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PAGE 7 MARCH 2022
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RISING CRIME RATES, MENTAL ILLNESS AND STOP-AND-FRISK
I
n New York City and nationwide, there is a rise in crime rates. While the violence is not identical to the climate of the 80s and 90s. The sharp upward spike in crime should cause some concern.
Between 1990 and 1998 crime rates decreased tremendously. During their respective tenures, New York City mayors David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani were under pressure to clean up the city. Violence and the crack epidemic scarred so many neighborhoods. Today’s New York City pales in comparison to the environment of crime and violence of the 1990s and 1980s.
"Adams, who spent some of his early youth as a gang member, then later a police officer, is no stranger to the world of crime." While former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani may be best known for conspiracy theories and hair dye today, in the 1990’s and early 2000’s he was referred to by many as the tough-oncrime New York mayor. Who could forget the leadership role Giuliani played during the World Trade Center attacks of September 11. Much like former Governor Cuomo, for a time, Giuliani was seen as a national hero and is often associated or credited with the continued decrease in crime going into, during and after his mayoral tenure (1994-2001). While he received praise by some, many have critiqued Giuliani’s methods used to curtail crime, particularly due to the outcomes of the infamous stop-and-frisk policies, implemented during his administration. Stop-andfrisk allowed law enforcement to detain and search any individual on the grounds of suspicion alone, and not probable cause. The policy was intended to send a message to criminals that they could be caught at any time. And while consequent years did see a decrease in crime, the vast majority
by Roderick Thomas
(over 80%) of the people stopped were never arrested, nor did they possess any weapons. However, New York City’s AfricanAmerican and Latino residents were almost instantly the target of the policy by an overwhelming majority. In some years, African-Americans and Latinos represented an alarming 90 percent of those stopped and frisked. The policy may have curtailed some petty crime, but the low number of arrested criminals compared to the abusive, and racially biased effects became another political stain on New York City law enforcement. Fast-forward to 2019 and New York City was experiencing an uptick in crime, but in 2020, New Yorkers would see the most dramatic spike in years. The uncertainty of the world in 2020 with the coronavirus pandemic undoubtedly had an influence in creating a climate of instability. Anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City jumped 96 percent between 2020 and 2021, while grand larceny, felony assault, and subway crimes also increased. In 2021 Mayor Eric Adams won the election for New York City mayor, to the discomfort of some New Yorkers, who believed he would reinstate stopand-frisk. Adams, who spent some of his early youth as a gang member, then later a police officer, is no stranger to the world of crime, having experienced several perspectives. Though he has previously acknowledged racism and abuse by police, Mayor Adams has voiced his opposition to the defund the police movement and Black Lives Matter leaders. Earlier this year Eric Adams revealed a program to curb violent crime in New York City. In this plan Adams includes a revised stop and frisk policy. Adams states that these identifiable NYPD crime units will be deployed in neighborhoods where crime is most concentrated. “We will not surrender our city to the violent few. I know how to do this, New York has done it before,” said Mayor Eric Adams. The mental-health perspective is one that may still not be getting enough light. The impact of the pandemic and the ongoing atmosphere of instability is felt in many communities. Crime does tend to be more concentrated in certain areas of the city. Senseless acts of violence are seen
Back in 2012, a group of Red Hookers came to the 76th Precinct Community Council meeting to demand an end to stop-and-frisk (photo by George Fiala).
inNYC, like the subway killing of Michelle Go, an Asian-American woman who was shoved onto subway tracks at Times Square and consequently died. Her attacker, a homeless and likely mentally ill man Simon Martial, confessed to pushing Michelle Go, claiming, “she stole my jacket!” There is a huge mental health component that the public has to grapple with. In the end, there are no easy answers
to lessening the violence in New York or elsewhere. However, here’s hoping that past mistakes help city officials, and the general public evolve the way crime, and community policing is handled.
Roderick Thomas is an NYC based writer, filmmaker, and Host of Hippie By Accident Podcast. (Instagram: @Hippiebyaccident, Email: rtroderick.thomas@gmail.com
George and Brian's Sandwich Odyssey pages 8 and9
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Press Pass NYC’s Pilot Program Launches in a Handful of High Schools by Erin DeGregorio
M
ore students will be introduced to journalism during high school, thanks to Lara Bergen, former children’s book editor and founder and interim director of Press Pass NYC. The idea came to Bergen five years ago when she was teaching English at Louis D. Brandeis High School, which at the time did not have a school paper. “I didn’t know how to channel the students’ different skill sets and interests, and so we tried a school newspaper,” Bergen explained. “It was profoundly rewarding for me as a teacher—by far the most interesting and productive class that I taught—and I could see it was revelatory for students who didn’t know what journalism and journalistic writing was about.” Last year, after learning that many other public schools do not have a paper or journalism program, Bergen believed it was time to turn an idea into a reality. “We have a million students in New York City and easily 800,000 of them will not experience journalism in pre-K through the 12th grade—in a city with small newspapers, the biggest newspapers in the world, and colleges and graduate schools with incredibly rich resources,” she said. “I realized what a perfect time in New York and in history this was for trying to revive journalism in schools. It’s the best way to learn news literacy.” “Access to scholastic journalism and opportunities to participate in it are fundamentally educational equity issues,” Bergen added. “This is also why our program is offered completely free to schools—asking only that they pay whatever online newspaper web hosting fees are incurred—if they can.” Seven high schools in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan have already begun working with Press Pass NYC
over the last five months. Melanie Werner, assistant principal at Brooklyn High School for Law and Technology reached out to Bergen, sharing her desire to launch a digital monthly newspaper at the Bushwick school. So, Bergen helped organize an all-female panel of six journalists to physically visit the high school on Feb. 15 and speak with approximately other goals.
“I realized what a perfect time in New York and in history this was for trying to revive journalism in schools. It’s the best way to learn news literacy.” 50 students about their careers for 90 minutes. “We’ve held events and had speakers visit us in the past, but I was so impressed both by the kinds and levels of questions that our students were asking and how forthcoming and honest the journalists were,” Werner said. “The students felt very inspired and showed interest in getting involved in our school newspaper and getting this off the ground. It was an awesome event.” Though Press Pass NYC is just shaping up, Bergen expressed optimism and hopes to launch a student-editor boot camp this summer, among
“This is our pilot year in figuring out what works best, but my desire is that this will not be an extra program for schools. This is not working on one thing and leaving, but actually coming in, supporting schools as much as possible, and helping schools do this on their own through consultation,” Bergen said. She also wants to make high schools aware of other existing organizations—including PEN America, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the US Journalism Education Association—as well as introduce them to journalism programs at local higher education institutions. “Lara brings tremendous energy to high school journalism programming and it’s great working with her and seeing her organization blossom in ways that also enhance what our journalism program at Baruch College is offering to public high school students and teacher-advisors,” said Professor Geanne Belton, director of the High School Journalism Program at Baruch College of the City University of New York. “I hope Baruch College’s high school journalism program, in collaboration with Press Pass NYC, will help make the experience of having a quality high school newspaper available to more students and that Press Pass NYC will expand journalism education and school newspaper interest and engagement within as many NYC public high schools as possible.”
Founded June 2010 by George Fiala and Frank Galeano with thanks to these guys
Page 2 Red Hook Star-Revue
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March 2022
Opinion: Words by George
I
Both had suffered in German prisoner camps during the war. As all this happened before I came into existence, as a kid I didn't think much about it. My world was similar to that of Beaver Cleaver, a happy childhood growing up in the America of the 1950's. My parents worked hard to give my sister and I that kind of idyllic youth. But as I got older I began trying to understand what kind of world they had lived through. My dad used to watch a program called "The Twentieth Century," narrated by the great newscaster Walter Cronkite. As he spent all of WW II in Europe, as a European, he was especially interested in the war from the American perspective. To get an idea of what I am talking about, look for Cronkite's 20th Century program about the Battle of the Bulge on Youtube. You see amazing footage of soldiers fighting in the snow - both Americans and Germans, as well as bombed out buildings, buildings on fire, and civilians trying to get the hell out. You kind of get an idea of what's going on today in the Ukraine, only in black and white. All this took place less than a decade before my birthday. Of course, in those days, a decade was forever for me. My parents made sure I stayed out of Vietnam by sending me to college, and I studied just hard enough to keep from flunking out and receiving a 1A draft card. All I knew was that war was bad, and primitive. I tended to the pacifist side of things, the Noam Chomsky side of things, and felt terrible at times to be an American, as we spent unbelievable amounts of money each year maintaining a huge military. It's true that most of that military was meant to serve as the world's peacekeeper. But I focused on the excursions we took in places like Mozambique, or Panama, or Nicaragua - either in proxy wars with the Soviets, or actual fighting against much
ping the Ukrainian army for this eventuality. And thankfully again, the world has stepped it up since the invasion. Hopefully this will all end well, but just like the beginning of Covid, there is ahuge uncertainty about the future. smaller nations, basically for dumb political reasons, such as boosting a president's popularity polls. And in the process destroying the lives of people just as important and worthy of a good life as us, although not many here thought about that. In those days I would sometimes look at the world from the viewpoint of the Soviets, to try and figure out the Cold War. I read lots of books about the 20th century wars, the Russian Revolution, Karl Marx. I eventually enrolled at the New School in a Master's program in International Studies. All in trying to understand history. One thing I could never understand is the ending of that cold war. Up until then the Soviet Union was the big enemy for patriotic Americans. All of a sudden, it's over, the Berlin Wall is smushed, my parent's original country and all their neighbors get to be truly independent and vote for their own leaders, and have a free press - not to mention Prague gets to be a hot place to hang out in–after all those years as a huge enemy, we kind of forgot about the Russians instead of welcoming them to our world and help them prosper in it, as they learned about the Western way. I thought that we owed them some sort of Marshall Plan in order to ease them into our kind of world where you could do more of what you liked to do, but in return, you wouldn't be guaranteed some klind of higher education, healthcare, and a place to live, as those under Communism kind of had. Instead, we sent them economist/professor Jeffrey Sachs, who was famous (or infamous) for his 'shock therapy' economic theory which stated that "In economics, shock therapy is the sudden release of price and currency controls (economic liberalization), withdrawal of state subsidies, and immediate trade liberalization within a country, usually also including largescale privatization of previously public-owned assets (Wikipedia)." While I pretty much appreciated the Bill Clinton presidency, to me this was his biggest mistake. The typical Russian had no idea how to live in such a
society, people lost their life savings as the ruble crashed, as well as their basic securities such as health and education. Every citizen was given shares of the former state-owned companies, but it was the former elites in the Communist Party who were smart enough to buy them from the impoverished public, at bargain basement prices, turning the elite Party members into the elite oligarchs. Alcoholism and suicide grew at astronomical rates, and life expectancy plummeted. By the end of the decade, the country pretty much threw out Boris Yeltsin and welcomed Vladimir Putin, ex KGB agent, who promised something a something better beginning (to quote the Kinks' Ray Davies.) Putin of course is still in power, and actually still pretty popular, as Russians were given a better living standard as well as some freedoms. But Putin always had a second track, which has culminated in a repetition of some of the horrors of that second World War. Today we get to see the horrors in color instead of black and white–but it's the same thing–tanks, missiles, guns, schools and homes blown up and on fire, and regular people, in this case wearing the same kinds of clothes and eating the same kinds of snacks as we do, kids with the same toys that we have, desperately fleeing on bus, car, train and even on foot (haven't seen any reports of oxcarts though). What comes to my mind, now having read history, is Hitler's invasion of his European neighbors, most notably Poland. While the world looked on, the Nazis and then Russia invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, for phony reasons. Nobody did much to help them out, despite treaties that Poland had with France and England. I thought about Poland as Russia began amassing a huge army outside of the Ukraine, but I never really thought that they would invade. As has been said by many of Ukrainians interviewed on TV, this after all is the 21st century. Thankfully, NATO countries including the United States have spent lots of time and money training and equip-
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And thank God for elections, as well as George Washington's idea that the presidency should never become a lifelong thing. We see how that's turned out in Mr. Putin's case. -George Fiala, Publisher
The drift anchor manifesto Brooklyn 3.6.2022 …is here to enhance the not moving visual arts referred to here as the image. The simple fact that paintings and drawings are standing still underlines what they can do and what they can’t do. It is especially their disability that distinguishes them from other media. I see the image as an anchor in an ever changing world around us. A calm stretch of sea where one can rest and contemplate. In a frontal look upon the image I feel that what is inside the image, so to speak, beyond the surface away from me, belongs to the producer of the image, the artist. The space between me and the image on the other hand belongs to my imagination, it is my space. However, in that very space something else is happening as well: From the outside lighting that might change, to my position and distance in front of the image, that already changed while I was approaching the image, everything is in motion. Yet, there is another and most important movement, that of the eyes. By its totality of showing everything at the same time the image creates an infinite possibility of ways to be seen, or to be scanned, if you will - and thus is infinitely revealing itself. The anchor is drifting to keep us on course; of course each individual according to their own imagination. Franz Landsperky
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Red Hook Star-Revue
About the most political thing I will say right here is thank God that we have somebody in the White House who knows what he's doing (as opposed to the last occupant, who didn't think actual knowledge was that important.)
