Our Town downtown
June 26, 2006
Migdalia Torres saw St. Brigid’s’ front gate open on March 11th, 2005 and thought it meant a new priest had been assigned to the East Village church. Most likely, the church, which is on Avenue B between 7th and 8th Streets, would reopen and things would return to the way they were four years earlier. It was about 8:30 p.m. and she went inside feeling the good kind of surprise. But her optimism was quickly replaced with shock.
As soon as she tried to enter the sanctuary, a woman who spoke with an accent and looked to be in her fifties accosted her. “(She) kept (saying) ‘you make trouble,’ ‘you make trouble for me’,” Torres remembers in a telephone interview. When she made it into the room the woman tried to shove her out, pushing her, but Torres made it past her to survey what to her was damage.
The organ was in pieces, the floors were completely stripped, and most of the pews were in piles.
There were about six workers, all men who also looked to be in their fifties, removing things near the altar. She approached and began questioning them, but they didn’t respond. “I guess they seemed surprised because I guess I walked in on something I shouldn’t have,” Torres, a member of The Committee to Save St. Brigid’s Church says.
Behind her, the woman continued to ask her to leave, and was threatening to call the police. Then she began to walk to the front of the sanctuary where Torres was.
Torres looked at the wall behind the altar and noticed that the crucifix was missing. She discovered it on the floor, on the left side of the room, wrapped in bubble tape, and walked over to examine it up close.
She heard the fifty-ish woman on her cell phone talking to someone in Polish (the same language the woman used to address the workers). Then she called the police.
Torres became hysterical when she saw the crucifix and the angels next to it. She had to sit down.
When the police showed up, they told Torres she was trespassing and had to leave. They said she didn’t understand − the church was going to be renovated.
Before the police escorted Migdalia Torres out of St. Brigid’s, she heard the woman tell them that she was removing asbestos. But the workers had no gear, there were no signs and it was dark outside. It was not the first time the parishioners of St. Brigid’s were the last to know about what was happening to their church.
In March 2006, the Archdiocese of New York announced that St. Brigid’s, a parish, was being demoted to chapel status, to be absorbed by Saint Stanislaus − a church on 7th Street with a predominantly Polish congregation.
Known variously as The Famine Church, The Irish Famine Church, and the Famine Irish Church, St. Brigid’s was completed at the end of 1849 by Irish shipwrights. Most were displaced by the potato famine, which devastated their country and left roughly a million dead. For years, its parishioners were predominantly Irish, but as the Irish, Italian and other immigrants who came to the East Side in the late 19th century migrated to the suburbs, it became increasingly Latino.
It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest standing church designed by architect Patrick Keely, an Irish immigrant who built over 600 churches and other religious structures.
Its most recent parish was a mix of neighborhood residents and commuters from the suburbs, Edwin Torres, a committee member (and Migdalia’s husband) says.
But in 2001, Cardinal Edward Egan closed the church citing structural damage, which the Archdiocese of New York estimated would cost $6.9 million according to The New York Times. (In a telephone interview, Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the archdiocese says the figure is “well in excess of $7 million.”)
Edwin Torres had LMW Engineering Group assess the damage and says they concluded it would cost about $300,000 to fix the cracks in the back wall of the church, which is the most commonly cited item in discussions about its structural problems. LMW’s president, Jieming Wang confirms this amount in an e-mail.
But what the damage is, exactly, and who is responsible for it are both in dispute.
Joseph Zwilling says the rear wall is separating from the rest of the building and the cracks are just one of many problems. “Why (their) estimate is so much lower, I can’t tell you, but I’m talking about a building that has major structural damage,” he says. He mentions problems with the floor joist and the building’s foundation, and says that the archdiocese’s engineers concluded that the rear wall could collapse at any moment.
But when Edwin Torres joined Saint Brigid’s over thirty years ago, St. Brigid’s School, which had been located in the 8th Street lot behind the church had already been torn down and moved to 7th Street, where it is today. And he says that this, the demolition of the original school building, caused all the structural problems, and that since it was the archdiocese’s decision to knock down the school, it is their responsibility.
Also, the archdiocese filled in the old school building’s basement with rubble. He acknowledges that this is standard procedure, but says it didn’t help things.
It may cost $7 million to restore St. Brigid’s, but if it does, that’s because the archdiocese let it deteriorate further, he says.
Torres “sincerely,” believes the archdiocese’s “heart is in the right place,” but takes issue with the way the parish was broken up. “There was no transition process. Were basically dispersed.” … “We were basically given a two-week notice to vacate.”
In September 2003, Father Michael Conway, the former pastor of St. Brigid’s presented a $103,000 repair fund he had collected from parishioners to the archdiocese. Harry Kresky, the committee’s lawyer, says the archdiocese still has those funds, and what they are being used for is anyone’s guess. “Our issue is that the archdiocese through the pastor, invited parishioners to contribute to a restoration fund − and having done that, they can’t turn and breach the contract that was created by that mutual understanding and demolish the church,” he says in a telephone interview.
Father Conway is now on assignment in India according to Kresky, and at the time of this writing has not responded to an e-mail Our Town downtown sent him seeking comment on this and other matters. But Edwin Torres says that Conway, who worked at St. Brigid’s from about 1996 to 2004, “was a great spiritual leader and an asset to, (the) parish.”
Although the archdiocese closed the parish in August 2004, a ruling was issued one year later granting the committee a temporary restraining order against demolition.
The judge who issued that ruling, New York State Supreme Court Judge Barbara R. Kapnick, also handed down a ruling in January of this year that dismissed the committee’s complaint against demolishing the church.
In her decision, she wrote that to stand in the way of demolishing St. Brigid’s “would be an impermissible intrusion into Cardinal Egan’s ecclesiastical authority,” as reported in the Irish Voice.
By June 13, 2006, the parties were in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court for the First Department (which includes New York and Bronx counties).
The committee’s appeal was expedited, but the decision could take several months to come down because the hearing took place shortly before the court’s summer recess began, Kresky says.
Should it lose this case, one option would be for the committee to request a hearing at the Court of Appeals in Albany, New York State’s highest court, he says.
Kresky says that under New York State’s Religious Corporations Law, the archdiocese does not own St. Brigid’s and therefore does not have the “ecclesiastical authority” to demolish it.
Also, this law requires the archdiocese to appoint St. Brigid’s two lay trustees so it can form a board. It never did this.
On the day of the most recent appeal, the committee announced that an “anonymous ‘angel’” had offered to purchase the property at market value and “preserve the church.”
The donor has not announced how he or she would reopen St. Brigid’s. Would it reopen as a church? Or as a church with an added component, like a cultural center, to help pay its ongoing expenses? The Eldridge Street Synagogue is using this strategy. The committee is not sure that it will even accept the gift, since it doesn’t know what the donor’s exact intentions are.
Joseph Zwilling is also unsure what the anonymous donor would do with the property and described the donor as a “wealthy resident in the neighborhood.” He dismissed talk of what the property might become in this person’s hands as speculation, and says that once the church is demolished, the Archdiocese hopes to maintain it for “some other form of ministry.”
Should the property become available, one bidder, a bidder that expressed interest early on, is Cabrini Medical Center. Its elder care division is looking to relocate by 2012. But given these circumstances “it’s impossible to know what will happen” Patricia Krasnausky (who is CEO of two Cabrini nursing facilities) says in a telephone interview.
Despite its visibility and that it knows how to fundraise − a recent benefit at an Irish pub that included readings by Pete Hamill, Malachy McCourt and others brought in over $21,000 − the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s Church has only just begun to formally organize itself. And though all twelve plus members agree that they don’t want St. Brigid’s torn down, they may have different ideas about what the precise plan should be.
One is almost adamant about wanting the church to be first and foremost a place of worship, and as close to what it was before it was shut down as possible, but acknowledges that a respectful mixed usage may be what is needed to keep St. Brigid’s “in the black.” Another is intrigued by the idea of using the Eldridge Street Synagogue as a model. And another imagines reopening it as a church, but also creating comprehensive charitable programs and services for seniors and kids, and perhaps partnering with Catholic Charities to serve the neighborhood’s large immigrant population.
The history of St. Brigid’s has an obvious Irish appeal and the majority of the crowd at the benefit reading appeared to be from this group. But it is important “to remember all groups’ (histories)” in planning for a revitalized St. Brigid’s, committee member Carolyn Ratcliffe says.
Roland Legiardi-Laura, also a committee member, thinks real estate is more of a factor for the archdiocese than it would care to admit. He points out that with the church on B, the school on 7th and B, and the empty lot where the school once was on 8th and B, the archdiocese has an enviable chunk of property. This much land across from (Tompkins Square) park is “a developer’s wet dream,” he says.
Jerome O’Connor, who used to own St. Dymphna’s, a restaurant near the park, and who lives in Brooklyn, attended the June 13th hearing. Afterwards, he looked up the property on the NYC Department of Buildings Web site and found the title (BIN: 1082499). He was surprised to find that two items on the 20-item “demolition checklist,” logged on December 27th, 2005, had been waived: “A17 LANDMARK LETTER RE NO DESIGNATION OR CAL;” and “A18 TITLE SEARCH.”
“A19 DEED FOR TRANSFER OF UNIMPROVED PROPERTY;”
and “A20 ECB VIOLATIONS(S) (sic) FOR ILLEGAL DEMOLITION” were also listed as “WAIVED.”
He provided Our Town downtown with a copy of a letter, dated June 19th, that he says he sent to Mayor Bloomberg.
The following is an excerpt:
I went to the building department at 9:30 on Thursday morning and was sent to the BEST office at 1 Center Street, who then sent me back to the DOB office. I became aware very soon that nobody at that office wanted to deal with this issue. After much persistence and spending four hours at the office, I met with Richard Rosen who has the title senior project advocate. After explaining my complaint, he went to investigate, returned at first telling me that he is sure no one in that office is responsible for these waivers, and suggested that someone illegally entered them in the computer. He then later told me that it was a common practice to waive these. In any event, I never did find out who waived them. I have been assured by friends who are licensed architects and a professional engineer that it is not a common practice. Even if it was a common practice to do so, I would think that the reason that this requirement exists in the first place and the fact that this buildings demise and ownership is in dispute in a very public manner which has been reported by every major newspaper in the city is reason enough to make sure that they are a requirement .
This was just the beginning of the bizarre circumstances in the issuing of this permit. Mr. Rosen, who I have to admit was quite helpful, then went to pull the folder to investigate further and came back to tell me that there was no folder. When I asked him about the microfilm he told me that it was not there and then took me to his office to check to see if a back up copy was in the Queens office, which I was told, is where it is kept in case something happens to the one in the Manhattan office. He assured me that a demolition permit could not be issued without the microfilm being done and that if that was the case that action should be taken immediately to revoke the permit under section 27-197 of the building code. I asked him if there is a record of this microfilm being paid for and he said he would look into it. Having read 27-197 of the building code I believe that the commissioner should immediately suspend the permit unless the microfilm and the folder containing the Letter from the Landmarks Commission and title search are in place and move to revoke it in five business days if they are not in compliance. Or, has the city decided that in order to save the Landmarks Commission from the extremely embarrassing position of having to sign off on the demolition of a building with such historical and cultural significance to the city, that they will change the rules and waive this and other requirements, that enable the Archdiocese to commit this Barbaric act of cultural and architectural vandalism so they can raise money by selling the land to a developer?
Mr. Rosen asked me to put my complaint in writing which I did when I got home and called him at 5 o’ clock to see if he had received it. He seemed to have changed his position and told me that there was a possibility that the folder may be in the legal dept and he could not take any action until he had ruled out that possibility. I also found it rather odd that he then mentioned that it could take 10 days to investigate this matter and that the chances of the permit being revoked immediately, which he stated earlier, were slim .What happened to section 27-197? Does that not apply to the Archdiocese?
… At present, the Landmarks commission is not considering this property for Landmark Status because it has a demolition permit in place. There is plenty of documentation that this property was presented to the Landmarks Commission for Landmark designation prior to a demolition permit being applied for …
I ask for your assistance in ensuring that this matter is dealt with in the proper manner by your administration.
If this building is demolished without the proper procedures in place a lot of people in this city are going to be very angry. Furthermore, if the Landmarks Commission does issue a letter without a public hearing to enable the Archdiocese to continue their … act it will undermine the reason for their existence the first place …
“There is a lot of momentum building in the Irish community because of (St. Brigid’s) historical significance … I am just getting to know the facts and when I have more work done, I will be able to make a better case for the argument. From what I’ve seen so far, there seems to be a very strong case for the argument that the (archdiocese) did a lot of things that could be considered suspect in this matter,” O’Connor writes in an e-mail.
St. Brigid’s Church “was flourishing,” when it closed Migdalia Torres says. When she was a girl, she received her First Holy Communion there on the same day as her older sister. While technically too young, she passed a test and was allowed to participate. She says that on Sundays there were people standing in the back. “(It was) like a Broadway play.” In recent years things were even better; the parishioners and the priests were less segregated. “It was a big family.” When St. Brigid’s closed, attendance at services was growing. “There were a lot of new faces” … “My vision was to reopen the church and fill it to the max like when I was a child.”
O’Connor brought an engineer to the property on June 22nd. He believes that being connected to criticism of the Department of Buildings would put the engineer’s career in jeopardy, and did not want to name him. “… If you take any action against (the Department Buildings) you go on their blacklist,” O’Connor writes. The engineer “assured (him) that the building is in no danger and believes it could be fixed for under $100,000.” But that was without going inside, and the building is still locked up.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, June 26, 2006
Sleeping On The Job: Workers recharge their batteries, in the Financial District
Our Town downtown
June 26, 2006
Once I’m asleep, I’m asleep. I’m out and that tends to be it. But I’m one of those people, who have to be in the perfect position, in total darkness to get there, and it often takes awhile.
When I found the time to go to Metronaps, where for a $14 walk-in or $65 monthly membership fee, you can sack out in a “Pod,” the conditions were opportune. The night before, I had attended a benefit at an Irish pub after a pretty full day of work. And by the time I got home, messed around on my computer and went to bed, it was already a quarter to one. At 6:30 a.m. my cell phone alarm went off, and I did it all over again. But not before downing my morning coffee.
I made a 3:00 appointment to attempt a nap, and to talk with Jason Bravo, a co-owner of the franchise’s Financial District location, which opened in March.
As soon as I exited the air conditioned office building I work in and started walking to the subway, I was hit by the heaviness of the air. It was a pretty dry heat, but uncomfortable nonetheless. But I kept it in perspective. And I also kept the last minute mini-assignment I received as I was leaving the office in perspective − and the line I waited on to get through the revolving door in the subway (all the turnstiles were roped off for some reason) in perspective − and the man, whose folded-up grocery caddy hit my leg as I passed through, in perspective too: going to this place a little pissed off seemed like a good idea. What could be timelier than testing a relaxation device on a mildly aggravating day?
These days I’ve been sleeping pretty well, both in terms of hours and soundness. But I cannot fall asleep on my back, period. That might not be a problem, Bravo explained. Once in the Pod, I would fall into a restful state more easily than I normally would because my feet would be elevated. This way the blood would flow to my brain more efficiently, allowing its sleep apparatus to function using “fewer guys” or neural messages.
When I got to the small storefront on Nassau Street, Bravo introduced me to his co-owners, Robert Carrillo and Larry Green, Jr. (Carrillo is a former investment banker. Green, Jr. was a lieutenant in the Navy). Then he showed me the “wake stations,” where customers can wipe their eyes, have a light sugary snack, or spritz themselves with Metronaps face mist (a clear liquid in a generic looking spray bottle) on their way out.
And then we walked into a dark room filled with the Pods themselves. They have a helmet-like appearance and are made of gel-coated fiberglass. The soft cushion inside is designed to reduce pressure on the lower back. Elevation is controlled with the touch of a button inside the Pod. The occupant is partially enveloped with his or her legs sticking out.
The function of these devices is benign, but looking at them, you can’t help being reminded of sci-fi images like the Precogs in “Minority Report,” submerged in solution, or the Jefferson Institute in “Coma,” with its involuntary organ donors gathered en masse for harvesting.
I took off my shoes and emptied most of what was in my pockets and got into one. Bravo set the timer to 30 minutes, 20 being the standard nap, and gave me a sleep mask (which was a little too snug). He draped a blanket over me like a flight attendant, and put headphones over my ears. Then he turned on a loop he called “Sounds of the Ocean.”
I quickly fell into a relaxed state, and for the next half hour, stayed almost completely still. I fiddled with the volume control and the Craftmatic-y elevation controls, and fidgeted, but only a little.
At one point, I wondered if in a bungled attempt to adjust the elevation, I had hit the wrong button and accidentally extended the time. The Pods are monitored by computer in the storefront, but I wasn’t sure if Bravo or Carrillo was watching the screen. So I took my mask off briefly a handful of times, and thought about getting out. But once I was convinced I was okay, I put it back on, closed my eyes and waited for the “full-body alarm clock,” − a combination of lights and vibration − to go off.
Maybe it was the coffee I drank earlier or the cheesy music, or the elastic straps of the mask against my temples, or just me, trying to sleep on my back − but I didn’t fall asleep.
When the alarm went off, I was rested I suppose, but it was that fully-clothed feeling you get when you doze off in a railroad car, or an airplane cabin with its manufactured air. Your eyes open for the last time after a rocky series of fits and starts.
My experience didn’t surprise Carrillo. “Napping and sleeping are two totally different things … napping is something everyone does, whether unconsciously or consciously. It’s just a matter of putting our bodies and minds in the right position to maximize the effect,” he said.
Metronaps founder Arshad Chowdhury opened the first Metronaps in the Empire State Building in 2004. It’s still there, but due to tight security, most of its customers are people who work in the building.
Chowdhury, an MBA, hired an engineer to create the Pods. But he did the sketches himself, and created a prototype of the Metronaps environment at Carnegie Mellon University, where he sold naps in lawn chairs at a dollar a piece.
For the Financial District location, the idea was that people working 18-hour days in investment banks and other financial organizations could come in to recharge their batteries, and return to work with increased productivity. (One high level executive at a law firm comes in to clear his head before making important decisions.) “Our aim is to be an employer’s best friend. Lots of money is put into employee benefits and this is an expense the company can see a return (on),” Bravo said.
But in addition to the business types it counted on, the new location is getting a lot of business from construction workers, and from tourists who are in the neighborhood visiting the World Trade Center site.
Bravo was a personal trainer and massage therapist before coming to Metronaps, and customers can opt for a pre-nap massage from him (“to get rid of some more guys”).
They can also have Metronaps order them food from some of the surrounding delis, with their lunch (or dinner) waiting for them after they leave.
While explaining the physical part of the concept, Bravo mentioned Circadian rhythms. But it sounded like Metronaps is really focused on the body’s ultradian rhythms. On its Web site, Northwestern University’s Center for Sleep & Circadian Biology describes ultradian rhythms as “biological timing processes that repeat themselves every few hours.” It’s easy to envision each ultradian cycle as a wave, and Metronaps wants the customer to wake up at the crest of the wave, with twenty minutes into a nap as the optimal time for this to occur. (The estimated cycle, which varies, is 90 minutes.) They don’t want people to fall into REM because if they do, they’ll wake up groggy. “People come in a little run down and they leave wired, if you will,” Bravo said. “It’s an exercise,” Carrillo said.
So in a dark room filled with what are essentially beds, and no immediate supervision, has anything … untoward, occurred? Above the front desk there’s a sign with the ground rules on it. The last one was added after the fact: “Only one napper per Pod.” And it seems safe to assume that people would know not to bunk together. But once, when it was time to remove the nappers from their Pods, a couple who had begun their naps in two separate Pods was found in one. “We had to (do) a thorough cleaning” Bravo said.
And someone once fell asleep so deeply that they slid almost all the way out of their Pod, without waking up. But other than that, things have been pretty tame.
When the full-body alarm clock finally went off, the lights and buzzing were anticlimactic, since I had already taken my sleep mask off a few times, thinking they had forgotten about me.
After I exited the Pod, I wiped my eyes and popped a sour apple Jolly Rancher at the wake station. Then I left Metronaps and went back to the office. But on the way there I stopped at a deli, compelled to pick up another cup of coffee.
-- Matt Elzweig
June 26, 2006
Once I’m asleep, I’m asleep. I’m out and that tends to be it. But I’m one of those people, who have to be in the perfect position, in total darkness to get there, and it often takes awhile.
When I found the time to go to Metronaps, where for a $14 walk-in or $65 monthly membership fee, you can sack out in a “Pod,” the conditions were opportune. The night before, I had attended a benefit at an Irish pub after a pretty full day of work. And by the time I got home, messed around on my computer and went to bed, it was already a quarter to one. At 6:30 a.m. my cell phone alarm went off, and I did it all over again. But not before downing my morning coffee.
I made a 3:00 appointment to attempt a nap, and to talk with Jason Bravo, a co-owner of the franchise’s Financial District location, which opened in March.
As soon as I exited the air conditioned office building I work in and started walking to the subway, I was hit by the heaviness of the air. It was a pretty dry heat, but uncomfortable nonetheless. But I kept it in perspective. And I also kept the last minute mini-assignment I received as I was leaving the office in perspective − and the line I waited on to get through the revolving door in the subway (all the turnstiles were roped off for some reason) in perspective − and the man, whose folded-up grocery caddy hit my leg as I passed through, in perspective too: going to this place a little pissed off seemed like a good idea. What could be timelier than testing a relaxation device on a mildly aggravating day?
