump dedication

"The Residents have doggedly been chasing an immediately recognizable aesthetic of cartoon creepiness for 50 years now."

Quinn on Books

Quinn on Books: A Plunge Into a New Reality

Review of War Diary, by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Greg

Nissan

Review by Michael Quinn

Right now, as you read this, there’s a war going on. Maybe you know every detail. Maybe you’ve skimmed the headlines. Maybe it feels like it has nothing to do with you.

But what if the war was happening where you lived? You might think, This can’t be happening. You might think, Someone has to do something. But what if no one did?

War Diary, by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Greg Nissan, is a firstperson account of the first few weeks of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. Originally published in the German newspaper, Der Spiegel (and online on Isolarii and Artforum), the short, urgent dispatches convey disbelief and anguish, and urgently appeal to Western readers for help. Belorusets often wrote an entry in the middle of the night, in German (which is neither her first nor second language), under the constant threat of bombing, and published it the next day alongside one of her photographs. “Tomorrow morning I will read this text again,” Belorusets writes on day 25. “If I do, it will mean that we survived the night.”

When the war starts, Belorusets, an artist, is splitting her time between Berlin and Kyiv, where she lives near her parents. People have been hearing the rumblings of trouble for a long time, but many stubbornly refuse to believe anything more will come of it. “War was still no more than a word for me, with the ring of history books and distant, mostly exotic news,” Belorusets writes. Then Kyiv is bombed for the first time since WWII. The war hits home.

At first, people assume it can’t last long. It seems so senseless and absurd. The first night, they’re urged to seek refuge in a bomb shelter. The shelter is wellstocked and not too crowded. It almost feels cozy. But the people emerge in the morning to a changed city—buildings are destroyed, streets are deserted—and soon find themselves changed as well. “War” as a word feels insufficient or meaningless. They are plunged into a new reality.

Familiar routines are replaced by terrifying new ones. Curfews. Air raids. Trips to the bomb shelter. Sirens. Tense silences. Sleepless nights.“Tomorrow seems an eternity away, as if it were happening on another planet,” Belorusets writes. Days are often spent alone, online, watching videos of destruction in disbelief, where “the end of the war is continually announced like a weather forecast.” The number of children killed is staggering. Life suddenly feels irrational, confusing, disorienting. People engage in agonizing debates over whether to leave—or to try to leave. Is it even

possible? Many try and do not make it. On the side of a road is a car “blackened with fire and pierced with bullet holes.” War soon becomes “a total, all-encompassing way of life that swallows up everything.” So how to explain waking up and feeling good for no reason at all? To feel lured outside by a sunny, spring day? To feel joy at finding a café unexpectedly open, or a bakery, or food on the supermarket shelves? What a luxury it suddenly is to loiter in a store for a moment, idly, to not be rushing home, bolting the door, covering the windows with bed sheets—at night, an illuminated window is a bullseye for a bomb—putting a lamp on the floor to write by, as the smell of burning drifts across a darkening sky. To escape a feeling of confinement, Belorusets takes walks, and when she’s moved to photograph something—Will that building still be there the next time? she’s sometimes stopped by armed men. Sharing photos of places online may make them targets for the next bomb, she’s warned. Other people eye her suspiciously, like she’s a Russian spy. Each time she raises her camera, she feels paranoid that she has become a target herself.

Mostly, she heads outside seeking connection. She listens carefully as strangers tumble out their thoughts, trying to make sense of the senselessness of war. It becomes clear that if anything a person does matters now, it’s because it’s in service to someone else. A concierge looks after people’s apartments to make sure nothing is stolen. A woman cares for a menagerie of abandoned pets. And Belorusets keeps this diary not for herself, but for us. War Diary is a slender book with tremendous emotional power. Its message could not be clearer. War isn’t just something happening over there, to them. It’s happening here, right now, to all of us.

Jazz by Grella

Jazz and the Poetics of Space

by George Grella

Bad things are just as valuable as good things, at least for a critic. Bad work (art, music, writing) is often a lesson in missed opportunities, the mistakes and missteps that, if corrected, would turn the bad thing into a good thing. It was a bad book I read recently that led to this column, a book about improvisation and the idea of contingency in everyday life that reduced both to the kind of academic detail that may work in a dissertation but that is absolutely not good critical thinking.

Taking random bits of experience and sensation and using them to produce some kind of coherent idea/ response is what training in improvisation (and a good liberal arts education) is all about. While neither will make your wealthy or necessarily happy, as Joseph Brodsky pointed out, they both fire up and connect synapses across the brain. And that is how I came to be thinking about jazz, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the accidentally avant-garde sexploitation movies of Doris Wishman.

Hopper was not a jazz painter in any way (as opposed to Stuart Davis, as an example), but he was of course one of the great painters of New York City, both the actual place and the one that lives in our imaginations.