mj
've lived in the United States all my life. But both my parents were from a part of the world that has been hugely in the news since the end of February. They came here from Czechoslovakia after World War 2, pretty much as refugees, my dad as soon as he could, my mom waited for her visa and just barely got out in 1948 as the Soviets were coming in.
©COPYRIGHT 2022 MARC JACKSON AND WEiRD0 COMiCS #5
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March 2022, Page 3
Antigone to be performed outdoors in Saugerties
F
rancis Karagodins is a senior at Bard College. He is a Brooklyn native, and has been a magician as well as an aspiring theater director.
by Nathan Weiser
“Antigone relates to now in the sense that there is a lot of discussion about what is the right way to behave and the right way to legislate.”
Opus 40 is a historic spot that has a connection to Bard College. Harvey Fite, a Bard professor and a sculptor, created the park, which was originally a bluestone quarry. Some call
His senior project will be a full production of the Greek tragedy Antigone at Opus 40, a sculpture park about a half hour from Annandale-on-Hudson campus.
Karagodins is a classics major, which involves learning ancient Greek and Latin. He has been translating this play from ancient Greek into English for the production. This will be his fifth production at Bard. He chose Antigone for his senior project for its timeliness. “The problems addressed within Antigone are the same problems that we must address today,” Karagodins said.
Karagodins compared the process of making this structure to the Michelangelo sculpture. Opus 40 is all blue stone with no cement used. Karagodins pointed out that the Greek amphitheater was built within existing topography and the amphitheater at Delphi in Greece has as its background real mountains. The same is true at Opus 40.
Karagodins’s production of the Sophocles play will take place at the end of April or the beginning of May depending on the weather. His essential cast will consist of six people and a Greek chorus. “In Greek tragedy, three actors were used and they would play different parts,” Karagodins said. “For example, the person who plays Antigone’s sister in one scene may play her husband in another scene because they use masks. I don’t think I am going to use masks.”
amount of discipline necessary to do this is beyond the experience and understanding of most people including myself.”
The production of Antigone will be the first official student production under a new cooperative agreement between Opus 40 and Bard College.
The centerpiece of the Opus 40 park is a perfect spot to produce a classical Greek play.
Antigone’s brothers died and one of them was not allowed to be buried, as ordered by King Creon. “Today we think a lot about contamination and what is right and wrong,” Karagodins said. “When we think about public health, we are thinking about the health of the state. In the ancient world, the health of the state was a more general notion.
his creation the Stonehenge of North America. Fite came to Bard to establish its drama department and teach sculpture. “Fite used instruments and machines to move the stones but he did so by himself, he had no helpers,” Karagodins said. “He had no equipment. In 37 years working everyday, he made this landscape out of blue stone. The
All the productions that Karagodins has directed have been located at historic locations. His first production took place at the Blithewood Manor, which is a 19th century mansion on campus. That was a production of Sophocles’s Electra. The senior has done two Shakespeare productions. One was Julius Caesar, which showed the events leading up to the political assassination of Julius Caesar. His other Shakespeare production was Richard III. Karagodins was born in New York, moved to Riga, Latvia with his Latvian parents after first grade and moved back to Brooklyn after fifth grade.
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Page 4 Red Hook Star-Revue
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March 2022
Parks Department holds online meeting to give a status update by Nathan Weiser
O
n February 17, the Brooklyn Parks Department and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had a virtual meeting to update the community on the progress of the Red Hook ball fields.
The good news that the Parks Department had for the 52 people on the call was that fields 5-8 are officially open for the public to use. These are the four softball fields on Bay Street on the same side of the street as the Recreation Center. According to Davey Ives, the chief of staff for the Parks Department in Brooklyn, the pandemic has delayed things about a year. Ives thanked elected officials who represent Red Hook for their support so far during the project that began in 2014 and he hoped for their support going forward. Except for Dan Wiley, who represents Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, no local elected officials, or their representatives, attended the meeting, which was on Zoom. A spokesperson for Alexa Aviles, Red Hook’s representative in the City Council, told the Star-Revue that they have spoken to the Parks Department in the past. However, questions came up during the meeting that needed to be answered by local elected officials, including a suggestion for lights at the new ballfields, something that would need City funding. The City Council controls the budget for capital improvements. Daniel Gaughan, who is the on-site coordinator from the EPA, explained the history of what made the area contaminated and why EPA got involved. “The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) referred the site to the EPA in 2014,” Guaghan said. “That is how long we have been working on this together.” According to Gaughan, the EPA prohibited access to ball fields 5-8 until the cleanup was complete. “We placed a demarcation layer on top of the contaminated soil,” Gaughan said. “We brought in at least 12 inches of clean fill, a drainage layer and synthetic turf. There should be no further contact with contaminated soil by anyone in the neighborhood.” Phase 2, which includes Field 9 and soccer field 2, is in construction and slated to be finished this summer. Phase three (ball fields 1-4, soccer field 3-5 and the track) is currently in construction as well with an anticipated completion of spring of 2023.
Lines for baseball and soccer have not been put in yet because of the cold weather. They need the temperature to be above a certain threshold in order for the paint to cure properly. Jose from the permits office has been reaching out to leagues and schools to make sure the league games can take place at the complex. People that have had permits in the past will continue to have permits honored. They will not change the permitting policy. “We are anticipating completion of phase two during the summer,” Syrett said. “We have the schematic plan. There will be a new ball field with synthetic turf and a new soccer field with synthetic turf. We have bleachers for each field and an entry plate with lots of seating, paths and planting.” “We have synthetic turf fields for softball, baseball and soccer,” Syrett said. “We will have full bleachers, we have adult fitness stations in this area and the handball courts are staying. ” Phase three will have lights around the track and the field inside the track will be a lit field, as in the past. “As we get new elected officials we would love to advocate for more lighting,” Ives said. “That makes Jose and the permits team’s job easier because it gives them more playability.” Soccer field 6 will get four smaller fields as well as a picnic area and seating areas. There will be an adult fitness station (can include bars to hold on to for squats or push-ups or an overhead press and elliptical-like machine) in this phase on Court Street. There will be lots of space for spectators to watch the soccer players on the new synthetic turf fields. The picnic areas will be on Bay Street where the food trucks usually are. There was a question about what will be done to protect the neighborhood so that the contamination does not get away from the site during construction. “The way we have designed our parks is to contain contaminants in the soil,” Ives said. “That was what EPA mandated us to address. The soils that we have tested for in the ground will be contained and the public will be protected. The air monitoring that Chris mentioned is in the interest of protecting the public to minimize/eliminate any impact we might have on the Red Hook community.” The Parks Department is trying to plant as many trees as possible and put in as much green space as pos-
sible to help clean the air.
figure out the best location.
“We took down a lot of trees and there are many more trees that need to be planted as part of the restitution,” Syrett said. “The way the restitution works with Parks is it is based on the size of the tree we cut down. For a 12 inch tree {that came down}, you will plant three trees.”
Regarding permits, the permits office has worked with groups that have had permits in the past and they will try to ensure that they come back. If there are new groups that want permits it is recommended that they get in contact with the permits office soon (718965-8912) to get in front of the line for when new times open up.