These days I’ve been sleeping pretty well, both in terms of hours and soundness. But I cannot fall asleep on my back, period. That might not be a problem, Bravo explained. Once in the Pod, I would fall into a restful state more easily than I normally would because my feet would be elevated. This way the blood would flow to my brain more efficiently, allowing its sleep apparatus to function using “fewer guys” or neural messages.
When I got to the small storefront on Nassau Street, Bravo introduced me to his co-owners, Robert Carrillo and Larry Green, Jr. (Carrillo is a former investment banker. Green, Jr. was a lieutenant in the Navy). Then he showed me the “wake stations,” where customers can wipe their eyes, have a light sugary snack, or spritz themselves with Metronaps face mist (a clear liquid in a generic looking spray bottle) on their way out.
And then we walked into a dark room filled with the Pods themselves. They have a helmet-like appearance and are made of gel-coated fiberglass. The soft cushion inside is designed to reduce pressure on the lower back. Elevation is controlled with the touch of a button inside the Pod. The occupant is partially enveloped with his or her legs sticking out.
The function of these devices is benign, but looking at them, you can’t help being reminded of sci-fi images like the Precogs in “Minority Report,” submerged in solution, or the Jefferson Institute in “Coma,” with its involuntary organ donors gathered en masse for harvesting.
I took off my shoes and emptied most of what was in my pockets and got into one. Bravo set the timer to 30 minutes, 20 being the standard nap, and gave me a sleep mask (which was a little too snug). He draped a blanket over me like a flight attendant, and put headphones over my ears. Then he turned on a loop he called “Sounds of the Ocean.”
I quickly fell into a relaxed state, and for the next half hour, stayed almost completely still. I fiddled with the volume control and the Craftmatic-y elevation controls, and fidgeted, but only a little.
At one point, I wondered if in a bungled attempt to adjust the elevation, I had hit the wrong button and accidentally extended the time. The Pods are monitored by computer in the storefront, but I wasn’t sure if Bravo or Carrillo was watching the screen. So I took my mask off briefly a handful of times, and thought about getting out. But once I was convinced I was okay, I put it back on, closed my eyes and waited for the “full-body alarm clock,” − a combination of lights and vibration − to go off.
Maybe it was the coffee I drank earlier or the cheesy music, or the elastic straps of the mask against my temples, or just me, trying to sleep on my back − but I didn’t fall asleep.
When the alarm went off, I was rested I suppose, but it was that fully-clothed feeling you get when you doze off in a railroad car, or an airplane cabin with its manufactured air. Your eyes open for the last time after a rocky series of fits and starts.
My experience didn’t surprise Carrillo. “Napping and sleeping are two totally different things … napping is something everyone does, whether unconsciously or consciously. It’s just a matter of putting our bodies and minds in the right position to maximize the effect,” he said.
Metronaps founder Arshad Chowdhury opened the first Metronaps in the Empire State Building in 2004. It’s still there, but due to tight security, most of its customers are people who work in the building.
Chowdhury, an MBA, hired an engineer to create the Pods. But he did the sketches himself, and created a prototype of the Metronaps environment at Carnegie Mellon University, where he sold naps in lawn chairs at a dollar a piece.
For the Financial District location, the idea was that people working 18-hour days in investment banks and other financial organizations could come in to recharge their batteries, and return to work with increased productivity. (One high level executive at a law firm comes in to clear his head before making important decisions.) “Our aim is to be an employer’s best friend. Lots of money is put into employee benefits and this is an expense the company can see a return (on),” Bravo said.
But in addition to the business types it counted on, the new location is getting a lot of business from construction workers, and from tourists who are in the neighborhood visiting the World Trade Center site.
Bravo was a personal trainer and massage therapist before coming to Metronaps, and customers can opt for a pre-nap massage from him (“to get rid of some more guys”).
They can also have Metronaps order them food from some of the surrounding delis, with their lunch (or dinner) waiting for them after they leave.
While explaining the physical part of the concept, Bravo mentioned Circadian rhythms. But it sounded like Metronaps is really focused on the body’s ultradian rhythms. On its Web site, Northwestern University’s Center for Sleep & Circadian Biology describes ultradian rhythms as “biological timing processes that repeat themselves every few hours.” It’s easy to envision each ultradian cycle as a wave, and Metronaps wants the customer to wake up at the crest of the wave, with twenty minutes into a nap as the optimal time for this to occur. (The estimated cycle, which varies, is 90 minutes.) They don’t want people to fall into REM because if they do, they’ll wake up groggy. “People come in a little run down and they leave wired, if you will,” Bravo said. “It’s an exercise,” Carrillo said.
So in a dark room filled with what are essentially beds, and no immediate supervision, has anything … untoward, occurred? Above the front desk there’s a sign with the ground rules on it. The last one was added after the fact: “Only one napper per Pod.” And it seems safe to assume that people would know not to bunk together. But once, when it was time to remove the nappers from their Pods, a couple who had begun their naps in two separate Pods was found in one. “We had to (do) a thorough cleaning” Bravo said.
And someone once fell asleep so deeply that they slid almost all the way out of their Pod, without waking up. But other than that, things have been pretty tame.
When the full-body alarm clock finally went off, the lights and buzzing were anticlimactic, since I had already taken my sleep mask off a few times, thinking they had forgotten about me.
After I exited the Pod, I wiped my eyes and popped a sour apple Jolly Rancher at the wake station. Then I left Metronaps and went back to the office. But on the way there I stopped at a deli, compelled to pick up another cup of coffee.
-- Matt Elzweig
Monday, June 19, 2006
Book Review: "Grief" by Andrew Holleran
Our Town downtown
June 19, 2006
Hyperion New York
Hardcover; $19.95; 150 pp.
In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Andrew Holleran said he was embarrassed that his latest novel “Grief,” took him five years to complete since it’s so short.
But it’s not surprising to learn that it wasn’t cranked out over the course of a few months in some pastoral writer’s hermitage. Had it been, it would be easy to imagine a claustrophobic period of isolation and creativity with Holleran holed up in his retreat. Claustrophobia is one thing that comes to mind when the number of existential ideas his characters ponder at each turn, coupled with the anguish they feel, are taken into account.
Nothing really “happens” in “Grief”: an unnamed narrator who has just lost his mother moves from Florida to Washington, D.C. to fill in for a professor on sabbatical at a nameless college. He rents a room from an unnamed landlord, teaches a course and returns to Florida.
But it’s not that simple. The only characters who are truly three dimensional in the book are the narrator and his landlord, and they have been drawn with an intentionally minimalist hand.
Most of the secondary characters are functional, which is okay because “Grief” is not a thriller; ideas and setting dominate the book, and all this anonymity serves to prevent the density a glut of complex people with interesting names and quirks might produce.
It also underscores the reality both men face. Taking his daily walk, the narrator thinks of the many clichéd observations people make about Washington (“… it’s a one-company town … or a city of permanent blacks and transient whites, or a town people come to only to improve their resume …”), but he reaches a different conclusion later on, when his friend Frank (one of the few named characters) drolly tells him how many friends he lost to AIDS in the 80s (“I got my suntan one summer from just standing in Rock Creek Cemetery”). “...the whole city must remind you of people who aren’t here,” the narrator replies.
And in a way, that’s the world that the narrator, who has more or less put his social life on hold since his mother became ill, and his landlord, a man who has all but given up sex, and who is struggling in his middle age with questions about his own mortality, inhabit.
It’s an impermanent, anonymous world where people constantly die. Both of them are looking for a place to call home, the narrator in literal as well as figurative terms. And both are struggling with their own form of survivor’s guilt − the narrator who has survived his mother, and his landlord who has lost some “three to six hundred,” friends to AIDS.
When he moves into the landlord’s house in Dupont Circle, D.C.’s predominantly gay neighborhood, the narrator finds a book of Mary Todd Lincoln’s letters and becomes nearly obsessed with them for the entire semester. “In the way that books can take over your life, the letters … were starting to be the reference for everything I noticed” he says. And this isn’t the only insight he has into reading. (“What is better than reading in the same room or same house with someone at night? Reading is an activity both communal and separate,” he writes.)
The letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, who never really had a home after her husband’s assassination, and was at one point committed to an institution by her son, is at once a framework for the conversations the narrator and his friends have about survivor’s guilt, intimacy, partnership, and death, and a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. “This is what Mary Todd Lincoln was doing all those years after the assassination − refusing to pretend that she had a home on earth …”
Other historical deaths, and the places the survivors they stayed in, both distant and recent appear. And because of this framework, and because the author is a prominent writer who is male and gay, comparisons to “The Hours,” are likely to be made. But “Grief,” is a different book where the individual characters matter less, and the ideas, and the world they inhabit matter more.
And with a few exceptions − some of Frank’s epiphany bearing straight talk is a little too Critical Moment-y and identify him a little too strongly as The Voice of Reason − Holleran is subtle in the way he uses dialogue to ask questions that are not easy to answer. Most of these questions deal with mourning and intimacy.
Whether by accident or design, the book’s release date coincides with the 25th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, and while giving a seminar on Literature and AIDS, the narrator implies that for the masses, the epidemic is little more than a trend piece. “AIDS is over. At least in this country − it had its cultural moment, and produced some art that will probably last no longer than thirties agitprop. It galvanized the nation for a brief period, but that moment is past. There is still no cure, and people are still going to die, and it still interferes with sex, but when the public learned that it was not going to affect them, that it was mainly a gay disease, it moved on.”
AIDS is at the heart of “Grief,” but “Grief” is not entirely − about − AIDS. Do the dead stay with us? What function does grief have? Could mourning be a selfish act?
The landlord only lets his tenant get so close, occasionally accompanying him and Frank in social settings, and the general tone of they have may seem nihilistic. But in a world where so many have been lost and will continue to be, forming attachments must entail a special kind of labor.
-- Matt Elzweig
June 19, 2006
Hyperion New York
Hardcover; $19.95; 150 pp.
In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Andrew Holleran said he was embarrassed that his latest novel “Grief,” took him five years to complete since it’s so short.
But it’s not surprising to learn that it wasn’t cranked out over the course of a few months in some pastoral writer’s hermitage. Had it been, it would be easy to imagine a claustrophobic period of isolation and creativity with Holleran holed up in his retreat. Claustrophobia is one thing that comes to mind when the number of existential ideas his characters ponder at each turn, coupled with the anguish they feel, are taken into account.
Nothing really “happens” in “Grief”: an unnamed narrator who has just lost his mother moves from Florida to Washington, D.C. to fill in for a professor on sabbatical at a nameless college. He rents a room from an unnamed landlord, teaches a course and returns to Florida.
But it’s not that simple. The only characters who are truly three dimensional in the book are the narrator and his landlord, and they have been drawn with an intentionally minimalist hand.
Most of the secondary characters are functional, which is okay because “Grief” is not a thriller; ideas and setting dominate the book, and all this anonymity serves to prevent the density a glut of complex people with interesting names and quirks might produce.
It also underscores the reality both men face. Taking his daily walk, the narrator thinks of the many clichéd observations people make about Washington (“… it’s a one-company town … or a city of permanent blacks and transient whites, or a town people come to only to improve their resume …”), but he reaches a different conclusion later on, when his friend Frank (one of the few named characters) drolly tells him how many friends he lost to AIDS in the 80s (“I got my suntan one summer from just standing in Rock Creek Cemetery”). “...the whole city must remind you of people who aren’t here,” the narrator replies.
And in a way, that’s the world that the narrator, who has more or less put his social life on hold since his mother became ill, and his landlord, a man who has all but given up sex, and who is struggling in his middle age with questions about his own mortality, inhabit.
It’s an impermanent, anonymous world where people constantly die. Both of them are looking for a place to call home, the narrator in literal as well as figurative terms. And both are struggling with their own form of survivor’s guilt − the narrator who has survived his mother, and his landlord who has lost some “three to six hundred,” friends to AIDS.
When he moves into the landlord’s house in Dupont Circle, D.C.’s predominantly gay neighborhood, the narrator finds a book of Mary Todd Lincoln’s letters and becomes nearly obsessed with them for the entire semester. “In the way that books can take over your life, the letters … were starting to be the reference for everything I noticed” he says. And this isn’t the only insight he has into reading. (“What is better than reading in the same room or same house with someone at night? Reading is an activity both communal and separate,” he writes.)
The letters of Mary Todd Lincoln, who never really had a home after her husband’s assassination, and was at one point committed to an institution by her son, is at once a framework for the conversations the narrator and his friends have about survivor’s guilt, intimacy, partnership, and death, and a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. “This is what Mary Todd Lincoln was doing all those years after the assassination − refusing to pretend that she had a home on earth …”
Other historical deaths, and the places the survivors they stayed in, both distant and recent appear. And because of this framework, and because the author is a prominent writer who is male and gay, comparisons to “The Hours,” are likely to be made. But “Grief,” is a different book where the individual characters matter less, and the ideas, and the world they inhabit matter more.
And with a few exceptions − some of Frank’s epiphany bearing straight talk is a little too Critical Moment-y and identify him a little too strongly as The Voice of Reason − Holleran is subtle in the way he uses dialogue to ask questions that are not easy to answer. Most of these questions deal with mourning and intimacy.
Whether by accident or design, the book’s release date coincides with the 25th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, and while giving a seminar on Literature and AIDS, the narrator implies that for the masses, the epidemic is little more than a trend piece. “AIDS is over. At least in this country − it had its cultural moment, and produced some art that will probably last no longer than thirties agitprop. It galvanized the nation for a brief period, but that moment is past. There is still no cure, and people are still going to die, and it still interferes with sex, but when the public learned that it was not going to affect them, that it was mainly a gay disease, it moved on.”
AIDS is at the heart of “Grief,” but “Grief” is not entirely − about − AIDS. Do the dead stay with us? What function does grief have? Could mourning be a selfish act?
The landlord only lets his tenant get so close, occasionally accompanying him and Frank in social settings, and the general tone of they have may seem nihilistic. But in a world where so many have been lost and will continue to be, forming attachments must entail a special kind of labor.
-- Matt Elzweig
The Block: West 10th Street between 5th & 6th Avenues
Our Town downtown
June 19, 2006
On a warm, clear day, a painter has his easel set up on the northwest corner of West 10th Street and 6th Avenue in front of Priscilla, a 1920s apartment building named after a character in Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” His subject is the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library, diagonally across the intersection.
The Church of the Ascension, is on the Fifth Avenue corner, also on the north side. Most buildings on the block are townhouses. And the trees that shoot out from the sidewalks gather overhead in a canopy that blocks out the sun almost completely. It’s like a bridal path, and were it not for the steady flow of taxis, cars and trucks that use it as a thoroughfare from the commotion of Sixth Avenue to the relative calm of Fifth, it might fit somewhere far uptown along the Hudson River.
The people who pass by are mostly middle aged, with several mothers and young children. There are a handful who look like grade school and college students, some people walking dogs, and a group of workers rehabbing a townhouse near the church.
There is a bike lane, but it’s a little tricky today cycle or skate down it today because of the opposite side parking rules.
Halstead Property’s Barry Silverman recalls a New York Times article about this block that described it as the most beautiful, desirable block in Manhattan. He found this curious because “Manhattan is a big place,” with lots of beautiful, desirable blocks including 11th and 12th, where the property values are the same.
Who lived here:
Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammett, Emily Post, Kahlil Gibran, Marcel Duchamp, Hart Crane, Isamu Noguchi, Jerry Herman, Charles Keck, Kathleen Turner, Franklin Adams, Frederick MacMonnies, Emma Lazarus, Isabel Whitney, Dorothy Thompson.
What happened here:
President John Tyler secretly married a woman, 30 years his junior in the Church of the Ascension in 1844. Frederic Edwin Church exhibited his painting, “Heart of the Andes” at the Studio Building, where artist like Winslow Homer and John La Farge worked in 1859. U.S. chess champion Frank Marshall founded the Marshall Chess Club in 1915. Resident Dashiell Hammett was sent to jail for refusing to be a red scare informant in 1951. Six-year-old Lisa Steinberg was killed by her adoptive father in the former home of Mark Twain, where she lived in 1987. (Source: NY Songlines)
Buying here:
“We would kill to have more sales inventory on West 10th Street, but there’s very little of it,” says Halstead Property’s Barry Silverman. There are no condo buildings and only one coop, The Peter Warren, on this block. Depending on size, layout and condition, Silverman estimates that a one bedroom, one bath in The Warren will cost you anywhere from $700-850,000. For a two bedroom, two bath, you’ll be spending anywhere from $1.1-1.4 million. One “stellar” townhouse with a garage and a carriage house is listed for $19 million. (It rented for $45,000 a month.).
Renting here:
Silverman says many of the buildings on this block are single family townhouses, and most of the properties are rentals. 44 West 10th Street, a prewar building, which has some rent stabilized apartments, “is very difficult to get into.” The market rentals run from about $4,000 a month for a one bedroom, to $5000 and up for a two bedroom, depending on whether renovations have been made. A small one bedroom in 38 West 10th, a brownstone, goes for $3200 a month. And rent for the fourth floor of the townhouse at 31 West 10th (that’s 2,000 square feet) is $12,500.
Amenities:
There is a Food Emporium on Sixth Avenue, and two restaurants − Piadina (Italian) and Alta (Mediterranean/tapas) − right on 10th. There’s a post office on West 10th, and the A,C,E,F,V and S Lines on West 4th and Sixth. P.S. 41 The Greenwich Village School, which is preK-5 is on West 11th.
-- Matt Elzweig
June 19, 2006
On a warm, clear day, a painter has his easel set up on the northwest corner of West 10th Street and 6th Avenue in front of Priscilla, a 1920s apartment building named after a character in Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” His subject is the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library, diagonally across the intersection.
The Church of the Ascension, is on the Fifth Avenue corner, also on the north side. Most buildings on the block are townhouses. And the trees that shoot out from the sidewalks gather overhead in a canopy that blocks out the sun almost completely. It’s like a bridal path, and were it not for the steady flow of taxis, cars and trucks that use it as a thoroughfare from the commotion of Sixth Avenue to the relative calm of Fifth, it might fit somewhere far uptown along the Hudson River.
The people who pass by are mostly middle aged, with several mothers and young children. There are a handful who look like grade school and college students, some people walking dogs, and a group of workers rehabbing a townhouse near the church.
There is a bike lane, but it’s a little tricky today cycle or skate down it today because of the opposite side parking rules.
Halstead Property’s Barry Silverman recalls a New York Times article about this block that described it as the most beautiful, desirable block in Manhattan. He found this curious because “Manhattan is a big place,” with lots of beautiful, desirable blocks including 11th and 12th, where the property values are the same.
Who lived here:
Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammett, Emily Post, Kahlil Gibran, Marcel Duchamp, Hart Crane, Isamu Noguchi, Jerry Herman, Charles Keck, Kathleen Turner, Franklin Adams, Frederick MacMonnies, Emma Lazarus, Isabel Whitney, Dorothy Thompson.
What happened here:
President John Tyler secretly married a woman, 30 years his junior in the Church of the Ascension in 1844. Frederic Edwin Church exhibited his painting, “Heart of the Andes” at the Studio Building, where artist like Winslow Homer and John La Farge worked in 1859. U.S. chess champion Frank Marshall founded the Marshall Chess Club in 1915. Resident Dashiell Hammett was sent to jail for refusing to be a red scare informant in 1951. Six-year-old Lisa Steinberg was killed by her adoptive father in the former home of Mark Twain, where she lived in 1987. (Source: NY Songlines)
Buying here:
“We would kill to have more sales inventory on West 10th Street, but there’s very little of it,” says Halstead Property’s Barry Silverman. There are no condo buildings and only one coop, The Peter Warren, on this block. Depending on size, layout and condition, Silverman estimates that a one bedroom, one bath in The Warren will cost you anywhere from $700-850,000. For a two bedroom, two bath, you’ll be spending anywhere from $1.1-1.4 million. One “stellar” townhouse with a garage and a carriage house is listed for $19 million. (It rented for $45,000 a month.).
Renting here:
Silverman says many of the buildings on this block are single family townhouses, and most of the properties are rentals. 44 West 10th Street, a prewar building, which has some rent stabilized apartments, “is very difficult to get into.” The market rentals run from about $4,000 a month for a one bedroom, to $5000 and up for a two bedroom, depending on whether renovations have been made. A small one bedroom in 38 West 10th, a brownstone, goes for $3200 a month. And rent for the fourth floor of the townhouse at 31 West 10th (that’s 2,000 square feet) is $12,500.
Amenities:
There is a Food Emporium on Sixth Avenue, and two restaurants − Piadina (Italian) and Alta (Mediterranean/tapas) − right on 10th. There’s a post office on West 10th, and the A,C,E,F,V and S Lines on West 4th and Sixth. P.S. 41 The Greenwich Village School, which is preK-5 is on West 11th.
-- Matt Elzweig
Q & A: Lee Briccetti, Executive Director, Poets House
Our Town downtown
June 19, 2006
Poets House, the archive and cultural center devoted exclusively to poetry, was founded by poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), and celebrated its 20th anniversary last week. In December, the organization announced that the Battery Park City Authority had designated it the nonprofit tenant of a 10,000 square-foot space that it will relocate to in 2007, with a rent-free guarantee through 2069. Its director, Lee Briccetti has a background in fundraising and is a poet in her right (her most recent chapbook “Day Mark” was published by Four Way Books in 2005, and she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). Poetry in America is “flowering,” right now, she says.
Q: What does poetry do that prose can’t?