The recent Edward Hopper’s New York exhibition at the Whitney displayed that, the kind of quiet, lonely corners and empty streets that can be found in the right places at the right times—6 a.m. on an August morning, a theater that has just opened its doors, the noir imagination of Nighthawks (not at the Whitney nor part of the show). And New York is the jazz city, of course, and though the music was not created here, it was quickly adopted and just as quickly centered itself as a progressive style integral to New York City life. All the cats either were here or had to at last pass through here, a poignant example being the late, tragic, problematic Art Pepper. One of the great alto saxophonists, he never played in New York until 1977, five years before his death, when after stints in prison and several comebacks, he finally booked a week at the Village Vanguard. The live recordings show a man more than a little amazed at himself, finally overcoming deep-seated insecurities about being able to measure up as a white musician in the jazz world and being able to headline in the Big Apple.

From Ellington at the Cotton Club, Benny Goodman bringing jazz to Carnegie Hall, Charlie Parker cementing the hyperdrive of America after World War II along 52nd Street, jazz has been the urban, and urbane, sound of sophistication and grit, repose and frenetic rush, the cocktail lounge and the A train barreling express from 59th to 125th street. The noir idea and aesthetic, doomed people struggling for some moral center, thrives in the city, and jazz for decades was the soundtrack for so much noir. It was the music of hip outsiders on both side of the law, and not in any specialized art way—think Peter Gunn and Johnny Staccato, an actual television series starring John Cassavetes as a jazz pianist and private eye. Yeah, television was cool way before The Sopranos

The sound carried through American popular culture for decades and finding it in some of Doris Wishman’s movies cements jazz as the music of New York. Several of her films were recently collected on the Criterion Channel, and they are riveting. They are intentionally lurid, pressing the edge of what was possible for nudity in the ‘60s. Two striking ones, Bad Girls Go to Hell and Indecent Desires, are noir dramas and what makes them sexploitation is that they are packed with gratuitous nudity. How gratuitous? There’s a scene in Indecent Desires where one

of the secondary characters does her “ballet exercises” topless, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the story or the plot. The thing is, though, that part of the sexploitation is that the movies are full of jazz, which here becomes the music of titillation, desire, and even perversion.

Wishman worked with essentially no budgets, filming with a handheld camera in black and white and without recording audio. She dubbed in all the dialogue in post-production. There’s no natural sound either; there’s dialogue and music that she dropped in after filming. And that music is jazz, and the jazz is meant to signify setting and drama: a character walks down the street, for the moment free and easy, and the music swings brightly; a scene of optimistic preparation has a quirky waltz-time knockoff of “Take Five,” with an alto player imitating Paul Desmond; lurid scenes of sex and violence have the kind of strip club sinuousness in the playing that leads to dissonant chords. It’s a perfect example of how jazz was so prevalent that it could be used in the most unsubtle storytelling because the sheer sound of it was a social cue; it would immediately triggering a sense of context, knowledge, and understanding in the viewer.

It almost goes without saying that these movies take place in New York; in Bad Girls Go to Hell, the main character flees Boston for Manhattan, while Indecent Desires is set in a very recognizable Queens, and specific details of apartment and office life in the borough are essential to the plot. New Yorkers will, and would have, recognized these spaces, and people watching these movies in the ‘60s—or even now—would know by the sound that these are New York spaces. Not Hopper’s of course, but this huge, fantastic city is full of people and stories, eight million as the great noir statement goes, and one sound that connects them all, through every space, is jazz.

Or at least it used to. Popular music has fragmented so much since the ‘60s, and that means New York City sounds have fragmented and, in my view, become elusive. What is the New York sound now, what musicians or bands, in any genre, have a sound that identifies them as part of New York? It’s not clear to me what that might be right now, and even if there is one. My ears tell me that last era of New York City sound was ‘90s hip hop (in a good way), maybe bands like The Strokes (in a not good way). This was my first and last thought while walking through Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars, the great exhibition of Lou Reed’s archives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Reed, not just in the Velvet Underground but his own solo work, was one of the quintessential New York musicians, and one of the great music makers about New York. Yes, he wrote famous songs about the city, but more than that he captured that New York City sound, one that goes across all styles. It’s tight at the core but loose, jangly, even a little spiky on top, has an attitude but isn’t mad—as the cliché goes, West Coast people act nice but are mean, while New Yorkers act mean but are nice. So, the music confronts you a little upfront, but it always buys you a shot and a beer in the end. It’s fundamentally mature, and in a pop landscape that focuses almost exclusively on ephemeral juvenilia of one kind or another, where Taylor Swift has ridden the long YA fiction wave to help supposed adults feel like they never left college, it’s hard to find mature music out there. That’s the New York sound, made by and meant for people who have their shit together, no matter their age.

Edward Hopper, Night Shadows, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Doris Wishman Still, from Indecent Desires

Marie's Craft Corner

Turn Coffee Sleeves Into Cute Easter Baskets!

by Marie Hueston

For months I’ve been collecting coffee sleeves—the paper covers you slip onto to-go coffee cups to protect your hands from the heat— knowing they could be turned into a craft someday. Then when I started thinking about what to use for an Easter basket, I realized these would work perfectly. Their textured surfaces even give them the appearance of a real basket. Here’s how to make your own.