The trees will be planted within the community board, which means Red Hook will get a lot more trees. In response to a question about why there are not any grass fields Ives said it is because synthetic turf fields are much easier to maintain, which maximizes playability. “At the Parks Department, we get a lot more use out of these fields. The turf is much easier to maintain than the soil. You do not have to worry about not playing on rainy days or when the field is vulnerable to reseeding.” There was a question about the need for port-o-potties in the park complex and a request to have them cleaned more often. According to Ives, the port-o-potties are a service that the Parks Department pays for. They will attempt to have them somewhere in the Red Hook ball field area during the peak summer season, and they will try to
The permits office is now taking inquiries to apply for permits for softball in the spring. You can also reach out to Jose to get a permit for soccer for later in the year. There was a question about allowing dogs on the ball fields during off leash hours. The answer is no because the Parks Department doesn’t allow dogs on any playing fields. They have already gotten complaints about people walking their dogs on fields 5-8. At Bush Clinton Park, which is about a block away from the ball fields, some of the basketball courts were recently resurfaced and new backboards have been funded. At Harold Ickes Park, on the other side of Red Hook, a construction project is currently in procurement.
"Except for Dan Wiley, who represents Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, no local elected officials, or their representatives, attended the meeting, which was on Zoom." Red Hook Star-Revue
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March 2022, Page 5
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In other news I notice the Bike-NaziPoliticos have proposed eliminating parking for the Not-Really-AffordableHousing (NRAH) going up in “transit rich zones.” Our new Beep, Antonio Reynoso, leads a cast of nine Brooklyn Council members, including Alexa Avilés (Red Hook/Sunset Park) and Lincoln Restler (Dumbo/Boerum Hill) who sent a letter (penned by Reynoso and Restler but yet to find its way online as of this writing) to City Planning extolling their grand idea. They think if we don’t build parking garages in the new basements, all those new residents will be forced to ride bikes or take mass transit. Hey, Politicos, how’s that been working out in transit-rich Park Slope for the past three decades where plenty of evidence exists that at any given time, most cars in Park Slope are endlessly circling, looking for parking? A lot of them wander down to Gowanus. Now they can mingle with the flotilla of NRAH vehicles looking for a spot. Wheeee! Funny thing about folks who live in NRAH. If they can afford a million dollar condo, they will damn sure find a way to bring their humongous SUV along to their new digs. And because they can never find parking, they’ll drive it to work more often in the hope of finding parking there, or just double-park it somewhere. I predict a new gig-economy occupation will soon be upon us: a Jeeves for Condo Masters (JCMs). Can’t find a spot in the morning or after returning home? Just call Jeeves and he or she will park it somewhere (miles away), then retrieve it as needed. An army of JCMs will spring
up, allowing for retrievals and pickups to be distributed among multiple JCMs. Of course, since Red Hook is among the sandiest of transit deserts, developers will still have to build spaces for some of their occupants. But perhaps it will become a favored locale for JCMs. Maybe the Politicos will then decree that JCMs deserve the first crack at the NRAH that by then will be TRRUH (Truly-Really-ReallyUnaffordable Housing). Time will tell. Finally, the studies I’ve seen about successfully getting transit-shy citizens out of their cars seem to point to trolleys and light rail as the best bet (dependable, quicker). But apparently the trolley lobby has never had the kind of money the automotive lobbyists have always had to sling around to keep all those crowded buses crawling amidst the cars looking for parking. It was obvious the de Blazio streetcar dream, BXQ, was fueled by developer money, not trolley bucks. Which brings us back to the Interborough Express, hopefully. And oh, by the way, the Brooklyn Heights Association proudly announced that eliminating a lane on the BQE and Brooklyn Bridge, aka, kicking the Promenade problem down the road for 10 years by adding misery to thousands of trips every day, “did not clog local streets.” So we can all be grateful for that, I guess. Unless you live on Hicks or Clinton Streets which seem pretty clogged to me thanks to Waze steering eastbound traffic off the BQE at Hamilton Ave now to avoid the “Kick the Can Lane Eliminations.” And so it goes. Take me now, Jesus, I’m ready!
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March 2022
A war with only losers by Dario Pio Mucilli, Foreign Correspondent
I
t’s not an easy task to speak with someone belonging to a people oppressed like the Ukrainians are currently; you might expect to feel pity, shyness or horror.
None of those feelings came to me when I spoke to Alla Pysana, an active member of the Ukrainian Community in Turin, Italy, which has organized many sitins and demonstrations for peace since the Russian Invasion began. Pysana, who’s an employee in the Honorary Consulate of the Republic of Ukraine in Turin, appeared rather determined and sure about what she was saying, demonstrating no weakness except the natural dismay for the fate of her people. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back before, I’ve been on the phone all the time”, she starts saying when we start the interview, “I’m from Netišyn, a city in western Ukraine, there I have relatives and friends, as well as all over Ukraine, from where I receive constantly terrible news: in major cities like Lviv sirens sound many times a day for the risk of Russian air attacks. People receives dispatches and guides that illustrate what to do in case of bombings, how to find or create a shelter, and so on” She is calm when she reports all these predicaments to me, so calm that instinctively I ask her if they had expected the invasion the whole time, despite President Volodymir Zelensky 's protestations of alarm from Washington. “We’ve been at war for 8 years, peo-
ple are used to it. During the latest weeks the growing tension has been perceived clearly by Ukrainians and the Government provided all the infos about how to behave in case of an open conflict. Of course psychologically it was a shock. Nonetheless, our nationals started to fight for the Fatherland, young people began to enlist voluntarily in the Army, allowing women and children to escape westward”. The importance she puts on the word “Fatherland” is striking. It is a noun or a concept that we, in the western world do not hear much anymore, maybe fortunately or maybe not. It is impressive seeing how, in such a crisis, the familiar call of the idea of nation plays a major role, without which all would be lost. In some manner it marks the difference of our western comfort from a warfare scenario and It makes you close to understand why, no matter the size of a dire situation, nationalism appears almost everywhere. Of course such a strong national feeling may be dangerous if it guides towards fascism or Nazism, an allegation Putin made explicitly towards the Ukrainian establishment, calling his invasion a sort of “war of liberation”. “Lies”, replies Pysana when asked about that, “if you’re Italian and you love your country, are you a Nazi? No, and the same is for Ukraine, where no Nazism issue has ever been in place.” This fiery answer needs to be factchecked: Ukraine has indeed a problem with far right paramilitary move-
ments, like Pravyi sektor, (literally Right Sector), which recall the typical fascist cameraderie, gesture and keywords. The Pravyi Sektor’s power lies in the 10,000 members in the corps, which are growing due to the emergency. The existence of a parallel army with specific political aims is not what could be said to be a core feature in a perfect Democracy, and nobody is brave enough to say that Ukraine has ever been that. But at the same time anybody can say that a “denazification process” is not what Putin is doing, because most of the people are not Nazi, nor the President himself, who is Jewish. So the Nazi fetish is just part of the fictitious casus belli Putin wanted to create. Another attempt at false flag was the security of the two separatist Donbass’ Republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, which Moscow recognized just a few days before the invasion. The Republic of Donetsk tried to open a representative office in Turin back in 2016 and thanks to some links with local politicians it seemed to have succeeded for a bit. “But they failed and they’re no longer operating” claims Pysana, who declines to comment over the links that the Representative Office had with a local major politician involved in the Regional Government of Piedmont (Turin’s Administrative Region). The Square in front of the Regional Government’s venue was chosen to be the spot for demonstrations of the
Ukrainian Community. This one demands respect for their national identity, but at the same time does not express hatred to the Russians. “My father was Russian, my mother Ukrainian”, reveals Pysana at the end of our call, “I’ve lived both in Siberia and Ukraine. Of course I felt the difference between the two cultures, but I never experienced discrimination, in either country. That was created by Putin as an excuse to invade. When I went to my grandparents in Donetsk they spoke Russian and I Ukrainian but we understood each other” The image given by Pysana’s words of two brotherly peoples torn apart by a conflict is too tough to be understood properly if you don’t live it daily in the cries for help you receive every day from your motherland, even if no longer live there. The Ukrainian Community abroad risks becoming a new Belarussian one, because if we don’t act, Ukraine might surrender, Zelenskyy might be deposed and then it will be too late to glue together the pieces of the vase. It will be late for almost everything. But in the meantime the Ukrainian people have already acted without expecting anyone’s help, in a national disillusionment that tastes like pride. But while it could be a moral victory for them, it is not so far from being the harshest failure in decades for the Western world, which is behaving more fearfully than the Russians are despite the sanctions.
What's with all those For Rent signs? by Brian Abate I’ve spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood and even as the pandemic is dying down, there still seem to be a lot of empty stores. So I stopped into a couple of local real estate companies to see what they would tell me.
H.L. Dynasty Real Estate Corp.
I spoke with Humberto Lopes, owner of H.L. Dynasty Real Estate Corp., located at 197 Columbia St. “I’m born and raised in Red Hook,” Lopes said. “I saw the neighborhood go down. I was very interested in real estate and I started buying real estate in Red Hook to redevelop the neighborhood. I’ve been doing that for about 30-40 years, so it’s been a really long time now. Lopes brought the BASIS Independent school to Red Hook and has now been open since 2014. “I wanted to make sure my tenants benefited the neighborhood and I’m proud to say that 100 percent of my tenants have benefited Red Hook,” Lopes said. “One of them is the Red Hook Initiative. I was building on Hicks and West 9th and they got in contact with me. They were almost out of the neighborhood at the time because they had no place to stay and
Red Hook Star-Revue
they fell in love with it and I thought it was a great fit for the neighborhood.” While Lopes has had lots of success and won numerous awards, he has had to get through some rough times to get to where he is now. I asked about what the real estate market was like at the height of the pandemic and how it is right now. “Early in the pandemic there were a lot of people leaving New York but now rentals are starting to go back up,” Lopes said. “There are a lot of people that are working from home now so it’s become much more common for young couples or single people to get two bedrooms instead of one because now they’ll use one of the bedrooms as an office. The two bedrooms went right away and so did the smaller commercial spaces. “The bigger commercial spaces aren’t going because the rent is too high and because of property tax. The momand-pop stores have also been hit really hard with more people working from home and using Amazon.” "We recently brought another artist, a beer company, and a recording studio into Red Hook,” Lopes said. A few listings on the H.L. Dynasty Real
Estate Corp. include: 6 Bay St. in Brooklyn: 6,000 square feet. 240 24th St. in Brooklyn: 1,140 square feet. 750-758 4th Ave. in Brooklyn: 2,600-20,200 square feet (with three spaces available.)