Robert Frost said poetry is a talking song, and I think it’s that emphasis on the emotional, the intellectual and the musical … In my view, the best prose contains elements of poems − that emphasis on rhythm and music.
Q: For example?
Nabokov. That’s the genius of Nabokov. Even though he was communicating in English, he was writing, essentially, in a second language. He was engaged in the creative properties of our language … Or Melville … when I read “Moby Dick” − that is one of our epic poems, even though he’s working with a different model than our current declarative model of a sentence. (It’s) that kind of long − almost like the sea itself. It goes on and on, wave after wave. …I think we are in the amazing position, as people in this country to have almost a bipolar upbringing, with Whitman as our Dad and Emily Dickinson as our mom. Whitman − who’s constantly bringing collections and catalogs to those long collective lines … It’s almost as if those lines have a similarity to a beat, (to) walking down the street. And then you have (Dickinson’s poems) − that almost have the sound of the hymn behind them − smaller, more interior, never really published in her lifetime. I came to her late in life, because I always though of her as “The Belle of Amherst,” − you know, a recluse. But her work is surprisingly extreme. It’s all about extremity of emotion. People think she writes about frogs and flowers, and she does, but her subject is emotional disintegration.
Q: Was winning the new Battery Park City location an uphill battle?
There (were) lots of ups and downs. We had to engage in a very long process of convincing them that we were the right organization for the building. And then we had to write a business plan. And what we were told was (that it was) the best plan from a nonprofit they had seen.
(And) then we had to convince them we could raise the considerable money (for construction and other expenses). (And) we’ve been very successful. I think they were concerned that a poetry organization speaks with a small, still voice … And we’ve been done proud with how Poets House has done with the fundraising. And a lot of that is because we have a great board. Their commitment to the project created great confidence and reciprocal confidence on the public side of the equation.
Q: Donald Hall was just named the next poet laureate of the United States. Do youthink he’ll be different from past laureates like Ted Kooser and Robert Pinsky?
He’s a wonderful poet and I think it’s a good choice. I think recently the poet laureates have had an important role in inviting a large public into the art, and he’s smart and generous, and I think he’ll do that.
Q: What is the state of poetry today?
I think poetry in this country is alive and well, and there’s plenty of it. I think though poetry is perhaps less a part of public education (than it once was) − and I’d like to see that change − poetry readings and the poet laureates, which you mentioned, have created the conditions for more people to bump into poetry through programs like poetry in the subways (Poetry in Motion) and Poets House, which makes a visible presence for poetry on the cultural landscape. Because of computer technology there are more books of poetry being published than ever before, and Poets House collects them all, for example, our Showcase program gathers them all and creates a festival that displays the entire annual harvest of poetry book production. This year there were 2,100 new books in our Showcase … (And) while there’s this explosion (in) readings and production, there’s a return to the oral tradition and to the pleasures of hearing poetry read out loud.
Q: What separates good poetry from bad poetry?
I think like anything, it takes experience to develop and train your ear to know what’s good and bad. That comes with experience and exposure over time. Personally, I’m less concerned with people … only reading the best. I’m more concerned with people finding something that speaks to them. I would love to have people feel a sense of excitement and discovery.
-- Matt Elzweig
June 19, 2006
Poets House, the archive and cultural center devoted exclusively to poetry, was founded by poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), and celebrated its 20th anniversary last week. In December, the organization announced that the Battery Park City Authority had designated it the nonprofit tenant of a 10,000 square-foot space that it will relocate to in 2007, with a rent-free guarantee through 2069. Its director, Lee Briccetti has a background in fundraising and is a poet in her right (her most recent chapbook “Day Mark” was published by Four Way Books in 2005, and she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). Poetry in America is “flowering,” right now, she says.
Q: What does poetry do that prose can’t?
Robert Frost said poetry is a talking song, and I think it’s that emphasis on the emotional, the intellectual and the musical … In my view, the best prose contains elements of poems − that emphasis on rhythm and music.
Q: For example?
Nabokov. That’s the genius of Nabokov. Even though he was communicating in English, he was writing, essentially, in a second language. He was engaged in the creative properties of our language … Or Melville … when I read “Moby Dick” − that is one of our epic poems, even though he’s working with a different model than our current declarative model of a sentence. (It’s) that kind of long − almost like the sea itself. It goes on and on, wave after wave. …I think we are in the amazing position, as people in this country to have almost a bipolar upbringing, with Whitman as our Dad and Emily Dickinson as our mom. Whitman − who’s constantly bringing collections and catalogs to those long collective lines … It’s almost as if those lines have a similarity to a beat, (to) walking down the street. And then you have (Dickinson’s poems) − that almost have the sound of the hymn behind them − smaller, more interior, never really published in her lifetime. I came to her late in life, because I always though of her as “The Belle of Amherst,” − you know, a recluse. But her work is surprisingly extreme. It’s all about extremity of emotion. People think she writes about frogs and flowers, and she does, but her subject is emotional disintegration.
Q: Was winning the new Battery Park City location an uphill battle?
There (were) lots of ups and downs. We had to engage in a very long process of convincing them that we were the right organization for the building. And then we had to write a business plan. And what we were told was (that it was) the best plan from a nonprofit they had seen.
(And) then we had to convince them we could raise the considerable money (for construction and other expenses). (And) we’ve been very successful. I think they were concerned that a poetry organization speaks with a small, still voice … And we’ve been done proud with how Poets House has done with the fundraising. And a lot of that is because we have a great board. Their commitment to the project created great confidence and reciprocal confidence on the public side of the equation.
Q: Donald Hall was just named the next poet laureate of the United States. Do youthink he’ll be different from past laureates like Ted Kooser and Robert Pinsky?
He’s a wonderful poet and I think it’s a good choice. I think recently the poet laureates have had an important role in inviting a large public into the art, and he’s smart and generous, and I think he’ll do that.
Q: What is the state of poetry today?
I think poetry in this country is alive and well, and there’s plenty of it. I think though poetry is perhaps less a part of public education (than it once was) − and I’d like to see that change − poetry readings and the poet laureates, which you mentioned, have created the conditions for more people to bump into poetry through programs like poetry in the subways (Poetry in Motion) and Poets House, which makes a visible presence for poetry on the cultural landscape. Because of computer technology there are more books of poetry being published than ever before, and Poets House collects them all, for example, our Showcase program gathers them all and creates a festival that displays the entire annual harvest of poetry book production. This year there were 2,100 new books in our Showcase … (And) while there’s this explosion (in) readings and production, there’s a return to the oral tradition and to the pleasures of hearing poetry read out loud.
Q: What separates good poetry from bad poetry?
I think like anything, it takes experience to develop and train your ear to know what’s good and bad. That comes with experience and exposure over time. Personally, I’m less concerned with people … only reading the best. I’m more concerned with people finding something that speaks to them. I would love to have people feel a sense of excitement and discovery.
-- Matt Elzweig
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Letter from Kumamoto
This story originally appeared in Japanzine in September 2004:
Kumamoto City is an excellent alternative for foreigners in Japan: those who aren’t interested in managing the chaos of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, or even smaller Fukuoka, but don’t want to be totally removed from “civilization” either. Foreigners usually end up in Kumamoto accidentally and then never leave. Those who do, often return a short time later.
Home to 660,000 people, Kumamoto City strikes the perfect balance between urban and rural living. It’s not as desolate as the countryside that makes up so much of Kyushu (and Kumamoto Prefecture, in particular), nor is it as hectic as Fukuoka, whose population of 1.3 million seems big.
Foreigners from large cities like London and New York may find Kumamoto to be too much of a small-town. The small minority of native English speakers is destined to run into one another again, and again, and again, and again …
But most things are overwhelmingly positive here. Hands down, the best thing in Kumamoto is its people. Maybe it’s the slower pace of life; maybe it’s the lower cost of living. But in Kumamoto, there is no shortage of courtesy, generosity and smiles.
ORIENTATION
Kumamoto City is located in a basin, halfway down Kyushu’s west coast. Summers are hot and humid; the rainy season lasts from June through July. And winters are characterized by a dry cold, with snowfall extremely rare on lower ground.
The most common selling point you hear about this city is its central location. An hour and fifteen minutes south by train from Fukuoka, it can be reached via the JR Tsubame and commuter lines. In 2007, the Shinkansen line connecting Fukuoka and Kagoshima will be extended to Kumamoto.
The central location makes the city a great jumping off point for excursions to places in Kumamoto Prefecture like Mount Aso – a chain of volcanic peaks, one of which is still active -- about one hour east, and Kikuchi Gorge, where the waters act as a natural air conditioner amidst a dramatic backdrop of waterfalls, rocks, and hills.
In the city itself, the most famous attraction is the impressive Kumamoto Castle, the former home of the Hosokawa daimyo. While not nearly the biggest in the country, it is still massive and stunning. Hosokawa house is a samurai residence near the castle and Suizen-ji Koen is a 300 year-old park that replicates the 53 stations of the Tokaido.
Kumamoto City’s size means visitors and residents can expect a decent level of urban convenience. The Kumamoto City International Center offers everything from free Internet access, to foreign language publications, classes, seminars, volunteer activities, and social events. Its English speaking staff is very helpful in navigating this almost completely Japanese town. The bulletin board on the second floor is a great resource for finding used bicycles, computers, and services like language and arts lessons.
English language books and magazines can be purchased at Kinokuniya Books, located on Ginza-dori. As elsewhere, the selection is small but comprehensive, though prices are quite high.
For Internet access, head straight to Media Café Popeye, halfway down Kamitori, on the left hand side of the street, or Cybac, off of Shimotori. Massage chairs, pool, darts and free drinks (non-alcoholic) are available as well.
The one truly frustrating thing here is banking. Higo Bank has ATMs all over the city, most of which stay open until 5pm. A few are open until 7, with a charge of ¥105. All are closed on weekends. Some convenience stores, and the Central Post Office, have 24-hour machines, but only offer credit card cash advances after-hours. This can be a sobering inconvenience, literally. It’s best to take out some extra money on Friday, and stretch it out as much as you can.
NIGHTLIFE
Kumamoto is not Fukuoka, but nightlife is easy to find. The main commercial district centers on two covered roads – Shimotori and Kamitori, where most of the nightlife is found. Jeff’s World Bar has been one of the main ex-pat watering holes for a long time. Walk up to the first floor, and make a left. Inside are friendly bartenders, a good beer selection, and many English teachers. The Sligo Inn, at the end of Kamitori, is the city’s only traditional Irish pub. At Shark Attack, a small pub with tiki décor and a sand-covered floor, drinks are affordable, the music’s good, and the clientele is a mix of gaijin and Japanese. At Sanctuary, a three-story bar on Ginnan Dori, beers and basic cocktails are only ¥300(!). Dance on the first floor or throw darts on the third.
This isn’t clubland, though there are a handful of options for people who want to dance. A lot of gaijin just head to Sharp, a basement pub with a small dance floor, and a friendly, English-speaking bartender.
FOOD
Eating is one of the easiest adjustments to make here, especially if you are into basashi – raw horsemeat – perhaps the Prefecture’s most famous delicacy. If you only remember one thing about the food here, keep this in mind: Kumamoto is a ramen town. After all, Kyushu is the birthplace of the famous noodles that are offered in a multitude of impressive configurations around the city.
Good yakitori can be enjoyed at the appropriately named Yakitori, just off of Shimotori. This sit-down restaurant offers a cozy, relaxed atmosphere with dim lighting and classic jazz (recorded).
Second Sight, a large storefront on Sakae-dori, houses Jang Jang Go, a Chinese restaurant that serves small, delicious, plates of noodles, meat and vegetables – and the tallest, (probably the only) refillable beer cylinders in town. Upstairs is Hanabata Kouminkan, a karaoke bar, which features uniquely themed boxes – one looks like a jail cell, another like a dressing room.
For those who prefer izakayas, Shirokiya, in Ansemachi, offers a wide variety of dishes and drinks. What this brightly lit, open izakaya lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for in price. It also has a picture menu. Try the anonymous looking Kyube Izakaya on Ginnan Dori. You are likely to be the only foreigners – but will be welcomed by the staff, engaged by the customers, and fed delicious food and drink. The mustard lotus root, and sashimi are highlights.
The city’s combination of balance, charm and beauty make it an excellent place to come for a visit, or stay for a while. As the summer wanes and we head into the autumn, now may be one of the best times to come and check it out.
-- Matt Elzweig
Kumamoto City is an excellent alternative for foreigners in Japan: those who aren’t interested in managing the chaos of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, or even smaller Fukuoka, but don’t want to be totally removed from “civilization” either. Foreigners usually end up in Kumamoto accidentally and then never leave. Those who do, often return a short time later.
Home to 660,000 people, Kumamoto City strikes the perfect balance between urban and rural living. It’s not as desolate as the countryside that makes up so much of Kyushu (and Kumamoto Prefecture, in particular), nor is it as hectic as Fukuoka, whose population of 1.3 million seems big.
Foreigners from large cities like London and New York may find Kumamoto to be too much of a small-town. The small minority of native English speakers is destined to run into one another again, and again, and again, and again …
But most things are overwhelmingly positive here. Hands down, the best thing in Kumamoto is its people. Maybe it’s the slower pace of life; maybe it’s the lower cost of living. But in Kumamoto, there is no shortage of courtesy, generosity and smiles.
ORIENTATION
Kumamoto City is located in a basin, halfway down Kyushu’s west coast. Summers are hot and humid; the rainy season lasts from June through July. And winters are characterized by a dry cold, with snowfall extremely rare on lower ground.
The most common selling point you hear about this city is its central location. An hour and fifteen minutes south by train from Fukuoka, it can be reached via the JR Tsubame and commuter lines. In 2007, the Shinkansen line connecting Fukuoka and Kagoshima will be extended to Kumamoto.
The central location makes the city a great jumping off point for excursions to places in Kumamoto Prefecture like Mount Aso – a chain of volcanic peaks, one of which is still active -- about one hour east, and Kikuchi Gorge, where the waters act as a natural air conditioner amidst a dramatic backdrop of waterfalls, rocks, and hills.
In the city itself, the most famous attraction is the impressive Kumamoto Castle, the former home of the Hosokawa daimyo. While not nearly the biggest in the country, it is still massive and stunning. Hosokawa house is a samurai residence near the castle and Suizen-ji Koen is a 300 year-old park that replicates the 53 stations of the Tokaido.
Kumamoto City’s size means visitors and residents can expect a decent level of urban convenience. The Kumamoto City International Center offers everything from free Internet access, to foreign language publications, classes, seminars, volunteer activities, and social events. Its English speaking staff is very helpful in navigating this almost completely Japanese town. The bulletin board on the second floor is a great resource for finding used bicycles, computers, and services like language and arts lessons.
English language books and magazines can be purchased at Kinokuniya Books, located on Ginza-dori. As elsewhere, the selection is small but comprehensive, though prices are quite high.
For Internet access, head straight to Media Café Popeye, halfway down Kamitori, on the left hand side of the street, or Cybac, off of Shimotori. Massage chairs, pool, darts and free drinks (non-alcoholic) are available as well.
The one truly frustrating thing here is banking. Higo Bank has ATMs all over the city, most of which stay open until 5pm. A few are open until 7, with a charge of ¥105. All are closed on weekends. Some convenience stores, and the Central Post Office, have 24-hour machines, but only offer credit card cash advances after-hours. This can be a sobering inconvenience, literally. It’s best to take out some extra money on Friday, and stretch it out as much as you can.
NIGHTLIFE
Kumamoto is not Fukuoka, but nightlife is easy to find. The main commercial district centers on two covered roads – Shimotori and Kamitori, where most of the nightlife is found. Jeff’s World Bar has been one of the main ex-pat watering holes for a long time. Walk up to the first floor, and make a left. Inside are friendly bartenders, a good beer selection, and many English teachers. The Sligo Inn, at the end of Kamitori, is the city’s only traditional Irish pub. At Shark Attack, a small pub with tiki décor and a sand-covered floor, drinks are affordable, the music’s good, and the clientele is a mix of gaijin and Japanese. At Sanctuary, a three-story bar on Ginnan Dori, beers and basic cocktails are only ¥300(!). Dance on the first floor or throw darts on the third.
This isn’t clubland, though there are a handful of options for people who want to dance. A lot of gaijin just head to Sharp, a basement pub with a small dance floor, and a friendly, English-speaking bartender.
FOOD
Eating is one of the easiest adjustments to make here, especially if you are into basashi – raw horsemeat – perhaps the Prefecture’s most famous delicacy. If you only remember one thing about the food here, keep this in mind: Kumamoto is a ramen town. After all, Kyushu is the birthplace of the famous noodles that are offered in a multitude of impressive configurations around the city.
Good yakitori can be enjoyed at the appropriately named Yakitori, just off of Shimotori. This sit-down restaurant offers a cozy, relaxed atmosphere with dim lighting and classic jazz (recorded).
Second Sight, a large storefront on Sakae-dori, houses Jang Jang Go, a Chinese restaurant that serves small, delicious, plates of noodles, meat and vegetables – and the tallest, (probably the only) refillable beer cylinders in town. Upstairs is Hanabata Kouminkan, a karaoke bar, which features uniquely themed boxes – one looks like a jail cell, another like a dressing room.
For those who prefer izakayas, Shirokiya, in Ansemachi, offers a wide variety of dishes and drinks. What this brightly lit, open izakaya lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for in price. It also has a picture menu. Try the anonymous looking Kyube Izakaya on Ginnan Dori. You are likely to be the only foreigners – but will be welcomed by the staff, engaged by the customers, and fed delicious food and drink. The mustard lotus root, and sashimi are highlights.
The city’s combination of balance, charm and beauty make it an excellent place to come for a visit, or stay for a while. As the summer wanes and we head into the autumn, now may be one of the best times to come and check it out.
-- Matt Elzweig
The War’s Not Over
This story originally appeared in Farang Untamed Travel’s September 2005 Japan issue.
TOKYO – It was Bunka-no-hi (Culture Day) and I was standing outside Tokyo’s Shibuya station, steps away from Hachiko crossing. An uyoku sound truck was parked and a crowd had gathered in front to listen to a heavyset man standing on the roof, ranting through a PA system, and swinging a Hinomaru (the Japanese flag).
Burly young men stood guard in navy colored jumpsuits on the ground. Their expressions were pious and angry. The onlookers included ordinary commuters, tourists from other parts of Japan, and a few foreigners. I didn't need to speak Japanese to understand the speaker.
At first, the crowd remained silent, passively receiving the message from the roof of the truck. But then, a Japanese 20something stepped forward from the crowd, got in the face of one of the groundlings and began challenging him. Were it not for one of the more restrained ideologues who jumped forward, and held back the grunt who had just been told off, there would have been violence.
When I first got to Japan in June 2004, I was intrigued and disturbed by sound trucks like these. They capture the imagination of many newcomers. But I lost interest when I realized that the neo-fascists (who often hide behind tinted truck windows) are just common thugs.
Shattered glass. Broken eggs. An overturned car. Riot gear. These were some of the first signs of the simmering tension between neighbors that exploded in protests, from Beijing to Hong Kong in April. The chaos was set off by the approval of a revised junior high school history textbook on April 5th, which the opposition perceives as Japan’s latest refusal to own up to its past.
Every four years, textbooks are screened for approval by the Ministry of Education. Since it was first approved in 2001, the textbook, which has been criticized for minimizing Japan’s wartime history, has been used in a small number of schools. It is a compilation by members of a nationalist group called the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, and paints a picture of the country’s relatively recent past in which things like the Nanking massacre; the sexual enslavement of “comfort women” from the occupied territories; and Unit 731, the army section which performed gruesome biological experiments on prisoners during the war - are either glossed over or omitted entirely.
It is rumored that the protests were quietly backed by the Chinese government in an attempt to stir nationalism at home and direct it against Japan. But even if China had these designs, Japan’s continued push for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council has not helped regional relations, nor have disputed claims to oil rich territory in the East China Sea.
In Jakarta for an Asia-Africa summit this spring, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi finally apologized to China for Japan’s World War II conduct. But like similar statements made in the 1990’s by other Japanese leaders, it was characteristically vague: “In the past, Japan through its colonial rule and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering for the people of many countries, particularly those of Asian nations.”
Koizumi in particular, has come under fire for his annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which commemorates Japan’s war dead – including 14 Class A war criminals like wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo who was executed in 1948.
These 14 were secretly enshrined in the 1970’s but the Shinto shrine itself has been around since the 1800’s. The 2.6 million inducted kami (spirits) include 28,000 Taiwanese and 21,000 Koreans who were forced into military service by their colonizers.
A common salutation between suicide bombers during the war was “let's meet at Yasukuni Shrine after we have died.”
In December, I was living very close to the Shrine, which is still a nationalist hub. On Sundays, I could hear members of uyoku, literally, “right wing,” groups in their black sound trucks squawking archaic military anthems for the whole neighborhood to hear. The date I chose to visit turned out to be, purely by coincidence, the current Emperor’s birthday.
December 23, 2004 (Emperor’s Birthday)
I am in the Yushukan. Claiming to be Japan's oldest museum, the Yushukan is located on the grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine.
I look inside a glass display case at a field uniform worn by Hirohito, scion of the Showa dynasty. Next to the boxed garment is a photograph of the man himself in consult with two officers, wearing it (presumably during wartime). There’s what looks like a gold lapel pin (also in the photograph) in a box to the left. It’s in the shape of a wreathed star. A matching hat is propped up on a satin covered post to the right as if its wearer might come back for it someday. The exhibit holds similar memorials to other dead emperors.