Galeano Real Estate
Galeano Real Estate, located at 104 Union St. is run Frank Galeano, who grew up in the area. His father has been a fixture there since the 1950's. “I started doing real estate here in December of 2000, so I’ve seen some changes in the neighborhood,” Galeano said. “I grew up here. My mother immigrated from Italy in 1929 and my grandfather immigrated from Italy in 1905 and ended up living on Sackett St. “I started right before 9/11, and in the aftermath, the huge cloud of dust landed here and suddenly there were a lot of vacant apartments because people were moving away. It was obviously a very sad way to get started but a very busy time too.” “New York has historically been a very stable real estate market full of primary residences and people who work in the city. After 2009, things changed. New York has a lot of secondary homes and as a result, it’s more valuable than it was in the past. One year ago it was
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really tough to rent anything but now prices are going up. Rents are up 10 or 20 percent and commercial rents are also rising. So many people from other countries and other parts of the U.S. have come to Brooklyn looking to start successful businesses.” After I asked Galeano about how he has adjusted to changes in the neighborhood over the years, he told me that “the important thing about loving the neighborhood is accepting change. We can’t tell the ocean what kind of waves to make; we can only swim the best we can.” His commercial listings include: 487 Union St. Corner storefront in raw condition (also has a basement.) 736 square feet and asking $4,000 per month. 3 applicants: An office, a photo studio, and a cafe owner. 101 Union St. 3,000 square foot warehouse asking $7,750 per month. Currently occupied by a company selling motorcycle gear. 94 Luquer St. 1,000 square foot warehouse for rent asking for $3,500 per month. 139 9th St. 1,620 square feet with 13 foot high ceilings asking for $5,000 per month. 115 Van Brunt St. 800 square foot storefront with a backyard asking for $4,000 per month. 22 Woodhull St. 1,600 square feet asking for $3,200 per month. 531 Clinton St. Asking $2,000 per month
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F & M Café & Restaurant
383 Van Brunt St.
Open from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday-Saturday and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday Favorite Sandwich: Reuben: Corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on rye bread. Frankie: “F & M has been here for 26 years.” Frankie: “I like everything about the Rueben. What’s not to like about it!” Frankie: “I love it here in Red Hook. I’m born and raised here and I’ve been here for 53 years now. We have lots of regular customers and welcome everybody here. I’ve gotten to know so many people from the neighborhood and I’ll make sure whether you have much money or not that you walk out of here fed.”
603 Clinton St.
Open from 8 a.m.- 9 p.m. seven days a week
Rahim Mohamad AKA General Ock (famous on TikTok) According to the NY Post: “He emigrated from Yemen in 1999
and it will be something medical-related. 225 Columbia St. Used to be the Red Apple restaurant-rented it out to a bagel shop. Now it’s being repaired and will become a neighborhood-style bar and grill.
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Turned 100-years-old this year. Open from 6 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays-Saturday Nicky Special: Ham, capocollo, salami, fried eggplant, provolone, hot salad, marinated mushrooms, lettuce, tomato, oil and vinegar on a hero.
so things have definitely changed a lot. At the time, I was a full-time postal employee but I’d get that done, run home and shower, and start at this job. I worked seven days a week, at night and on Sundays. ”
Awaye Realty
DiFiore transitioned to working fulltime as an associate broker and for years worked for Century 21.
“I started in real estate for James Realty in Bay Ridge when I was 19-yearsold because I wanted to make some extra money,” DiFiore said. “Apartments were going for $150-$250 then
“We were forced to close because of the law but we never stopped working,” DiFiore said. “We had lots of vacant apartments and no one that wanted to rent them. There were so many people leaving and a lot of supply but no demand. We struggled to
Awaye Realty is on the other side of the BQE at 526 Court Street. I spoke with Joseph DiFiore who started working there in 2009.
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The pandemic was a challenging time for DiFiore and Awaye Realty.
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Farmer in the Deli
357 Myrtle Ave Open 24/7 Spoke to Muhammad
Chopped Beef Sandwich: Chopped beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo
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379 Columbia St.
Red Hook Food Corp
(continued from previous page)
Favorite Sandwich: The Ocky Way: “A chopped cheese (chopped up burger meat and cheese) with peppers, seasoning, bacon, mozzarella sticks, spinach, tomato on a Jamaican patty. And can’t forget your bev: neva neva, neva!”
Defonte’s
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REAL ESTATE
and took over running his family’s bodega in 2007.”
Edward Lunch & restaurant 56 Lorraine St
Open from 6 a.m.-9 p.m. seven days a week. Spoke to Junior Cuban sandwich: Pork, ham, cheese, pickles, and mayo. Also had a great avocado salad.
stay afloat but we managed to do so.” “The market really bounced back in the last 6-7 months and every property that we list, we sell,” DiFiore said. “Real property is selling for asking price and above, and rental prices are stable. The pendulum has swung back and now it’s a seller’s market and landlord’s market. Now we have a lot of people who want to rent and not many properties to rent.” DiFiore also gave some advice that applies to realtors and other jobs as well, saying “You have to be ambitious. If you’re ambitious and you work hard good things will start to happen.”
square foot professional suite for sale for $1,200,000. 478 Smith Street, Brooklyn NY 11231. Use: Restaurant: the Burrito Spot. Approximately 2400 square foot business for sale for $398,000. 641 President Street, Park Slope. 170 -400+ square foot office. Asking $1,500. 4th Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11217. Between St. Marks Pl & Warren Street. Commercial/ Office Space.Approximately 5,000 square foot office space on the 2nd floor with high ceilings. Large open space with 10 separate rooms. $5,000. 13th Street, Brooklyn NY 11215. Between 6th Avenue & 7th Avenue. Approximately 1,800 square ft. 2nd floor with elevator offering a large reception/waiting room with space for 3 receptionists, consulting rooms sinks, doctor’s offices and 2 Bathrooms. $7,000.
Here are some current listings: 9 Prospect Park West: Approximately 1,152
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March 2022
Star-Revue Food:
George and Brian's Sandwich Odyssey George: What happened was we decided to find five places in the neighborhood, actually four in the neighborhood and one outside the neighborhood… Brian: but not too far away – George: and check out their sandwiches. This was at lunchtime on different days, and each of us had half the sandwich. The idea was to go to these places and ask the people who worked there to give us their favorite sandwich. George: The first place we went to was F & M Cafe and Restaurant, which is here on Van Brunt Street not far from the office. Frankie made us his favorite sandwich, which was… Brian: The Ruben. George: Describe the Reuben sandwich. Brian: Usually I don’t like sauerkraut that much, but it had sauerkraut, corned beef, Russian dressing, and cheese. I like that it was toasted. Somehow, the sauerkraut fit in really nicely, so in this case I did like it. George: To me what was the best thing about it was the warm sauerkraut, which was a sour taste, and the delicious taste of the corned beef and I think it had mustard? Brian: Russian Dressing. George: Oh, wait a minute, we can’t really say Russian Dressing anymore… how about Ukrainian type dressing? Brian: how about European – Asianish Dressing. George: I can’t think of anything wrong about this sandwich. Brian: Me too. George: Even better than a hot dog! George: The second place, we went to this place because of an article last April in the NY Post that talked about a bodega in Red Hook which has become an international Tik Tok success. Brian: Yes, we went to the Red Hook Food Corp to get a sandwich from Ocky. George: Yes, we asked for a sandwich the Ocky Way. Ocky, by the way, is from Yemen. Then we listened to the video of Ocky describing his sandwich. Ocky: So, we got a chopped cheese the Ocky Way which is basically a burger, we chop it up with peppers, some of our seasonings, you got mozzarella sticks, bacon, spinach, and tomatoes, and we add the mixed cheese, on the Jamaican patty, which is basically the Ocky Way! And as always, you’ve got to have the Bev! George: I picked Yoo Hoo. Brian: Now this was a big sandwich! George: Did you look at the Tik-Tok Videos? Brian: yes… they are quite
Joe Demonte, of Defontes
Red Hook Star-Revue
entertaining. He has all kinds of sandwiches in the. Some have marshmallows, some had candy…. But I like the mozzarella sticks. (here we start looking at some of the photos we took). Brian: Look at the height of that one! George: Yeah, three breads. Brian: Subways has foot long sandwiches, they have foot high ones! George: So here’s the thing. We took this sandwich, we walked out to Bush Clinton Park, sat town on a bench in back of the big swimming pool, actually, and we opened the sandwich, and it was unbelievably heavy, and it was unbelievably juicy, lets say, and having a sandwich in a Jamaican patty was unusual… and I happen to like the jalapeno peppers… Brian: I like the mozzarella sticks a lot. George: Yes, that was an amazing touch… all in all it was such a meld of different flavors.. bacon, I remember the bacon, it had one green thing, Brian: That was the spinach. Brian: But the fact is we each ate it because it was so good, but by the time we walked back to the office, at least for me it was feeling a little heavy in my stomach… Brian: I usually eat dinner at like 6 o’clock, but that night I couldn’t eat anything til around 9. George: Well, what happened to me was… lets just say I spent a lot of time in the bathroom that night. And even the next day I had to have, like, light food. Brian: It was a serious sandwich! George: The next day we went to a traditional Red Hook place that’s celebrating their 100th anniversary this year, called DeFontes. Everybody knows Defontes. Brian: We had the Nicky Special. Hot salad, pastrami, ham, capocollo, provolone. George: This was a sandwich that was the perfect sandwich after the sandwich with everything fatty and hard on the stomach, to eat. This was a good sandwich for the stomach,
Frankie and the F&M Rueben
it seemed that way to me, because you had vegetables, you had mushrooms, you had carrots, you had celery, in a very nice marinated style with a nice vinegary taste. The hot salad, which Defontes makes themselves, made it unique, at least in my long life experience eating sandwiches. Brian: It tasted very fresh, like if you had just picked the stuff from a garden… George: This sandwich was humongous, and the bread was good too! Brian: It’s the biggest sandwich I’ve ever seen! One half of the sandwich was bigger than most full sandwiches. (We look at a closeup). Brian: You know what… did I taste cucumbers on it too? George: Yeah, and also, don’t forget this… EGGPLANT! Gently fried eggplant. Brian: Yes, the eggplant was the key! George: It was reminiscent of mozzarella sticks slightly… but more refined. George: With the cucumbers and all, this was about the healthiest sandwich that you could possibly eat, if you’re going to have a sandwich. Brian: Yes, it had a lot of healthy stuff. George: It doesn’t quite qualify as vegan, because of the capocollo and ham and stuff like that, so Eric Adams couldn’t eat it, but maybe he could take out the meat and still enjoy it. Brian: Tremendous eggplant! George: OK, Defontes, lets say it’s different than the other sandwiches, but lets say so far we have two of them no complaints at all, the third one the only complaint was maybe a little too fatty…. Maybe our stomachs weren’t exactly ready for it. Brian: But all very good. George: A very good mélange of flavors in each one. George: So then, we took the car this time to a place on Myrtle Avenue called Farmer in the Deli, that features something I had never heard about before: Chopped Sandwiches. You see how they take everything from
the sandwich and chop and chop and chop, unbelievable amounts of chopping, and then put it in the hero (looking at video and pointing). George: : I think that’s a chopped cheese – we’ll have to go back for that someday, but what we had, at the suggestion of a fellow customer, was a chopped hamburger. So look at that – he cooked the hamburger and then chopped it up, and then added what seemed like Velveeta – a very soft cheese, and I see lettuce in there, Brian: and tomato, and then mayo. George: It looks unbelievably luscious. Brian: And the bread was toasted, a toasted hero. George: You know what.. we have to do this every week! I would say my experience at Farmer in the Deli was like eating a very good Whopper or Big Mac on a hero, and lots of it. Brian: It was almost like a Philly cheesesteak, but different. George: So we’ll put that maybe slightly below the other places, but an unbelievably good lunch. George: The last place we went to was in easy walking distance from the office, a place called Edward’s Lunch. They feature lots of things besides sandwiches, but for this day we got the Cuban sandwich. The difference between this and the others is that it wasn’t just toasted, but it was put in something that modern people call panini makers, but if you go to South America, they have them all over the place, two pieces of metal that press and heat the sandwich at the same time. Brian: yeah, they had lots of other stuff like empanadas, rice and beans, chicken – it’s a full restaurant with tables. George: I couldn’t resist adding something to our sandwich order – the avocado salad. In fact, I feel like having it again right now – I have to go back. This was the healthiest part, even though technically it wasn’t part of the sandwich. Brian: it went really well with the sandwich too. George: Better for you than fries. So here’s the sandwich – what do you see. Brian: Pickles, you got cheese, maybe swiss cheese, ham, lots of pork. George: It’s a traditional Cuban sandwich. Brian:Really good! A very good experience! George: Say goodbye! For the full story of this walking tour through sandwich heaven, check out our original unfiltered recording at https://youtu.be/c1gMmdTVLO8
Ocky the Tick Tok star of Clinton St. Mohammed of Farmer in the Deli
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Junior serving our Edwards Cuban
March 2022, Page 9
American Utopias
I
generally do not like Broadway shows. While I appreciate the talent, the stagecraft, etc. of Broadway shows, I just don’t generally connect with the style of music. And yet, in January 2022, during the height of Omicron, I saw two Broadway shows in one week that absolutely blew my mind. Both shows were last minute. Totally unexpected. I received a text from my friend Jack on a Tuesday saying he had extra comp tickets to see David Byrne’s American Utopia for Thursday of that week. To be honest, I thought I was seeing a concert. I didn’t know it was a Broadway show. Jack sent me the address to the St. James Theater as I was on my way in a taxi. The St. James Theater seats about 1,700 people, so it’s an intimate setting. David Byrne came out to the stage holding a model of a brain in his hand. As he sang “Here,” Byrne pointed to areas of the brain that are responsible for various functions of the mind and body. Here is a region of abundant details Here is a region that is seldom used Here is a region that continues living Even when the other sections are removed Who sings songs about brains? The song is a meditation on how the brain works. But Byrne doesn’t just list anatomical names for parts of the brain. He ponders the meaning of it all, ending the song on a question: Here is many sounds for your brain to comprehend Here the sound, it’s organized into things that make some sense Here there is something we call hallucination Is it the truth or merely a description? Let me make a risky disclaimer. I’ve never been the biggest Talking Heads fan. I liked them OK, but I’ve preferred David Byrne’s solo career post the Talking Heads. Byrne is clearly still in the process of artistic discovery. I’ve heard people say they’ve seen David Byrne’s American Utopia on HBO or have seen the Broadway show more than once. Many agree that Byrne’s shows have gotten better. His one-time edgy stage performance has become more engaging. The joke isn’t just on you. In this incarnation of David Byrne, you’re in on the joke. And he even makes fun of himself. He was charming and funny without pandering. Like the stage shows Byrne is known for, David Byrne’s American Utopia is performance art. With an incredible cast of musicians and singers, the movement and dancing are choreographed to synchronize with the lighting and the lyrics. It’s not the typical Broadway singing and dancing. It reminded me of shows I’d see at performance art venues like La Mama twenty or so years ago. But there was so much comedy and joy in all of this. Even the little electronic squiggly notes that trailed off the end of song phrases were mimicked in dance movements by the two backup vocalists, Chris Giarmo and Tendayi Kuumba, making the audience giggle.
Page 10 Red Hook Star-Revue
by Mike Fiorito
And the crowd responded to the energy that the performers were putting forth. People were hungry for the amazing performance that the players were offering. It was spellbinding. I heard hoots, cheers, shouts, and calls to the stage. The vibration level was palpable. Like much of Byrne’s music, these songs are very percussive. Though it has altered in the past, in addition to the backup singers already mentioned, the band is made up of Jacquelene Acevedo, Gustavo Di Dalva, Daniel Freedman, Tim Keiper, Karl Mansfield, Mauro Refosco, Stéphane San Juan, Angie Swan and Bobby Wooten III. All the musicians are excellent, but the West African, Brazilian Cuban, Moroccan, and other drums really drive the music. People were out of their seats dancing, their arms in the air. It was a concert after all. What I loved about the show is that, despite the heaviness of the lyrics and some of the political commentary, Byrne and the musicians sent you out the door joyfully singing the final songs “Road to Nowhere” and “The Great Curve.” I don’t know if it was just a great night, but it was a perfect show, end to end. David Byrne’s American Utopia has announced its final performances at the St. James Theater through Sunday, April 3. Now, weirdly, my mother-in-law gifted me tickets to Flying Over Sunset, which is about Aldous Huxley’s role as a philosopher and psychedelic guru in the Hollywood, California area in the fifties and sixties. I’ve been a fan of Aldous Huxley since I first read Brave New World in the seventh grade. I’ve since read nearly every novel, every essay collection and pretty much all Huxley’s non-fiction, including Heaven and Hell, Moksha and Doors of Perception. When your mother-in-law buys you tickets for an Aldous Huxley related show, you know she’s onto who you are, and you appreciate that. Flying Over Sunset is based on a book by James Lapine (who also directed the musical). Like American Utopia, Flying Over Sunset has the audacity to concern itself with science and the deepest questions of reality and spirituality. It opens with Aldous Huxley traipsing through The World’s Biggest Drug Store with his wife, Maria, and philosopher, Gerald Heard. We meet Aldous picking products off the shelves and staring at them, hopelessly fascinated with the phenomenon of American consumerism. While Huxley gets down on his knees, holding a can of shaving cream up to his face, he is trailed by Maria and Gerald babysitting him. Aldous is portrayed as a kind of stoner. He takes more LSD than the other characters, Cary Grant, Clare Booth Luce and Gerald Heard and seems always ready for the next trip. And while this doesn’t sound anything like the serious and courageous intellectual Aldous Huxley whom I’ve greatly admired most of my life, it does make the musical more humorous.
belies my inexperience with Broadway shows. What do I know? The songs by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie were entertaining and comical. However, I won’t be listening to the soundtrack again. The main story of Flying Over Sunset describes how Huxley, Grant, Luce, and Heard are thrown together for a wild night on LSD. They each experience visions of both heaven and hell. While I enjoyed the show, it didn’t accurately depict LSD trips. The hell experiences that each character had reminded me of 1950’s portrayals of people with mental health issues -- not people who were experiencing Mind-AtLarge as described in Huxley’s books. Grant, Luce, and Huxley see troubled visions of their mothers or fathers and relive these experiences on stage. I think more archetypal visions of demons and mythological characters might have been more accurate, but this was not a performance of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it was a musical. Secondly, I would also have liked to have seen their experiences portrayed with a bit more seriousness. More than just colorful and fanciful, psychedelic trips are often reported as being the most significant experiences of a person’s life. While I understand that Flying Over Sunset is a musical and not a staging of a sacred book, there was a missed opportunity here. Michelle Dorrance’s choreography for the tapdancing scenes is dazzling. Tony Yazbeck (Older Cary Grant) and Atticus Ware (Younger Cary Grant) received standing ovations. This may have been the highlight of the show. After not seeing a Broadway show since Honeymoon in Vegas a few years ago, I was lucky to see two great shows in the same week during the height of a world crisis. While I am not typically a Broadway music fan, Broadway is one of New York City’s most important industries. Broadway musicals hire creative talent: dancers, stagecraft artists, musicians, etc., enriching the culture of the city in countless ways. Broadway has been hurting and this impacts the art and artists of New York City. I am incredibly grateful that I was one of the lucky few to see these shows. Flying Over Sunset https://flyingoversunset.com/ David Byrne’s American Utopia https://americanutopiabroadway.com/ Mike Fioritohttps://mikefiorito.com/
The staging and lighting at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (at Lincoln Center) are spectacular. I was awestruck by the thirty feet curved walls that sweep in and out across the stage. I was worried that the performers might get hit by the moving stage if they didn’t precisely sync their movements. But that just
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March 2022
ing fashion models and trans sex workers to catch the next in what seemed an endless parade of Japanese punk oddballs. It’s a clean, polished and vicious disc, streaming in full on their Bandcamp page (at least until Bandcamp falls to the profit hunger of its new corporate lord and master).