A tourist brochure explains that the curators are "proud to display a carrier-borne Mitsubishi Zero fighter aircraft." A white cigar-shaped plane is also prominently displayed, hanging from the ceiling of one of the rooms. That’s the kamikaze.
Kazuya, a Japanese friend of mine, has a theory. He thinks Koizumi is afraid of angering the spirits believed to dwell in the Shrine, and this is why his visits continue, despite the anger of neighbors like China and South Korea that bore the brunt of Japan's wartime policies. And many Japanese, with the foundation of Shinto – the ancestor worship-based religion that bolstered nationalism during the war – do believe in ghosts.
Kazuya says the war criminals should be removed. And as a foreigner who has been living in Japan for nine months, it’s unusual to hear a Japanese express this opinion, or any opinion on the matter.
Still inside the museum, we walk past a seemingly incongruent ikebana (traditional flower arrangement) session, and into a screening room where we watch a documentary about the Shrine and the Yushukan.
Since I speak almost no Japanese, I have brought Sachiko, Kazuya's wife, to translate. Francois, a friend who is from Lyon, France, is also with us. Francois and I are the only foreigners in the room. When the planes begin to smack into the deck of an aircraft carrier, an old man sitting in front begins to sob. The film cuts to a present day auditorium where senior citizens wave tiny Hinomaru’s and sing martial hymns in unison as they’re played on stage.
Sachiko urges us to leave early. Later, she explains that the audience may have been "aggressive" and that she thought we should exit before the lights came up.
After leaving the theater, we slowly wind our way through the rest of the museum. Among the arguments made by the exhibit placards, which are available in English as well as Japanese, is that the Japanese Empire was an inspiration to Gandhi and others. This assertion is made above a timeline of Asian civil rights leaders: “not until Japan began to accomplish victory after stunning victory in the Greater East Asian War did the idea of independence enter the realm of reality.”
"Once the desire for independence had been kindled under Japanese occupation, it did not die, even though Japan was ultimately defeated. Asian nations fought for their independence and won it."
The argument that a small, radical minority is nothing to worry about starts to crumble when that minority starts having a perceptible influence on the powerful. What may have once seemed like isolated incidents -- the 1960 killing of a Socialist leader by a right wing youth, and the 1990 shooting of Nagasaki's mayor for criticizing Hirohito by a member of the right wing Shoki-juku -- sound a lot less isolated when they extend far enough to have a real effect on public policy.
Take, for example, the murder of a Diet member by a man with uyoku ties in 2002. When asked about the killing, Prime Minister Koizumi said that "the use of violence to silence politicians is utterly unforgivable."
But he and his predecessor -- both members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which is actually Japan's conservative party – have made reforms aimed to please the uyoku, like the creation of a national youth service, which -– as The New York Times' Howard French wrote in 2001 -- "critics complain is really aimed at preaching traditional conservative values."
The far right is also seeking a Constitutional amendment, which Koizumi supports, that would allow the country to make war again.
In a recent e-mail, French writes that the uyoku "has broad but unacknowledged ties with what you might call the respectable right (read LDP)."
"Rear-guard actions attack those who dare hold alternative points of view on the issues conservatives care about,” Michael McDonagh writes in Tokyo Journal. “The uyoku, and the organized crime organizations (yakuza) have a historical association accommodated by the authorities because they work within and underpin the system, creating a shadow version of the establishment."
So for example, if left wing demonstrators appear in a public place, the more mainstream conservatives can count on the uyoku to roll up and give them a good talking to (or a beating), since their own hands are tied.
But this is not to say that no one is doing anything.
“There are pockets of opposition in Japan, but they are fragmented, and have a hard time gaining any traction, in part because the media, which are overwhelmingly conservative, pay almost no attention to their efforts and don't often reflect their point of view. I don't think Japanese civil society is quite as brain dead or lacking in energy as it is sometimes portrayed. It is weaker than it should be, but still kicking,” says French.
As we're getting ready to leave the Yushukan, we enter the room with the Zero hanging from the ceiling. It is a wide open space filled with weapons of all kinds. In one corner is a multicolored tank, and two young men, dressed in dark suits -- perhaps, as Francois suggests, yakuza -- pose in front of it. One dons a pair of small black spectacles that hearken back to the Taisho period, and smiles proudly as his friend takes his picture.
Before the protests, when I first became aware of the controversy, a name – Yoshifumi Tawara – kept popping up in articles written during the 2001 textbook hysteria.
Tawara is Secretary General of Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21 - a group fighting to remove the history book.
I wanted to speak with him in person to clarify the timeline, but I was really interested in his opinion of the book’s implications.
After a few false starts, I located him and had a Japanese friend, Yuka, call his office. (Yuka’s stepfather happens to be a Tokyo school principal).
Yuka had good news: Tawara was interested in, or at least willing to meet me. But there was a catch: neither of us spoke the other’s language.
So when Yuka told me she could not accompany me to Tawara’s office, I panicked. I had to find an interpreter on short notice. And due to the sensitivity of the topic, I couldn’t ask just anyone.
That’s how I ended up taking Francois, who speaks some Japanese. We planned to get the conversation on a digital recorder. Then I would give it to Yuka. She would transcribe it, and then translate it from Japanese to English.
Yoshifumi Tawara’s West Tokyo office is not unlike a school administration room. The walls are a dull color, and in the main room there’s a long table, which is covered in clutter.
Tawara sits impassively across a table from Francois and I, smoking and growing increasingly frustrated, realizing, I suspect, that Francois’ Japanese ability doesn’t quite match the description Yuka gave him.
My focus wanders while I wait for Francois to give me Tawara’s answers in English. I notice a scroll calendar on the opposite wall. It has the logo of a comfort women’s advocacy group on it. I look back at it every now and then while I wait, trying to read Tawara’s responses, which seem more and more begrudging. But the calendar reminds me that even if he’s less than happy to be spending his precious time with me –- he’s a brave person doing a brave thing.
But I admit I’m irritated that whenever I try to raise the greater question about right wing movements, he acts annoyed and reiterates that he doesn’t see a connection between the textbooks and the far right at large. This doesn’t make sense to me at all. And later, as we head down the stairs, I feel disappointed and a little aggravated.
When Francois and I have exited the building, we‘re both convinced that Tawara has probably given me nothing. After all, didn’t he sigh impatiently whenever Francois consulted his dictionary, or I tried to clarify something in my godawful Japanese? We were wasting his time and he didn’t mind letting us know it.
But when I get the transcript from Yuka that weekend, I see that Tawara was more forthcoming than I thought.
Reading it, I realize that even if Tawara and I speak different languages, we share concerns about Japan’s future.
Tawara says that Nihonkaigi, which is the largest uyoku organization in Japan, and which is represented in the textbook approval process – is also behind the effort to change the Constitution.
Sound trucks are an internal problem and the “general public is not interested in them at all,” says Tawara. But, “the more influential members of the far right are trying to enable Japan to make war again. In this sense,” he says, “I think these organizations are very dangerous.”
The Yasukuni Shrine, “has been the symbol of aggressive war in Japan.” And, “the fact that Prime Minister Koizumi and all the other ministers go there to pray is actually against the Japanese constitution.”
There is a direct relationship between Japanese media coverage and public interest in issues like the Shrine. And he predicts that when history textbooks are selected by municipal districts again, the Japanese mainstream will refocus their attention rightward.
After I finished speaking to Tawara, Yuka made a suggestion: why not speak to her stepfather, the principal? He was in the middle of a prolonged lawsuit, brought by a teacher he had disciplined for refusing to stand during a school graduation ceremony when “Kimigayo,” Japan’s national anthem, was played, awhile ago.
In 2003, the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education ordered all teachers to stand up, face the flag and sing during graduation and enrollment ceremonies. This is another controversial policy since they are both symbols of pre-surrender Japan. Since then, over 50 teachers have been punished for their disobedience.
I thought he could provide an added dimension to the picture, but I wondered why Yuka thought he would want to speak to me in the first place. He was the enforcer, so it seemed safe to assume that he was on the government’s side. Wasn’t he? “If he was,” right wing, “my mother never would have married him,” Yuka said. But it didn’t quite add up. I took her offer anyway.
Long after my meeting with Tawara, demonstrators were throwing water bottles at Japanese businesses and consulates in China. I followed up with Yuka to see if she had talked to her stepfather, and she looked a little embarrassed.
“Well,” she said. “I started to ask him, you know ‘what do you think about this whole textbook thing; what do you know about it?’ But he said, ‘why are you asking me about it?’”
“But I thought you said he wasn’t right wing?” I said, confused again.
“I know … Maybe he is.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then maybe it’s not a good idea.”
“Yeah,” she said. She sounded kind of anxious.
I finished my first week of classes at a vocational school where I teach English, just as the protests began in China. Several of us had begun our jobs that week and were having our welcome dinner at a mixed menu restaurant in Shibuya.
It was to begin an hour after work. But we got stuck in a teacher’s meeting and had to rush to the restaurant at the last minute. At other companies I had taught for, foreign teachers and management were segregated for the most part. So it was hard for me to comprehend that a desire to get to the restaurant before the school director arrived was why the staff was running around, frantically closing down the school for the night -- and then racing to the train station. But I soon understood: we were expected to receive our Riji-Cho (“President”) as he sat down to eat.
When Riji-Cho showed up with his female assistant, and when he left – before the rest of us – we stood.
The meal was nearly unending – nabe; sashimi; soba; unlimited drinks; and more dishes. The night was fairly orchestrated. Gently but resolutely, Japanese staff approached the foreign teachers at careful intervals, urging us to sit down next to each of our bosses and chat with them for a little while. Apparently, our presence at their tables had been requested. And each of the new staff members -- both foreign and Japanese -- had to make a short speech at a scheduled time. We weren’t told about this until after we arrived.
Sometime towards the middle or the end of the dinner, the young head of Japanese instruction – our students include many international students, mainly from China and Korea – sat down at the end of my table. She was visibly tipsy. And in English, she made light of the fact that even some of the Japanese staff were not exactly comfortable in such a traditional setting.
Her giddiness came, it seemed, not only from the alcohol, but from the same place that drove the rush to beat Riji-Cho to the restaurant. “… But he is my boss,” she said, her cheeks flushed, her arms extended forward in a gesture of supplication. “And I will follow him!”
-- Matt Elzweig
TOKYO – It was Bunka-no-hi (Culture Day) and I was standing outside Tokyo’s Shibuya station, steps away from Hachiko crossing. An uyoku sound truck was parked and a crowd had gathered in front to listen to a heavyset man standing on the roof, ranting through a PA system, and swinging a Hinomaru (the Japanese flag).
Burly young men stood guard in navy colored jumpsuits on the ground. Their expressions were pious and angry. The onlookers included ordinary commuters, tourists from other parts of Japan, and a few foreigners. I didn't need to speak Japanese to understand the speaker.
At first, the crowd remained silent, passively receiving the message from the roof of the truck. But then, a Japanese 20something stepped forward from the crowd, got in the face of one of the groundlings and began challenging him. Were it not for one of the more restrained ideologues who jumped forward, and held back the grunt who had just been told off, there would have been violence.
When I first got to Japan in June 2004, I was intrigued and disturbed by sound trucks like these. They capture the imagination of many newcomers. But I lost interest when I realized that the neo-fascists (who often hide behind tinted truck windows) are just common thugs.
Shattered glass. Broken eggs. An overturned car. Riot gear. These were some of the first signs of the simmering tension between neighbors that exploded in protests, from Beijing to Hong Kong in April. The chaos was set off by the approval of a revised junior high school history textbook on April 5th, which the opposition perceives as Japan’s latest refusal to own up to its past.
Every four years, textbooks are screened for approval by the Ministry of Education. Since it was first approved in 2001, the textbook, which has been criticized for minimizing Japan’s wartime history, has been used in a small number of schools. It is a compilation by members of a nationalist group called the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, and paints a picture of the country’s relatively recent past in which things like the Nanking massacre; the sexual enslavement of “comfort women” from the occupied territories; and Unit 731, the army section which performed gruesome biological experiments on prisoners during the war - are either glossed over or omitted entirely.
It is rumored that the protests were quietly backed by the Chinese government in an attempt to stir nationalism at home and direct it against Japan. But even if China had these designs, Japan’s continued push for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council has not helped regional relations, nor have disputed claims to oil rich territory in the East China Sea.
In Jakarta for an Asia-Africa summit this spring, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi finally apologized to China for Japan’s World War II conduct. But like similar statements made in the 1990’s by other Japanese leaders, it was characteristically vague: “In the past, Japan through its colonial rule and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering for the people of many countries, particularly those of Asian nations.”
Koizumi in particular, has come under fire for his annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which commemorates Japan’s war dead – including 14 Class A war criminals like wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo who was executed in 1948.
These 14 were secretly enshrined in the 1970’s but the Shinto shrine itself has been around since the 1800’s. The 2.6 million inducted kami (spirits) include 28,000 Taiwanese and 21,000 Koreans who were forced into military service by their colonizers.
A common salutation between suicide bombers during the war was “let's meet at Yasukuni Shrine after we have died.”
In December, I was living very close to the Shrine, which is still a nationalist hub. On Sundays, I could hear members of uyoku, literally, “right wing,” groups in their black sound trucks squawking archaic military anthems for the whole neighborhood to hear. The date I chose to visit turned out to be, purely by coincidence, the current Emperor’s birthday.
December 23, 2004 (Emperor’s Birthday)
I am in the Yushukan. Claiming to be Japan's oldest museum, the Yushukan is located on the grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine.
I look inside a glass display case at a field uniform worn by Hirohito, scion of the Showa dynasty. Next to the boxed garment is a photograph of the man himself in consult with two officers, wearing it (presumably during wartime). There’s what looks like a gold lapel pin (also in the photograph) in a box to the left. It’s in the shape of a wreathed star. A matching hat is propped up on a satin covered post to the right as if its wearer might come back for it someday. The exhibit holds similar memorials to other dead emperors.
A tourist brochure explains that the curators are "proud to display a carrier-borne Mitsubishi Zero fighter aircraft." A white cigar-shaped plane is also prominently displayed, hanging from the ceiling of one of the rooms. That’s the kamikaze.
Kazuya, a Japanese friend of mine, has a theory. He thinks Koizumi is afraid of angering the spirits believed to dwell in the Shrine, and this is why his visits continue, despite the anger of neighbors like China and South Korea that bore the brunt of Japan's wartime policies. And many Japanese, with the foundation of Shinto – the ancestor worship-based religion that bolstered nationalism during the war – do believe in ghosts.
Kazuya says the war criminals should be removed. And as a foreigner who has been living in Japan for nine months, it’s unusual to hear a Japanese express this opinion, or any opinion on the matter.
Still inside the museum, we walk past a seemingly incongruent ikebana (traditional flower arrangement) session, and into a screening room where we watch a documentary about the Shrine and the Yushukan.
Since I speak almost no Japanese, I have brought Sachiko, Kazuya's wife, to translate. Francois, a friend who is from Lyon, France, is also with us. Francois and I are the only foreigners in the room. When the planes begin to smack into the deck of an aircraft carrier, an old man sitting in front begins to sob. The film cuts to a present day auditorium where senior citizens wave tiny Hinomaru’s and sing martial hymns in unison as they’re played on stage.
Sachiko urges us to leave early. Later, she explains that the audience may have been "aggressive" and that she thought we should exit before the lights came up.
After leaving the theater, we slowly wind our way through the rest of the museum. Among the arguments made by the exhibit placards, which are available in English as well as Japanese, is that the Japanese Empire was an inspiration to Gandhi and others. This assertion is made above a timeline of Asian civil rights leaders: “not until Japan began to accomplish victory after stunning victory in the Greater East Asian War did the idea of independence enter the realm of reality.”
"Once the desire for independence had been kindled under Japanese occupation, it did not die, even though Japan was ultimately defeated. Asian nations fought for their independence and won it."
The argument that a small, radical minority is nothing to worry about starts to crumble when that minority starts having a perceptible influence on the powerful. What may have once seemed like isolated incidents -- the 1960 killing of a Socialist leader by a right wing youth, and the 1990 shooting of Nagasaki's mayor for criticizing Hirohito by a member of the right wing Shoki-juku -- sound a lot less isolated when they extend far enough to have a real effect on public policy.
Take, for example, the murder of a Diet member by a man with uyoku ties in 2002. When asked about the killing, Prime Minister Koizumi said that "the use of violence to silence politicians is utterly unforgivable."
But he and his predecessor -- both members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which is actually Japan's conservative party – have made reforms aimed to please the uyoku, like the creation of a national youth service, which -– as The New York Times' Howard French wrote in 2001 -- "critics complain is really aimed at preaching traditional conservative values."
The far right is also seeking a Constitutional amendment, which Koizumi supports, that would allow the country to make war again.
In a recent e-mail, French writes that the uyoku "has broad but unacknowledged ties with what you might call the respectable right (read LDP)."
"Rear-guard actions attack those who dare hold alternative points of view on the issues conservatives care about,” Michael McDonagh writes in Tokyo Journal. “The uyoku, and the organized crime organizations (yakuza) have a historical association accommodated by the authorities because they work within and underpin the system, creating a shadow version of the establishment."
So for example, if left wing demonstrators appear in a public place, the more mainstream conservatives can count on the uyoku to roll up and give them a good talking to (or a beating), since their own hands are tied.
But this is not to say that no one is doing anything.
“There are pockets of opposition in Japan, but they are fragmented, and have a hard time gaining any traction, in part because the media, which are overwhelmingly conservative, pay almost no attention to their efforts and don't often reflect their point of view. I don't think Japanese civil society is quite as brain dead or lacking in energy as it is sometimes portrayed. It is weaker than it should be, but still kicking,” says French.
As we're getting ready to leave the Yushukan, we enter the room with the Zero hanging from the ceiling. It is a wide open space filled with weapons of all kinds. In one corner is a multicolored tank, and two young men, dressed in dark suits -- perhaps, as Francois suggests, yakuza -- pose in front of it. One dons a pair of small black spectacles that hearken back to the Taisho period, and smiles proudly as his friend takes his picture.
Before the protests, when I first became aware of the controversy, a name – Yoshifumi Tawara – kept popping up in articles written during the 2001 textbook hysteria.
Tawara is Secretary General of Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21 - a group fighting to remove the history book.
I wanted to speak with him in person to clarify the timeline, but I was really interested in his opinion of the book’s implications.
After a few false starts, I located him and had a Japanese friend, Yuka, call his office. (Yuka’s stepfather happens to be a Tokyo school principal).
Yuka had good news: Tawara was interested in, or at least willing to meet me. But there was a catch: neither of us spoke the other’s language.
So when Yuka told me she could not accompany me to Tawara’s office, I panicked. I had to find an interpreter on short notice. And due to the sensitivity of the topic, I couldn’t ask just anyone.
That’s how I ended up taking Francois, who speaks some Japanese. We planned to get the conversation on a digital recorder. Then I would give it to Yuka. She would transcribe it, and then translate it from Japanese to English.
Yoshifumi Tawara’s West Tokyo office is not unlike a school administration room. The walls are a dull color, and in the main room there’s a long table, which is covered in clutter.
Tawara sits impassively across a table from Francois and I, smoking and growing increasingly frustrated, realizing, I suspect, that Francois’ Japanese ability doesn’t quite match the description Yuka gave him.
My focus wanders while I wait for Francois to give me Tawara’s answers in English. I notice a scroll calendar on the opposite wall. It has the logo of a comfort women’s advocacy group on it. I look back at it every now and then while I wait, trying to read Tawara’s responses, which seem more and more begrudging. But the calendar reminds me that even if he’s less than happy to be spending his precious time with me –- he’s a brave person doing a brave thing.
But I admit I’m irritated that whenever I try to raise the greater question about right wing movements, he acts annoyed and reiterates that he doesn’t see a connection between the textbooks and the far right at large. This doesn’t make sense to me at all. And later, as we head down the stairs, I feel disappointed and a little aggravated.
When Francois and I have exited the building, we‘re both convinced that Tawara has probably given me nothing. After all, didn’t he sigh impatiently whenever Francois consulted his dictionary, or I tried to clarify something in my godawful Japanese? We were wasting his time and he didn’t mind letting us know it.
But when I get the transcript from Yuka that weekend, I see that Tawara was more forthcoming than I thought.
Reading it, I realize that even if Tawara and I speak different languages, we share concerns about Japan’s future.
Tawara says that Nihonkaigi, which is the largest uyoku organization in Japan, and which is represented in the textbook approval process – is also behind the effort to change the Constitution.
Sound trucks are an internal problem and the “general public is not interested in them at all,” says Tawara. But, “the more influential members of the far right are trying to enable Japan to make war again. In this sense,” he says, “I think these organizations are very dangerous.”
The Yasukuni Shrine, “has been the symbol of aggressive war in Japan.” And, “the fact that Prime Minister Koizumi and all the other ministers go there to pray is actually against the Japanese constitution.”
There is a direct relationship between Japanese media coverage and public interest in issues like the Shrine. And he predicts that when history textbooks are selected by municipal districts again, the Japanese mainstream will refocus their attention rightward.
After I finished speaking to Tawara, Yuka made a suggestion: why not speak to her stepfather, the principal? He was in the middle of a prolonged lawsuit, brought by a teacher he had disciplined for refusing to stand during a school graduation ceremony when “Kimigayo,” Japan’s national anthem, was played, awhile ago.
In 2003, the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education ordered all teachers to stand up, face the flag and sing during graduation and enrollment ceremonies. This is another controversial policy since they are both symbols of pre-surrender Japan. Since then, over 50 teachers have been punished for their disobedience.
I thought he could provide an added dimension to the picture, but I wondered why Yuka thought he would want to speak to me in the first place. He was the enforcer, so it seemed safe to assume that he was on the government’s side. Wasn’t he? “If he was,” right wing, “my mother never would have married him,” Yuka said. But it didn’t quite add up. I took her offer anyway.
Long after my meeting with Tawara, demonstrators were throwing water bottles at Japanese businesses and consulates in China. I followed up with Yuka to see if she had talked to her stepfather, and she looked a little embarrassed.
“Well,” she said. “I started to ask him, you know ‘what do you think about this whole textbook thing; what do you know about it?’ But he said, ‘why are you asking me about it?’”
“But I thought you said he wasn’t right wing?” I said, confused again.
“I know … Maybe he is.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then maybe it’s not a good idea.”
“Yeah,” she said. She sounded kind of anxious.
I finished my first week of classes at a vocational school where I teach English, just as the protests began in China. Several of us had begun our jobs that week and were having our welcome dinner at a mixed menu restaurant in Shibuya.
It was to begin an hour after work. But we got stuck in a teacher’s meeting and had to rush to the restaurant at the last minute. At other companies I had taught for, foreign teachers and management were segregated for the most part. So it was hard for me to comprehend that a desire to get to the restaurant before the school director arrived was why the staff was running around, frantically closing down the school for the night -- and then racing to the train station. But I soon understood: we were expected to receive our Riji-Cho (“President”) as he sat down to eat.
When Riji-Cho showed up with his female assistant, and when he left – before the rest of us – we stood.
The meal was nearly unending – nabe; sashimi; soba; unlimited drinks; and more dishes. The night was fairly orchestrated. Gently but resolutely, Japanese staff approached the foreign teachers at careful intervals, urging us to sit down next to each of our bosses and chat with them for a little while. Apparently, our presence at their tables had been requested. And each of the new staff members -- both foreign and Japanese -- had to make a short speech at a scheduled time. We weren’t told about this until after we arrived.
Sometime towards the middle or the end of the dinner, the young head of Japanese instruction – our students include many international students, mainly from China and Korea – sat down at the end of my table. She was visibly tipsy. And in English, she made light of the fact that even some of the Japanese staff were not exactly comfortable in such a traditional setting.
Her giddiness came, it seemed, not only from the alcohol, but from the same place that drove the rush to beat Riji-Cho to the restaurant. “… But he is my boss,” she said, her cheeks flushed, her arms extended forward in a gesture of supplication. “And I will follow him!”
-- Matt Elzweig
Class Anxiety: Lower Manhattan Is For Families Now. Where Will They Send Their Kids to School?
Our Town downtown
June 12, 2006
The kids are here, and more are on the way.
In the past five years, more than 8,000 new housing units have gone up south of Canal, and over 14,000 more − including constructions and conversions − are in the works, according to the NYC Economic Development Corporation.
But even before large numbers of New Yorkers began calling Lower Manhattan home, there was nothing quite like it. Relics like Alexander Hamilton’s tombstone and Federal Hall stood just minutes away from perhaps the world’s only burger joint with its own doorman and piano player, and were surrounded by institutions where millions were made and lost daily. The triangular area bordered by Broadway, Canal, Vesey and the Hudson, was still regarded as a dreary warehouse district, and wasn’t what Forbes magazine now calls one of the country’s “priciest” ZIP codes. And to the south, ferries took tourists to the Statue of Liberty.
This mix of the old and new, the historical and the purely commercial, of the densely active, bustling alongside the relatively barren, was unusual to say the least.
But in a few years, a part of town that was once a dark lonely place at night will house almost 50,000 people.
Lower Manhattan is almost a community. Yes, there are questions about amenities, with many getting tired of the Fresh Direct lifestyle. But the linchpin, perhaps the biggest question that remains, is where its children will go to school.
Schools in District 2, like PS 234 in Tribeca are among the best in the system. But even there, students are up against one of the biggest bones of contention between city parents and the Department of Education: overcrowding.
Kevin Doherty, PS 234’s PTA President, is looking at the present with one eye on the future and worrying. The school has already had to give up its computer room due to increased class size. At one point there were concerns it might have to give up its
science room and begin holding classes on a cart.
Two city lots next to 234, known as 5B & 5C were recently sold to private developers who are in the midst of putting up about 650 residential units there, so Doherty expects even more school−aged kids in the years to come. What he doesn’t know is how they will be accommodated.
The School Construction Authority’s Five− Year Capital Plan Amendment includes the construction of an annex to PS 234 − 140 new seats − and the construction of a new school on Beekman Street on the Lower East Side, which will hold 630. But in the face of those 650 units and the “explosive” growth in general, 740 new seats are little more than a consolation prize to Doherty, who describes them as “a drop in the bucket.” To make things worse, the city has still not broken ground on either project.
As a consequence of tightening space, lots of parents are pulling their kids out of public schools with good reputations and putting them into private schools.
Julie Koster sees this first hand as head of admissions at Claremont Preparatory, the new K− 8 school that is located in the old Bank of America building on Broad Street. She says Claremont is getting more and more transfers from public schools.
And even though Koster herself, moved to Tribeca from Chelsea for the great public schools, she no longer wants to send her child to one because of overcrowding.
At Claremont, which is owned by MetSchools, Inc., tuition for one year (not including uniform costs) is $27,500, but Koster says that the school has a generous scholarship program, the student body is diverse.
The kindergarten, 1st, 2nd and 4th grade classes (there are no third graders this year), have up to 20 students with two teachers. Learning specialists and guidance counselors “are constantly in and out of classrooms as well” she says.
Daniel Koffler is a manager at MetSchools. His father, Michael Koffler, is the company’s founder. He says MetSchools, which owns several other schools, was encouraged by the downtown housing boom and was looking to open a continuing school somewhere in Manhattan as early as five years ago.
Claremont currently has 54 students and will have twice that in the fall. A pre− K division will open in 2007.
Charter schools are also an issue, and not only in terms of the public funding they receive. Ross Global Academy, a new charter school that plans to open this fall will share space with the public NEST + M school on the Lower East Side. Hundreds of students protested in front of Cipriani Wall Street to disrupt Joel Klein who was speaking at a benefit there on June 6th, according to The New York Times. The protest coincided with the latest hearing in a lawsuit filed by NEST’s PTA. State Supreme Court Judge Robert D. Lippman is reviewing the case.
Stuart Fischer, a Ross spokesman, says the organization is confident that the school will open its doors on September 6th as planned. “There will be a total of 160 students,” with more than 130 already enrolled. The remaining 30 are expected to be enrolled “in the next week or two,” he says in an e− mail interview. The school is affiliated with the Ross School in East Hampton, which was founded 15 years ago by Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of former Time Warner Chairman and CEO Steve Ross. The K− 6 school’s design was created in collaboration with NYU, and Fischer says it will only “’incubate’ at 111 Columbia Street for two years,” before going to find another location, “standard operating procedure for,” NYC charter schools.
Leonie Haimson is executive director of Class Size Matters, a group dedicated to reducing class size on a systematic level. She thinks opportunities like this one, are being provided to charters at the expense of public schools. She says charters and overcrowding are the two “fastest growing items on (the) public school systems budget.”
And her own situation is telling. By the time her daughter finished the 6th grade she was fed up with overcrowding and put her in a private school. (She has a son who attends a public elementary school.)
She is not convinced by the common argument that well− performing charters compel public schools to compete. All you need to do, she says, is look at NYC’s private school industry. It is “thriving,” yet it does nothing to improve public schools.
One initiative Haimson is working on is garnering support to build a new high school on Governor’s Island, which is being eyed as a prospective site for a charter.
These sticking points are part of a broader argument that she shares with PS 234’s Kevin Doherty: the Bloomberg administration and the City Council may talk a lot about improving education, but “when it comes to the way things are really done,” private interest projects like the West Side stadium, hosting the Olympics, and building new Mets and Yankees stadiums are given priority. “Education comes last” she says. Incentives for the communities surrounding these projects are too few and subsidies for the private interests (i.e. stadium developers) are too high.
It seems like the type of gripes she and Doherty have with the city could be leveled against any number of administrations past, since the school system is such a behemoth of a bureaucracy.
And Haimson, who is passionate about her cause can seem a bit didactic at times.
But there seems to be more than a grain of truth to what’s got them riled with the current state of education, especially in terms of priorities. And it’s a complaint that extends to the private sector.
When Haimson read a recent New York magazine article entitled “Building the (New) New York”, she was frightened, but sadly, not surprised by a glaring omission. The article, which imagined how the city might look all the way up to 2030, and included a section entitled “Lower Manhattan in 2016,” mentioned just about every possibility except how the rapid development it envisioned would affect the city’s schools. “Check it out and try not to cry,” she writes in an e− mail forward.
On a Tuesday morning at the Claremont school, a class of pint− size musicians collaborates with their young music teacher, who is sitting with an acoustic guitar in his lap. One’s on electric guitar, another’s on bass, another’s on drums, and another’s on keys. They sound pretty good and bring “School of Rock,” to mind.
In another room, a small group is engaged in a language lesson. They will be taught three, including Mandarin, before they graduate.
An art class quietly affixes tape to small canvasses for a lesson that involves painting with primary colors.
Outside, about an hour later, a school bus sits just south of the cordoned off picnic area, where solid jacketed stock exchange workers and others take breaks, and tourists sit at tables.
In front of the exchange, a TV reporter politely shoos away a large group of I Love NY t-shirt wearing kids who hope to get in the shot, explaining that he’s sorry, but “this is a very serious piece about terrorism.” The camera filming him is set up next to George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall. A helicopter hovers overhead, north of Wall Street.
To the right of Federal Hall there’s a NYPD emergency vehicle parked next to special unit cops holding rifles. One of them is in the canine unit. A patrolman leans up against 30 Wall, near the NY Sports Club.
At one of the world’s most famous intersections this scene may not typify all of Lower Manhattan. But the obvious signs of transition − the scaffolding, the sounds of construction − do. Security of all kinds is everywhere.
Security, Business, Tourism. These three seem to have the heaviest presence on Wall Street and Broad, and at first glance it doesn’t look like a place families live, where children live, play and go to school - a neighborhood. But is this really a neighborhood? If anything it is a place of history, anxiety, commerce, excitement, a place worthy of curiosity.
But as the cops wait for a call to action, standing around and talking, next to Federal Hall, a telltale sign of neighborhoods all over New York City pulls up behind them, Mr. Softee.
-- Matt Elzweig
June 12, 2006
The kids are here, and more are on the way.
In the past five years, more than 8,000 new housing units have gone up south of Canal, and over 14,000 more − including constructions and conversions − are in the works, according to the NYC Economic Development Corporation.
But even before large numbers of New Yorkers began calling Lower Manhattan home, there was nothing quite like it. Relics like Alexander Hamilton’s tombstone and Federal Hall stood just minutes away from perhaps the world’s only burger joint with its own doorman and piano player, and were surrounded by institutions where millions were made and lost daily. The triangular area bordered by Broadway, Canal, Vesey and the Hudson, was still regarded as a dreary warehouse district, and wasn’t what Forbes magazine now calls one of the country’s “priciest” ZIP codes. And to the south, ferries took tourists to the Statue of Liberty.
This mix of the old and new, the historical and the purely commercial, of the densely active, bustling alongside the relatively barren, was unusual to say the least.
But in a few years, a part of town that was once a dark lonely place at night will house almost 50,000 people.
Lower Manhattan is almost a community. Yes, there are questions about amenities, with many getting tired of the Fresh Direct lifestyle. But the linchpin, perhaps the biggest question that remains, is where its children will go to school.
Schools in District 2, like PS 234 in Tribeca are among the best in the system. But even there, students are up against one of the biggest bones of contention between city parents and the Department of Education: overcrowding.
Kevin Doherty, PS 234’s PTA President, is looking at the present with one eye on the future and worrying. The school has already had to give up its computer room due to increased class size. At one point there were concerns it might have to give up its
science room and begin holding classes on a cart.
Two city lots next to 234, known as 5B & 5C were recently sold to private developers who are in the midst of putting up about 650 residential units there, so Doherty expects even more school−aged kids in the years to come. What he doesn’t know is how they will be accommodated.
The School Construction Authority’s Five− Year Capital Plan Amendment includes the construction of an annex to PS 234 − 140 new seats − and the construction of a new school on Beekman Street on the Lower East Side, which will hold 630. But in the face of those 650 units and the “explosive” growth in general, 740 new seats are little more than a consolation prize to Doherty, who describes them as “a drop in the bucket.” To make things worse, the city has still not broken ground on either project.
As a consequence of tightening space, lots of parents are pulling their kids out of public schools with good reputations and putting them into private schools.
Julie Koster sees this first hand as head of admissions at Claremont Preparatory, the new K− 8 school that is located in the old Bank of America building on Broad Street. She says Claremont is getting more and more transfers from public schools.
And even though Koster herself, moved to Tribeca from Chelsea for the great public schools, she no longer wants to send her child to one because of overcrowding.
At Claremont, which is owned by MetSchools, Inc., tuition for one year (not including uniform costs) is $27,500, but Koster says that the school has a generous scholarship program, the student body is diverse.
The kindergarten, 1st, 2nd and 4th grade classes (there are no third graders this year), have up to 20 students with two teachers. Learning specialists and guidance counselors “are constantly in and out of classrooms as well” she says.
Daniel Koffler is a manager at MetSchools. His father, Michael Koffler, is the company’s founder. He says MetSchools, which owns several other schools, was encouraged by the downtown housing boom and was looking to open a continuing school somewhere in Manhattan as early as five years ago.
Claremont currently has 54 students and will have twice that in the fall. A pre− K division will open in 2007.
Charter schools are also an issue, and not only in terms of the public funding they receive. Ross Global Academy, a new charter school that plans to open this fall will share space with the public NEST + M school on the Lower East Side. Hundreds of students protested in front of Cipriani Wall Street to disrupt Joel Klein who was speaking at a benefit there on June 6th, according to The New York Times. The protest coincided with the latest hearing in a lawsuit filed by NEST’s PTA. State Supreme Court Judge Robert D. Lippman is reviewing the case.
Stuart Fischer, a Ross spokesman, says the organization is confident that the school will open its doors on September 6th as planned. “There will be a total of 160 students,” with more than 130 already enrolled. The remaining 30 are expected to be enrolled “in the next week or two,” he says in an e− mail interview. The school is affiliated with the Ross School in East Hampton, which was founded 15 years ago by Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of former Time Warner Chairman and CEO Steve Ross. The K− 6 school’s design was created in collaboration with NYU, and Fischer says it will only “’incubate’ at 111 Columbia Street for two years,” before going to find another location, “standard operating procedure for,” NYC charter schools.
Leonie Haimson is executive director of Class Size Matters, a group dedicated to reducing class size on a systematic level. She thinks opportunities like this one, are being provided to charters at the expense of public schools. She says charters and overcrowding are the two “fastest growing items on (the) public school systems budget.”
And her own situation is telling. By the time her daughter finished the 6th grade she was fed up with overcrowding and put her in a private school. (She has a son who attends a public elementary school.)
She is not convinced by the common argument that well− performing charters compel public schools to compete. All you need to do, she says, is look at NYC’s private school industry. It is “thriving,” yet it does nothing to improve public schools.
One initiative Haimson is working on is garnering support to build a new high school on Governor’s Island, which is being eyed as a prospective site for a charter.
These sticking points are part of a broader argument that she shares with PS 234’s Kevin Doherty: the Bloomberg administration and the City Council may talk a lot about improving education, but “when it comes to the way things are really done,” private interest projects like the West Side stadium, hosting the Olympics, and building new Mets and Yankees stadiums are given priority. “Education comes last” she says. Incentives for the communities surrounding these projects are too few and subsidies for the private interests (i.e. stadium developers) are too high.
It seems like the type of gripes she and Doherty have with the city could be leveled against any number of administrations past, since the school system is such a behemoth of a bureaucracy.
And Haimson, who is passionate about her cause can seem a bit didactic at times.
But there seems to be more than a grain of truth to what’s got them riled with the current state of education, especially in terms of priorities. And it’s a complaint that extends to the private sector.
When Haimson read a recent New York magazine article entitled “Building the (New) New York”, she was frightened, but sadly, not surprised by a glaring omission. The article, which imagined how the city might look all the way up to 2030, and included a section entitled “Lower Manhattan in 2016,” mentioned just about every possibility except how the rapid development it envisioned would affect the city’s schools. “Check it out and try not to cry,” she writes in an e− mail forward.
On a Tuesday morning at the Claremont school, a class of pint− size musicians collaborates with their young music teacher, who is sitting with an acoustic guitar in his lap. One’s on electric guitar, another’s on bass, another’s on drums, and another’s on keys. They sound pretty good and bring “School of Rock,” to mind.
In another room, a small group is engaged in a language lesson. They will be taught three, including Mandarin, before they graduate.
An art class quietly affixes tape to small canvasses for a lesson that involves painting with primary colors.
Outside, about an hour later, a school bus sits just south of the cordoned off picnic area, where solid jacketed stock exchange workers and others take breaks, and tourists sit at tables.
In front of the exchange, a TV reporter politely shoos away a large group of I Love NY t-shirt wearing kids who hope to get in the shot, explaining that he’s sorry, but “this is a very serious piece about terrorism.” The camera filming him is set up next to George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall. A helicopter hovers overhead, north of Wall Street.
To the right of Federal Hall there’s a NYPD emergency vehicle parked next to special unit cops holding rifles. One of them is in the canine unit. A patrolman leans up against 30 Wall, near the NY Sports Club.
At one of the world’s most famous intersections this scene may not typify all of Lower Manhattan. But the obvious signs of transition − the scaffolding, the sounds of construction − do. Security of all kinds is everywhere.
Security, Business, Tourism. These three seem to have the heaviest presence on Wall Street and Broad, and at first glance it doesn’t look like a place families live, where children live, play and go to school - a neighborhood. But is this really a neighborhood? If anything it is a place of history, anxiety, commerce, excitement, a place worthy of curiosity.
But as the cops wait for a call to action, standing around and talking, next to Federal Hall, a telltale sign of neighborhoods all over New York City pulls up behind them, Mr. Softee.
-- Matt Elzweig
Book Review: “Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories,” by Toni Schlesinger
Our Town downtown
June 12, 2006
The Q & A interview is a mysterious animal. Seen on the page, it would appear to be a fairly rigid type of format − have a conversation and document it, word for word. But when a reporter sets out to do a Q & A they have greater options than they might if they were say, reporting a fire or a school board meeting. They might choose to tape and take notes. They might choose not to take notes. Or, as in the case of Toni Schlesinger, who wrote The Village Voice’s “Shelter” column for eight years, they might take notes without taping the conversation, writing down only “what (they) want to remember,” as she explains in the introduction to “Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories,” a collection of the columns, which she stopped writing earlier this year. Princeton Architectural Press, New York; 315 pp; $24.95.
It would be helpful to know a little about Schlesinger (or The Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon, or any other Q&A interviewer for that matter) before reading one of her columns. Because she is more prolific than she is well-known, it was easy to take her byline for granted each week, and her columns, which chronicled the bizarre housing circumstances New Yorkers are confronted with, at face value, like transcripts.
Schlesinger is described in a back of the book note as “a journalist, fiction writer, and a theater artist,” and as a playwright in May interview with her former employer.
Her theatrical side comes out in the free-flowing essays that preface each section of the book, which is divided thematically. The sections have straightforward names like “Immigrants,” “Neighborhoods,” and “Zoo” (for residents with pets), and characteristically abstract ones like “Journey,” “Calling,” and “Light.”
In each Shelter column, there is basic information about each residence and its inhabitants, a picture, usually an interior photo and the interview itself. The columns in the book appear as they did in The Voice with minimal changes.
Schlesinger’s knowledge of architecture, neighborhoods, urban planning and the humanities is formidable. But it interrupts the flow of more than a few of the interviews. Mid-discussion, her questions can trail off into mini-monologues that, at their worst, call the spontaneity and accuracy of the exchange into question:
SCHLESINGER: What’s that sound?
KIMBERLY LANE: That’s the clucking, hens and stuff.
SCHLESINGER: Hens too? Hens sound like they’re laughing. I feel like I’m in some children’s story but an urban one. Hello, Mr. Rooster. Well hello there, Mrs. Hen. Did you lay an egg? No, not yet, Mr. Rooster. Here’s hoping. Cluck, cluck, good luck. And so forth. Then later in the book one or the other would feel excluded and there would be class distinctions but in the end they would realize that all that mattered in life was being a good hen/or rooster …
−
SCHLESINGER: Shall I tell you about my journey here? OK … the rhinestone turtle pillbox in the souvenir store was sparkling madly. The pirate ship made of bearded pearls looked proud. There was a big pineapple made out of gold coins. I don’t know if it was real money − if so, an expensive pineapple. Your semicircular white couch looks like half of Saturn’s ring.
CHRIS: It’s Margo’s couch. We read a stoop sale ad−“Everything must go in TriBeCa”…
Because many potential subjects had privacy concerns, the majority of people Schlesinger interviewed come from what she calls “the mysterious middle.” And yes, there is the squarish couple living in a one-bedroom in Chelsea for $2700 a month, and the yuppies with the Sag Harbor weekend share, the retired box maker in SoHo, and the doorman and his wife in Bensonhurst. But most of the people whose homes she enters are artists, actors, writers, musicians, architects, “progressives,” or people otherwise connected to creative and/or humanistic pursuits. This is a New York that definitely exists, but it feels incomplete somehow.