It’s surprising that Sonic Youth, gone now for more than a decade, have yet to go the deluxe/unreleased route. Their Bandcamp page is replete with live sets and rarities, but In/Out/In (out March 18 on vinyl, CD, cassette and download from Three Lobed Recordings) may mark a change in that missing tide. The album collects five tracks recorded between 2000 and 2008, mostly instrumental and varyingly experimental. After the meandering, 10-minute opener “Basement Contender” (which sounds like a lackluster latter day Velvet Underground outtake) there’s the first of a pair of harder edged jams “In _ Out” and “Out _ In,” recorded a decade apart, the first with singer/bassist Kim Gordon at her subdued “Bull in the Heather” best. The driving instrumental “Machine” is, at under four minutes, by far the shortest, and maybe the strongest, track included but the most fascinating is the abstract noise of “Social Static,” showing how well the band worked outside of song format. A lot of it seems a bit subdued, at least by their standard, but it works well as a set, and a fine one at that.
Montreal’s NOBRO also claim punk cred, but they remind me more of early ’70s hard rock pop. The Runaways are an obvious parallel for the gender demographic, but I hear traces of Alice Cooper’s straight-ahead rockers. I had already started writing a review of the 7-track, 23-minute Live Your Truth Shred Some Gnar before I listened, ready based on the advance tracks to say that if they were just working their way to a great greatest hits album somewhere down the line (if anyone even still does those), that’d be good enough. The lead-off “Better Each Day” is as gloriously passionate/apathetic as “Don’t Die” from their short debut Stay Sick, but really the whole potty-mouthed record rips. It’s available digitally and streaming in full, and Dine Alone Records has also paired it with the previous EP for a 12” release, giving them a proper first album.
ies well. The trio is comprised of keyboardist Chris Abrahams (The Necks) and drummer Jim White (Dirty Three)—both bands known for stretching themes into dreams—and guitarist Gareth Liddiard (Tropical Fuck Storm), who brings the ugly. They reprise Liddiard’s “The Radicalisation of D” (from his album Strange Tourist), a wretched tale in Leonard Cohen cadence, and include the previously released “Punumbra.” The high point, though, is “The Names of the Plague” with Dan Luscombe (the Drones) on baritone guitar. “You are living in a nightmare you can’t bribe your way out of ” repeats the haunting refrain, supplied by Liddiard’s uncle, the Irish poet Ian Duhig. At a ferocious quarter of an hour, it’s set to become a raging anthem for the next variant resurgence. A deeper descent into springtime seasonal affective disorder can be indulged with the debut album from Spain’s Ab’bhau. The stated intent of the band of musicians from the Spanish noise underground (connections to Black Earth, Suspiral, Inhumankind, Phicus, Triple Zero, Gárgara and Sudaria) is “void invocation, void materialization” and “Black Metal Destruktion.” Out last month on vinyl, CD and download from Cyclic Law, Devastaciones Bajo El Fulgor Del Vacío is a fantastic slow grind, lots of atmosphere, lots of depth, with flurries of activity on the surface like insects above dark, still waters. There’s occasional riffs and rarely regular rhythms; when there are regular beats, it usually seems only the drummer in the ensemble of unnamed members is paying heed. The void they conjure is pretty nightmarish. You can stream it for free but you can’t bribe your way out of it.
Despite what their name might suggest, Los Bitchos would probably fare better than NOBRO in polite company. Their music would, in any event. The London instrumental combo’s music is absolutely infectious: surf-guitar exotca drawing from their city’s (and their own) cultural diversity. There’s hints of Argentine cumbia, Peruvian chicha and Turkish psych in their beguiling upbeat tunes, simple melodies bouncing atop sophisticated arrangements. Let the Festivities Begin (vinyl, CD and download out last month from City Slang) is their first full length and getting enough of it isn’t easily done.
If that’s a bit too trance in your thrash, though, and what you need is something more like someone who just cleanly ripped their lips off, you could do worse than looking to the new album from Nagoya’s Nicfit. The band has been around since 2009 but Fuse is their first full length, out in January on vinyl and download from Upset the Rhythm. They claim postpunk roots (Essential Logic, Magazine, Wire), but reminds me more of the 1990s glory days of The Cooler in Manhattan’s Meat Packing District, when you could walk through the smell of fetid animal flesh and past aspir-
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Good times and righteous indignation aside, there’s some powerful resonance to post-winter misery. The ice has melted but the world’s still cold. TS Eliot saw it, declaring April as the cruelest month, and Fran Landesman knew it well when she wrote what became a jazz standard: spring can really hang you up the most. The underground power trio from Down Under Springtime isn’t trying to do anything to lighten that desolate mood. Their three track Night Raver EP (a March 2 digital release from Joyful Noise Recordings) has them stretching out more than on their 2021 debut, which suits their scuzzy rever-
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March 2022, Page 11
New Risha Gorig film to be featured at Jalopy on March 24
Reason #5 to join the Rotary Club
Get out of your bubble! Get to know a variety of people different from the ones you usually talk to.
Rotarians are from every background, culture and country you can imagine. In today’s silo-ed world, meeting and doing service projects with a wide blend of people is meaningful and fulfilling—and achieves one of Rotary’s aims: PEACE and TOLERANCE. (Extra bonus, Rotarians are the nicest and most helpful people you’ll ever meet!)
The Brooklyn Bridge Rotary Club meets the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month, over dinner in Downtown Brooklyn, from 6-7:15 pm.
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The Red Hook filmmaker describes her newest project as "A dark and powerful tale of the passing of existence. The fallen angels watching from another world and beyond watching human suffering and brutality. Their presence and touch are not felt." Risha continues: "An immediate cult classic poetic and visually stunning. Angels from above come to watch and observe humans to decide their fate, hoping to end their destructive ways. An apocalyptic reflection of the state of humanity at it’s breaking point . A true art house film. The film is directed by Risha Gorig. The cast includes Elizabeth Ehrhardt, Sam Lefkowitz, Myra Gorig, Dave Robinson, Jacqueline Kelly and Frank Lorentz, Joe Buscoti, Kelly Doak, Lilly Parson, My D, Narada Johnson, Vahni Cantino, Robbie Giordano and Sara Davis.
Joe Buscotti of Magazine London wrote of the film: "The central plot and theme of Gods and Monsterss revolves
around how everyone’s individual, every day, decisions can significantly change not only one’s own future and circumstances, but combined as humanity, can significantly change the ultimate outcome of the world. As the movie follows multiple characters through days, and years of their lives, it plays as microcosms of the world, and the begs the question of “What if?” there are higher beings and powers influencing our decisions, and whether it is for good, or evil, and are they, good or evil, and how will it ultimately affect the fate of the world. Gods and Monsterss is a must see and more than once, as Risha Gorig clearly created what is sure to be a timeless cult classic." The film will be shown at 8:15 on Thursday, March 24, at Jalopy Theater, 315 Columbia Street. Admission by donation, reservations at (718) 3953214. For more information and to view the trailer, go to Godsandmonsterss.com
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March 2022
A Major League Baseball Lockout Calls for “Major League” Baseball
I
s it too early to say there won’t be a 2022 Major League Baseball season? Because it sure feels like there won’t be one. If the current lockout, which has already claimed some of Spring Training, begins eating regular season games, which seems likely, who knows where things end — or how the shrinking fan base will react.
But maybe baseball is doomed anyway. Cultish devotion to advanced metrics has made watching games miserable. Call it the zombieball era. Hard-throwing pitchers have turned baseball into a sport of strikeouts. Hitters clad in body armor look kitted out for war, not an at-bat. Data-driven managers cycle through endless middle relievers, sometimes one per batter, and innumerable infield shifts. So don’t even think about stolen bases — you’re not getting on base. And all those unwritten rules turn players into dour sourpusses and joyless robots. (It’s not for nothing that Bryce Harper, in 2016, started the (unsuccessful) Make Baseball Fun Again campaign.) No wonder the only people actively interested in baseball are old timers, stats nerds, and stubborn dummies like me. Baseball has always been a bit conservative; nothing so old could escape that fate. But it never used to be this way. The pre-steroid era had a shaggy, hangdog quality, less hyperprofessional, more accessible. More human. Players didn’t physically resemble comic book characters and going to games didn’t feel like attending a corporate retreat. Baseball was fun. And often weird. And, sure, frustrating in its traditions. But it was always thrilling to enter a stadium and be awed by the spectacle and pageantry of baseball.
That’s one reason why it’s such a favorite of the movies. Other sports are more cinematic, but none are a better match for the silver (or streaming) screen. The individual storylines embedded on each team, in every inning, during every at-bat make it rich in storytelling potential. And it’s America’s Pastime. When we see a baseball movie, we bring to it our unique history with the game and the nation, projecting ourselves, our anxieties, our dreams onto the film.
The baseball cinema canon is rich, but with the current state of the game — and the current ownercaused labor trouble — Major League feels particularly appropriate. David S. Ward’s 1989 worst-to-first R-rated comedy about the hapless Cleveland Indians and its insidious owner’s designs to move the team to Miami by fielding a squad so bad no one wants to attend games, was a hit when it was released that spring. It grossed nearly $50 million (on an $11 million budget), spawned two sequels, launched Wesley Snipes’ career, and confirmed Charlie Sheen’s movie star bonafides. (Major League also stars Tom Berenger and Corbin Bernsen, along with a solid cast of character actors, like Dennis Haysbert and Chelcie Ross. It’s James Gammon, though, as manager Lou Brown, who steals the show. With his wheezing-engine voice, push broom mustache, and endearingly gruff demeanor, Gammon is, hands down, the best manager in baseball movie history.) Some of the film has aged poorly, particularly the inane romantic subplot that finds Berenger’s Jake Taylor borderline stalking his ex, played by Rene Russo. If you squinted hard enough in ‘89, it might have seemed endearing; in our #MeToo era, it renders our ostensible hero a pathological lowlife. And then there’s “Indians” and the team’s racist logo, both of
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by Dante A. Ciampaglia which Cleveland jettisoned for Guardians starting in the 2022 season. But most of Major League holds up: the well-timed gags and jokes land, the achingly predictable narrative arc still connects, broadcaster Bob Uecker is still incorrigibly fantastic. (“Just a bit outside” remains a killer laugh line.) And at a crisp 107 minutes, the film is zippy and pleasantly efficient.