That said, she doesn’t confine herself to Manhattan below 14th Street and hipster Brooklyn. She visits a family with different generations living on the same street in the Bronx and a homeless man living in an AIDS/HIV center in East New York, Brooklyn. She goes to the Upper East Side, visits a family in Queens and talks with an au pair on the Upper West.
“I do not want to relive the conversation … The ‘Shelter’ column is an impression,” Schlesinger writes. And when you look at the photos of the apartments, houses and other structures (which include a house boat, a former bar and several varieties of converted loft space) this is underscored. The photos are not detailed interiors, but rather glimpses of the resident or residents, sitting somewhere in their homes. Schlesinger doesn’t want to you to get stuck on floor plans, dimensions or other specs (although the pieces include square footage and price), but rather to use these fleeting images as a way to enhance her impressionistic renderings of people and their living situations. She wants you to look at a tiny snapshot, read the interview and fill in the parts of the picture that were cropped out with your imagination.
If you read the introduction, and then go straight through all 300 or so pages, then your understanding of her approach and constraints will be complete. But the reason that Shelter worked so well as a column was that it (along with Robert Sietsema’s Counter Culture) served as a nice break from the heavy-handed near propagandist political writing that has dominated The Voice for a long time (though there’s hope of a more eclectic approach with a new parent company and editor).
“Five Flights Up” could be read like any other book, from beginning to end. But the pieces can get tedious when read this way, and are more enjoyable as spontaneous, coffee table reading.
Still, those who make it through the whole thing in one fell swoop will be able to enjoy one longtime New Yorker’s vision of the city. The sum of the columns coalesces in the way a representational mosaic might if you stepped back far enough for all the pixels to come together.
The picture that emerges is an idiosyncratic, aging city, one with lots of thankfully stubborn “creative types” who live, often alone, in a real estate market that forces them to be incredibly resourceful in the ways they find, shape, and reshape the places they call home.
-- Matt Elzweig
June 12, 2006
The Q & A interview is a mysterious animal. Seen on the page, it would appear to be a fairly rigid type of format − have a conversation and document it, word for word. But when a reporter sets out to do a Q & A they have greater options than they might if they were say, reporting a fire or a school board meeting. They might choose to tape and take notes. They might choose not to take notes. Or, as in the case of Toni Schlesinger, who wrote The Village Voice’s “Shelter” column for eight years, they might take notes without taping the conversation, writing down only “what (they) want to remember,” as she explains in the introduction to “Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories,” a collection of the columns, which she stopped writing earlier this year. Princeton Architectural Press, New York; 315 pp; $24.95.
It would be helpful to know a little about Schlesinger (or The Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon, or any other Q&A interviewer for that matter) before reading one of her columns. Because she is more prolific than she is well-known, it was easy to take her byline for granted each week, and her columns, which chronicled the bizarre housing circumstances New Yorkers are confronted with, at face value, like transcripts.
Schlesinger is described in a back of the book note as “a journalist, fiction writer, and a theater artist,” and as a playwright in May interview with her former employer.
Her theatrical side comes out in the free-flowing essays that preface each section of the book, which is divided thematically. The sections have straightforward names like “Immigrants,” “Neighborhoods,” and “Zoo” (for residents with pets), and characteristically abstract ones like “Journey,” “Calling,” and “Light.”
In each Shelter column, there is basic information about each residence and its inhabitants, a picture, usually an interior photo and the interview itself. The columns in the book appear as they did in The Voice with minimal changes.
Schlesinger’s knowledge of architecture, neighborhoods, urban planning and the humanities is formidable. But it interrupts the flow of more than a few of the interviews. Mid-discussion, her questions can trail off into mini-monologues that, at their worst, call the spontaneity and accuracy of the exchange into question:
SCHLESINGER: What’s that sound?
KIMBERLY LANE: That’s the clucking, hens and stuff.
SCHLESINGER: Hens too? Hens sound like they’re laughing. I feel like I’m in some children’s story but an urban one. Hello, Mr. Rooster. Well hello there, Mrs. Hen. Did you lay an egg? No, not yet, Mr. Rooster. Here’s hoping. Cluck, cluck, good luck. And so forth. Then later in the book one or the other would feel excluded and there would be class distinctions but in the end they would realize that all that mattered in life was being a good hen/or rooster …
−
SCHLESINGER: Shall I tell you about my journey here? OK … the rhinestone turtle pillbox in the souvenir store was sparkling madly. The pirate ship made of bearded pearls looked proud. There was a big pineapple made out of gold coins. I don’t know if it was real money − if so, an expensive pineapple. Your semicircular white couch looks like half of Saturn’s ring.
CHRIS: It’s Margo’s couch. We read a stoop sale ad−“Everything must go in TriBeCa”…
Because many potential subjects had privacy concerns, the majority of people Schlesinger interviewed come from what she calls “the mysterious middle.” And yes, there is the squarish couple living in a one-bedroom in Chelsea for $2700 a month, and the yuppies with the Sag Harbor weekend share, the retired box maker in SoHo, and the doorman and his wife in Bensonhurst. But most of the people whose homes she enters are artists, actors, writers, musicians, architects, “progressives,” or people otherwise connected to creative and/or humanistic pursuits. This is a New York that definitely exists, but it feels incomplete somehow.
That said, she doesn’t confine herself to Manhattan below 14th Street and hipster Brooklyn. She visits a family with different generations living on the same street in the Bronx and a homeless man living in an AIDS/HIV center in East New York, Brooklyn. She goes to the Upper East Side, visits a family in Queens and talks with an au pair on the Upper West.
“I do not want to relive the conversation … The ‘Shelter’ column is an impression,” Schlesinger writes. And when you look at the photos of the apartments, houses and other structures (which include a house boat, a former bar and several varieties of converted loft space) this is underscored. The photos are not detailed interiors, but rather glimpses of the resident or residents, sitting somewhere in their homes. Schlesinger doesn’t want to you to get stuck on floor plans, dimensions or other specs (although the pieces include square footage and price), but rather to use these fleeting images as a way to enhance her impressionistic renderings of people and their living situations. She wants you to look at a tiny snapshot, read the interview and fill in the parts of the picture that were cropped out with your imagination.
If you read the introduction, and then go straight through all 300 or so pages, then your understanding of her approach and constraints will be complete. But the reason that Shelter worked so well as a column was that it (along with Robert Sietsema’s Counter Culture) served as a nice break from the heavy-handed near propagandist political writing that has dominated The Voice for a long time (though there’s hope of a more eclectic approach with a new parent company and editor).
“Five Flights Up” could be read like any other book, from beginning to end. But the pieces can get tedious when read this way, and are more enjoyable as spontaneous, coffee table reading.
Still, those who make it through the whole thing in one fell swoop will be able to enjoy one longtime New Yorker’s vision of the city. The sum of the columns coalesces in the way a representational mosaic might if you stepped back far enough for all the pixels to come together.
The picture that emerges is an idiosyncratic, aging city, one with lots of thankfully stubborn “creative types” who live, often alone, in a real estate market that forces them to be incredibly resourceful in the ways they find, shape, and reshape the places they call home.
-- Matt Elzweig
Led by the Nose: Photographer friends hope you’ll follow their trail
Our Town downtown
June 5, 2006
Walk anywhere from 125th and Lenox through Manhattan, down to Bushwick on the Eastern border of Brooklyn, and you may encounter a black sticker with large white letters, looming in the distance. It will most likely be affixed to a news box or the bottom of a lamp post, or maybe to one of the garbage receptacles that appear along the gum-stained sidewalk every now and then. The creators of this sticker and others like it have a very clear narrative in mind.
If you follow it, you will first notice the sticker when you are far enough away to read the large text, but not close enough to read the tiny letters above it. Eventually, you will be within arm’s length of the sticker and the image will sharpen, revealing itself to you, but not entirely.
And if you continue along the path the creators have laid out in front of you, you will meet them at a way station of their choosing, and finally, end up right where they wanted you to. You will, of course, not realize this whole ruse until it’s all over and it’s someone else’s turn.
Now it’s possible that the so-called cult of celebrity is not a true phenomenon, that if we were to look for the source of the US Weekly’s, the People’s, the Paris Hilton’s and the Brangelina’s of our culture, we’d only be looking at ourselves in the mirror. But try to resist. Go ahead – as you walk past the low-lying shelves of some newsstand and see a headline about Nick and Jessica’s latest efforts to reconcile, or Michael’s most recent appearance in a playroom near you, or about what the girl from Survivor may have done with the host of American Idol, backstage at the MTV Awards. Try not to look. These days, that’s about as easy to do as avoiding midriffs at a junior high school dance.
Once you are right in front of the sticker that drew you to its face, read it carefully and make sure your eyes did not deceive you - “TO WED LINDSEY LOHAN” it says. Yup. But the purpose of this sticker is not immediately clear.
Have patience. If you do all this, you will find yourself at the web site of one Kareem Black. (His URL is the fine print on top.) Or, if you are confronted with some of the other stickers in this campaign, of Matt Salacuse.
Both are print photographers who have, literally, made it their business to get you to their sites, so you can view their work. At the end of the day, “YOU’RE A CUSTOMER,” as one sticker reads.
Salacuse and Black met each other in much the same way they hope potential customers, both figurative and literal, will reach them. It was a circuitous route, one in which they had to put two and two together to realize they were standing next to one another all along. Both studied photography in BFA programs in the late 90s, Black at SVA and Salacuse at NYU. And at one point they shot for the same magazine, The FADER, but only recognized each others’ names.
The current campaign, which began in January 2006, is not Salacuse’s first foray into the world of what Black calls “abstract advertising of yourself.” Black spotted 11 x 14 posters that Salacuse had made during the 2000 presidential election, in various photo editors’ offices around that time. The poster consisted of red and blue stripes with a portrait of Salacuse and the slogan, “SALACUSE FOR ASSEMBLYMAN.” At first, Black wondered whether these editors were politically active, but upon closer inspection, he realized he had been duped: in much smaller type it said “OR FOR PHOTOGRAPHER.” He was impressed. This was “the germ” of the current campaign, Salacuse says.
When they finally met in person, at The FADER’s offices in 2000, they were both “star struck,” they say. Although with Black and especially Salacuse, it’s not always easy to tell where the irony ends and the earnestness begins.
Last year, long after he first saw the Assemblyman poster, Black was intrigued by a suggestion his assistant made – why not put together a campaign with the both of them in boxing trunks, ‘facing off’ in a phony bout or series of bouts? But once Black did a little research, he realized this was nearly identical to a campaign Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat ran in the 1980s.
In Pianos, a bar on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, they explain how this campaign – which includes stickers that say “SHAKING HANDS, KISSING BABIES”; “TASTES GREAT!”; “ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET”; “BELIEVES HIS OWN PRESS”; and portraits of each of them based on Salacuse’s original Assemblyman poster – came into being. But first Salacuse and then Black (and later Salacuse, again) make sure whether they are actually being interviewed – and not being stung by “law enforcement.” Their concerns are valid, since as Black freely admits, what they are doing in the streets is “graffiti, basically.” Two to three months ago, Black says he was issued a summons by undercover cops in a “fake cab” on Lafayette and Prince Streets for putting up stickers. He claims these cops told him that if they were on the vandalism squad, he would’ve spent the “night in the box.” He made his court appearance and paid his fifty bucks. And he implies that he would do it again, if he had to.
What Salacuse and Black are really looking for in this campaign, which requires a constant replenishment of stickers, since publications that don’t clean them off their news boxes on a regular schedule face city fines – is a reaction (and ultimately, business).
And so far, they are getting that reaction. Salacuse claims he got an e-mail from a girl who saw the “ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET” sticker and who, after visiting his web site, was disappointed to learn that there were no holistic tips, no ‘ancient chinese secrets’ to be found. “My main slogan (that) I put on my t-shirts … (is) ‘YOU’RE A CUSTOMER’ and people were like ‘oh that’s so nice, I’m one of your customers.’ And I’m like ‘no dude, you’re a trick. Yeah, I tricked you …’” Salacuse says.
It all seems a bit cultivated, but they are the first to admit it. “Here’s the thing about all of this … it’s all … tongue-in-cheek …” Black says.
On the side of a nondescript brick building, on the East side of Ludlow Street, about a block away from Pianos, is a mural that shouldn’t be up anymore. It’s a mural that was scheduled for removal on May 20th, but was still there as of the 22nd, according to Salacuse.
It is based on Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” In place of Adam are Black and Salacuse. In place of God, is the iconic fashion and portraiture photographer, Richard Avedon, who died in 2004. And instead of the lifeforce that passes invisibly from God to Adam, through his right index finger, is a gift from Avedon to Black and Salacuse: “his mojo.”
Though the mural, which will be shown on their web sites soon, will vanish any day now, they plan to “reacquire the wall” for another campaign towards the end of the summer. All Salacuse will say is that it’s “top secret.” But it’s easy to equate “top secret” with all the law enforcement references.
Salacuse reiterates that whatever self-serving objectives there may be to the project, it’s all one big joke; that seems like an at least somewhat self conscious way of demonstrating humility. “We know Richard Avedon wouldn’t cross the street to spit on our shoes.”
-- Matt Elzweig
June 5, 2006
Walk anywhere from 125th and Lenox through Manhattan, down to Bushwick on the Eastern border of Brooklyn, and you may encounter a black sticker with large white letters, looming in the distance. It will most likely be affixed to a news box or the bottom of a lamp post, or maybe to one of the garbage receptacles that appear along the gum-stained sidewalk every now and then. The creators of this sticker and others like it have a very clear narrative in mind.
If you follow it, you will first notice the sticker when you are far enough away to read the large text, but not close enough to read the tiny letters above it. Eventually, you will be within arm’s length of the sticker and the image will sharpen, revealing itself to you, but not entirely.
And if you continue along the path the creators have laid out in front of you, you will meet them at a way station of their choosing, and finally, end up right where they wanted you to. You will, of course, not realize this whole ruse until it’s all over and it’s someone else’s turn.
Now it’s possible that the so-called cult of celebrity is not a true phenomenon, that if we were to look for the source of the US Weekly’s, the People’s, the Paris Hilton’s and the Brangelina’s of our culture, we’d only be looking at ourselves in the mirror. But try to resist. Go ahead – as you walk past the low-lying shelves of some newsstand and see a headline about Nick and Jessica’s latest efforts to reconcile, or Michael’s most recent appearance in a playroom near you, or about what the girl from Survivor may have done with the host of American Idol, backstage at the MTV Awards. Try not to look. These days, that’s about as easy to do as avoiding midriffs at a junior high school dance.
Once you are right in front of the sticker that drew you to its face, read it carefully and make sure your eyes did not deceive you - “TO WED LINDSEY LOHAN” it says. Yup. But the purpose of this sticker is not immediately clear.
Have patience. If you do all this, you will find yourself at the web site of one Kareem Black. (His URL is the fine print on top.) Or, if you are confronted with some of the other stickers in this campaign, of Matt Salacuse.
Both are print photographers who have, literally, made it their business to get you to their sites, so you can view their work. At the end of the day, “YOU’RE A CUSTOMER,” as one sticker reads.
Salacuse and Black met each other in much the same way they hope potential customers, both figurative and literal, will reach them. It was a circuitous route, one in which they had to put two and two together to realize they were standing next to one another all along. Both studied photography in BFA programs in the late 90s, Black at SVA and Salacuse at NYU. And at one point they shot for the same magazine, The FADER, but only recognized each others’ names.
The current campaign, which began in January 2006, is not Salacuse’s first foray into the world of what Black calls “abstract advertising of yourself.” Black spotted 11 x 14 posters that Salacuse had made during the 2000 presidential election, in various photo editors’ offices around that time. The poster consisted of red and blue stripes with a portrait of Salacuse and the slogan, “SALACUSE FOR ASSEMBLYMAN.” At first, Black wondered whether these editors were politically active, but upon closer inspection, he realized he had been duped: in much smaller type it said “OR FOR PHOTOGRAPHER.” He was impressed. This was “the germ” of the current campaign, Salacuse says.
When they finally met in person, at The FADER’s offices in 2000, they were both “star struck,” they say. Although with Black and especially Salacuse, it’s not always easy to tell where the irony ends and the earnestness begins.
Last year, long after he first saw the Assemblyman poster, Black was intrigued by a suggestion his assistant made – why not put together a campaign with the both of them in boxing trunks, ‘facing off’ in a phony bout or series of bouts? But once Black did a little research, he realized this was nearly identical to a campaign Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat ran in the 1980s.
In Pianos, a bar on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, they explain how this campaign – which includes stickers that say “SHAKING HANDS, KISSING BABIES”; “TASTES GREAT!”; “ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET”; “BELIEVES HIS OWN PRESS”; and portraits of each of them based on Salacuse’s original Assemblyman poster – came into being. But first Salacuse and then Black (and later Salacuse, again) make sure whether they are actually being interviewed – and not being stung by “law enforcement.” Their concerns are valid, since as Black freely admits, what they are doing in the streets is “graffiti, basically.” Two to three months ago, Black says he was issued a summons by undercover cops in a “fake cab” on Lafayette and Prince Streets for putting up stickers. He claims these cops told him that if they were on the vandalism squad, he would’ve spent the “night in the box.” He made his court appearance and paid his fifty bucks. And he implies that he would do it again, if he had to.
What Salacuse and Black are really looking for in this campaign, which requires a constant replenishment of stickers, since publications that don’t clean them off their news boxes on a regular schedule face city fines – is a reaction (and ultimately, business).
And so far, they are getting that reaction. Salacuse claims he got an e-mail from a girl who saw the “ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET” sticker and who, after visiting his web site, was disappointed to learn that there were no holistic tips, no ‘ancient chinese secrets’ to be found. “My main slogan (that) I put on my t-shirts … (is) ‘YOU’RE A CUSTOMER’ and people were like ‘oh that’s so nice, I’m one of your customers.’ And I’m like ‘no dude, you’re a trick. Yeah, I tricked you …’” Salacuse says.
It all seems a bit cultivated, but they are the first to admit it. “Here’s the thing about all of this … it’s all … tongue-in-cheek …” Black says.
On the side of a nondescript brick building, on the East side of Ludlow Street, about a block away from Pianos, is a mural that shouldn’t be up anymore. It’s a mural that was scheduled for removal on May 20th, but was still there as of the 22nd, according to Salacuse.
It is based on Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” In place of Adam are Black and Salacuse. In place of God, is the iconic fashion and portraiture photographer, Richard Avedon, who died in 2004. And instead of the lifeforce that passes invisibly from God to Adam, through his right index finger, is a gift from Avedon to Black and Salacuse: “his mojo.”
Though the mural, which will be shown on their web sites soon, will vanish any day now, they plan to “reacquire the wall” for another campaign towards the end of the summer. All Salacuse will say is that it’s “top secret.” But it’s easy to equate “top secret” with all the law enforcement references.
Salacuse reiterates that whatever self-serving objectives there may be to the project, it’s all one big joke; that seems like an at least somewhat self conscious way of demonstrating humility. “We know Richard Avedon wouldn’t cross the street to spit on our shoes.”
-- Matt Elzweig
Q & A: Leonard Lopate, Public Radio Host
Our Town downtown
June 5, 2006
In WNYC’s soon-to-be-former offices, Leonard Lopate looked at the headlines of the major dailies, which were lying neatly on a tabletop. “Horror”; “Tragedy”; “Crushed,” he said softly, reading from three of them. It was in the same gentle voice that he uses five days a week, to bring out the stories of guests from just about every field imaginable. Earlier that afternoon he had interviewed a brain surgeon, an autoharp expert, and a writer for the New Yorker.
LL:…I think people rely on a station like WNYC to find out about things they might not otherwise find out about, or you read a listing in the NY Times, The Village Voice and it sounds intriguing, but then you hear somebody on a show like mine and you know whether that’s something you really want to spend some time with. Often, the … if the people present themselves really well, it will motivate you to go and buy that book, or see that play, or go to that movie, or find out more about the … the news story that we’re covering. We don’t just cover the local stories, but we have a series called “Underreported,” with coverage (?inaud.) of all the stories that unfortunately are not really given enough press, but we feel should be discussed – things that you probably were curious about, but probably couldn’t find out much about. We do that. So, we have an opportunity to do things that other people really don’t.
M: What are some of the most underreported stories in the past several months? And it doesn’t have to be confined to stories that have appeared on your show?
LL: Well I think about the things that we’ve done on our show … Actually, how it got started: I was reading these little reports in the NY Times about a “Maoist insurrection” in Nepal. This was 3 years ago, and I wondered “well, what’s that all about? And what does ‘Maoist’ mean in this case?” And so we did a show on it. And … I don’t think anybody’s ever even (inaud.) covered it the way we did. We talked about the group and how it developed, who the leaders, their … how they were inspired by Shining Path in Peru. And it was really fascinating. And then that led us to a whole bunch of other things. Recently we talked again about Congo, before the NY Times did a big piece on how … or was it NY Times or Time magazine I think …the current issue on how it’s the most devastating war in the world, has been, since World War II – and yet it gets so little coverage. It’s a shocking story. And we think that public radio listeners want to know about that stuff, and you can’t find out about it unless somebody does the work and gets it for you.
M: How would you say that WNYC is different from other public radio stations?
LL: I can’t compare it to other public radio stations. I only can tell what makes this special. I am given 2 hrs a day to do what I think is important. I’m trusted to present an interesting program everyday and I’m also able to do it in the long form. And it’s because we’re public radio and we don’t have commercials, I can do a minimum of 20 min on a segment and a maximum of 40 min. I can probably even go longer. Sometimes we go to an hr. which allows us to really get deeply into something, to go beyond the soundbyte kind of radio you normally hear, and I know that, based on just the response that we get from the audience, this is something that people really appreciate. I just got a letter today, an e-mail from South Africa – somebody who said :”Gee, I just came upon you and I’m so grateful.” … We got a letter from a woman in Japan. (To JHoulihan, did you see that one, Jennifer? JHoulihan: no) – a letter from a woman in Japan who said that “I started listening to you to learn English and then I got interested in the things you were talking about.
M: I was going to ask you about Internet listeners …
LL: And I think if you that if you read the Intern Herald Tribune or other newspapers like they’re wonderful, but they really don’t give you that kind of stuff. If you want know it’s … when you leave the country, you always have this, I always have this feeling of “well the country’s gone crazy” because … what I’m getting from newspapers is so limited. And then I come back and there’s a complete environment and I know what The United States is really all about. And I think if you listen to shows like mine or Brian’s, you get a sense of what’s really going on. And I’m sure when you were away, you were almost reassured that The United States was still The United States, it was still people … were thinking about things beyond the obvious.
M: What would you say The United States really is all about right now?
LL: Well I think, what I’m trying to say is that it’s a really complex place. You know, it’s very easy to … simplify things, whether we’re talking about the French, the British, the Czechs, the Congolese or whatever. And I think if you go around the world right now, you’ll have a lot of people telling Americans what their country’s all about. And then we say “…that’s not ... what it is” … We know that there’s an awful lot of complication here, and, nuance, and that all gets lost when you just do something in the usual forms. And a show like ours, which covers … the range from politics to the arts to memoir to, today we talked about autoharp. After, we talked about being a brain surgeon… And that’s all part of what makes a culture a culture.
M: Can you talk about your research process … how do you prepare for an interview …how do you prepare for different guests?
LL: Well I have a wonderful staff, and they do the first work … They book the guests … although we all consult on what we think would be good and what wouldn’t be good. And then, people will write something for me, in the morning. Before we are on the air, I go over it with them, learn what they have. I put in my own two cents and then on the air, it becomes what it becomes. But I do rely an awful lot on the solid work that my producers do for me.
M: At some point in your interview with Daniel Okrent, you referred to something in his new book, and he said something like, “you’re quoting me directly.” Do you have a photographic memory?
LL: No, that was on a piece of paper. I was reading it … No, I don’t memorize many things. I was always very bad at memorizing poems in school. What I have really is ... a friend calls it “a photogenic memory.” I remember a lot of stuff that I’ve read and seen, and I don’t mean verbatim, but I remember a lot of stuff, so that I may be involved in a conversation with somebody and something will come into my mind that I haven’t thought about for … 22 years. And I …will say “… didn’t such and such happen at one point?” And people are usually surprised, because … nobody remembers that anymore. But I didn’t remember it until … that moment. And I think that it works very well for me, the kind of show that I do, because this is a real generalist type of show.
M: You started out as a music DJ, but what did you study for example, before that?
LL: I was a painter. And I was a serious painter, and my brother was at Columbia. He got a jazz show, but I really was the one who knew about jazz, so we wound up, even though I hadn’t gone to Columbia. I would up at the show, did that a few years and then … I wasn’t particularly good. I was like most college radio people “Here’s John Coltrane, and he’s gonna play ‘Giant Steps.’ Uh … the pianist is Tommy Flanagan. John Coltrane, Atlantic Records, John, John Coltrane. That was John Coltrane.” … You know, you’ve heard that kind of thing. But I did that for a couple years and then I did some fill ins on WBAI doing gospel music, and I got a show on BAI playing gospel music. That led to me being asked if I wanted to do a talk show. And I wound up doing one there for 8 years. And then the host of this show, which was then called “Senior Edition” died of a heart attack, surprising everybody. They tried some people out. I was the third person they tried, and I’ve been here ever since. So that was 21 years ago on March 5th.
M: Just out of curiosity, who was the host?
LL: His name was Marty Wayne. He was one of the most loved and funny people in radio, but very different from my style. I mean, I like to believe I’m funny too, but Marty was a kind of a NY character. And he would say things that I probably would not say. Or … the audience, today, would be a little shocked by … a lot more double entendre …I am not gonna … He was your uncle Marty, okay?
M: I read that you like puns…
LL: Sometimes, yeah, if they occur to me … You know, I have that kind of mind. I guess I grew up in a family where there was a lot of word play. My brother became a writer. I thought of being a writer as well, but Phillip and I divi-ed it up. I became the painter, he became the writer. He could have been the painter and I could’ve become the writer.
M: Do you think you’ll ever write a memoir or anything like that?
LL: Um .. I’ve been approached, and I, so far have resisted. I did write a novel once, that will never be published. It sits in a closet, and I won’t even let loved ones look at it.
M: What was the topic?
LL: Well, it was ahead of its time … I wrote it in the 70s, and it was about Croatian émigrés to The United States talking about all the problems back home, at the same time adjusting to this country. There was a lot of (inaud.) art in it as well, but that was before the breakup of Yugoslavia. And if you read the book you would’ve said “Gee, how did you know it was going to happen?” … I’m not a Croat. It was a novel. It was a novel. Well I did research, but I also made up the people, and it was a lot of fun.
M: How far in advance … how spontaneous are your choices of guests?
LL: We try to … because we’re an overview show, we’re not a news-driven show – we try to set most of the stuff up within, about three weeks in advance. But there’s always a lot of adjustment. First of all, “Underreported,” is something that is often done within a few days. We’re doing East Timor tomorrow. That’s not what we originally thought we’d be doing. But we had a long history of doing East Timor. We once, before independence, we once did a phoner with a reporter who’d been thrown into jail, and he had a cell phone. And, we were talking to him from his cell about what was going on in East Timor. That was exciting. But I’d say about 90 percent of the show is pretty much set 2 or 3 week s in advance. And there are the, crises. We get a call “so and so isn’t going to make it into town, or got sick, or something else happened,” and then we come up with something else at the last minute. But, if we were Brian Lehrer’s show, is more news-driven, and even he tries to work more and more in advance. In the old he was very much like “I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow.” His … it’s different from our show … we definitely wanna to know what we’re going to be doing tomorrow.
M: How often do you interview people who are not in the studio?
LL: We used to have a rule that we would not do a phoner unless there was a good reason, which was a … call, to, Dili in Indonesia, or to Kandahar or something like that – or, if the person who we interviewed was such a great booking we were going to put up with it. But, most of the time we insisted that people come into the studio because I prefer eye-to-eye contact. But … we’ve changed. And there’s a lot more on the phone these days. So I would say we’re about 80 percent in studio, 20 percent outside.
M: Have you ever had to put aside something you really, really wanted on the show, in the end because you decided it just didn’t fit?
LL: I’m not sure. I think we always feel that we can make it work. More often, what’s happened is, there’s been a guest, or a topic that I’ve been really hot for and then, the guest turns out to be somebody who’s really difficult to talk to, doesn’t want to talk, or who gives yes and no answers – or does something really wild and off the wall and I’ve had a few of those.
M: Would you mind giving me a few examples?
LL: Well, you’re not gonna put it in the article because it’s too far out, but an example: JJ Johnson, probably the greatest trombonist in modern jazz – I’m thrilled that JJ Johnson’s coming on the show. I write this little introduction that says “the trombone is 500 years old, a primitive instrument and very difficult to play complex, modern jazz lines on. But, JJ Johnson figured out how to do that and not only did he create great music, but he showed the way to every musician who followed him on his instrument. JJ Johnson, welcome to my show. ‘Lenny, I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but I got something very important to tell you. They are railroading this young guy, Michael Jackson, the same way they railroaded Mike Tyson.’ “Wha?” ‘Yes, Lenny’” And then goes on. And we’re talking to JJ Johnson, the greatest trombonist in modern jazz. And he, I guess cause he worked in Las Vegas - this was years ago. He’s been dead for a number of years, he probably met Michael Jackson, or whatever I don’t know what had gotten into his head – and we went on, and then I kept on trying to get him back to the topic, and then he said “and there’s another thing, Lenny – bebop – I, hate that phrase, that word bebop.’ And I said, “but JJ, I didn’t use bebop, I said ‘modern jazz.’” Now I could’ve used “bebop” but I just happened not to. He said “not you, Lenny. It’s those other guys” … So, something that I really had been looking forward to – a hero – turned out to be, a problem. Other times I’ve had guests who say, I’m not gonna mention names cause this guy’s alive, um, I asked him about his work and he just didn’t wanna talk about it. He kept on, resisting, talking about … what had brought him there in the first place. There are some people who consider it immodest to brag about themselves, and others of a certain generation who think that if you are ingratiating, then, you’ve lost your integrity – and that’s, I guess it’s okay for them, but it sure makes it difficult for me.
M: Food seems to play a significant role in your show. I noticed that you recently won a James Beard Foundation Award for “Best Food Radio Broadcast.”
LL: Well food is one of those things that just naturally became part of the mix over the years. Just like, when I first came here, the conventional wisdom was “you can’t talk about fiction on a show like this because people haven’t read the book; you can’t talk about the visual arts because people can’t see the art.” And food was another one of them. Later, any number of, of good food shows developed in public radio. There were food shows in commercial radio, but they were very different … usually very plug oriented. But we started talking to, people like Julia Child and then, some of the best chefs. And then we started talking about the issues in food, local food and organic food and whatever else – and the response has been fabulous. And then, we had the opportunity to invite Ruth Reichl to be a regular on our show, and so she’s on once a month. And then we do other things as well. And we won the James Beard Award for a segment I did with Ruth and Daniel Blue, the famous French chef – and a scientist from the Manila Institute in Philadelphia. And it was about the importance of smell to taste. And we were putting nose clips on, and … talking like this (nasal voice) on the radio and putting these, very powerful flavors in our mouth (sic) and discovering that we couldn’t taste them until we took the nose clips off … So that was fun, and the James Beard people, I guess, liked it. We beat out some pretty heavy contenders so I was, I didn’t expect to win.
M: I remember hearing something, I think it was with Ruth Reichl, about food blogs …
LL: We, yeah, we did food blogs And we’ve … you know,you do it once a month, you cover a lot of different stuff.
M: You mentioned the Congo, you mentioned East Timor. You often deal with these topics that go way beyond NY, and way beyond the United States. How do you take this types topic, that could be viewed as being so far out of peoples’ worlds, and bring them back in so that they can relate to them?
LL: I guess by trying to make them interesting and trying to present them in a way that people can connect to. But also, I think people want to know about the things that they can’t find out about elsewhere. We talked about Evo Morales, who’s now the President of Bolivia, about 3 or 4 years ago, when he was just this upstart politician stirring things up … I think it was just something interesting cause there was a lot of turmoil in Bolivia, which has turned out to be even more complicated since. And he’s now the head of the government and upsetting a lot of people by nationalizing things. But we were talking about the possibility of that, the mood among the indigenous people in Bolivia, 3 years ago or so. If you’d heard that and then read the news articles that developed later, you might’ve had more context to understand them … than somebody else who just suddenly gets a snapshot of something that’s happening in the world, cause 98 percent of the news that we get is this snapshot kind of thing. Suddenly there’s a riot somewhere, and they say “there’s a riot and … the causes are blah-blah-blah-blah. And then, they don’t have much time to explain it all. Well if we can tell you about things that are developing and then a riot occurs in that place … If you’ve been listening to our coverage of Afghanistan over the last five years, a lot of it with, exclusives with a woman named Sara Chase who used to work for NPR and now has opened a business in Kandahar, but also has not stopped being a reporter in her head, and just knows things, you probably would understand Afghanistan a lot better than somebody who relies on the news bulletins and the occasional article in The New York Times.
M: Just because you mentioned it, do you think this whole thing about a Latin bloc, a leftist bloc, is a lot of hype, something that major media outlets are just running with for headlines, or do you think it’s valid?
LL: Well I think that there are trends. There are political trends that occur all the time. Europe, will suddenly, European countries will suddenly vote in the socialists. And then people see a trend. And then, a whole bunch of … For reasons that often have to do with local politics or have to do with the fact that there was corruption or some sex scandal – then the other side ends up getting its turn, and back and forth. But I think that in Latin America, because of all of the … dictatorships that they’ve had over the years, there probably is going to be a leftist romance for awhile. But look at Brazil – Brazil voted in a leftist government and it’s having all sorts of problems with that government. I suspect despite this new leftist movement in Latin America, Brazil’s next gvt will probably look a little more right wing. And then, if those guys screw up, it’ll move to the left again. But I think perhaps, if there is a feeling in those countries that something is changing people might very well say “oh gee, we’ll take a chance that the … our neighbors took a chance. In the past, I was always afraid to vote for this candidate because I thought he was gonna change things too much. Maybe we need to change things too much.”
M: Outside of work, how do you end up applying all the seemingly disjointed pieces of knowledge you pick up from the guests – who come from completely different fields?
LL: By annoying my friends and saying, “so and so was on my show and she said this” or going to a movie and saying, afterward “you know, five of those stars have been guests on my show,” and then, the person I’m with says “you know, I didn’t need to know that” … in other words … it’s almost impossible to get away from, the obnoxious side, which is … I’ve met a lot of, as you say, a lot of interesting, important people, and I don’t know what the heck to do with it. We’re not gonna hang out together afterward.
M: So I guess it becomes like a running dialogue in your head when you’re not here …
LL: Yeah. Or, sometimes I’ll see somebody and think – and here’s the other thing cause it’s been 21 years – I’ll think, “wait, was that person on my show, once?” And I’m not sure.
M: Even if they’re not super famous …
LL: Well … yes, well, the super-super famous you remember. You know, you remember that you had a former president or a former secretary of state, or one of the many, most (inaud.) famous movie stars in the world, or whatever on your show. But there are an awful lot of very good people out there. I don’t remember if Lionel Stander was on my show or not. He was you know, he was … good actor, controversial. I don’t remember. I, sometimes I think “yeah, I think I remember that conversation,” and other times I’m not sure whether it was just that I read a lot of stuff about him.
M: You deal with serious, complex, sophisticated things and people on your show. Do you have any low brow hobbies or moments when you’re not at work?
LL: How low brow do you wanna get, well, I … really, most of my life is in some way connected to what I do. If I go to a movie, I mean I try to see movies that are, the good movies. But more often than not, I’m going to see a good movie that I may very well be talking about on the show – see a play bec one of the actors or the playwright is coming on the show. I guess the only exception is, um, watching Mets games … which I do once in awhile.
M: Are you excited about the Mets this year?
LL: Absolutely.
M: They seem like contenders this year.
LL: Even though they lost yesterday, but it’s okay. Every team loses once in awhile. Even the Yankees have lost a few times-
M: Well it’s such a long season.
LL: Yeah.
M: Can you talk about downtown? Do you live downtown? Where do you see downtown going from this point on?
LL: Well I lived downtown for a long time. I lived in Chinatown on Canal and Mulberry for 25 years, and then I left. I moved back to Brooklyn, where I grew up. And I moved back in the year 2000. 2001 obviously was a, traumatic year. But … to be honest … and … after what happened at the World Trade Center and the air quality and everything. I was kinda grateful that I’d left for, at least for a time. But I miss it … I mean, I love the things that I get living near Prospect Park. And what I miss is the energy of that area – Little Italy, Chinatown, the incredible food that was available. I would walk down the street and see these celebrity chefs shopping in the … you know on my way to work they’d be coming there early in the morning to buy stuff in the stores that I bought my stuff in. And, downtown seems to be moving in a direction where you may not even ever have to go above 23rd Street, although I will, I ‘m not one of those people who feels that way. But more and more now, where Tribeca is, not only has great restaurants, but …we’re starting to see theater down here and other things. And you can see great jazz downtown. And WNYC, when we decided to find new quarters. We didn’t move uptown, we just, we’re moving a little further north on Varick Street. So, we’re … north of Canal, south of Houston.
M: What’s your favorite jazz club?
LL: I guess it’s gotta be the Village Vanguard because it’s been there so long and been so important. I knew Max Gordon and Lorraine is a listener to the show, irrelevant to this conversation, but she just, every time she sees me, she wants to talk about something she heard on the show. And the Vanguard … there was a time when it just, kept live jazz alive in NY when all the other clubs went under … I think it’s an incredible place. And thank god there’s no smoking there anymore. That was the bad part … You’ve been to the Vanguard?
M: Yeah.
LL: The low ceiling used to be impossible when people smoked.
M: Is there anything in terms of future shows, future guests that you’re especially excited about?
LL: I don’t know … We’ve instituted a couple of series and that allows a lot more flexibility. We have a series called “Backstory,” in which we look at something that you may know about from what just happened in the news, but we go back. For example, the first “Backstory” was about Bashir, the head of Sudan. You/we?(inaud.) keep on reading about Sudan and Darfur and “Bashir’s government said this” or whatever, but, do you know anything about this man?
M: (No.)
LL: Well, so we went out and we found out all about Bashir. We had this “Please Explain” series where any question that any questions that anybody, that comes to mind, we, if we can we will investigate it. Hedge funds, we’re gonna, this week we’re gonna talk about what determines the price of oil.
M: Someone I spoke to recently was saying that the removal of the gold standard is the real reason for the gas crisis. It sounded a little far-fetched …
LL: That’s his theory … There are a lot of people who still want to return to the gold standard. It seems kind of crazy to me. Because money … the idea of the gold standard is that every dollar bill is represented by some gold in Fort Knox or some other place. But a dollar bill … also represents the richness of the soil, the unmined ore, the genius of people, somebody who’s inventing something right now in Tacoma, Washington that will turn things around in the world. That’s all represented by the dollar bill too, so I don’t agree with him.
M: Yeah, it seemed pretty obscure.
LL: But you know, I had my little weirdo things. We all do. Our things where we think “well I understand why this works!” And some of them you can say on the air, and some of them you just bite your tongue.
M: I’m curious to hear yours.
LL: Nah, nah, nah, nah.
M: Finally, what’s the last really great thing you read?
LL: You know, I read a lot of stuff, but for … total pleasure, I guess it was a collection of stories by James Salter, who just … there are so many wonderful writers, but I was reading these short stories and thinking “gee, I would like to write short stories.” That, I guess, is something special. He just writes in a way that makes you- I wouldn’t want to write like him, but it makes you feel like you should think about how you can use the language. I don’t know if you’ve ever read James Salter.
M: No, I haven’t. I see his name mentioned in articles a lot, but …
LL: Well, he’s … they call him “a writer’s writer,” and when you read him, you understand why. He just does … miraculous things within a sentence. Well, I don’t know, there are so many good things. The problem for me is that most of the stuff I’m reading, I’m reading for my job, and that’s … you read differently when you’re doing that. So and even if you’re reading a great book, you’re formulating questions. If I were reading “War and Peace” right now I’d be thinking “and so, Mr. Tolstoy, why …”
M: Is he someone from history, I realize how much of a cliché that question is …
LL: Well, I just brought that up because I was a … “what do you think Napoleon,” “do
you think your version of Napoleon is accurate?” you know, or whatever. I don’t know, but that’s the way your mind winds up working, so I’m always thinking about “oh – how can I use this in an interview,” and that really distorts life, but I guess it goes with the job.
M: Distorts life …
LL: Yeah, because you just can’t, just can’t sit back and enjoy it for itself. Your mind is always, is always working in a certain way because that’s what you do. I’d imagine that when mathematicians are relaxing, they’re still thinking about numbers.
M: Well anybody who has a passion for something, I guess.
LL: Or even if just the way … it’s just, the way, you, you deal with, you confront the world. It’s your … it’s what your profession is. When I took steno typing in high school and sten drove me crazy. I couldn’t go to a … I saw, I saw “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in the original production. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life- with, with the legendary cast. And I remember, taking the whole play down in my head, in Pittman. It was driving me crazy, but, that’s where my mind was right then. I mean, no, I was saying to myself, “stop it! This is incredible. This is a great, what a great performance you’re seeing. And yet, they would talk and I’d be writing it down.
M: It’s like a compulsion.
LL: Thank god I’m past that.
-- Matt Elzweig
June 5, 2006
In WNYC’s soon-to-be-former offices, Leonard Lopate looked at the headlines of the major dailies, which were lying neatly on a tabletop. “Horror”; “Tragedy”; “Crushed,” he said softly, reading from three of them. It was in the same gentle voice that he uses five days a week, to bring out the stories of guests from just about every field imaginable. Earlier that afternoon he had interviewed a brain surgeon, an autoharp expert, and a writer for the New Yorker.
LL:…I think people rely on a station like WNYC to find out about things they might not otherwise find out about, or you read a listing in the NY Times, The Village Voice and it sounds intriguing, but then you hear somebody on a show like mine and you know whether that’s something you really want to spend some time with. Often, the … if the people present themselves really well, it will motivate you to go and buy that book, or see that play, or go to that movie, or find out more about the … the news story that we’re covering. We don’t just cover the local stories, but we have a series called “Underreported,” with coverage (?inaud.) of all the stories that unfortunately are not really given enough press, but we feel should be discussed – things that you probably were curious about, but probably couldn’t find out much about. We do that. So, we have an opportunity to do things that other people really don’t.