What helps is writer-director Ward’s macro view. He fills the frame with Cleveland, the city and its people acting as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the team’s fortunes. The film opens with a three-minute credit sequence, a time capsule of a late-‘80s hard-luck Rust Belt town set to Randy Newman’s “Burn On;” a recurring series of locals pop up to vulgarly rag on the club then jump on the bandwagon. It’s hard to imagine a film taking such detours in our present era of short-attention-span kinetic filmmaking — then again, it’s hard to imagine that this kind of film would even get made today. Major League is the type of midbudget picture Hollywood has abandoned. That’s a shame, for lots of reasons, but perhaps most important is that it robs us of low-stakes, up-tempo escapism that’s both bright and celebratory. Every atom of Major League is out of vogue today, and returning to it feels like visiting an oasis. That goes for its presentation of the game, too. Is it the best baseball movie ever made? Nope. Characters are as two-dimensional as baseball cards. The Yankees, Cleveland’s big bad nemesis, is more Gas-House Gorillas from “Baseball Bugs” than an actual ball club. And it often feels like it’s chasing the ghost of Bull Durham, Ron Shelton’s much better film released a year earlier. (The Berenger-Russo plotline, especially, comes off as a thin-gruel version of Durham’s Kevin Costner-Susan Sarandon relationship.) But it resonates, still, because it’s a time machine back to a not-so-long-ago era of the game. Players — on every team, not just Cleveland’s squad of misfits — range from fit and lithe to broken and doughy. (Not a bulging roid freak in the bunch.) Batting helmets are hitters’ only armor. Pitchers routinely make it into the ninth inning, even after they give up two-run shots in a big game. Guys who throw 96 mph fastballs, like Sheen’s Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn, are seen as freakish specimens, not just another dude trying to make the rotation. And players perform elaborate clubhouse superstitions, show emotion after a big hit (without fear of reprisal), and — gasp! — have fun. Have mercy. Some of this is narratively convenient Hollywood pablum, sure, but it’s easy to buy into the thing when it’s so enjoyable to watch. Doubly so when you realize something like this will never exist again. Try to imagine what a Major League made for this moment in baseball history would look like… Actually, don’t; it’s too depressing.
data robs from the sport. If there’s no uncertainty, if everything is predestined by the advanced stats and metrics, why even play the games? And how do you tell stories about a sport built on myth that has been stripped of its mystique? A film like Major League endures because it bottles the essence of what’s best about baseball. That’s a precious thing when not even baseball seems to know what’s precious about baseball these days.
That said, this isn’t strictly a nostalgia trip. I chose Major League as my baseball fix because it’s explicitly pro-labor. Or, put another way, it’s a one-hour-and47-minute-long middle finger to management. Besides being a gold-digging creep, team owner Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) — by disinvesting in the Indians in every conceivable way — is an avatar for the venal culture of profit primacy that, more than 30 years later, has rotted major league baseball to its core. In any given season, only a handful of teams are actually competitive; every other club is just an exercise in revenue extraction for cheapskate owners more interested in lining their pockets than investing in their squads. And Phelps points to the future, again, with her plan to tank the season to achieve her goal of moving the team to Florida. Taking a dive is officially a no-no, but it has become a kind of tacitly accepted strategy not just in baseball but across sports — owners’ middle finger to fans. Player-owner tension is in sports movies’ DNA, but Phelps is clearly the bad guy in Major League. And at a moment when actual baseball owners are willing to tank a season to pry a few extra dollars away from players, she’s a good stand-in for members of that uniquely American class of oligarchy acting as actual villains of actual baseball.
Watching Major League in 2022 is bittersweet for both movie and baseball fans. You’re left wishing for more films of this scale, and it’s a reminder of what the sport used to be. Made a few years before baseball’s last major work stoppage in 1994-95, it captures a period that’s hardly aspirational but certainly more fun. How could anyone see this kind of baseball and think, “Yeah, watching a quant-nerd simulation run on real people in a big stadium sounds like a great way to spend five hours of my life”? (I wish that were a rhetorical question.) Maybe the lockout will surprise everyone and result in a better deal for players and a better game for fans. Hope springs eternal — the creed of every true-blue baseball fan! But if we’re not going to have the real thing in 2022, the movies give us plenty of ways to enjoy an idealized version of the game. And you could do a lot worse than Major League.
What Major League — and the baseball picture generally — shows us is that the game is at its best when it’s exuberant, slightly crass, and always unpredictable. (Ironic for a genre that leans so heavily on formula.) Last-chance guys with busted knees, fireballers just out of prison, and walk-ons with more confidence than skill, assembled as dead-end losers, can, with the right down and dirty leadership, put together a winner. Every fan of every basement dweller, deep down, looks at the Opening Day roster and imagines a Major League-like miracle blessing their team. That hope sits at the center of baseball, and it’s what
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March 2022, Page 13
Books QUINN ON BOOKS: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT Review of Behind the Mask: Living Alone in the Epicenter by Kate Walter Review by Michael Quinn
T
he start of the pandemic was like a game of musical chairs. The music suddenly stopped. We all scrambled for safety. We worried for (or laughed at) the ones without a spot (the pandemic also revealed the mean-spirited among us). But we all anticipated the music starting right up again and the game resuming as it did before. Two years later, we’re still waiting. It’s clear people are fed up with that. Impatience has meant the end of a lot of the rules we’ve been arguing about. But does that mean the pandemic is over? Our memories are as short as our tempers. We’ve already forgotten how it was in the beginning. How scary things felt. How quiet things got. How we started compulsively washing our hands. How we wiped down our groceries with Clorox wipes. How we started standing six feet apart. Governor Cuomo. Remember him? He gave those daily reports that made people feel like someone was in charge. An illusion of safety, but a helpful one. Few of us had heard of Zoom, and then that’s all anyone talked about— over Zoom. We were all so confused. We were told we didn’t need to wear masks, and then we should (sometimes even two), and then none, and then one again—but this time only this special kind that was out of stock everywhere. Remember how isolated everyone felt? Seniors were hit especially hard. Kate Walter, a writer in her seventies living in Manhattan, has created a carefully-observed time capsule of her life these last two years in her essay collection, Behind the Mask: Living Alone in the Epicenter. Walter, a retired writing professor, describes it as “my personal story, my opinions and observations, my emotional reactions from my point of view as a journalist.”
It’s a kind of pandemic diary that testifies to the power of positive thinking. Walter recorded what was happening in real time (many of the essays were originally published in the Manhattan newspaper The Village Sun) so they have a fantastic immediacy. She writes in a clear way with an eye for interesting details. Her observations poke awake our own dormant memories and make us realize things we’d noticed, but had forgotten, busy as we were absorbing so much change. Walter lives alone in a 600-squarefoot apartment in Westbeth Artists Housing, a naturally occurring retirement community in the West Village. Finding herself alone after a decadeslong relationship goes belly up, she never gives up hope for a chance to have one more great romance. Prepandemic, she puts herself out there. She attends Middle Collegiate Church (“one of the most progressive churches in the city”), and belongs to writing and singing groups. She goes to the party of a new acquaintance and realizes almost everyone is wearing a hearing aid. Oh no, she thinks. It’s an old person party. What’s a person like me doing in a place like this? Of course we don’t see ourselves the way we see other people—and the way other people see us, she realizes. Old age has a way of sneaking up on all of us. So does a pandemic. Almost immediately, everyone’s confined to their apartments. Earlier disasters—9/11, Superstorm Sandy—“brought us together as we helped our neighbors,” Walter writes. “The virus forces us apart.” As “a fairly tech-savvy senior with a great internet connection,” Walter tries to make the best of it. She has good practices in place: she meditates, she keeps a gratitude journal, she practices qi gong. She sees a therapist (“for decades in various locations”), the mysterious Dr. R, who helps Walter interpret her crazy pandemic dreams.
Walter relays one about a bridge, curious about its meaning. “‘Will we ever get to the other side?” Dr. R said dramatically.” As a social creature, Walter is soon climbing the walls. She misses museums and bookstores. She misses the stimulation people provide. Cheering for essential workers every evening is a welcome respite from the exhausting undertaking daily life has become. Going out is dangerous and involves outfit changes, the donning of masks, and an endless supply of hand sanitizer. A trip to buy sweatpants is planned with the precision of a military operation. The goal is to risk exposure to other people. Even under the best of circumstances, Walter hates shopping. Once inside the store, though, she discovers herself “desperate for an in-person conversation with anyone about anything, I actually enjoyed talking to the store clerks about styles and sizes, colors and fabrics. What was happening to me? Was I turning into my mother?” From her mother, Walter and her two siblings have inherited a little bungalow on the Jersey Shore. Walter finds refuge there for the summer, but is also “blinded by houses with two or three Trump banners blaring from their rooftops.” (In quiet protest, she puts a Biden bumper sticker in her window.) Whatever dangers it holds, the city is really where Walter feels most at home. It’s where she came to be herself (she came out as a lesbian in 1975) and she’s never forgotten how lucky she is to live here. Throughout Behind the Mask, Walter always counts her blessings. She notices and appreciates things about the place where she lives, and engages with the world around her. This makes the city feel like more than a home—it’s a community.
Things to Look Forward To: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day, by Sophie Blackall Review by Marie Hueston, mhueston@schools.nyc.gov By her own admission, Brooklyn-based author and illustrator Sophie Blackall is an optimist, someone who is able to see the silver lining in just about any cloud. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and even the most glass-half-full among us felt the strain. “When things seemed especially grim, I began posting a list of Things to Look Forward To on Instagram, because I needed cheering up and I wanted to feel less hopeless,” Blackall recalls. Her followers, in turn, posted their own lists. “People baked muffins and delivered them to neighbors and first responders. They told me about things they had learned and things they wanted to learn. We were doing things, even as we were looking forward to them.” You might recognize Blackall’s illustrations from her
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She plants tulips in the park near the Stonewall Inn. She peeks into the window of a dearly-beloved, now shuttered neighborhood store. She pops into her favorite wine shop and chats with the clerk at her local branch of the New York Public Library (“my second home”). She eats lunch outside and enjoys the sun on her face. These sound like little things, but they’re the kinds of things that give life great meaning when you pay attention to them. Of interactions like these, Walter writes, “These brief encounters give me hope. They remind me of the life I used to have and will someday have again.” When the pandemic first started, I thought there’s two ways we’ll look back on this. Remember when we wore masks? Or, remember when we started wearing masks? Will this be a passing interlude, or an eternity? Either way, the wait is turning out to be a long one, so grab a book. Kate Walter has written a deeply personal one about what we’ve all been through that will give you a new appreciation for your own experience—and for the city we all call home.
numerous picture books and early readers, notably the Ivy & Bean series. She has won two Caldecott Medals, an annual distinction for children’s book illustrators, once in 2016 for Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear and again in 2019 for Hello Lighthouse. Perhaps you gazed at her work without even knowing it during your subway commute back in 2011, when her piece “Missed Connections” was included in the MTA’s Arts for Transit program. Her latest project, Things to Look Forward To: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day, evolved out of her pandemic posts and is due out this spring from Chronicle Books.
The things Blackall looks forward to are wide-ranging, from simple pleasures like spotting a rainbow or a flock of birds to activities like learning a new word or mending a hole. Each page of the book reminds readers that no matter how dark the world seems at times, there’s always tomorrow. Excerpted from the book, here is a selection of things we can all look forward to.
Hugging a Friend:
It was only during the pandemic when I couldn’t hug anyone that I realized how much I missed it. My
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Jazz by Grella Just Sing by George Grella
H
ere’s a motto to listen by: it’s harder to write a song than a sonata.
There’s a general perception both among outside listeners and musicians inside institutional structures that the sonata is one of the supreme formal achievements of classical music. And this is true, proven by how vital and enduring the form has been since composers like Haydn were inventing and refining it in the 18th Century (anyone interested in exploring that story should read Charles Rosen’s brilliant book, Sonata Forms, which uses notation examples but is fully accessible to general readers).
I’m not here to denigrate sonatas, I’m here to elevate songs. Songs are self-evidently great, just think about how you feel when you listen to them, even if you don’t sing along, and that’s all you need to know about their effect and value. This means a song-based form like jazz is self-evidently great (even just on paper, before the music starts and you’re tapping your foot), and also why I’m never satisfied when I hear anyone say jazz is America’s classical music. Classical music can have itself, we don’t need another kind, we’ve got jazz and doesn’t have to be anything more than jazz. Again, I’m not putting down classical music which I not only love but is fundamental to my background as a musician and composer. Rather, I want to obliterate false notions of sophistication and high and low, which are more based on atavistic notions of social class and race than on anything musical: in terms of aesthetic and formal, philosophical and social, criteria, jazz is at the top alongside many equals.
But what if jazz is more sophisticated? This is what I mean by saying a song is harder to write than a sonata. A sonata is a form that works, roughly, through a structure of harmony and style. They come predominately in three movements, fast-slow-fast, and follow a harmonic structure (even if only in the first movement) that lays out specific material and moves it through key changes and sets it against other material, only to bring it back in the end in a transformed version. This structure itself was only identified after the fact, in the 19th century, through a process of studying the common elements in hundreds of pieces. The thing about writing a sonata, though, is you don’t really need a melody. You need some kind of recognizable idea, a riff, but it doesn’t have to be memorable outside the listening experience, or even very good. What’s most important in a sonata is harmony, and the what Western music is taught, harmony is given more importance than anything else. This is also true in jazz, where musicians are expected to master harmony as the basis for improvisation and composition. Now, think about songs. A good song needs a good melody and good lyrics. Melody is much loved but little understood, there’s no substantial teaching in how to make a good melody, and the results through history seems to come down to some combination of hit-and-miss and innate talent. Some like Verdi and Dvořák had it, others had it some of the time but not all the time, like Beethoven and Mahler, some never really had it, like Schoenberg, and some never really needed it, like Stravinsky. Classical music is the kind of tradition where a great historical genius like Stravinsky never really had to fret over a good melody. But anything to do with songs better have a melody or get the hell out of here. And by the way, you have to also write meaningful words that fit right into the melody and that work with the harmony as well. And if you want to be worth something, you’ve got to do it over and over again. That’s pretty fucking hard. Think about a great composer like Billy Strayhorn, who wrote the all-time classic “Lush Life” and numerous other compositions for Duke Ellington. Strayhorn
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crafted fabulous tunes, like for “Chelsea Bridge,” “Lotus Blossom,” and “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing,” but the lyrics for those are nearly forgotten, they just don’t tell a rich, complex, unforgettable story as they do for “Lush Life.” But that song, and ones by the great lyricist Fran Landesman (“Spring Can Really Hand You Up The Most,” “The Peacocks”), Hoagy Carmichael, George and Ira Gershwin, Stevie Wonder, Antonio Carlos Jobim, are sophisticated works of musical art in every way. On the value system of Western music, the harmonies from these—especially Carmichael and Gershwin—are of the highest level, full of endless riches that musicians mine in their improvisations, technically sophisticated but also so well-crafted that their subtle flow buries itself like a star inside the listener. Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” alone became it’s own improvisational form, with musicians keeping the harmonic structure and adding their own ideas in replace of the original melody—a sonata-like form, if you will. But unlike any sonata, the versatility and enduring meaning of “rhythm changes” are so profound that, as the late, great Phil Schaap used to point out, Charlie Parker blew over the changes, and they are the harmonies on which the theme to “The Flintstones” was written.
"Classical music is
Hoagy Carmichael, photo from 1947
experiences that relate to the lyrics, how they rise and fall. Even if things get bad in life, the songs in your heart stick with you and become better and more moving as our journey continues. Songs are the stuff of life, and sometimes sonatas are too.
Joys for Today
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the kind of tradition where a great historical genius like Stravinsky never really had to fret over a good melody."
friends and I hug to celebrate something good, and we hug to commiserate when things are bad. I hug my grown children and remember when they fit in my arms; I hug my parents and almost remember fitting in theirs. I hug my bony ninety-two-year-old friend very gently, and I hug my friend’s giggly baby robustly. And I look forward to their hugs in return.
Writing a Letter:
The pandemic reminded many of us of the joy of sending each other things in the mail. We crave tactile connection. If we can’t see each other or touch each other, we can write something by hand and imagine it arriving in someone else’s hand. We dash off electronic messages all the time, but when we sit down to write a letter, we think more about the person reading it. Will they rip it open and read it right away? Will they put the kettle on and take their time? Will they write back?
Moving the Furniture Around: How’s that for both abstract musical and technical quality and social meaning? I again will emphasize that this is not a competition, rather that it’s about hearing how great songs are, and how much musical brilliance it takes to write a song that thousands of musicians want to play decade after decade. It’s also a way to think about sonatas and songs together. The metaphorical explanation of sonata form is that it’s about a journey: the subject (you) sets out into the world, as expressed in the initial idea; the countersubject is a representation of the vicissitudes of life; when the initial subject returns, it has been changed by the previous experiences, perhaps more concentrated, strong, even more beautiful. Sonatas have global appeal because listeners can hear this voyage and it reflects on everyone’s life.
Songs do that too, of course, that’s what they are about. And a song like (to pick a personal favorite) Elvis Costello’s “The Other End of the Telescope” changes in the ears and the mind as one goes through life. They start off as something you like, stick in your mind, then gain new meaning and depth as you have
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My grandmother, who never went on vacation, used to say, “A change is as good as a holiday.” Every time we visited her, we would find the living room reconfigured. There’s something to be said for moving furniture around. For one thing, it forces you to sweep under the couch, and maybe you’ll find something you thought was lost. It also makes you see things that had become invisible to you. It changes your perspective.
Making a List:
If you are in a rut, if you feel overwhelmed by gloom, if you are exhausted and uninspired and out of sorts, you can make a list of Things to Look Forward To. Simple things, everyday things. Things that don’t cost much money. Things you can do without leaving the house. Things that bring you pleasure. Things that you don’t want to take for granted. Things that may never actually happen but are fun to look forward to all the same. And if you make such a list, you can share it with a friend, or with me, and it might make us all feel better. Share your list with Sophie Blackall, or just follow her, on Instagram @sophieblackall
March 2022, Page 15
Marie's Craft Corner
Recycle take-out chopsticks into picture frames by Marie Hueston
If you’re like me, you have a drawer in your kitchen where you stash things like take-out chopsticks because it seems wasteful to throw them away. Here’s an easy craft idea to transform those chopsticks into picture frames for children’s artwork, photos, postcards, or whatever you’d like to display.
What you’ll need: To make the frames, all you’ll need is take-out chopsticks, glue, and paint. A hot-glue gun will let you work more quickly, but school glue can also be used. Optional deco-
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rations include small branches and pine cones, dried flowers, stickers, beads, or anything you choose.
Lay out your chopsticks. Take chopsticks out of their paper wrappers and lay them flat. Most pairs are connected on one side. You can either leave them connected as you create your frame or divide them into individual sticks before you begin.
Design your frame. It’s up to you how wide or thin you’d like the sides of your frame to be. I made one frame using two sets of connected chopsticks on each side, and one frame using three individual sticks on each side. Decide whether you’d like the chopstick edges to meet precisely at the corners (like my 4-stick-width frame) or if you’d like them to look more ran-
domly placed, like my 3-stick frame.
Glue sticks in place. Start by laying out two sides of your frame, then position the third side to set the final shape of your frame and glue in place at the corners. Glue down the fourth and final side of your frame at the corners and let dry completely before painting.
Paint your frames. Once painted, it’s hard to tell that the frames are made from chopsticks. You can use either washable craft paint or acrylic. If using acrylic, consider covering surfaces and wearing clothing you don’t mind getting paint on, since acrylic will not wash out. You can pick any color for your frames. I chose turquoise for one, and dark brown for the other.
Add decorations. I left my blue frame unadorned, but my brown frame reminded me of branches so I decided to add some natural elements. I found small twigs and pine cones from a hemlock tree and glued a pine cone on each bottom corner and a cluster of small branches and two additional cones on top, in the center of the frame.
Display ideas: Once the paint is dry and decorations are in place, secure artwork to the back of your frame using scotch or masking tape. Prop frames up on a shelf or hang them on the wall using 3M Command Strips which won’t damage the wall if you change your arrangement.
April preview: Start saving tea boxes for an Easter craft!
Share your designs with us! Send photos to the editor: george@redhookstar.com
www.star-revue.com
March 2022