M: What are some of the most underreported stories in the past several months? And it doesn’t have to be confined to stories that have appeared on your show?
LL: Well I think about the things that we’ve done on our show … Actually, how it got started: I was reading these little reports in the NY Times about a “Maoist insurrection” in Nepal. This was 3 years ago, and I wondered “well, what’s that all about? And what does ‘Maoist’ mean in this case?” And so we did a show on it. And … I don’t think anybody’s ever even (inaud.) covered it the way we did. We talked about the group and how it developed, who the leaders, their … how they were inspired by Shining Path in Peru. And it was really fascinating. And then that led us to a whole bunch of other things. Recently we talked again about Congo, before the NY Times did a big piece on how … or was it NY Times or Time magazine I think …the current issue on how it’s the most devastating war in the world, has been, since World War II – and yet it gets so little coverage. It’s a shocking story. And we think that public radio listeners want to know about that stuff, and you can’t find out about it unless somebody does the work and gets it for you.
M: How would you say that WNYC is different from other public radio stations?
LL: I can’t compare it to other public radio stations. I only can tell what makes this special. I am given 2 hrs a day to do what I think is important. I’m trusted to present an interesting program everyday and I’m also able to do it in the long form. And it’s because we’re public radio and we don’t have commercials, I can do a minimum of 20 min on a segment and a maximum of 40 min. I can probably even go longer. Sometimes we go to an hr. which allows us to really get deeply into something, to go beyond the soundbyte kind of radio you normally hear, and I know that, based on just the response that we get from the audience, this is something that people really appreciate. I just got a letter today, an e-mail from South Africa – somebody who said :”Gee, I just came upon you and I’m so grateful.” … We got a letter from a woman in Japan. (To JHoulihan, did you see that one, Jennifer? JHoulihan: no) – a letter from a woman in Japan who said that “I started listening to you to learn English and then I got interested in the things you were talking about.
M: I was going to ask you about Internet listeners …
LL: And I think if you that if you read the Intern Herald Tribune or other newspapers like they’re wonderful, but they really don’t give you that kind of stuff. If you want know it’s … when you leave the country, you always have this, I always have this feeling of “well the country’s gone crazy” because … what I’m getting from newspapers is so limited. And then I come back and there’s a complete environment and I know what The United States is really all about. And I think if you listen to shows like mine or Brian’s, you get a sense of what’s really going on. And I’m sure when you were away, you were almost reassured that The United States was still The United States, it was still people … were thinking about things beyond the obvious.
M: What would you say The United States really is all about right now?
LL: Well I think, what I’m trying to say is that it’s a really complex place. You know, it’s very easy to … simplify things, whether we’re talking about the French, the British, the Czechs, the Congolese or whatever. And I think if you go around the world right now, you’ll have a lot of people telling Americans what their country’s all about. And then we say “…that’s not ... what it is” … We know that there’s an awful lot of complication here, and, nuance, and that all gets lost when you just do something in the usual forms. And a show like ours, which covers … the range from politics to the arts to memoir to, today we talked about autoharp. After, we talked about being a brain surgeon… And that’s all part of what makes a culture a culture.
M: Can you talk about your research process … how do you prepare for an interview …how do you prepare for different guests?
LL: Well I have a wonderful staff, and they do the first work … They book the guests … although we all consult on what we think would be good and what wouldn’t be good. And then, people will write something for me, in the morning. Before we are on the air, I go over it with them, learn what they have. I put in my own two cents and then on the air, it becomes what it becomes. But I do rely an awful lot on the solid work that my producers do for me.
M: At some point in your interview with Daniel Okrent, you referred to something in his new book, and he said something like, “you’re quoting me directly.” Do you have a photographic memory?
LL: No, that was on a piece of paper. I was reading it … No, I don’t memorize many things. I was always very bad at memorizing poems in school. What I have really is ... a friend calls it “a photogenic memory.” I remember a lot of stuff that I’ve read and seen, and I don’t mean verbatim, but I remember a lot of stuff, so that I may be involved in a conversation with somebody and something will come into my mind that I haven’t thought about for … 22 years. And I …will say “… didn’t such and such happen at one point?” And people are usually surprised, because … nobody remembers that anymore. But I didn’t remember it until … that moment. And I think that it works very well for me, the kind of show that I do, because this is a real generalist type of show.
M: You started out as a music DJ, but what did you study for example, before that?
LL: I was a painter. And I was a serious painter, and my brother was at Columbia. He got a jazz show, but I really was the one who knew about jazz, so we wound up, even though I hadn’t gone to Columbia. I would up at the show, did that a few years and then … I wasn’t particularly good. I was like most college radio people “Here’s John Coltrane, and he’s gonna play ‘Giant Steps.’ Uh … the pianist is Tommy Flanagan. John Coltrane, Atlantic Records, John, John Coltrane. That was John Coltrane.” … You know, you’ve heard that kind of thing. But I did that for a couple years and then I did some fill ins on WBAI doing gospel music, and I got a show on BAI playing gospel music. That led to me being asked if I wanted to do a talk show. And I wound up doing one there for 8 years. And then the host of this show, which was then called “Senior Edition” died of a heart attack, surprising everybody. They tried some people out. I was the third person they tried, and I’ve been here ever since. So that was 21 years ago on March 5th.
M: Just out of curiosity, who was the host?
LL: His name was Marty Wayne. He was one of the most loved and funny people in radio, but very different from my style. I mean, I like to believe I’m funny too, but Marty was a kind of a NY character. And he would say things that I probably would not say. Or … the audience, today, would be a little shocked by … a lot more double entendre …I am not gonna … He was your uncle Marty, okay?
M: I read that you like puns…
LL: Sometimes, yeah, if they occur to me … You know, I have that kind of mind. I guess I grew up in a family where there was a lot of word play. My brother became a writer. I thought of being a writer as well, but Phillip and I divi-ed it up. I became the painter, he became the writer. He could have been the painter and I could’ve become the writer.
M: Do you think you’ll ever write a memoir or anything like that?
LL: Um .. I’ve been approached, and I, so far have resisted. I did write a novel once, that will never be published. It sits in a closet, and I won’t even let loved ones look at it.
M: What was the topic?
LL: Well, it was ahead of its time … I wrote it in the 70s, and it was about Croatian émigrés to The United States talking about all the problems back home, at the same time adjusting to this country. There was a lot of (inaud.) art in it as well, but that was before the breakup of Yugoslavia. And if you read the book you would’ve said “Gee, how did you know it was going to happen?” … I’m not a Croat. It was a novel. It was a novel. Well I did research, but I also made up the people, and it was a lot of fun.
M: How far in advance … how spontaneous are your choices of guests?
LL: We try to … because we’re an overview show, we’re not a news-driven show – we try to set most of the stuff up within, about three weeks in advance. But there’s always a lot of adjustment. First of all, “Underreported,” is something that is often done within a few days. We’re doing East Timor tomorrow. That’s not what we originally thought we’d be doing. But we had a long history of doing East Timor. We once, before independence, we once did a phoner with a reporter who’d been thrown into jail, and he had a cell phone. And, we were talking to him from his cell about what was going on in East Timor. That was exciting. But I’d say about 90 percent of the show is pretty much set 2 or 3 week s in advance. And there are the, crises. We get a call “so and so isn’t going to make it into town, or got sick, or something else happened,” and then we come up with something else at the last minute. But, if we were Brian Lehrer’s show, is more news-driven, and even he tries to work more and more in advance. In the old he was very much like “I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow.” His … it’s different from our show … we definitely wanna to know what we’re going to be doing tomorrow.
M: How often do you interview people who are not in the studio?
LL: We used to have a rule that we would not do a phoner unless there was a good reason, which was a … call, to, Dili in Indonesia, or to Kandahar or something like that – or, if the person who we interviewed was such a great booking we were going to put up with it. But, most of the time we insisted that people come into the studio because I prefer eye-to-eye contact. But … we’ve changed. And there’s a lot more on the phone these days. So I would say we’re about 80 percent in studio, 20 percent outside.
M: Have you ever had to put aside something you really, really wanted on the show, in the end because you decided it just didn’t fit?
LL: I’m not sure. I think we always feel that we can make it work. More often, what’s happened is, there’s been a guest, or a topic that I’ve been really hot for and then, the guest turns out to be somebody who’s really difficult to talk to, doesn’t want to talk, or who gives yes and no answers – or does something really wild and off the wall and I’ve had a few of those.
M: Would you mind giving me a few examples?
LL: Well, you’re not gonna put it in the article because it’s too far out, but an example: JJ Johnson, probably the greatest trombonist in modern jazz – I’m thrilled that JJ Johnson’s coming on the show. I write this little introduction that says “the trombone is 500 years old, a primitive instrument and very difficult to play complex, modern jazz lines on. But, JJ Johnson figured out how to do that and not only did he create great music, but he showed the way to every musician who followed him on his instrument. JJ Johnson, welcome to my show. ‘Lenny, I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but I got something very important to tell you. They are railroading this young guy, Michael Jackson, the same way they railroaded Mike Tyson.’ “Wha?” ‘Yes, Lenny’” And then goes on. And we’re talking to JJ Johnson, the greatest trombonist in modern jazz. And he, I guess cause he worked in Las Vegas - this was years ago. He’s been dead for a number of years, he probably met Michael Jackson, or whatever I don’t know what had gotten into his head – and we went on, and then I kept on trying to get him back to the topic, and then he said “and there’s another thing, Lenny – bebop – I, hate that phrase, that word bebop.’ And I said, “but JJ, I didn’t use bebop, I said ‘modern jazz.’” Now I could’ve used “bebop” but I just happened not to. He said “not you, Lenny. It’s those other guys” … So, something that I really had been looking forward to – a hero – turned out to be, a problem. Other times I’ve had guests who say, I’m not gonna mention names cause this guy’s alive, um, I asked him about his work and he just didn’t wanna talk about it. He kept on, resisting, talking about … what had brought him there in the first place. There are some people who consider it immodest to brag about themselves, and others of a certain generation who think that if you are ingratiating, then, you’ve lost your integrity – and that’s, I guess it’s okay for them, but it sure makes it difficult for me.
M: Food seems to play a significant role in your show. I noticed that you recently won a James Beard Foundation Award for “Best Food Radio Broadcast.”
LL: Well food is one of those things that just naturally became part of the mix over the years. Just like, when I first came here, the conventional wisdom was “you can’t talk about fiction on a show like this because people haven’t read the book; you can’t talk about the visual arts because people can’t see the art.” And food was another one of them. Later, any number of, of good food shows developed in public radio. There were food shows in commercial radio, but they were very different … usually very plug oriented. But we started talking to, people like Julia Child and then, some of the best chefs. And then we started talking about the issues in food, local food and organic food and whatever else – and the response has been fabulous. And then, we had the opportunity to invite Ruth Reichl to be a regular on our show, and so she’s on once a month. And then we do other things as well. And we won the James Beard Award for a segment I did with Ruth and Daniel Blue, the famous French chef – and a scientist from the Manila Institute in Philadelphia. And it was about the importance of smell to taste. And we were putting nose clips on, and … talking like this (nasal voice) on the radio and putting these, very powerful flavors in our mouth (sic) and discovering that we couldn’t taste them until we took the nose clips off … So that was fun, and the James Beard people, I guess, liked it. We beat out some pretty heavy contenders so I was, I didn’t expect to win.
M: I remember hearing something, I think it was with Ruth Reichl, about food blogs …
LL: We, yeah, we did food blogs And we’ve … you know,you do it once a month, you cover a lot of different stuff.
M: You mentioned the Congo, you mentioned East Timor. You often deal with these topics that go way beyond NY, and way beyond the United States. How do you take this types topic, that could be viewed as being so far out of peoples’ worlds, and bring them back in so that they can relate to them?
LL: I guess by trying to make them interesting and trying to present them in a way that people can connect to. But also, I think people want to know about the things that they can’t find out about elsewhere. We talked about Evo Morales, who’s now the President of Bolivia, about 3 or 4 years ago, when he was just this upstart politician stirring things up … I think it was just something interesting cause there was a lot of turmoil in Bolivia, which has turned out to be even more complicated since. And he’s now the head of the government and upsetting a lot of people by nationalizing things. But we were talking about the possibility of that, the mood among the indigenous people in Bolivia, 3 years ago or so. If you’d heard that and then read the news articles that developed later, you might’ve had more context to understand them … than somebody else who just suddenly gets a snapshot of something that’s happening in the world, cause 98 percent of the news that we get is this snapshot kind of thing. Suddenly there’s a riot somewhere, and they say “there’s a riot and … the causes are blah-blah-blah-blah. And then, they don’t have much time to explain it all. Well if we can tell you about things that are developing and then a riot occurs in that place … If you’ve been listening to our coverage of Afghanistan over the last five years, a lot of it with, exclusives with a woman named Sara Chase who used to work for NPR and now has opened a business in Kandahar, but also has not stopped being a reporter in her head, and just knows things, you probably would understand Afghanistan a lot better than somebody who relies on the news bulletins and the occasional article in The New York Times.
M: Just because you mentioned it, do you think this whole thing about a Latin bloc, a leftist bloc, is a lot of hype, something that major media outlets are just running with for headlines, or do you think it’s valid?
LL: Well I think that there are trends. There are political trends that occur all the time. Europe, will suddenly, European countries will suddenly vote in the socialists. And then people see a trend. And then, a whole bunch of … For reasons that often have to do with local politics or have to do with the fact that there was corruption or some sex scandal – then the other side ends up getting its turn, and back and forth. But I think that in Latin America, because of all of the … dictatorships that they’ve had over the years, there probably is going to be a leftist romance for awhile. But look at Brazil – Brazil voted in a leftist government and it’s having all sorts of problems with that government. I suspect despite this new leftist movement in Latin America, Brazil’s next gvt will probably look a little more right wing. And then, if those guys screw up, it’ll move to the left again. But I think perhaps, if there is a feeling in those countries that something is changing people might very well say “oh gee, we’ll take a chance that the … our neighbors took a chance. In the past, I was always afraid to vote for this candidate because I thought he was gonna change things too much. Maybe we need to change things too much.”
M: Outside of work, how do you end up applying all the seemingly disjointed pieces of knowledge you pick up from the guests – who come from completely different fields?
LL: By annoying my friends and saying, “so and so was on my show and she said this” or going to a movie and saying, afterward “you know, five of those stars have been guests on my show,” and then, the person I’m with says “you know, I didn’t need to know that” … in other words … it’s almost impossible to get away from, the obnoxious side, which is … I’ve met a lot of, as you say, a lot of interesting, important people, and I don’t know what the heck to do with it. We’re not gonna hang out together afterward.
M: So I guess it becomes like a running dialogue in your head when you’re not here …
LL: Yeah. Or, sometimes I’ll see somebody and think – and here’s the other thing cause it’s been 21 years – I’ll think, “wait, was that person on my show, once?” And I’m not sure.
M: Even if they’re not super famous …
LL: Well … yes, well, the super-super famous you remember. You know, you remember that you had a former president or a former secretary of state, or one of the many, most (inaud.) famous movie stars in the world, or whatever on your show. But there are an awful lot of very good people out there. I don’t remember if Lionel Stander was on my show or not. He was you know, he was … good actor, controversial. I don’t remember. I, sometimes I think “yeah, I think I remember that conversation,” and other times I’m not sure whether it was just that I read a lot of stuff about him.
M: You deal with serious, complex, sophisticated things and people on your show. Do you have any low brow hobbies or moments when you’re not at work?
LL: How low brow do you wanna get, well, I … really, most of my life is in some way connected to what I do. If I go to a movie, I mean I try to see movies that are, the good movies. But more often than not, I’m going to see a good movie that I may very well be talking about on the show – see a play bec one of the actors or the playwright is coming on the show. I guess the only exception is, um, watching Mets games … which I do once in awhile.
M: Are you excited about the Mets this year?
LL: Absolutely.
M: They seem like contenders this year.
LL: Even though they lost yesterday, but it’s okay. Every team loses once in awhile. Even the Yankees have lost a few times-
M: Well it’s such a long season.
LL: Yeah.
M: Can you talk about downtown? Do you live downtown? Where do you see downtown going from this point on?
LL: Well I lived downtown for a long time. I lived in Chinatown on Canal and Mulberry for 25 years, and then I left. I moved back to Brooklyn, where I grew up. And I moved back in the year 2000. 2001 obviously was a, traumatic year. But … to be honest … and … after what happened at the World Trade Center and the air quality and everything. I was kinda grateful that I’d left for, at least for a time. But I miss it … I mean, I love the things that I get living near Prospect Park. And what I miss is the energy of that area – Little Italy, Chinatown, the incredible food that was available. I would walk down the street and see these celebrity chefs shopping in the … you know on my way to work they’d be coming there early in the morning to buy stuff in the stores that I bought my stuff in. And, downtown seems to be moving in a direction where you may not even ever have to go above 23rd Street, although I will, I ‘m not one of those people who feels that way. But more and more now, where Tribeca is, not only has great restaurants, but …we’re starting to see theater down here and other things. And you can see great jazz downtown. And WNYC, when we decided to find new quarters. We didn’t move uptown, we just, we’re moving a little further north on Varick Street. So, we’re … north of Canal, south of Houston.
M: What’s your favorite jazz club?
LL: I guess it’s gotta be the Village Vanguard because it’s been there so long and been so important. I knew Max Gordon and Lorraine is a listener to the show, irrelevant to this conversation, but she just, every time she sees me, she wants to talk about something she heard on the show. And the Vanguard … there was a time when it just, kept live jazz alive in NY when all the other clubs went under … I think it’s an incredible place. And thank god there’s no smoking there anymore. That was the bad part … You’ve been to the Vanguard?
M: Yeah.
LL: The low ceiling used to be impossible when people smoked.
M: Is there anything in terms of future shows, future guests that you’re especially excited about?
LL: I don’t know … We’ve instituted a couple of series and that allows a lot more flexibility. We have a series called “Backstory,” in which we look at something that you may know about from what just happened in the news, but we go back. For example, the first “Backstory” was about Bashir, the head of Sudan. You/we?(inaud.) keep on reading about Sudan and Darfur and “Bashir’s government said this” or whatever, but, do you know anything about this man?
M: (No.)
LL: Well, so we went out and we found out all about Bashir. We had this “Please Explain” series where any question that any questions that anybody, that comes to mind, we, if we can we will investigate it. Hedge funds, we’re gonna, this week we’re gonna talk about what determines the price of oil.
M: Someone I spoke to recently was saying that the removal of the gold standard is the real reason for the gas crisis. It sounded a little far-fetched …
LL: That’s his theory … There are a lot of people who still want to return to the gold standard. It seems kind of crazy to me. Because money … the idea of the gold standard is that every dollar bill is represented by some gold in Fort Knox or some other place. But a dollar bill … also represents the richness of the soil, the unmined ore, the genius of people, somebody who’s inventing something right now in Tacoma, Washington that will turn things around in the world. That’s all represented by the dollar bill too, so I don’t agree with him.
M: Yeah, it seemed pretty obscure.
LL: But you know, I had my little weirdo things. We all do. Our things where we think “well I understand why this works!” And some of them you can say on the air, and some of them you just bite your tongue.
M: I’m curious to hear yours.
LL: Nah, nah, nah, nah.
M: Finally, what’s the last really great thing you read?
LL: You know, I read a lot of stuff, but for … total pleasure, I guess it was a collection of stories by James Salter, who just … there are so many wonderful writers, but I was reading these short stories and thinking “gee, I would like to write short stories.” That, I guess, is something special. He just writes in a way that makes you- I wouldn’t want to write like him, but it makes you feel like you should think about how you can use the language. I don’t know if you’ve ever read James Salter.
M: No, I haven’t. I see his name mentioned in articles a lot, but …
LL: Well, he’s … they call him “a writer’s writer,” and when you read him, you understand why. He just does … miraculous things within a sentence. Well, I don’t know, there are so many good things. The problem for me is that most of the stuff I’m reading, I’m reading for my job, and that’s … you read differently when you’re doing that. So and even if you’re reading a great book, you’re formulating questions. If I were reading “War and Peace” right now I’d be thinking “and so, Mr. Tolstoy, why …”
M: Is he someone from history, I realize how much of a cliché that question is …
LL: Well, I just brought that up because I was a … “what do you think Napoleon,” “do
you think your version of Napoleon is accurate?” you know, or whatever. I don’t know, but that’s the way your mind winds up working, so I’m always thinking about “oh – how can I use this in an interview,” and that really distorts life, but I guess it goes with the job.
M: Distorts life …
LL: Yeah, because you just can’t, just can’t sit back and enjoy it for itself. Your mind is always, is always working in a certain way because that’s what you do. I’d imagine that when mathematicians are relaxing, they’re still thinking about numbers.
M: Well anybody who has a passion for something, I guess.
LL: Or even if just the way … it’s just, the way, you, you deal with, you confront the world. It’s your … it’s what your profession is. When I took steno typing in high school and sten drove me crazy. I couldn’t go to a … I saw, I saw “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in the original production. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life- with, with the legendary cast. And I remember, taking the whole play down in my head, in Pittman. It was driving me crazy, but, that’s where my mind was right then. I mean, no, I was saying to myself, “stop it! This is incredible. This is a great, what a great performance you’re seeing. And yet, they would talk and I’d be writing it down.
M: It’s like a compulsion.
LL: Thank god I’m past that.
-- Matt Elzweig
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